A quick calculation told me I’d been awake for nearly thirty hours. “I understand exactly.”
“Isn’t that the worst?” She waited for me to respond, but that was guaranteed to take us off-topic, so I smiled and nodded instead. “Anyway, I’m lying there and was almost asleep when a car drove by. The way this cottage is angled to the street, headlights shine right into my bedroom.”
“Is it normal for cars to drive by at that time of the morning?”
LaVonne smiled at me as though I’d hit on something important. “No. That’s partly why it caught my attention.” She paused and pondered. “Then again, I’m generally asleep at four in the morning. Maybe it’s a more common occurrence than I realize.”
“Did you get up to see where the car was going?”
“No. I was irritated that they woke me up when I was almost asleep. Whoever they were, they went that way.” She pointed west toward Suzette’s cottage. “I tried to fall asleep again, but you know how your brain thinks about things you can’t do anything about in the middle of the night?”
Pyramids, chorizo, and blueberries. “Very familiar.”
“I started thinking about how Lorena, April, and I were talking about Suzette at Hearth & Cauldron the other day. It was awful, and I should have defended Suzette’s honor or changed the topic. Something.”
I hoped this was leading toward the events at the Thibodeaux cottage last night. Then again, the coffee was good, the cookies very tasty, and the chintz-covered sofa quite comfy.
“Well,” she continued, “by that time I was fully awake and there was no way I’d fall back to sleep. I got up and paced the house, feeling the need to apologize to Suzette even though she had no idea we’d been talking about her. So I started baking. Hence the mess in the kitchen.” She waved a hand at the plate on the coffee table. “These are clearly Christmas cookies, and around six o’clock, I realized Suzette was Wiccan and might not approve of a Christian symbol in her home.” She paused. “Although, now that I think about it, I don’t think she was a practicing Wiccan. I’m not sure she was a practicing anything.”
“She wasn’t,” I said through a bite of a spritz cookie dipped in chocolate and decorated with red, green, and white sprinkles. Buttery, crispy, and chocolaty, I gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up. I swallowed the bite. “According to Alan, she dabbled for a while but hadn’t practiced in years. Not with the coven, at least.”
Morgan had explained to me that many witches were solitary, preferring to worship and practice in the privacy of their homes.
LaVonne nodded. “I thought so. I decided the cookies might not be appropriate so went non-religious and made a coffee cake instead.”
“I noticed the coffee cake inside her cottage. When did you bring it over?”
“Right around eight thirty this morning. Alan didn’t seem all that happy to have a visitor.”
“He told me he’d still been sleeping when you knocked.”
She pondered this. “Hmm. Couldn’t say. But now that you mention it, he did seem to be a little out of it. I guess he could have just woken up.” She leaned in. “Or he imbibed in a little too much punch last night.” Her eyes went wide, and she slapped a hand over her mouth. “I have got to stop hanging out with Lorena. I never used to gossip like this.”
Why would Alan tell me he’d been sleeping but not explain that to LaVonne? He did mention that he never slept that late. Maybe he was embarrassed to be caught in his pajamas?
“You brought over the cake,” I prompted, wanting to move this along, “and you went inside?”
“Yes, but only for a minute or two. Since he was still so groggy or sleepy or whatever, I gave him the cake, told him how great I thought it was that he was here visiting his aunt, and then I left. That’s when I noticed the tire marks in the driveway.”
I nodded. “Alan’s wife Nina dropped him and Suzette off after the celebration last night.”
LaVonne considered this, then shook her head slowly. “No, these were fresh. It had been snowing all night. I distinctly remember sitting at my desk grumbling about how it was still falling at one o’clock and then rejoicing at about two that it had stopped. I love winter, but a few days’ break from all this would be nice, you know?”
“You’re sure the tracks were fresh?”
“Positive. I didn’t catch it on my way to the door, but I definitely noticed as I left. The tracks went halfway up the driveway and stopped next to the walkway.”
“Were there footprints as well?”
LaVonne closed her eyes, picturing the scene, and they sprang open a second later. “Yes! There were footprints. I stepped in them on my way to the door. There was a shovel sitting on the front porch, so I used it to clear the walkway.” She gave a happy wiggle. “Little neighborly gesture.” At my expression, she stopped wiggling and her face fell. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“You couldn’t possibly have known,” I assured, “but those were likely the suspect’s prints.”
LaVonne gasped and I realized I’d all but announced Suzette had been murdered. I needed more coffee to help me keep my thoughts straight. I held my mug out to her. “Could I get a refill?”
I jotted “footprints in snow on sidewalk and tire tracks on driveway” in my notebook and was reviewing the rest of my notes when she returned with a full mug. So far, everything she told me matched up with Alan’s statement.
“You know,” I began, “if you stepped in the footprints on your way to the door, they wouldn’t have been usable anyway. No harm in your shoveling.”
“But I shouldn’t have stepped in them, should I?”
“Like I said, you couldn’t have known.”
“You think Suzette was killed? Of course you do. Why else would she be out on her patio in the middle of the night?”
