4 Return To Sender: A Cat Cozy Mystery: A Mail Carrier Cozy Mystery

by Tonya Kappes

  “From what I understand, you have plenty of time on your hands.” She wasn’t letting me off the hook so easy.

  “My mom has a big mouth.” I knew Mom had told her about me passing out, then losing my mind when I accused Nick Kirby of killing Simon. None of it looked too sane.

  “And why don’t you read up on this too.” She handed me another brochure on stress and midlife crisis.

  “I’m not having a midlife crisis.” I was sure of that.

  “Of course, you aren’t, but all stress can play into menopause.” She was so sweet in her delivery that I wished she’d been a little more condescending. “If we can get your stress under control, then maybe we can get you sleeping.”

  After she’d gone over a few more things about my sleep, hot flashes, gut issues, and other unmentionables that didn’t seem right going over with your high school classmate, we finally got on the topic of Peaches Partin.

  “I know Peaches was taking pills to sleep. I was thinking of maybe getting some of those to, you know, help me sleep.” I shrugged.

  “Your sleeping issue is different than Peaches. Not everyone is the same, Bernie.”

  “I’m just afraid if I take one too many, I might not wake up, and I sure want to wake up for Clara.” I was trying to figure out how many were needed to knock someone out.

  “That Clara. She’s a doll baby.” She held her hand out for me to shake. “It was good seeing you, and I look forward to hearing what you think about the reading material I’m sending home with you.”

  “That’s it? You’re not even going to entertain my idea of needing a sleeping pill?” I asked.

  “Bernadette, you forget that we went to school together. Remember when we went to the party at that old farm and the boys brought all the beer?” Looks and a good memory? Dang, Faith had it all. “You took one sip of beer and puked all night, saying you were drunk. I don’t ever recall seeing a beer in your hand at a party since.”

  “I drink beer.” I did. Rarely, but I did.

  “Let’s just say that if I gave you a sleeping pill, you’d be trying to throw it up a second after swallowing it.” She shook a finger. “I know you. And you need to trust your doctor.”

  “You’re the only doctor in town,” I said after she shut the door so she didn’t hear me.

  Chapter 15

  With a handful of no help, I headed straight back to the house on Little Creek Road. I’d passed the duck who’d been waiting for me to throw some duck pellets but realized they’d taken my mail carrier bag from me when they’d hauled me down to the post office and had me sign off on my suspension.

  “I’ll bring some over before I leave,” I told my duck friend, who greeted me with a few quacks. “Yeah, I feel like a quack.” I headed over the bridge on my dead-end side of Little Creek Road and straight toward my house.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Front Porch Ladies were gathered on Millie Barnes’s front porch. It was no coincidence either. Millie’s house was the closest to mine, and when I didn’t deliver their mail, I’m sure they were all over it. Thank goodness I made it inside before they yelled for me to stop by.

  There wasn’t any information to give them, and even though I really wanted to know what Millie had found out as well as Harriette when she took the repast food over to Simon Little’s parents, it would have to wait.

  I would have barely enough time to make it out to Peaches’s parents’ house before I had to come home and get ready for my super-secret date with Mac, though I wasn’t supposed to know about it.

  Buster greeted me at the door, his tail thudding against the table I had sitting just to the right of the door. Instead of letting him dance and prance around to give me kisses, I let him straight out to potty and went inside to check on Rowena.

  She barely lifted her head to see I was home when I found her on my pillow curled up away from any sort of sunlight in the house. She loved it dark and cold on warm summer days like today.

  “Hey girl,” I sang out to her after she yawned, outstretched her front paws, and then arched her back as she got her footing. “Want a treat?”

  It was funny how she and Buster received the word “treat” so differently. She lifted her paw and licked it a few times as if she were thinking she’d be so kind as to grace me with her presence and even accept a treat.

  I heard Buster scratching at the bottom metal part of the screen door and hurried back down the hall before he got his claws on the actual screen, which I’d really gotten good at replacing over the past few months.

