Scones and Scoundrels

by Molly Macrae

  “Pay him no mind,” Maida said after he’d gone. “He made that remark himself.”

  Gillian came to the door with Tallie and a docile Rachel Carson.

  “Are you sure you’re all right for getting home?” Tallie asked.

  “Aye. Thank you. I know I was off my head a bit earlier, like this wee lass, here, was. Ian’s blather cleared all that away, but.”

  “Nice to know it was good for something,” Janet said. “Call when you’re ready to think about a memorial. Call any time.”

  There were too few hours of sleep that night. While Janet was using caffeine to prop her eyes open the next morning, another postcard arrived from Sharon Davis. She was in Lucerne, Switzerland. This card only had seven words and two exclamation points. They were oddly apropos: The cheese! Died and gone to heaven!

  22

  Reddick and the Major Investigation Team knocked on the door of the tearoom shortly before they opened that morning.

  “No, there have not been other reports of people falling ill after consuming food or drink at your business,” the detective superintendent with the Major Investigation Team said in answer to Christine’s question.

  “By ‘falling ill,’ you mean dying, do you not?” Christine, at her frosty Elizabeth II best, asked. “Which begs my next question: What leads you to believe Daphne Wood’s death can be attributed to Cakes and Tales?”

  Reddick stepped forward smartly. “May I, sir?”

  The detective superintendent appeared to struggle with his answer, but in the end only spit out the words, “You may.”

  Reddick inclined his head for Christine and the others to follow him from the tearoom into the bookshop. Janet was tempted to match his step, which was close to a march. She suspected Christine might be tempted, too, and didn’t dare look at her. Laughing now would be as inappropriate and embarrassing as laughing at a funeral. Janet bit her cheek and kept her eyes on Summer’s face, still pale with shock.

  Reddick halted their procession a dozen or so feet into the bookshop and cast a glance toward the tearoom. Apparently satisfied, his posture relaxed a fraction.

  “This information is not to be shared. May I have your word on that?” The four women nodded. “Early indications are that Ms. Wood ingested a poisonous substance. It’s unknown, as yet, what that substance was or what transpired.”

  “If you don’t know, then why are you here?” Summer asked.

  “We had a report of Ms. Wood carrying home tea and scones from an event here yesterday. It’s possible the substance was in one or both of them.”

  Summer had started shaking her head as soon as Reddick mentioned the tea and scones. “It isn’t possible. It absolutely isn’t. Other people were drinking from the same batch of tea and eating scones from the same trays, including Constable Hobbs.” Summer’s eyes narrowed. “He’s the one who told you she took them, isn’t he?”

  Tallie put her hand on Summer’s shoulder. “I don’t think we really have anything to worry about, Summer. Am I right?”

  “We’re in the process of eliminating possibilities as much as looking for the source. We won’t inconvenience you for long.”

  Janet waited until Reddick had returned to the tearoom and closed the door, then she looked at the others. “Fireplace? For a few minutes before we open the bookshop, anyway, so we can wrap our minds around this.”

  They sat in the comfy chairs, first looking at each other, then off into their own thoughts. Janet felt guilty for having imagined Daphne and Rachel Carson greedily gobbling scones the night before. While she’d been picturing that, Daphne had already been dead or dying.

  She looked at each of the others again. Tallie was watching Summer. Summer wasn’t relaxing into the soft chair. Christine looked ready to bite.

  “An accident,” Christine snapped. “The woman was lunatic enough to serve up houseplants. Who knows what she’s been foraging in other people’s gardens? It could have been an accident.”

  “The dog is fine?” Summer asked.

  “She was freaked out,” Tallie said. “Hungry, though. I wasn’t sure what to feed her and ended up giving her a bowl of lentil soup. Kind of weird, but she ate it.”

  “Do you think the dog was bright enough not to touch the poisoned food?” Christine asked.

  “Or snooty enough,” Tallie said.

