by Betty Webb
Poor old Harper. She had been nothing more than a rung on a ladder for two different men.
I motioned toward the corner, where Frasier’s fake black beard had landed. “Why the beard?”
“I thought that if anybody saw me messing around at the park, they’d think I was that uppity Preston Morrell.”
This infuriated me all over again, so I gave him another hard poke in the ass. “Don’t talk like that about my almost-stepfather!”
Frasier began to cry.
All that bloodshed, just so a hollow man could climb the corporate ladder. Besides killing two people, Frasier had purposely implicated a good man, and made a good woman unemployable. Talk about scum.
Disgusted, I poked his ass with the pitchfork again. “Stop being such a baby. You’re lucky I don’t have…”
I had meant to say “…a gun,” but the sound of several cars roaring down the street toward us silenced me. No sirens?
Brakes screeched. Car doors slammed. Women called out to one another.
Within seconds, the back porch light clicked on.
“Teddy! Are you all right?” Colleen.
“Don’t let the kids come out here!”
“Gotcha!”
A thunder of feet down the steps as the porch light revealed the forms of several women I recognized as librarians from the San Sebastian County Library.
Their hands were outstretched, clasping dangly keyrings.
No.
Those dangly things weren’t keyrings.
They were pepper spray canisters.
The heavy artillery arrived when Colleen fetched her Glock 19 from the house.
“How long have you had that thing?” I asked.
“It belonged to Joe’s father. I kept it because…Well, because you never know, do you?”
Colleen and the librarians and I sat in a circle around Frasier, each of us aiming our weapon of choice at him. The reference librarian was uncertain if her pepper spray canister worked because she’d owned it for almost two years and hadn’t yet tested it.
So she tested it on Frasier.
It worked.
Frasier was still crying when we heard sirens approaching.
“Guess the bank robber situation has been resolved,” Colleen said.
“About time,” the child’s librarian grumped. “I’ve already missed South Park.”
Chapter Twenty-six
All was well that ended well with the hostage situation, too. The bank robbers had indeed surrendered, leaving the Grampion family unharmed. Swarmed by the press, the Grampions left the farm to the various factions of law enforcement and skedaddled to the San Sebastian Holiday Inn Express. There was a rumor going around town that a producer from Sixty Minutes had called, and that a New York literary agent had already inveigled the rights to a hostage tell-all with the working title, Hot Hostage Hearts. According to town gossip, Peggy Sue Grampion, a cheerleader at San Sebastian High, had fallen for one of the hostage-takers—the cute one—and promised her undying love as he was led away in handcuffs.
Saturday morning’s edition of the San Sebastian Journal screamed in eighty-four-point Gothic,
LIBRARIANS CAPTURE MURDERER WHILE
BANK ROBBERS SURRENDER
The newspaper sold so many copies the presses had to roll for a second edition, and why not? Their subscribers received two big stories for the price of one. With pictures.
The Rejas residence was declared a crime scene, with the yard off-limits for the next few days. No one was happy about that, especially not Tonio and Bridie. Although the adults had agreed to withhold the grisly details from them, the children had figured out enough that they wanted to see Frasier’s bloodstains for themselves. Every cop who trudged through the house was subjected to so many pleas for information that I eventually called Bucky Snow and requested another favor. Happy to oblige, Bucky duly escorted the kids to the San Sebastian Cineplex where they were treated to a double feature of Wonder Woman and The Muppets in Outer Space.
But the best part of the day arrived when I received a call from Lila Conyers to inform me that on Monday, she would be starting work at Blue Seas Marine Laboratory as Preston Morrell’s personal assistant.
“And the Lab’s paying my tuition so I can finally get my masters!” she enthused. “Oh, Teddy, I can’t thank you enough. Um, by the way, did you know Toby’s moved in with me? He’s so precious.”
“Don’t get too attached,” I warned. “That cat’s middle name is Unfaithful.”
Thinking about Toby called up a vision of my Merilee. Unlike Toby, my boat was always there for me, a comfort when I was upset, a joy when we were out on the water together. If these past few days had taught me anything, it was to remain true to my values—and I valued the hell out of her.
The struggle over my boat’s fate had to end now.
But how to tell Joe?
By Sunday evening, things had calmed down enough at Casa Rejas that Colleen was able to bake another batch of cranberry-apricot scones. These were greatly appreciated by Bridie and Tonio, the deputies, the crime scene techs—and my mother.
Caro had stormed the house less than fifteen minutes after the police had arrived, demanding I return with her to the safety of Old Town. Upon my refusal, she had bunked down overnight with Colleen, and the two had chattered into the wee hours like a couple of teenaged girls at a pajama party.
