Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  6

  “You didn’t tell me we were working for the police,” my mom whispered as we signed the paperwork.

  Maybe my omission was petty and childish, but I’d rather think about it as smart. To save face, she wasn’t able to walk away once we were there and reading the forms. Or, I should say, once my mom was reading the forms. They were the same ones I’d signed when I’d worked as a consultant for the department back in January. At least this time I wouldn’t end up nearly freezing to death out in the woods.

  Strangely, my mom sounded less annoyed at my small deception than I’d expected. An uncomfortable feeling, heavy and tight, settled at the pit of my throat. Why did it suddenly feel like she’d played me rather than the other way around?

  My mom handed the signed forms back to Erik. He’d been less talkative than usual since we arrived, his lips drawn and shoulders stiff beyond his normal military bearing. It was the bloodshot eyes that gave him away, though. He wasn’t as sick as Chief McTavish, but he was heading there.

  He slid the forms into a folder. “The missing manager’s name is Bruce Vilsack, and we’ve already talked to his family and checked his apartment. No one’s heard from him, and his roommate says he hasn’t been home.”

  His voice carried an extra layer of gravel that hinted at a sore throat as well. Erik took his position seriously enough that, with Chief McTavish already out sick, he’d have to be on the verge of being admitted to the hospital before he’d call in sick himself. Hopefully I could at least take some of the burden of this case off of him. If as many officers were already out sick as Chief McTavish suggested, Erik was probably not only sick but also pulling double shifts.

  “Do you have the DNA results back from the blood?” my mom asked. “To confirm that he’s our victim.”

  Erik’s glance slid my way just enough that I saw it. “Thanks to Mark and his strings.”

  I licked my lips to cover up a smile. Thank you, Erik. As sick as you are, you’re still trying to help me out by praising my boyfriend in front of my mom.

  “The DNA’s a match with the sample we took from Vilsack’s apartment,” Erik said. “That’s all we have results on for now. I’m about to release The Sunburnt Arms, but it’ll be a bit before the lab finishes testing anything relevant.”

  My mom ran her fingers down the length of her pen. I’d almost forgotten how small her tells were compared to most people’s. Fiddling with her pen and not controlling the direction of the conversation were dead giveaways. She was struggling to adjust to the new role. Normally by the time she and my dad got involved, the police had already built up more of a case, a strong enough one that my parents’ client felt the need to call them in.

  I’d found that the questions weren’t that different from the ones we were used to. It was simply the reasons for asking them and the angle of approach that differed.

  A tingle went up my spine that felt almost like confidence. I didn’t often get the chance to take the lead from one of my parents. “You asked about enemies?”

  “Of course.”

  Erik’s tone had a bit of a bite to it—whether because he was sick or because the chief thought he needed not one but two consultants, I wasn’t sure. Erik tended to be humbler than he should be, so my guess was the former.

  He must have realized how he sounded too because he put obvious effort into softening his features. “The family claims he didn’t have any enemies.”

  My mom inclined her head slightly to one side like her body was trying to help her make the switch in thinking. “The victim’s family always does. But the victims always do.”

  The cynicism sounded like a false note in my ears, but she was right. Even good people had enemies, deservedly or not.

  Erik turned his head into his arm and coughed. “His roommate said he liked to move from woman to woman. He didn’t think any of the women Vilsack went out with were angry enough with him when it ended to kill him, but I asked him to make a list of anyone whose name he remembered anyway.”

  “What about the—” My mom and I both started the question and stopped at the same time.

  My mom nodded at me to continue.

  The tingle of confidence spread and warmed my entire body. My mom and I had never worked together like this before. I’d always been assigned a task that was carefully monitored by someone who could speak to a jury without sounding like Oliver Twist begging for more food. It might actually be fun to work side-by-side with my mom as equals and to show her that I might be a crappy lawyer, but that didn’t mean I was a failure. I was good at other things. Important things.

  I rubbed my palms along the skirt my mom had insisted I change in to when she believed we were meeting a client. “What about the woman who didn’t check in?”

  Erik flipped through his notes. “Alice Benjamin. Mandy didn’t have anything other than an email address and a name. I have someone seeing if they can track down a phone number.”

  My mom set the pen down on the table and folded her hands. Her expression turned almost bored, like the glamor had suddenly worn off the case. “In most situations, the person who looks guilty is.”

  In other words, my mom thought Alice likely killed Vilsack and then fled, and given how Vilsack’s roommate described him, the motive was probably romantic. Alice found out he was cheating on her with another woman, or she was married and Vilsack threatened to expose their affair.

  That would be an interesting case in my mom’s world, where she’d have to build a defense for Alice, but on the other side, where things seemed simple, there wasn’t a challenge for her.

  No challenge for her meant she wouldn’t see this as a valuable use of our time. Even if Alice’s husband had followed her here and killed them both, it wouldn’t interest my mom, and we’d be back to how I was wasting my life here.

  I wasn’t about to let that happen, which meant I wasn’t about to let our role in this investigation fizzle out on our first day. “Alice Benjamin also might have had nothing to do with it at all. We have a lot of blanks to fill in first. Did Mark think there’s a chance Vilsack is still alive?”

