“No,” Lottie said. “It can’t have been Karen.”
“Well then who was it?” Jessie asked, trying to keep the frustration from her voice.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t think it’s a possibility it was Karen?”
Jessie’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Freddie to confirm there was no strange meat thermometer in his kitchen.
“No,” Lottie said immediately. “I’d almost be impressed if she’d worked up the courage to do something like that.”
Jessie dropped her head into her hands. “You can’t talk like that. A man is dead.”
“It’s true,” Lottie said, shrugging. “Karen’s always been a coward. Look at the example she’s setting for that boy. She may as well wrap him up in bubble wrap.”
“But Lott—”
“It’s not Karen,” Lottie interrupted.
Jessie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Fine,” she said quietly. She made a mental note to bring it up with the chief later. It was the best they had right then, even if Lottie refused to see it. She sighed. It would be a lot easier if Lottie hadn’t argued with every single person in town at one point or another.
“What if it’s just a coincidence?”
Jessie shook her head. “That might be the case if they had just grabbed the thermometer from the café kitchen, Lottie. But they didn’t stop there. How did your Santa suit get behind that trash can if it wasn’t all planned in advance?”
Lottie shrugged. She seemed to crumple inward in front of Jessie’s eyes. “I know. It’s just so hard to accept. Why would somebody do that? I’ve spent every minute since the party trying to work it out and I can’t. The only explanation that makes sense is somebody wanted David gone and they used my argument with him as a cover. David filed a complaint against me, you know. And knowing him, he didn’t keep that to himself.”
Jessie thought of something. “Do you have cameras here too?”
Lottie shook her head. “No, just in the store.”
“Okay, that might work. If somebody went there to steal your suit, then they’d have been caught on camera, right?”
“Nope,” Lottie said in a small voice. “After Chief Daly asked for the memory card, I was so mad. I didn’t bother replacing it. I mean, why bother if my own footage it could be used against me?”
Jessie wanted to bang her head against the wall in frustration. It seemed like every time they got somewhere they were thrown back to where they’d started. Karen Palmer was their only useful lead—so why wasn’t Lottie taking that and running with it?
Chapter 17
“Yoo-hoo,” Jessie called cautiously. “Ken?”
Jessie wasn’t afraid of the Springdale Chronicle’s editor-in-chief. No, it was the resident rodents in the Chronicle office that she feared. Ken swore blind that there were no critters in resident, but the strange rustling sounds she often heard there suggested otherwise.
Jessie was always careful to announce her presence there to give them a chance to scuttle away. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Ken?” she said again, entering the open door and making sure to stomp as hard as she could on the wooden floor.
Ken Dobbs appeared from the back room carrying an ancient manila folder. His paper was a one-man show apart from a part-time assistant who was rarely there. He’d told Jessie before that he was still getting around to digitizing the paper’s records. She was just surprised he hadn’t paid somebody to do it before the whole archive was eaten by mice.
“Oh hello there, Jessie. Now look here; haven’t I told you there’s no rodent problem here? We’re clean as a whistle.”
Jessie smiled innocently. “Yes, of course. I didn’t say anything.”
“You always stomp around like an elephant at a party?”
She shook her head, trying to keep the smirk off her face. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What can I do you for, Jessie?” he asked, dropping the folder on his already-overcrowded desk and wiping his hands on his pants.
Jessie took a seat in the chair opposite. “I wanted to come and talk to you about the David Fairway case.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “I guess… I guess I wanted to see what you were planning on publishing in the next paper.”
Jessie didn’t like this one bit—it seemed pushy to go to Ken’s own office and try to talk him out of mentioning Lottie—but she knew somebody had to do it. Otherwise, Lottie would spend the next several months seething as people talked about her behind her back. Lottie of all people wouldn’t appreciate the sneakiness of that.
“The news,” he said shifting in his seat and watching her carefully. “As always.”
“Which is? Look, Ken,” she said, shaking her head. “I just want to make sure that nothing’s going to be published that leads to harassment of somebody who hasn’t yet been found guilty by a court of law.”
Ken held up his palms. “I appreciate where you’re coming from Jessie,” he sighed. “I know you and Lottie are friends, but I can’t just ignore this case and pretend it isn’t happening. If I stopped printing things that somebody somewhere didn’t like, then I’d have a blank newspaper and a whole bunch of angry advertisers. Including the Bakehouse.”
Jessie closed her eyes and leaned back in the seat. She was lost now. “Have you looked into the case? Found anything interesting?”
He shook his head. “If I had, I would have brought it to Chief Daly. But no, I don’t think I’ve found out anything new. It all seems pretty clear-cut if you ask me.”
Jessie winced.
“Look, I’ll make sure to stick to the facts, okay? No editorial about the dangerous streets of Springdale. Just the facts. But Jessie, you must see how bad it looks for her?”
