Pippa, knowing that the game was up, rolled her eyes and set her glass down.
“You caught me then,” Pippa said softly when she pulled the door back.
“Pippa, are you literally hiding in your own house?”
She peered past me onto the street. “It’s not safe out there for me,” she whispered, before dragging me inside with her.
“Pippa, I’ve been calling and calling you for days. Did I do something to offend you?” I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her reasons for ignoring me had nothing to do with guilt. Maybe I truly had committed some terrible trespass against her.
She shook her head and slunk back into the shadows against the wall. I knew she liked to keep the lights off in the house as much as possible to conserve electricity, but this was just ridiculous. “Can we turn a light on?”
She shook her head. “It’s better this way. Where no one can see me…”
“Come on, Pippa. Don’t you think you’re being a little ridiculous right now?”
“I didn’t think you’d miss me so much,” she said quietly as she sat down on the sofa. “You shouldn’t worry about me, believe me. Go on without me.” She was still speaking in that same eerie tone.
I wanted her to snap out of it. “Believe me, if I am going to continue with this case, I am going to need you, okay? Blake was a very bad substitute. He just made matters worse today when he came along to investigate.”
Pippa turned to me sharply. “What did he do?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about him and Claudia, and the way I had overreacted. “Caused a scene, basically. He just had to be a drama queen and create an elaborate scenario where he and I were married, with a baby on the way.” I neglected to mention my own overreaction, and the fact that I had run through the lobby and stormed off, leaving Blake stranded there. I still wasn’t sure how he had gotten home.
At least my story seemed to brighten Pippa’s mood. There was a hint of a smile curling on her lips.
“Would that be such a bad thing?” Pippa asked.
“Pippa!” I leaned back heavily on her sofa. “So, are you going to tell me where you’ve been the past two days, then?”
Pippa stared down at her hands. “Rachael, I have something to admit to you.” Her words were heavy and she struggled to even get them out. “Something to admit to everyone, actually.”
“Well, do we need to call a press conference?” I joked, nervously.
I quickly saw that my lighthearted tone was not appreciated in that moment. She slunk down into a wooden chair across from me and stared to the wall on the side.
“It’s about my apples.” She gulped and took a few seconds before she could continue. It truly was as though she was giving a press conference to one. “They are…they are not as organic as I may have claimed.”
I stood up and stared through the back window at the apple orchard, which looked real and organic enough to me, with the moonlight glinting off its branches. What was she talking about? “What, are they made of plastic?” I laughed again.
I turned back to see Pippa sitting there grave-faced.
She stared up at me as though asking for forgiveness, then she blurted out her big confession. “Rachael, I used insecticide on the apple trees.”
At first, I thought she must have been joking with me, although I didn’t quite get the punchline. Insecticide? What was she talking about?
The sign for her apple stand was laying against the wall, advertising the things that she had become famous for in Belldale. The freshest apples. The best apples. The most organic apples.
But I could tell that she was not joking. She looked ashamed, burdened. Getting it off her chest to me hadn’t seemed to lighten her load either.
“Pippa…why didn’t you say something earlier…”
She bit her lip. “Rachael, I am so ashamed. What will I do if people find out my apples aren’t organic?” She wrung her hands. “Oh, I never thought something like this would happen, though. I never thought anyone would die.”
“What are you talking about, Pippa?”
And as soon as she started speaking, her separation, her guilt, suddenly made sense.
“Rachael, I think I am the one who killed Valerie.”
Chapter 8
The barn was even darker than the house was, but Pippa told me that it was safer to discuss the matter there, so we’d left the house to try and figure out our next move.
We both heard footsteps and suddenly it didn’t seem safe in the barn at all. Marcello poked his head into the barn and I jumped. He didn’t see me, though. “Pippa, I gotta go to work! And Lolly is crying for you anyway. Hello?” he called again, as we both heard his footsteps growing closer. “Pippa. This is just getting ridiculous now… Rachael will find out what happened sooner or…” He arrived at the doorway to the barn and stopped when he saw me. “Oh. Hello there, Rachael. I hope you are well.”
But he’d caught me and Pippa huddled in the middle of the barn, whispering and looking guilty. I didn’t care about the fact that I’d been lied to right then. I stood up and tried to hide the fact that Pippa had been crying. “Hello there, Lolly!” I said in that over-exaggerated voice people use when talking to babies. “What have you got there? A new rattle?” I reached over and shook it. The noise and movement made her giggle.
“What are you two talking about?” Marcello asked, concerned.
Pippa quickly wiped her tears away. I jumped in to answer. “We’re just, um, discussing changes to the menu,” I said. “Pippa gets a little overemotional when we remove blueberry pie, you know how she is.” I reached over and told him I’d take Lolly for a little while. He shrugged and before he left for work, he told us not to stay in the barn for too long.
“How is Marcello dealing with his new job anyway?” I asked, bouncing Lolly up and down. She kept stretching her arms out like she was trying to get to her mom. “I don’t think he’s ever held down a job this long before, has he?”
Marcello had been working as a barista at a coffee shop and bar in the next town over. He had been there for almost five months, which was unheard of. The place must really have trouble holding onto staff if Marcello was a long-term employee.
