“Take your time, ma’am. I won’t be defeated by mere cupcakes,” he promised, flashing white teeth and killer dimples.
Missy was still laughing at his antics when she reached the front of the shop and saw a man whom she didn’t recognize. He was tall, thin, and looked to be in his mid-sixties or so.
“Good morning,” she greeted him cheerfully, despite the task that she’d put on hold to come see him. “What can I do for you?”
“I think the better question might be, what can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand…are you selling something?” Missy was puzzled, and more than a bit annoyed that the man was wasting her time by playing games.
“Not at all. My advice is free. Take a good hard look at your friends, not everything is as it seems, and desperate people can sometimes do desperate things,” he said with a bit of a sinister smile.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Missy’s eyes narrowed. The man looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him.
“Sure you do, you just have to think about it. Think about it carefully. It could be a matter of life and death,” he replied, enunciating his words in a manner that made them sound threatening.
“I think you’d better leave. I have no idea who you are or what you want, but you need to get out of my shop and don’t come back,” Missy willed her voice not to quaver as she gave the order.
“Oh, you’ll see me again, little hothouse flower, you surely will,” he chuckled, with no humor in his eyes, then turned and left.
Missy stood shaking, staring at the door for a few minutes after the man left, halfway expecting him to come back.
“Everything okay out there, Ms. B?” Spencer called from the kitchen.
“No,” she called back softly and he came running, his eyes darting to every corner assessing the immediate situation.
“What happened?”
Missy briefly related the strange conversation with the man and the Marine took off out the front door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man. All he saw was a car that had been parked well away from the Inn and cupcake shop, pulling out into traffic. Memorizing the plate number, he filed away the information for future reference. He had work to do once he was done baking and frosting.
When he returned to the shop, he asked Missy for a full description of the man, which she gave him, right down to the tips of his patent leather shoes.
“What do you think it all means, Spence?” Missy worried.
“I have no idea, ma’am, but I’m going to find out,” he replied grimly.
Chapter 13
Kel had texted Echo, and finally got her to agree to come over for dinner. While he had no desire to eat, much less cook, he planned to have Thai takeout, fresh and hot, when she arrived. He knew which vegan dishes that she loved and had bought a special bottle of wine for the occasion. He wasn’t feeling great, but knew he’d feel better once they’d both said whatever they needed to say to one another.
He’d called in his Thai order in advance, to be delivered at seven o’clock, and told Echo that dinner would be served around quarter after, so he was surprised and a bit dismayed when the doorbell rang at six-thirty. One of them was early, which frustrated the artist, because he’d been very specific about his instructions to the Thai delivery guy, and Echo was never early.
“The best laid plans of mice and men,” he muttered on his way to the door.
When he opened it, he had only a moment of surprise before a crushing blow knocked him out.
**
The Thai delivery driver left Kel’s house after profusely thanking the tall, thin man who had given him a fifty dollar tip. The oddly smiling guy hadn’t wanted the food to be brought into the house, taking it at the door, and offering to pay in cash, despite having pre-paid for the order with his credit card. He seemed rather strange, but strange could be forgiven when a tip of that size was on the line.
**
Echo timed her arrival at Kel’s precisely, getting to the doorstep of his elegant art deco home at precisely 7:15 as requested. Her heart pounded so loudly that she was afraid he’d be able to hear it. Taking a deep breath and firmly pulling up her figurative “big girl panties,” she rang the door bell.
“Here we go,” she whispered to herself, not knowing how her declaration of love would be received, but knowing that she had to try. She could swear that she detected the scent of her favorite Thai food, and decided to take that as a good sign of what was to come.
Her pulse raced as she heard the bong-bong-bong of the bell resonating through the house. She shifted from one foot to the other, waiting for Kel to answer the door, still rehearsing her monologue in her head. She stood, fidgeting for a couple of minutes, puzzled when he didn’t come to the door.
Knowing that the bell had sounded in the house, she rang it again anyway, thinking that perhaps the artist had been in the shower, or otherwise indisposed, the first time she had rung, which would be out of character for the pathologically prompt artist. Her eyes filled with tears when he still didn’t come to the door, but in a pathetic attempt to reach out to the man who had stood her up, she texted him and waited. Nothing. So it had come down to this. He’d asked her to come over, and had totally blown her off. Well, at least now she could go cry it out, knowing that she had closure. Obviously there was nothing between them, nor would there ever be – he’d made that patently clear.
Thankful that the artist lived so close to downtown, she blindly ran the couple of blocks that it took to hail a cab and went home, trying not to break down in the back seat.
She ran up the front steps of her house after paying the cab driver, tears running down her cheeks, and continued once inside, barreling into Spencer in the hall.
“Hey, what happened?” he asked, when she collapsed into his arms sobbing.
“I’m so embarrassed, Spencer, I can’t even believe it,” she cried, wiping her face with her hands, trying desperately to pull herself together.
The Marine pushed her far enough away so that he could look into her eyes. “Echo…what happened?” he asked gently.
She shook her head and turned away, heading down the hall toward the living room, with Spencer on her heels.