“May I have another of those scones, Colleen?” Caro asked, the next morning. “They truly are delicious.”
Colleen beamed at her new BFF. “Not only can you have another scone, Caro, but I’ve made an extra dozen for you to take home.”
My mother looked down at her miniscule waistline. She had always fiercely protected her size 0. Nevertheless, she said, “A dozen sounds perfect.”
The two air-kissed, and Caro headed off to Old Town, clutching a box of scones to her surgically enhanced breasts.
Relieved, Joe pulled me into the hallway and kissed me so passionately I had trouble catching my breath.
“Promise me you’ll never get mixed up in a murder case again,” Joe said, as I came up for air.
“I promise.”
“You almost got killed. Again.”
“I said I promise.”
Joe wasn’t finished. “Let’s elope.”
“You don’t want to wait until the granny cottage is finished?”
“Nope. I want you right here where I can keep an eye on you.”
Another long kiss.
Resurfacing, I said, “Um, about that. You need to know I’m not giving up the Merilee.”
He looked at me in shock. “But I thought you’d come to your senses, that…”
I held up my hand, stopping him. “The Merilee is my sanctuary. We’re a package deal, Joe. Love me, love my boat.”
When he frowned, I thought we were about to have another argument, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he said, “Besides the needless expense, I thought she was added work for you.”
“Work that I love. Like my job at the zoo.”
He frowned. “You’re saying I’ve been blind, is that it?”
“No blinder than me. I didn’t realize how much I loved that boat until…Well, until it looked like I might have to give her up.”
“That’s an emotion I can understand.”
A few minutes of heavy-petting later, Joe climbed into his cruiser and took off for his office to begin work on a mountain of paperwork. After straightening my clothes, I went into the kitchen to help Colleen put away the breakfast dishes.
I was too late. The kitchen was already spotless and Colleen was sitting in the office nook, hunched over her green laptop. The minute I walked in, she threw me a startled look and hit the Escape key.
“I thought you and Joe were…”
“He’s off to supervise again.”
She smiled. “He loves to supervise. Don’t let him go too far with it. Not with you, anyway. He’s always loved your independent streak.”
�
��No worries there.”
I looked at the laptop. It was time to clear the air. “Colleen, I have a confession to make. One day when I came through here, I saw that you’d been looking a rather odd website. Something about how to clean gunpowder off your hands.”
She flushed so deeply that her freckles almost disappeared. “Oh, no! You saw that?”
“I’m afraid so. And I thought…I thought…”
“You thought I might be the killer?”
“Well, kinda.” Never had I felt so uncomfortable.
Colleen began to laugh, great howls separated by guttural snorts. Her reaction was so unexpected that I just stood there and watched. After she’d howled herself out, she wiped her eyes and said, “I guess I’ll have to divulge my awful secret. But if you tell Joe, I will kill you!” At the expression on my face, she added, “Joke!”
Still laughing, she walked over to the laptop and brought up the file she’d been working on when I entered the kitchen.
“Take a look, Teddy.”
I leaned over and began to read…
The brave zookeeper faced down the killer with only a rake for a weapon. Behind her, the macaque monkeys cringed in fear of the menacing man.
“And that’s why you shot Emaline DeBussey!” Lettie Hently spat, brandishing her rake at the leering David Randolph Wilkerson IV. She wasn’t about to let that monster hurt her beloved animals. “You thought merely wiping your hands with a HandiWipe would make the gunshot residue go away, but…”
Epilogue
Three Months Later
The gossip going around town was that Frasier Morgan wanted to plead Not Guilty. His argument was that he’d been in the Rejas’ yard, innocently looking for his lost dog—he didn’t have a dog—when he was assaulted by a group of radical feminists who had just returned from watching a re-screening of Wonder Woman at the San Sebastian Cineplex.
But he changed his mind when his attorney, a high-roller from San Francisco, played him the recording of that evening’s events. The attorney duly warned him that even if the recording, made under duress, was eventually thrown out of court, there was still the matter of the rifle dredged out of the Slough. The authorities had traced the Remington Gamemaster 141 to Frasier’s father, who had used it on hunting trips with his then-friend Miles Stephenson Betancourt IV, CEO of Prime Pacific. So upon his attorney’s advice, Frasier accepted a plea deal wherein his sentence would be reduced from life without parole to a mere sixty years.
At least Frasier came from a long-lived family.
