Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  Erik signaled me to follow along—at least he knew enough not to try to conduct the interview alone—but Elise grabbed my elbow before I could.

  “For what it’s worth,” she said quietly, “she seemed genuinely confused about why she needed to come with me.”

  I thanked her and hurried after them. Alice Benjamin wasn’t projecting guilt. But my mom was right—often the simplest solution was the correct one. Vilsack’s blood was in the room that she was supposed to occupy.

  I took the seat next to Erik, but shifted it a little further away. Alice wasn’t the only one who didn’t want his germs.

  My mom wasn’t here, but I could hear her prompting me to put Alice at ease.

  I rested one hand on the table and kept the other in my lap. Erik had already introduced me as a consultant with the department, so at least I didn’t have to worry about explaining who I was and why I was here.

  “I’m sure we can clear this up quickly. I’d imagine you want to settle into your room. We just have a couple of questions for you about where you’ve been the past couple of days. Your reservation for The Sunburnt Arms was for Thursday night.”

  Alice glanced at the door to the room like she expected someone to jump through it and shout You’ve been punked! “You dragged me down here because I missed my original check-in. You must not have any real crime around here if you’ve criminalized rescheduling your hotel reservation.” Her forehead crinkled. “Besides, I called the B&B where I was supposed to be staying and told them I’d pay for the missed nights so long as they held my room. The desk clerk I talked to said that was no problem.”

  I waited for Erik to jump in with a follow-up question, but he looked like he’d much rather put his head down on the table and fall asleep. So clearly he was only going to be a figurehead in this chat. “And what time was that? That you talked to the desk clerk.”

  Alice shook her head like she couldn’t figure out why it would matter. “I don’t know. A little after 5:00 I guess, once the tow truck driver got to me and told me all the garages in the area were closed for the night.”

  A chair dance wouldn’t have been professional, so I held it in. Assuming Alice told the truth, we could continue to narrow our timeline for when Vilsack might have been attacked. We now knew it was sometime after 5:00 pm. Honestly, though, that wasn’t a huge improvement from knowing it was after 4:00 pm when Mandy checked my mom in and then went back to her rooms for the evening.

  I slid a pad of paper to Alice across the desk. “If you could write down the tow truck company you used and the hotel you stayed at, so we can verify, I’d appreciate it.”

  Alice accepted the paper and pen, but she stared at them for a second. “Why do you need to verify where I was? What’s going on?”

  Erik wasn’t giving me any guidance at all, so the decision appeared to be up to me whether this was the right time or not. I hadn’t been the lead on anything in an official capacity before.

  Don’t reveal anything you don’t have to, both my parents had taught me. I’d skip the word murder.

  “There was an incident at the bed-and-breakfast the night you were supposed to check in.” I pulled the DMV photo of Vilsack from the file Erik had thankfully remembered to grab. I slid it across the table to her. “Do you know this man?”

  She shook her head. The action was so simple and natural that I believed her.

  She chewed on her bottom lip. “Is it not safe to stay there?”

  Crap. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to sink Mandy’s business more than Vilsack’s murder had.

  “It’s safe,” Erik said, in a voice that we wouldn’t have been able to hear in a room with any sort of ambient noise. “What brought you to Fair Haven?”

  Her bottom lip disappeared completely between her teeth. She released it. “Business.”

  I leaned back in my chair slightly and let the silence hang. If you let silence hang long enough, most people would try to fill it, especially when they were uncomfortable. And Alice was definitely uncomfortable answering questions about why she came to Fair Haven. She probably didn’t even realize how much her demeanor changed as soon as Erik asked the question. She didn’t want to tell us why she was here.

  She ran her fingertips along her lips one finger at a time. “Do the police have to keep things confidential?”

  Alice Benjamin clearly didn’t watch any crime shows on TV. My knee-jerk was to flat-out lie and say yes. I didn’t. I’d earn her trust more if I replied in such a way that she couldn’t doubt I was being honest with her.

