Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  I knew I should press it even further, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the statement that Tim had implied there wasn’t much sleeping going on. Just thinking it made me feel crass and dirty. My parents wouldn’t have shown the same mercy. Shark might have been stretching it in describing myself. I was more like an eel. Or maybe one of those poisonous corals.

  Leslie had her mug back in her hand, rubbing her thumb over the top of the handle. “What I meant was there’s no drinking involved with staying in. My job’s too noisy for a hangover.”

  That was a good cover, but she’d still missed one part. One that we could check with her boss. I just needed to confirm that I wasn’t making an unfounded assumption.

  I focused on relaxing my body posture. Shoulders down, casual stance—like I believed her. “Fair enough.” I mimed writing to Elise for show. “So we can get it right in our notes, you worked on Thursday and Friday from what times?”

  “My shift’s nine to five.” She still had a wary tone to her voice, but she’d stopped rubbing the cup handle.

  “So you’re saying you were with Tim from the time you got off work on Thursday to the time you went into work on Friday?”

  “That’s right.”

  Elise was writing down what she said, but her pen hesitated.

  My next push would either crack Leslie’s story or she’d continue to try to hold to it and we’d prove that she and Tim hadn’t been together by checking with her boss. I could probably threaten and save us the trouble. Leslie likely wouldn’t want us chatting with her boss about the possibility of her taking off from work early.

  I caught her gaze and held it. “Tim said you were together from around three on. So one or both of you are lying.”

  Her eyelids drooped, and her lips turned down. I’d read about faces crumpling before, but I’d rarely seen it happen.

  She dropped her gaze to her coffee cup. “What do you think Tim did?” she whispered.

  The sadness in her voice hit me in the chest with that sensation like the middle had caved in. I’d been imitating the police’s methods and my parents’ methods. It wasn’t me.

  Now that she wasn’t opposing us, I could go back to the way I preferred to deal with people—with compassion.

  “We don’t know that he did anything,” I said as gently as I could, “but he might have killed one of his co-workers.”

  She gave a slow I’m-thinking head nod.

  I moved around the small kitchen island but kept a respectful distance. “Tim wasn’t with you, was he?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why did you lie?”

  “I always say Tim was with me if I’m asked. We’ve been friends since we were kids, and I didn’t mind. He has some…situations in his life.” She took her time pouring the remainder of her coffee into the sink. She turned back around and leaned against the counter. “I don’t want to share all his private business, but it’s not to cover for anything illegal. I promise. Tim’s not like that.”

  She had no idea how much I wished we could simply take people’s word on whether or not another person was capable of murder. It would make investigating crimes so much easier. As it was, there wasn’t anything else she could tell us. Now we had to find out why Tim lied.

  Scherwin had a rumpled and sleepy-looking Tim in the interview room by the time Elise and I got back to the station. It looked like he’d hauled Tim out of bed and hadn’t given him a chance to even put on real clothes. Thankfully, it seemed he slept in sweats rather than in his boxers or in the nude.

  Tim’s posture was hunched over, more so than I would have expected from fatigue alone, even though he had been working all night and couldn’t have been in bed more than an hour before Scherwin roused him.

  “I should have told you the truth from the start,” Tim said before we’d even sat down. “It wasn’t right to expect Leslie to lie to the police. I panicked.”

  Elise held up a hand. “Before you say anything else, have you been read your rights?”

  Tim nodded. “I don’t need a lawyer. I wasn’t honest with you, but I didn’t kill Bruce, either.”

  My dad had a name for people who tried to deal with the police by themselves at this stage, and it wasn’t a polite one. Since I was on the side of the police this time, though, I wasn’t about to encourage Tim to bring in a lawyer. One thing I was sure of—we’d get more information out of him without one. Hopefully information that would close this case.

  “Then why did you lie?” I asked.

  For a second he looked like he wanted to ask me why I was the one leading the interviews when I wasn’t a police officer, but instead stretched both hands out on top of the table.

