Vangie Vale and the Murdered Macaron (The Matchbaker Mysteries Book 1)

by R. L. Syme

  “Don’t!” I grabbed his arm, hauling him down and away.

  He stumbled under my weight and caught himself, pulling me up with him. “What’s wrong, Vangie?”

  “Don’t touch that,” I said, making desperate eye contact, trying to convince him through sheer willpower. “Don’t touch any of it.”

  “Why not?” Scarlet asked, backing away like we’d just opened a can of Ebola.

  “You don’t want the cops to find your prints on that.” I swallowed hard. “I’m pretty sure Jenna Van Andel just dropped off the knife that killed your wife.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Derek stared at the knife for a long time, his eyes turning glassy. I didn’t dare try to comfort him. I never should have said what I said, but I needed him to back off the bag. We all stood there in silence for a long time, staring at that weapon like it was a ticking bomb.

  Maybe it was.

  The shrill ring of my phone cut the air and I pulled it from my pocket, only to find Peter Mayhew’s picture staring up at me. Crap on a holy cracker. This was not turning out to be a good day.

  With a shaky hand, I answered the call.

  “Where are you, Vangie? I’ve just been by the bakery.” I could hear a car buzzing in the background of Peter’s voice.

  Holy cracker for the win. He hadn’t even waited to get where he was going before calling me. Totally safe, dude.

  I closed my eyes. Peter was mad. I could hear it. There was no getting around the fact that my window had been destroyed.

  “It was an accident,” I said, finally, waving at Derek as I walked outside. I covered the phone with my hand and told them not to touch anything until I got back, then went back to Peter. “No big deal. I’ll get the glass company to come and replace it this afternoon.”

  Peter snorted. “There’s no glass company in Saint Agnes. You’re going to have to talk to someone at one of the window places in Madison Falls, and good luck with that. They won’t be able to schedule you for a week.”

  The door opened behind me and Scarlet came outside, also on the phone. I covered my speaker, just in case Peter could hear any of her words. As soon as she was out of hearing distance, I went back to the call.

  “Vangie?” Peter was asking. “Vangie, did you hear me?”

  “I did. I’ll call the window place right now. Thanks, Peter.”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “I warned you, Vangie. I told you if anything else like this happened, I was going to have to put in a call to the bishop.”

  “Someone destroyed my window…” I made a quick glance at Scarlet, who was still at the end of the sidewalk, “…on accident…and you’re going to report me?”

  “The stipulations of our agreement with the denomination are very clear. If anything scandalous happens, you’re to be stripped of your ordination and fired.”

  Those words landed hard, right in the middle of my chest, and made me suck in a deep breath. My bishop had said to me, more than once, that I’d been trying to get myself stripped of my ordination ever since I got ordained. He thought I didn’t want to be in the ministry. But that wasn’t true at all. I knew I was built to do this.

  I just didn’t like to be told what to do.

  “Please, Peter,” I said, dropping my voice. “It was just an accident. There isn’t going to be a scandal.”

  “That’s not what I hear from Travis at the local paper. He said they’re doing a whole story on your involvement in this mess with the actor and Claire Hobson, and they don’t even know about your little incident in North Carolina.”

  I heard the phone ring inside Derek’s house, and I wanted to pull my hair out. I could only babysit so many things at one time.

  “Please, Peter. I’ll talk to Travis. Just give me a day to fix this before you call anyone in Raleigh.” I tried to sound appropriately contrite, given that he probably just wanted to scare me. But at this point, I couldn’t take any chances. He’d been holding his knowledge of my misdeeds over my head ever since I came. I couldn’t let this be the thing that ended my career as a pastor.

  He agreed, reluctantly, and I hung up the phone with a long sigh. This was a super crap day.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Scarlet said, walking toward me, staring at the screen of her phone. “Henry’s accountant just told me that he was making regular payments to Claire Hobson, like I said, starting about fifteen years ago, but the checks weren’t going to Minnesota.”

  “They were going here, weren’t they?” I asked, stuffing my phone in my pocket. “I just know it.”

  “Yeah. The checks were sent to Claire Hobson, but the mailing address was on Mockingbird Lane.”

  “I’ll bet it was Frances Barnett’s house.” I swallowed hard, reluctant to bring this up, but…I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had to know. “What did Henry tell you about Claire?” I asked.

  Her silence was pretty telling, but I kept waiting, hoping she would answer. If we could somehow poke a hole in Henry’s motive, we might be able to convince Malcolm to keep investigating.

  “Not a lot.” When she finally spoke, her voice had turned from whiny beauty queen to concerned friend. “I know it happened a long time ago. I think it was when he was in high school, maybe right after. I don’t know. He got drunk once last year and started talking about it. After he graduated high school, ‘an ex’ got so crazy, he had to leave Saint Agnes. I mean, it turned out that coming to LA earlier than planned was a great move for him. He happened to run into a casting director at his gym and they had him read for a big soap opera part the next day. It was definitely serendipity.”

  I bit my lip, trying not to point out that she’d just intimated the assault had helped his career. That was not going to help loosen her tongue. And it made me hate her just a little bit.

  “So, you didn’t know who it was?”

