Murder with Honey Ham Biscuits

by A. L. Herbert

  “Cynthia slipped one or more of them in Sherry’s glass of champagne the night she was killed... to make sure Sherry would be asleep when she came in to shoot her.” I turn to Cynthia. “With your history of addiction, it would be hard to score any strong sedatives from a legit doctor, so you had to find an illegal source, which is half the reason you went to Brentwood Manors. I’m not sure what you got from Bruce—that is the name of your supplier, right? Apparently, he’s known to be dealing in virtually any drug known to man—meth, cocaine, Percocet, OxyContin, Rohypnol. But whatever you got from him, you used it to spike Sherry’s drink.”

  “She did pour and hand out the champagne that night,” Wavonne confirms. “I remember because I was annoyed that she didn’t fill my glass very high.”

  “It makes even more sense when you think back to Sherry, who I’m told was known to be a late night partier, being the first to leave Vera’s little send-off gathering. Her sister also said that most nights they generally talked for an hour or more. But the night of her death, Sherry cut the conversation short because she was so tired—she wasn’t tired, she was drugged with whatever Cynthia scored at Brentwood Manors.”

  “Even if she did drug Sherry, how does that explain how she was in two places at once?” Detective Hutchins inquires.

  “I’m glad you asked,” I respond. “That brings me to the second reason Cynthia went to Brentwood Manors. I got a little inside intel that Bruce was the go-to guy in that neighborhood for drugs, and that another fellow, by the name of Sam, a few doors down, was the go-to guy for weapons. And we have it on good authority that Cynthia went to see both of them.”

  “Why would Cynthia go to the weapons guy if she already had a gun?” Wavonne asks.

  “Because this Sam fellow did not just deal in guns. He dealt in all sorts of weapons and what I guess you’d call accessories. I had to think on this one hard, but last night it came to me when Wavonne shut off the TV, and I was enjoying the quiet. It occurred to me that, in addition to guns and knives and all sorts of ammunition, Sam may have also sold the one thing that made everything make sense.” I do another pause, because, well, let’s face it, they’re fun. “I’m quite certain that Sam sold, and Cynthia bought from him, a silencer.”

  “A silencer?” Vera asks.

  “Yes. Sometimes called a suppressor. It’s like a muzzle—it significantly reduces the noise a gun makes when it’s fired—perhaps so much so that it would sound like little more than a sneeze to someone on the other side of the wall in a neighboring room.” I turn to Trey. “You did say in passing that you thought you heard Sherry sneezing through the wall shortly before she was killed.” I refrain from mentioning the truth—that Trey heard the sneezing sounds on an illicit recording device because, one, I promised him I would not share that information with the police, and two, I’m sort of embarrassed that I didn’t insist on sharing it with the police immediately. If I had, unlike me and Trey, surely Detective Hutchins and his team would have been able to recognize the sounds of suppressed gunshots for what they actually were, and we could have wrapped all this up much sooner.

  “Um... yes,” Trey says. “I thought I heard her sneezing about five minutes before Sherry was shot, but you’re making it sound like . . . like she was actually being shot when I heard what I thought were sneezes?”

  “This is still not making any sense to me,” Detective Hutchins says.

  “Oh, it was a complicated scheme all right,” I reply. “And it took me a while to figure it out, but in addition to my quiet time last night, something else Wavonne did tipped me off to Cynthia’s exploits.”

  “Does this have anything to do with you dragging me out of bed at midnight to show you how to work the TV?” Wavonne asks, referring to me goading her out of bed after I talked with Jack last night.

  “I didn’t ask you to show me how to work the TV, Wavonne. I asked you to show me how you synced your phone to the TV like you did when you watched Netflix at the inn a few days ago. But, to answer your question, yes, you teaching me how to remotely control the television with your phone helped me figure this whole thing out.” I start walking around the room as I speak. “This is how I think it went down: Cynthia went to see Sherry shortly after we finished filming for the day. While in the room, she synced her phone to Sherry’s TV. At some point she unlocked the patio door. Then, while we were all gathered in the concierge lounge, she drugged Sherry.

