Some people painted or gardened. Alex cooked. Thankfully, he was quite a talented chef.
On the other hand, while his getting lost in creating culinary delights helped him, it had led to my gaining at least ten pounds since we began dating. However, I knew the benefits for his peace of mind far outweighed my extra padding I’d collected around my hips and behind.
And the truth of the matter was if I’d get myself back on the treadmill, both of us would benefit from his delicious cooking. When that would happen, however, I couldn’t say. I always had the best of intentions, but then something always came up.
Like work at The Eagle. Or a case. Or the desire to sleep late instead of jumping on the machine in the corner of my dining room before the day started.
Alex cleared his throat to get my attention. I stared across the desk and saw him looking at me with a curious expression. “Were you just daydreaming about what I’d cook for dinner? You looked like you were a million miles away there.”
“No. I was silently chastising myself for not exercising more. Let’s get down to work so we can get home to that meal.”
“Okay, boss,” he said with a wink before beginning our discussion. “We need to run down who our suspects are. First up is Tamara Ridgeway. She has no alibi for the time Donny says Amy was killed. On top of that, the Third Eye Center is right near where she was found, so in theory, Tamara could have done the crime and gone back to the center without anyone being the wiser.”
I rolled my eyes at the memory of that awful woman. “You won’t get much argument from me about Tamara Ridgeway being a good suspect.”
“Okay,” he mumbled as he put a check mark next to her name in his notepad. “Onto the next one. First, let me see what Craig has found out.”
Craig answered the call quickly, and Alex said, “I’m putting you on speaker so all three of us can be on the same page. What did you find out about our three witches?”
“I’m just getting into the car to leave Jerilyn Fox’s house. She and Susie Mitchell both have people who will testify that at the time Amy was killed they were nowhere near the woods. Jerilyn was at her mother’s in Caston from six o’clock on, and Susie had eight-thirty dinner reservations with her husband Jonas at an Inner Harbor restaurant called Finnegan’s. They had crab cakes and toasted to all the success she had at the tarot readers convention that day,” Craig explained, sounding like he was reading off a sheet of paper in front of him.
Alex jotted down the highlights in his notes, so I leaned over the desk so my face was close to his phone and asked, “What about Melody? Did anyone at the theater see her there while she was seeing An Affair to Remember at The Colonnade?”
“I spoke to the only man working there in the afternoon—a man named Dick Montanga—and he said he recognized her from the picture on her pamphlet you gave me. Said he remembered seeing her come in because only three people saw the movie last night and she got a huge bucket of buttered popcorn.”
“Okay, thanks Craig,” I said into the phone’s speaker. “Hang on. Alex probably wants to tell you something.”
Sitting back in my chair, I mentally crossed off each of the three witches from the suspect list in my brain. That left Tamara, Kellen, and Stephen.
“Call if you need backup for any reason, Craig. Good work,” Alex said with a smile.
I knew his enthusiasm for the job Craig had done would thrill him. Through the phone, his happy voice said, “Thanks, Alex! If it’s okay, I’m going to go home for the day after I get back to the station. Katy has a pot roast she texted me about, and it’s been cooking all afternoon. I can practically smell it from here.”
“Go enjoy that delicious pot roast, Craig. We’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Alex said cheerily.
After he ended the call, he leaned back in his office chair and stretched his arms behind his head. “That takes care of the women in our rogue’s gallery. Now for the men.”
I knew how hard talking about Stephen as a suspect was for Alex, so I quickly brought up Kellen Martin. “Amy’s wonderful boyfriend Kellen, who is so overcome with sadness and grief? He has no solid alibi and he’s a real winner.”
“Being a terrible person doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a murderer. If that were the case, this job would be a lot easier. We could just go looking for the rotten ones out there,” Alex said with a sly smile.
“Well, he’s on the top of my suspect list,” I said, still disgusted by his behavior when we asked him about his relationship with Amy.
“Above Tamara Ridgeway?” Alex asked in a shocked voice.
I put my hands out in front of me and pretended to weigh each suspect’s chances at being the killer. “She is a complete shrew and her obsession with Amy calling herself a witch may have been more about her being a jealous former girlfriend than a difference in religious beliefs. On the other hand, Kellen Martin is possibly the world’s worst boyfriend and a real putz, so if he turns out to be the killer, I won’t be sorry to see him go away for good.”
Sighing, he looked up toward the ceiling and quietly said, “That leaves Stephen. I think we need to talk to Mrs. Henderson and find out just how long Stephen was out on that call.”
“Do we know how long he claims to have been handling the issue with her?” I asked.
Flipping through his notes, he stopped on a page filled with details and said, “The report he filed says he was gone from right after nine, like Craig said, to quarter after ten. The call about Amy being found came in at ten twenty-five.”
I instantly did the math in my head and knew that even though it would be difficult, Stephen could have done the crime and gotten back to the station in time. I didn’t say anything, though, because I saw by the sad look on Alex’s face that he knew how long it took to get from where Amy was found to the police station too since he’d driven that distance hundreds of times.
“Let’s go talk to Mrs. Henderson,” he said, nearly jumping up out of his seat, clearly eager to get out of the office.