  Erik shook his head. “Possible but not probable were Mark’s words. There was a lot of blood pooled behind the toilet and under the sink, and it looked like someone started to clean up, probably using the items Mandy found in the wash, and wasn’t able to finish.”

  I restrained myself from looking directly at my mom. Her expression wouldn’t give much away anyway. But from the corner of my vision, I caught the tiniest change in her posture. She brought her upper body forward. The unfinished cleanup had her interested again.

  “Any leads on the body?” my mom asked. “Without one, a decent defense attorney can call into question almost every piece of evidence you bring against their client.”

  “We’re waiting on the state cadaver dogs.”

  Erik scrubbed a hand around the back of his neck. An expression flickered across his face like he couldn’t remember for a second what he’d been about to say.

  Not a good sign. The next natural step would be to talk to Mandy’s other employees and clear the remaining guests. But if Erik was too sick to stay focused, a traditional interview/interrogation style could harm the investigation by tipping off the perpetrator without giving us enough benefit to justify it.

  Plus, in a case like this, where we had more question marks than potential answers, it felt like we might want to be a little more informal until more of the lab results came in.

  I opened my mouth to suggest to Erik that my mom and I could talk to Sunburnt Arms employees while he managed things here, but I snapped my lips shut. One of the “tricks” my parents warned their clients about was police personnel pretending their questions were innocent when they weren’t. Would my mom see me as a traitor for doing the same?

  I waited for the sharp pain in my chest, but it didn’t come. Instead I felt almost…calm. I couldn’t let what my mom might think or not think stand in the way of doing what I knew was best. Th
at’s what had landed me in a job I hated in the first place.

  I picked up the photocopy of Erik’s notes and the list of evidence they’d collected so far, and then stood. “Why don’t we start talking to Mandy’s other employees while you coordinate things here? They don’t know we’re working with you, and they might be more open.”

  Erik sneezed loudly enough that his chair squeaked. He slumped slightly—the first time I’d ever seen him with anything less than perfect posture. “Maybe that’d be for the best.”

  As we were climbing back into my car, my cell phone rang. The screen said Mandy. I waited for it to sync to Bluetooth and answered over the speakers.

  “You have us both,” I said.

  “There’s dust everywhere, the kitchen’s a mess, and things are missing.” Mandy sounded like she needed to be offered a paper bag to breathe into.

  Better I didn’t ask how she’d gotten to The Sunburnt Arms so fast after the police released the scene. My suspicion was she’d gone back to keep an eye on things from a distance despite my strong recommendation that she stay away.

  “I’ll never get it back in order before the next guests are supposed to arrive,” Mandy continued, her voice rising in pitch. “I’ll have to cancel more bookings.”

  My mom raised her hand and caught my attention. She pointed from herself to me and then at the speakers.

  I nodded. Whether my mom’s motives were altruistic or practical, since it’d give us a chance to question Mandy’s staff in a casual environment, I agreed with her. “There’s not much you’ll be able to do alone there tonight. Why don’t you call in all your staff for tomorrow after church? My mom and I will come, too. We can make a list of what you might need to buy as we set things right.”

  “It feels like I’ve been robbed.”

  The situation couldn’t be quite that bad. The police tried to cause as little mayhem as possible. But they would have fingerprinted, photographed, and collected evidence, both trace and otherwise. That meant that all the stained linens and laundry would be gone as evidence, and so would any other items the police might think could be connected to the case.

  “It can feel like you’ve been violated. I promise we’ll put it right, so you won’t lose any more guests. Head back to my place for now, okay? We’ll bring home dinner.”

  I disconnected the call.

  The twist in my stomach had nothing to do with hunger pains, even though it was well past when I’d normally have eaten.

  I’d lied to another friend. I’d made it sound like we were coming for her when really we were coming to find out if we’d need to bring even more trouble on her by investigating one of her other employees as a potential murderer.

  I swallowed hard, but it didn’t clear away the gritty feeling in my mouth. The thought that I would have offered to help her anyway barely took the edge off.

  My mom watched me. “Even the good guys have to bend the truth sometimes,” she said softly. “You know the police do it.”

  I knew. And I knew that in a world with as much evil as ours, the good guys sometimes had to deceive the bad ones in order to protect society. It was the collateral damage like Mandy that bothered me.

  My fingernails dug into the steering wheel. Maybe it was time I told my mom that. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t come back. It’s one thing to bend the truth in pursuit of making sure a criminal can’t hurt anyone else. It’s something else entirely to try to do it in pursuit of the exact opposite. I can’t do that anymore.”

  I peeked at my mom. Her expression was smooth, like I’d said I don’t like chocolate anymore rather than like I’d basically said I found what she and my dad did morally untenable anymore.

  “So it’s not that you’d rather make maple syrup than be a lawyer?” she asked.

  Anyone else might have added a mocking tone to it, throwing my own words back in my face. My mom simply sounded relieved.

  I’d have preferred her to mock me. The relief in her voice irritated me the way the boy who sat behind me in school did when he’d put a finger less than an inch from my face and chant I’m not touching you. The temptation to deny it was almost more than I could handle.

