The only positive aspect to the article was that Leo had declined to comment on the investigation. He hadn’t told the press about Lydia’s potential “motive,” or that she could have been the last person to talk to him alive.
“I’m sorry,” Dianna said. “I’m sorry that the paper is being so cruel to you with its innuendos about you as the killer, and that I didn’t find out any more about that man in the suit.”
“It’s all right,” Lydia said, folding up the newspaper so she wouldn’t look at it anymore. “I hired you to make taffy. Not to track down suspects to clear my name. This wasn’t what you signed up for, was it?”
“This isn’t quite the peace and quiet I expected at the shore,” Dianna admitted. “But I’m not going to abandon you in your time of need. I tidied up the kitchen, and I think I’m doing well with your recipe for the pineapple taffy. It’s true we might not get much business today, but by the time this is all cleared up I’ll have perfected my technique.”
“Thank you for being so positive. I think I needed to hear that. It seems like everywhere I turn there’s more bad news.”
It seemed like Dianna was getting ready to contradict her, but she was interrupted by Lydia’s ringtone. Lydia looked at her phone and saw the call was coming from her brother. She excused herself and headed to her office as she answered the phone.
“Miss Doherty?”
Lydia balled up her free fist out of frustration. This wasn’t a good start to a brotherly chat.
“This is she,” Lydia responded, determined to sound even more proper than he did.
“Would you mind coming into the station this afternoon? We have some more questions.”
“I have some questions too. Are you even looking into any other suspects? Do you know who had access to the taffy samples on the boardwalk? Do you know anything about Daniel Brine’s background? And do you just allow your medical examiner to say whatever he wants to the press?”
“Our questions are about the deceased realtor selling your home,” Leo said, cutting her off. “If you have any documentation, it would be helpful if you brought it in.”
“I think someone used my taffy to kill Randall Holmes to divert suspicion away from them. I was giving out free samples and—“
“I don’t want to hear your theories,” he said gruffly. “This is my investigation.”
“And are you sure you shouldn’t be taken off this case because of a conflict of interest?” asked Lydia.
“On the contrary. My colleagues think that I’ve been very objective when considering that my sister might be a killer. I’m not letting sentiment get in the way at all.”
“Just jealousy and pigheadedness.”
“Let me know when you’re coming in,” Leo said before hanging up abruptly.
Lydia took a deep breath to try and calm down. She supposed that she could head over to the police station shortly. There weren’t any customers, and most of her staff hadn’t shown up. She wandered into the kitchen, looking for an excuse to keep her from going to talk to the detectives immediately. However, the kitchen was impeccable and spotless. The stainless steel table was sparkling, and the trash had been taken out.
“Dianna, did you take out the trash?”
Her employee walked closer to her, frowning. “I did. I was just looking for things to do to clean up while you were upset about the paper. Did you need something in there? Was it evidence? Oh dear. Do you want me to go through the dumpster down the block?”
Lydia considered it for a moment. “No. There’s no need. I was thinking of showing Detective Doherty how I was accounting for my missing taffy, but he doesn’t want to listen to what I have to say anyway.”
Feeling distraught, Lydia collected her purse. She was about to tell Dianna that she could either watch over the shop which would most likely remain empty or go home for the day. Lydia would collect whatever papers she had from her house to bring to the station.
However, then the shop door opened. An excited Kelsey and Jeff ran inside.
“You’re here,” Lydia said, sounding surprised. “I thought I scared you off.”
“Nah. We’re made of tougher stuff than that,” said Jeff.
“And I’m sorry we’re late,” Kelsey said. “But it’s for a good reason.”
“What is it?” asked Lydia.
Kelsey could scarcely contain her joy, and Jeff looked rather smug. They glanced at one another, and Jeff nodded.
“We found the man in the suit!” Kelsey said.
“You did?” Lydia asked, nearly jumping for joy. It was news she wanted to hear, and Kelsey’s enthusiasm was infectious. “That’s wonderful.”
“Neither of us recognized him,” Kelsey began.
“So I knew it wasn’t someone who went surfing a lot,” said Jeff.
“Or someone who visited my school. Or a friend’s parent,” Kelsey continued. “So, we had to start from scratch.”
“And we thought the best way to do that was to figure out what made him distinctive. And that was his tattoo,” said Jeff. “I have a friend who has a tattoo parlor in town. I’ve considered getting one, but you shouldn’t really let saltwater get on it while the ink is drying, so I haven’t committed to one. I also don’t know exactly what I would get.”
