Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  That left Holly, the Powerses, and the Marshalls. Holly was too short, though that was all she had speaking in favor of her innocence.

  Amy Powers was too small, George Powers was too frail, his handwriting hadn’t matched the note, and neither of them had a motive. He wasn’t hiding a drug addiction the way I’d thought, and Drew obviously hadn’t planned to reveal what Amy wanted to do. He didn’t have to warn her the way he did.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marshall were both too short, and they’d been together the whole time. Even if they hadn’t been, Mr. Marshall’s handwriting hadn’t matched, either, and even my suspicious mind couldn’t come up with a reason they’d have wanted to kill someone they’d only recently met.

  I clasped a hand around the cold metal of the bed railing. Maybe Chief McTavish had come up with a solution and he was waiting for me to ask. “So you’re basically telling me that no one on the tour could have killed Drew.”

  “Not quite. If you’re feeling well enough, I need you to come with me to speak with Holly. Otherwise, we need to assign a public defender. Either way, you should be aware that I plan to take her into custody on the charge of killing Drew Harris.”

  18

  Chief McTavish went to find my doctor so I could be discharged early.

  Apparently, Holly’s doctor had decided she was well enough to leave, and while McTavish came to talk to me, he also sent an officer to Holly’s room to bring her down to the station. It felt like a sneak attack meant to prevent anyone from warning Holly what was coming. They were taking precautions to make sure she didn’t run again.

  Despite telling me he’d have to arrest Holly, he hadn’t done it yet, but he’d flagged his intention. Unless something drastic changed in the next couple of hours during her interrogation, she’d be arrested and, soon after, brought before a judge for her plea. I had no choice but to check out of the hospital now.

  Mark wasn’t going to like it. He didn’t want me leaving the hospital until the doctor thought I could safely go, and this morning, the doctor had told me he wanted me to stay one more night for observation.

  The part of me that didn’t want to be controlled by anyone sat like a devil on my shoulder, telling me to text Mark from the police cruiser when it was too late to undo what I’d done.

  A much softer voice said that would create a wound in our relationship that we might not be able to heal. It’d show him that my promises meant nothing.

  I dialed his number. He answered, and I explained the situation. “I’ll stay if you want me to, but I’d like to remain on this case.”

  The long-suffering sigh I’d been dreading didn’t come.

  “Most public defenders already have an impossible case load,” he said instead. “If she’s passed off to them, they’ll encourage her to take a plea because the evidence makes it look like mounting a defense would be a waste of time.”

  Chief McTavish was coming down the hall, my doctor at his side. I angled away slightly. “That’s what I’m afraid of. What should I do?”

  “Go.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. But promise me that if you feel light-headed or sick at all, you’ll call an ambulance right away.”

  That I could agree to. “I promise.”

  Chief McTavish helped fast-track my discharge. The doctor insisted on listing it as against medical advisement even though he said I should be fine. I couldn’t blame him. He had to cover his hind end in case I collapsed.

  When we reached the police station, Chief McTavish led me past the front desk and to a metal door with the world’s tiniest window. It couldn’t be terribly useful unless you wanted to peek inside to make sure your suspect was where you’d left them before you entered, but its original intention was no doubt lost in the past. The Fair Haven police station didn’t look like it’d been updated in decades.

  The chief had his hand on the doorknob.

  I stretched an arm out in front of him and planted my hand on the doorframe, blocking his path. “I need a minute to confer with my client before we begin.”

  The expression that flickered across his face bore a passing resemblance to respect. Had he been testing me? Waiting to see if I’d want to hear her story so she could actually answer some of his questions rather than simply blocking his investigation entirely?

  He backed away with a nod, and I entered the room alone.

  Holly was perched on her chair, one ankle tucked beneath her other knee. They’d left her with her phone, and the squishing noises coming from it made me think she was playing one of those bug-squashing games. She’d pulled her hair up into a messy topknot and had put too much makeup under her eyes, probably to try to cover the purple there. She hadn’t succeeded.

  Holly glanced up and set her phone down on the table. “Finally. I’ve been here for like two hours.”

  I didn’t need to glance at my watch to know it’d been half an hour at most. “Did they read you your rights and tell you why you’re here?”

  “Drew.” His name came out hesitant and low, like she wanted to hold onto it. “They’re blaming me for…for what happened.”

  The fact that she stumbled over saying that Drew was dead gave me hope that Nancy and Daisy were right about her.

  My parents had a private rule. They insisted on honesty from their clients about their guilt. You defended an innocent person differently than you did a guilty one. Not better or worse, according to them, just differently. You had to be on your guard for different traps and different arguments. In my time working for them, they hadn’t defended many innocent people. That meant I had less practice with it as well.

  But the first step was always to forge a connection with your client so they trusted you. I rounded the table and selected the chair next to Holly. I angled it so I faced her rather than the table and settled in. She watched me closely.

  “I’m on your side,” I said, “and I’m here to protect you, but first I need you to tell me the truth. Did you kill him?”

