Baking Bad--A Cozy Mystery (With Dragons)

by Kim M Watt

Miriam squeaked, tried to get out from behind the bench, stepped on her own skirt then Mortimer’s tail, and would have fallen into the hydrangeas if Alice hadn’t grabbed her arm.

  “Just out here, Inspector,” Alice called, and Miriam gave a little hiccoughing cry of alarm. Alice lowered her voice. “Are you quite alright, Miriam?”

  “No,” Miriam hissed back. “She’s here! That means she knows about last night! And now she’ll ask about the tablet, and oh, oh—” It suddenly felt very hard to breathe, and she sat down heavily on the bench.

  “Please pull yourself together,” Alice said mildly, and although Miriam wanted to wail that it was entirely unfair to expect anyone to be together, considering the circumstances, she managed, after a fashion. Mortimer was clutching his tail, looking both pained and alarmed, and she whispered, “Sorry.” He nodded violently.

  Miriam was still taking deep breaths and concentrating on soothing her aura when the detective inspector ducked under an overhanging branch of the apple tree and stood looking at them in a way that suggested she was probably trying to appear friendly and approachable but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

  “Good morning Ms Martin, Ms Ellis,” the inspector said.

  “Good morning,” Alice said, smiling, and nudged Miriam.

  “Eep. Morn. Morning,” Miriam managed, and felt herself going pink.

  “Are you alright, Ms Ellis?”

  Miriam nodded enthusiastically. It was the ‘Ms Ellis’ as much as anything else that unnerved her. If DI Adams would only call her Miriam, she would feel much better. But she’d asked the inspector to do just that during the interview at the village hall, when they had gone over and over Miriam discovering the vicar’s body while the inspector pried at her answers from every direction with an inexhaustible persistence that now seemed dreadfully threatening. She’d insisted on calling her Ms Ellis all the way through. It was probably some rule about not being too friendly with suspects. Suspects! She swallowed hard and tried to focus on her aura again.

  “May I offer you a cup of tea, Inspector?” Alice asked. “And are there any more scones inside, Miriam?”

  Miriam shook her head, and tried to say that she’d get the tea, but she couldn’t seem to make her voice work. And the tablet was there, right there on the table. What if the inspector was looking for it? What if she knew it was missing? They were all going to jail. Well, not the dragons. But she and Alice were.

  “A cuppa would be lovely,” the inspector said, still looking at Miriam curiously. Miriam tried to infuse her aura with innocence, but she was pretty sure that if the detective inspector could see auras, she’d have arrested Miriam by now.

  “Do sit down,” Alice said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Don’t go! Miriam wailed, but inside her head. The detective inspector sat down and smiled at her. She had a nice smile, with slightly crooked teeth. It would have put Miriam quite at ease, if her eyes hadn’t been so keen and quick above it.

  “This is a lovely garden, Ms Ellis.”

  Miriam nodded enthusiastically, spreading her fingers to show just how appreciative she was of the inspector’s compliment.

  “So many wonderful plants. I’m terrible with plants. I had a spider plant in London once, but it jumped to its death from the top of the fridge rather than put up with me.”

  Miriam made a sad face.

  “Do you grow a lot of your own produce?”

  Miriam nodded. This was okay. She could do this.

  “And is this a herb garden here?” the inspector asked, pointing at a Miriam’s crowded collection of staggered, mismatched pots and troughs, all full of medicinal herbs and plants that she steeped, or dried, or crushed into pastes. “What have you got here? I recognise the mint, but that’s about it.”

  Answer, Miriam’s brain commanded, but her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She had the momentary, panicked thought that she might never be able to talk again, then one very sharp claw tapped her bare foot, not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to make her jump up and run across to the herb beds.

  “Lemongrass,” she said, pointing wildly. “Verbena. St John’s Wort. Valerian. Ginger. Um. Yes.”

  “Oh, are you showing Detective Inspector Adams your herb garden?” Alice asked, coming down the little path with a clean mug in one hand and the regular-sized teapot in the other. Miriam felt her shoulders slump at the sight of her. Things couldn’t go too wrong with Alice here. “She does have a wonderful garden, does Miriam.”