  No wonder Mr. Macum, Buster’s previous owner, didn’t have a lick of screen in the screen door. He kept it taken off, and I now knew why.

  “You want a treat?” I asked Buster.

  Here was the difference between him and Rowena. His ears perked up. His tail did whirly twirls, and he darted into the kitchen, only to run back to see if I was coming and quickly. He did this a couple of times before I did get into the kitchen, unscrewing the treat jar with the homemade goodies from Iris.

  “There you are.” I eyeballed the little feline thief as she walked into the kitchen. “You have her to thank for this screw-top jar.” It took me a few seconds to get the jar open. “If she didn’t knock it over all the time and spill them out on the floor for you two to gobble up, making your stomachs upset, then I wouldn’t have to put a tight lid on this thing.”

  Rowena sat back on her haunches and threw her hind leg up in the air, licking her thigh like she didn’t care a bit what I had to say.

  “You two be good while I’m gone.” I put a treat up on the counter far away from reach as Buster was known a time or two to counter surf, stealing any and all things edible, not to mention horrible for him. “With no job, I can’t afford to take you two to the vet. So be good.”

  No matter what anyone told me, I was confident these two understood exactly what I was telling them.

  I opened the freezer door and looked for anything in there I could take with me to the Partins’. As a Southern gal, it was beat into your brain to never go to someone’s house empty-handed, and in this case, the frozen lasagna my mom had made me a few weeks back was the perfect dish to take.

  I gave the fur kids one last pat goodbye, even Rowena, and headed out the door with my head down so the Front Porch Ladies couldn’t catch my eye on the way to my car.

  Once safely inside and driving up the street, I gave them a great big wave, or three, when I passed them. All four of them were standing up waving me to stop. The more they waved at me, the bigger my wave got.

  “Shew,” I said and looked in my rearview mirror at them with their hands placed on their hips and their lips moving a mile a minute, no doubt talking about me. “That was close.”

  Once I’d turned down Main Street and headed out of town toward Peaches’s house, I let my mind wonder about the questions I needed her to answer. Some were going to be difficult and had to do with her drinking.

  The subdivision her parents lived in was very nice. The houses weren’t so close together like the neighborhood behind the courthouse on my third loop. These houses were built in the sixties when neighborhoods had a little more room.

  This neighborhood had an LLV mail carrier, but I wasn’t sure who and obviously wasn’t going to find out anytime soon.

  I pulled into the driveway, and Corine must’ve seen me pull up from inside because she greeted me at the door.

  “I brought you a lasagna made by my mom.” I held it out in pride knowing they were going to love it. “It’s frozen so you don’t have to cook it tonight.”

  “Are you kidding?” Peaches called out from inside the door before she popped her head out from over her mom’s shoulder. “We are putting it in right now.”

  “Thank you, Bernadette. You shouldn’t’ve,” Corine insisted.

  “Yes, she should’ve.” Peaches reaction made her mom blush.

  “I swear I taught her better than that.” Corine and I both laughed, knowing Peaches was just actin
g out in good gesture. “Welcome to our home.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry I resisted you coming now that you brought this.” Peaches’s eyes grew as she peeled off the tinfoil lid. “Smack my mama, this looks good.”

  “You better not smack your mama.” Corine winked before she headed outside to the deck, which was purely a strategic move on her end to leave me and Peaches alone.

  “Go on. Ask away.” Peaches turned around, and the sun flooded through the windows, allowing me to get a good look at her.

  “Have you been sleeping?” I knew what China was now trying to tell the doctors when she pleaded for them to refill Peaches’s prescription.

  “No. Unfortunately, my sleeping pills are out.” She tapped the pads of her fingers underneath her eyes. “It’s a little hard to sleep when you’re coming off a binge and find out that you killed your ex-boyfriend who only did good things to try to keep me off the bottle.”

  “Are you sure you had anything to do with it? I mean, you did ask me to look into things.” I helped her with the oven when she looked all around it to turn it on. “We will put that in once the preheat is finished.” I patted the counter to have her set the foil pan down.