Pippa answered me in a quiet, little voice, “They just have him standing in one spot all day, making coffees,” she said. “So there’s not so much trouble he can get into.”
I wasn’t sure about that. A coffee machine involved boiling water and scalding milk. Not to mention electrical equipment. “Really? You sure he hasn’t caught the whole shop on fire yet?” I was only joking, but Pippa wasn’t really listening anyway.
“A couple of burns to his hand…” she mumbled, not engaging in the conversation.
“Come on. Let’s listen to Marcello. Let’s go back inside. There are too many sharp and rusty things in here for a baby.”
Pippa sat down on the kitchen windowsill glumly. I could see that my attempt to change the subject and lighten the mood hadn’t worked.
I walked over with a wriggling Lolly in my hands and stood beside her. Lolly was trying to break free of my arms, almost turning herself sideways to get to Pippa.
“Pippa. Think about it this way. If all your apples are poisonous, then everyone who ever ate one of your apples would be dead.”
She was white-faced and stricken. “That’s what I’m afraid of, Rachael,” she whispered. “What about all those apples I sold at the farmer’s market on Saturday, before I knew that it was the apple pie to blame?” She wrung her hands. “What if I killed every person I sold an apple to?”
I put Lolly down on her blanket and she immediately began to crawl to Pippa. “Pippa, you are not responsible for a two-hundred-person massacre,” I said. “We would have heard about something like that by now. Come on, grab your coat. And grab Lolly. It’s time to stop hiding out.”
We drove in silence. Well, Pippa and I were silent. Lolly was screaming from the backseat, which helped to cover the fact
that Pippa and I weren’t talking to each other.
“You know why I couldn’t tell you about this, don’t you, Rach?”
I sighed and turned my head away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the reason why. Was it because she didn’t trust me? What reason could she have for not telling her best friend what was really going on?
“It’s because if I told you, I would have to admit that my apples aren’t organic. I can’t risk this getting out, Rachael. My farmer’s market stall would go under.”
“You only rent it week to week.”
“Sometimes I pay for a month in advance. Anyway, you know what I mean,” she said quietly. “I would never sell another apple and you know it.” She stared at her hands and then squeezed her eyes shut. “Rachael, what about all those apples I sold with the huge price markup? Five dollars per apple?” She looked stricken
I gripped the steering wheel. She was right. Five dollars for an apple that wasn’t even organic…well, the farmer’s market customers might riot.
Maybe keeping it a secret from the public wasn’t such a bad idea. Yes, it was dishonest. Morally wrong. But it might prevent anyone from dying over apples…especially Pippa.
“I’m a fraud. I’m no better than Alex,” Pippa said as we pulled up outside Dough Planet.
Speak of the devil.
Alex was working late, unloading boxes of fruit from his truck and carrying them into the back entrance to the Dough Planet kitchen. “Good. You two can finally talk this all through,” I said.
“Oh, no way,” Pippa said. She stopped unbuckling Lolly’s car seat. “I am not talking to that guy. Under no circumstances.” She turned her attention back to Lolly. “How do you feel about a trip to the park instead?”
“Pippa, it is seven-thirty in the evening.”
“So? Parks are still open at this time.”
“You have to come inside, Pippa.”
She grabbed me by the sleeve before I could enter Dough Planet. “Are you crazy? You want me to reveal my deepest, darkest secret to my worst enemy?”
Since when had Alex become her worst enemy? A little overdramatic, if you asked me.
I needed to talk some sense into her. “You are going to come inside, Pippa, and you are going to see how Alex prepares the apple pies. Okay?”
“No way,” she said stubbornly, refusing to move. Lolly was sitting up in her arms, looking amused.
In the end, I had to push her through the door into the kitchen
Alex looked up at us in shock. He was rolling dough like a madman, with a bunch of berries and lemons sitting in the sink behind him with cold tap water running over them. “Oh,” he said, in a voice that sounded somewhat relieved. “I thought you were Blake…”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Alex shook his head. “No, if anything it is a relief to see the two of you instead. Well, the three of you,” he added, looking a little cautiously toward Lolly. Alex waved toward the mountains of pastry. “As you can see I haven’t even got the pastry into the trays yet. And I haven’t even started on the filling. Blake is going to expect these to be baked and ready by the time we open in the morning.” Alex shook his head. “But he is dreaming.”
“Using stolen apples today?” Pippa asked haughtily. “Or did you actually pay for them this time.”
I nudged her in the ribs a little. I thought she was being too harsh on Alex. He was obviously under tons of pressure from Blake. And I knew just how demanding Blake could be. I felt like I was his employee and he wasn’t even paying me for my time.
Alex didn’t reply to Pippa’s comment. He just went back to rolling dough.
“Here. Let me help you,” I said, reaching for an apron.
“Rachael!” Pippa screeched. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I tied the apron behind my back. “Alex is going to show us how he makes his pie filling,” I said meaningfully. “Aren’t you, Alex?”
“Uh…sure.”
He started rolling dough and chopping apples, throwing all the ingredients into the bowl so quickly that the whole thing was a blur.