  “I was just complimenting her on it,” DI Adams said, looking away from Miriam finally. Her eyes slid over the garden, up rather than down, as if there was something on the ground that she didn’t want to see. Miriam raised her eyebrows at Beaufort, and he grinned back, teeth yellow against his greenish skin. Mortimer didn’t look at either of them. He was flat on his belly with his front paws over his eyes and his wings wrapped around him like a bat, as if that was going to make him somehow less visible. Miriam thought he needn’t worry. It didn’t seem to her like Detective Inspector Adams was the sort of person who saw dragons, even if she had an uneasy feeling that she saw an awful lot else.

  “It’s wonderful,” Alice was saying. “Miriam keeps us all supplied with cold remedies, stomach ache cures – everything one could wish for, really.”

  “I mostly make soaps,” Miriam surprised herself by saying. “And skin creams. To sell.”

  “They must be very popular,” the inspector said, watching Alice pour out the tea. Beaufort and Mortimer’s big mugs sat squatly on the end of the table, and some messy flowers had appeared in them, as if they had every right to be there. Miriam supposed that dragons must be quite adept at hiding any evidence of themselves, after all these centuries of pretending to be nothing more than stories.

  “They do okay,” Miriam agreed, starting to feel a little more confident.

  The inspector took a sip of tea and gave an appreciative sigh. “Oh, that’s very nice.”

  “Can’t beat a good cuppa,” Miriam agreed, and grimaced when Alice looked at her sharply. Oh, no. She was going to start babbling now, wasn’t she? First she couldn’t talk, now she was going to babble? She swallowed hard against a horrified giggle and concentrated on her mug.

  There was a moment of quiet as the women sipped their tea, and the inspector looked everywhere except at the dragons. Finally she nodded almost casually at the tablet, still lying in plain view, and said, “That seems a bit out of keeping.”

  Miriam tried to say isn’t it and it isn’t at the same time, and came out with something that sounded like “Isnisn.”

  “Sorry?” The DI looked perplexed, and Miriam squeaked when Alice trod rather firmly on her bare toes.

  “Our Miriam does very well, selling online,” Alice said. “Etsy and so on.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Miriam decided she was better not to speak.

  “It’s rather clever. Quite beyond me, all this stuff. But she was just showing me her new listing for crystal-embellished dreamcatchers. They’re very pretty indeed. Would you like to take a look, Inspector?”

  Miriam almost spat her tea out. Alice couldn’t mean that she wanted her to fire up the vicar’s tablet, right here in front of the inspector? That was madness! Then she saw that DI Adams was shaking her head firmly and making those little hand movements people use when they’re trying to be polite but really, really don’t want something.

  “No, no. That’s fine. Wonderful that you can find such an audience for your, ah, work.”

  The busy garden silence descended again, and Miriam allowed herself a moment to feel both impressed by Alice’s judgement of the inspector’s character, and mildly insulted that she’d been able to hear air quotes around the word “work”.

  “So,” DI Adams said, and placed her mug very neatly on the table, the handle exactly parallel with the edge. Miriam was embarrassed to see it was a cartoon donkey one that she’d brought back from Spain. “I understand you wer
e both at the vicarage last night.”

  Miriam opened her mouth to deny it, and Alice spoke over her. “That’s right, Inspector. We only realised when we met for tea this morning. I imagine we were both worried about Graham out there all the night with no dinner.” She sounded faintly reproachful, and the DI opened her mouth, shut it again, then finally found her words.

  “Well, you’ll be pleased to know he wasn’t there all night, and that he didn’t starve, either.”

  “Oh, I’m glad to hear he got a break. And Rosemary did say she was going to take him breakfast, so I guess we covered all bases.”

