Lexy felt her shoulders relax. Creating new recipes was a key to success for her bakery business and she loved trying them out on her grandmother, Nans, and the other ladies because they always provided an honest critique.
“Just the right scheetmess,” Ruth said, slurring the last word, before reaching into her mouth and pushing down on her bottom teeth. She glanced around the table, then shrugged. “Sorry, I have new dentures and they keep slipping out.”
Lexy looked around Nans’s condo while she chewed her biscotti. It was a good size for an “independent living” condo in a retirement complex. Nans had moved here a year ago when she stopped driving so she could be closer to her friends and “the action”. The facility provided a variety of activities and entertainment and had a decent dining room where the residents could get meals if they didn’t feel like cooking.
The large complex had living quarters for senior citizens in various different situations, such as the assisted living facility and the nursing care section. Nans and the other ladies were quite independent and all had their own condos.
They were seated around Nans’s dining room table, situated in between her kitchen and living room, with a view of the entire living area. The morning sun streamed in through the sliding glass door at the other end of the room. Lexy could see water dripping from the snow melting on the roof and hoped it meant winter would soon be releasing its cold grip on the area.
Lexy’s eyes landed on the empty chair across from her.
“Where’s Ida?” she asked, her brows wrinkling together. The four women were usually always together and Lexy found it odd that Ida wasn’t there this morning.
“Oh, she’ll be right along. She had an errand to run,” Nans said, then looking at the plate of biscotti she added, “we’ll save her a couple of biscotti. I’m sure she’ll love them.”
Lexy nodded and took another dainty bite. Normally she would have devoured most of the biscotti by now, but she’d noticed her jeans were fitting a little tight and figured it might be wise to cut down on the eating.
“Lets get down to business and talk about the Bertram Glumm murder,” Nans said.
Lexy rolled her eyes. Nans, Ruth, Ida and Helen were amateur detectives. Though they were all well past the age of seventy, they still kept active and had been successful in solving many cases. They even had a name for themselves — The Ladies Detective Club. The problem was, they saw murder everywhere.
“You don’t know he was murdered,” Lexy said.
Nans peered at Lexy over the top of her glasses. “Of course he was dear. I think the girls know a murder when they see one.”
Lexy felt a pang of guilt. Nans and the other ladies had been instrumental in helping her solve a few murders, including a couple where Lexy was the main suspect. She had just returned from a national bakery contest in Las Vegas with Nans, where she had managed to win second-prize despite having been one of the suspects in the murder of one of the judges in the contest.
The Ladies Detective Club had helped her solve the case by using old fashioned detective work and communicating on their iPads. Lexy owed it to them to at least listen.
“OK, what have you got?” Lexy grabbed another biscotti. Had she eaten a whole one already?
Ruth pulled out her iPad, fingers at the ready apparently, to record their conversation.
“From what I know, Bertram went into nursing care when we were in Vegas, and passed away suspiciously the day before we came home,” Nans said.
“That’s right. Bertram was only seventy-one. He was healthy as a horse. In fact, he lived just two doors down from me,” Helen said, her eyes wide.
Lexy wrinkled her brow. “If he was healthy as a horse, what was he doing in the nursing care section? And why aren’t the police looking into his death?”
Ruth’s lips pressed together. “The police are just passing it off as another old person dying. They didn’t even do an autopsy!”
“Yeah, you know how they can be,” Nans said, then looking at Lexy, “not your Jack, of course. He’d listen to us…or to you.” She raised her eyebrows.
Lexy felt her cheeks grow warm at the mention of Jack. She’d been dating Detective Jack Perillo for almost a year now and, while he might listen to her about other things, he had made it clear that he took a dim view of her investigating murders. She felt her stomach clench, realizing that she’d be in hot water with him if he knew what they were discussing.