As soon as we opened the glass front doors to leave the station, the late afternoon heat hit us like we ran into a brick wall. But instead of going to the car, he began walking in the opposite direction toward my house.
“Let’s walk since Mrs. Henderson only lives a few blocks away on Poplar Street.”
Was he insane? Walk in this heat?
I wanted to say no more than any other word in the entire English language, but I had the sense that he needed this to clear his head, so I said yes, even while I silently wondered if I would still be able to stand up by the time we got there in the stifling heat.
After ten sweaty minutes, we arrived at Mrs. Henderson’s blue house at 455 Poplar Street, just a block away from Victorian Row. While her house wasn’t a grand home like those in the more exclusive section of town nearby, it certainly wasn’t a character-less cookie cutter type of house either. Painted the color of a robin’s egg, the Craftsman style home had a large front porch and nicely trimmed deep purple Rhododendrons landscaped around it.
We stopped on the sidewalk in front of her house and I wiped the sweat from my forehead and my neck under my hair. Of course, Alex looked like he had just stepped out of delightful air conditioning, all crisp and fresh, while I looked like a wrung out dishrag.
“God, I hope she’s home. If we walked all this way in this heat and she’s gone out, I’m going to be more than a little peeved.”
He smiled at my frustration. “You look beautiful, even when you’re all sweaty like you are now.”
I wiped my damp hands on my dress. “Thanks. I feel like someone dunked me in a pool of salty tepid water.”
His smile slid from his face, replaced by a look of disgust. “Again, with the vivid descriptions. Let’s see if Mrs. Henderson is home.”
As we made our way up the front walk, I said under my breath, “If she has her air conditioning on and invites us in, she will be my new favorite person of all time.”
Mrs. Henderson spent most of her time c
omplaining about traffic in front of her house and people parking in the spot she considered hers, despite the fact that she had a perfectly good driveway and garage on the side of her house. Other than that, she had a tendency to be a bit more strident than I preferred in a person. My father believed that came from her working as a nurse for nearly forty years. I didn’t know if that was true. I just knew every time I’d ever seen her, she looked like she’d just sucked on a lemon. Even when she smiled, it was always tight-lipped, as if she had to force herself to be pleasant.
But her defining feature to nearly everyone who ever met her was her height. Nearly six foot tall, she towered over every woman in town and some of the men. It only added to her severe look.
We hit the first stair to the porch and saw her sitting in a white rocking chair fanning herself with a magazine. She would not be my favorite person today, unfortunately.
“Mrs. Henderson? My name is Alex Montero. This is Poppy McGuire. We’d like to ask you a few questions about the complaint you made to the police last night,” Alex announced as we stepped onto the porch painted blue to match the house.
She stood up and met us before we reached her, and I saw the surprise Alex felt at meeting her. Tilting my head back, I watched her slowly stretch her lips into one of her tight smiles.
“Officer, I hope you aren’t like the one who came by last night. My, he was rude,” she practically spit out.
“We’d just like to ask you some questions about that, if that’s okay, Mrs. Henderson,” I said in my nicest voice, hoping to use charm to make her forget how ignorant Stephen had been to her.
She lowered her gaze and looked at me for a moment like she had to go back into her memories to figure out who I was. Then after a few seconds, I saw the recognition in her eyes.
“Poppy McGuire. You’re Joe’s daughter, aren’t you? I remember you from my time at the hospital.”
With a chuckle, I nodded as Alex looked over at me. “I had a habit of getting pretty scraped up as a child.”
Mrs. Henderson smoothed a few steel grey hairs into her tight bun. “I was thinking of when you would come visit your mother.”
There was that severe personality that matched her look. Nothing like bringing up the memory of when my mother was dying to put a damper on our visit.
I felt Alex tense up next to me, but we had a job to do, so he asked, “About the officer who came out last night, Mrs. Henderson. We just need some information.”
Looking like she didn’t care about why we were there anymore, she grimaced and sat back down in her rocking chair. As she stretched her long legs out in front of her, she said, “Other than his being rude and doing nothing about the problem, I’m not sure what else there is to say.”
Alex knew how to handle Sunset Ridge’s most cantankerous citizens, so I knew he’d do the same with her. Turning on the charm, he smiled down at her in that way all the elderly women found so appealing and softened his tone.
“We want to make sure the problem is taken care of, so if you can answer just a few questions, I’m sure we can solve this issue to your satisfaction.”
Silently, I translated his borderline smarmy statement. You call all the time and will probably continue to call about this nonsense issue, but since we need your help, I’ll be as nice as pie in the hope that you’ll be less prickly and give me the answers I need.
As if on cue, her icy tone warmed, and that tight smile loosened up a tiny bit. “Well, I am happy that the police department is finally taking my complaints seriously. Would you two like a glass of homemade lemonade?”
Alex politely declined her offer, but I nearly jumped onto her lap at the thought of a cool glass of anything in this weather.
“Oh, yes, thank you, Mrs. Henderson. That would be wonderful,” I gushed as she turned to grab the pitcher of lemonade from the table next to her.