“Whoa, slow down,” I cautioned Alex.
“Slow down?” He threw an apple into the sink with a little too much force. “Did you not hear me explain what kind of a rush I’m in tonight?” He kept looking toward the door as though he expected Blake to barge through it and rip his head off like a crazed monarch whose servant had disappointed him.
“I just want Pippa to see exactly how the apples are prepared,” I explained slowly. “It’s important, okay?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“Now, you wash every apple before you bake with it, right?”
Alex shrugged as if this was only common sense. “Of course. We wash all our produce before we cook with it.” He started to scrub the apples under the tap water. “Not that it matters as much with organic produce. They shouldn’t have any nasty chemicals on them.”
I could see that Pippa’s legs had gone wobbly beneath her. I reached over and took Lolly from her arms before she collapsed. Lolly started to cry, so I quickly tried to distract her with a spatula by pretending that it was a rattle.
“And so, those apples that you cooked with last week—the ones you borrowed from Pippa’s farm—”
“Stole!” she shouted.
“You would have washed them thoroughly as well, right, Alex?”
He looked impatient. “Yes. Of course. They would have been scrubbed before they went in the pie. And then they are baked at such a high temperature that no bacteria—or anything—can survive.” He shot Pippa a look and lowered his eyes. “What are you trying to tell me?”
I paused and looked at Pippa, but her eyes had fallen toward the floor. “Well, it’s just that those apples you took from Pippa’s farm…they may have had a little extra help growing.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a little chemical help involved. In keeping the insects away.”
He dropped the knife he’d been holding. “Are you telling me that those apples I cooked with weren’t even organic?” Alex was sweating and I didn’t think it was solely down to the hot oven beside him in the tiny kitchen.
Pippa didn’t answer so I had to. “I’m afraid so. Yes.”
Alex picked up the knife again. “Do you know what Blake will do to me if he finds out?”
Pippa and I looked at each other. Just what would Blake do to him?
And just what was Alex going to do to us?
“You can hardly go climbing up on your high horse over this matter when the apples were stolen!” Pippa cried, backing out of the kitchen. But there wasn’t far to run.
“I paid you the money for them in the end.” Alex grabbed the edge of the counter and leaned forward until he was only inches from Pippa’s face.
We all jumped when we heard the front door of the bakery open. I glanced through the crack in the door to make sure. Shoot.
It was Blake.
“Is there a another way out of here?” I said, spinning around to find my purse. I had no interest in having a conversation with Blake. And even less interest in being trapped in a small kitchen with a man holding a knife.
Alex pushed Pippa out the back door and I followed behind.
We stumbled out onto the street. “Did that help to set your mind at ease?” I asked, taking Lolly again.
Pippa shook her head and stomped back to the car.
“No.”
“I can’t believe the nerve of him,” Pippa grumbled as we drove back to the farm. “He steals from me, and then blames me about the quality of what he stole.”
I just hoped that Alex wouldn’t tell Blake. Or the police. I was 99% sure that Pippa couldn’t have been responsible for Valerie’s death, but there was still a lingering doubt in the back of my mind. Just how toxic was this insecticide that she had used?
“I just wanted to keep the apples free from insects and bugs” Pippa said. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt. The opposite. I know
I have done a terrible thing. An unforgivable thing.”
I wasn’t sure it was quite that catastrophic.
I had an idea. “Give me a look at this chemical you used,” I said once we were back in the farmhouse. “Maybe it will explain what the effects on human consumption are.”
Pippa stared at me with betrayal flashing in her eyes. “You think I did it, don’t you, Rachael?” Her eyes started to fill with tears.
Just wait until she discovered that I’d thought she poisoned the pie on purpose. I was hoping that was never going to come out.
I shook my head. No. I was almost totally sure that she didn’t. Almost. “Just give me a look at the label.” I said gently.
“Well, you’ll have to come out to the barn,” she said, stomping outside again.
I carried Lolly and followed her out to the barn and she dragged a gigantic tub of a murky looking yellow liquid out of a rusty looking cupboard, as I stared around at the abandoned rusty tools laying in the middle of all the mud and gunk in the farm. My shoes were ruined. Honestly, you couldn’t pay me enough to be a farmer.
I handed Lolly to Pippa and leaned down to look at the ingredients. It was dim in the barn so I had to squint. I winced at the sticky outside of the container, wondering if I was poisoning myself. I tired not to let Pippa see that I was worried, making a mental note to scrub my hands thoroughly when we were back in the house.
It took a few moments for me to read the label and process what I was seeing. I had to read over the list of ingredients a second time, just to be sure.
No. This couldn’t possibly be right.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, hearing the annoyance in my voice.
“What is it?” Pippa asked, her own voice weighed down with worry. “Oh, goodness, it’s even worse than I thought, isn’t it?” She paced back and forth and took short breaths like she was about to hyperventilate.
“Pippa…” I said, staring up at her. I shook my head heavily. “This is all-natural insecticide…”
Pippa blinked a few times and let out a short laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Oh, actually, please tell me you are not kidding me,” Pippa said, pushing me aside in her excitement to check the label.
Apple Assassination Page 7