“Anyway,” Nans continued, “Bertram slipped on the ice and broke his leg. He lives alone and couldn’t manage on his own. He was in immense pain, so they put him in the nursing section ’til he could care for himself. They had only planned to keep him there for a week.”
Lexy narrowed her eyes in thought. Nans could be right—she usually was.
“But why would someone want to kill him?” Lexy asked stating the obvious question.
Before anyone could answer, the door to Nans’s condo flew open and Ida tumbled inside.
“Ladies, grab your coats. There’s been another murder!”
2
The sound of chairs being scraped back filled the room as the four women scrambled to get up from the table.
“Hurry, before they clean out the room! We’ll take the quick route across the courtyard.” Ida motioned to them from the doorway.
“Helen, take your special glasses.” Nans gestured to the table beside the door where a pair of thick, black eyeglasses sat.
“Special glasses?” Lexy echoed.
“We’ll explain later when there’s time,” Nans said, tossing each of them their jackets from the coat rack beside the door.
They ran out behind Ida following her down the stairs to the door that led across the small courtyard, and into the nursing care section.
The nursing care section resembled a small hospital, complete with a central desk and several small rooms with hospital beds. Ida hustled down the wide hall; the women following like ducklings after a mother duck.
Ida stopped in front of one of the rooms, cast a look down the hallway and slid inside. Lexy and the others followed.
The room looked much like any other hospital room … except for the dead body in the bed.
“It’s Mavis Sanders!” Nans gasped, covering her mouth with her hands.
Lexy looked at the woman in the bed. White hair, clusters of wrinkles. She looked peaceful. Could she have been murdered? Lexy felt an icy finger trace its way up her spine. She quickly turned away from the bed to inspect the rest of the room.
Nothing looked out of place. Prescription bottles sat on the bedside table. The sheets were pulled up neatly. The pillows were placed under her head. It looked as if she had died peacefully in her sleep, which made Lexy wonder—just how was she murdered?
On the other side of the room, she could see Helen tilting her head at weird angles and fiddling with her glasses.
“Hurry upfff…” Ruth’s dentures flew out of her mouth, clattering onto the floor and sliding under the bed.
“Crapff,” she said, bending from the waist and peering under the bed.
“I’ll get them.” Lexy got down on her hands and knees, her butt up in the air and reached under the bed. The floor was squeaky clean. Remembering they mopped the floors in this section twice a day, she felt grateful she wouldn’t get any dirt on her off-white pants.
Tilting her head sideways to get a better view, she saw the dentures had slid all the way towards the head of the bed. She scooched further under. Feeling a little creeped out about flailing around under the bed of a dead woman, she quickly swept her hand from side to side.
Her fingers encountered something small and round. Not the dentures, but she held onto it anyway. Another long sweep and her fingers hit the dentures. Grabbing on to them, she slid her front out from under the bed. On her hands and knees like an inchworm, she was just about stand up when a grating voice rasped loudly from the doorway.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing!”
Lexy swiveled her head towards the voice. Standing in the doorway was Nurse Bettina Rothschild, hands on hips, with a face puckered like she’d just devoured a sour lemon. Lexy’s stomach felt like lead and her heart raced.
“We were just paying our respects,” Nans said, head slightly bowed.
Rothschild’s scowl deepened as she directed her glare at Lexy. “What do you have there?”
“Oh, this? Ruth’s dentures slipped out. I was just retrieving them for her." Lexy held the dentures up while hiding the other object behind them in her hand.
Lexy tried to keep her hand from shaking as Rothschild took two steps towards her to get a better look.
“You’re not supposed to take anything from the room. Which one of you is Ruth?” She glared at each of them in turn.
“Herethh.” Ruth raised her hand, then opened her mouth to show the missing teeth. “Thsee.”
Rothschild bent her large frame slightly to peer into Ruth’s mouth. She looked around at the women, her eyebrows mashed together. A commotion out in the hallway stole her attention. She glanced at the door, then turned back to Lexy and Ruth.
