A Cup of Death

by K. J. Emrick

  “Hold on Kyle, how do you know that Jack was leaving for the station?”

  “He told me,” Kyle said, settling onto the bed next to her. “Or rather, he said the words so I could hear them. You should have seen him, Miranda, he was so cute just walking around the kitchen and calling to me. Had no idea I was right behind him. ‘Kyle,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m going to the station. Tell Miranda where I am,’ and so on and so on. He was just adorable.”

  “I’m so glad that you weren’t still on the dating circuit when I met Jack,” she said to him. “I’d hate to have to fight you for him.”

  “You’d win, Miranda,” Kyle promised. “You’re cuter. It’s that flame color in your hair. Guys go crazy for the redheads.”

  “Don’t you know it. Well. I guess we’ll just have to wait for Jack to come back. I suppose he went there to get the coffee cup sent to the lab.”

  She walked out of the bedroom, and down the hallway to the living room, and stopped. She turned to the front door, and a feeling came over her that was hard to describe in words.

  There was someone coming. Her psychic senses were telling her that someone was about to knock on the door.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Miranda smiled ruefully. If only her abilities worked that way when it came to the lottery.

  “Kyle, would you mind?”

  “Hmm?” he asked. “Oh. Sure. Just hold on a tick.”

  He floated halfway through the wall next to the door to check on who was out there and then pulled himself back inside. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said, “but it’s Hannah. That brunette from the diner last night.”

  Well. That was unexpected. “Is she alone?”

  “Yes, of course. Don’t you think I would have mentioned if she wasn’t alone?”

  Miranda gave him a skeptical look but left it at that. She opened the door, and sure enough she found Hannah Smith standing there. The permanent scowl on her face turned to surprise when she saw Miranda. It looked like she’d been awake all night, with her shirt all rumpled and strands of her graying hair falling across her face.

  “Uh, hello Miss Wylder. Yes, I remember you from last night. I take it you remember me, too?”

  “Yes, Hannah, I do.” Miranda leaned against the doorframe, unsure if she should let this woman into Jack’s house or not. It was more than just being at someone else’s place. This woman was part of a group of people who were involved in murder and mystery. Was Hannah part of it too? “Um. Can I help you?”

  “I was expecting to find Detective Travis here. I wanted to speak to him.”

  “Oh? How did you find his house?”

  “This is Moonlight Bay,” she said mockingly. “It’s not exactly a bustling metropolis here. It’s barely big enough to call a town. All I had to do was put ‘Jack Travis’ into Google.”

  “Ah, I see.” Miranda thought it was strange how there could be some people in life who you just knew you would never, ever be friends with. She got that impression from Hannah Smith. In spades. “So, tell me. What did you want to talk to Jack about?”

  “It’s something personal, I’m afraid.” She sniffed haughtily. “I don’t want to talk about it with just anyone.”

  “Oh, really?” Miranda snapped. “Were you going to ask him if we know where Braydon Wise is?”

  That hit home. Miranda had guessed correctly. She’d been right about their lovey-dovey act being just that. An act. Braydon was having an affair with Janice Peniston, a married woman, but he was cheating on Hannah Smith to do it. He didn’t go back to her last night.

  The woman pulled in a breath, debating with herself. “One of our friends died yesterday, Miss Wylder. He was very close to us. I just want to find out who killed him.”

  “And, find out where Braydon is?” Miranda couldn’t help herself from twisting the knife a little. She and Jack were starting to put this mystery together, but there were still parts missing.

  They hadn’t yet worked out what part Hannah played in all of this. “My relationship with Braydon is none of your business,” she said to Miranda. “I’ll just wait to talk to Detective Travis, I think.”

  Kyle snorted. “If he wants to talk to you. Jack Travis is a busy man.”

  He certainly was, Miranda agreed silently. Right now, hopefully, he was interviewing Josh Bates.

