“Are you younger than him?”
Phoebe nodded. “Mom got with Dad after she returned to the city. Kev and I managed to put together a timeline, so we knew when things happened.”
“She never married your dad.”
“It wasn’t until I talked to Kev I found out she couldn’t. She was already married and she never bothered to divorce Kev’s father, which is just like her. He never pushed her for one either, but I think that was more because he did still care about her, and knew that saying the wrong thing was enough to tip her over the edge. Mom was volatile. She left Dad when I was six, for good, which is something I will always be grateful for, because I didn’t want her to be a part of my life. Even then I knew she wasn’t capable of being a parent.” Phoebe sighed. “My brothers died a few years ago, in an accident, and finding Kev meant I felt less alone. Now I’ve lost everyone.”
“How about your dad?”
“When I made the decision I wanted to be a part of Mom’s life he disowned me. He did hate her, but then her dealers found us and took everything. There was nothing Dad could do to stop it and from them on he made it obvious what would happen if one of us chose to get to know her. I couldn’t leave her alone, though. She needed someone there to try to make sure she looked after herself. I didn’t hate her for the choices her dealers made. I couldn’t hate her. She was my mom and I wanted to be there for her, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to change her.”
“I could introduce you to Kevin’s dad. That might help a little. He’s alone now and he can help you get through this, although, as much as I hate to tell you this, you are going to be a suspect.”
“Due to the argument we had.” Phoebe sipped her coffee. “That’s not a surprise. He was so determined to find Mom’s killer and I thought the best thing we could do was leave it. It was going to be one of her dealers, so there’d be no chance of us getting any sort of conviction.”
***
Knocking on the Thompson’s door for the second time in a day wasn’t unusual when Mary-Ann was with Kevin. She’d spent almost as much time there as she had at her own home, and she always knocked, no matter how many times she was told she could walk in whenever she wanted. When Sally answered the door Mary-Ann couldn’t help smiling. “Hi. I take it things are going okay.”
“They are.” Sally stared at Mary-Ann. “What are you doing here again?”
“Actually, I’m glad both of you are there, because I have someone to introduce you to. Can you get Mr. Thompson? I think it will be simpler that way.”
Looking confused Sally disappeared into the house. Mary-Ann turned to where Phoebe was waiting on the other side of the road and gestured for the other woman to join her. By the time Phoebe had reached her Sally was back at the door with Kevin’s dad. “Hello, Mare. Who’s your friend?”
“I want you both to meet Phoebe. Phoebe is Kevin’s younger sister.”
Mr. Thompson studied Phoebe. “You weren’t at the funeral.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t go. Mom and I weren’t in a good place when she died, so I wanted a chance to say goodbye alone. That’s when I met Kevin.”
“I’m not surprised. She was a hard woman to care about. Were you the young woman he was talking to?”
Nodding, Phoebe brushed a hand through her hair. “I needed someone, because I was alone, and finding Kevin changed my life. The only issue we had was the way he wouldn’t stop hunting for Mom’s killer. That’s why we argued the day he died. I wanted him to leave it. He told me he couldn’t, as he was close to working out who it was.” She looked at Mary-Ann. “Could that be the reason he was killed?”
“Everyone in the tent on the day was someone we knew.”
“That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have killed him, Mare, especially if they happened to be the killer. My wife wasn’t exactly faithful to me, so there’s a chance someone in Green Springs had an affair with her.” Mr. Thompson shrugged. “Anything is possible. Someone killed my son for a reason we haven’t yet worked out.”
Mary-Ann sighed. “You should talk to D.I. O’Connor about it. He needs to know everything about this.”
“Yes, he does, but I think you’re the one who’s most likely to find out who it was.”
“Why?”
“You know everyone in Green Springs. You knew Kevin better than anyone else, sorry Sally, and if anyone’s going to be able to get to the bottom of this mess it’s going to be you.”
Sally nodded. “He’s right. Kevin and I would have got to that stage, but we’d only been together a year. I want you to find out who it was.”
***
“Rob, I need a list of everyone who was in the tent on the day of the cake competition.”
“Okay.” He sounded amused. “My brother just asked for exactly the same thing.”
“He must have spoken to Phoebe.”
“Who’s Phoebe?”
“Kevin’s younger sister.” There was a long silence. “I know. That’s exactly how I felt when I first met her.” Mary-Ann shook her head. “I don’t understand why Kevin was keeping so many secrets from us all, but he was, and that means I’m even less certain of who might have been willing to kill him. His dad thinks it might have been someone who had a fling with his wife and then ended up killing her in the city.”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“Right now I don’t know anything. I have no idea who Kevin is now, because he’s not the man I knew, and that means I need to try to work out who would have killed someone I don’t know.” She shook her head. “This just reminds me of what it was like to find Paul’s killer.”
