She rubbed her tummy harder. If she didn’t stop soon, she was going to leave a shiny spot. “Do you think it’ll be easy to figure out?”
I wasn’t getting it. “Why?”
“Rebecca!” She gestured at her stomach. “This baby could come any day now. Any day. I need Dan available at the drop of a hat. You, too. You have to take care of Evan when I go into the hospital.”
Ohhhhh. Now it made sense. She didn’t care so much about Melanie as she did about how much Melanie’s death was going to mess up her life. That made a lot more sense.
My sister was deep into nesting mode. I hadn’t been around when Evan was imminent, but based on what Dan said, it was pretty much the same. Everything narrowed down into pinpoint focus. The nursery was ready. Diapers had been purchased. The freezer was stocked. But we were now veering into territory that my sister could not control and that was going to drive her certifiably batshit.
Our parents died in a car accident when I was sixteen and Haley was eighteen. I reacted by going totally out of control in the usual teenage girl kinds of ways. Some drinking. Some inappropriate boys. Some minor juvenile delinquency. At least until Coco Bittles realized I could cook and took me under her wing. Haley had gone the complete opposite direction. She’d stepped into adulthood and responsibility and never stopped. She lived in the land of order and control. While she loved being a mom (and who wouldn’t with a sweet little cupcake of a boy like Evan), there were a lot of things out of her control, and that tended to make her a teensy-weensy bit craycray.
“I will be here,” I assured her. “I have my cell phone charged and on me at all times. Text me a 911 and I will come running. Dan will be here, too. You know he will. There is nothing that is higher on his priority list than you, Evan and the Peanut.” The Peanut has been our code name for my new niece or nephew ever since Haley brought home an ultrasound that looked a little like Mr. Peanut had taken up residence in her stomach. Sans monocle, thank goodness.
Haley’s face crumpled a little. My sister was generally not weepy, but the end-of-pregnancy hormones were wreaking havoc with her tear ducts. “Promise?” Her voice sounded really tiny.
I bopped up the stairs to the porch with Sprocket at my heels. “Stick-a-needle-in-my-eye promise. Scarlett-O’Hara-swearing-to-the-sky-she’d-never-be-hungry-again promise. Inigo-Montoya-vowing-revenge promise.” I wrapped my arms around her as best I could.
She snuffled into my hair. “I’m so glad you came back. I’m so glad you’re home.”
“Me, too, sis. Me, too. Sometimes I wish I’d never left.” I released her and waved good-bye. This time she let me go.
Sprocket and I hurried along. I would have loved to make our usual detour up to the lighthouse on Lake Erie, but we were running way too late for that. A lot of people had expected me to avoid the area, what with the almost-being-killed-at-the-lighthouse thing. Even I hadn’t been sure how I would react to walking by it on Sprocket’s and my usual route. It, however, didn’t seem to be the center of my concern. I won’t lie and say that none of what happened there affected me. I’ve had some bad dreams. Dreams where I’m swallowed up by the end of a gun barrel. Dreams where Sprocket didn’t pull through. Dreams where the lighthouse burns around me.
But they were only dreams. I may wake up gasping, but then Sprocket will lick my face and I calm right down again.
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. “Good morning, Garrett,” I sang into my cell.
“I can’t believe you didn’t call me.” He didn’t sound as pleased to talk with me as I was to talk to him. “You find a dead body and I hear about it from Pearl.”
Grand Lake was a small town and news traveled faster than melted butter over a hot scone. Pearl was Garrett’s secretary and was hooked up to the town’s gossip pipeline like a Hummer to a gas pump. I winced. I probably should have called him. He seemed to feel kind of proprietary after saving my life. It was nice. I wasn’t used to it, though. “Sorry. It all happened so fast and then Dan was questioning me and then Antoine . . .”
“Antoine? Antoine knew about this before I did?” It sounded like the words were coming out through gritted teeth.
