“Ruby!” I winked. She laughed. “Thanks Ruby, you made this almost sort of fun.”
“It’s what I do,” Ruby answered seriously. “I’m the one they send down to calm the people in the hold. I have a whole stand up routine. Are your aunts coming in next?”
“No,” I said. “The older ones are all consulting lawyers.”
“Well, they should do it. It would only clear them and help us narrow the playing field.”
No, it really wouldn’t.
I stood outside blinking in the sunshine when Rory’s mail truck came rumbling up. Was he going to yell at me some more? I wasn’t exactly in the mood for that right now.
I looked around, hoping for a quick getaway, but my chauffeur was gone. He probably thought I’d need a few more hours.
“She said yes,” he said, leaning out of the left hand side of the truck. “Get in. We have to go now.”
I hopped in the right side and sat down. “Who said yes?” Did he mean Leanne? I felt my heart start to race.
“Leanne,” Rory told me. He started driving and I started bouncing.
“The shocks on this thing are appalling,” I said, grabbing onto the door to steady myself.
Rory only grunted. “Leanne said we could look around while everybody was out. I’ve already wasted a half hour trying to find you. Girard didn’t want to tell me you were at the police station. Finally I just had him give the phone to your Aunt Hazel. She told me you were here getting fingerprinted. I came as fast as this old tank allows but…we might lose our chance soon.” Rory’s hair was wild and so were his eyes. I probably looked similar, from the bouncing and wind, let alone the excitement of finally getting back into the bedroom.
It felt an eternity till we arrived at my driveway. Rory parked the mail truck, hopped out, and I did too. He took my hand— to hurry me along? Or for a different reason? — and we raced along the garden to the back of Vanessa’s house. His hand was rough and warm and made mine tingle. He let go to knock on the door.
The door popped open and Leanne waved us in, stiffening as she saw me. “Quick,” she whispered. “I don’t know how long we’ve got.”
“Leanne, I’m sorry,” I began.
“Save it. You think you’re the first rich girl to pull rank with me? Well you’re not,” she said, and raced into the foyer, waving us up the steps. “If anyone sees you, I’m telling them you broke in to steal jewelry. So get moving. Five minutes and that’s it, okay?”
We nodded, trying to get upstairs as quickly and silently as possible. Vanessa’s bedroom door was wide open. The rug had been steam cleaned but I could still smell the cologne.
Rory stepped in gingerly, as if the body were still there. “Where was she?”
I pointed to the spot. “I saw a piece of paper in her hand.”
“Do you remember what it said?” Rory avoided the spot where Vanessa had been. “This window has been clawed or scraped of something.”
“Yeah, it was open when I found her. But the curtains were still inside, not pushed out as if someone jumped. Plus, they would have landed in the roses and we would have seen that. I think the paper was an IOU.” I knelt down in the right spot and inhaled deeply, trying to get a better handle on the cologne. “I’m surprised the shampoo didn’t destroy the cologne, but I can still smell it.”
“I can too, it’s so strong,” Rory looked through a few bureau drawers. “What are we looking for in here anyway? It’s pretty morbid.”
I didn’t answer right away. I just inhaled the scent again. I leaned closer to the carpet. He knelt down beside me. “You’re not a bloodhound, you know,” he said gently. “We can’t track the killer by scent.”
“Maybe we can, but I doubt it would stand up in court. Find anything?”
“This was in the top drawer under some stuff. It’s a card for an online supplier. Maybe it’s where she orders her perfume? She has several bottles of the stuff. They all look pretty expensive.”
I tried to take the card from him but it slipped between our fingers and floated toward the bed. We scooted after it and ended up half under the bed together.
“This is a weird first date,” he said.
“This isn’t a date,” I said with a laugh.
“Would that be so bad? Going on a date with me?” Rory’s warm, coffee-scented breath tickled me. I suddenly became aware of how close he was and how silly we both were, almost hiding under the bed together. But mostly I noticed how good he smelled. There was pine and oranges and musk under that coffee. My heart did a little flip.
