“I don’t know, but it’s clear Henrietta is up to something,” Jake said. “I only wish I knew what it was.”
“She tried the same thing at my store, you know.” Olivia picked up one of her chocolates and popped it into her mouth out of pure habit. She bit down, and sweet, sticky cherry juice glazed across her tongue, accented perfectly by the warm, rich flavor of milk chocolate. “She tried to break in this afternoon. I had to call Detective Keene on her.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. He came down here and everything, but she’d already left, and there wasn’t much he could do without any solid evidence,” Olivia said and pursed her lips. She got the distinct impression that Detective Keene wouldn’t help her even if there had been evidence of a break-in.
Jake touched the mouse pad and scrolled the video back to its beginning. They watched Henrietta Long approach the back window at the Cuddle Clinic again.
“I assume this means the police are interviewing her,” Olivia said.
“They have already,” Jake replied. “She came up with the excuse that she’d heard a noise inside the clinic and wanted to check it out.”
“A likely story.”
“That’s what I thought.” Jake tucked his palms under his elbows and sat back in his chair. “I guess we’ll never know.”
Olivia snorted, then pressed two fingers to her nose. “Maybe you won’t,” she said.
For once, Jake didn’t try to stop her from following up on a lead.
Chapter Twenty
Another fall morning dawned in Chester, bringing with it the icy breeze that drove the locals into her store, along with a few tourists to boost. Chester wasn’t exactly a tourist hotspot, but it had its season, and the spiced lattes did particularly well this time of the year.
The Fall Festival had served to draw in the crowds from surrounding towns and cities, along with a few from neighboring states.
The door to the Block-a-Choc Shoppe clanged open and closed almost continuously and had done so since opening time that morning.
“You got espresso?” a man asked with a thick Boston accent. “And none of that watered-down stuff. Real, good espresso.”
“Of course,” Olivia said and tapped Alberta on the arm. “Albie here will look after you, sir.”
Olivia had been on her feet since five o’clock that morning, and she hadn’t managed more than a wink of sleep the night before. Henrietta Long had twirled through her mind, pen and notepad at the ready.
Olivia backed away from the counter. She stripped off her apron, and Alvira stepped up to replace her. “I’m glad you’re taking a break,” said her youngest A. “You’ll run yourself ragged at this rate. The last thing we need is a burnt-out Olivia.”
Olivia managed a tired smile and nothing else. She strode past the counter and between the wooden tables inside her store, each seating a host of customers. She swept past a table where Bob, one of her most loyal customers, sat and gave him the same smile she’d offered her A.
He returned it and lifted his cup in salute.
Olivia reached the front door, opened it, and slipped out into the late morning light, which hung above the rooftops of Chester.
The woman from the antique store across the road waved at her, and Olivia waved back. Finally, the locals had started warming to Olivia and her chocolate store. She stifled another yawn behind her fist, then walked a few feet to one of the bus stop benches next to a lamppost.
Olivia plonked down and rested her aching feet. A flutter of motion caught the corner of her eye, and she turned her head. A yellow flyer, worried by the breeze, had been taped to the lamppost beside her. It was another of those Cuddle Clinic-hating notices. Olivia shook her head and sighed.
None of this made sense.
Jessica might have hurt her sister to get control of the Clinic, but had she meant to kill her? And Pinkie—he’d been in love with the woman. Could Jana have angered him by refusing his advances?
And Henrietta…now, there was the real question mark. Perhaps, if she could find and talk to Henrietta, she’d be able to squeeze a confession out of her.
The thought urged Olivia to her feet. Sure, she could do that. She’d been pretty persuasive in the past, and that suspicious meeting between Jessica and the reporter had added ammo to her arsenal.
Olivia turned and hurried down the sidewalk, away from the Block-a-Choc Shoppe and toward the offices of the Chester Gazette.
Her sensible, flat-heeled pumps, polka-dot to make up for their lack of heel, chewed up the concrete. She lifted her gaze and focused on the corner.
A woman ahead of her hurried along, her gnarled hand grasping a cane. Her gray hair bobbed on top of her head in a curled do.