“Fine, take the dentures and go. I don’t want to see you ladies messing around in my hospital again!” Her rubber-soled nurse shoes let out a loud squeak as she turned and rushed off towards the hall.
Lexy handed the dentures to Ruth, then mashed her index finger into her right eye in an attempt to control her nervous eye-tic.
“You still have that eye problem?” Helen asked Lexy as they started to head towards the door.
Lexy turned to look at Helen out of her good eye and nodded.
“You know I can fix that with hypnosis.”
“Yes…” Lexy’s answer was cut off when she walked into Nans, who had stopped abruptly just short of the doorway.
Looking around her grandmother, she could see the exit was blocked by a steel gurney accompanied by two large men in McGreevy Funeral Home tee-shirts. Lexy recognized one of the men as Barry McGreevy, who she’d gone to high school with.
Barry squinted at her. “Lexy Baker?”
“Hi Barry.” Lexy gave him a half smile. “You’re taking her straight to McGreevy’s?”
“Yep, natural causes. No need to bring ‘em to the hospital.”
Lexy exchanged glances with the other four women.
“So, you’re sure she died naturally?”
“That’s what the report says.” Barry nodded at a clipboard hanging from the end of the gurney.
“Are you a relative?” He asked.
“No, just a friend.” Lexy felt a pang at the lie and crossed her fingers behind her back.
“Oh, well I’m sorry for your loss,” Barry said, then turned to the bed. “Guess I better get to work.”
Lexy looked away as Barry pushed the gurney next to the bed in preparation for transferring the body onto it.
The women started to leave but their exit was blocked again, this time by Nurse Rothschild and one of the aids.
Rothschild scoured at them, then pointed at the door, “Get!”
Nans shuffled towards the door. The others fell in line. As they filed out, Lexy could hear Rothschild barking orders to the aid, her voice cold and unfeeling.
“Make sure you flush any medications labelled for this patient. And get the sheets and pillowcases to laundry right away … we need to get this room ready for the next one A.S.A.P!”
3
“I don’t know about you guys, but that nurse scared the bejesus out of me!” Lexy said, perching on the arm of Nans’s overstuffed sofa facing the other ladies in the dining room.
Ida rolled her eyes. “She’s not known for her bedside manner.”
“Kind of strange, a nurse being so cold and mean. You’d think she would have picked a different profession.”
Helen held up the eyeglasses she’d been wearing. “Lets get these pictures uploaded.”
“Pictures? What’s with those glasses, anyway?” Lexy asked remembering how Nans had instructed Helen to make sure she brought them to the room.
“These are spy camera glasses!” Nans said proudly. “They can take pictures or video and no one would even know.”
“We bought them on the Internet.” Ruth added.
Lexy raised her eyebrows and watched while Nans took them over to her computer desk, then opened a tiny door on the arm of the glasses. She sat down at the desk. Fishing in a drawer, she produced a USB cable which she connected from the glasses to the computer.
The women clustered around the computer desk as the pictures uploaded automatically, creating a gallery on the screen.
“Does anyone see anything out of place?” Nans asked.
Lexy studied the pictures, tilting her head at different angles. Nothing stuck out to her as out of the ordinary.
“No.”
“Nope.”
“Not me.”
“Let’s watch the video.”
The very bottom of the screen showed a video file. Nans double-clicked on it. A large video filled the screen. Everyone laughed as Ruth’s dentures shot out onto the floor. The video zoomed in on Lexy’s butt sticking out from under the bed as she fished to retrieve the dentures and they laughed even harder, causing Lexy’s cheeks to burn.
“If you guys are done laughing at me now, I did find something interesting under the bed.”
Four gray heads turned to look at her with four sets of eyebrows raised up to their hairlines.
She pulled the object she’d found under the bed out of her pocket and held it up.
Ida squinted at it. “What is that?”
“It’s a black pearl stud earring. I found it under the bed when I was looking for the dentures.”
