Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  For a second, I felt like I’d walked into a glass door—dazed and confused. Thankfully, he seemed to interpret my silence as a sign to continue.

  “I scared the attacker off, but the guy you had me sitting on was sliced up pretty bad. He lost a lot of blood before paramedics got to us.”

  Sliced up…that sounded like… “The guy who jumped him tried to kill him with a knife?”

  “That’s what it looked like to me. They took me in the ambulance since I got cut across the hand, but nobody here’ll tell me anything about the other guy. All I can tell you was he was still breathing when we got to the hospital.”

  “Did you get a good look at the attacker? Could you identify him?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. It happened too fast.”

  I sank into the empty chair nearest to me. Someone had tried to kill Terrance. Likely the same person who’d killed Cary. If Ahanti’s stalker and Cary’s murderer were the same person, then Ahanti’s stalker had tried to kill Terrance.

  Terrance wasn’t Ahanti’s stalker after all.

  18

  One of the least flattering qualities I’d inherited from my dad was how difficult it was for me to apologize. Perhaps it was because it meant admitting I’d fallen short. I’d worked hard to apologize when I was wrong, but it still never felt comfortable.

  Even less so when my mistake landed someone in the hospital. Mark tried to convince me on our drive back to DC that Ahanti’s stalker would have attacked Terrance whether or not I believed him. Maybe that was true, but maybe not. Maybe he would have been watching his back, expecting the stalker to come after him the way he came after Cary.

  Maybe he would have even been somewhere else, preparing a defense.

  Or maybe he’d be dead because you wouldn’t have sent the private investigator after him, the rational voice in my head said.

  Even if I couldn’t have known for sure what was coming, I’d let him down by not considering that he might be telling me the truth.

  Which was why we were now standing in the hospital instead of heading back to our hotel. Lucas had been able to tell me where the ambulance took them, but he hadn’t known anything more about Terrance’s room number…or even whether he’d pulled through. The hospital could give him blood, but if the knife hit an organ, they might not have been able to save him. And I didn’t know what long-term damage extreme blood loss might cause. For all we knew, Terrance could have brain damage if he survived.

  Mark came back to where I’d been waiting. When I was turned away peremptorily, he’d gone back to talk to the woman at the desk. We’d wagered that either his dimples or his MD might get us a little more information.

  “As a professional courtesy, they told me Terrance is alive but in critical condition. They’re not allowing him visitors at this time. That’s all they were willing to say.”

  It wasn’t much, but at least he had a chance. As my dad liked to say, it’s not over until the verdict is read, and even then, there are appeals.

  “Should we tell Ahanti?” Mark asked.

  My gut reaction was to say no since it’d destroy the modicum of peace she’d found in knowing who was stalking her. If I didn’t, though, she wouldn’t be paying attention anymore, and that was even more dangerous than the possibility of another panic attack.

  I dialed her number. “Is Geoff with you?” The last thing I wanted to do was give her the news over the phone if she were alone.

  “Yeah, we were celebrating.” Her voice sounded so unsuspicious that pain bloomed in my chest. “Did you want to talk to him?”

  Coward that I was, I almost considered it. I could tell Geoff and he could tell Ahanti. But if I couldn’t be there for my best friend, I didn’t deserve to have one. “No, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t there by yourself.”

  A beat of silence. “That sounds a lot like a version of are you sitting down? What’s wrong?” All the lightness drained out of her voice.

  I explained what had happened to Terrance.

  She didn’t respond right away, but I could hear sniffling on the other end and then Geoff asking what happened. I listened as Ahanti repeated what I’d said. Geoff swore.

  It was his voice when someone finally came back to the phone. “The guy you hired is sure it was Terrance who got jumped? And the police don’t think it was a random mugging or something like that?”

  I hadn’t talked to the police. “I’ll check with Detective DeGoey, but the investigator I hired knew what Terrance looked like and he helped him until paramedics arrived. It was definitely Terrance.”

  “I don’t think Ahanti should go into work tomorrow. Or at all, until the police figure out who’s doing this. It’s not safe.”

  “I can’t live like a bird in a cage,” Ahanti said in the background. “I can’t afford to keep cancelling appointments. I’ve worked too hard to flush away my business. Nikki even said I’m not the one who’s done anything wrong.”

  The hysterical note in her voice sounded like it might be helped along by a couple glasses of alcohol. Geoff had probably brought champaign, thinking this was all behind them at last.

  “Do you hear that?” Geoff asked me. “Reason with her. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

  Muffled noises like they were passing the phone back and forth, Geoff insisting she talk to me again, and Ahanti refusing to accept it from him. They’d definitely both had a couple of glasses of something. Neither of them were heavy drinkers, and they both tended to get a little goofy when they did drink.

  “I’m going into work tomorrow,” Ahanti finally said into the phone. “I think the reason I had that panic attack was because I was focusing so hard on guarding my every move. It’s too stressful for me to live a half-life like that.”

  Couples had broken up over smaller trials than this. I didn’t want that for them. They really were good for each other. And one of their strengths as a couple was compromising. I just had to get them to remember that.

