Cherry Chocolate Murder

by Abby Byne

  “No, no—“ Nick trailed off as he finally managed to get the register open. “I—Uh—got to get something from my car.”

  He hurried out to the street through the front door, banging into the door frame as he went.

  Normally, Bitsie would have laughed, but today she wasn’t feeling amused. It was very unlike Nick to be clumsy. What was wrong with him, anyway?

  She waited another five minutes for Nick to return, and, when he did, he seemed much more composed.

  “You need anything before I head out?” she asked him. Normally, he would have chatted a bit, inquired about her plans for the afternoon, or told some corny joke, but not today.

  Nick just said, no, he didn’t need anything and wished her a pleasant evening.

  Bitsie stopped at the convenience store down the street and bought a little red notebook and a package of blue retractable ink pens for Roscoe. Then she headed for Shady Grove.

  Normally, Bitsie parked in front of the facility, but today she drove around back to the service entrance where the dumpster was. She hoped no one would catch her at it, but she intended to do a little dumpster diving. She put on a pair of gloves, stacked up few abandoned milk crates she’d found lying around, and hoisted herself up on them so she could survey the contents of the dumpster.

  It took her nearly forty-five minutes to find anything of interest. The bags from the kitchen were obvious, and she skipped those. The rest she opened one-by-one. It was tedious work, and she didn’t even know what she was looking for, or if she’d know when she’d found it, but she had a suspicion that a certain someone had been discarding evidence related to the poisoning, and they’d done it in the past twenty-four hours. The most likely place to find that discarded evidence, Bitsie had decided, was in a trash-bag inside the dumpster.

  She concentrated on the small bags, the kind used in the trashcans in the resident’s private rooms. She’d opened eighteen trash-bags before she found the one she was looking for.

  “Bingo!” she whispered. She carefully retied the bag without removing any of the contents and climbed gingerly down off of the stack of milk crates. She was almost certain that no one had seen her, and she quickly stashed the trash-bag in her trunk before anyone did. Then she drove around to the front and parked in her usual place.

  Roscoe was pleased with the notebook and pens.

  “I’ll call you when I have a couple of days’ worth of data,” he said. “I think you don’t need too many days to give you an accurate picture of who sits where around here. We’re all creatures of habit, not that we have much scope for variety even if we wanted it.”

  Chapter Nine

  That evening, after giving Max his supper, Bitsie locked him up in the bedroom and spread a clean sheet out on the living room floor. She set the trash-bag she’d recovered from the dumpster in the middle of the sheet and donned a fresh pair of gloves. She opened the trash-bag and carefully set out the contents on the sheet-covered floor and examined them one-by-one.

  Twenty minutes later, she was convinced she’d found the poisoner. She took off her gloves and picked up her phone to call Stan, but it rang in her hand before she had a chance to make the call.

  It was Nick.

  “I just got a call from a lawyer representing Granddad,” Nick said. “Late this afternoon, he was arrested at Shady Grove.”

  “But he didn’t do it!” said Bitsie.

  “I can’t bring myself to believe it either, but, apparently, the results came back from the lab, and the yellow powder in the tainted cupcake consists of the same chemicals that are in the heart medicine that Granddad takes.”

  “But surely he’s not the only one at Shady Grove who’s on that medication.”

  “Possibly not,” said Nick. “But there’s more. It seems that the day after the poisoning Grandad volunteered to let them search his room, and, when they did, they found another cherry chocolate cupcake discarded in his trashcan.”

  “Maybe one got dropped on the floor, and he threw it away.”

  “I don’t think so. The cupcake that the police found in Grandad’s trashcan was mangled up, and also had bits of powdered heart medicine mixed in with it. It was either a failed attempt at tampering with a second cupcake, or it was intentionally made to look that way.”

  “Would Roscoe have even had a chance to do something like that?”

  “I don’t like to think so, but we left before anyone had any cupcakes, so unless Grandad can find witnesses to testify that he never left the common room, it doesn’t look good for him.”

  “What does Roscoe say?”