  Before Hannah could just leave, Miranda tried to squeeze her for a little more information. “And how well did you know Leon Peniston? You said he was your friend.”

  She blinked rapidly, realizing the corner she’d put herself in. “Well, I didn’t know Leon personally. It wasn’t like I hung out with him a lot or anything.”

  “But you just said you were friends.”

  “You asked me how well I knew him and I told you that I did not know Leon Peniston personally.” She flipped a hand through the air, dismissing the whole issue. “That’s all. Now. If you’ll excuse me.”

  Miranda let her walk away this time. She had no reason to stop her and she couldn’t think of any question that would nail her to the spot. Oh, she had questions, but she had a feeling they would all be as artfully dodged as that last one had been.

  So she closed the door when Hannah got to her car and drove off. She locked it, too, and was glad that Jack had locked it for her when he left. If that had been Braydon Wise, Miranda had the feeling that her life might have been in danger. It was an odd sort of thought, considering Braydon had been nothing but sickly sweet to her and Jack last night, but she couldn’t shake it. Someone had killed Leon Peniston to keep him from talking to her, and he’d died on her doorstep.

  Now that she and Jack had gotten closer to figuring out what was really going on, the killer might not hesitate to kill her as well.

  She went to Jack’s kitchen, making herself a cup of tea as Kyle floated along behind her. In her experience, secrets were a relative thing. A secret that one person thought was devastating might not mean anything to someone else. A teenager who found themselves liking people of the same gender might feel the need to hide their sexuality for fear of being disowned by family and friends, only to find out their friends already knew and their parents were nothing but supportive.

  By the same logic, some people killed to keep secrets that were only going to come out anyway.

  “What do you think about all of that?” she finally asked Kyle. She was sitting down now, and her tea was half gone, and her brain had worked at the sudden visit from Hannah Smith from every angle and gotten nowhere. “You’ve been pretty quiet for the last twenty minutes.”

  “I was letting you think,” he said to her with a smile. “I could see the smoke coming out of your ears.”

  “Oh, ha ha. I’m serious. I got the impression that Hannah was coming here to ask if Jack knew where Braydon was.”

  “Right. You said as much to her. She kind of avoided answering you.”

  “You noticed that too, right?” She took another sip of her tea. “But I have to wonder why she came to Jack to ask?”

  “Uh,” he said, “because he’s a police officer?”

  “Well, of course he’s a police officer, but if she wanted to ask a police officer shouldn’t she have just gone to the police station? I mean, she looked him up on the internet to find his house, for the love of God.”

  “I guess that’s true. Maybe she was hoping to keep the fact Braydon didn’t come home to her a secret?”

  “She’s a puzzle wrapped in a bundle of crazy, to be sure,” Miranda mused. “At least some other things are making sense. At this point it seems obvious that Janice is the one who broke into my house…”

  “What?” he gasped. “When did you come up with that?”

  She went over what she had realized this morning, when she woke up in Jack’s bed, and Kyle had snuck in on her.

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” he grumped, folding his arms over his chest. “I never sneak.”

  “Yes, you do, you just need to know when to do it, and when not to.”

&nb
sp; “Hmph.”

  “Anyway, Janice broke into Ragged Rest. Or, possibly she did it with an accomplice. Hannah, or Braydon even.”

  “Or Leon Peniston,” Kyle pointed out. “Janice and Leon were married, after all. They might have done it together. Ooh! That might be what he wanted to confess to you.”

  “Do you think? Would he come all that way, leaving his car in another location and walking up to Ragged Rest, just to confess he broke into my home?”

  “Possibly,” Kyle shrugged. “If he thought his wife would be mad at him for doing it, sure.”

  “So does that mean Janice is Leon’s killer? And how does this all relate to my Aunt Connie’s disappearance?”

  “Hmm. Maybe take the two things separately,” he suggested, sounding just like Jack for a moment. “Let’s apply the evidence only to Leon Peniston’s death for now.”

