Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  The sketches bore only a few similarities to her final design, kept around now for scrap. The design had taken her months and, in that time, she hadn’t worn a ring. She’d texted me a picture of it on her hand when it’d finally been finished.

  I switched to my text messages and scrolled back. That was only three weeks ago.

  My theory only worked, though, if she and Geoff had done something similar to Mark and me and kept their engagement mostly private until she had the ring. I’d known about it, and they’d begun making arrangements, but they might not have told everyone. Without a ring, it wouldn’t have been obvious, and I knew Ahanti hadn’t posted it on social media until she had the ring to flaunt.

  “I think it might have been your ring. How many people knew about the engagement before your ring was finished?”

  Her pen slipped from her fingers and rolled onto the couch. “Almost no one knew. Just you and our families.”

  We had our trigger.

  My phone beeped, and I glanced at the text in case it was my mom. It was.

  I held my phone out to show Ahanti the sender. “They’re releasing Geoff for now. My mom wants to know if you feel up to bringing me back to the hotel. She wants to see the material from the stalker and ask you a few questions. She suspects the two cases are related.”

  Ahanti nodded. “Let me grab a sweater and pull on some jeans. Hotel air conditioning is always too cold.”

  I took a picture of the list of names as a back-up while I waited. It was another lawyerly trait that I couldn’t seem to shake.

  I didn’t know what my future held in terms of practicing law, but based on what Mark had told me earlier today, my dad and I needed to have a talk. Whatever decision I made—

  Ahanti screamed.

  12

  I jumped to my feet and spun around, but then my legs felt stiff, like someone had dunked my bottom half in liquid nitrogen.

  Ahanti stared down at something on the top of her dresser, her hand pressed to her mouth and a sweater and pair of jeans crumpled on the floor at her feet.

  She sprinted toward the bathroom.

  My brain and my legs came back to life at the same time. The walk across the studio apartment felt abnormally long, like I’d stepped into some sort of carnival funhouse.

  As I passed the bathroom, Ahanti sat on the floor, slumped over the toilet. I didn’t stop.

  Before I could comfort her, before I could decide what to do, I had to see what was on that dresser. The closer I got, the more I wanted to turn back. To take Ahanti and leave the apartment and hide somewhere and pretend like she didn’t have a stalker and I hadn’t already seen too many horrible things to ever feel safe again.

  A knife rested on the dresser. Dried rust red stained the blade.

  Heat burned through my stomach and up into my throat. I almost turned back to join Ahanti in the bathroom. But I couldn’t. I had to see it, and then I had to call the police.

  One step closer and I could make out the paper lying beneath the knife like it was a macabre paperweight.

  On the paper was a printout of a picture of Cary lying on the ground. He was dead. Below it, someone had scrawled a message.

  Sorry I missed you. I took care of the problem. I’ll always take care of you. See you soon.

  I sank down onto the edge of the bed. Ahanti came out of the bathroom, wiping her mouth with a washcloth. She looked stunned, almost numb.

  I turned her around and led her back to the bathroom. “I’m calling the police. Get what you absolutely need. You won’t be able to stay here tonight.”

  I dialed 911, and for the first time, I wished the officers who were going to respond would include Fair Haven’s Chief McTavish. He and I might be like anchovies and chocolate together, but I knew how he worked and how he’d treat a case like this. In DC, even though this was a homicide now, it likely still wouldn’t be a priority.

  I gave the dispatcher the name of the detective we’d originally spoken to about Ahanti’s stalker and had Ahanti provide the name of the detective who interviewed her earlier today. Then I texted my mom and Mark, and snapped a picture of the knife and message as well. The police doubtless wouldn’t like that if they found out, but I knew my mom would approve.

  Detective DeGoey—as Ahanti had informed me his name was—arrived on the scene with the responding officers. A small part of me wondered what it said about me that, in my mind, my best friend’s home had become “the scene.” Did it mean my parents were right about my inability to completely give up the law? I shoved the idea to the back of my mind. It could wait.

  DeGoey and the officers went over to where the knife sat and talked quietly. He called someone on his cell phone and came back over to where I stood. I’d decided to follow my dad’s lead and not sit. That way I wouldn’t have to look up at DeGoey like a naughty child.

  DeGoey came back across the apartment and stopped next to me. He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “For an innocent woman, she spends a lot of time with her lawyer.”

  What I wanted to do was snub him, but that would be counterproductive. He wasn’t the detective trying to prove Ahanti had committed a murder anymore. He was the detective who was trying to solve Cary’s murder, a murder we now knew intersected with Ahanti’s stalker. Hopefully he’d understand that distinction soon. As much as it galled me, that meant we’d be better off with him as an ally.

  I gave him a smile so sweet it practically dripped honey. “Most people don’t have a defense attorney for a friend. That’s the capacity I was here as when we discovered the knife and the note, and that’s why I was here Thursday night as well.”

  His eyebrows were too thin for a man’s. They flattened a bit now and almost disappeared. “You also didn’t mention before that you weren’t some underling from Fitzhenry-Dawes. You are a Fitzhenry-Dawes.”