“I get it, Ken,” she said gravely. “I just don’t think she did it. It’s too sneaky. Let’s say it had been Lottie and she felt homicidal. She would have just attacked him there and then instead of coming up with a shaky alibi and using her own meat thermometer. The fact that she supposedly followed him to the restroom makes it premeditated, whereas she could have argued that it was an accident if it had happened spontaneously in her store. That’s another thing—she’s impulsive. She wouldn’t have stalked him—I know her. If she had to wait ten minutes, she would have calmed down before it was time to strike.”
Ken was stroking his chin and listening intently. “You know, she may have followed him to the bathroom to speak to him and then things got out of hand.”
Jessie shook her head. “No. She wasn’t at the meal. And another thing—she wouldn’t have had the thermometer on her person. He was killed in the middle of the meal. The turkey was long carved by then.”
Jessie sat in stunned silence. Was that a development? Maybe if they got a psychologist to assess Lottie, they could prove she wasn’t the killer.
“We can’t rule out the possibility that she made the murder appear uncharacteristic in order to cast some doubt on whether she was behind it,” Ken said, seeming to read her mind.
“You think she did it?” Jessie asked hopelessly.
Ken shook his head slowly. “Who else could have done it? What other suspects have we got?”
Jessie puffed her cheeks and exhaled loudly. “I can’t think of any. And neither can anybody else I’ve asked.” She thought of something. “Can I ask a favor? Maybe I can look through the archives and see if anybody had a run-in with him before?” she asked hopefully.
Ken shook his head. “You’re welcome to check, but I don’t think you’ll find anything. I’ve been running this paper for as long as I’ve been here and I don’t recall ever writing anything about David Fairway.”
Jessie sighed. “I guess it was worth a shot.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” Ken sighed. “I don’t say it lightly—it’s not like it’s fun for me to publish things that hurt my friends, but that’s what journalism is about. You suppress one story and then
suddenly you’ve become the personal mouthpiece for another person’s agenda.” He shivered.
Jessie nodded and got to her feet. “I understand, I really do. Look, thanks for promising to keep it to the facts. At least that way we might keep the more ghoulish element away from Lottie.”
Ken smiled and opened the folder he had brought to his desk. “Tell her I’m thinking of her? If she didn’t do it, then she’s going to need all the help she can get in cracking this thing because from where I’m sitting, the case against her looks watertight.” He frowned. “Maybe don’t share that last bit with her.”
Jessie nodded. “Of course. Though I’ve tried to emphasize the seriousness to her. She’s been trying to hide her head in the sand and hope this will all blow over because of her innocence.”
Ken’s eyes widened. “Well, I must say that’s probably not the best approach. I could name you at least five individuals who’ve spent decades in prison before having their sentences quashed. Even if the truth does come out, there’s no guarantee when that might happen. My suggestion? Tell her to hire the best attorney that money can buy.”
Jessie nodded as she turned toward the door. She didn’t bother telling him that Lottie would never agree to that. Jessie had already tried to convince her, but Lottie wasn’t the kind of person who changed her mind once it was made up.
Jessie stopped and wondered if she should even bother asking the question that had just popped into her mind. She realized there was no harm in asking. “Hey, Ken?” she said.
He looked up from the paperwork he had already become absorbed in. “Yes?”
“What about people with grudges against Lottie?” she asked, lingering in the doorway. “Can you think of any? Not even spats that made the paper necessarily, just gossip around town.”
Ken sighed. “You’re really convinced she’s innocent, aren’t you?”
Jessie froze. Everybody kept asking her that as if it was a crazy thing to believe. But to her it was natural. Nothing about the crime struck her as something Lottie would do, but she had no concrete evidence to prove that. “Yes,” she said. “Though I’m not sure how much good that’s going to do.”
He put down his documents. “How do you mean? It’s good to have somebody in her corner.”
Jessie shook her head. “Well, that’s the thing. If we were going to find evidence, we would have found it by now. Time is ticking on, and whoever is responsible for this has disappeared into the woodwork. As time goes on, it’s becoming less and less likely that we’ll find the real killer.”
Ken stroked his chin. “I find that hard to believe —that’s if what you’re saying is true, of course—but if there is a different killer, they must have left some clue. The perfect criminal is a rare creature—murder is often a crime of passion, so people aren’t thinking rationally.”
Jessie shrugged. “In this case, it seems like the killer knew exactly what they were doing.” She came back over to his desk. “That’s the one thing that doesn’t make sense. May I?” she gestured to the chair. Ken nodded. Jessie sat down and crossed her legs. “This is totally off the record, of course.”
Ken nodded.
“And it’s just a theory anyway.”
“Go on.”
“Well.” Jessie hesitated. If she was the only one in town who wanted to fight for Lottie, then this felt like a betrayal of sorts. But she had reached a dead end. She’d played it through in her head over and over. “Okay. So Lottie was supposed to be at the meal, right? She got delayed at the last minute because of an email from a supplier. So if this was a setup, the real killer would have had to think on their feet. Fast. I mean, who does that? Who notices a friend’s absence and has the wherewithal to source two of her possessions and use them to frame her? It just doesn’t make sense—only a criminal mastermind could pull off something like that in such a short timeframe.”