  “Wow, Kyle. Every once in a while, you actually do a good job as spirit guide.”

  He gave her a pained look. “Of course I do. You don’t think they’d send me back to watch over you if I didn’t know what I was doing, do you?”

  “Honestly? Sometimes I get the impression that you broke out of that next place and kind of found your way back here by accident.”

  He laughed at that, but Miranda couldn’t help but notice how thin it sounded, even in his ghostly tenor.

  “I’m sorry, Kyle, I didn’t mean to tease you. Anyway. We need to find Janice and confront her about breaking into Ragged Rest before she gets away. She said last night that she was going to leave today. I don’t want her to leave Moonlight Bay because then it will take days for the police to catch up to her. Days in which she can build some sort of alibi.”

  “Sounds good,” Kyle agreed, floating up almost to the ceiling. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  “Go? Go where? Go how?” she looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Jack left. He took the car to go to the police station.”

  “Ah, but you forget,” he said dramatically, “he took his car to the police station. Remember? You guys came back from the trip in a rental van, Jack drove Jean-Paul and Sapphire home, he came back to Ragged Rest with you and that was when you found the break in. He’s had that van ever since.”

  “So?” she asked, confused.

  He rolled his eyes like it should have been obvious. “So, if he took his car to the station, the van is still…”

  “In the driveway!” she almost shouted, finally catching on. “You’re right. Okay. Let’s go.”

  “See?” Kyle asked her. “You need your spirit guide.”

  “Yes, Kyle, I do.”

  She grabbed her purse and threw her shoes on and was out the door in two minutes. She only made it through the door and down the front steps before she saw Braydon Wise getting out of a car parked on the street.

  He smiled at Miranda and started walking across the brown grass of the lawn toward her. The heat had been terrible in the last few weeks, turning everything dry and dead, but in this moment, Miranda felt a wave of cold rippling through her.

  Earlier, she’d been thinking that if she ever saw Braydon Wise again, he was going to kill her. Her psychic senses had told her so.

  They were telling her the same thing now.

  “Miranda?” Kyle asked her. “He’s coming this way. What do you want to do?”

  The answer to that came to her easily. What she wanted to do was go back in time about an hour and keep herself from ever getting out of bed this morning.

  Instead, she settled for bolting back inside and slamming the door shut.

  Chapter 8

  “I have to call Jack,” she said, not really knowing why she said it out loud. She dropped the purse back on the kitchen table and pulled out her mobile. Her mind tried to supply the number to the police station, but she was so frazzled that it wouldn’t come, and she had to open up her contacts list to find it before she could even start to dial the number and then—

  The knock on the door was loud and Miranda dropped her phone again in her fright. It bounced and clattered underneath the table.

  “Seriously?” Kyle said. “Is this really the time to develop a case of butter fingers?”

  “Just shut up!” she hissed. “I need you to go check on Braydon for me and tell me what he’s doing.”

  The front door crashed and cracked, the tell-tale sounds of someone breaking in.

  “He’s coming in,” Kyle informed her dutifully. “That’s what he’s doing.”

  Yes, he certainly was. Braydon Wise was coming through the locked door of a police officer’s home like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like there was no one who would stop him.

  Like he could do anything he wanted.

  The loud, sickening crack of wood breaking announced to her that Braydon had broken in.

  Miranda took a step back, and then another. Jack’s house wasn’t big. There weren’t many places to hide. Thankfully the kitchen wasn’t right at the front of the house but she didn’t think she could make it to the back door and get out in time. She could already hear Braydon’s footsteps in the hallway that led to the kitchen from the front door.

  “Kyle,” she whispered, “I need you to get my phone. Get it and bring it to me.”

  “Uh, Miranda? I’m a ghost. Kind of hard for me to pick anything up.”

  “You do it with pencils!”

  “A mobile phone’s a lot heavier than a pencil…”

  “Just do it!”