  “I hate to say it, but I probably shouldn’t’ve asked you to waste your time. Even Tim Crouse thinks I might’ve blacked out and killed Simon. After all, who else would he let in after hours? Who else had the return to sender package that was taken to the post office? Who else is on the video leaving Tranquility Spa with a bottle in their hand, the same bottle at the scene? And who else was seen on the security camera at the post office?” She lifted her finger and pointed to herself. “This girl.”

  “But did you go all the way to the garage?” I asked. “Could you physically make it to the garage, then, in your head, formulate a plan to kill him by using your prescription?”

  “There’re no cameras at the garage. Since there’s nothing next to it on either side, and the school and country club are too far away to see anything from their cameras, then yeah. I’m it.” She gnawed on her cheek and stared into space. “I don’t remember picking up a bottle that night. That’s the weird thing.”

  “Take me through the night. Step-by-step.” I encouraged her to tell me what she did remember so I could see if there were any holes in her story that I could possibly think through. It took everything in my head to completely focus on her and what she was saying.

  “I had an afternoon class. I was cleaning up, and the last thing I remember was seeing the return to sender package. I looked into the basket on the counter, and the mail you’d delivered that morning was there, and I wondered why you didn’t take the package.” She stopped and blinked a few times. “That’s all I remember.”

  “You don’t remember anything after that?” I asked, knowing that wasn’t much to sleuth on or even help get her off the hook. The oven beeped, letting us know it’d reached cooking temperature.

  “Not a thing.” She curled up onto the balls of her feet and reached across the island to retrieve her water bottle. “I hope they have good water in jail,” she teased, shaking the Tranquility Spa bottle back and forth. “I’ve been thinking I might be able to get them to let me teach my fellow inmates yoga.”

  I walked over and put the lasagna in. I punched in the timer so I’d be able to keep an eye on it.

  “I’m sorry.” I turned around and gave Peaches a hug like I would Grady. “I’m sorry I’m treating you like a mom, but my heart is breaking for you because you are the kindest person I know.”

  “You look tired, Bernie.” Leave it to Peaches to put herself on the back burner when it came to noticing things about people she cared about.

  “Stop worrying about me. I’m worried about you.” I had to be honest with her about what I’d found. “I’m not sure I can help you. Every time I get a lead or hear a clue, it all comes back to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we already mentioned the bourbon bottle. But did you hear he had bourbon in his mouth?” I asked, knowing Angela would die if she knew I told any sort of information she’d given me, regardless of whether she’d already asked Peaches or not.

  “That can’t be. Simon didn’t drink bourbon. He’s gluten intolerant.” She looked at me.

  “Yeah. Which makes me know you didn’t do it. If you really killed him, you wouldn’t be coherent enough to even think to put all those sleeping pills in his sports drink, then after he died, fill his mouth with bourbon. Then write a note. Whoever killed him had no idea he would be allergic to gluten.” It was our only leg to stand on, and by the look on her face, she knew it too.

  “How did you find all this out?” she questioned me.

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you need to tell Tim Crouse he needs all the records from the sheriff’s department, which he can get because he’s your lawyer.” If she told Tim what I said word-for-word, he’d not be happy.

  “How can I thank you?” She threw her arms around me. “You are a genius. I told Mom that. I told China that.”

  “Speaking of China.” This was where things got a little sketchy. “Do you think the killer took your pills?”

  Her mouth dropped.

  “Bernie,” she gasped. “Who do you think the killer is?”

  “I think it’s Nick and maybe Sarah.” That gave her pause. “Let me explain.”

  I quickly told her about me overhearing Nick and Sarah’s conversation.

  “I think she and Nick are having an affair, or she was going to get some sort of money out of the deal from Nick if she got information from Simon. But I can’t stop seeing Nick’s face when he noticed the certified letter to Simon was from the patent department and his name was not on it.”

  “This is starting to make a lot of sense.” She blinked several times. “Nick and Sarah continued to try to see me at the studio. Nick kept telling me to listen to him, and Sarah kept trying to come to class. I left my pills at the studio, and they are gone. The only thing left was the pill bottle. I found Nick behind my counter.”