  His barriers were going to be harder to crack than the Fair Haven officers’. Good thing I wasn’t a quitter. “Would it have mattered if I did?”

  His lips curved into the world’s tiniest smile. “Not in a positive way.” He motioned back toward the two officers. “We’ll have to close this place up to fingerprint it. I hope for her sake”—he looked over my shoulder, I assumed at Ahanti—“that we find some because the timing is almost too convenient. She comes home from being questioned by the police about her ex-boyfriend’s murder, and the real murderer has left a confession in her apartment.”

  I could have protested that I’d gone back here with her right afterward, but that wouldn’t help. He could easily suggest she’d left it here before, just in case. And while I doubted he’d ever say it out loud, he clearly didn’t think well of my parents’ firm. He might even think I’d helped her create this situation so there’d be reasonable doubt for a jury.

  Besides, any of that obscured the real solution here. I definitely hadn’t accrued enough goodwill for him to follow it for my sake, but maybe he’d listen to reason. When we took away all the layers, he and I both wanted the same thing—to catch the person responsible. “We’ve already been to the police because she has a stalker. We believed that stalker might be the deceased, but now it seems her stalker is your murderer. We have the messages her stalker sent her. I think you’ll find the handwriting is a match. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to look into it as an option.”

  He stone-faced me but said, “Show me.”

  Thankfully, we’d already separated out the stalker’s messages from Ahanti’s other fan mail. I brought him over to the box and waited nearby while he glanced through it.

  Finally, he straightened. “I’ll take it with me for handwriting analysis and to check for matching prints. The handwriting looks similar, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t copy it, knowing it would deflect suspicion.”

  But he sounded less certain than before. He pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to me. “In case anything else comes up. And if you’re telling the truth, I’d recommend she doesn’t stay here anymore alone once we release the pla
ce. Once a stalker kills, they’re more likely to do it again.”

  13

  My mom, Geoff, and Mark waited for us in Mark’s hotel room when Ahanti and I arrived.

  If the situation hadn’t been so grim, I might have laughed at the sight they made. My mom, lipstick as fresh as if she’d applied it a moment before, sitting with her perfect posture in the desk chair. Her lilac perfume hung lightly in the air, and she hadn’t even taken off her shoes to get more comfortable—that would have been unprofessional. Mark perched on the corner of the bed and shot glances at the door that connected our rooms like he was seriously considering making a break for it. Still the handsomest man I’d ever seen even when his peeling sunburn made him look like he had leprosy. And Geoff, wearing clothes that looked like he’d been heading to the gym when the police called, slouching one shoulder against the wall by the window. Between the slouch, his scowl, and his position, he reminded me a bit of a castle gargoyle.

  Mark sprang to his feet and crushed me into a hug. “I hope you like gray hair, because at this rate, I’m going to be completely gray before I’m forty.”

  I hugged him back, even though his reaction seemed a little over the top. I hadn’t been in any actual danger this time. “You’ll look distinguished with gray hair anyway.”

  He slowly released me.

  My mom pressed her lips together in a way that clearly said what have you gotten me in to now? “Next time, Nicole, perhaps you could be a little more detailed in your text.”

  What had I written? I’d been trying to contact the police, make sure we had a record of the evidence, and keep Ahanti calm all at the same time. I pulled my phone from my purse.

  The text I’d sent to my mom and Mark read Stalker broke into Ahanti’s apartment with a knife. Called the police.

  I scrunched up my nose. Reading it back, I could see how that might have been misinterpreted. It did sound a bit like the stalker broke in while we were there. “Oops?”

  “I assured both men that you wouldn’t have taken the time to text us if the stalker had literally been in the apartment with you at that moment,” my mom said.

  I explained what had happened in more detail. “And I got a picture.”

  My mom and Mark moved forward, huddling over my phone in the slightly gruesome curiosity shared by medical examiners and criminal defense attorneys who’ve seen too much to be shocked by anything.

  Between them I caught a glimpse of Geoff’s face. He was watching us with a look that I might have given to a vampire going in for a human snack.

  He moved past us to Ahanti. “We need to talk outside,” he said low in his throat.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught movement that I assumed was Ahanti shaking her head. “Whatever you’re going to say, you might as well say in front of Nicole. I’ll tell her anyway, and she’ll tell Mark because couples shouldn’t keep secrets.”

  Geoff’s skin was the color of dark chocolate, making it impossible to tell if his face went red or not. “Like you kept things from me, you mean.”

  I might not be able to see a change in his skin color, but I could hear it in his voice. Mark and I had our own disagreements, and Geoff’s voice had taken on that spoiling-for-a-fight tone people got when grievances had piled up over time. Ahanti said he hated causing a public scene, but she’d forced his hand.

  Ahanti shrugged away from him. “This situation isn’t easy.”

  “I didn’t say it was, but catering to this man hasn’t gotten us anywhere. We should elope the way I wanted. Once he sees you’re married, he’ll stop trying to win you over, and we’ll be done with this.”

  A cold shot, like spilling ice water down my arms, ran over me. Mark glanced up from his examination of the image on my phone’s screen and met my gaze.

