“Yeah, but not on the island,” Kaillie replied.
“Are you really so naïve that you think the greed of human nature doesn’t exist on our little patch of paradise?” Aunt Lucy said. “I could absolutely see Joe killing Leonard to get a hold of that land. He could make millions selling condos there.”
“There’s only one problem,” Leanne chimed in. “Joe was in the coffee shop, but he was sitting at the table furthest from Leonard, and he didn’t leave his seat once. He was working on his computer the entire time. He couldn’t have done it.”
I nodded. I knew who Joe was now, and as far as I knew, Leanne was right. I hadn’t seen him get up from his computer even once before Leonard’s attack had begun.
“I can’t believe this is a conversation we’re having at dinner,” Aunt Debbie said, shaking her head.
“Hey, it’s the first time in years someone has been murdered here, and it was in the café our family owns. You have to let us speculate,” Aunt Lucy retorted. “Who else was there?”
“Well, there was Dianne Mulgrew,” Lucy said.
“Oh, she introduced herself to me,” I said. “She works at the bank, as a teller, right?”
“That’s her,” Leanne confirmed.
“She seemed really nice. She went and spoke with Leonard at one point, right?”
“Yes,” Leanne said. “I saw that as well. But then, what reason could she possibly have to want Leonard dead? Diane works at the bank, same as he does, but she’s there during the day and he’s there at night. It’s not like they would have interacted much.”
I nodded, and made a mental note to try and learn more about Dianne Mulgrew. After all, she had the opportunity to kill Leonard. Maybe she had done it.
“Don Kilmer also had the chance to kill him,” Leanne said. “He walked past the table where Leonard had been sitting while Leonard was in the bathroom. He would have had to have been quick, but he could have slipped something into the mug without anyone noticing.”
“Which one was Don?” I asked.
“The one who ordered two large coffees and drank them himself,” Leanne asked. “How the guy doesn’t die of a caffeine overdose I have no idea.”
I laughed. “That’s right, I remember him. He dropped a couple quarters into the tip jar on his way past Leonard’s table and his hands were trembling.”
“He’s a good guy,” Kaillie said. “He owns the hardware store here in town.”
“I can’t think of any reason he’d have to kill Leonard,” Lucy mused. “Frankly, I’m surprised that brother of his didn’t finally take him out.”
“Roman?” I asked, and Lucy nodded.
“Yes. The fact that those two still lived under the same roof astounds me. They’ve been at each other’s throats since their mother died.”
“Oh?” Kaillie asked. “I knew they didn’t get along, but I didn’t realize it was so bad.”
“It really was,” Aunt Lucy said with a solemn nod. “You were only a child, so we kept a lot of the worst of it from you, but it was bad. At one point, the two of them got into a fistfight in the middle of Main Street. On a weekend in August. I’ve heard of deer coming out of the forest and causing traffic jams, but that was the first and last time I’ve seen one caused by two grown men going to town on one another.”
“They were fighting over their mom’s wishes, right?” Aunt Debbie asked.
“That’s correct,” Aunt Lucy replied. “The will said that old Roseanne Steele wanted to be cremated, and have her ashes scattered into the Pacific Ocean. But Roman insisted that in the day before she died Roseanne told him privately that she had changed her mind and wanted to be buried in the churchyard along with the rest of her family. There were no witnesses to this statement, so obviously it couldn’t be considered, and Roseanne was cremated, her ashes scattered as per the written will. Roman never forgave Leonard for doing that to their mother, and they fought horribly for years since. I can’t imagine what must have gone down under that roof without us knowing.”
“There was that one time Roman went around with a black eye for a few weeks,” Kaillie said. “I remember thinking he looked even scarier than usual when he walked past me down the street.”
“Yes, that was about three months later,” Aunt Lucy said, nodding. “We all knew Leonard had done it to him. The rumor at the time was that he hit him in the face with a frying pan. Some of us were taking bets as to how long it was going to be before one of them moved out.”
“You say that as if it wasn’t you running the pool,” Aunt Debbie said pointedly to her sister. “And don’t think I don’t remember that you kept everyone’s money.”
Aunt Lucy shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, the pool is still going. Besides, my money was on one of them murdering the other.”
“Well, you lost,” Leanne said with a grin. “Roman wasn’t in the coffee shop that day.”
“In that case, everyone lost, and as the pool organizer, I get to keep the money,” Aunt Lucy announced. “No harm no foul.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Kaillie said with a small smile.
“Yeah, well, half the people who initially placed bets are dead now anyway,” Aunt Lucy said with a shrug. “And I’m sure the rest have forgotten.”
“There was one other person I saw speaking with Leonard,” I interrupted, wanting to get the conversation back onto the murder. After all, if I was going to try and find out who killed him, I needed to know who my suspects were. “Another man, older, grey hair. Very thin, ordered a coffee and a muffin.”
“Oh, Jack,” Leanne said, nodding. “Jack Frost. And yes, that is his real name. He’s a retired math teacher.”
“He was one of my favorite teachers,” Kaillie said with a fond smile. “He was always willing to stay late and explain a concept you didn’t understand.”