  “You need to tell Tim this.” I knew it was probably too dangerous for me to confront Nick or Sarah at this point. So, having Tim do it and letting Angela know was probably the best thing.

  Or maybe I’d give Angela a call to let her know.

  “Are you okay?” I knew it was time to stop talking about the investigation. Her shoulders had slowly crept up toward her ears. Her brows were in a permanent furrow along with the lines on her forehead. Her jaw had tensed. I could see stress was written on her face.

  “I need to think clearly. The only thing that helps me do that is yoga.”

  My heart nearly jumped into my throat when I thought she was going to say that having a drink was the only thing that helped clear her mind.

  “You look like you could use some deep breathing too.” The sweet disposition that I knew of hers was now shining through. There was light in her eyes when she talked about yoga that told me she was right. She needed her practice. “I can see by the dark circles you aren’t getting sleep.”

  “No sleep because of this darn menopause,” I growled, putting a smile on her face.

  “I have an idea.” She looked right and then left as if she didn’t want her mom to hear. “You and Iris meet me at the studio tonight after ten. That way you can do your special date with Mac and my parents will be fast asleep, making it much easier for me to leave the house. We can do an hour of yoga.”

  “I’m worried you won’t be able to resist the temptation of going to get liquor.” I knew this was the time to be so honest that it might ruin the friendship we had or even our business friendship.

  But I had nothing to lose on the business side. I had no idea if I was going to get my job back after the suspension or not. It was a gamble I was going to take to make sure Peaches needed what she needed to get herself clean and sober.

  “I promise. I’m on a mission to find out who the real killer is and who is framing me for a murder I didn’t commit. If that m
eans getting the help I need and staying sober, I’m all for it.” She pulled out a card from the back pocket of her jeans. “This is my sponsor’s card, and I’ll keep it with me. I’ve done this once. I can do it again.”

  There were a few moments of hesitation and a few times she gave me puppy dog eyes that melted my heart, but when she put her hands up in a prayer position and frowned at me… that did me in.

  Chapter 16

  “Hunter-green short-sleeved shirt and your black linen… um… not linen. Jeans and tennis shoes.” Iris started our conversation off with an outfit.

  “Huh?” I wasn’t sure what on earth she was referring to.

  “Your outfit for tonight. You’re calling about what to wear, right?” She was so much more into this surprise than I was.

  “No. I’m calling about yoga.” It was like my brain hadn’t processed what she’d told me to wear. “Jeans? Tennis shoes? Is he taking me on a picnic?”

  “Yoga? What about yoga?” she answered me.

  “First, tell me what I’m doing tonight because I wasn’t going to wear jeans.” I had planned on wearing a summer dress because it helped with my current hot flashes. Jeans wouldn’t be good to the sweaty creases in my legs. “Did you forget I’ve got my own personal furnace flipped on high all day long? And in the heat of the summer night, I’m thinking no jeans.”

  “Just wear some sort of pants to be comfortable.” She huffed. “Now that I’ve answered your question, you answer mine about yoga.”

  “I stopped by the diner after I was suspended from the post office.” While I got around to answering her question, Iris was doing a whole lot of un-hun and mmm-yea. “I ran into Corine Partin, Peaches’s mom.”

  “Really?” Iris was intrigued. “Make this quick because I’ve got some pies in the oven that cannot overbake and talking on the phone with you makes me forget all about the pies.”

  “Fine.” I was going to try to make it quick because I’d just pulled in to my house and had to get a quick shower before Mac picked me up, which was soon. “Corine asked me to stop by and talk to Peaches after she got home from being interrogated again by Angela. I did, and I think we might have some more digging around to do with Nick and Sarah. I think they both had something to do with Simon’s murder. Mac said we’d be home by nine tonight, so meet me at the bakery at nine-thirty so we can go over the clues. Plus, I told Peaches that you and I would meet her at Tranquility Wellness for yoga at ten.”