“The point is that we asked him if he recognized anyone with that tattoo,” Kelsey said after elbowing Jeff for getting off-topic. “And his friend didn’t ink that tattoo, but he thought he knew that a realtor here had an anchor like that.”
“We thought that might be important because Randall was a realtor too.”
“I think you are on to something,” Lydia agreed.
“We looked up local realtors online and checked them out. The man we saw that day didn’t have a picture online. But look at the logo for Atwater Realty,” said Kelsey. She held up a printout of the logo. It looked exactly like the anchor tattoo that they had seen on the man in the suit.
“Great job,” said Lydia, excitedly.
“We went by the office this morning to make sure that the guy we saw was there,” said Kelsey. “And we saw him through the window.”
“We were going to go inside and talk to him,” Jeff said. “But you made us promise to be careful and not let him know we were on to him.”
“What you did was perfect,” Lydia assured them. “I’ll go and talk to him now and maybe get some answers.”
Her three employees gathered around her as she headed to the door.
“Do you want us to close up or stay here?” asked Dianna.
“Since you have some taffy on the puller, why don’t you all stay here and practice what I showed you the other day? I’ll be back soon.”
“Good luck,” Jeff said.
“Thanks,” said Lydia. She thought she might need it.
13
The Other Realtor
“Welcome to Atwater Realty. I’m Walt Atwater. What can I help you with today?”
Lydia wondered whether she could really come out and ask the man what she wanted help with – discovering whether he was a murderer or not. She was grateful that her employees had tracked down the last man to take a taffy sample, but now she needed to determine if he was hiding a guilty conscience.
She had come up with an excuse for her questions as she made her way over to the office. She hoped that it would work in getting the man to talk.
“I’m Lydia Doherty. I think we met in passing at my shop, Doherty’s Taffy and Trinkets.”
“Yes, of course. Delicious pineapple salt water taffy,” Walt Atwater said. His broad smile started to fade. “But I believe there has been some unpleasantness since I was there last.”
“That’s right. And that’s what I wanted to talk about,” Lydia said as he ushered her to a seat near his desk. She glanced around to see if there was anyone else in the office, but there was no one at the welcome desk. It appeared she was alone with the possible murderer. She knew that she would have to make her story convincing if she didn’t want to arou
se suspicion.
“You want to talk about that unpleasantness?” he asked raising an eyebrow.
“I mean that I want to talk to you about selling my family’s house. Because you’re a realtor,” Lydia said quickly. “Randall Holmes was handling the sale. With his death, I’m not quite sure what to do.”
“I might be able to help you,” Walt said.
“I hope you don’t think I'm insensitive,” Lydia continued. “Looking for a new realtor so soon after his death, but I do want to sell the house for my aunt’s sake. She’ll need the money.”
“How many bathrooms?”
“Three. And it has lovely views of the beach,” said Lydia.
“I’m sure I can sell it for you,” Walt said as he began taking some forms out of his desk drawers.
“Thank you so much. I have heard wonderful things about you. When I was first deciding who to trust with this sale, I was considering coming here. I only asked Randall Holmes to sell the house because I worked with him when I bought the taffy shop.”
“Well, that’s understandable,” Walt said. He let out a little laugh, but then excused himself. “My apologies.”
“What?”
“No, no. It’s nothing. It’s in bad taste.”
“Was it about the taffy shop?” Lydia asked. “You can tell me. I’ve heard everything these days.”
Walt paused, but finally admitted what was on his mind. “I was just thinking there’s a bit of irony in the world. I thought Ruth would come to me to sell her taffy shop because I’ve known her for years, but Randall Holmes swooped in. He wooed her with his terrible taglines about Holmes tracking down buyers and it not being a mystery why you should choose him. It’s funny that he was found dead outside the shop like that.”
Lydia nodded, trying to remain cool. This definitely sounded like a motive to her. Perhaps that was even the reason why the salt water taffy had been used as a murder weapon. Walt wanted Randall to die eating from the shop that he felt Randall stole from him.
“Maybe you dodged a bullet with the sale?” Lydia suggested, hoping this sounded like normal small talk. “The taffy shop hasn’t been especially lucky for me so far.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Walt said. “I hadn’t considered that. I’ve just been thinking about what a good sale it must have been. I don’t know exactly what you paid for it, but I know there was interest in the building. It couldn’t have been cheap.”
“No. It wasn’t,” Lydia said. “But my uncle left me enough in his will to get the shop. He knew it was my dream.”
“Well, the thought was nice. He couldn’t have known what would happen outside your door to bring the property value down.”