  “An accident could make sense,” Janet said. “Maybe something she ate interacted with a medication? Or could it have been suicide? Everyone has down times, but she seemed to have a switch that flipped more dramatically than others.”

  “Suicide is always a possibility, even for people we think we know,” Christine said. “And we certainly didn’t know her.”

  “But we do know she irritated a lot of people in a short amount of time,” Tallie said, “and made some angry.”

  Summer sat forward. “It’s that short time span that interests me. It seems too short. I’d ask who kills over insults and contrary opinions, but hothead crime is in the news all the time. But poison takes planning. A hothead might cool off before getting past step one.”

  “You think this might be someone who’s been smoldering?” Janet asked.

  “If they find poisoned scones at her place, then they weren’t my scones,” Summer said. “And that means someone not only planned, but also went to the trouble of baking.”

  “Of all the bloody nerve,” Christine said. “Smoldering and then scheming with our scones.”

  The police didn’t stay long. The detective superintendent didn’t communicate anything beyond letting them know they could open the tearoom and resume business. Reddick, apparently, had already left. Summer and Christine immediately went to see what damage had been done to their domain, Summer rolling up her sleeves, Christine fussing like a hen disturbed from her nest.

  Rab and Ranger arrived as Janet unlocked the bookshop door. First things first, they went to Ranger’s chair and Rab spread a bath towel on it.

  “That’s new,” Janet said, nodding at the bath towel Ranger was walking circles on before settling.

  “Second best,” Rab said. “He prefers the Rangers tea towel. It’s in the wash.”

  “Nice to have you back, Ranger,” Tallie said. The dog yawned and Tallie turned to Rab. “You heard the news about Daphne?”

  “Aye. Sad, that. I was afraid I might have to quit while she was here, but.”

  “You pretty much did,” Janet said.

  “Ranger didn’t take to her. I was afraid she’d be stopping in here all hours and I didn’t like to upset the lad.”

  “He didn’t mind you coming in without him yesterday?” Tallie asked.

  “Special circumstances. He wouldn’t like being on his own too often. Bottom shelves need dusting. I’ll just go—” A nod toward the far corner of the store finished the sentence.

  Janet watched Rab drift off with a duster and thought, not for the first time, that his easy-oasy way of dealing with life’s wobbles and peccadilloes might be healthier than most.

  Their business came from tourists more than locals that morning. Janet told Tallie she was just as glad. Although repeated exchanges of wonder over the sudden death might add incremental layers to eventually cushion the shock, they were also exhausting. But without those layers laid down, she wasn’t as prepared as she might have been when the door jingled and Martin Gunn came in. The bounce in his step had gone and his cheeks looked as though they might never glow pink again.

  “Martin, hi, how are you?”

  He flicked a half-smile at her, one that quickly sank.

  “Shocking news,” she said.

  “Aye.” He seemed to cast around for something else to say, and she couldn’t blame him for coming up short. Then he stuck his arm out and waved vaguely in the direction of the tearoom. “The police were here?” He looked as though he couldn’t bear to say more.

  “All’s well,” Tallie said, coming to his rescue. “Eliminating possibilities, they said. Go on through. It’s business as usual.” />
  “Summer will be glad to see you,” Janet added.

  His cheeks did color slightly at that, but it wasn’t the happy pink Janet had seen the morning after the ceilidh. He took himself off to the tearoom before she could study his mood further. Tallie excused herself to run inventory reports in the office. Janet, alone for the time being, practiced the syllable Martin and Rab shared in common, saying “aye” quietly to herself, trying it with various stolid, reserved, and unresolved emotions. It didn’t seem to come naturally to her, though, and she wondered if the addition of a sigh would help.

  “Are you all right?” Rab asked, suddenly there and looking at her with concerned eyebrows.

  Janet put a hand to her chest. “Fine, yes. Startled, but fine.”