Olivia stopped in her tracks.
That wasn’t just any old lady. That was Mrs. Bitsworth, and for once she didn’t stumble around and flop to the floor. The cane helped her stay upright. But why hadn’t she used a cane at Jana’s memorial? Or before that on both of her angry visits to the Cuddle Clinic?
Suspicions coalesced in Olivia’s mind, but she kept them in check.
Bitsy turned the corner and continued on her path, clunking her cane with every other step. Olivia wormed her cell phone out of her pocket. She clicked through to her contacts list and scrolled down to Jake Morgan’s number. She paused, her thumb hovering over the green phone icon.
No, she couldn’t call him now. A text would do. Wouldn’t want to alert Bitsy to her presence. Olivia stalked to the corner as casually as she could manage and peered after the old lady. Bitsy didn’t look back. She kept an even pace with her cane, walking solidly now that she had something to balance with. She halted at the traffic lights and clicked the button for the walk signal.
Olivia opened a blank text, and her fingers clicked on the buttons. She had to erase way more than she should have; she wasn’t used to all this clicking and tapping.
Following Bitsworth. She’s got a cane.
That was the best she could do for now. Hopefully, Jake would see the significance of the cane. He’d surely heard about the woman before and seen her in town after Jana’s death.
Bitsy crossed the road, clunking all the way, and reached the other side. She headed down the street that led into Chester’s more affluent neighborhood.
Olivia waited until the old lady in her plum trench coat reached the corner. Finally, she darted out from behind the corner of a building and hurried after Bitsy.
A text buzzed through on her cell. Olivia lifted it but kept moving.
Don’t do anything “Olivia” yet. I’m on my way.
Anything “Olivia?” What was that supposed to mean? She tucked the cell into the back pocket of her jeans to get it out of the way.
She’d forgotten to put on her coat, but the cold didn’t bother her. Bitsy’s sudden mobility did.
Chapter Twenty-One
Bitsy Bitsworth hurried up the front stairs of her sprawling home. Unlike the others that surrounded it, the two-story building didn’t have a front gate. The storm door flapped closed, but the clunk of her cane rang out behind her down the long, paved walkway that led to the porch.
Olivia crossed her fingers. She’d followed the woman all the way to her house. Now what?
Bitsy left her front door open.
Olivia wasn’t a stupid person, but the beginnings of a curious urge tugged her toward the house. This had to be what Jake meant by “Don’t do anything ‘Olivia.’”
She halted beside the mailbox and checked the letters printed across its white metal side. Bitsworth.
Why did she have a cane now? More to the point, why had she flopped around and embarrassed herself in public without it? Perhaps Bitsy was the kind of person who liked to cause a scene.
No, that couldn’t be it.
Olivia’s back pocket buzzed, but she ignored her cell this time.
Puzzle pieces drifted toward each other and clicked into place in her mind. Bitsy had a cane that she hadn’t possessed at
the memorial service. Could the cane have made the indentation beneath Jana’s bedroom window? Olivia’s curiosity reached a fever pitch. She glanced left and right, then scurried up the path toward the front steps.
Warm air gushed from the open doorway and brushed against Olivia’s cheeks. The scent of a cherry pie baking in the oven wafted out along with it, and her stomach grumbled. She hadn’t had breakfast or anything but coffee since that morning.
“Hello?” Olivia whispered it under her breath just so she could tell the cops—or Bitsy if it came to that—that she had called out before entering.
She climbed the front steps, her belly bubbling from nerves now.
“Ridiculous,” she muttered. “It’s just a little old lady.” Possibly a murderous one who’d had no qualms about attacking a young woman in her own home.
Olivia stepped over the threshold and onto the polished wood floor within. That cherry pie smell smacked her right in the face, and her eyes widened.
Wait, hadn’t Bitsy screamed at them about cherries? She’d said she was allergic.
Olivia’s phone buzzed in her back pocket. Five separate buzzes, evenly spaced. A call.
She halted beside the rickety entrance hall table and bit her bottom lip. Maybe this was a bad idea.
