Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  Still, I didn’t want to sit on my furniture with blood and lake gunk on my clothes.

  I pulled my used-to-be-blue t-shirt out from my body. “I’m going to grab a shower. Are you able to stay for a bit?”

  A hint of pleading sneaked into my voice before I could stop it. As much as I hated to come across as needy, right now, I was. Because there was a good possibility that Mandy, my friend, had tried to kill me.

  Velma turned her attention to Mark, and he scrubbed behind both her ears. “As soon as I got the call, I logged a personal day.”

  He picked up my laptop and held it out of reach of Velma’s probing nose, which only convinced her it was something she wanted. She bounced up and down.

  Mark put the laptop back down. “Since your mom’s not here, maybe we could look at rings. Give me an idea of what you like.”

  That was almost worth skipping the shower for. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the rust-colored stain on my shoulder. Almost.

  I hurried through my cleanup. When I went back downstairs, the dogs were nowhere to be seen, and my laptop rested on the kitchen island, closed. Mark stood next to it, his cell phone in his hand.

  I finished pulling my wet hair back into my ponytail. If situations could have an odor, this one smelled like more trouble. “What’s going on?”

  “You want the good news first or the bad news?”

  I didn’t want any more bad news. Ever. “Good first.”

  “Alice is awake. The doctors say she doesn’t show any deficits yet. They’ll need to keep her under observation for a while and run more tests, but they think she’ll be okay.”

  I let myself smile. It died quickly. If that was the good news, I could guess the bad. “The blood in Mandy’s trunk was Vilsack’s, wasn’t it?”

  Mark nodded. “They’re going to question Mandy. Chief McTavish says you and your mom can’t be part of the interrogation, for obvious reasons, but you can listen if you want.”

  Normally, I would have plowed him down to get there and listen. Maybe it was the pounding in my head. Maybe it was how disconnected my brain felt. Or maybe it was the feeling that’d been growing inside me since Alice and I were sitting on that rock in the water that all of this was too hard and I wasn’t strong enough to handle it.

  Whatever the cause, the police station was the last place I wanted to be. Doubtless it was another sign of my weakness, but I couldn’t face Mandy or the situation just yet.

  That said, I didn’t want to sit here, either. I couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to look at engagement rings anymore. I wanted that to be a good memory for us, without this hanging over it.

  I picked my spare set of keys off the key rack by the door. “Actually, I want to go to Dad’s Hardware and see if they can make me a duplicate key. This is currently my only one, and with my luck, I’ll lose it.”

  Mark didn’t argue or question, and I loved him for humoring me. I did catch him sending a text to someone—probably my mom or Chief McTavish.

  They could think what they wanted about me not coming down to the station. For once, I didn’t care.

  Given all that had happened, I didn’t expect Becky to be the person manning the key-cutting machine, but she was.

  We stopped in front of the desk, and she shrugged. “If The Sunburnt Arms is closing down, I’ll need to take more hours here eventually. I need the money.”

  I wasn’t surprised she knew. Two older gentlemen we passed on the way in were already talking about Mandy being taken into custody. If scientists wanted to discover how to travel at light speed, all they needed to do was observe the way news traveled in this town. “That obvious what I was thinking?”

  Becky shook her head. Her dangling earrings bounced off her cheeks. The happy motion of her earrings looked out of place in contrast to the red around her eyes and edging her nose. She’d obviously been crying this time. “It’s what I would have wondered if the roles were reversed,” she said.

  Becky didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t offer any more information. I pushed my keys across the counter. “I need a spare set made from these.”

  Becky picked them up and examined the clicker attached to the keys. “For your car?”

  I nodded.

  She handed them back. “Keys for pretty much any car built after 1995 have a transponder chip inside. I could copy the key, and it’d look identical, but it’d never work in your car. You’ll have to go to a dealership.”

  “There’s one on the other side of town,” Mark said quietly behind me.

