“That about sums it up, though I’m more concerned with who murdered him. I can only guess it had something to do with Jacob Blackleach deceiving you.”
“You don’t think that I—”
“No, I don’t believe you had anything to do with Blackleach’s murder, but that doesn’t mean someone else wasn’t trying to protect you or the store from this perpetrator. Who else might have known you were coming to Paramour Bay?”
“No one.” For some unknown reason, Ted’s sunken eyes and wobbly smile materialized in front of me. I shook off the uncertainty that now consumed me. “Not even my mother knows I’m here, though she’s about to after I give her a call later today.”
“I take it she’s not going to approve of you leaving the city?”
Sheriff Drake studied me over the rim of his cup, but what bothered me most was that he put his lips around the edge and tilted the contents until he’d taken a healthy drink of his coffee.
Was that a sparkle of glee in those dark eyes of his?
I resented him in that moment.
“No, she’s definitely not going to approve.” I had expected to learn a lot more than what Sheriff Drake was sharing with me, and it made me wonder if he wasn’t holding some piece of vital information back. “Sheriff Drake, I—”
“Liam.” He set his half-empty mug back down on the desk, not bothering to lean forward. His small smile was nothing like Ted’s, but I wasn’t about to let that distract me. “No one around here really calls me Sheriff other than Eileen, and I think she does it only because she knows it bothers me.”
It would be hard for me to call him Liam, because that would personalize our relationship. He wasn’t my friend, and I doubt he ever would be due to me being here for only twelve short months. In all honesty, he’d probably be glad to see me go, seeing as I was the first to report a dead body during his term as sheriff.
“You said that a murder hasn’t occurred in the town of Paramour Bay in close to fifty-three years.” I’d been watching Liam very closely for any type of sign I was steering the conversation in the right direction. The moment his gaze switched to the files in the chair, I knew I was onto something. “Out of curiosity, did the case have anything to do with my grandmother or the Blackleach family?”
Liam rubbed a hand over his freshly shaven jaw, but I was relatively sure he only did so to buy himself time. My stomach pulled as if someone had set a weight down on my soul. I shouldn’t have asked the question, because I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“Yes, Raven.”
Wow, that weight wasn’t just set down…it was as if it had been dropped from the Empire State Building.
Liam not only gave a reply, but he did one better that had me regretting even coming to Paramour Bay. I definitely shouldn’t have accepted that call from the Fake Larry Butterball.
“Your grandmother was a person of interest in the murder of Norman Palmer, whose body was found floating face down in the bay. To the best of my knowledge though, the Blackleach family was not connected to that particular homicide.”
Chapter Five
I spent the rest of the morning trying to come to terms with the fact that my dear old Nan might have been a cold-blooded killer, as well as somehow managing to wipe away the dust on every item in the tea shop without breaking a single teacup. It was a miracle in and of itself, made only more so given all the added angst.
I shouldn’t have counted my blessings so early, though.
The world often seeks a balance.
“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before leaving the city.” I sometimes use my hands when talking, and I’d gotten a little dramatic when explaining the last three days in meticulous detail repeatedly. And that included finding Fake Larry Butterball dead in the storage room. “Hold on for one second.”
I set my cell phone down to pick up the bigger pieces of the teapot that I’d just knocked off one of the high-top display tables. I blamed the purple-haired lady standing across the street for the distraction while flashing her the evil eye. She’d practically materialized out of nowhere and was in the same spot as she was yesterday, though she made no move to enter the store to introduce herself.
Was she waiting for me to flip over the open sign?
Was she a regular, having run out of tea?
I hadn’t planned on being open for business for another few days until I was able to do a little more research, but I also didn’t want to miss out on a sale. If the purple-haired lady was one of Nan’s customers, wouldn’t she be able to tell me what she needed instead of me looking like a complete idiot who didn’t know what I was doing?
My cell phone practically vibrated when my mother yelled into her phone.
“I’m here, I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t have done this, Raven. You need to get in your car and drive back to the city right this minute.”
We’d been arguing on and off for the past half hour, with Heidi trying to intervene every now and then in an attempt to calm Regina Marigold down…which was virtually impossible once she got up a good head of steam. In those thirty minutes, she had relatively kept her cool.
Now?
I hadn’t expected her reaction to my moving here for twelve months to be quite so dramatic. Yes, I’d expected surprise and possible anger. Even disappointment. But full-blown rage? Her directive was rather harsh, but not the least bit effective.
I’d made my decision, and she would have to come to accept that.
Or not.
“Mom, don’t you understand? This is my chance to make something out of my inheritance. I can live rent free in Nan’s old house, run her tea shop for one year while I get my head together, and then move back to the city debt free after I check off all the stipulations Nan made in her will. I might be able to even go back to college without working two jobs to pay for my tuition. Having time to study as well as sleep might just have a profound effect on my grades.”