She turned to leave, but a flicker of yellow caught her gaze. A flyer! One of the Cuddle Clinic-hating flyers. No, not one, an entire stack of them, wedged beneath an empty flower pot.
Her initial suspicion doubled.
Bitsy had put up the flyers. Bitsy, who’d complained endlessly about having to make appointments at the clinic. But why would she want cuddles if she hated the place? Could it have been to get closer to Jana?
Footsteps sounded upstairs, and a door slammed. Olivia rushed through an open doorway to the left and entered a vast dining area, furnished with a walnut table and matching upholstered chairs.
A hat rack stood in one corner, a collection of canes in the other. No hiding spots. Perhaps she could—
Olivia blinked and switched her focus back to the stack of canes in a decorative brass bucket.
Mrs. Bitsworth’s canes.
Olivia’s feet traveled across the wooden boards, which creaked in response. She slipped past the chairs, and her Block-a-Choc Shoppe sweatshirt hooked on the carved top rail of one of them. She freed herself and hurried toward the canes.
She didn’t dare touch any of them, just in case they were evidence, but she leaned closer.
Bitsy’s cane collection would’ve excited antique collectors. Polished wooden canes jostled for attention, but one, in particular, stood out. It was a metal cane, dented slightly near the middle. Olivia leaned in and caught a glimpse of its dirty stopper on the end.
“Soil,” she whispered.
“You,” a voice muttered behind her.
Olivia didn’t jump a foot into the air. It was a miracle, indeed, because her heart leaped into her throat and beat out a tattoo against her flesh.
She rotated, one foot in front of the other, and faced Mrs. Bitsworth.
The elderly woman clasped a wooden cane in her right hand and a plate in her left. On top of it sat a slice of piping hot cherry pie.
“Hungry?” she asked and foisted the plate on Olivia.
Olivia grasped the porcelain and pinched her fingers on the rim. “No, thank you,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bitsy said, in a voice more lucid than the one she’d used the entire week. “Cherries are your favorite fruit, aren’t they? You put them in your chocolates.”
“The chocolates you said you were allergic to.”
“I told a little fib,” Bitsy said with a shrug. “Everyone does that from time to time.”
Except Bitsy hadn’t told a little fib; she’d had a full-on nuclear meltdown over the cherry chocolates and accused both Alvira and Olivia of trying to murder her in front of all the mourners at Jana’s memorial service.
Olivia opened her mouth to reply, then snapped it shut again. The hall floor creaked outside the dining room, but Bitsy didn’t notice.
She grabbed the cherry pie from Olivia, snatched up the silver dessert fork on the plate, and tucked into her creation. “See? Nothing wrong with it. Delicious.” Crumbs and bits of cherries dropped from her lips and splatted to the floor. “Don’t be so paranoid, Miss Cloud. Do you think I’m trying to poison you?” Bitsy laughed at the absurdity of the idea, then dumped the plate on her dining room table. The fork rattled against the porcelain.
A figure appeared, framed in the doorway behind the old woman. Olivia barely managed to keep the relief off her face.
Jake Morgan had arrived, and he held his fancy smartphone up, the small black square of its camera lens aimed directly at them.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Olivia had to keep the woman talking.
“Why would you lie about your allergy to cherries, Mrs. Bitsworth?” Olivia asked; she avoided glancing toward the doorway again.
“Oh, dear, isn’t it obvious?” Bitsy shook her head and patted her gray up-do at the same time. “Everyone thinks I’m the crazy old lady who lost her husband. I have to keep up that appearance.”
“But why?” Olivia asked.
Mrs. Bitsworth bumped her cane against the wooden boards. “Because I attacked Jana Jujube.”
Olivia gasped.
“Oh relax. I’m sure you figured it out the minute you saw that dented cane in my collection,” Bitsy replied. “I’m too old to do a good job of hiding the attack. And too old to be bothered about it.”
Questions darted across Olivia’s mind, grazing the surface of her thoughts then flitting off again into the oblivion of confusion.