  “I wasn’t with Leslie, but I was with someone the whole time, just like I said.”

  Elise gave him a patented Cavanaugh eyebrow quirk. “If that’s the case, why not tell us?”

  Tim hung his head. The silence stretched, and Elise, to her credit, let it.

  Finally, he looked up. Red rimmed his eyes. “The man that everyone thinks is my best friend is also my partner. I was with him.”

  Normally, it wasn’t my place to comment on anyone’s decision to keep such a private and personal part of their life to themselves, but this was a murder investigation. Normal rules didn’t apply here. We needed to confirm that he was telling us the truth this time. “Why not say so?”

  “Fair Haven is a small town. Lifestyles that are accepted in a city aren’t here.” He looked reproachfully at me like moving from a city to Fair Haven proved I’d hold the same attitudes and try to pin the murder on him because of it. “Landon works at the daycare. There are parents who would want him fired if they found out.”

  That was a good enough reason to keep their relationship a secret. The question now was whether they were willing to kill over it. “Did you kill Bruce Vilsack together because he found out and threatened to expose you?”

  “No!” Tim slammed his hands down on top of the desk. Then he must have realized how that outburst might make him seem, and he tugged his hands back close to his body. “No,” he said more calmly.

  “Explain it to us,” Elise said. “If you went to so much trouble to hide your relationship for all these years, it sure looks like motive if Vilsack knew.”

  “He knew, but he’s known for years. He caught us kissing one time after practice when we thought we were the only ones left in the locker room. But he didn’t care.”

  Elise raised both her eyebrows this time.

  Tim brought his hands up in an I swear it gesture, palms toward us. “He said he wasn’t going to judge. Besides, he knew if he said anything I could ruin him, too. He liked to try to sleep with any pretty guest who came in The Sunburnt Arms’ front door, and Mandy would have fired him for that.”

  I knew he was telling the truth. Mandy prided herself on running a clean, homey, safe bed-and-breakfast. A lecherous front desk clerk preying on guests…she wouldn’t have even given him a warning or two weeks’ notice. And she’d have made sure the whole town knew why.

  “Landon’s building has security cameras,” Tim said. “I don’t know how long they keep the recordings for, but if they still have them, you’ll be able to see me going in before Bruce even came in to work and not leaving until the next morning. The same for Landon. We didn’t do it.”

  14

  I’d become like one of Pavlov’s dogs, except instead of salivating when I heard a bell ring, I flinched when I heard my cell phone ring.

  Somehow the word had gotten around by early on Saturday that we’d questioned Tim multiple times about the murder of Bruce Vilsack, and now Mandy’s conspiracy theory generator was working overtime.

  “Maybe I should fire Tim,” Mandy said, “just to be safe.”

  I mimed hitting my head against a wall until my mom glared at me over her coffee cup. She had Mark’s autopsy report on Penny’s husband spread out in front of her. We’d been looking over it together—no gunpowder residue on his hand confirmed he
hadn’t shot himself—when Mandy called. We still, however, had no way to connect the two murders. It was looking more and more like they really weren’t related.

  I pressed my fingers into the pressure point between my eyes. “I don’t think you need to—”

  “Or I could fire everyone and hire all new staff. Becky!”

  The way Mandy yelped her name made me think Becky came up behind her and caught her by surprise. Muffled voices carried through the line as if Mandy had pressed her cell phone to her chest.

  “Sorry,” she said a minute later, “Susan and Becky needed my keys to run to the store. We’re still finding things we’re out of thanks to the police search. Did you know they took all the rubber gloves?”

  I did. They’d found a set in the trash with a substance that looked like blood inside and had taken all the rest they’d located to be safe. The theory was that the killer either wore them to keep from leaving prints or to protect their hands when they cleaned up some of Vilsack’s blood. Perhaps both.