  Her lip did an honest-to-goodness quiver, and her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Instead, she slowly shook her head.

  I held her gaze for a moment longer, waiting for a tell that she was lying to me. She didn’t look away, and her body language stayed open. She didn’t reach for her phone or elaborate. The simple head shake was it. And I believed her.

  I dug a tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. “I need you to walk me through what happened that day, especially how you ended up with Drew’s blood on your gloves.”

  “I did what you told us and went out looking for the little girl, but…” Holly fingered the corner of her jeans’ cuff. She looked up at me. “Do I have to tell everything? It’s embarrassing.”

  I ran my hands over my thighs. People misunderstood each other every day. Body language, for all it could tell about a person, was even harder to read accurately. Holly’s embarrassment was going to read as guilt to Chief McTavish. “You have to tell all of it, and try not to be embarrassed about it, okay? They’ve heard a lot worse than anything you’ll have to say.”

  Holly bobbed her head. “I was afraid of getting lost and not being able to find my way back. I kept imagining everyone having to spread out to look for me. So I turned around early.”

  The pink that spread up into her cheeks made her look like a china doll. If this had to go to trial, her looks should play to her advantage. I gave her a keep-going nod.

  “When I got back to the sleigh, Drew was on the ground and there was—” She pressed a hand over her mouth and her throat worked like she was trying not to gag.

  It’d be justice in a way if she threw up on me. The thought alone triggered my gag reflex as well. I could just imagine Chief McTavish coming back to find us both bent over the trash can.

  I swallowed hard and rubbed her upper arm. “You can do this.”

  She touched her fingertips to her temple in the same spot Drew’d been stabbed. “All I could think was I needed to stop the bleeding. If I could stop the bl
eeding, someone could save him. But then I realized he wasn’t breathing.”

  Drew had likely died instantly, given the location and force of the blow. Nothing Holly could do would have helped him. “That’s how you got blood on your gloves.”

  She nodded.

  “But why run?” I motioned back toward the door Chief McTavish would come through when he joined us. “The police would have believed you if you hadn’t run.”

  “Drew introduced me to everyone as his assistant. I thought whoever killed him would come after me next.”

  I felt the weight of her fear through my shoulders and down my back. She might not have been wrong. Assuming whoever killed Drew was also the person who broke into Drew and Holly’s homes, the killer connected them enough to suspect Holly might be hiding something that could implicate them.

  “Did Drew leave anything with you for safekeeping that could make you a target?”

  She touched her pinky finger along the crack in her lip and shook her head. “But the police should have found the pictures he was taking. He told me he was going to break a big story that he hoped would get him noticed by newspapers from the bigger cities. He wanted to start building up a portfolio so he’d have an easier time getting a job once we graduated.”

  Now Holly might not even have a chance to go to college.

  At least her story fit with what we’d already learned. The big story had to be Shawn White’s drug activities. A high school teacher dealing to his students would have probably gotten picked up by the Grand Rapids Press.

  Chief McTavish would be back any minute, and I had one more thing I had to cover with Holly before he did. He’d no doubt ask her about the fight she had with Drew. As long as her story matched with what Daisy and Amy said, and she didn’t try to hold back on the details because she was embarrassed by her jealousy, we’d be okay.

  “The police have a witness who remembers seeing you and Drew fighting shortly before his murder. You’re going to need to be able to explain the fight. Your mom said it was because a friend suggested Drew might be cheating on you.”

  The blush I’d expected came, but it was different. Not pink and in her cheeks. Instead, her ears and neck went red. Her gaze shifted slightly, like she was looking at a point above my left temple. “Yeah, Amy Powers. But Drew was just trying to keep her out of trouble. He even made sure to arrange the tour we’d be on to match the one she and her dad were on so I could meet her and see there wasn’t anything going on.”

  There was a new note in her voice, like the softness was forced instead of natural.

  Crap, crap, and double crap. I rubbed a hand over my eyes. Everything she said matched with what she told her mom at the time and what Amy told me later, but every innate lie-detector fiber in my body said she wasn’t telling me the whole story.

  If she was withholding it from me, she’d probably withheld it from her mom, too. Amy would have only known her own side of it all, not what happened privately between Drew and Holly.

  The problem was that I didn’t know her well enough to know how to approach it. Did I try to act like her friend and weasel it out, or did I play hardball?

  I checked my watch. Ten minutes had already passed. We didn’t have time for nice. If she lied to the police like she’d just lied to me, they were going to charge her with Drew’s murder, and they had enough circumstantial evidence that they had a good chance at getting a conviction.

  I needed to know what she was hiding before Chief McTavish forced it out of her. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to make eye contact. After I was silent a couple of seconds, she looked at me.

  “I don’t defend people who lie to me,” I said. “I need the whole story.”

  Her expression said you wouldn’t dare.

  I made sure mine replied try me. I’d told Nancy I didn’t defend people who were guilty, and right now, I wasn’t convinced anymore that Holly hadn’t killed Drew, regardless of how sincere she’d looked when she swore she hadn’t.