“I have a talent,” Bitsy said and tapped the side of her nose with her gnarled finger. “For the dramatic, of course.”
Olivia didn’t dare shut her eyes to figure this out, no matter how much she wanted to. She stared at the tip of Bitsy’s sharp nose instead. “What do you mean?” she asked at last.
Even if she figured it out, she had to get Bitsy to spell it out so that Jake could record it from his position in the doorway.
“I mean, I pretended to be allergic to cherries,” Bitsy said and shifted her cane to her front. She clasped it in both hands. “I pretended to be unhinged. And I purposefully left my canes at home so that no one would suspect I had anything to do with the murder.”
“But why would they suspect you?” Olivia asked.
“I left marks behind. I was sloppy. It wasn’t as if I planned to murder the poor girl,” Bitsy said and huffed out a sigh. It was the same type of sigh Olivia’s own mother would’ve employed after ruining a casserole.
“Mrs. Bitsworth, what happened?” Olivia asked. She’d been desperate to ask since she’d laid eyes on the flyers in Bitsy’s entrance hall. “Why did you attack Jana?”
Bitsy pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “The Cuddle Clinic,” she said in serene tones, “is an abomination. It’s a scar on the face of Chester. I spoke to that girl once, I talked to her a million times about that darn place.”
“But, you used to go to the Cuddle Clinic. I saw you there,” Olivia said, scraping her hair behind her ear. She grasped a few of the strands and held them.
“Of course I went there. I needed to know what the enemy had planned.” Bitsy wrung her palms against the top of the cane again. She practically throttled it. “And trust me, the Cuddle Clinic is the enemy.”
“You said you didn’t mean to kill her,” Olivia said. Another prompt to keep her talking.
There was another creak from the hallway floor, and Jake moved out of sight. Olivia didn’t glance at the gap he’d left. Gosh, had he abandoned her? She refused to panic about an old lady who had thrown a tantrum about cherry chocolates.
Even if she was a murderer.
“No, I didn’t. I was doing reconnaissance,” Bitsy said and continued throttling the hook of her cane. “I wanted to find out what Jana had planned, so I followed her home. I cre
pt around the back of that poor little house of hers, and that’s when I planted my poor old cane in the flower bed.”
That explained the hole in the ground. “What happened then?” Olivia asked.
“I spied on the little cretin. She held a meeting first with that pink boy who works for her. Apparently, he was in love with her. He confessed it, but she asked him to leave, and he rushed out,” Bitsy said. Her expression soured again. Her lips puckered into a tight circle.
Olivia risked a quick glimpse of the entrance to the room. Empty. Shoot! Jake really had abandoned her here. Had he done it to call the cops?
“Then she arrived,” Bitsy said.
Olivia snapped her gaze back to the murderess. The old lady had narrowed her eyes, and the cane-throttling had reached an all-time high.
“Who?”
“The sister. The one in the horrible pantsuit. She arrived and lectured Jana about the clinic and how things had to change. I was excited at first until I realized that she didn’t want to close the place down. She wanted to expand it.”
“I see,” Olivia said, although Bitsy’s confusion, her trickery regarding cherries, and the feigned interest in cuddles from the clinic made her mind swirl like coffee down a drain.
“Jana told her sister to leave, and then it was just us two,” Bitsy said. “I knocked on her kitchen door. She let me in. We talked again, as we did every time I visited the Cuddle Clinic, and I told her exactly what I thought of her little business, at last.”
“You hadn’t before?”
“Oh no. I’d led her to believe I loved the cuddles. Imagine that, strangers hugging each other for money!” Bitsy shuddered, and the cane’s end tapped against the wooden floor.
“How did she react to your news?”
“She was understanding, but she refused to close the clinic. She turned her back on me. Told me to leave. And that’s when I did it,” Bitsy said. “It was an angry reaction. I didn’t—it wasn’t planned. I’m not sad she’s dead, but I didn’t expect her to die. And now, that stupid clinic is flourishing without her.”
Itsy-Bitsy Murder: Chocolate Cozy Mystery #2 Page 8