  “I haven’t gotten to talk to him, but, according to his lawyer, Grandad swears that the evening Malcolm was poisoned, he didn’t return to his room between the time we brought the cupcakes and the time Malcolm collapsed. He did, however, leave briefly to use the bathroom just down the hall from the common room.”

  “It’s going to be very hard to prove that Roscoe was in the bathroom the whole time he was missing from the common room.”

  “I know,” said Nick miserably.

  “So your theory is that someone planned to frame Roscoe from the very beginning?”

  “Yeah, unless Granddad really did it. I hate to doubt his word, but I had no idea that another tainted cupcake had turned up in his trash.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Bitsie insisted. “I have proof!”

  “You do?” Nick sounded shocked.

  “I do,” said Bitsie, “and I’m about to turn my evidence over to the police.”

  A half-hour later, Stan was standing in the middle of Bitsie’s living room, surveying the trash-strewn floor.

  “You’re going to have to tell me what I’m looking at here,” said Stan. “I see a few crumpled papers, an eviscerated white teddy bear, a bunch of chess pieces, a breath-mint tin containing some disgusting-looking brown goo, and a piece of green string.”

  “That’s correct,” said Bitsie, “the rest of the trash in the bag is pretty useless, just a bunch of used tissue, toenail clippings, cough drop wrappers, and what was left of the stuffing from the teddy bear. Everything you see spread out there in the middle was hidden inside the teddy bear. Poor teddy had been ripped open and then sewn back together—badly, I might add—with that bit of green dental floss.”

  “Take a closer look at that disgusting brown goo,” said Bitsie, handing her brother a clean pair of gloves.

  Stan put on the gloves, then picked up the tin of goo and looked at it.

  “Give it a sniff,” said Bitsie. “What does it smell like?”

  “Peppermint?”

  “Yes. And what else?”

  “I don’t know, turpentine? Some kind of chemical, at any rate.”

  “My money’s on the shoe polish.”

  “Peppermint-scented shoe polish?” said Stan. “I don’t think so.”

  “I believe it’s a mixture of brown shoe-polish and peppermint toothpaste.”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Because what materials would the average old man stuck in his room at a nursing home have in his medicine cabinet with which he could replicate the appearance and consistency of chocolate frosting.”

  “Oh,” said Stan. “I suppose that’s plausible, but what’s with the rest of the stuff?”

  “Take a good look at those chess pieces.”

  Stan picked up a knight and turned it over in his hand. “Nothing strange about this one.”

  “Try another,” said Bitsie. “The white queen, for instance—“

  Stan picked up the white queen. “What about it?”

  “Compare it with the black queen.”

  Stan picked up the black queen with his other hand.

  “The white queen is lighter,” he said.

  “Now,” said Bitsie, “I may turn out to be wrong, but I strongly suspect that if you carefully remove that bit of felt from the bottom of the white queen, you’ll find that she’s been hollowed out.”

  Stan started to pull at the felt.
>
  “Wait!” said Bitsie. “That’s evidence, do it inside a plastic bag.”

  After Bitsie brought him a plastic zipper bag, Stan carefully peeled back the felt from the bottom of the white queen. As he did so, several yellow pills dropped into the bag.

  “Oh!” said Stan.

  “Now are you ready to entertain the possibility that you might have arrested the wrong man.”

  “Where did you find this stuff?” Stan asked.

  “I did a little dumpster diving in the back alley of Shady Grove.”

  “Ah. Whose trash is this, anyway?”

  “It belongs to Clarence Crake.”

  “But how did you know to go through his trash?”

  “Well, I’ve been almost certain Clarence was the poisoner ever since I realized that he and Miss Lavinia Fay each have half of a set of his and hers’ teddy bears.”

  “Really? Is there such a thing as his and hers’ teddy bears?”

  “You betcha! See that poor disemboweled bear. He has bowtie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you walk into Miss Fay’s room tomorrow morning, I think you’ll discover that she has a nearly-identical girl bear with a ribbon around its neck.”