“The property value?”
“People don’t like shopping or eating near where someone was murdered,” Walt explained. “I didn’t read today’s paper yet, but yesterday there was a picture of the crime scene with your shop in the background.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Well, we don’t need to talk about how that property will suffer. We can focus on the house you’d like to sell.”
Lydia nodded and began answering his questions about her current house. Part of her realized that she really did need to find a new realtor to sell the house, but she wasn’t sure she wanted one of her suspects to really handle the sale.
“It’s nice that it has a deck,” Walt said as she described the home. “People like to be able to sit outside on the weekends.”
“Right,” Lydia said, jumping on a chance to bring the subject back to the questions that she needed answers to. “Like on a Friday night. It might be the perfect thing to do. Do you ever do that?”
“I normally spend time on my balcony rather than a deck.”
“And were you there this Friday?” Lydia asked, trying to sound innocent.
“This Friday was raining,” Walt said. He eyed her suspiciously. “And why are you asking about this Friday?”
“Oh. Well, I just realized that you must have had some competition with Randall Holmes. And I just wanted to make sure that you couldn’t possibly have been involved with what happened to him if I’m going to do business with you.”
Walk rose to his feet, looking angry. “You think I might have killed Holmes?”
“No,” Lydia said, backtracking. “No, not really.”
Her cell phone began ringing, and she was grateful for an excuse to leave immediately. She didn’t even mind that it was an annoyed Leo wondering what was taking her so long to get to the station.
14
Another Interrogation
Lydia was back in the interrogation room, but this time she didn’t have her trusty canine companion seated next to her. Detective Grey seemed more at ease without the dog there, but Leo was in a bad mood. He was pacing by the table.
“Let me get this straight,” Leo said. “You didn’t get the papers I asked for. Instead, you went to talk to a new realtor because you thought he might be the killer. I don’t know which part of this I have a bigger problem with.”
“I was only talking to him because it didn’t seem like you were following all possible leads,” Lydia said. “I was looking at all the people that took samples of my pineapple taffy because one of them could have added cyanide to a piece and killed Randall Holmes.”
“Lydia, you can’t do things like that.”
“It’s Lydia again?” she asked. “Not Miss Doherty?”
Leo gritted his teeth. “You can’t interfere with a police investigation, especially if you’re a suspect in it.”
“It’s because I’m a suspect that I needed to act. You must have seen what the paper is saying about my taffy shop. They still have a lot of fodder against me even if you didn’t tell them I was an official suspect. I guess I do appreciate that you did that.”
“I always say “no comment” to the press when it’s an ongoing investigation,” said Leo.
“Great,” Lydia replied with a sigh. The little bit of familial feeling that she thought was there must have only been in her imagination.
“You can’t investigate on your own. It could jeopardize our case in court, and you could get hurt.”
“Are you pretending you care about my safety now?” Lydia asked as she crossed her arms. “Because it still seems like you’re trying to prove I’m guilty of something I didn’t do.”
“I’m following the evidence and right now—“
Detective Grey cleared his throat, interrupting his partner. “Doherty, can I talk to you for a minute?”
He rose from the table and headed to the door. Leo followed him out of the room. Lydia stayed in her seat and tapped her fingers on the table nervously. Nothing seemed to be going right for her. Now what could the detectives be talking about? Would they have more bad news for her when they returned? She rubbed her wrists, hoping that they soon wouldn’t have handcuffs on them.
However, when Leo and Detective Grey reentered the room, her brother seemed much calmer.
“We think that you’ve answered all the questions we have for now,” Detective Grey said. “And we’re sure you have a lot of work to do with your new business.”
Lydia stood up, wondering if there was some catch to this. She looked at Leo.
“You’re free to go.” He sounded more like his old self when he asked, “But would you mind if I stop by later to pick up those papers about the house?”
“No. That would be fine,” said Lydia. “I’ll be there all evening after I lock up the taffy shop.”
“Well, I’ll see you then.”
Lydia nodded and left the station. Maybe Detective Grey had said something to him that made Leo act like a brother again. Maybe they actually had made some progress on the case and had found some other suspects.
She was beginning to feel a little more optimistic until she reached her taffy shop. There were some people on the boardwalk and beach, but everyone seemed to be giving Doherty’s Taffy and Trinkets a wide berth. She even saw a couple jump over the b
oardwalk’s railing onto the sand to avoid walking directly past the shop.
Lydia entered the taffy shop and saw a large pile of wrapped pineapple salt water taffy and three dejected employees.
Pineapple and Poison Page 6