  She must have seen I was serious about walking out because her mouth drooped open. “You’d really drop me as a client.”

  I channeled my mom’s iron mask. “The deal is I represent you so long as you don’t lie to me. You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t lie.” She pouted her full lips. “I might not have told everything, but I didn’t lie.”

  “What did you leave out?”

  She slid her phone back and forth along the table. “Do we have to tell the police if I tell you?”

  “Not necessarily. It depends on whether it’ll help prove you’re innocent or not.”

  Ug. That made me sound like my parents, but it was true. If she was innocent, I wasn’t going to have her tell the police something that would make her seem guilty.

  “I wasn’t mad at Drew because he met with Amy. He told me he was going to do it before he went. I was mad because…” She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth and sucked on it for a second. “We’d been working and saving so hard, and he decided we should give some of what we’d saved for school to Amy and her dad because they were having trouble paying their medical bills. He thought she was going to do something stupid otherwise even after his warning.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Amy was determined if nothing else. The same quality that probably earned her scholarship could have been the one that lost it for her.

  “It wasn’t fair.” Holly’s voice kicked up a notch in vulnerable anger. “She already had a scholarship. She was going to go to school. So what if they had to go without a few other things in the meantime? Amy had twice what Drew and I did growing up. I told Drew if he gave away our money, he and I were done.”

  The back of my throat burned. You don’t have to like your clients, my dad used to say. It’s not our job to be their friends.

  It still would have made this a lot easier if Holly didn’t have a way of shaving down my nerves like they’d been stuck in a pencil sharpener. It was hard not to judge her as selfish and shallow, but I also didn’t know what it was like to grow up in her circumstances. I’d had everything I could want and more, including a free ride to not only college but law school as well.

  Amy hadn’t mentioned Drew offering her money, so it seemed like Drew might have caved. But if that were the case, why would Holly still be harboring so much anger? It felt like the way to get the most out of Holly was to avoid direct questions for the moment, and see what came out. The girl didn’t have much of a filter. “You two seemed to have made up by the time of the tour.”

  Her shoulders curled in. “Drew came back to me a couple days later and said he’d figured out a way we could keep our school money but help Amy and her dad, too.”

  My chest felt like someone was playing the drums on it from the inside out. If there were a legal way for Drew to make more money, he surely would have done it before then. That left only illegal means.

  The two that came to mind were switching sides and selling drugs for Shawn White or blackmailing him.

  19

  If Drew had been working for Shawn White, Shawn wouldn’t have had a reason to kill him, so the most likely circumstance seemed that he’d decided to sell the photographs to Shawn rather than turning them over to the police.

  The note had tried to warn me that Drew was a bad person, and I hadn’t wanted to hear it. Not that Shawn White was the good person the note claimed, but he thought he was doing the students a service. He saw himself as good, and the note-writer never claimed objectivity.

  Though the handwriting hadn’t matched Shawn or Kristen’s, and none of this explained how Shawn could have managed to kill Drew given the circumstances.

  I couldn’t risk becoming so fixated on Shawn being responsible for Drew’s murder that I missed other possible explanations. It still felt like none of the possible suspects could have done it.

  “Did Drew tell you what he planned to do?” My voice came out about how I’d expect it to sound if a bouncer-sized man had his hands wrapped around my throat. />
  Holly gave me a funny look like she couldn’t figure out why I would be upset.

  She couldn’t—she didn’t know me—but since coming to Fair Haven, I’d always fought to solve the murders of people who’d died trying to do good. They’d been white hats, whereas Drew’s attire was gray at best. The thought made me feel like I’d been wearing the same pair of dirty clothes for weeks.

  And now I was stuck defending a person I didn’t like for the murder of a person who might have brought it on himself.

  “He didn’t want me getting involved, so he wouldn’t tell me the details.”

  The annoyance in her voice made me want to shake her. Drew had clearly been trying to protect her, and it’d been trying to keep her happy that had led him down this path to begin with. None of that, as my parents would say, was my business, though. My business was casting reasonable doubt on the assertion that my client had committed the murder.

  “He did tell me that he saw something while spying on the person for his big story,” Holly said. “He’d originally planned to turn the other info over to the police at the same time as he broke his story, but no one would get hurt if he didn’t, so we could use it instead.”

  Foolish me had handed Drew’s SD card over to the police without looking at every picture on it because I’d assumed—wrongly—that the murderer must be Shawn White. I’d wanted him to be the guilty one because he was a drug dealer preying on kids, and he’d tried to kill me.

  I was going to have to figure out a way to convince Chief McTavish to allow me to see the images again.

  A brief knock on the door preceded Chief McTavish entering the room.

  My understanding of Holly’s story turned out not to matter. As Chief McTavish interrogated her, she completely ignored my signals as if she didn’t even see them, answered questions he’d never asked, and tangled up her response to his questions about her argument with Drew so that it sounded like she might have been willing to kill him. I made sure that she clarified that she and Drew reconciled, but it was too little, much too late.