  “So, Miss Fay and Clarence Crake are an item?”

  “Used to be,” Bitsie said. “They were carrying on a quiet affair up until a few months ago. My theory is that Clarence was becoming increasingly unhinged, so Lavinia broke up with him.”

  “What makes you think Clarence Crake is unhinged? Besides trying to poison someone, I mean.”

  “Take a look at these,” said Bitsie, picking up the stack of crumpled papers nestled against the head of the teddy bear.

  Stan examined the papers one by one and handed them back to her.

  “It’s just a bunch of random notes: phone numbers, times for television programs, clues for a crossword puzzle, maybe?”

  “Yes, there’s nothing special about any of those papers until you compare them to these!” Bitsie reached into her handbag and removed the packet of Lavinia’s love-letters with a flourish.

  Stan took the packet from her and skimmed the top letter.

  “This letter certainly counts as unhinged. Are they all like this?”

  “I assume so,” said Bitsie, “though I’ve only made it halfway through the stack.”

  “And you think Clarence Crake really wrote these?”

  “Yes. Compare them with those notes. Look at the handwriting and even the notebook paper. They’re all written by the same person.”

  “Well, it’s hard to pin an attempted-murder on someone based on a bunch of weird love-notes, even if they are addressed to a woman that the victim was also pursuing.”

  “No,” said Bitsie, “I suppose not, but what about this?”

  She pulled the photocopy of the threat-letter out of her handbag like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  Stan took the copy and read it through.

  “This guy is serious,” he said at last.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And crazy.”

  “That, too.”

  “I wonder if he’ll confess?” Stan said, more to himself than to Bitsie.

  “Hard to say, but the evidence is pretty damning. It’s definitely his handwriting on those letters. It won’t be hard to find lots of people who can confirm that used to be his teddy bear. He was clearly trying to dump everything related to the poisoning at once. Those random notes scrawled on bits of paper were just some things he thoughtlessly dumped in the trash with the rest.”

  Stan nodded.

  “Clarence was well-known to be the only one who ever used that chess set,” Bitsie continued, “and I’m confident that a search of his medicine cabinet will turn up a bottle of brown shoe polish and a tube of peppermint flavored toothpaste.”

  “I guess we should have applied the sniff test to the tainted cupcake while it was still fresh,” said Stan. “Now it’ll have to go back to the lab to confirm that the components of the ‘frosting’ match the contents of Mr. Crack’s medicine cabinet.”

  “What do you think happened to the rest of poor teddy’s stuffing?”

  “Flushed down the toilet?”

  “Probably.”

  Roscoe was quietly released the same evening, but, on the advice of Stan, he didn’t go back to Shady Grove. He went home with Nick instead.

  In the morning, Stan explained, they’d get a warrant to search Clarence’s room. In the meantime, it wouldn’t do to tip Clarence off that the police had figured out they’d got the wrong man.

  Bitsie wondered if Miss Fay would fess up to her former relationship with Clarence Crake. It seemed a bit far-fetched to Bitsie that Lavinia wouldn’t have realized that all those creepy love-letters weren’t from Clarence, but Bitsie supposed it was possible that a furtive relationship between two seniors in assisted living might not have included written correspondence or even a glance at the other’s handwriting.

  “Besides the bears, what led you to the conclusion that Clarence Crake and Miss Fay had been involved with each other?” Stan had asked Bitsie the previous evening.

  It was a hard question to answer. It had started with Ruby’s claim that Lavinia had been carrying on a romance with a mystery man. Then Bitsie had figured out that the writer of the threat-note and the love-letters was one and the same person. The final piece of the puzzle had been the bears. Bitsie couldn’t help wondering whose idea those matching teddy-bears had been and where they’d gotten them from.

  Even though she was convinced that Clarence Crake had poisoned Malcolm’s cupcake, she still wasn’t entirely sure how he’d pulled it off.