  We might as well continue our wild key chase.

  Telling Becky to have a good day would have seemed insensitive. Neither of us were going to have a good day. “Thanks anyway.”

  Becky rolled her lips in. “I’m really glad you’re okay. I’m so sorry…I wish…” She shook her head. She held my gaze as if willing me to understand what she couldn’t manage to say.

  She didn’t need to apologize for Mandy. I stuffed my keys back in my pocket. “Me too.”

  Mark linked my arm through his. He glanced back over his shoulder, but didn’t say anything until we were almost to the doors. “I didn’t realize you two were that close. I know you went to a support group meeting with her back when we suspected her, but she seems really upset.”

  She had seemed especially upset. More so than I would have expected given we were barely beyond the acquaintance stage. Then again, she did credit me with preventing former Chief Wilson from hurting anyone else, and a lot of her grief probably stemmed from her damaged faith in Mandy. They’d worked together for years. They might have even been closer than Mandy and I were—than I thought Mandy and I were.

  Besides, even though I’d only attended a single meeting, I suspected support group members bonded more quickly than people who met other ways.

  Mark chauffeured me to the car dealership, where I ordered another key, and then we headed for Quantum Mechanics to sign off on whatever repairs Tony needed to make to my car. Fix-A-Dent was technically the body work shop in town, but Tony was the one I trusted with my car. I also wasn’t willing to face a stranger right now, who I’d have to explain the strange damage to. Well, you see, I was holding an unconscious woman while sitting on a rock at the bottom of a steep drop… That wouldn’t sound crazy or made-up at all.

  By the time we reached Quantum Mechanics, though, I felt like someone had vacuumed out all my energy.

  “Do you want me to go in and take care of it?” Mark asked.

  “And grab whatever I left in my backseat, please.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and laid it on the seat beside me. “In case you want to call your mom.”

  I did want to talk to my mom, but not now. She’d want to tell me about Mandy’s interrogation and whether or not she’d pled guilty. A nap seemed like a better way to go.

  I’d always thought you weren’t supposed to sleep if you had a possible concussion, but Dr. Santos said that was only if I was showing symptoms like dilated pupils and trouble walking. And so long as someone woke me every two hours to check for worsening symptoms. Mark definitely wouldn’t take more than two hours in Quantum Mechanics—Tony wasn’t much for small talk—so I might as well let my eyes drift shut.

  I laid my head back into the headrest.

  Mark’s phone rang. I glared down at the screen. Fair Haven PD.

  Ugg. I couldn’t let it go to voicemail. Despite having taken a personal day, Mark might still be needed for something. Plus, it could be my mom. She’d know by now that my cell phone was sunken treasure. Even once they pulled Alice’s car from the lake and I got my credit cards and driver’s license back, my phone would be trash.

  If it was my mom and I didn’t answer, the consequences would rival the ten plagues in the book of Exodus.

  I picked up the phone and swiped my finger across the screen. “Mark Cavanaugh’s phone. Nicole speaking.”

  “I knew Mark would be able to get a hold of you.”

  I fumb
led the phone like it’d grown hedgehog spikes. “Mandy?”

  19

  “I need a lawyer,” Mandy said. “They’re accusing me of killing Bruce and trying to kill the biologist.”

  No mention of trying to kill me along with Alice. Convenient, since she now wanted my help.

  I pulled the phone away from my face and stared at it. Either I was asleep and dreaming all this or she was delusional. I wasn’t going to pinch myself. I’d had enough pain for one day. Since the world around me had color to it, I had to assume I wasn’t dreaming. I never dreamed in color.

  “Nicole?” A shrunken version of Mandy’s voice carried out of the phone. “Nicole, are you there?”

  Chief McTavish and my mom couldn’t know she intended to call me to represent her. They wouldn’t have allowed it.

  I brought the phone back to my ear. “I can’t be your lawyer.” I spoke slowly to be sure she’d catch every word. This conversation needed to be over.

