Houses and Homicide

by Alabaster, Stacey

  I turned back to Pippa slowly. “Well, what are we supposed to do now?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to sell the few possessions we have, I suppose. Just to make ends meet. Maybe I could get one of my old jobs back…” Pippa was ranting.

  “I don’t mean about the bakery, Pippa. I mean, what about Cheryl?”

  She crossed her arms and stubbornly replied, “I’m a little bit more worried about the fact that we just lost our guaranteed incomes.”

  “Come on, Pippa,” I said gently. “That guy was a jerk. Did you really want to have to work with him every day, whether it was in person or just over the phone, for the rest of our careers? Did you want him to come in and take apart the entire bakery, change everything? Call us ‘girls’ condescendingly every time he saw us?”

  And did we even want to be swallowed up by The Pastry Tree at all? Maybe I should have been worried, watching Jarrod’s black BMW driving towards the horizon out of sight, but all I felt was overwhelming relief.

  “I guess not,” Pippa said, kicking at the ground. “It just feels like we’re lost now.”

  “Well, we’re not,” I commented, straightening up. “Because we’ve got a clear goal. Let’s put everything else aside for a second. We need to find out who killed Cheryl.”

  Pippa nodded. “You’re right, Rachael. No matter what happens with us, Cheryl deserves justice.”

  It was dark, but we began to walk down the street, keeping a brisk pace so that we didn’t freeze.

  “Maybe we’ve been looking at this all the wrong way,” I said to Pippa as we hurried down the street.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t someone in Belldale who wanted Cheryl dead. Maybe it wasn’t even anyone connected to The Pastry Tree. Maybe it was someone from her life in the city. An ex-boyfriend, an annoying housemate…”

  Pippa stopped dead in the street. “Hey, are you taking about me?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not sure why I came up with that.”

  It was just that Sue had been getting on my nerves, just a teensy bit, with all her singing the last few days. Anyway, she’d paid three months rent up front so she was obviously a responsible roommate who came up with the cash on time. It also meant I was stuck with her for at least three months.

  We walked along slowly for ten minutes, then fifteen, until we had almost done an entire round circuit of the area. Passing Dough Planet, I sighed. “I feel like we’ve exhausted every avenue in this town, Pippa. We know pretty much everyone Cheryl talked to her in her last two weeks here, we know practically everywhere she went. What are we left with?”

  “Well,” Pippa said, stopping. “Like you were saying. Maybe we need to look further than Belldale. Maybe we might need to take a trip into the city.”

  Chapter 11

  The following morning, I jumped at the sound of an oncoming train tooting its horn. Did they always have to be so loud?

  “I cannot believe we are standing on this platform again.” I shivered in the frosty early spring air, glad I was wearing my thick red wool coat as well as a beanie and scarf.

  Last time we had taken a trip into the city, I had been much more dressed up. And last time we’d taken a trip to the city—to take a meeting with Cheryl about the future of our merger—someone had ended up dead. We’d come to a dead stop in the middle of nowhere, trapped on a train with a dead body and a murderer.

  I’d vowed never to take a train ride again.

  “Come on,” Pippa said. “What are the odds of someone getting killed this time?”

  I’d heard that one before.

  But the best way to investigate Cheryl’s life in the city was to, well, go to the city. We didn’t know much about her personal life, only that she was a little careless with money and prone to making rash decisions.

  “At least the trains are running regularly again,” Pippa commented. “After the incident.”

  Yeah, I supposed that was something, but I was still kind of hoping it wouldn’t arrive. Of course it did, right on time, the one time I wanted it to be running late.

  It was a different conductor than the one we’d had the last time, which at least made me feel a little better and a little bit more like we were in safe hands. “Here goes nothing,” I said with a sigh as I stepped onto the carriage.

  And this time, there were no unscheduled stops along the way, no crisis…and no one was killed.

  The head office of The Pastry Tree was only a couple of blocks from the station and I knew the way well. Pippa had never been so I had to lead, a little proud of myself. We’d made the meeting for 11:00am and we’d arrived with twenty minutes to spare.

  “My name is Pippa and this is Rachael,” Pippa said, introducing us both to the general manager of The Pastry Tree, Peter Jahren. We were sitting in a room with glass windows all around, at least fourteen feet tall. “We work at a bakery in Belldale. The one that was going to be incorporated into The Pastry Tree.”

  He nodded. “Right. Dough Planet, your bakery is called, right?”

  Pippa gritted her teeth and tried not to look like she was fuming. “Rachael’s Boutique Bakery,” she said flatly.

  He flushed a little pink around the sides of face. “Oh, of course. Yes, Cheryl was also in talks with you guys, I hear.”

  “It must be a hard time for you, losing Cheryl. I hear she was close with everyone here at head office.” At least Jarrod had been good for one thing.

  He nodded and folded his hands on top of the boardroom table. “Cheryl was definitely one of a kind. She didn’t get along with everyone here, of course, but she and I were good friends.”