  “So what do you think?” Mandy asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to hire new staff, and then my guests can be certain of their safety?”

  Not necessarily. She could as easily hire someone else like Bruce with shaky morals, but saying that would only result in more panicked phone calls. I already wanted to drop my phone in a bucket of water. “That wouldn’t be fair to them if they had nothing to do with it.”

  “From the way you’re investigating all my staff, it sure seems like you think it was one of them.”

  I had thought so, but we’d looked in to everyone other than Mandy herself without any success. Elise had floated the idea that we should consider Mandy. I’d shut her down a little harder than I needed to. Mandy wouldn’t have done this. Murder was bad for business.

  And that was how I could keep her from firing everyone and starting over. Becky didn’t need another sad event in her life, and Tim didn’t need to be searching for another job, worried that he wouldn’t get one if his personal life became public.

  I climbed up onto the one stool my mom had left me from the dog barricade she insisted on keeping up. “Just because we’re investigating your staff doesn’t mean one of them did it. The police have to be thorough. Besides, if you fire everyone, that’ll make it look like you think they’re guilty, and it will bring a lot of negative press to The Sunburnt Arms.”

  Mandy sighed. “I didn’t think about that. You’re probably right.”

  My phone beeped in my ear. Saved, as the 90s TV show said, by the bell. “I’ve got another call coming in.”

  Mandy said goodbye, and I switched over. The amount of time I spent on the phone lately was getting out of hand. I liked my phone as well as anyone, but I liked talking to people face-to-face better, and the last week or so, it seemed like I’d be better off permanently implanting an earpiece. My phone-holding arm was exhausted.

  I tapped the screen to switch calls. “This is Nicole.”

  “Hey, sweetheart.”

  If I closed my eyes, I could imagine Mark’s dimples when he said it. Maybe my day wasn’t starting off so bad after all, despite Mandy’s knee-jerk reaction to our investigation.

  Mark asked how my morning had been so far, and I filled him in on the Mandy drama.

  “So I received my own unusual phone call today,” Mark said when we finished talking about Mandy.

  My fingers went cold. All I could think to do was to echo what he’d said to me when I’d made the same proclamation. “Good unusual or bad unusual?”

  “It depends. I can’t get away today, but are you free for lunch after church tomorrow? It’s supposed to be a nice enough day that we could eat outside.”

  I said yes, but my voice sounded hollow in my ears. Mark had to have heard it.

  I’d accused Mandy of being paranoid, but I was no better. He’d said unusual rather than bad, which meant it probably wasn’t cancer or some other medical problem. But he hadn’t wanted to talk about it over the phone, and he seemed to want privacy.

  It didn’t much matter what we had for lunch. I wasn’t going to be able to eat it. My stomach was too full of rocks.

  The address Mark gave me when we met up at church brought me to Shoreline Park. It’d clearly been named by the county and not the citizens of Fair Haven because the name was too mundane.

  The park itself ran along the edge of the lake, with beautifully tended grass, trees, and picnic tables. Mark had said to follow the signs along the red gravel path to The Patty Wagon, a food truck that had parked in the same spot during tourist season for so many years that the city council added signs along the path.

  The path itself was well-shaded, but it ended at the beach, where the sun was heating up. Since it wasn’t full tourist season yet, the sand was still almost empty. A few couples and one family walked along the waterside.

  Mark waved to me from beside a bright red truck almost the size of a bus. The Patty Wagon served gourmet burgers—the Big Kahuna burger topped with grilled pineapple; the Philly Cheese Steak burger smothered in sautéed peppers, caramelized onions, and provolone; and so many other options I could have happily come here every day for a week to try something new. If I hadn’t been so nervous, I might have even attempted the Poutine Burger. Mark explained that it was named after a traditional Canadian dish, but all I cared about was that it had French fries, cheese, and gravy all piled on top of the beef patty.