She handed me the glass that at that very moment became the most important thing in the world to me. Parched from our walk there, I gulped down the entire glass, not even caring that it was too bitter and needed about a cup of sugar to make it taste good, while Alex began to ask his questions.
“So about the officer who came out last night. Can you tell me what time he arrived?” Alex asked.
“He got here right after nine, and he was rude. So short with me. He didn’t care one whit about what I had to say. He gave me a lecture about the road being public parking and walked away.”
“How long was he here?” Alex asked, obviously nervous about hearing her answer.
Mrs. Henderson rocked back and forth in her chair as she thought about the question and said, “My favorite show Cross Country hadn’t finished yet before he left. I know that. He was outside doing nothing, as far as I could gather, and he interrupted my show to tell me he was going before it finished. Other than that, I’m not sure. I was just so angry that he did nothing.”
“What time does Cross Country come on?” I asked.
“Nine to ten every weeknight. It’s really a wonderful show. Have you ever seen it?”
Alex wrote down her answers in his notebook, and I shook my head to answer her. “No. I don’t watch much TV anymore.”
Nodding, Mrs. Henderson agreed. “Oh, I don’t either. Everything good has been done before. These days, most of what they’re putting on are just redos of shows from the past. It’s like creativity has gone dry in Hollywood nowadays. But Cross Country is different. It’s a talk show and cooking show all in one.”
I didn’t know if I was supposed to pretend to think that sounded interesting. It didn’t. Neither talk shows nor cooking shows were entertaining, in my opinion, and the idea of them being mashed together into one sounded like something I’d never want to see. Did the people being interviewed eat food while they were speaking? I had the vision of pieces of food spraying from between guests’ lips as they talked about their newest book or movie they were promoting.
Yuck. No thanks.
Alex looked up from his notepad and asked, “So the officer was gone by ten o’clock, ma’am?”
“Yes, but he was incredibly rude before he left. He acted like doing his job was an inconvenience. Like he had somewhere else he wanted to be and couldn’t be bothered with my problem.”
“There’s no chance that he was here until the end of your show?” Alex asked in a hopeful voice that tore at my heart. He so wanted to hear that Stephen had been here long enough to make getting out to the woods near his house and killing Amy impossible.
Mrs. Henderson’s mouth tightened into a thin line that stretched across her face. “Young man, I know when my favorite show comes on each night. Cross Country airs from nine to ten every weeknight. Since it wasn’t a weekend night, that meant it came on channel forty-five at exactly nine. I’m old, but I’m not senile, Officer Montero.”
Quickly, he tried to smooth her ruffled feathers with a smile and an apology. “I meant no offense, Mrs. Henderson. I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure I had all the details so we can solve this problem as soon as possible.”
Like it usually did, Alex’s charm offensive succeeded in its objective and Mrs. Henderson’s anger melted away in seconds. Waving away his apology, she said, “I would appreciate that. I’m not asking for much. I just want the parking spot in front of my house clear each night, but invariably, someone arrives right after dark and parks in it.”
“Well, we’ll be sure to watch for who’s parking there and have a little talk with them. I’m sure it will all be fixed this week. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Henderson.”
He turned to leave even as I hoped she would offer me more of her sour lemonade that while tart still quenched my thirst. Since it looked like I wouldn’t be getting any more, I placed the empty glass on the table next to her and thanked her for her help.
“If we have any other questions, we might have to come back. I hope that’s okay.”
With one of her tight-lipped smiles, she said, “I’ll be here just enjoying this beautiful day.”
I hurried down the stairs to catch up with Alex, who had already made it to the sidewalk that ran alongside the street in front of her house. I knew what she said hadn’t been what he’d wanted to hear.
“Next time, let’s forget the walking and go with the air conditioned car, okay?”
He slowed down his walking and looked over at me. “Sure.”
“Are we still doing that wonderful meal tonight?” I asked, hating how unhappy he looked after hearing the truth that Stephen had lied.
“Sure. I just want to stop back into the station for a minute. I won’t be long, and then we can get home to some lemon chicken and rice. Sound good?”
I smiled up at him and wished I could do something to make him feel better. “That sounds fantastic. A nice meal and some time relaxing tonight will do us a world of good.”
He didn’t respond to my suggestion, and as we crossed the street to head toward the station, I knew the fact that Stephen now absolutely had to be considered a suspect weighed heavily on his mind.
And I doubted cooking some chicken and relaxing on the couch with me would change that. The only thing that would change his mood would be solving this case and hopefully finding out that Stephen wasn’t the one who had killed Amy Perkins.
Chapter Fifteen
I opened my eyes after Alex rolled over for the fifth time in ten minutes, his arm knocking into my side with each turn. Looking over at the alarm clock, I saw the time in bright red numbers.
3:38.
This was the third time that night that he’d awoken me with his tossing and turning. I knew what was wrong, but I had no idea how to fix it.
“Alex? You okay?”
He sighed but said nothing, so I rolled over and saw him in the moonlight lying there staring up at the ceiling. That frown that had been a semi-permanent part of his face since the moment Stephen came under suspicion in this case looked even deeper.
The Witching Hour Page 15