Tactical error there. Garrett, like Dan, was also not my ex-husband’s biggest fan. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a lot of Antoine fans among the town’s male population. The ladies were a different story. That didn’t endear Antoine any more to the guys. “Garrett, it was his assistant who was dead. Of course he heard about it first.”
There was a grunt on the other end of the line that I took as a lawyerly acknowledgment that he didn’t have a good counterargument.
I turned the corner onto Main Street, onto the line of neat little shops, most in old bungalows that had been converted, one of which was POPS. “I’ll make it up to you,” I said. “I’m trying out some new recipes. Come by the shop for lunch. You can help me figure out what’s working and what’s not.”
“What kind of recipes?” I heard a softening in his voice. I was honestly beginning to wonder if anyone had ever cooked for this man before in his life. I’d swayed a lot of people with food, but he was a total pushover. He was on the edge of forgiving, poised on the precipice of magnanimity just because of the offer of popcorn. “I don’t want to give too many details, but I will tell you that bacon is involved.”
“I’ll be there at one.” He hung up.
I tucked the phone back in my pocket with a smile. Who knew that pork products would be the key to solving all relationship problems?
I walked into my shop and found Susanna and Sam slumped in the little ice cream parlor chairs in the corner looking a little like they’d been kneaded and punched down. “How’d it go?”
Sam lifted his head from being pillowed on his arms. “How do you do that every morning? That’s insane!”
“It’s the new pumpkin-spice popcorn bars. The lines have been getting really long since I introduced those at the beginning of October.” I’d wager I’d had close to a ten percent jump in business since I started selling them.
“People are super grumpy before they’ve had their coffee,” Susanna said. “Like super, super grumpy.”
“But then they brighten right up as soon as you caffeinate them, right?” As satisfying as drinking a cup of really well-made coffee was, it really didn’t hold a candle to watching someone else drink a cup of coffee that you’d made really well yourself.
“Truth.” Sam stood up and stretched, which meant his fingertips were practically brushing the ceiling. I’m pretty sure the boy grows an inch a week. Then he hitched up his jeans and said, “Come on, Suze. If we leave now, we’ll be on time.”
Susanna took off her apron and grabbed her backpack. “Ready.” Then they were gone, Susanna’s long dark ponytail swinging behind them like a flag.
The high school in Grand Lake had a late start on Thursdays, which was why my two helpers could be there that morning. It had gotten me through a lot of busy days, but the truth was I was going to need more permanent help for the morning rush. I had no idea where I was going to find that help, unfortunately.
Help or no, I figured I’d better get started in the kitchen or Garrett was never going to forgive me.
As usual, once I was in the kitchen I got lost. Lost in the sizzle and the steam, the scents and the tastes and the sounds and the sights. A few customers came in and out, wanting treats for their morning coffee breaks or mid-morning snacks for preschoolers. Mainly, however, the shop was quiet, letting me enjoy immersing myself into my own crazy kitchen world of popcorn.
That is, until a knock on the back door signaled the arrival of the owner of the shop next to mine. “Come in,” I sang out. “I have treats.”
Anastasia Bloom, owner of Blooms, the flower shop next to mine, walked in along with Faith Bates. Faith was Barbara Werner’s niece. She’d moved to Grand Lake only a few weeks before, but she’d already become a regular at
my back door with Annie for morning coffee break. Barbara was hoping to ease her way out of the antiques business and Faith was looking for a fresh start.
“Something smells amazing.” Faith walked over to the counter to look over my shoulder.
“Bacon,” I said as I heated up water for coffee. “Everyone loves bacon.”
“What’s it for?” Annie took her usual place at the long table in the center of my kitchen.
“I’m thinking of expanding into having some lunch offerings,” I said over my shoulder as I measured grounds.
Annie raised one eyebrow. “You’re going to need help.”
“I know.” I chewed on my lip. “I’m not sure where to even start, though.”