  As it was, I knew any burger I’d order would go to waste, so I got onion rings and a soda. Mark got the same, and we headed away from the beach.

  For the first time in a long time, walking in silence with Mark made me feel like my skin wanted to crawl off my body. I held up an onion ring. “Does this signal a milestone in our relationship? If we had a little garlic to go with them, we’d officially be as far from date food as we could get.”

  Mark chuckled, but it sounded like an echo of his normal laugh. Problem was, I wasn’t sure if it really was or if my imagination was playing tricks on me.

  Mark led the way to a small manmade waterfall. The water feature itself rose up out of the ground like a hill, and the water rolled down brick steps in the front. Flower beds full of hyacinths and daffodils climbed up the sides. A placard nearby said the beds were maintained by the local Rotary Club.

  I loved this town more and more with every new nook and cranny I discovered.

  Mark sat at the nearest picnic table. “Laura and I used to come here.”

  I settled in beside him and took his hand. We didn’t talk much about Mark’s first wife, but he knew that he could bring her up whenever he wanted to. His love for her and for the little girl they’d lost was part of him, and I needed to love all of him or none. I chose to love all.

  Maybe the phone call he’d gotten was from someone in his past—in their shared past—and it’d triggered some memories. Maybe I’d overreacted.

  My stomach settled, and I started in on my onion rings using my free hand. If I wanted, I could always swing back by The Patty Wagon and get that poutine burger afterward.

  He stroked his thumb over my knuckles. “The call I got today was from a company in DC.”

  I dropped the onion ring I’d just picked up.

  “DC,” I echoed inanely.

  I should have had something more articulate to say. Something to ask at least. But it felt like someone turned on a noise machine in my brain. So many thoughts screamed for my attention that I couldn’t grab onto any of them.

  “They said they’d heard of my research in New York into new techniques of detecting poisons. They’re interested in building on that research to improve detection and treatment of poisons in living patients. They offered me a job.”

  “A job. In DC.” Good Lord, I was starting to sound like Rain Woman. The noise in my brain must be killing off my brain cells.

  A job in DC meant leaving Fair Haven.

  The pieces fell into place, and my brain cleared. That’s why he mentioned Laura. He’d only returned to Fair Haven because
she was mentally ill. It was possible he hadn’t wanted to stay here. He might have enjoyed his research-focused career. He might have enjoyed big-city living.

  “Do you want to take the job?”

  He gave a single shoulder shrug, about as noncommittal as one could get. “I’d like to consider it.”

  Something lodged in my throat. I uncapped my soda and downed a big swig. Too big. Like I’d swallowed a log. I coughed until the pain cleared.

  Where did that leave us? Would there still be an us?

  I rubbed at my chest with both hands. Stay positive, Nicole. No panicking. “When will you decide? I’ve never been in a long-distance relationship before, but we managed to stay connected when I was back in DC even before we were dating.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” Mark scrubbed a hand over his forehead. “I’m really bad at this.”

  My hand twitched, hit the soda bottle, and it tipped sideways. All over Mark.

  I grabbed our napkins, shoved them at him, and pulled the little package of tissues from my purse. This day definitely needed a do-over.

  Pressure formed in my head that felt suspiciously like tears.

  Before I spilled my drink on him, it almost sounded like he wanted to break up with me now. But that couldn’t be the case. We’d introduced our parents last week, for crying out loud. We were joking about what we’d name our kids.

  Then again, it’d all been in jest. We’d never had a serious conversation about where this relationship was headed. I’d been daydreaming about white dresses and cute, pudgy babies, but that didn’t mean Mark was. For all I knew, he wasn’t even interested in getting married a second time and trying to start a family again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  I must have been staring at him blankly because he patted the stain on his pant leg. “I never liked these pants anyway.”

  He must have thought I was fighting tears because of the spill.

  “You’re bad at what?” I asked. My voice had a strangled tone that I couldn’t control. I scooted backward a bit on the bench so I could see him better.