  Alice and the inspector were watching each other in a strange, cautious way that made Miriam uncomfortable. Alice was terribly good with people. She always seemed to be able to get them to do pretty much as she wanted, and they’d think it was their own idea. But Miriam thought that the detective inspector was something beyond what Alice was used to dealing with, and she wondered if Alice herself realised that. If she realised that she couldn’t deflect an investigation with a stern look and a sharp comment. She hoped very much that Alice did realise it. It could be the undoing of them all if she didn’t.

  “It appears there was some disturbance at the house while you were both there, too,” Detective Inspector Adams said.

  “Graham heard a noise, yes,” Alice said. “And Miriam told me this morning that he came rushing out of the vicarage just as she arrived.”

  “So you two didn’t know the other was there? You didn’t cross paths?”

  “There are at least three separate ways to get to the vicarage, Inspector. We live in different parts of the village. It would have been more surprising if we had crossed paths.”

  The inspector took another mouthful of tea, frowning at the garden as if realising that something wasn’t quite right, but not sure just what. She put the mug down, rubbed her eyes, and looked at Miriam. “Why did you open the door on an active crime scene, Ms Ellis?”

  Miriam squeaked. She couldn’t help it, it just slipped out.

  “Inspector,” Alice said, the word an admonishment.

  The inspector ignored her. “Why didn’t you just knock?”

  “I did,” Miriam managed, feeling suddenly indignant. As if she’d have just walked in anywhere without knocking! “But I heard Graham shouting, and thought maybe he was saying to come in.” She hadn’t thought anything of the sort, she’d been worried he was shouting at Mortimer, but she couldn’t exactly say that, especially with the inspector looking increasingly uncomfortable, frowning unhappily and rubbing her eyes every time she looked at the garden.

  “Why would you think he was telling you to come in?”

  “Well, why wouldn’t he?”

  “Because it was a crime sc— Oh, forget it.” The detective inspector got up so hurriedly that her chair almost tipped over. She grabbed it, and said, “I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m going to have to go. I think something in your garden is triggering my allergies.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Miriam said. “Can I get you something? Some local honey tea, maybe, or a neti pot?”

  “A neti …? No. No thanks.” DI Adams looked faintly revolted. “Is there a chemist in town?”

  “Not here,” Alice said. “You’ll be best going back to Skipton for that.”

  “Of course I will.” The inspector sighed heavily, and, still not quite looking at the dragons, said, “Why are there empty plates on the ground?”

  “Pixies,” Miriam said, without hesitating. “I always put food down for the pixies if we eat in the garden.”

  “Pixies.”

  “Pixies.” Miriam smiled, trying to project absolute trustworthiness.

  DI Adams looked from one woman to the other, as if she had more questions to ask but wasn’t sure she even wanted the answers. Then she just nodded, and said, “Have a nice day, ladies. Please stay away from crime scenes.”

  “Of course,” Alice said, and they watched her walk down the little path, still rubbing her eyes. She paused to crush a mint leaf between her fingers, breathing in the scent deeply, then reached for another plant.

  “Oh, not that one, Inspector,” Miriam called.

  “No?”

  “No. That’s belladonna. Very poisonous. You don’t want it on your fingers.”

  The inspector looked at the plant more closely, then back at the two women, and Miriam’s heart dislodged itself from her chest, winding up somewhere in the pit of her stomach. The DI’s smile was gone, and the look she gave them was cold, evaluating. “Thanks for the warning,” she said, and walked away.

  “Alice,” Miriam hissed, and the older woman gave a single sharp shake of her head. Beaufort was already moving, low and silent and fast for a big old dragon, while Mortimer appeared to have gone into hibernation. The High Lord vanished through the overgrown garden with barely a whisper of shifting vegetation to mark his passage, and Alice covered the cream with a napkin to keep any flies off, then sipped her tea. Miriam tried to imitate her, but her hand shook and she knocked the mug against her teeth, so she put it back down with a sigh. She was going to need to break into the chocolate Hobnobs at this rate.

  It wasn’t long before Beaufort came trotting back down the path, his head high and his wings shaken half out, the sun sliding off his natural greens and golds and making him luminous.

  “She’s gone,” he said cheerfully. “She’s a very intense woman, isn’t she? I wish we’d left some scones for her. I think she could have used a scone. They always make me feel more relaxed.”