“She’s right, Miss Regina. This experience will be good for her,” Heidi said, her voice coming in loud and clear on the other end of the line. She’d made sure my mother had put the call on speaker phone. I could picture her sitting at my mother’s kitchen counter with a glass of wine, even this early in the day. They could both drink me under the table with both hands tied behind their backs. “And we can both visit on the weekends. It won’t be so bad. The train ride was quite pleasant. And I’m sure that handsome-looking sheriff will get to the bottom of who killed Fake Larry, the turkey guy.”
Okay, maybe Heidi wasn’t helping that much, but at least she was there for moral support.
I took the broken pieces of china that I’d picked up off the floor and tossed them in the trashcan behind the register. It had been easy to avoid the back, considering I’d spent most of my time dusting and straightening the delicate items on display. Unfortunately, I now needed a dustpan and a broom.
“You don’t understand what you’ve gotten yourself into there.” The beads clicked back and forth as I walked through them. Somehow, my mother’s voice rattled even more than those tiny ivory-colored fairies. “You need to get yourself in your vehicle and drive back here immediately. Now, Raven Lattice Marigold.”
I was so taken aback to hear my mother use my full name that I totally forgot all about my fear of entering the storage room and being reminded of Larry—I mean, Jacob.
“Mom, I can’t do that. I’d lose everything to the wax museum.” My mother would come around. I had to believe that she would, because there really was no other option. Besides, Heidi was very persuasive and would no doubt smooth things over once we finally hung up. It did make me wonder why Mom was so desperate to have me leave Paramour Bay. “Is there something I should know about Nan? Does this have anything to do with what happened to Norman Palmer?”
The silence on the line was heavier than the pollution hanging over the streets of New York City after a Friday evening commute.
“It is about Norman Palmer,” I repeated
in shock. My Nan, the same woman who would never play with playdough because it would get underneath her manicured fingernails, might actually have had something to do with a murder. I needed to sit down. Fast. I grabbed the stepladder in the corner, obviously used to reach the higher shelves, and sat on the top step. “Did Nan do him in?”
“What?” Well, it appeared I wasn’t the only one appalled at the thought. “Of course, my mother didn’t have anything to do with his murder. That is just sheer bollocks.”
Boy, it was a good thing I didn’t mention that I thought the man might have been my grandfather. That would have definitely sent my mother over the edge.
“Then tell me why you never came back here. Why are there so many secrets regarding our family and this town?”
“Just…just don’t go talking to any of those people. I’ll be there on Friday, and I’ll help you sort this mess out with the lawyer—the real one.”
The fact that my mother disconnected the line without saying goodbye told me that she’d worked herself into quite a tizzy. I wasn’t too worried that she would show up in Paramour Bay on Friday, for several reasons. I had serious doubts she could muster the courage to make the trip, given that the first one to come to mind was the fact that she hadn’t stepped over the town’s limit since the day she left. Furthermore, Heidi would have a chance to work her magic.
I sighed and contemplated closing my eyes for just a few moments, but then I realized that I was in the same room where Fake Larry Butterball had been murdered. In all fairness, the state police or their hired minions had done a good job collecting any evidence that might have been part of the investigation.
Then again, it might have been Liam who had gone the extra mile.
The good ol’ sheriff was kind enough to let me know that Fake Larry had been hit over his head with a blunt object. It could have easily been one of the many figurines on the shelves. Trust me, I tried to erase the image of the game Clue’s classic candlestick from my mind, but it was virtually impossible.
Although it did make me wonder exactly what was used to murder Norman Palmer and how he came to be floating face down in the bay.
It was hard for me to accept that my Nan might have been involved in killing a man, but the fact that she hadn’t been arrested told me there had been no proof she’d done anything at all. And it wasn’t like it had hurt her business any, because I had found one of the financial reports underneath a shelf beneath the register. Surprisingly, this place did do a fairly decent business in various blends of tea.
Now that I’d ventured into the back, I began to look around at all the shelves. There were more glass containers filled with various tea leaves and other herbs, as well as wooden boxes filled with tea sets packed in straw and other fragile items associated with the preparation of the beverage.
Who knew that there were tea chests, strainers, whisks, filters, infusers, and a ton of other accessories that went into making the perfect cup of tea? I was hoping that all this research would give me a taste for the stuff myself.
The many inventory items on hand would certainly help my pocketbook, that’s for sure.
Something caught my eye, and it reminded me a lot of the coffee table at my Nan’s house. Well, my house. It was very hard to get used to that way of thinking when everything was so new to me.
I stood, pulling my skirt from underneath the small stepladder. I’d gotten in the habit of checking things like that, because as you’re aware, I’m not the most graceful woman. Once I made sure I was in the clear, I made my way over to the wooden cabinet that had captured my attention. Sure enough, it had almost the identical carvings as the coffee table in my house.
“Are you back here?”
You know the saying my heart stopped? Yeah. That just happened for real.
What happened to the bell above the front door?
The eerie whisper had come out of nowhere, but it was followed by purple hair coming through the off-white beads. The color clash was almost as horrifying as the fact that I’d jumped so far back that I practically knocked over the tiny stepladder.
What was it with people sneaking up on me around here?