“He stood me up, Spence. I feel like an idiot. I was so excited. I was actually going to do what you said and tell him how I feel, and he completely blew me off.” She sank down into the couch, miserable.
Spencer’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me exactly what happened, from the time that you got there until the time that you left.”
Echo related every detail of the humiliating experience, her cheeks getting progressively more red.
“And he wasn’t even home,” she concluded.
“We don’t know that,” the Marine replied, thinking.
“Of course we do. Unless you think he was there and just didn’t answer the door. It’s possible, I suppose, if he really wanted to avoid me,” her lower lip trembled.
“This isn’t like him,” he murmured.
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“Something’s not right. I’m going over there to check on him, and you’re coming with me,” he decided, heading for the door and pulling Echo off of the couch on his way.
“Spencer, no. I really don’t want to be there when he opens the door and either says that he forgot about our date, or changed his mind,” she protested, as he pulled her along behind him.
When he heard her words, he stopped short and confronted her in the foyer.
“All due respect, you know better than that, Echo. Kel is a good man who would never do something like that to you or anyone else. If he didn’t answer that door, you can bet there’s a darn good reason why, and if he’s in trouble, we need to go help him out,” his gaze was earnest and unwavering.
“You’re coming with me, because even if you doubt him, you’re the one he’s going to want to see if he’s hurt or sick or something.”
Echo nodded. “Okay,” she replied quietly
, and followed him out to his car.
Chapter 14
Spencer and Echo got to the front steps of Kel’s house, and the Marine immediately sprung into action, without bothering to try the doorbell, leaving Echo baffled.
“Do you know how to disarm his alarm?” he gestured to the box on the wall by the door.
“Yes, why?”
“Do it, because I have to break the door down and we don’t want the police here until we determine what the situation is,” he bit out, his urgency evident.
“Break the…why do you have to do that?” Echo began to panic.
“You see this?” he pointed to a smudge on the landing.
“Yes…”
“It’s blood, probably from the bottom of someone’s shoe, so take these,” he tossed her a pair of nitrile gloves that he’d shoved into his pocket when he left the studio. “And get the alarm shut off,” he ordered, all business.
“Oh no,” she whispered, shakily shoving her hands into the gloves and opening the door to the alarm. “It’s not armed,” she called out.
“Good,” was the last thing she heard before Kel’s door splintered inward on the backside of Spencer’s well-placed kick.
The duo dashed into the foyer, horrified to see the artist slumped in the entryway, unmoving. There was a note pinned to his chest, a knife in one hand and a superficial slash across his right wrist. Spencer felt for a pulse as Echo swayed on her feet, overwhelmed.
“You don’t have time to faint,” he barked. “Call Chas and get an ambulance here.”
The Marine bound Kel’s wrist, stopping the sluggish flow of blood, then saw that the source of most of the blood, on the Spanish tile in the foyer, was a head wound that looked like blunt force trauma. Items including an empty syringe, that looked like they had come from an office, were scattered on the marble top of his foyer table, and Spencer instructed Echo not to touch anything.
In a matter of minutes, Chas arrived with swarms of officers and an ambulance team. Echo and Chas told him everything that they knew about what had happened, then were sent home so that the police could process the scene. In Spencer’s car, Echo could smell the blood that had stained the Marine’s pant leg as he rested Kel’s hand on it while he bound his wrist, and her face was pale as she asked him a single question.
“What did the note say, Spence?”
“Echo, I really don’t think…” he began.
“Don’t baby me, Spencer,” she yelled, interrupting him. “Tell me what the note said,” she enunciated through her teeth in a tone that led him to comply.
He sighed and pulled over to the side of the road. With the flash of car lights zipping by and the noise of tires on pavement serving as a background, the Marine swallowed hard and brushed a stray flame-colored curl from her forehead.
“It said – Kiss today goodbye…I was a goner anyway ,” Spencer said quietly, a lump forming in his throat.
“But…but…Kel would never say something like that. It doesn’t make sense,” she blinked, not wanting to believe the implication.
“It does make sense,” Spencer’s jaw tightened.
“But…how?” Echo practically whimpered. “I don’t understand.”
“Kel liked musical theatre, right? Went to Broadway once a year?”
“Yeah, so?” she asked, not certain that she wanted to hear the explanation.
“That line in the note…Kiss today goodbye…it’s a line from a song in the musical A Chorus Line.”
“But…what does it mean?” tears rolled down her cheeks.
“The rest of the line goes…Kiss today goodbye, and point me toward tomorrow. It’s as if we always knew…but I won’t forget…what I did for love. Won’t forget, can’t regret, what I did for love,” his voice broke a bit at the end, but he clamped his jaw shut and forced recovery for Echo’s sake.
“Spence, does that mean…” her eyes widened.
“Echo, no,” he captured her hands. “Listen to me. This…this kind of thing…it’s no one’s fault. There’s no way that we could have seen this one coming. You didn’t do this, and there’s nothing you could have done to stop it, okay? Do you understand that?” he took her chin in his hand, his eyes seeing the pain in her soul.
She shook her head, green eyes flooded with tears. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t understand, I don’t understand at all…I hurt, and I don’t know what to do,” she sobbed.