  “Shortly thereafter, Cynthia returned to Sherry’s room via the unlocked patio entrance, found Sherry asleep on the bed, and shot her, using a suppressor to quiet the noise. Cynthia then quickly snuck back into her room via the patio, only to immediately leave it again through her other door and head down the hall to the concierge lounge. There, she sat down and got a glass of wine from the attendant. She took a casual sip from her stemware before she picked up her phone and began to remotely control the television in Sherry’s room.

  “With a few touches of her finger she raised the volume of the TV as high as it would go and blasted the sound of recorded gunshots. She’d been counting on the inn’s top-of-the-line Bose Surround system, and it didn’t disappoint. The fake gunshots sounded completely authentic... perhaps even louder than actual gunshots. This is when we all thought Sherry had been shot, when, in actuality, at this point she already had two bullets in her. There was so little time between when Sherry was really shot and when everyone thought she had been shot, it didn’t occur to anyone to question the timing. Cynthia executed her plan so quickly that any early time-of-death indicators, like body temperature or skin color, didn’t blatantly not coincide with the moment we were all led to believe Sherry was killed. Sherry was, in fact, dead before Cynthia raised that glass of vino to her lips.”

  “That is quite a work of fiction you’ve come up with,” Cynthia says.

  “I don’t think it’s fiction at all,” I reply. “In fact, I’m willing to bet anything that, when the detective here gets a warrant and checks your phone records, we’ll find out you linked your phone to Sherry’s TV and remotely controlled it just before the noise of bogus shots came from her room.” I’m using Wavonne’s bluffing strategy again. I actually have no idea if Detective Hutchins can get such a warrant or if this level of detail would even be available via phone records, but I figure Cynthia probably doesn’t know either.

  My words make Cynthia shudder, and there is a look of complete and utter guilt on her face.

  “I know you did it, Cynthia,” I say. “But honestly, I’m still not quite sure why you did it. You didn’t seem to care that Russell was having an affair with Sherry and, per Trudy, you would be very well taken care of if he divorced you. I know you enjoyed the privileges of being Mrs. Russell Mellinger but, as long as you were taken care of financially, I can’t imagine it was worth murder to stay married to Russell.”

  “Well taken care of?!” Cynthia both asks and exclaims at the same time. “We had an airtight prenup. Even if I could prove that he was cheating on me, if we divorced, I’d barely get a pittance.”

  “Trudy said you would get eighty thousand dollars a month,” Wavonne says.

  “Like I said,” Cynthia replies. “A pittance.”

  “On what planet is eighty thousand dollars a month a pittance?” I ask.

  “Do you have any idea how much it costs to look like this at sixty-two years old?” Cynthia questions, and I’m quite certain everyone in the room gasped more at the fact that this stunning woman before us is sixty-two years old than when I accused said woman of murder. “The dermatologists? The plastic surgeons? The beauticians and makeup artists? Do you have any idea how much it costs to charter a private jet? How much it costs to own and maintain seven homes? You can’t even rent a villa in the South of France for a summer for eighty thousand dollars. Eighty thousand dollars would not even cover my country club membership. My God, on eighty thousand dollars a month, I might have to... have to”—she can barely get the words out—“have to fly... fly commercial.”

  C
ynthia seems to be completely unraveling at this point. “That little bimbo thought she was going to take my place. I was all for her taking this”—she gestures toward Russell next to her—“off my hands a few nights a week, but if she thought she was going to take my place as his wife, she had another thing coming.”

  “Boy did she ever,” Wavonne says. “Two things. It was two bullets, wasn’t it?”

  A little side eye from me prompts Wavonne to shut it, and Cynthia continues.

  “I have put up with this”—Cynthia eyes Russell again and her absolute disgust with him shows in her face—“for thirty years to have everything I have and intend to have until my dying day. There was no way I was going to cede my houses and my clothes and my cars and most important, my money, to some Mary-come-lately. But that little Sherry outsmarted me. She led me and everyone to believe she was a simpleton, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this”—she looks at Russell and refers to him as “this” yet again—“it’s that he’ll sleep with anything with firm breasts and a nice pair of legs, but he’s only truly attracted to women with some smarts. I always made sure to choose his little playthings carefully.”