“There you are.” The shimmering beads began their melodic tune as the older woman slid the rest of her body through the clicking strings. She didn’t appear as old up close as she did from far away, maybe having hit seventy, seventy-five at most. One thing was clear, she was just as nervous now as she was yesterday. “I was supposed to pick up my order a few days ago, but I thought it best that I wait.”
“I’m sorry,” I managed to say in spite of the blood rushing through my ears. My adrenaline was near an all-time high, approaching a new record. Now that I think about it, there hadn’t been any part of my recent move that hadn’t involved a myriad of emotions. “Your order?”
“Yes, Rosemary assured me that if she should ever pass on to the other side that you would see to it that I was taken care of. It’s oh so very important I have it. And my name is Pearl Saffron. I’d stay and talk some more, but I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea with me being here and all.”
Wrong idea?
I didn’t have a clue as to what Pearl Saffron was talking about, let alone what the wrong idea could be that had her worried. She had the shifty appearance of committing a crime, and for one second, I thought maybe she was responsible for Fake Larry Butterball’s death.
Her apprehension was akin to an addict picking up her drug of choice from a new source. But I was talking about a seventy-some year-old woman up against a fifty-some year-old man. There was no way she could have subdued a full-grown male. No, it was doubtful that Purple Pearl had anything to do with Fake Larry’s plucking.
“Um, I’m Raven.”
I thought I’d start out by introducing myself. It would give me time to try and figure out why Pearl would think I knew something about her order when I hadn’t even known my Nan owned a tea shop.
“Oh, I know who you are, dear. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, talked about you all the time.” Pearl reached out and patted my hand, but it became clear rather quickly that she had an ulterior motive. She actually slipped me a fifty-dollar bill. “I’ll be up front, waiting for my tea leaves.”
Why had Pearl emphasized tea leaves in such a high-pitched tone?
I was left by myself as Pearl made her way back through the strings of beads.
Now what was I supposed to do?
My silent question was answered when a small bag was somehow knocked off one of the top shelves. I confess that in that one moment I considered leaving this shop, this town, and even this city. A miniature paper bag was now lying on its side on the counter with the name Pearl written on it in red ink.
It was hard to tear my eyes away from the obvious elephant in the room, but a blur of orange caught my attention. Well, it might have been black. I wasn’t sure, but I was almost positive it had fur. I sucked in my breath to steel myself at finding a mouse up on the shelf.
There was nothing there.
Now I began to feel like Heidi. She’d seen something twice, adamant that something had scurried around the shop and my new house. Yet there had been nothing to find upon looking more carefully.
“I’m not going crazy,” I whispered to myself, leaning over without taking my eyes off the top shelf. I managed to snag the small paper bag and stand without incident. “I’m not going crazy. I’m not going crazy.”
That’s debatable.
I spun around, certain that someone had actually responded to my mantra, but I was alone in the back room.
Was this it?
Was I going certifiably insane?
Was I hearing voices now?
I no longer wanted to be alone. If that meant talking with Pearl for a while, then that’s what I would do. I honestly don’t even remember leaving the storage room, but I was through those antique ivory-colored beads before I could hear any more voices inside my head.
“I managed to find your order, Ms. Saffron,�
�� I called out, noticing she wasn’t browsing or looking inconspicuous in any way. Her eyes had been trained to the magic beads. “At least, I think this is what you’ve come in for today.”
Pearl had already paid me for her purchase, though I still wasn’t quite sure what type of tea I was selling her. I decided that being upfront with her was the right choice or else I would have no idea what type of tea leaf concoction she bought on a regular basis.
“Ms. Saffron, I should be honest with you. I’m sure you know that Rosemary hasn’t spoken to me or my mother in many years.” Pearl’s eyes were trained on the brown paper bag in my hand. Again, I refrained from peeking inside. “I don’t know anything about the shop. I have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me, but I’m sure I’ll get there if you’re just patient with me. Are these tea leaves special in some way? Did Nan take a special order from you for some specific company?”
Pearl didn’t reply right away, though the lines in her forehead deepened when she frowned her disapproval that I would ask such a question. She held out her hand in impatience.
“Dear, we shouldn’t be talking about this here. Anyone could happen to walk inside.” Pearl reached forward and took the bag from my hands before lifting the flap of her purse. She carefully set the paper bag inside the opening as if the contents could explode. “Your grandmother was very meticulous in her dealings with me and the others. I’m sure she has a log of some sort hidden away, just as I’m sure you’ll pick up where she left off without a hitch.”
Dealings?
A log?
Was that in reference to a list of names?
Oh, my!
I was going to be sick to my stomach.
“Ms. Saffron, was my grandmother your drug dealer?”
Chapter Six
The immediate skeptical look on Pearl Saffron’s face had me questioning my newfound theory that Nan was a drug dealer of some sort. I’m not exactly sure how I could be that far off the mark, given the context of the conversation leading up to this exchange. After all, I’d just given this woman a bag containing a brown leafy substance in exchange for fifty dollars.
Magical Blend (A Paramour Bay Cozy Paranormal Mystery Book 1) Page 5