  “I just don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “Why did Cheryl even say she wanted to make the deal with us, if she was just going to screw us over and then take off out of town? Leaving us to pick up the pieces? Why did she have to play us like that?”

  Peter shook his head slowly. “No, I doubt that was her intention at all. Quite the opposite, I would have guessed.”

  I was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I can only assume that Cheryl was trying to play nice, trying to keep you on her side…because she would have been seeing a lot of you two, whether she went through with the business deal or not.”

  I was a little dumbfounded. “Why would Cheryl have been seeing a lot of us if she didn’t intend to purchase our bakery?”

  Peter obviously thought the two of us were a bit dense. “Isn’t it obvious? Because, she was intending to move to Belldale, permanently.”

  Pippa and I looked at each other. Why would she want to do that, when she…

  “Peter, are you sure about this?” I asked him. “It’s the first I am hearing of it.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding firmly. “She’d already put her apartment on the market here, and she was in talks with a real estate agent in Belldale.”

  “Wow,” I said, leaning back. “So what happened with the deal?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that,” Peter responded. “But I don’t think the agent will be very pleased to hear that she’s dead, from the sounds of the guy. I think he was trying to pressure her into some kind of land contract deal.”

  I held my breath and looked at Pippa.

  Her eyebrows were raised so high they were practically swallowed by her hair.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “I-I don’t know?” Peter looked frazzled. “Why is that such a big deal?”

  “Peter, it’s a huge deal. Please, if there’s anyway you can find out, do it.”

  Peter sighed and rolled his eyes a little, like we were really putting him at a huge inconvenience, but he stood up and said that he’d go through his texts and emails to see if he could find anything.

  He returned with his tablet and made a few searches, all the time acting like he was doing us the largest favor in the world. I was starting to wonder if these corporate types had even a drop of loyalty in their blood. O
r was it really a case of someone dies and we just replace them? We don’t even care who did it?

  “Okay, I’ve finally found the text from Cheryl where she was talking about the guy.”

  I leaned forward in expectation. “And?” I said. “Peter, do you have his name?”

  He nodded.

  “His name was Clark.”

  Chapter 12

  The train ride back all seemed to be going smoothly when suddenly we heard the familiar sound of train brakes and the train started to come to a slow halt.

  “Why are we stopping?” Pippa asked, fear in her eyes. She gripped the sides of her seat, even though that would have offered her little security. “This isn’t a scheduled stop.”

  I was getting a horrible sense of déjà vu.

  When the announcer told us there was something on the tracks, I just about lost it.

  But this time, there really was just a tree branch on the tracks. After twenty minutes, it was taken care of and we were on our way.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. “Wake me up when we get home,” I said. “I can’t handle any more of the stress of these train rides. Next time, we drive.”

  Finally back in Belldale, I stood up before the train even pulled to a stop and jumped out onto the platform as soon as they gave the go-ahead, almost falling face first onto the concrete.

  “Where are we going?” Pippa called, hurrying after me.

  I climbed into the car and started the engine before Pippa even got a chance to close her door properly. “We’ve got to go back to the Golden Medallion.”

  “What?” she asked. “I thought we were going to find Clark? Why do we need to go to the Golden Medallion?”

  “Think about it,” I said on the drive over. “They have been trying to keep strangers out of the hotel ever since the incident occurred. Non-guests, I mean. They practically made me show my passport the day I came to visit you,” I said.

  Pippa clung onto the dashboard so that she wouldn’t get flung around. I slowed down a little.

  “I’m not sure I’m following you,” Pippa said. “In fact, I think I’m getting dizzy, though that might just be the erratic driving.”

  “So what I’m saying is, maybe Clark wasn’t a non-guest. Maybe he was an actual guest of the hotel.” I pulled into the parking lot of the Golden Medallion. “So that is what we are here to find out.”

  “Please, you have to let us take a look at the security footage,” I begged Anderson. “We think we know who killed Cheryl Spellman.”

  “You have some nerve asking me for any favors like that, missy,” he said snootily.

  “Don’t you want this case wrapped up quickly as possible?” I asked him, waving my hands around the empty lobby. “Because it looks like business has been suffering a lot since one of your clients was found dead in the pool. People might be thinking this is a dangerous place to come back to.”

  He thought about it for a long time.

  “Fine. But I doubt you’ll find anything that the police didn’t find.”

  But the police had been looking for non-registered guests. I just wanted to find one person: Clark.

  Pippa screamed at Anderson to pause the footage. He glared at her.

  “Sorry. I might have gotten a little overexcited there.”

  He paused it but the figure in the shiny suit was already gone. “Rewind it back a little bit,” she said.

  “There. There he is!” I cried out, matching Pippa’s excitement levels as I practically bounced off the chair.

  “There is who?” Anderson said, his French accent suddenly becoming pronounced.

  “That guy,” I said, pointing the screen again. “Do you recognize him?”

  “Of course I do,” Anderson replied, shaking his head. “You don’t forget a client as difficult as him.”

  Sounded like Clark all right.

  “So he was staying here, the night that Cheryl was killed, as a guest?”