“We do have suspects.”
“Yes, but I don’t think it was any of them.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into them. It’s far too easy to stop yourself from thinking about someone as a suspect if you know them well.”
“I wasn’t wrong last time.”
“No, you weren’t, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t this time, Mare. I know why you don’t want to think it’s them, but there is a chance it was them. You need to keep that in mind.”
Mary-Ann sat opposite Alex and Robert. “The main suspects.” She scribbled her name down. “It was my cake, Kevin’s my ex, and people think I’m the one who was calling him all the time.” That was followed by Sally’s. “Then you have the current girlfriend, who also happened to be involved in the cake competition, and could well have been jealous if she believed I was calling Kevin. So far she seems to be dealing with this in the way any grieving girlfriend would, but she might be a very good actress.”
Phoebe’s came next. “You have the newfound sister, who wanted him to stop hunting for their mom’s killer…” She looked at Alex. “Do you know anything more about whether or not Kevin is Phoebe’s brother?”
“I’ve been looking into it, and so far I haven’t found a birth certificate, even when I asked Kevin’s father about it. For now I don’t think it matters. Phoebe believed Kevin was her brother and that’s enough.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “It’s possible Phoebe was the one who murdered their mom, in a fit of rage, and that’s why she didn’t want Kevin looking into it. The other option is it was her father who killed her mom, which is another reason why she wouldn’t want Kevin looking into it.” Sighing, she added Mr. Thompson to the list. “Even though he wasn’t at the competition there’s a chance he might have had the cake poisoned. He is the only one who would have known Kevin was taking over from him.”
“If Kevin had made the decision he wasn’t talking to his dad how would they have dealt with that?”
“Text, probably.” Mary-Ann shrugged. “Honestly, I think it was more than the two of them weren’t talking as much as they normally would be, rather than them not talking at all. The two of them were too close for them not to talk for a couple of months.”
“Does that mean Sally was lying?”
“No, it doesn’t, but it does mean Kevin would have kept his dista
nce. A text is something he could have ignored, if he wanted to. He knew the cake competition was coming up, so he wouldn’t have done, in case his dad needed him to step in again, which has happened a few times recently. His dad has osteoarthritis.”
Robert nodded. “Obviously there are going to be days when he feels better than others. It must have been planned a little in advance.”
“Probably a couple of days at most. That’s the way things work when it comes to these little competitions we have.” Mary-Ann smiled. “It was Mom who used to win them all, once.” She didn’t often talk about her parents, but good memories were good memories. “Now I’ve managed to make my life work out the way she always wanted hers to. She was the one who taught me how to bake in the first place.”
“Everyone in the tent, if Kevin’s dad is right, could be a suspect.” Alex, of course, had to draw their attention back to the work they were supposed to be doing. “Where were the cakes?”
“I’m not certain. We had to make a different one for each round, and there were five rounds. It took about three hours to get to the point where it was just the two finalists, so someone would have had that time to poison the cakes, although they couldn’t have been certain I was going to be able to get through to the last round.”
“You were always going to get through to the last round, Mare, because you’re one of the best bakers in the town. Maybe that’s why they chose your cake. There was no guarantee it would be Sally who was against you.”
“The tastings were blind. No one knew which cake was which.”
“Unless they happened to know you well enough to be certain which cake was yours.”
“Not possible. I picked a different recipe because the judges do know me. I didn’t want an unfair advantage.” She laughed. “They knew all of the competitors, as it’s often the same people who enter these, but I always make sure to do something unusual when I enter a competition. It would be like entering one of my lemon meringues into the pie competition. Everyone would know who it was straight away.”
“Were there any labels on the cakes at all?”
“Underneath the cakes would have been our names. That’s why the judges can’t cut slices themselves, and each one is given a slice from a different cake.” Mary-Ann nibbled her lip. “Kevin was the only one of the judges to be given a slice of my cake, otherwise the other two judges would have been poisoned as well, which means we need to find out who was the one slicing the cakes.” She pulled the list towards her. “Jenna McGrath is a good person, so I wouldn’t have thought it was her, although there was a time when she thought she might end up with Kevin. Maybe jealousy, but then I would have thought she’d use Sally’s cake, as Sally was the one who was in a relationship with Kevin.”
“Could she have thought the two of you were getting back together?”
“No, she sees me with Rob too often for her to think that was a possibility.”