The county attorney’s attempt to link Miles Stephenson Betancourt IV to bribery was proceeding slowly. After much thought, Frasier had retracted what he had said on the recording about Miles’ knowledge of the otter count problem, and so far, no evidence of tampering had surfaced.
I had my suspicions about who was paying Frasier’s legal bills.
Which brings me to Harper Betancourt-Booth. After second-guessing her plan to start a fashion magazine—too much work—she whirlwind-romanced Lex Yarnell, the Gunn Zoo’s park ranger, which terminated in a suspiciously hurry-up wedding. Zoo gossip had it that as part of the prenup, Lex’s extended family would be moving out of the trailer park and into a new five-bedroom, five-bath home in one of San Sebastian’s tonier suburbs. The Yarnells would never need to work in the fields again. As for Lex’s part of the bargain, he had signed an agreement that “any children arising from the union of Harper Genevieve Betancourt and Lex Michard Yarnell would henceforth and hereafter carry the surname name ‘Betancourt.’”
The news from the zoo was even more satisfying. Clarabelle, our new macaque monkey, had finally been introduced to Kabuki. It was love at first sight, and Clarabelle, like Harper Genevieve Betancourt Booth Yarnell, was already pregnant.
In another satisfying piece of zoo news, Janet Hewitt, whose carelessness around dangerous animals had worried us all, accepted a job at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the worst thing that could happen to her there was to be stung by a jellyfish. Since she was so close to Aster Edwina, we’d given her a farewell party at Phil’s Fish Market, where she’d gotten plastered enough to confess to a brief affair with the despicable Stuart Booth. The affair had ended in tears when he left her for a younger woman—Amberlyn Lofland.
Closer to home, Colleen’s cranberry-apricot scones became such a hit in San Sebastian that she was thinking about opening a small bakery named Scones ’R Us. It would operate out of the recently completed granny cottage.
“She’s doing too much,” Joe grumbled, stroking my frizzy hair.
I snuggled closer to him under the cool sheets. “Oh, stop worrying about your women, Joe. We’re fine.”
It was just past sundown, and we were lying together in the Merilee’s aft bunk, while Miss Priss, wayward little Toby, and a completely healed Bonz snoozed in the bow bunk. The tide was coming in, and the Merilee rocked sleepily with it. With the next ebb tide, we would leave for San Diego, making stops at friendly ports along the way.
“I still can’t believe I wanted you to give her up,” Joe said, holding me tight.
“Well, you did. But I should have been more open with you and not allowed everything to build up.”
“Let’s promise to always be open with each other from now on.”
“Pinky swear?”
“Pinky swear!”
We pinky-swore.
He was quiet for a while. Just as I thought he’d drifted off to sleep, he said, “Baking for hundreds of people will take up too much of my mother’s time, Teddy. We have to do something to stop her. She’s almost in her sixties, for Pete’s sake! And then there’s that damned book. So how could she…?”
Ah, yes, that damned book.
Colleen, that sly Irish businesswoman, had contacted the same New York literary agent who had wrangled the book/film contract for Hot Hostage Hearts, and wound up with a contract of her own. As a result, Murder At the Zoo was slated to be released next spring, with a TV series to follow. She was already halfway through the sequel.
“Colleen’s doing fine, Joe.”
“But she’s working too hard! She…”
“Cm’ere, handsome.”
For the next few hours my new husband was too busy to worry about overworked women.
Colleen’s Cranberry-Apricot
Scones
INGREDIENTS:
12 ounces self-rising flour
5 ounces whole milk
3 ounces chilled cubed butter
3 large eggs (1 for egg wash)
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon honey
1 1/2 ounces dried and diced apricots
1 ounce dried cranberries
1/2 ounce chopped pistachios
1/2 ounce crushed pistachios for topping
1 ounce brown sugar for topping
Pinch of salt
INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 400 F.
Mix dry ingredients (except for crushed pistachios and brown sugar) together in large mixing bowl. Blend well. In a separate bowl, whisk two eggs into the milk. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients. Mix. Add butter to mixture, cutting butter into pea-sized lumps. Add honey to cranberries, chopped apricots, and chopped pistachios. Fold in to dough mixture.
Put dough/fruit mixture onto a floured surface and roll out to a 1-inch thickness. Use a cookie cutter or glass rim to shape dough into circles; there should be approximately ten. Place on well-buttered cookie pan. Wash top of scones with beaten egg mixture, then sprinkle with brown sugar and crushed pistachios.
Bake scones 12 minutes or until golden.
Serve with butter, fruit jam, and/or clotted Devonshire cream—if you can find any.
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