“Yeah, he’s good people,” Leanne confirmed. “Although I do wish he had bumped my C+ up to a B back in tenth grade.”
“Would he have had any reason to kill Leonard?” I asked, and all the other heads around the table shook in unison.
“Nope. Jack’s a good man. You’ll get to know him better soon; he comes in at least a couple of times a week.”
Aunt Lucy gave me a curious look, but I carefully ignored it and slurped up another mouthful of spaghetti. There were three people who could have murdered Leonard Steele. Now I just had to figure out which one of them actually did it.
Chapter 12
The following day I went back to the coffee shop with Aunt Debbie, who got the call just after four in the morning that the crime scene technicians had finished and we were welcome to open up again. I was a little bit worried about what peoples’ reactions were going to be. What if everyone felt the same way as Ariadne Stewart? What if people saw I was the one taking orders and immediately left, thinking I was going to poison them? What if I really wasn’t welcome in this town anymore?
I tried not to think too hard about these things, but it was hard to do so when the first customer of the day walked up to the door, had their hand on the handle, made eye contact with me behind the counter and immediately turned around and walked the other way instead.
“Oh, I’ve got to get out of here,” I said to Leanne. “I’m hurting business already.”
“Nonsense,” Leanne said, taking my hand and giving it a quick squeeze. “So there’s an idiot or two out there who thinks badly of you. So what? You’re a part of this family now, and that means sticking up for one another. We’re not going to just throw you in the back and hide you away just because a few people in town don’t like you.”
“Thanks,” I said, managing a small smile. I did like the fact that she was sticking up for me; apart from Dad I had never really had that in my life before.
“Even if people think you did it, don’t worry. They’ll move on. In a week or two everything will have been forgotten, and they’ll go back to normal. You never know; the cops might even figure out who kil
led Leonard Steele.”
“You say that like it’s not a foregone conclusion,” I said with a laugh.
“That’s because you haven’t met our police chief, Ronald Jones,” Leanne said. “He makes the navigator of the Hindenburg look like an aerial ace.”
“That much of a train wreck, huh?”
“He’s old as dirt, an alcoholic, and once famously caught a couple of tourists transacting a drug deal underneath the window outside his office. He told them to keep it down and slammed the window shut. One of the other officers heard the commotion, wondered what was going on in the alley outside the police station and found the culprits.”
“Wow,” I said, giggling. “How does the guy still manage to have a job?”
Leanne shrugged. “The fact that this isn’t exactly a high-crime area, I guess. There hasn’t been a murder in years, burglaries are virtually unheard of, and petty crime is basically the only thing that happens here. It’s not a great idea to commit a crime on an island where the only way out is via a ferry that runs a couple times a day.”
“Fair enough, but shouldn’t he still have been ousted years ago?”
“Probably, but he’s never screwed anything up badly enough to get fired, or have it suggested that he retire,” Leanne said with a shrug. “The drug thing was bad, but they managed to sweep it under the carpet in their report, so the higher-ups that make these decisions never found out about it.”
“So there’s basically no chance that the person who actually killed Leonard is going to get caught,” I said, frowning. “That sucks. That means everyone is going to think I did it.”
Leanne gave me a sympathetic look. “It will go away. I promise. This is a good place, and most of the people who live here are reasonable. I know it sucks, but people will start coming back.”
I nodded, distracted by the entrance of Janice, who flashed me a huge smile as soon as she saw me. “Eliza! So nice to see you again.”
“Thank you, same to you,” I said, giving her a warm smile. Maybe Leanne was right: not everyone was going to automatically assume I was a killer.
“It’s such a shame what happened to Leonard yesterday. I’ve heard he was murdered. Can you imagine? Who would do such a thing?” Janice shook her head sadly.
“I don’t know, but I hope the killer is found,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” Janice said. “It terrifies me to think someone willing to go to those lengths is living among us here on the island. Of course, I’d feel quite a bit better about things if we had stronger leadership in the police force, but at least a few of the detectives the chief has working for him aren’t idiots. Hopefully they figure it out.”
“I think they will,” Leanne said. “This is a small town, and there weren’t that many people who had the opportunity to kill him.”
“Yes. I’ll put it out to the universe that the killer be found, and hopefully the cosmos will answer.”
Janice placed her order once more, which Leanne had already been making for her, thanked us, and left.
“See? That wasn’t so bad,” Leanne said to me. “Don’t let the people who don’t know you get you down. They’ll come around.”
I really hoped Leanne was right.
For the next few hours I continued to take orders. We began to get enough customers that I no longer had time to worry whether or not any of them thought I was a murderer, and I made sure that when I poured the brewed coffee into cups from the large containers I did it from the side so that the customers could see I wasn’t slipping poison into their drinks.
During a quiet period, a familiar-looking woman walked in. I recognized her; it was Dianne Mulgrew, the woman who had stopped and had a chat with Leonard while he was drinking his coffee.
“Hello, welcome to Cackling Witch Coffee,” I said to her. “What can I get for you today?”
“A twelve ounce latte and a blueberry muffin, please,” she said to me, handing over a bill. Her eyes darted over to the table where Leonard had been sitting the day before, where he had died.