  I tucked the photo of Vilsack and the paper she’d finally written the requested information on back into the file so Erik could assign an officer to check it later. Assuming he didn’t collapse first. “It depends. If what you say isn’t important to the case, then yes. If it impacts the case, then we can’t.”

  Her posture immediately relaxed. “I have the same restrictions in my job.”

  She fished around in her purse and handed me a card. Alongside her name and contact information was the logo for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

  “I’m a member of NOAA’s analytical response team. We got a report that the lake here might be experiencing a problem with harmful algal blooms—toxic algae, basically. I was sent to evaluate the lake and collect samples.”

  In other words, not only did she have an alibi for the night of the murder and a legitimate reason for missing her reservation at The Sunburnt Arms, she also had a reason for being in Fair Haven that had nothing to do with Bruce Vilsack. I glanced in Erik’s direction and he nodded. He didn’t think she was our killer, either.

  Even if she had a clear motive, we’d still have needed to explain how a woman not much larger than me had managed to haul a man’s dead-weight body out of The Sunburnt Arms by herself. None of Mandy’s employees would have helped a guest cover up a crime.

  But she might have had someone else in town she could call on. Just because she was from out of town didn’t mean she had no friends or family living here.

  “One more question, and then we’ll let you go.” I stood to show her I meant it. “Do you know anyone here in town?”

  She shook her head. “That’s one of the reasons they sent me. It’s important that whoever goes out to collect the samples and survey the situation is objective.” She reached for the pen again. “Let me write down my boss’ number. You can check everything I’ve said with him.”

  I’d also ask Elise to run a background check to see if her name popped up in connection with anyone in town.

  Barring some hole showing up in her story, we were now in one of the worst possible situations for an investigation. We had no viable suspects.

  9

  “I think my sister might have done it.” Mandy’s voice came through my cell phone at a volume that would have rivaled my alarm.

  Or at least it felt that way. I reached for the clock on my night stand. 7:00 am. Not that early necessarily, but I’d had trouble falling asleep again last night.

  I slumped back into my pillows. If Mandy kept calling like this, we were going to have to establish some ground rules. I couldn’t be expected to make sense out of her rabbit trails before I’d even had my first cup of coffee. “Start over. What did your sister do?”

  “She called last night because she heard about the murder, and she started into me again about letting the place go. Said this was a sign it was time to let someone younger take over. Do you think she might have killed Bruce to scare me into selling?”

  The scent of coffee brewing wafted up from downstairs. I knew God didn’t work on a system of scales where you could cover over the bad things you’d done with good deeds, but if he did, my mom deserved to be forgiven for a lot for putting that coffee pot on this morning. Maybe, after a cup, Mandy’s suggestion wouldn’t sound quite as outlandish.

  Right now, I had to draw on all my friendship reserves to not toss the phone across the room. I didn’t even know where to start with this one. I
hauled myself out of bed. “Why does your sister want you to sell?”

  A slurping noise came across the line like Mandy was drinking her own cup of coffee. I shuddered. I hadn’t minded having Mandy as a house guest except that she kept insisting on brewing the coffee in the morning. And her coffee was about as close as you could come to rat poison without actually killing someone.

  “She wants us to travel together,” Mandy said between slurps. “I think she’s also worried it’s too much for me and that I’ll make myself sick.”

  “Okay. Those are logical, caring reasons. Do you think your sister is the kind of person who’d kill someone so the two of you could travel together?”

  Two beats of silence. “No.”

  “And you don’t have any other reason to think she might have done it, right?”

  “None,” Mandy said. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should start reading romances instead.”

  I gripped the stair handrail tightly to keep from crushing my phone. That’s all Fair Haven needed. If Mandy switched from reading mysteries to reading romances, she’d likely also switch from coming up with conspiracy theories to matchmaking. Heaven help all the single people.