  She looked down at her hands. “He never told me outright, but I figured it was Claire after she started showing up on set when he got cast as Tom Bronson.”

  “Then why did you tell the sheriff about the assault?” I asked, stuffing both my hands in my coat pockets. This was the part that didn’t make sense to me.

  “What?” She was genuinely angered by the suggestion. The lines on her face went an inch deeper. “I didn’t tell him anything. He already knew about it. He asked me a thousand questions about it, and I couldn’t lie to him.”

  I paused with my hand on Derek’s door, trying to think of a reason for Malcolm Dean to know about an assault that clearly no one talked about. Unless he had been at the party the night it had happened—which I couldn’t rule out completely—I couldn’t imagine how he’d known.

  “Let me just see if he’s off the phone yet,” I said, slipping the door open just a crack. Derek was standing over the duffel bag, the knife glistening in his hand. My throat went thick with fear as he pointed the knife at us, his hand shaking, and I slowly edged into the room with my hands up.

  “Now, Derek,” I said, trying to force a calm, collected tone. But my heart was pounding so hard, I could practically hear it beating in my chest. “Why don’t you put the knife down and tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Shut up!” His words echoed in the low-ceilinged room. “Just shut up. I need to think.”

  My brain was moving a thousand miles a second, much too fast for me to focus on one thought. He hadn’t even thought about fingerprints.

  Was he guilty after all?

  A loud, groaning noise sounded off to my right, and both Scarlet and I jumped for a moment. It was just the pilot light pushing the heater on. I grabbed Scarlet and pulled her all the way inside, closing the door to keep out the cold air. No need making everyone more jumpy than they already were.

  “What happened, Derek?” I asked. “When we left, you were fine. I need you to tell me what happened.”

  He pressed the knife-wielding hand to his forehead, like he’d had a thought distracting enough to make him forget he was holding so
mething dangerous. If that knife did end up being the murder weapon, it was completely tainted now.

  “Did you know that he assaulted her?” The choking emotion in his voice nearly broke my heart, and I couldn’t lift my eyes. “You did. I knew it.”

  “I thought you would be better off not knowing.”

  “The sheriff,” he croaked out, dropping the phone completely. “He said the case was closed. Henry murdered her to cover it up. Killed himself because he got caught. You lied to me. You said someone killed him.”

  “I didn’t lie.” I held up my hands, glancing at Scarlet for support, but her face was so white, she could have passed for a vampire Buffy was about to stake. “Right, Scarlet?”

  “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no…” Her stammer was punctuated with little breaths, like she was trying to work up the courage to say the word.

  I nodded my head. “You said Henry felt guilty about it for a long time, that he was sorry. He wouldn’t have wanted to kill Claire.”

  She returned the gesture, wildly, like a little kid. I was afraid she was going to edge toward me, making us a bigger target. We needed to split his focus. I tried taking another step along the wall, but the knife went up again, and I stopped.

  “That must have been why she went to get money from Henry. Why she told me he would pay her. It was bigger than her kid.” He nodded, sniffing and slouching back onto his heels.

  Scarlet opened her mouth to object, but I snapped my fingers at her. Don’t do it, I tried to advise her telepathically as soon as our eyes met. If only silent conversations really worked.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d talked to the press. We had a file on her, for all her stalking behavior. It would have been easy to prove she was unstable—”

  “Stop saying that!” Derek said, despair edging his voice. “She was not stalking him.”

  Scarlet didn’t even attempt to look contrite. She just stared straight ahead, like she was trying hard not to show weakness. These two were impossible.

  “We found the payments to Claire,” I said to Derek. “They’ve been going to an address here in town.”

  That seemed to relax him a little, and he dropped the knife to his side. “So she was getting what she wanted?”

  “I’m not sure. The checks were made out to Claire, but mailed to a local place.” I pulled the door shut behind me, stepping to my left, toward Scarlet.

  He shook his head, wiping at his nose with his wrist. “I don’t understand any of this,” he bellowed.

  Him and me, both.

  “Let’s talk it out, Derek. We’re not going to resolve anything otherwise.” I said it in my calmest voice. Then I turned toward Scarlet. “Henry said Claire talked to him while you were inside the convenience store in Rolo,” I said, trying to change the subject back to the task at hand. “Did you happen to see her, at all, when you left the store?”

  “No.” She paused, then added, “I was in there for a while because the clerk was playing stupid video games on his phone. It wasn’t until I got the first text from an unknown number about money for Claire—” she shot a look at Derek, “—that I asked Henry about it. He said he’d talked to her briefly while I was in the store.”

  “So, how do you know he didn’t kill her?” Derek asked, his brows pulling together, knotty and angry. “You don’t.”

  “He wouldn’t have had time. And where would he have gotten that knife?” I said, pointing to Derek’s weapon.

  “This thing?” He held the weapon out in his open palm, like he was offering it to me. “This is Claire’s knife.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s Austin’s.” I reached for it and he didn’t pull away. Before I knew it, I had the thing in my hand. It was hot from his touch, but I’d disarmed him. Or he’d allowed himself to be disarmed.