  “Choose his playthings?” Detective Hutchins asks.

  “Yes, I set my husband up with other women. Get over it,” Cynthia responds. “But only as distractions to give me a night off here and there. I was careful to not choose wife material. The stupider they were, the less chance of Russell having anything other than the most primal interest in them.” This is the first time tonight she has referred to her husband as “Russell” rather than “this.” “And Sherry gave us all the impression that she was the stupidest of the stupid. But it turns out, little Ms. Oops-I-Forgot-And-Used-All-The-Cheese was not so daft after all.”

  “So she did sabotage me?” Vera says.

  “Of course she did,” Cynthia replies. “That girl was scheming from day one. I just wish it had not taken me so long to figure that out. We were almost two weeks into filming... about the time she said something about Benjamin Franklin being the first president of the United States, that I began to wonder if anyone could really be as dim-witted as she was making herself out to be. Once I really gave it some thought I figured out how smart she actually was. But it wasn’t until I realized that she had manipulated Russell into giving her advance notice of the challenges that I knew she was trouble.”

  Trey sends an “I told you so” look my way.

  “We did an exotic seafood challenge last week. Each contestant was given a basket with a unique seafood item in it. We tasked the contestants with preparing espardenyes, gong gong, whelks... all sorts of oddities most people, even experienced chefs, had never heard of. Moreton Bay bugs, lobster-like things from Australia, were in Sherry’s basket. All the other contestants were near-clueless about what to do with the ingredients given to them and needed a lot of time to formulate a plan. But Sherry set right off preparing a rather complex Moreton Bay bug curry with mangoes. A few days earlier she was totally prepared with a recipe for a strawberry-almond cobbler when the gang was tasked with making sugar free desserts. She had clearly gotten Russell to tip her off, and if Russell was playing along, I’m sure he eventually figured out she was no dummy either. And that’s when I was done for—I can compete with youth and beauty—I can’t compete with youth, beauty, and brains.” Cynthia turns to Russell. “You fell for her, didn’t you? I have put up with you for thirty years and then you go and fall for the first hot young thang that isn’t dumb as a doornail.”

  From the way Russell is looking at her you can tell she pretty much has it right.

  “You killed her?” Russell asks, anger rising in his voice. “You killed my Sherry?”

  “Oh no,” Cynthia yells back at him. “You do not get to be mad at me! I’m the one that should be mad. I gave you the best years of my life, and you were ready to throw me out like yesterday’s garbage with an allowance not fit for a pauper. That’s right, I heard you on the phone with the divorce attorney last week, and that’s when I knew I had to do it. That little hussy was going to take everything away from me if I didn’t... if I didn’t kill her.”

  “I think you’ve pretty much taken everything away yourself, Ms. Mellinger,” Detective Hutchins says, walking toward her. “I’m sure you know that you’re going to have to come with me.”

  Cynthia doesn’t resist when he reaches for her hands and cuffs one and then the other. He gives her the usual spiel about her right to remain silent and her right to an attorney before grasping her elbow and leading her toward the exit.

  “I’m sorry, Vera,” Cynthia says on her way out. Detective Hutchins allows her to stop as she continues talking. “I never meant for you to be implicated, but when things started to turn in your direction it was a convenient way to throw them off my trail.” She swings her head around to look at Russell. “It should be you in handcuffs. If you had just gone to smoke your stupid cigar like you do every other night instead of meeting with that contractor in here, you’d be the one being hauled off to the police station, and I’d still have your name, and your money, and your properties—I’d have it all, without having to put up with you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Russell asks, now looking more confused than angry.