  Anderson checked the books.

  “No, he had already checked out…” Anderson paused. “The day before.” He quietly placed the book down, looking sheepish.

  “I suppose because I recognized him, I didn’t stop to think…that he shouldn’t have been there.”

  But there was still one thing I couldn’t figure out: why had Clark killed a potential new property buyer?

  “It’s Marcello,” Pippa said with the phone to her ear, putting a finger up to her mouth to let me know to keep my voice down while she spoke.

  I stood back and waited for her in the lobby. I’d already told Jackson what we’d discovered. He said he was headed over to Clark’s house to question him, and that we’d speak soon. He cautioned us not to say anything to anyone, but to stay away from Clark until it was all sorted out.

  Pippa looked a tiny bit teary when she ended the phone call, but she managed to keep it together. “Well, we’ve decided to back out of the deal. Even if we still had the money to pay for it, we can’t deal with Clark any longer. Obviously. We’re going to email his office to tell him in the morning. I didn’t give Marcello any details, like Jackson warned.”

  We heard the tapping of high heels slowly entering the lobby. It was the receptionist from the other day, Nina. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I overheard your conversation. Were you guys talking about that real estate agent, Clark?” she asked nervously.

  “Do you remember him?” I asked, standing up from the sofa I’d just been lounging in.

  Nina nodded. “Yes, but only because he was very angry the one time I saw him. It’s kind of hard to forget a guest like that.”

  “What do you mean, angry?” I asked Nina.

  “Well, I knocked on his door, to see if he needed room service, and the door pushed right open. But he hadn’t heard me come in…”

  The lobby had grown even quieter.

  “He was yelling at someone. Saying, ‘how dare you do this to me, with so little notice?’ He was threatening to sue her at first and then, well, he threatened to do something far worse to her…” Nina looked a little scared, even as she was telling the story. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just backed out of there with the pile of towels in my arms, and quietly closed the door behind me.”

  I was a little confused. What could Cheryl have done to Clark to make him so angry?

  “Nina, why didn’t you say anything before?” Pippa asked.

  Nina shook her head apologetically. “I had no idea at the time he was talking to Cheryl Spellman.” She shrugged. “I’m still not sure he was. I only mentioned it now because I heard you guys talking about him.”

  “Do you remember anything else, Nina?” I asked.

  Nina looked a little unsure. “After he checked out later that day, I went back to his room to clean up and I found the papers with the deal that he must have been so angry about. But I threw it in the garbage.” She shrugged. “I’m really sorry. I had no idea it would turn out to be so important to anybody.”

  Pippa slapped her forehead and groaned. “Great, just great.”

  But I didn’t think all hope was lost. Nina had still seen the files, and that counted for something.

  I smiled at her, to try and make her feel more relaxed. She really looked terrified, like she was being interrogated. “Nina. Do you know what house she was planning to buy? Was there something in the files about that?”

  She nodded a little unsurely. “Yes, I remember it, it caught my attention. But only because it’s such a distinctive property. The purple cottage on the edge of town. The one with a yard so big you could fit a barnyard in the back.”

  Pippa’s jaw fell open. “So not only was I Cheryl’s backup plan, I was Clark’s as well!”

  I wasn’t entirely sure that was the thing to be focused on right then.

  Cheryl had been planning to buy Pippa’s house. The very one that had almost collapsed right in on her. The very house that Pippa and Marcello were trying to back out of buying.

  I was getting worried. “Tell me, Nina. Can you r
emember what precisely was he so angry about?”

  “Well, from the sounds of it, Cheryl had backed out of their real estate deal. She no longer wanted to buy the house he was offering. He was so angry, I guess he…he killed her.”

  I looked over frantically at Pippa, but she was distracted by her phone.

  “It’s Marcello,” she said. “Rachael, he just messaged me to say he didn’t think it was right to back out of the deal by emailing…he’s already gone to the house, to meet with Clark.”

  Chapter 13

  “Oh, why isn’t he answering his phone!” Pippa cried out as we raced to the parking lot. She tried for the fifth time, but there was still no answer. I gulped. I only had one guess why he wasn’t picking up: he was currently talking to Clark.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get to the house before it’s too late.”

  We could see Marcello’s silhouette through the front window of the purple cottage.

  Although the foundation was shoddy and half the ceiling lay on the floor, they had somehow managed to get inside and were talking in the ruins of what used to be the living room.

  “They’re inside!” Pippa cried out. “Oh my goodness, what if he has Lolly with him…”

  “Lolly is with a babysitter, remember,” I told her as we climbed out of the car. “So you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel much better,” Pippa stated in a frenzied whisper.

  My hands were shaking as I turned off the ignition. I’d told Jackson about Clarke, but Jackson had gone to Clark’s house, not the purple cottage. And he wasn’t picking up his cell.

  “Just keep calm and stay quiet until the cops arrive,” I whispered, even though I knew Pippa had no intention of doing that if her husband was in danger.

  We crept along the side of the house, trying to get a better view of the inside. It was very possible that they were just talking.