“It’s such a tragedy, isn’t it?” I offered in a quiet voice.
“It truly is. I was speaking to him just a couple of minutes before it happened.” Dianne shook her head.
“What were you speaking with him about? You two worked together, right?”
“Well, we both worked at the bank, that much is true. But we didn’t work together. He was the security guard, so his shift started right as mine ended at the end of the day. I knew he was seeing the doctor about his heart, and I hadn’t seen him since, so I was just asking how he was doing.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said. “I didn’t know him at all; yesterday when I served him was the first time that I met him.”
There was a slightly awkward pause for a moment. “Of course, right. Well, he told me he was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Frankly, I was surprised he wasn’t diagnosed earlier, given how cantankerous he could be. He even showed me the pills he had to take and complained about the doctors making him take them.” Dianne smiled sadly. “I mentioned to him that they were obviously good for his health, and Leonard complained that his bad ticker came from his father’s side of the family, but that he wasn’t going to let genetics get the best of him. Then he swallowed one of the capsules whole and said the pharmaceutical industry could go to hell, and that for what that pill cost, it should taste like maple syrup. That was Leonard. It’s sad to think that was the last conversation I’d ever have with him.”
“It sounds like you were fond of him. Not a lot of people in this town were, from what I’ve heard.”
“Oh, I was. Leonard was a grouch, no doubt about that. There was a reason he worked at night, when he didn’t have to interact with other people. And the whole situation with his brother was awful. But he wasn’t a bad person, deep down, so I always tried to be nice to him. You never know what someone else is going through, after all.”
“My dad always said that,” I said softly, finding the tears coming to my eyes yet again. I still cried so easily at the thought of him. I blinked back the tears and took a deep breath to steady myself.
“He sounds like a smart man,” Dianne said. “That’s why I was always nice to Leonard. As far as I knew, he never did anything really bad to anybody, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
“Well, hopefully the police will find out who did this.”
“I certainly hope so,” Dianne said as Leanne brought her coffee over to her. “He may not have been the easiest person to get along with, but as far as I know, he never did anything to deserve to be murdered.”
Obviously, someone disagreed. It could have been Dianne, but after speaking with her I didn’t think she was the person I should be focusing on. She seemed like a genuinely nice human being who reached out to Leonard when not a lot of people would.
A moment later, the door opened once more, and when I looked at the person who walked in my breath caught in my throat. It was Leonard!
No, on second thought, it wasn’t him. But my goodness was there a family resemblance. Their faces were exactly the same shape, but this man had a slightly larger nose, and his eyes were rounder, and more deep-set. Apart from that, the two men could have been identical.
He confirmed my suspicions as soon as he made his way to the counter and spoke.
“Everyone is saying this is the coffee shop where my brother died. Is that true?”
So this was Roman. “It is. I’m sorry for your loss,” I replied.
“Well, I’m not. As far as I’m concerned, Leonard should have left this earth years ago. I’m not sad he’s dead. My only hope is that the medical examiner treats his body the way Leonard would have hated, the way he forced us to do with my mother.”
Wow. Roman Steele was not mincing words. I had no idea what to reply, so I kind of just gaped at the man. That didn’t seem to bother him; he just kept talking.
“So it was here that he died. Good. He had it coming, quite frankly. I st
ill can’t believe he did our mother that way. She told me what she wanted. Told me just a few hours before she died. And all because Leo wouldn’t believe me when I told him we had to go through all that trouble, just to have mom buried in the churchyard. She wouldn’t have wanted that, you know. She didn’t want that. Didn’t want it at all, but he made her get cremated all the same. She should have been buried, her body with her family. That was what she really wanted. She loved her family, mom did. But now he’s dead, and I’m glad for it.”
“Do you want a coffee or anything?” I finally managed to stammer out, not exactly knowing where this insane rant was going.
“Eh?” Roman asked, surprised, as if he didn’t realize where he was. “Oh, a coffee? Nah. I just came here to see the spot where that no-good brother of mine finally died. I’ll do everything I can to make sure he isn’t buried next to mom. He doesn’t deserve to spend eternity next to such a good woman.”
And with that, Roman rapped his knuckles on the counter a couple of times, looked around, nodded as if satisfied with what he saw, and walked back out.
I widened my eyes at Leanne, who wiggled her eyebrows at me.
“I told you he was a little bit strange. They both were.”
“You were not kidding,” I replied. “But hey, grief makes people act in strange ways.”
“I don’t know, that didn’t seem to me like a man who was grieving his brother.”
I shrugged. “I barely remember what I did the first few days after Dad died. Grief does weird things to you. Roman might make some decisions now, do some things and say some things he’ll regret later.”
“Maybe,” Leanne said, but she didn’t seem convinced.
Either way, I wasn’t going to judge Roman too harshly. There was absolutely no way he was the killer – I would have noticed him being in the coffee shop at the same time as his brother – which meant he couldn’t have killed him. So he had just lost his brother. The two might have hated each other, but I figured when you lived under the same roof as someone for what was probably sixty-some years, losing them suddenly like that would have an effect, regardless of how well you got along.
Wake Up and Spell the Coffee Page 7