Ken nodded. “It’s often the simplest solution. Which is this: Lottie left and went next door, where she called her supplier. That was her alibi. Then she came back to the café through the back and lingered in the kitchen until David excused himself and went to the bathroom.”
Jessie listened quietly, shaking her head. “But that doesn’t work either,” she said when he had stopped talking. “Because she had no way of knowing when he’d go to the bathroom. Okay, sure, his condition is common knowledge. It was likely he’d eat too much rich food and leave, but that couldn’t have been timed to the minute.” Jessie sat forward excitedly. “There’s nowhere to hide, Ken! There’s not one place in the café where you could hide from view of the kitchen and still see who was going into the restrooms.”
“What about outside the restroom window?”
Jessie shook her head. “They’re frosted.”
“Across the street?”
Jessie nodded slowly as she worked that through in her mind. “So you’re saying she could have hidden across the street and then rushed back to this side, through her store and in through the back of the café when she saw him get up to go to the bathroom?”
He nodded morosely. “I’m sorry, Jessie. But you’ve got to consider it.”
“No,” Jessie said, adrenaline shooting through her. Don’t you remember? We had Christmas decorations on the front window. And the door was covered with them too. There’s no way anybody could have seen in from outside! Whoever did this must have been right there at the table! We would have seen them lingering around otherwise. Now do you see?”
Ken tilted his head. “It still doesn’t explain the Santa costume and the thermometer,” he said carefully. He knew most of the details of the case, but Chief Daly had asked that he keep those to himself.
“No, it doesn’t,” Jessie sighed. “The real killer would have had to have known in advance that Lottie wasn’t going to be at the party in order for that to work. Which suggests they found a lucky scapegoat. In which case, our real killer has disappeared into the wind.”
She got up and slumped to the door. Jessie was exhausted by all of this. She felt like an older kid, willing herself to keep believing in Santa when everyone around her was telling her not to. But she had to keep believing.
“Hey, Ken,” she said, thinking of something she knew he’d never agree to. “I know you said you’d never omit something newsworthy from the paper, but what if it was for a good cause?”
He watched her carefully. “I’d need to know exactly what you meant before I could give you a definitive answer.”
Chapter 18
Jessie pottered around the kitchen, unable to stand still. She’d been restless since first thing that morning and it had only gotten worse as the morning progressed.
She had even offered to help with the baking, but Bee had shooed her away with a terrified look on her face. Despite all her efforts, Jessie still hadn’t managed to get the hang of baking, and that was despite her sweet tooth.
“You seem agitated,” Bee said, watching her from the other side of the kitchen.
Jessie shook her head. “No. I’m fine.”
She went back to stirring her pot and scrutinizing the list of partygoers. She felt certain that if she stared at it for long enough, something new would leap out at her. Let’s face it, she thought, something new has got to leap out at me.
But it hadn’t happened so far. She had come to know many of those people well over the several months she’d been living in Springdale. And the list of people who’d had altercations with Lottie was almost as long.
Nothing she thought of helped to narrow the field. It was the perfect crime. The murderer was more than likely someone on that list. She shivered at the thought.
They’d left the jacket behind the trashcan. It didn’t mean that they’d gone back to the party, of course, but then they’d have risked being missed. It made no sense to Jessie: who killed somebody in cold blood and then went back to enjoying Christmas carols and pecan pie?
Jessie sighed. It was irritating her that her theorizing was coming up with nothing useful.
But then what was everybody else doing? Now that Lottie had been charged, the investigation was all but over. So Jessie might as well have focused all her energy on her little crazy theory that she couldn’t shake herself out of.
“Okay,” Jessie muttered. “I can cross out my own name. And the Chief’s. And Aunt Bee’s.” She groaned. If she started eliminating friends and family from the list, she’d have no list.
What am I missing here? she asked herself. Am I just being stubborn? It seems Lottie’s as likely to commit murder as any of these people. Chief Daly said he’s locked friends up before.
She started again. This time, instead of crossing out names she drew a star beside all those people who she’d trust with her life. That removed Melanie, Maddie Sweet, Julia and Julia’s daughter Tania. She stared at the list again. And Ken. He wasn’t as close a friend as all of the others, but she had grown to appreciate his friendship as she’d gotten to know him better. She put a star beside Chief Daly’s name too.
Jessie looked at the list and sighed. What did it actually mean? She had a very subjective list of people based on her own judgment. It meant nothing. The only name that kept jumping out at her was Karen’s. Chief Daly was looking into Ms. Palmer—he had made Jessie promise not to go back to Karen’s house without him. Jessie had no intention of scaring the real suspect into hiding.
She put the paper down with a sigh and reached back to the counter to grab her phone to text Melanie. It was only when her fingers didn’t land on the phone that she put the lid on the pot and turned around. The kitchen island was completely bare.
“Aunt Bee, have you seen my phone?” she asked, glancing over. Her aunt had her back to her and was hunched over the counter. It seemed a strange stance to take when she was supposed to be making cinnamon rolls. Jessie frowned when she saw the rolling pin abandoned on the bench. “Aunt Bee? What are you doing?”
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