  “Yeah. He gave it to Claire.” Derek walked back to the couch, pulling the black bag along with him. “She saw him on Monday and he gave her that knife. It belonged to her father.”

  Breath caught in my throat and several things clicked at once in my brain, like a kaleidoscope moving into place. Austin meeting Claire outside the bank, finding out she was his aunt, giving over a knife that had once been his grandmother’s prized possession.

  And he’d proceeded not to tell either his mother or grandmother about the meeting at the bank. Or about his plan to meet her at the bakery. There were plenty of lies to pick from in Austin’s pantheon.

  But the knife hadn’t been in Austin’s hand before the murder. It had been in Claire’s. That put everyone right back on the table as suspects. Including both of the people in the room with me.

  Great.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You don’t even know for sure it’s the murder weapon.” Derek pointed at the knife in my hand.

  He had a point. I turned it over, looking for any signs of blood. There were none. “Well, I know the entry wounds were jagged, this knife has been missing since the murder, and you just told us Claire probably had it on her, so it makes sense this would be the murder weapon.”

  “I thought we were going to turn it over to the cops,” Scarlet said, from near the door. “Then they’d determine whether it was the murder weapon.”

  “Yeah, until boy genius over here decided to touch it.” I pointed at Derek, more than a little frustrated. This certainly complicated matters with the police. “What else is in there, anyway?”

  He bent to pick up the bag and set it on the couch. “There’s an old sweatshirt of hers and a stuffed animal, some books,” he said, riffling through it. “I didn’t intend to touch any of it, but…” He trailed off, looking at the far wall.

  He didn’t say the words, as if doing so would make the whole thing real again.

  It was a seductive idea—the thought that you could deny the truth of something by not acknowledging it. A complete lie, of course, but a beautiful one.

  “We’re going to have to do something with the knife,” Scarlet said. “If it really is the murder weapon.”

  In the end, we decided to wait on what to do. Malcolm wasn’t out looking for the murder weapon—he thought the case was solved—and Derek wasn’t doing anything illegal that would cause the cops to come in and search his house. If we found evidence that was strong enough to convince the sheriff to re-open the case, we would turn the weapon over at that point. The police probably wouldn’t collect evidence on a closed case, anyway.

  I wasn’t sure I was willing to live with probably, but it would have to do for the time being. If Peter caught wind of this, I was done.

  We all left, Derek driving behind us on his way to the funeral home. Scarlet offered to work her magic on Travis at the paper, as she was constantly working to keep this out of the national media attention—which seemed like a full-time job on its own—while I tried to fix the mess at the bakery. But Derek still needed to bury his wife. I’d offered to go along, and he turned me down. We all agreed to text or call if anything happened, and traded numbers.

  After the morning we had, it felt like all of us needed to be alone.

  As we drove across town, I watched Scarlet out the corner of my eye. Her demeanor had changed quite a bit over the last few days. That prissy, Southern drama queen still lurked under her skin, no doubt. Her down-quilted winter jacket looked like it had cost a thousand dollars. Probably something you’d buy at Barney’s New York. Maybe that part of her would never change. But I could tell this week had changed her—at least on some level.

  “How long do you have to stay here?” I asked, turning onto Main Street and driving through the heart of town. I had come to appreciate the landscape and beauty of this place, but I wasn’t sure someone like Scarlet ever could. That was okay. Hollywood would gladly take her back.

  “I’ll probably try to make another meeting with that banker about Henry’s mother’s estate. If Henry is—” her voice broke, but she caught herself, “—gone…then I’m not sure what will happen. I certainly don’t have the legal authority to sign for anything,
but when I get back to LA, his lawyers will need all of the relevant information. I might as well gather it.”

  “Why’d she stipulate that he had to be here in person, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “She always had a big thing about him not coming back. She didn’t like to travel, so they never saw each other again after he moved to LA.”

  “Wow.” I couldn’t imagine not seeing my dad for twenty years. I hadn’t seen my own mother in twenty years, but she wasn’t alive. Several months without my very-much-alive father had been hard enough.

  “Yeah. She wouldn’t come to his weddings, but she’d lay a guilt trip on him every time he called for a holiday about how he never came to see her.”

  “When did she die?” I asked, turning the last corner onto Mockingbird Lane.

  “Maybe four years ago.”

  “That’s a long time not to deal with an estate.”

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t have any siblings and he’s the last living relative, so there wasn’t even a funeral when she passed. It was right around the time he landed the big part on Bronson. They shot the pilot that summer, and then he had two long film shoots, back to back. After the show got picked up, he had to be on set pretty much all the time. He just never had a chance to get to it. This was his first genuine break in years, and I think he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. He told me he was running out of time to take care of it, but I figured he he was just taking advantage of the real estate market up here.”

  I laughed, pulling up in front of the bed and breakfast and putting the Tank into park. “There isn’t a market up here, to speak of.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, he was ready to get it done. We finally both had a break at the same time, so he made an appointment with the banker and I bought the plane tickets.” She put her hand on the door handle, but she didn’t open it. A pensive look lined her pretty features. “Y’know, I just thought of this. If he was planning to do something specific with the money, maybe that was what the deadline was about.”