“I never thought about it,” I blurted out. My face flooded with heat. Dang. His eyes filled with hurt and he looked away. But I caught sight something at the back of the bed. “Hey, wait a minute, do you see that?”
“Oh, don’t mind me. Just a bruised ego over here,” he muttered.
I slid out from under the bed and went to stand beside the headboard. I pulled the bed away from the wall just the slightest bit and a phone dropped to the carpet. “Oh! Oh, look what I found!”
“It’s Vanessa’s phone,” Rory whispered.
I scooped it up. “And it has a voicemail on it.” I resisted the urge to do a victory hop.
“Are you two done in here?” Leanne called from the doorway. I dropped the phone into my purse and eyed Rory up, daring him to rat me out.
“Yeah, we’re done,” he said with a sigh.
“Good, because you’ve been up here for at least fifteen minutes. You have got to go. Now!” She shooed us down the stairs and back out into the garden. We raced back through the garden to the mail truck.
My eyes must have practically glowed with delight. I hugged the purse to me. I had my first bona fide clue. Rory grabbed for the purse, but I snapped it away from him. He rolled his eyes and threw his hands up in the air.
“Well go on, play it already. I got you in there and I really need to know if we found anything.”
“You’re right,” I said, and pulled the phone out. We sat on my porch steps, cuddling as close as possible so we wouldn’t miss anything. It was a little distracting being that close to him, but I managed. I hit play.
The robotic voice informed us that we had two new voicemail messages. I turned the volume up. My heart stopped and I felt Rory’s body tense beside me as a gritty man’s voice started to speak. “Mrs. Stewart, we have been extremely patient with you. But enough is enough. Call me back before six p.m. You know the number.”
I hit four to mark it as new and listened to the second message. This time it was a woman’s voice. “Vanessa, you know what this is about. You know what we have to do.”
“Well, that woman there is the winner,” Rory said. “Cripes, she sounds scary. You should give that to the police immediately.”
“I will,” I said. “Eventually. I might want to listen to it a few more times.”
“Ella!” Rory stood up annoyed. “You can’t. This isn’t a game! Vanessa’s dead. The cops need that phone. What if lady-scary-voice is involved?”
“I’m not erasing them,” I protested. “I’m just listening. And I said I would turn it in eventually.”
“Well, don’t call me if they send you to prison,” Rory said. He turned to leave.
“Wait,” I grabbed his arm.
“For what?”
“I…” Like you? Am intrigued by the idea of a date with you, but for some reason am not sure how to handle that? Oh, why did my tongue get tied in important moments like this? “Thanks,” I blurted out.
“Thanks?”
“For getting me into Vanessa’s bedroom…”
“I think I helped,” Rory said.
“You definitely helped,” I said.
“Yes, well what are mailmen for?”
Ouch.
He left, and I stood there hugging myself.
“I don’t think you’re just my mailman,” I said lamely to no one.
Trouble walked out from under a bush. “Well, you handled that marvelously.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, feeling sour. “I’ll make it up to him.”
“When?” The cat stared at me, tail flicking with interest.
“When this is over,” I told Trouble, “I will ask him out.”
Trouble snorted and disappeared back under the bush.
Chapter Seven
Back inside, Mother was organizing black dresses for everyone. “Oh good, Ella, dear,” she said waving me over. “Here, try this one on.”
I held the black dress against my slim frame. “Mother, this is going to make me look like I am swimming in fabric. I’m going in that cute sequined cocktail dress I bought for Lisa’s—”
“Oh no, you won’t,” she interrupted. “That dress fit your Aunt Sarah perfectly, and she refuses to go near any of the others. Auntie Joe is wearing my onyx-studded wedding outfit. Hazel is impossible. She says she already has a dress but it is from the eighteen hundreds. I swear it has a metal frame hoop under it.”
“Okay… Aunt Sarah can wear cocktail dress, but I’m still not wearing this. It’s huge and totally not my style.”
“But what are you going to wear, then?” Mother’s eyes were wide and she was flapping her hands a bit.