  “I know you said something before about conflict of interest and working the case with the police, but I can’t go to prison. You have to help me.”

  She legitimately sounded both frantic and confused.

  This made no sense. I might have been wrong about Mandy’s ability to kill someone, but she wasn’t crazy. We’d spent hours discussing books and pastries. I’d have noticed if she were unbalanced. Nosy, yes. Unbalanced, no.

  “I can’t be your lawyer because you tried to kill me.”

  A choking sound filled the phone like she’d been drinking something and swallowed it down the wrong way. It slowed to a sputter. “I don’t understand.” She had a disoriented tone.

  “I was in the car with Alice Benjamin.”

  A sniffling noise. “They didn’t tell me. Who would do this?”

  The next sound across the line came too close to someone trying to hold back sobs.

  This isn’t right, a tiny voice said in the back of my head.

  Mark climbed back into the truck. Your mom? he mouthed.

  Mandy, I replied.

  Red flushed his face, and he reached for the phone. I squiggled back in the seat. I couldn’t blame him for his reaction, but I also wasn’t going to relinquish the phone until I figured this out.

  Mark clamped his hands around the steering wheel hard enough that his knuckles turned white.

  “It wasn’t me,” Mandy said in a wet voice. “I tried to tell the police I couldn’t have taken my car out. It wasn’t working. It hasn’t been working reliably. It worked for Becky and Susan yesterday afternoon, but then yesterday night it didn’t. It’s done this before. I even called Quantum Mechanics about it, but then it started working again. Ask them. Ask Susan. Ask Becky. I couldn’t have done this because the car stopped working last night. I planned to call Quantum Mechanics today again because something’s clearly wrong, but then we got busy.”

  She claimed her car wouldn’t start, and yet, based on an eyesight comparison, they believed the paint on her smashed-in front end matched that of Alice Benjamin’s car.

  One part of her story would be easy enough to check. “Hang on.”

  I lowered the phone. Mark was most certainly not going to like this. “I need you to go ask Tony if Mandy called him about her car not starting.”

  He quirked an eyebrow in a way that clearly said do what now?

  I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear and pressed my hands together in a please gesture.

  He sighed and climbed back out of the truck.

  Becky’s words from earlier kept playing in my head. A duplicate car key would look identical but wouldn’t actually start the car because it didn’t have the special chip in it. I hadn’t known that. Mandy probably didn’t know it, either. If the key on her key ring looked like hers, she’d assume it was.

  But it could have been a duplicate that someone swapped out for hers so that they could have access to her car without her realizing that her key was missing.

  “When was the other time your car wouldn’t start? Was it the day before Bruce died?”

  “How did you know?” I’d never noticed before how expressive a voice Mandy had, but this time her tone was like I was a magician who’d sawed someone in half right in front of her.

  I knew because if someone wanted to be sure they had access to her car when they needed it, they’d swap out the keys beforehand.

  The problem with that theory was that only one other person had the ability to both take Mandy’s keys and duplicate them—Becky. Dad’s Hardware was the only place in town to have keys made. Anyone who ran key machines would surely know trying to duplicate a modern car key was useless and wouldn’t have done it, and Mandy only loaned her keys to her employees.

  But Becky had an alibi for Vilsack’s time of death and no motive.

  Unless…

  I stripped off my watch.

  If we’d died on that rock, whatever medical examiner got my body could have easily thought what Mark did about Bruce Vilsack—that I’d died at the same time as my watch stopped. That wouldn’t have been true. My watch stopped two hours after I originally went into the water. It happened naturally to my watch, but if someone wanted to tamper with time of death, they could have kept Vilsack’s watch until a time they knew they had an alibi, broken it, and then put it back on his wrist. By hiding his body, they knew it’d be too late for anything more exact than a window of death. Destroying his watch would lead everyone to the wrong conclusion about his actual time of death.