“Hey, speaking of starting,” Annie interrupted. “How did the meeting with Melanie go? When is the taping going to start? Is Antoine going to be here in the shop?” She sounded a little too interested in Antoine’s schedule. A lot of the women in town had been a little too interested in his schedule. Annie surprised me, though. She had a silver fox of her own these days. What really surprised me, though, was that she didn’t know exactly how the meeting had gone. Or not gone.
I looked at her closely. Then I looked over at Faith, whose face was equally bland. Were they bluffing? Or had they seriously not heard? “The meeting did not go well.”
Annie snorted. “Figures. That woman has been jealous of you since she laid eyes on you. Is she trying to sabotage the segment?”
Faith shook her head. “Allowing your ex-husband back in your life is a mistake, if you ask me.” Faith had recently gone through a fairly acrimonious divorce and her opinion of ex-husbands was pretty low. Her opinion of present husbands wasn’t much higher. Actually, to be honest, she was kind of anti-man at the moment.
I looked back at Annie. She was a damn good actress. She’d had me and pretty much the entire town convinced that she hated the very air that our illustrious mayor Allen Thompson breathed. Turned out they were having a steamy affair right under everyone’s noses. I hadn’t had a clue. In fact, I’d been convinced that Allen was lurking around behind our stores for reasons that were a lot more sinister than booty calls. I’d accidentally outed them when I smacked him over the head with a flowerpot while they were in flagrante delicto on Annie’s potting table. “You really don’t know?” I asked.
“Know what? I’ve had my nose stuck in the flowers for the Elks Lodge Supper Dance all morning.” She looked over at Faith. “Did you hear anything?”
She shook her head. “I dropped the girls at school and went to the shop. I’ve been photographing items for Auntie Barbara’s eBay shop. I had music on. I didn’t hear anything.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “I didn’t have the meeting with Melanie. She’s dead.”
In retrospect that may not have been the best way to tell someone about an unexpected death. Annie reared back in her chair, which caught on a crack in the wood floor and tipped over backward, landing with her legs sticking up in the air. Faith dropped her coffee mug, which fell onto the floor and cracked.
I raced to Annie and leaned over her. “Are you all right?”
She blinked up at me, her clear blue eyes even brighter than usual. “What happened?”
“You fell over backward.” How hard had she hit her head?
“I know that. How did Melanie die?” She reached her hands up to me to have me help her up.
I straddled her and tried to pull her up into a sitting position. It wasn’t working. “I don’t know. I think she may have electrocuted herself. She was in the bathtub and there was a blow-dryer in the tub . . .”
“That shouldn’t work.” Annie started to wiggle her way backward on her back.
Faith crouched behind Annie and tried to tug her free. “Don’t they have some kind of safety thing built in? The weird plug thing.”
I didn’t know. I have a poor relationship with blow-dryers. Point one at me and I erupt into frizz. You don’t even have to turn it on. “Maybe it malfunctioned.”
Faith tsked. “Even so, people should know better than to have electrical appliances near the tub. Was she dim?”
“No,” I said. “Actually very sharp. Maybe she knew about the plug thing and thought it would be safe.” That didn’t explain why she would have someone else’s blow-dryer there and plugged in, though, and I was still convinced it wasn’t hers.
Annie wiggled herself off the chair so she could sit up. We had managed to get her into a sitting position again when Dan walked in. He took one look at the three of us on the floor with me crouched over Annie and Faith with her arms around Annie’s waist and said, “I don’t want to know.”
* * *
After sending Annie and Faith off with some still-too-hot-to-eat bacon popcorn, I poured Dan a cup of coffee. He took a sip and set it down. He didn’t add any cream or sugar.
“There’s something about the three of you together that makes me think of Shakespeare’s witches,” he said.
“I can see that. I’m totally planning a new Eye of Newt Popcorn.” I sat down across from him with my own cup of coffee.
He took another sip.
“Really? That’s it? No sigh of relief?” I prodded. I thought there’d at least be a smile when drinking my coffee after the weird brown liquid at the café.