“That could be from anyone, though,” Ruth chimed in.
“True, but when I was on the floor, I noticed how clean it was. They mop those floors twice a day, don’t they?”
The ladies nodded.
“So the earring must have fallen sometime between the last mopping and when we got there.”
“Which means, it’s highly likely the earring belongs to the murderer!” Helen said.
“Or it could have just fallen off someone’s ear. It’s not a definitive clue,” Nans lectured.
“Did anyone notice if Nurse Rothschild was missing an earring?” Lexy joked, “She seems like a likely murderer to me.”
The other women laughed, but Lexy was half serious.
“We don’t even know that Mavis was murdered. Barry said she died from natural causes. She did look pretty old,” Lexy said.
“Mavis? She was fit as a fiddle. Why, just last month we went on a golfing trip to Florida and she out-golfed everyone there. Even people in their sixties!” Ruth pointed out.
Lexy chewed on the inside of her bottom lip. It did seem coincidental that two reportedly healthy people had died in the past week.
“Does anyone know why she was there?”
Ruth tapped her lip thoughtfully. “When we were on the golfing trip she was complaining about elbow trouble. Kind of like tennis elbow, but from golfing, I guess. I think she mentioned she might be going in for an operation. She could have been there just to recover, like Bertram was. She also lived alone and probably couldn’t manage by herself until she was steady on her feet.”
Nans turned back to study the pictures on the computer screen. “You know, these pillows under her head look a little strange. Staged, almost. I bet the killer suffocated her with the pillows.”
Ida and Ruth gasped.
“With no autopsy, we’ll never know. But the nurses and doctors there must have thought she died from natural causes or they would have sent the body to the coroner instead of straight to the funeral home,” Lexy said.
Nans narrowed her eyes. “They might have just assumed it was natural causes … or they might be trying to cover something up.”
“Do you think the police will believe us now?” Ruth asked.
“I don’t know. Jack didn’t seem to think there was any foul
play in Bertram’s death, but I can talk to him tonight. Maybe in light of this new death, he’ll start to take notice,” Lexy said.
“Great. I know you have certain persuasive powers with him.” Nans winked at Lexy, causing the other women to laugh. Lexy felt her cheeks grow warm again.
“If we could only figure out why someone killed them, we’d have a much better chance of convincing him.”
Nans pressed her lips together in a thin line. “That’s true. We need to find the motive.” She spun around to face the other women. “Girls, I fear we may all be in danger. The killer has struck twice this week already. If the police aren’t interested in helping us, we’ll just have to speed up our efforts to figure out who it is --before they have a chance to kill again.”
4
Lexy opened the back door to The Cup and Cake. Taking a deep breath she let the intoxicating aroma of sugar and butter permeate her senses. She never tired of that smell. Nor did she ever tire of being there. It had been her lifelong dream to open a bakery and she’d been able to fulfill that over a year ago.
“Is that you Lex?”
Cassie’s voice rang out from the kitchen. Lexy poked her head in. Cassie, Lexy’s assistant and best friend, was rolling out pie dough, her face flushed. Flour dotted her apron and black jeans. Her pink-tipped spiked hair bobbed up and down like a bird as she worked the dough.
“Hi.”
“Hey, how did they like the recipe?”
“What? Oh, the biscotti recipe. They loved it.” Lexy had almost forgotten the reason she had gone to Nans’s that morning.
Cassie beamed a smile at her. Which was unusual considering she didn’t smile often. Lexy noticed Cassie was really working the dough, making exaggerated movements with her hands. What was up with that?
Ignoring Cassie’s odd behavior, she blurted out, “Something else happened while I was there.”
Cassie looked up from her dough rolling, eyebrows raised.
Lexy Baker Cozy Mystery Series Boxed Set Vol 1 (Books 1 - 4) (Lexy Baker Cozy Mysteries Boxed Sets) Page 26