  Surely the attack on Terrance had given the police more evidence they could use to figure out who was really behind this. They’d have to believe Terrance’s story that he sent only the one message, trying to break up Ahanti and Geoff. What we needed to do was find a way to keep Ahanti safe until the police analyzed the new evidence, but we had to do it in a way that made her not feel so trapped.

  “Put me on speaker, okay?”

  “I think that worked,” Ahanti said, her voice sounding farther away.

  I put my end on speaker as well so Mark could hear. “How many clients do you have booked for tomorrow?”

  “Two. A design consult for a new client and then Eddie’s back in. I’m starting his tattoo tomorrow.”

  That wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. For tomorrow at least, it’d be easy enough to keep Ahanti safe at work, especially if I could get Lucas to sit out front again. “You want to work, and Geoff wants to keep you safe. After your consult leaves and Eddie arrives, could you lock the door and turn your sign to closed? That way no one unexpected can walk in on you.”

  “Without Terrance there, that’d be best anyway. I can’t stop what I’m doing whenever someone comes in.”

  “What about with the new client?” Geoff said. “That could be her stalker.”

  With how her stalker had escalated and the content of his messages, I doubted it. They’d talked about Ahanti’s touch. A new client wouldn’t have even sat down to talk with her yet.

  Geoff wouldn’t see it that way, though.

  I glanced at Mark. I hadn’t spent much time with him this trip, not the way we’d planned, at least.

  He moved in behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “We’ll make sure she’s not there alone with the new client.”

  By the time we finished the call to Ahanti and Geoff, it was almost midnight. I went back to my room, but instead of crawling into bed like any sane person would do, I pulled Detective DeGoey’s card from my wallet.

  I turned it end over end. He shouldn’t have giv
en it to me if he didn’t intend for me to call. But it was late, and the intent behind it had been for me to call if I had any more information about the case, not for me to call because I wanted information about the case.

  Manners won out, and I set the card on my nightstand. Ahanti was safe in her apartment with Geoff, and nothing the detective said could make a difference tonight anyway.

  19

  I slept fitfully, waking up from nightmares I couldn’t remember. I ended up out of bed and showered before my alarm was even set to go off. That gave me the vague sensation that I was doing vacationing wrong. Then again, there’d been nothing else normal about this trip.

  Mark and I planned to stay with Ahanti until her consult client left and Eddie arrived, and then we’d made an appointment with a realtor to find out about house prices within an easy commute of where Mark might end up working. He’d been right when he said one of my major concerns was apartment living with two big dogs. If we couldn’t afford a house with even a modest yard within a close enough distance that Mark wouldn’t give himself high blood pressure thanks to the traffic, that would be a major black mark against moving back to DC. Most people likely would have waited until they’d decided to move before pricing homes, but I wasn’t most people. I liked having a plan, and I hated surprises.

  Ahanti opened late on Wednesdays, so I waited until Mark and I had breakfast together before calling Detective DeGoey. By the time I woke up this morning, I’d realized that the grumpier he was, the less likely I was to get any information from him. Waking him up accidentally seemed like a great way to increase the grumpy factor.

  DeGoey answered on the second ring.

  “This is Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes, Ahanti Tenali’s lawyer.”

  “I remember you.” His voice had a dry edge to it, but I couldn’t tell if amusement or annoyance put it there. Police officers had enough training in controlling their tells that they were harder to read even in person, let alone on the phone.

  Which left me with no direction as to how to forge ahead. “We learned about Terrance Moore and—”

  “I can’t talk to you about an ongoing investigation.”

  That was vague enough to make me want to shake him. Was he referring to the investigation into who had attacked Terrance? Or was he trying to tell me without telling me that they were reopening the investigation into Cary’s murder?

  I’d assume it was a hint if I was back in Fair Haven where even I-never-jaywalk Erik fudged things a little to give me information. But we weren’t in Fair Haven anymore, Toto.

  Unfortunately, that also meant I couldn’t be Fair Haven Nicole. Here I had to be Big City Nicole. I hadn’t had much success at that before. If you asked my parents, succeeding here required a drive and hardness that I didn’t have. And didn’t want to have.

  But now was as good a time as any to see if I could get what I wanted and needed here without sacrificing who I was.

  “I appreciate that, Detective. I don’t want to impede your investigation in any way or jeopardize a conviction when you find the right suspect. All I’ve ever wanted was to make sure whoever is behind this is caught so my client can be safe.”

  I made sure to keep any snark or snootiness out of my voice. I didn’t want to imply that he didn’t care about justice or about Ahanti’s safety. It seemed to me like he did care.

  The silence on his end of the line stretched like I’d caught him off guard. He’d probably expected some moral blackmail like I hope you can appreciate that we can’t trust you to keep people safe and to find the right perpetrator. In the background, I heard the low drone of a room full of people talking, but none of them close enough to hear distinct words.

  I forged ahead. “I’m calling because we’d like to know if the attack on Terrance yielded any more evidence that might point you to who’s really behind this. We need to know how extreme we need to get in making sure my client stays safe. I figured that if I tried to work with you instead of against you, there’d be a better chance of achieving that.”