Sighing, Mary-Ann went further down the list. “It was easier with Paul. Limited suspects make for a much simpler case.”
Alex laughed. “Of course it does.” Their eyes met. “Why else do you think anyone in my position does their best to have a short list of the most possible people to be involved? At the moment we have that short list, and we have a longer list of people who might have been involved, although, to me, it seems unlikely.”
***
Every time Mary-Ann walked past the park she thought about Kevin. It was impossible not to. Most places she was able to push aside the memories that might get the better of her, but there… sometimes it seemed like they spent all their time there when they weren’t at her place. Slowly, even though she knew she should be heading for the shop, she stepped through the gate. The moment she did she was with Kevin again, they were eighteen, and arguing over the decision she made to leave Green Springs.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You’ve said that numerous times. That’s not going to change anything. All I really want to do is get away from Green Springs for a while.”
“Four years isn’t a while.”
“Kevin…” She shook her head. “Things have changed since the two of us first got together. I’ve changed.” Their eyes met. “I’ve been through a lot recently and I think this is the best choice I could make.”
“Why not stay here? You have friends, and family, and we were talking about getting married.”
“Now I don’t think it’s the best idea.” She hated saying it, but she knew she had to. “I still care about you, and I don’t want this to be the end, but if you can’t support me I don’t think this is going to work out. I know it’s going to be hard…”
“The city changes people.”
“I’m not your mom. I’m not going to become her. I can understand why you’d worry, but I promise you I’m not going to get into anything dangerous.”
For a long time he was silent. “You can say that all you like, but you don’t know what might happen when you’re there.”
“That’s why I want us to do this together. You can visit me and keep me from falling off the rails.” She knew even as she said it there was no chance of it happening. “In the end it’s up to you what you think will work for you, and I understand if you decide you want this to come to an end.”
“There’s nothing I can say to convince you to stay.”
“No, there’s not.” She felt the tears welling up in her eyes. “I’m sorry it came to this, Kev.”
“So am I.” He kissed her cheek. “I’m going to miss you, Mare.”
He walked away, leaving her in the park, and she remembered sitting underneath the tree she thought of as theirs, the tears streaming down her cheeks. It was Hannah who’d found her there, staring into the distance. A hand rested on her shoulder. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” Mary-Ann turned to look at Hannah. “Would this have happened if Kevin and I were still together?”
“Maybe. You can’t think like that, though, because what’s done is done. Going to the city was something you wanted to do. It was the right thing for you to do at the time.”
“Was it?”
***
There were three copies of the list. Hannah, Darren, and Kelly each had one, while Mary-Ann stared down at her notebook. “Can you see anyone who might have had a motive?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have one.” Darren looked at her. “Kevin was keeping secrets from the people who meant the most to him, which means we have no way of knowing who he’d become close to in the time.”
“I know.” She sighed. “When Sally and I were together she went into his main email account, but she doesn’t seem to know anything about the secondary one he had.”
“You mean the one every logical person has in order to deal with spam messages from people you buy from once and never want to hear from again.”
“That one.” She laughed. “Kevin had one, and I think he might have used it for the investigation he was doing into his mom’s death. There’s nothing anywhere else.”
“Why haven’t you checked it?”
“I don’t know if I should.”
“Of course you should. Then you need to tell Alex about it if there is anything more than spam in it, okay?”
Nodding, Mary-Ann went over to the computer. She put in Kevin’s other email address, hoping the password was still the same, and smiled when she found it was. Her smile quickly faded. “This is not good.”
“What?” Darren was behind her, a hand on her shoulder, and that meant he could see the emails. “You need to call Alex.”
“I know I do.” She got her phone out of her pocket just as someone knocked on the door. “Hannah, would you get that?”
Without waiting for an answer Mary-Ann minimised the window, not wanting anyone else to see what Kevin had been doing, and turned to look at who it was. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Kevin.”
“That’s good. I need
to talk to you about him as well.”
“How about you start?”
Mary-Ann turned back to the computer and brought the window up. “Kevin had more than one email address. When we were younger he used this one for online shopping and nothing else, which is why he wouldn’t have mentioned it, but things have changed since then. He’s been using it to keep in contact with at least three women, who, I think, must have had something to do with his mom. There are a few emails from Phoebe as well, so it seems as though he’s been trying to keep that separate from the rest of his life, for whatever reason.”
“I realised why I couldn’t find a birth certificate for Kevin. The woman who said she was his mom wasn’t. Both her and her twin sister were pregnant at the same time.”
The Alpha Billionaire's Unexpected Baby: A Billionaire BWWM Pregnancy Romance Page 79