He took out his notepad. “You make a lovely cup of coffee, Rebecca. You know that. I need to know a few more things about what you saw this morning.”
“I can’t think of anything I noticed that I didn’t tell you about.” I got up and started wiping down my already clean counters. I certainly didn’t want to mentally take myself back to that hotel bathroom.
“Humor me a second.” He took another sip of coffee. “I need to know more about the blow-dryer.”
I stopped scrubbing and turned to look at him. “The blow-dryer? Beyond that it didn’t have a diffuser? Why?”
“It wasn’t the hotel’s blow-dryer. At least it wasn’t the one that came with her room. That one was still in its bag stowed underneath the sink.” He leaned back in his chair.
“Well, it wasn’t hers.” I shrugged.
He didn’t respond to that. “Did you notice anything else about it? Anything else . . . girly that I might not know?”
Ah. Poor man. Dan had never owned a blow-dryer in his life and Haley’s hair was like mine, too curly to suffer that kind of treatment. “Sorry. I don’t have anything else.”
“Someone altered that blow-dryer, Rebecca. Someone removed the GFCI protection,” he said.
That must have been what Annie had been talking about, about why a blow-dryer wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—electrocute someone. “Do they all have that?”
“Since about 1991. There used to be electrocutions from blow-dryers all the time. Then the Consumer Product Safety Commission mandated that all units have GFCI protection. You should be able to throw a blow-dryer into a tub while it’s on and have it shut itself off harmlessly. Unless someone messes with it and removes that GFCI protection,” he explained.
“Why would someone do that?” I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear the answer.
“The one reason to do that is to use it to electrocute someone,” Dan said, bringing the front legs of his chair down with a thump. “It doesn’t make the blow-dryer more effective or lighter or . . . well, anything that I can figure out.”
I stared at him. “Who would do something like that?”
“I think Melanie might have done it herself.” Dan shook his head. “I think it may have been suicide.”
“Wait. She went out and bought a blow-dryer just to electrocute herself with it?” There had to be better ways.
“Looks like she might have done exactly that. You were right about her having one with a diffuser. It was in her suitcase. So she must have bought this one for this purpose.” Dan rubbed at his face. I r
efilled his coffee cup.
“Do you know why?” My life had pretty much disintegrated a couple of years ago. I’d been down. Way down. But suicide? How far down did you have to be to decide that was your best path?
“We’ve only started to look, but I can tell you she was in a massive amount of debt. Tens of thousands of dollars and the creditors were closing in,” Dan said. “We ran a preliminary background check and found that. I’m not sure what more we’ll find as we dig a little further.”
Antoine might not pay great, but he didn’t pay subsistence wages, either. “That surprises me.”
“It might not if you’d taken a closer look at her lifestyle. The girl liked to spend.” He pushed his coffee mug at me for a refill.
I’d sort of known that. When I’d still been around Melanie on a regular basis, I’d noticed more than once that she always had top-of-the-line items. Kate Spade purses. Louboutin shoes. The newest phones. Late-model cars. She’d made me feel a little shabby sometimes. Still, debt was a reason to declare bankruptcy, not kill yourself. Besides . . . “Her hotel room didn’t look like someone who was getting ready to commit suicide. Her hotel room looked like someone who was getting ready for a date.” I poured the last little bit of coffee into my own mug and sat down across from him.
“That’s not uncommon, Rebecca, especially with women. They want to be found looking good.” He turned his mug around and around in his hands.
“But she wasn’t found looking good, Dan. She was naked. In the bathtub. I mean, next to being found on the toilet, I’m not sure I can think of a way most women would want less to be found. I mean, it wasn’t even a bubble bath!” No woman with a shred of vanity in her would have wanted to be found like that.
He looked up, surprised. “Bubble bath? Why would that make a difference?”
“You know, all those frothy bubbles strategically placed. I can see being okay being found like that. But naked? With no makeup? All pruney and shriveled from the water? No.” I shook my head. “Absolutely not.”
Pop Goes the Murder Page 3