  “Have you tried talking to your sister about why you don’t want to sell?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then why don’t you do that? I bet once you talk to her, you’ll also set your mind as ease that she’s not the killer.”

  Mandy and I disconnected.

  For the first time, I got a look at my downstairs. All but two of my stools and all my dining room chairs lay on their sides, making a fence. My dogs met me with happy tail wags but without the frantic need-to-go-out whines I usually got in the morning. The chair-fencing blocked them out of the kitchen, but ran from the laundry room door next to the door outside so that someone could technically open and close it for them without having to be in the corral with them.

  My mom sat on one of the remaining stools, a fresh mug of coffee in her hand. She waved a hand at the chair barricade. “This way we can both have our space.”

  My mom might have a freak flag not so different from mine after all. She just hid it a lot better.

  My phone beeped. A text message from Elise. All of Alice Benjamin’s story checks out. She couldn’t have killed Vilsack.

  That was good news for Alice and bad news for us, especially since the day my mom and I spent with Mandy and her employees hadn’t given us any more insight into who might have wanted to hurt him.

  I padded across the floor and handed the phone to my mom so she could read the text as well. Before my fingers could wrap around the handle of the coffee pot, my phone rang again.

  My mom held it out to me.

  I backed away. “If it’s Mandy, let it go to voice mail.”

  My mom checked the screen. “It’s Mark.”

  That call I wanted to take. I snagged the phone from her.

  “What have you been wishing for since this investigation started?” Mark asked.

  I’d been wishing for a lot of things, but the one that would help us the most was a body. “They found Vilsack? Tell me they found Vilsack.”

  “He’s on his way to me now for the autopsy. I’ll call you as soon as I have results.”

  It was probably inappropriate to be so happy that they’d discovered his body, but the chances of him turning up alive had always been slim. At least now we’d have more evidence to work with to catch whoever did this to him. “Do we know yet where he was found?”

  “On land belonging to Susan and Jurgen Schmitke.”

  Susan—the cook at The Sunburnt Arms.

  If I could go back in time, one of the things I would have told my younger self was to take and appreciate naps when she could get them. Even the coffee my mom and I picked up at The Burnt Toast on the way to the station wasn’t enough to make me feel fully awake.

  The interview with the Schmitkes wasn’t much help. I talked to Susan alongside Erik, and my mom talked to Jurgen with Elise. Both of them insisted they had no idea how Vilsack’s body ended up on their property.

  It turned out they lived outside of Fair Haven on fifty acres, so it wasn’t like they lived in town and he’d been buried in their back yard. The cadaver dogs found him inside their bush. Whoever left him there had pulled a bit of scrub brush over him, but hadn’t tried to bury him.

  “I’d have expected them to do a better job of hiding the body,” Elise said when we all met back in the chief’s office after the Schmitkes were released. “It could be a frame-up. Whoever killed him obviously knows he worked with Susan, so they disposed of his body on their land, knowing we’d search areas with some connection to Vilsack first. He was barely covered, like whoever put him there wanted him to be found.”

  Erik grunted from his seat and popped another throat lozenge into his mouth. Wrappers filled the wastebasket next to the desk.

  The grunt was so generic sounding that I wasn’t sure if it was in agreement or not.

  I waited for my mom to make the counterargument, but she didn’t say anything. I knew what I thought she’d argue as a defense attorney, but maybe I was wrong. “That’s what I’d propose if I were defense counsel for the Schmitkes, but if my client were someone else, I’d suggest that the Schmitkes knew they could claim a frame-up if they did a sloppy job of disposing of his body.”

  “That’s what I’d argue as well,” my mom said.

  Coming from her, that was almost better than a hug.

  Since my mom hadn’t yet toured Sugarwood the way I’d planned, we headed back to see the grounds and wait for Mark to call with results.