  Bitsie knew the medication that Roscoe took was also used to prevent complications related to diabetes. Clarence Crake was diabetic. There was a strong possibility that Clarence was on the same medication, only at a lower dosage. Bitsie was betting that by the time the investigation was complete, it would become apparent that Clarence Crake had been stealing Roscoe’s higher dosage pills and replacing them with his own half-strength ones.

  Bitsie pulled up the pictures of the two dosages of Losartan pills that she’d saved to her computer. Her memory had served her correctly. The 100mg tablets and the 50mg tablets looked exactly the same. Clarence must have been stealing them when he stopped by Roscoe’s room every morning. Probably, he didn’t steal one every day but switched out as many as he could from Roscoe’s weekly pill organizer whenever an opportunity presented itself.

  And Clarence would have had another reason to visit Roscoe’s room every morning. Since Roscoe and Lavinia lived on the same hall, Clarence’s visits to Roscoe’s room would have given him cover to slip his odious love-notes under Lavinia’s door. Two birds with one stone; how very clever. The old coot might be crazy, but underneath his mad exterior beat a surprisingly devious heart.

  Bitsie was sure that the search of Clarence’s room the next morning would turn up all the evidence needed to arrest and charge him, but Bitsie was still curious about something. She was so curious that she couldn’t resist calling Nick.

  “Could I talk to Roscoe?” she said when Nick answered.

  “I think he’s asleep,” said Nick. “We were watching TV and—“

  In the background, Bitsie could hear Roscoe’s voice protesting that he was not asleep.

  “Just resting my eyes,” Roscoe said cheerfully after Nick handed off the phone to his grandfather.

  “You didn’t happen to have that little red notebook on you when you got arrested?” Bitsie asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Keep it in my pocket all the time now. Not a lot of information in it, though. Just a diagram of the seating arrangements in the dining room and the times everyone came and went at meal-time for the past two days.”

  “That’s plenty,” said Bitsie. “Would it be OK if I came over and took a look at it?” She really ought to be asking Nick that question. She wondered if Tracy was there.

  “Sure,” said Roscoe. “Come
on over.”

  Bitsie had only been to Nick’s house a couple of times. He lived in an old farmhouse he was fixing up. It was several miles out of town and not on the way to anywhere. When Bitsie and Nick got together, they usually met at the bakery or at her house.

  When Bitsie arrived at Nick’s, she looked for a car with Nebraska plates parked in the gravel drive. She didn’t see one, but it could be parked around back by the barn, so she told herself not to relax too much. It got dark early in November, and it wasn’t like she could see much outside the beams of her headlights.

  She got out of the car and made her way up the steps. It was cold and starless, and Bitsie started wishing that she had just stayed at home.

  Nick answered the door when she knocked. He smiled at her and invited her in, seeming for the moment like his old self, but perhaps he was putting on a show for Roscoe. Bitsie found herself wondering if Roscoe even knew that Nick’s ex-wife was back in town. Possibly, Nick was waiting to spring the news on his grandfather until he was sure that his newly rekindled relationship with Tracy was going to last.

  “Here it is,” said Roscoe, presenting Bitsie with the little red notebook.

  The living room was dimly lit by a flickering fire in the old brick fireplace and a small table lamp next to the recliner that Roscoe occupied. Bitsie took the notebook over to Nick’s dining-room table where the light was better and opened it up.

  There were two bits of information that she was interested in. The first was where Clarence sat at meal-times, and the second was when Clarence, Malcolm, Lavinia, and Roscoe came and went from the dining room.

  The seating arrangements were just as Bitsie had predicted they’d be. Clarence sat where he had a direct line of sight to both Lavinia and the entrance to the dining room.

  The times everyone went to breakfast were less enlightening. Clarence usually ate breakfast early, from 6:30 to 7:00. Malcolm and Lavinia came in later, both arriving around 7:00 and staying until about 7:30.

  “What about you?” Bitsie asked Roscoe.

  “What about me?”

  “When do you eat breakfast?”

  “I go really early, usually when they start serving at 6:00, and then I hang around for a while. Usually, ‘til 7:00 or so.”