“Kel is alive, and when he’s awake and well enough to have visitors, our only job is to show him how much he means to us. It’s the only thing we can do, and it’s what he’ll need most. In the meantime…we wait. Okay?”
“Okay,” she nodded. “Will you come in when we get back? I can’t bear the thought of being alone. Is that stupid?”
“Of course it’s not,” he wiped her tears away. “I’ll be happy to keep you company, I don’t really want to be alone either,” he admitted. “If it helps at all, I think that this probably wasn’t actually a suicide attempt.”
Echo sat up taller. “Really? What makes you say that?”
“The smudge of blood on the front step, the way that Kel’s body seemed “staged,” the Thai food on the table that was still warm, and the fact that Kel had everything in the world to live for. Successful career, people who love him – he was happy.”
“But what about the note?”
“I’m betting that Chas has someone comparing it to other samples of Kel’s writing to see if it’s even close.”
“But who would do something like that to him?”
“By the looks of the strange collection of items on his foyer table, someone who was trying to frame him for the murder of the doctor.”
Chapter 15
Charice Faraday sat in an interrogation room twisting her hands together nervously. She’d had to drop her kids off at the babysitter’s house after being summoned to the police station to answer some questions, and was not happy about it. The kids had school in the morning, and she didn’t want to be late for the first day of her new job. The handsome detective entered the room suddenly, making her jump.
“Ms. Faraday, can you tell me where you were between 6:30 and 7:30 this evening?” Chas Beckett asked, sitting across the stainless steel table from the former receptionist.
“Well, let’s see, that was after dinner, so I would have been at home with my kids. What’s this all about, Detective?” she asked.
“Do you have anyone, aside from your children who can verify your whereabouts?” he ignored her question.
“Well, no. There was no one else there, just me and the kids,” she shrugged. “Why?”
The detective’s phone buzzed just then, with an interesting text from Spencer. He’d learned to trust the young man’s instincts, and excused himself for a moment so that he could go answer the message that was flagged as urgent.
“Sergeant Johnson,” he got the attention of the desk sergeant. “Could you please run this plate for me and notify me when you get a name and address? Thanks.”
Returning to the interrogation room, he resumed his questioning, intrigued by the Marine’s request.
**
Spencer made sure that Echo got to bed after a couple of glasses of wine that put her out like a light, and sat in the living room waiting for a reply from Chas. When the text came in, he shot out of the house and jumped into his car, heading for an unassuming middle-class neighborhood. Parking on the next block, the Marine moved with extreme stealth through the sleep-darkened houses, homing in on a white one with green shutters. There was a light on in the kitchen, and the sedan that had sped away from Missy’s cupcake shop was sitting in the driveway.
Pulling some simple tools, that he had liberated from Echo’s junk drawer, out of his pocket, he used them in a most unconventional way, and entered the house through the garage, slipping into the mudroom that adjoined the kitchen, undetected. His target was distracted by the task of trying to bleach a rather large bloodstain out of the sleeve of a button-down shirt. Spen
cer incapacitated the man quickly and silently, without him ever knowing what had happened. With a gloved hand, he turned off the water tap, leaving the bloody shirt in the sink.
Binding the man’s hands and feet, he blindfolded him, then opened a capsule under his nose to revive him.
“Wha…” the man mumbled, confused when he came to and couldn’t see, walk, or use his hands.
“Arnold, Arnold, Arnold…somebody was quite the naughty boy,” Spencer said, his voice low and dark.
“Who…who are you? Don’t you hurt me…I’ll scream. I’ll call the police,” he blustered, visibly trembling.
“If you scream, I’ll see to it that you’re unable to do it again, and the police are already on their way, so let’s have a little chat, shall we?”
Arnold needed to be convinced…mildly, to participate in the type of chat that Spencer was referring to, but in the end he decided that it would be far more prudent to spill his guts rather than risk spilling his blood at the hands of a man that he’d never seen, and told all.
His wife had been a patient of Winstead Burrows, who had treated her in the months before she died, with an experimental drug, because it was her only hope. Her condition was so advanced, that traditional therapies were of no use. It cost Arnold everything he had, but he gave it willingly, desperately hanging on to the hope that his beloved wife might be saved.
When she died, he threatened Doctor Burrows on numerous occasions, but the kindly gent never reported it, fully recognizing the agony of profound loss. The behavior continued for months, and, after a conversation at a local diner, Arnold discovered that Burrows was treating Kel in a controversial manner, and that the artist was scared that he wouldn’t survive. Thinking that the artist would soon be dead anyway, Arnold followed the doctor’s every move, watching and waiting for his chance at revenge.
He’d studied up on what drugs would stop the heart rather quickly, and searched the internet until he found a source out of the country that would provide him with a drug that seemed rather innocuous if used as prescribed, but turned deadly when administered in a heavy dose. When the doctor rented a boat on the marina that day, it was because Arnold had promised to leave him alone if he paid him one hundred thousand dollars, which was what was in the bag that Andrew Koslowski had seen when Burrows boarded.
Cranberry Orange Murder: A Frosted Love Cozy Mystery - Book 29 (A Frosted Love Cozy Mysteries) Page 5