  But I didn’t want to lie to my mom as well just for spite. “There’s a lot about being a lawyer that I miss.”

  That didn’t make any difference, though. I could miss it all I wanted. I’d still never be good at it. I could speak in front of a judge because he or she was a single person. As soon as you added a jury and a courtroom of spectators, though, no amount of Toastmasters and practice had been able to keep me from sounding like I had a speech impediment and a memory issue.

  And a prosecutor needed to be able to speak in a crowded courtroom the same as a defense attorney.

  My mom studiously avoided eye contact as if I was a feral cat that she was afraid of spooking. “They’re not all guilty, you know.”

  My dad had once told me the opposite. During the case where he’d been defending my boyfriend for killing his wife, I’d confronted my dad with evidence that Peter had, in fact, killed her.

  They’re always guilty, he’d said.

  I’d found out since coming to Fair Haven that wasn’t true. Sometimes innocent people were accused of crimes they didn’t commit. They needed someone to protect them and advocate for them. But I couldn’t be that person any more than I could be a prosecuting attorney for the very same reasons. I couldn’t work alone. I needed someone who could eloquently argue a case in court.

  My fingers ached from gripping my steering wheel. “Would you pay someone a salary to sit around and wait for the innocent ones?”

  My mom didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

  No one would hire someone like me. What I wanted didn’t matter. Except for the rare cases when I was able to work with the police, I didn’t have a future in the legal field.

  7

  When we arrived at The Sunburnt Arms the next day, Mandy’s other employees were waiting for us outside. She kept a small staff, so with Vilsack missing and presumed dead, that left three employees. If The Sunburnt Arms looked half as bad inside as Mandy described, we’d need everyone working hard to get it ready for the guests scheduled to check in tomorrow.

  Mandy’s cook—who I’d learned from Mandy the night before also took care of the lawn and gardens—was a middle-aged woman who wore her long brown hair in a strict bun that always reminded me of a giant cinnamon roll stuck to the back of her head because of the way the silver streaks played through it.

  She paced the porch as we came up, despite the fact that we were ten minutes ahead of when Mandy asked everyone to arrive. “At least the guests won’t be here for breakfast tomorrow,” she said without stopping her energetic march. “Based on the pictures you sent me, we’ll need to clean the whole place to meet health and safety standards.”

  Not for the first time I wished for the Cavanaugh ability to arch an eyebrow on command. I looked in Mandy’s direction. “Pictures?”

  The expression on her face bore a remarkable resemblance to a child who’d stolen a handful of cookies and lied about it. “I only took a few to show everyone here how much work we had.”

  Show everyone else around town who asked, more likely, but it wasn’t my place to reprimand her. She wasn’t a guilty child. Her wrinkles bore testament to it.

  Mandy unlocked the front door, and Susan—the cook—whisked her and my mom straight back to the kitchen. Which I couldn’t help but smirk at. My parents had a housekeeper clean their apartment. My mom hadn’t scrubbed anything in years.

  The smile faded from my lips. A desire to hug my mom replaced it. We might not agree on how to run a business, but I couldn’t fault her for her work ethic. If scrubbing a floor was what it took to do our job for the police, she’d do it. Whether it was a genetic trait I’d inherited or a learned quality they’d taught me, I owed my parents a thank you for instilling the values of hard work and doing what was necessary.

  Tim followed them inside and head
ed straight for the front desk computer. Presumably, when Mandy called each of them, she’d given them their instructions. She’d forgotten to give me mine, but first on my own to-do list was to get to know the one employee I hadn’t met yet.

  Mandy’s “cleaning girl” turned out to be in her mid-twenties, maybe five years younger than me. She had a way of standing with her shoulders tucked forward that made me think she wanted to go unnoticed.

  She turned to follow Tim inside. I scurried up the steps and touched her arm to get her attention.

  She flinched and spun back toward me.

  “I’m Nicole.” I extended my hand and almost faltered.

  She’d done a good job with her makeup, but it couldn’t completely cover the long, thin double scar that ran in parallel lines down her left cheek.

  I made a point of looking her in the eyes. I suspected many people had a hard time doing that rather than staring at her cheek.

  She accepted my hand. Slowly. “Becky.”

  Ideally, I needed to work somewhere with her or Tim long enough to be able to naturally slide Vilsack into the conversation. I motioned toward the door. “Mandy forgot to tell me where I should start. I thought you might be able to help me.”

  She tucked her hair behind her right ear, but not her left, as if she wanted it to hang down and hide as much of the scar as possible. “Based on the pictures, every room’s going to need cleaning and straightening. Maybe you could start by vacuuming the lobby while I take a better look upstairs?”

  Even though her voice gained a little confidence as she spoke, she still managed to turn the last part into a question.

  Vacuuming in the lobby was the worst possible assignment. It wouldn’t give me a chance to talk to her or to Tim because no one would be able to hear me well enough over the noise. But if I questioned her, I had the sense she’d shut down so tightly I wouldn’t get another chance.

  I smiled like a thousand-watt lightbulb. “I can do that.”

  And I would…just not right away.