  He looked only slightly skeptical. “Have you got a wee moment?” He held up his phone. “There’s something you might like to see. A blog post on one of Daphne’s websites.” He handed the phone across the counter to her.

  “She had more than one site?”

  “Modern communication.”

  “How did she have any?”

  “She thanks her public library,” Rab said.

  “She had rude things to say about librarians.” Feeling a scowl coming on, Janet took a calming breath and read the blog’s headline and the first paragraph. “Well, good Lord, she doesn’t pull any punches, does she? This is—” She didn’t want to say what it was before reading through to the end. She handed the phone back to Rab. “Send me the address, will you? I definitely want to read this, but I don’t want to tie up your phone.” And she didn’t want to spit invective all over it. “If you have her other site addresses handy, send them, too, will you?”

  Rab did some dexterous thumb work and slipped the phone into a pocket.

  “Do you think anyone at the paper has read that?” Janet asked.

  “Could be. It’s dated Saturday morning.” He took a duster from another pocket and stuffed it in the bag of others below the counter.

  “Finished with the bottom shelves? Thank you.”

  “I’ll finish tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll wash those dusters, too. Thought I’d see if they need me in the tearoom just now.”

  “Oh.” Janet knew few people would fault her for being annoyed that he hadn’t finished dusting, Christine among them. But she forgave him this morning because he’d just helped her realize she had her own “aye” for which she needed no practice. She took out her phone, navigated to the web address Rab had sent, and with an “oh” expressing several emotions, settled on the stool behind the counter.

  Reading the blog post between customers helped Janet digest it. Daphne was in rare, ranting form throughout, and smaller portions of her vitriol were easier to take. She railed against reporters, editors, newspapers in general, and print newspapers, in particular. She framed her rant by choosing the Inversgail Guardian as her prime example. She made it specific by calling out James Haviland, and made it personal by calling him names Janet had heard references to but never read or heard with her own ears. When Tallie came out of the office, Janet sent her back in to read it on the computer.

  “Maybe reading it on the small screen intensified the vileness of it,” Janet said. “See what you think.”

  What Tallie thought took longer to find out than Janet expected.

  “Time suck,” Tallie said when she came out of the office again. “Sorry about that. I read some of her other posts and took a look at her other sites. I’m not surprised by any of it, really. We heard the same kind of thing at the ceilidh. She definitely had her own slant. That’s what a blog’s good for, though. It’s a personal soapbox, and you can skew things any way you want.”

  “She didn’t just skew with the post about James and the Guardian, she skewered. Anyone at the paper who read it would be furious. I take it there’s more like that?”

  “She spread the wealth,” Tallie said. “To put it politely and mildly, she was a committed environmentalist. I wonder if any of her targets found out she would be in Inversgail.”

  “And dropped in to see her? In that case, if we thought retracing her steps in Inversgail might help us figure out what happened—”

  “It might not help at all. Her blog let her step on people all over the globe.”

  “It seems unlikely someone would come any great distance to kill her,” Janet said. “But say someone flew in and then flew out again, how would we ever know? Check car rentals or hotel registries? We wouldn’t know what we were looking for. That would be a dead end.”

  “And that’s a bad term.”

  Early in the afternoon, Rab and Ranger called it a day. Rab gave a soft, short whistle. Ranger hopped down from his chair, took hold of the bath towel in his teeth, and followed Rab to the door. Rab took the towel from the dog and folded it. They left as Constable Hobbs entered, the dog and both men nodding as they passed.

  Hobbs disappointed Janet by having no new information about Daphne’s death, explaining that the Major Crime Team was still collecting and sifting information. She thought he might be buttering them up when he told her he would most likely get more and better information from them than he would from the specialists.

  “Even from Reddick?” Janet asked. “That’s disappointing. Do they have a working theory? I feel like we’re in the dark and it’s not a good feeling.”

  “They might be in the dark, as well,” Hobbs said. “The DS wasn’t interested in hearing that Ms. Wood was interested in Sam Smith’s death.”