“Um, one of the other thirty some-odd black dresses we own between the two of us?”
“Oh.” Mother exhaled, deflating like a balloon. “Oh, of course. This stress is too much for me.”
“Put some of that grapefruit-jasmine-ylang ylang blend I made for you in the diffuser and have Girard give you a foot massage,” I told her. I gave her a quick peck on the cheek and raced upstairs to my room to get showered.
We had a few hours till the wake, but I could count on Mother to hound me until I was ready. She certainly did not believe in being fashionably late. Punctuality was one of her more annoying qualities, even more so when she was tense. I think that’s why I was always at least five minutes late to everything. It was my quiet and not too impolite revolution.
In the shower I played the scene with Rory under the bed over and over again in my mind. I am an idiot, I thought. He was never going to ask me out at this rate. He practically had under the bed, and I had been so awkward I basically told him to go away. I didn’t want him to go away. He smelled so good.
After this nasty murder business was over I would just have to ask him out myself. I pictured myself unmasking the murderer, leaping into Rory’s arms, and us racing off to get some outrageously expensive pizza, or maybe get outrageously expensive pizza and go see a movie. I love movies. So many good excuses to sit close and cuddle.
After the shower I forced myself away from Rory and back to the case at hand. Vanessa was receiving threatening phone calls. Why? Was she a gambler? In trouble with the mafia? Did she steal the wrong someone’s jewelry? I absentmindedly applied make up while I turned the clues over in my mind.
Max and George both wore cologne similar to the cologne dumped over Vanessa, I thought, as I dabbed my wrists with my own. Both were shady.
Max was well known for doing drugs and any girl he could come by. Why Ruby liked him, I had no idea! He gave me the creeps and had recently alienated his sister. Was the murder the final straw? Did Maureen break with him after he murdered Vanessa? We had seen him alone at the restaurant. But that was before the murder. Hmm.
George was also a womanizer. More notorious than his son. And he had laughed when they found the body. Who does that? Did he have Vanessa killed so he could inherit all the money? Or maybe to marry Leanne, and then their son would be legitimized? I frowned. I could definitely peg George for it, but I wasn’t ruling out Maureen or Leanne. I just needed more information. The wake would be the perfect opportunity to get that.
A knock on the door broke my reverie. Aunt Hazel entered wearing something Dickensian. “Ella, your mother is determined to get me into something more modern.”
“Anything would be more modern than that,” I pointed at her dress. “Are you meeting Miss Havisham later?”
Aunt Hazel put her hands on her bustled hips. “Listen here, you young person, this is respectable.”
“Okay,” I conceded. “But you may as well give in. She’s not going to let you out of the house liked that.”
“She is a stubborn one,” Aunt Hazel said. “Trouble said you investigated the murder scene. Did you find anything?”
“So much,” I answered, and showed her the phone. “Vanessa was being threatened. There were two messages on here and I listened to them both.”
“How did you get her phone?”
“Oh, it was under the bed. Stuck between the bed and the wall.”
“And the police missed it?”
“I had to be halfway under the bed to see it. Anyway, she was being threatened by at least two different people — though they could have been working together — and there was an IOU in her hand when I found her.”
“Was she a gambler?” Hazel asked. “Doing drugs? Involved in anything illegal?”
“No idea,” I said. “Let’s find out at the wake. We can ask questions subtly. Someone at the wake has to know something.”
“Yes,” Hazel agreed. “Someone at that wake is the killer.”
We walked over to the Stewart house in our finest black outfits. The lights were on and people were pouring in the front doors. We had Leanne let us in through the kitchen door. “We brought lasagna,” I told Leanne.
“Thanks.” Leanne was dressed in a French maid’s uniform, complete with lacy white apron. Her hair was up and two tiny pink dots on her cheeks betrayed her embarrassment. She took the pan and placed it into a warming oven. I hung back to speak to her.
“I like the new uniform,” I said sympathetically.
“Yeah, me too,” she said matching my tone. “Mr. Stewart thought it would be appropriate for tonight.”