  Miriam thought the inspector might have used the scones to try and force a confession out of them somehow, but she didn’t share that idea. Instead she looked at Alice and said, “Did you see how she looked at me when I said about the belladonna? You don’t think …?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice admitted. “But Mortimer already heard that it was poison, didn’t you, Mortimer?”

  “That it might be,” he said, muffled under his paws.

  “Sit up, lad. She’s gone now. And she strikes me as a very nice lady.” Beaufort patted Mortimer on the back, which only made him curl up more tightly.

  The detective inspector struck Miriam as a lady who wanted very much to arrest someone, which kind of negated any niceness, in her view. “Alice, what do we do? What if it was belladonna? What if she thinks it was me?”

  “I think it’s very clear to anyone who meets you that you don’t have the constitution to be a murderer,” Alice said.

  Miriam wasn’t quite sure whether she should be flattered or insulted. Alice’s tone didn’t make it immediately clear.

  “However, I think we can be sure that she’s still looking at the Women’s Institute,” Alice continued. “So we need to be very discreet as we continue our enquiries.”

  “As we continue them?”

  “Of course.” Alice tapped the tablet. “We have at least three possibilities here to look at. Violet, who may or may not be the woman you saw at the village hall the night the vicar was killed; S.B., who seems to be someone from the vicar’s past; and the person who was upset about the fete. BestBakerBoy.”

  “But why can’t we just leave it to the inspector? She’ll have seen all these emails! It seems very silly to still be poking around when she suspects us!” Miriam’s face had gone very hot, but she planted her hands firmly on the table and tried to look stern.

  Alice smiled at her. “In my experience,” she said, “when the police decide that they have the murderer, they become very fixated on them, whether there’s evidence or not. So leaving things be when they may have evidence that points to us seems rather foolish to me.” She finished her tea and put the cup down, while Miriam wondered what the older woman meant by in her experience. Alice had just arrived in the village one day, moved into her pretty little cottage, and taken over the W.I. with perfect, ruthless efficiency. She didn’t talk much about what happened before that, and somehow no one asked any questions. She supposed they must have, initially, but she certainly coul
dn’t remember Alice answering any.

  “But what are we supposed to do, Alice? We’re not trained investigators. Look what happened when we went to the vicarage. Mortimer was almost caught!”

  “Then we shall have to be more careful.”

  Mortimer made a small noise and tucked his tail a little tighter around him. Miriam rather wished she had some wings to hide under, too. “But what can we actually find that the police can’t?”

  “We will find the things they’re not looking for,” Alice said simply. “We are two intelligent women, and two very talented dragons. What more could we possibly need?”

  Miriam had to question just how intelligent they were, to even be discussing doing something that she was pretty sure would be classed as interfering with police business. Which probably carried a jail sentence, to add to the murder charge.

  “I do rather think you’re right,” Beaufort said. “We can’t just sit aside and hope the police decide it’s not you. Not when we can do something about it.”

  Miriam covered her face with both hands. “I really don’t want to go to jail,” she said, her voice muffled. “Who would take care of my garden?”

  “Neither of us are going to jail,” Alice said. “We’re going to make sure of it, aren’t we?”

  Beaufort nodded enthusiastically, and Mortimer shifted one wing, uncovering an amber eye that glared at them. “I’m still not sure this isn’t the worst idea since the ice dragons did that country swap with the Hawaiian clans, but fine. We’d only have to break you out of jail, and that would be even more complicated.”

  “Well done, lad,” Beaufort said, and gave him another of those painful-looking pats on the back. “Now, what do we need?”

  “We will need something very, very concrete to go to the police with,” Alice said. “A solid suspect. So I think you’d best take a look at those emails again, Miriam. Let’s see what else we can find out.”

  Miriam tapped her fingers on the table, looked at her friends, then picked up the tablet again with a sigh. “Alright. Yes. But can we at least have some sandwiches now? Being suspected of murder apparently makes me very hungry.”