  “The DS?”

  “The one you might refer to as ‘the officious person in charge,’ the detective superintendent.”

  “Dopey and shortsighted is more like it,” Janet said. “Reddick knows she was asking questions, but if the DS isn’t listening, he probably won’t consider that we might be in danger, too.”

  “And that’s why I’d like you to pass along any information you come across. I see that as a good way to avoid another homicide.”

  “Jolly Norman,” Christine said at the end of the day when Janet told her about his visit. “How comforting.”

  “It’ll be a way for him to beat the specialists, too,” Janet said. “And by him, I mean we. We did it last time and bloody well can again.” She pounded a fist on the counter.

  “I hadn’t realized what a competitive streak you have,” Christine said.

  “It’s for the greater good. We’re really all on the same side.”

  “And now you sound like a politician.”

  “Heaven forbid. How did it go in the tearoom today? Any fallout from the search?”

  “One or two comments about opening late,” Christine said, “but no one mentioned police and neither did we.”

  “Martin did,” Summer said, “but discreetly. And he shared a draft of his revamped article with me.”

  “Are they going to run it?” Janet asked. “I mean, as is, or rewrite it again? How sad and awkward.”

  “They could run it as is with a special note under the headline,” Summer said. “Martin was in the dumps to begin with because he said James turned the article into a fluff piece. He got pretty emotional about it this morning. He’d spent a lot of time with Daphne, and felt as though he’d really gotten to know her. He said the cuts, especially now, feel like they’re cutting away at her, personally.”

  “That’s interesting,” Tallie said.

  “He said she talked a lot about honesty and truth and that resonated with him. Resonated is one of his favorite words, judging by how often he used it.”

  “Did you ask him if anything she said about honesty and truth resonated in particular?” Christine asked.

  “She told him she lived in the woods because they’re honest. More honest than cities or towns or the people in them. She also said her dog is more honest than most people.”

  “A Pekingese trimmed to look like a lion?” Janet asked.

  “Her ideas of truth and honesty were interesting, to say the least,” Christi
ne said.

  “And irritating,” said Janet. “Depending on who they irritated, and how much, I wonder if they provide motives?”

  “That’s why I asked Martin if he’d share the original article with me,” Summer said. “It might prove educational. He said he’d get it to me.”

  “You’re brilliant,” Janet said.

  “And his notes. He said he’d get them to me, too.”

  Ian Atkinson knocked on Janet’s door that evening, bearing a package of dark chocolate digestive biscuits. Both were a surprise, the biscuits more pleasant than Ian. He told her he’d just met a deadline and he was coming up for air and thought he’d make the neighborly call he should have when she first arrived. Janet, though not fond of him, saw no point in being rude. She supposed the circumstances of the previous night’s visit meant it hadn’t counted as a neighborly welcome. Now, his timing was good. The kettle she’d put on started to whistle. She invited him in, accepted the biscuits with thanks, and after showing him to the living room, went to put the tea things on a tray. When she went back to the living room, he was standing at the back window.

  “Tell me those aren’t binoculars you have trained on Daphne’s house,” Janet said.

  Startled, Ian whirled around. The binoculars were on a strap around his neck or he might have flung them like a discus.

  “You can’t use my living room for a stakeout, Ian. For goodness sake.”

  “You snuck up on me.”

  “I did not. Why do you even have binoculars with you, if this is your long-postponed social call? And don’t tell me you’ve taken up birdwatching. What do you even hope to see?” She really did want to know and wondered if she’d already blown the chance to find out by scolding him.

  “Not what. Who.”

  “What?”

  “Who,” Ian repeated. “And no, I haven’t taken up birdwatching.”

  “Someone’s in the house?” Janet couldn’t help herself and went to the window. She couldn’t see anything and first wondered if he was pulling her leg, then wondered if she still had the old binoculars her children had used to look for seals and pirate ships. “Is it the police?”