  My theory also explained why he’d been left to bleed all over the bathroom floor. The killer, or killers, had to wait to dispose of his body until they could put the watch back on him. It explained why they hadn’t hidden the body very well. They needed someone to find him so they’d find the watch.

  If they waited until after the PTSD support group meeting to move his body, and then tried to come back to clean up, it could also explain why they hadn’t cleaned up fully. They’d run out of time. Or perhaps they left the blood on purpose, wanting someone to follow the trail to Vilsack’s body and his staged time of death. The towels in the wash could be ones they used to protect their own clothes while carrying him and to clean themselves up afterward.

  “I can’t be your lawyer,” I said to Mandy, “but let me see what I can do. I have an idea, okay?”

  It took me another minute of convincing her before she hung up the phone.

  Mark slid back into the truck. “Tony says Mandy called him a week or two ago because her car wouldn’t start. He was going to have it towed back here so he could look at it, but she called back the next day to say it was working after all.”

  That fit Mandy’s story. Whoever had committed these crimes had done a lot of planning to deflect suspicion and keep from getting caught, but it would be a stretch to say that Mandy had pretended her car didn’t work, even went so far as to call a mechanic, on the off chance that she might later have to claim she couldn’t have been involved in pushing us into a lake. She wasn’t psychic. She’d have had no way of knowing she’d need that excuse.

  Mark was watching me with raised eyebrows. “How about you tell me what’s going through your head?”

  I explained the pieces that were coming together. He started nodding halfway through, letting me know that my logic was still sound despite my bruised brain.

  “And wouldn’t Mandy have at least tried to scrub the blood out of her trunk if she knew it was there?” I said. “It’s like someone wanted us to find it, just like they wanted us to find Tim’s baseball bat and Vilsack’s body on Susan Schmitke’s land.”

  “Let me play devil’s advocate, because you know what Chief McTavish will say when we bring this to him.”

  I snorted. Chief McTavish might have hired me to consult on this case, but that didn’t mean he’d like it when I showed up claiming that the easy solution wasn’t the right one. “Sure.”

  “Where’s the motive? Why try to kill you and Alice? Why would Becky kill Vilsack in the first place?”

/>   I couldn’t answer the question of motive for Vilsack’s murder yet, but I had a pretty good idea about why Alice and I ended up in the lake. “I think the attack today might have been more misdirection. I kept investigating Vilsack and the B&B employees. Whoever did this wanted to put the focus back on Alice as the intended target and Bruce as collateral damage. And it worked.”

  “Now,” Mark said, “how do we prove it?”

  20

  Mark drove us in circles around Fair Haven. We couldn’t go to Chief McTavish when all I had were theories, but I didn’t want to go home. My dad would say I was naïve for believing Mandy, even with Tony’s confirmation of her story. Maybe I was. But I didn’t think so, and she was sitting somewhere, sick to her stomach and scared because she thought she was going to prison for something she didn’t do. I couldn’t leave a friend that way any longer than I absolutely had to.

  We hit the pothole in the street outside of Nacho Bizness, the one restaurant we hadn’t been to because I didn’t like Mexican food. The bump flared my headache. It would be a lot easier to think if my head didn’t feel like it was trying to pump all my brains out through my ears. “What we need is the motive.”

  Mark hit his signaler again. If the police saw us, they’d assume we were on something for driving in circles like this. “Could it have been an accident, and then she took the watch to try to cover up what she’d done? You thought it might have been an accident when we originally suspected her.”

  That was before she shoved the car I was in into a lake. That definitely hadn’t been accidental. “I can’t think of an accidental way she hit him with the baseball bat in a bedroom she shouldn’t have been in with him at all.”

  That was the crux of it. Vilsack and Becky didn’t have a relationship that we knew of. She didn’t work nights at The Sunburnt Arms, so it wasn’t like he sneaked up on her the way I had, and she grabbed the first thing available—even if we could explain why Tim’s bat was in a guest room.