“I bet he did.” She grabbed a tray of drinks. I grabbed a tray of appetizers. She raised an eyebrow at me but shrugged it off. Help was help. Eavesdropping as a waitress was still helping Leanne. I maneuvered my tray over to a few of Vanessa’s bridge partners.
“This is so sad,” Amy McGovern said to Sydney Sheridan. “She was so vivacious.”
Sydney nodded and took a bacon wrapped scallop. “It is sad,” she agreed. “I lost my best brooch here. It disappeared off my coat and I meant to ask her about it.”
I moved farther into the crowd. Detective Garza spotted me and waved me over. She took a scallop. “I didn’t know you moonlighted as a waitress for fancy parties.”
“I may or may not be eavesdropping,” I told her honestly. “I also have something for you.” I handed the tray to another server. He took it, frowning at me as if trying to figure out who I was and why I wasn’t in uniform. “Here, this is Vanessa’s phone. We found it yesterday under the bed.”
Garza lifted one of her perfectly manicured eyebrows. “Were there any messages?”
I nodded.
“And did you listen to these alleged messages?”
I shook my head no.
“Good. If you had listened to them I might have to charge you with obstruction of justice. Not to mention a whole host of other charges if I was feeling cranky.”
I took my tray back as the server passed again. “I was only trying to help my local police in their murder investigation by turning over a piece of evidence that they missed.”
She grinned, showing teeth. “You’ll let me know what you find out tonight.”
It was not a question. I nodded and she took another scallop.
“These are delicious.”
I moved through the crowd of mourners for a few more minutes until my tray emptied. A few more debutantes had mentioned missing jewelry. No one said they were the killer outright. Dang. Although not too surprising.
Leanne’s son was sitting alone on Vanessa’s chaise lounge. He looked like he was about five. I sat down next to him.
“Hi Johnny, I’m Ella.”
“Hi,” he said, looking sulky. “I’m bored and there’s no pizza.”
“I brought a lasagna,” I told him. “I’m sure your mom will let you have some if you ask.”
“Okay.” He looked up at me. “Is my mom going to lose her job?” His eyes were so wide and the exact shade of blue as those of a certain man of the house.
“Why do you think she would lose her job?”
“Miz Stewart said she didn’t trust Mom to not make any more mistakes. I don’t like Miz Stewart.” He slid off the chair and disappeared into the kitchen. Was Leanne bad at her job? Or at keeping family secrets?
Auntie Joe found me then. “Come on, let’s have some snacks.”
“I was trying to get some facts,” I told her.
She nodded, “So is Sarah. She said she would compare notes with you in a bit. But we’re missing our chance to eat fancy foods and pretend we belong here.”
“I do belong here,” I told her with a laugh.
“Oh,” Auntie Joe giggled. “Give us time and we’ll make sure you stick out like a sore thumb at these silly things.”
We wandered into the room where the family had put up a photo of Vanessa. Her eyes followed me. She wanted me to find her killer. I could feel it. I was starting to feel like I had all the clues I needed but I was just being incredibly thick about it.
Mother stood near the portrait, alone, arms wrapped tightly around herself. Father was a few yards off, talking with George and Max.
I went straight to Mother and hugged her. “I’m so sorry about Vanessa.”
“Oh, I’m alright, Ella. No need to hover,” she said, but her smile was pained. I hugged her again. “Don’t make me cry. My mascara will run. Tomorrow at the funeral is soon enough for looking like a mess. I am an ugly crier.”
“She was a good friend,” I told Mother.
“To me she was the best. Oh, we may have quibbled over men here and there, but we spent most of our lives together. I can’t help but feel alone without her.” Mother covered her eyes. “You just never know.”
Detective Garza was there drinking from a glass of water, eying my mother like a hawk. She scribbled something in her notebook. I walked over to her. “Your mother is an elegant lady,” she said.
“Elegant suspect, you mean,” I told her.
Scent of a Killer: An Ella Sweeting Aromatherapy Magic Cozy Mystery (Ella Sweeting: Witch Aromatherapist Cozies Book 1) Page 6