  She was already heading for the side door. The one that went to a short hall that went down past a laundry room and then to the cellar stairs. If she could get down there, and hide, then she wouldn’t have to worry about—

  “Miranda Wylder,” she heard Braydon calling to her. He was stepping very purposefully through the house. She could hear his footsteps. “I know you’re in here. I was watching Hannah this morning. I followed her here.”

  She took another few steps backward. If she was going to get away, Miranda knew she needed to go now. Run, she told herself. Run.

  Too late.

  He stepped around the corner of the entryway to the kitchen, with a big smile on his face. “There you are. I have to say, you’re a hard woman to find. I went to that estate of yours this morning. Your Ragged Rest is an impressive place. Kind of spooky when it’s empty.”

  Actually, Miranda was feeling rather spooked right here. “You can’t be here,” she said. It sounded weak and stupid, even to her. “This house belongs to Detective Jack Travis. He’s not going to be happy that you broke his door.”

  “You know, you’re a lot like your aunt,” he said to her, shaking a finger in the air as he paced, back and forth, across the kitchen. “Yes, Ma’am. You and Constance Cleary are a lot alike. I knew it just as soon as I saw you in that diner. Now I find you talking to Hannah this morning. Think you’re going to find out the goods on me, is that it? You just can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”

  “My aunt?” Miranda echoed, playing for time. “You knew my aunt?”

  “Constance Cleary,” he said again, twisting the name on his lips. “She was always more trouble than she was worth.”

  Miranda stared at him now. What was he talking about?

  “Careful, Miranda,” Kyle cautioned. “He sounds like he’s on the warpath!”

  Kyle was under the table, pushing at her mobile. It moved across the floor centimeters at a time. She should have just dived for it herself, Miranda thought, but she didn’t want to get stuck under there and give this man more of an advantage than he already had.

  The phone scraped out another centimeter. And another. She knew he was doing his best, but at this rate it would be tomorrow before the phone made it to her.

  What was Braydon talking about when he said her aunt was trouble? She and Jack already suspected he had something to do with Leon Peniston’s death, and with Connie’s disappearance also. It had become plain from the scene at the diner last night that he and Josh Bates were associates. Bates had said Braydon was in
volved.

  Here was her proof.

  Even without her psychic senses, Miranda could see how much danger she was in. Braydon Wise was telling her things he didn’t need to. As far as Miranda was concerned, that could mean only one thing.

  He did not expect her to live to tell anyone.

  “I notice you didn’t say anything about this last night,” she said, still moving back, still stalling for time.

  “Of course not,” he said, with an annoying little chuckle. “Last night that boyfriend of yours was there, and he had a gun. I tend not to open up like this to men with guns. Then again you aren’t armed, and you’re alone, aren’t you?”

  “She’s not alone, she’s got me!” Kyle shouted at him. Her mobile slid a little further out from under the table and stopped again. “I’m coming, Miranda!”

  Somehow, that didn’t make her feel any better.

  If she could get away from Braydon, hide or run or find some way to defend herself, just until Jack got home… maybe then she would find some way to stay alive.

  “Um,” she said, “you knew my aunt?”

  She took a step back. He followed her with a step of his own.

  “Don’t be coy, Miss Wylder. You’re smarter than that and so am I. You know that I knew Connie. I know what you’ve been up to all this time. Ever since Josh Bates betrayed me by approaching you, you’ve been piecing things together. You nearly had me last night and if I hadn’t gotten that fool Janice Peniston to shut up, she would have talked us both into a jail cell.”

  Her phone slid into the toe of her shoe. Well, well, well.

  Kyle was there now, standing beside her, beaming like he’d just moved Uluru across the Outback. “Now, for my next trick, I’ll make this bloke disappear.”

  Miranda wasn’t going to hold her breath to see that happen. Obviously, Braydon thought she knew a lot more about his activities than she did. If she could get him talking, and maybe even confessing to something, and still live through this…

  Well, that would pretty much be just another day in Moonlight Bay, now wouldn’t it?