  The noise in the background faded as if DeGoey were moving away from a group of people. “Take whatever precautions you can. I’m doing what I’m able to on my end, but my opinion of what’s going on isn’t the popular one anymore. Recent events might end up being treated as an unrelated crime.”

  He’d kept it vague enough that he couldn’t be accused of giving me anything he shouldn’t. I understood anyway. He believed Terrance wasn’t the guy, but it was possible he’d be outvoted and Terrance, if he survived, might still be tried for Cary’s murder and for stalking Ahanti. That likely meant the attack on Terrance hadn’t turned up any knew evidence, at least not yet. It could take weeks before they had the DNA results from the lab.

  Worse, unless something changed, we were on our own for figuring out who was really behind it all.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” I said to Mark as we drove to Skin Canvas. “Since Terrance sent the picture of Geoff, the list Ahanti made earlier isn’t even a starting point. Her stalker might have been there that day, but he might not.”

  The only thing we knew for sure anymore was that her stalker was a man. My private investigator was sure the attacker was a man.

  With only a couple of days left before Mark and I headed back to Fair Haven, it didn’t look like we were going to solve this before we had to leave. Detective DeGoey hadn’t sounded confident that the police would pursue other suspects. And Ahanti would remain at risk, the focus of a man who’d killed already.

  “When we eliminate what Terrance sent, what do we still know?” Mark asked.

  The words not much came to mind, but that wasn’t entirely true. “Many of the messages still showed up at Skin Canvas, and the stalker wrote to her about her touch, so it’s likely one of her clients.”

  Mark gave an affirmative grunt and hit the brakes to avoid a car that jammed itself into a space that barely fit it. “What I do sometimes is look at anything strange that doesn’t seem to fit, and I focus on that.”

  The fact that he could still come up with that while navigating the traffic was impressive.

  The thing that had troubled me since we first catalogued this creep’s messages were the strange gaps. “He doesn’t maintain consistent communication with her.”

  “It could be someone who travels for work,” Mark said.

  I pulled my phone from my purse and opened the note feature. I typed in Mark’s suggestion. “It probably isn’t multiple incarcerations. She’d know if one of her clients kept ending up in jail.” I tapped the edge of my phone against my chin. There wasn’t much in the way of specifics in the messages, but the comments about her touch still made my skin crawl. “Maybe he sends her messages either when she’s working on one of his tattoos or when she isn’t.”

  “Isn’t would make more sense.” Mark parked the rental car. “If she’s as much a pack rat about her calendars as she was about her fan mail, you should be able to see if any names come up regularly shortly before she received a message. Did you want me to stay and help you sort through?”

  It would make the work go faster since Ahanti wouldn’t be able to help. Unfortunately, it would also mean he wouldn’t be able to scope out the real estate situation for us. That would make the decision about whether or not to move even harder than it would already be. And if he stayed, Ahanti would ask questions. “I don’t want to get her hopes up if this turns out to lead nowhere. She must already feel like a yoyo with all the ups and downs.”

  Finding a parking space almost made us late. I waved at Lucas sitting in his car out front as we passed. He raised his bandaged hand in return. I couldn’t keep a private investigator sitting out front of Ahanti’s shop forever—at least not on my dad’s dime—but, thankfully, Lucas agreed to come back today, despite the short notice.

  Inside, Mark and I sat in the cushy chairs Ahanti kept in her waiting area and looked through her portfolio as if we were a couple intending to design matching tattoos. Ahanti did her consult wit
h the new client.

  The new client at least didn’t strike me as a viable suspect. He wanted Ahanti to ink a picture of his wife and two kids on his back.

  Mark left to meet the realtor as soon as the new client was safely out the doors. Ahanti locked the door behind him and went back to her chair to finish her notes and see when she could fit another client into her schedule.

  I peeked sidelong at the calendar. Because she liked to keep everything, Ahanti still used a paper and pen planner to schedule all of her appointments. I’d be out of luck if she kept them at her apartment.

  I meandered back into the office area as if I were simply killing time until Eddie arrived.

  Ahanti labeled everything, so she should have it clearly marked if the calendars were here. I knelt down by the filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer.

  “What are you doing?” Ahanti said from behind me.

  I lost my balance and grabbed for the filing cabinet drawer. It pulled all the way out, metal screeching against metal. I stayed upright. Barely.

  Ahanti stood over me. Her arms were crossed, but another expression flickered across her face. Like for a second she was afraid she couldn’t trust even me.

  The part of me that always felt not quite good enough ached in protest. The more rational part of me knew I might feel exactly the same way if our roles were reversed. Maybe more so since I was naturally paranoid and suspicious.

  I clambered to my feet and brushed off my knees. Mark should have stayed because I was going to have to tell Ahanti, after all. “I was looking for your old calendars. I thought that I could use them to figure out whose appointments matched the pattern of the stalker’s messages.”

  Her bottom lip jutted the tiniest bit. “Why were you doing it behind my back?”

  This was quickly turning into one of those situations where in trying not to harm, I’d ended up doing more harm than if I’d been honest in the first place. Note to self—don’t try to keep secrets from your best friend or you might not have one once it’s over. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up. It might be another dead end.”