  He caught it, too. If Geoff were Ahanti’s stalker, we’d found the reason why he might have sent the burned picture of himself.

  He didn’t want to wait to get married. He didn’t want to share their wedding with anyone else. It made me think about the stalker Taylor Swift had a few years back who believed he was married to her and who threatened to shoot anyone who he saw as a danger to her or their relationship. I wasn’t up on celebrity news, but I vaguely remembered Rhianna having a similar situation.

  The chill on my skin seeped into my blood, down deep to my bones. If Geoff turned out to be her stalker and she married him, she’d never be safe. Things would be okay at first, but then if he ever felt she wasn’t paying enough attention to him, if he ever imagined she might be interested in another man, he could snap again and hurt Ahanti or someone else. I didn’t even want to think what would happen if they had children and he felt Ahanti was paying them more attention than she paid him.

  My mom passed my phone back into my numb hand. Up until this point, she’d been pretending to ignore the conversation. In my family, arguments weren’t something you ever did in front of non-family. It didn’t matter the impetus.

  But Ahanti and Geoff weren’t her family, so up until now, she’d been treating it the way she did when clients argued with their relatives in front of us. By the look on her face, her patience had run out.

  She extended an arm between them like a blocker. “That’s enough,” she said in the tone that always made me cower as a child, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong. “Whoever is behind this killed a man because that man seemed to be harassing Ahanti.” She speared Geoff with the gaze that made prosecuting attorneys sit back down and forget the objection they were about to make. “Getting married could get you killed as well. In her stalker’s version of reality, she wants to be with him, and you’d have coerced her into a situation the stalker would feel compelled to free her from.”

  Ahanti sank to the edge of the bed. Her eyes glassed over like she no longer saw anything around her.

  Geoff crossed his arms over his chest. “Then we should leave DC. I can start a new practice anywhere.”

  My mom said something about how they’d have to change more than their location to lose a stalker determined enough to kill for her. The buzzing in my head made it hard to focus on what she was saying.

  They couldn’t be allowed to move away. Not until we were sure he wasn’t the stalker. She’d have no one to protect her, and she wouldn’t know to protect herself until it was too late.

  Mark slid a hand down my arm and shook his head. He leaned in close, his lips almost touching my ear. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  He pulled me back to the other side of the room.

  “Geoff was in police custody most of today,” he whispered. “He wouldn’t have had time to leave the knife and photo after Ahanti left for work and before the police called him in. It wasn’t him. We’re still looking for someone else.”

  14

  When Mark and I came out of the church service we’d picked to attend the next morning, Mandy had texted me. Again.

  If you let me throw the nylon leashes out, I’ll buy you these pretty leather leashes with the matching collars to replace them.

  She sent me a link. The woman was obsessed. I only ever used the nylon leashes to tie the dogs to the stoop railing when I bathed them outside, so maybe I should let them go. The old leather leashes could be the bath leashes, and the ones Mandy had picked out were much nicer. But I’d let her stew a little longer first.

  Ahanti had texted me as well.

  Police done with my apartment. I called Eddie, and he’s free this afternoon to check my place. Can you come?

  In the second it took Mark to unlock the car with the clicker, I considered telling her no. Eddie should know more about what to check than I would. Besides, this trip was supposed to be about Mark, and so far, I hadn’t even spent much time with him.

  Thankfully, it didn’t seem like I’d been expected to. Most of the events they’d had planned were for Mark to get a better idea of the scope of their research, the work environment, and what they were offering him. Other than the first day, and a dinner we were supposed to atten
d together with his potential future boss and his wife, my presence hadn’t been necessary.

  But still. It felt like I was spending most of my time hunting down another criminal and not nearly enough time with Mark seeing the sights. I hadn’t even had time to confront my dad about blackmailing—or bribing, depending on how you looked at it—Mark into staying here.

  The passenger-side window lowered. “Are you getting in?” Mark asked.

  Enough heat to rival the Virginia sun arched up my neck and into my cheeks. Ahanti always teased me about my tendency to space out when I was thinking. I climbed in.

  The leather seats scorched my legs even. “Ahanti’s having a security check of her apartment done today. She wants me to come by.”

  “Should I drop you off?”

  He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t even sound annoyed. I couldn’t lean over far enough to kiss his cheek, so I snagged a hold of his nearest hand and planted a kiss on the back of that.

  He flipped his hand over so ours rested palm to palm and squeezed. “We’ll have to talk eventually about whether I take his job or not.”

  At first it felt like a topic jump. But it wasn’t really. He was still thinking I wouldn’t be happy long-term in Fair Haven because of how cases drew me in like they were the bright light and I was the mosquito.

  “Do they want your decision before we leave?”

  Mark shook his head. “They said they’re slowly expanding the department, so we can take a few weeks to decide after we go home.”

  Mark pulled into a parking space in front of Ahanti’s building. “Did you want me to stay? If not, your mom asked if I wanted to get coffee just the two of us this afternoon.”

  The panic sensors in my brain flashed all sorts of warning colors at the thought of Mark and my mom having coffee. For all I knew, she was in on whatever my dad’s plan was. I was much more afraid of her ability to sway Mark than of my dad’s.