  “Why do you think I asked you to put the gun in the desk before we went to the museum? I could have just as easily done it myself, but then it wouldn’t have had your prints on it. If you had just been off smoking your cigar around this secluded property with no cameras and no witnesses when I shot Sherry, like you were supposed to be, you’d be the man whose prints were on the gun that killed her and you would not have had an alibi. Combine all that with a love affair gone bad, and I suspect you would have had a very hard time proving your innocence.”

  Russell appears to be completely speechless, as if he’s too shocked by what he just heard to say anything.

  “Let’s go,” Detective Hutchins says, and gives Cynthia a little tug.

  The rest of us hang back and watch as he takes her outside and out of sight. We remain quiet while exchanging glances. Just when I think no one has any words to share, Wavonne pipes up, “This isn’t going to affect me and Halia being on TV, is it?”

  Epilogue

  “I finally figured it out. Last night. When I was switching out the box of baking soda in the refrigerator,” I say to Momma and Wavonne as the three of us try to wrap up dessert preparations for the day. “Buttermilk!”

  “Buttermilk?”

  “That’s why Sherry’s biscuits rose, and Vera’s waffle didn’t.” I wait for one of them to ask me to elaborate, but both of them seem far more interested in the cakes Momma is popping out of their pans than my cultured milk revelation. “They both used the expired baking powder, but Sherry’s biscuits came out nice and light while Vera’s waffle was a mess. Remember?” I ask Wavonne.

  “I haven’t stayed up nights thinkin’ about it.” Wavonne says this with a “because I, unlike you, have a life” sort of inflection. “But, yeah, I remember. Fluffy biscuits.” She pats me on the behind and then looks at my bustline. “Flat waffles. But what’s buttermilk . . . and your pear-shaped figure have to do with anything?”

  I let Momma finish laughing at Wavonne’s little quip before I continue.

  “Way back when, Grandmommy taught me that you could substitute baking soda for baking powder as long as you added something sour or acidic with it. Sherry must have used both baking powder and baking soda in her recipe—the recipe I went over with her certainly called for both. Her adding buttermilk to the mix was enough to activate the soda and aerate the biscuits even if the baking powder was bad.”

  “Makes sense,” Momma says while filling a pastry bag. “I never trust dates on anything. I always check my baking powder... put a little in a spoon, pour some water over it, and make sure it fizzes. If it doesn’t bubble, I throw it out regardless of the expiration date on the package.”

  “I guess that’s why these look so good,” I re
ply, watching her work her dessert-making magic. She’s piping a layer of vanilla custard over freshly baked sponge cake, and, now, Wavonne and I will go behind her, arranging a mix of fresh berries over the custard. Momma will then add a second layer of cake, pipe on another coat of custard, and Wavonne and I will do our thing with the berries a second time.

  “Berries are always better in the summer,” Momma says, keeping an eye on Wavonne and me as we top the cakes.

  “They do seem to be brighter or sweeter or something,” I agree as I try to delicately arrange some strawberries on one of the cakes. When I reach for some blueberries, one of my servers steps into the kitchen.

  “Halia. There’s a Vera Ward here to see you.”

  “Tell her to come on back.”

  A few seconds later Vera comes through the kitchen door, and I walk over and give her a hug.

  “Hey, girl,” Wavonne says.

  “Hey, Wavonne.”

  “Momma,” I say. “This is Vera. She was one of the contestants on Elite Chef.” I turn to Vera. “And this is my mother, Celia Watkins.”

  “You’re the one who got the raw deal with the cheese and the baking powder?” Momma asks.

  “Yes. That would be me. But it all worked out.... Well, not for Sherry, of course.”

  “Hate to break it to you,” Wavonne says. “But it didn’t exactly work out for you either. Sherry screwed you out of a possible win, and you ended up a murder suspect.”

  “True,” Vera says. “But the tide has turned.”

  “Really?” I ask. “How so?”

  “Russell called a meeting with me and Trey at the inn, which is finally open... like really open. I figured he was going to talk to us about taping a final challenge and that I might still have a chance at winning. It’s been two months since Cynthia was arrested, so I figured he was ready to start moving on without her.”

  “So, what happened? Is there going to be a final cook-off between you and Trey?”