While she lamented stepping in evidence, I sipped the fresh coffee, gathering my thoughts before saying anything more that could upset her. I tried to envision the scene when Reed and I arrived. I remembered the sidewalk being clear . . . and a strip down the driveway too.
“Did you start clearing the driveway?”
LaVonne put her hands over her face in shame. “Yes, ma’am. I was going to clear the whole thing for them. I made my first sweep up to the garage, turned to go back down, and that’s when I saw Suzette on the patio.”
Neither Reed nor I had caught that. The tire tracks we saw on the driveway had probably belonged to whoever had pushed Suzette outside. Dr. Bundy and his EMTs had trampled all over them, assuming when we said the scene was clear that we’d gotten what we’d needed of the tracks. Blame it on lack of sleep from partying with the Wiccans the night before. What’s done was done. We’d have to find another way to figure out who had put Suzette Thibodeaux outside.
Chapter 15
Reed was just finishing downloading the pictures from the cottage when Meeka and I walked in. He looked up, about to tell me something, and his expression went slack. “What happened?”
“Finish what you’re doing and then come to my office. We need to whiteboard.”
I knelt to remove Meeka’s booties, which she was happy to have off, but she backed away when I reached for her parka.
“Are you cold?” I asked. “Or enjoying being toasty warm in there?”
She replied by trotting into my office and straight to her cushion in the corner. Maybe I should have left her at home with Tripp. I hadn’t been sure if her services would be needed or not when we left. Turned out, I didn’t need a K-9 today. Although, we could have used her in the kitchen. If the powder on the counter was illegal, she would’ve alerted on it. The house was overwhelming for her, though. It would’ve been cruel to put her through that.
I pulled the portable whiteboard away from the wall and found a collection of “sister hearts” all over the back side. Rosalyn must have drawn them while I was showing Dad around the station. She used to do that when we were little. I’d take out my homework to hand it in and find two intertwined
hearts at the top of the page. Fortunately, my teachers found it cute. She’d put at least a dozen sets on the whiteboard, and I felt a little bad erasing them. By the time the board was clear and I’d taken out my notes, Reed appeared with two mugs of coffee in hand.
I took a long swig and sighed. “I swear, I could mainline caffeine today and would still feel like I was in a daze.”
“Same. We should gather our thoughts but not do anything more until we’ve gotten some sleep.”
“Agreed.”
“You were obviously freaked out about something when you walked in. Did something happen with LaVonne?”
Reed said LaVonne’s name with a hint of fondness. She and her husband moved to Whispering Pines twenty-five years ago when his parents left him the cottage in their will. Reed was only twenty-four which meant he’d lived next door to them his entire life.
“I’m now ninety-nine percent sure we’ve got a murder.”
“Well, crap.” He dropped into the guest chair across from my desk. “Why?”
I explained about the footprints and tire tracks. “I didn’t even think about the tracks when we got there. In my mind, there was no way this was a murder. I blew it.”
“You aren’t alone. I didn’t catch it either.”
“I stopped back at the Thibodeaux cottage after leaving LaVonne’s place. There are other car tracks, gurney tracks, and footprints all over that driveway now. No way we’d get anything reliable.”
Reed turned the chair to face the whiteboard. “That’s only one piece of evidence. What else have we got?”
In red erasable marker, I wrote Victim: Suzette Thibodeaux at the top of the board. Beneath that along the left-hand side, Suspects. “Who do we like?”
“I know it’s a long shot, but we have to include Alan Thibodeaux. April and Rourke O’Connor directed a few threats at our victim last night.”
“Lorena Maxwell had all sorts of nasty things to say about her at Hearth & Cauldron on Thursday. To my knowledge, she didn’t even come to the gathering last night. She lives on the other side of the village near Sundry, right?”
“She does,” he agreed. “If it was warmer out, she’d walk or ride her bicycle over to Suzette’s, but in these temperatures she’d drive.”
“So the tire tracks could’ve been hers.” I added her name to the list with the other three.
Thinking out loud, he mused, “Since most of the village was at The Inn last night and she lives alone, it would be easy for her to sneak over with no one seeing her. Of course, that also means she wouldn’t have an alibi.”
I added columns for Means and Method next to Suspects and wrote his theory in the Means column. “What’s her motivation, though?”
He pondered the question. “I’ll get back to you on that. What about Thibodeaux’s wife?”
“Nina? Why do you want to add her?”
“Motive. She didn’t get along with our victim.”
“She didn’t, but it’s kind of a stretch from don’t get along to murder. They barely knew each other.”
“Don’t have to be around a person to know them. Her husband must’ve told her plenty of stories.”
“True.” I wrote her name. “I hate to do it, but we’ve got to put Gil Bailey up here. I want to talk with him and Oren and find out exactly what Suzette did that upset them so much.”
“You’d better put Oren up there then too.” He waited for me to write, then asked, “What about Lily Grace?”
“What about her?”
“Do you think she—”
“Had something to do with this? No. Absolutely no way.”
“Sheriff—”
“Deputy, no. I can’t even imagine a situation where she would do something like this. She was making a hex banishing harmony candle for him at the celebration last night.”