  By the time he did, my yawns had grown large enough that a dentist could have worked on my back molars without any issue. My mom insisted on driving us to Cavanaugh Funeral Home, saying she didn’t want to end up in a field in the middle of nowhere because I’d fallen asleep behind the wheel.

  If I hadn’t crashed my car multiple times since coming to Fair Haven, I might have been insulted.

  Inside the funeral home, I led the way to the door marked with a brass sign emblazoned with the words County Medical Examiner. Because our county was small, Mark’s office was at the funeral home. He liked to joke that, in his career, it was much better than working from home.

  Mark let us in.

  I glanced around the room. It was empty except for us. “No Erik or Elise?”

  Mark’s smile was more amused than the question should have merited. “Elise ordered Erik to go home.”

  I snorted.

  My mom gave me a withering glance. “I thought he was the ranking officer with the chief of police out sick.”

  “Normally.” Mark’s grin turned cheeky. “But happy girlfriend, happy life. Elise said she was confident that you two could handle this on your own and catch her up later. She’s reviewing the results on the evidence the lab’s been able to test so far.” He sobered as soon as he settled in behind his desk. “I collected all the usual samples from Bruce Vilsack’s body, but I’m pretty confident cause of death was blunt force trauma to his skull.”

  That should speed up some of the evidence processing. Now that they knew Vilsack hadn’t been stabbed to death, none of the kitchen knives would need to be tested for blood.

  “Could you determine the shape of the weapon?” my mom asked.

  Mark passed her a small stack of photos. When my mom offered them to me, I shook my head. The only thing I was worse at than speaking in front of the jury was dealing with blood and bodily trauma.

  Mark took the photos back. “It looks like whatever hit him was cone shaped. No flat edges.”

  A tremor flashed through my legs. Mandy’s employees wouldn’t have helped a stranger, but they might have helped one of their own. Becky had swung her long-handled squeegee at me with the force of a professional baseball player. If Vilsack came up behind her unannounced, maybe she’d hit him accidentally and then panicked.

  Susan Schmitke might have been the person she called afterward for
help. My mom had said that the tone toward Becky from Mandy and Susan was motherly.

  “How big a cone-shaped object?” I asked. “Like a broom handle?”

  “That’d be too small and probably would have broken, leaving splinters in the wound.” Mark held up his hands to demonstrate the size. “We’re looking for something even larger than a rolling pin.”

  Cone-shaped and larger than a rolling pin. Hadn’t there been a baseball bat on the evidence list? “Do you have a list of what the police took from the scene to test?”

  “I don’t, but I can have Elise check it if you have an idea.”

  I told him my theory.

  He called it in to Elise, then set the phone aside. “She says there’s a bat logged in and that it had a substance that looked like blood on it. She’ll push it to the front of the list and start checking to see if any of Vilsack’s friends, relatives, or co-workers play on a team.”

  If it had been the bat, then my theory about it being Becky and an accident had about as much solidity to them as a soap bubble. It seemed like this case had a lot in common with trying to catch soap bubbles before they popped.

  My mom jotted notes in a notebook the same way she did when she spoke with a new client. “A bat suggests premeditation. Since Ms. Benjamin hadn’t checked in yet, it’s not like he went up to her room for some reason and someone accidentally hit him with a bat she had lying around.”

  Becky’s swing at me still ate at the back of my mind, but my mom was right. Whoever brought that bat up to the room had to have intended to use it. Not only that, but Becky didn’t work nights, so she shouldn’t have been there, and as far as we knew, Becky had no motive. I didn’t want to point a finger at her without a bit more to go on. Based on the fact that she attended a PTSD support group, she’d already had something terrible happen to her. She didn’t need me adding false accusations to it. Plus, I’d have the perfect opportunity to try to find out if she might have had a reason to want Vilsack dead when I went with her on Thursday night.

  Mark and my mom had moved on to discussing dinner plans, a topic switch that I suspect only police, medical examiners, and criminal attorneys could make without feeling squeamish.