“My point exactly.” Reed stood and took a blue marker from the tray at the bottom of the whiteboard. “She loves him. The candle proves she was worried about him. Depending on what Suzette was up to, it could be motive for Lily Grace.”
He added the girl’s name.
In the five months that Reed had been working as my deputy, his skills had grown more than I thought possible in such a short time. He’d learned a little about law enforcement from his time with his uncle and my predecessor, Sheriff Karl Brighton, but he’d been disrespected. Karl treated Reed like a lost soul, like he wouldn’t be able to make his way in the world without constant guidance. This directive surely came from Reed’s mother.
Quite honestly, I hired Reed because I’d been desperate for help. After watching him eagerly read the list of online documents I gave him and then share his newfound knowledge with me, I knew I’d made the right decision. Out of respect for all that my deputy had accomplished, I left Lily Grace’s name on the board but drew a red line through it.
“She didn’t do it,” I insisted.
“Then I’ll be the one to question her.” His confidence had grown too. Enough to question his boss’s decisions.
We engaged in a little stare down, one that Meeka didn’t like if the whine from the dog cushion meant anything.
I finally broke eye contact. “We should make a timeline.”
“We should,” Reed agreed. And all was right with the world again. At least the world within the Whispering Pines Sheriff’s Station.
We switched positions. I took a seat in the chair and let Reed do the writing.
“What do we know?” He uncapped his blue marker and drew a line from left to right. At the far-right side, he wrote 0930 officers arrive at scene. “LaVonne called The Inn at oh-nine-hundred hours, knowing that was the only place there would be someone near a walkie talkie to call one of us. Laurel contacted me immediately afterward because she didn’t want to bother you and your family.”
To the left of his first notation, he put, 0900 call about death received.
Continuing with the reverse timeline, I said, “LaVonne found the body at approximately eight forty-five after arriving at Suzette’s house with her coffee cake around eight thirty.” I waited for Reed to add those events. “At approximately four in the morning, the headlights of a car going toward the Thibodeaux residence lit up LaVonne’s bedroom.”
“Are we assuming that was our suspect?”
“The timing matches. LaVonne stated that it stopped snowing between one and two in the morning. She says the tire tracks were fresh, as in free of new snow, when she got there with the cake.”
Reed noted these things on the timeline and then went to the farthest left side of the board to start at the beginning of the evening. “When did the Thibodeauxes leave The Inn?”
“Laurel told them all to get out right around nine o’clock. Alan stated they got home around ten.” Reed wrote that on the board. “They had tea, and by ten forty-five, Alan was ready for bed.”
“Did his wife leave before or after he went to bed?”
I checked my notes. “Before. Nina left, he offered to help his aunt get ready for bed, she snapped at him that she could do it herself.”
Using the red marker, Reed drew a big box along the timeline from ten forty-five last night to eight thirty this morning and placed a star on the four o’clock car’s headlight entry. “There’s our window of death.”
I nodded. “Dr. Bundy indicated Thibodeaux was nearly solid. If we use his ‘meat freezes at an inch per hour’ theory . . .” I stared at my own leg trying to guess how many inches thick it was and then factor in that Thibodeaux was a good fifty pounds less than me.
“Are you trying to do math?” Reed looked as much like a zombie as I felt.
“Yeah. Our window is too big. She’d been dead for a good while before LaVonne found her. For now, we need to go home, sleep, and come back to this tomorrow.” I pointed at our suspect list which read:
Alan Thibodeaux
April O’Connor
Rourke O’Connor
Lorena Maxwell
Nina Thibodeaux
Gil Bailey
Oren Bailey
Lily Grace
Another name came to me. “You’ll hate this as much as I hate Lily Grace being on that list, but we need to add LaVonne LeBeau. She found the body.”
Reed grumbled incoherently but put his neighbor’s name at the bottom. Then he put a line through her name right away. I couldn’t help but smile.
“What about your list of people who were in The Inn’s lobby last night when Suzette was being harassed?” I asked. “Let’s check that before we leave. Anyone on there you think we should add to the board?”
Reed pulled his notebook out of his pocket, unfolded the paper from last night, and gave an exhausted sigh as he scanned the list. “I don’t know. These other folks were there, but I don’t think they actually interacted with the victim. Laurel kicked them out before they could.”
“All right. We won’t add them to the board, but let’s not forget about them. Many times, the guilty party is someone who slides under the radar.”
He jotted “Inn List” at the bottom of the board as a reminder.
We made a loose plan to return to the station in the morning, review what we’d written on the board to be sure it actually made sense, and then proceed from there.
While I put Meeka’s booties back on her, knowing she’d want to run around the trench when we got to the house, Reed casually said, “Rosalyn says she’ll be here for a few weeks.”
“She’s got about a month off over the holidays. She’ll be here until the third week in January or something like that.” Then my tired brain registered the tone in his voice. “Deputy, are you interested in my sister?”
Reed flushed crimson-red and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Not seriously. We both have to go back to school.” He shrugged. “I figured if she’ll be here a while we could, you know, have dinner.”
Whispering Pines Mysteries Box Set 3 Page 37