Hot, Spicy Murder

by Patti Benning

  “Can you walk?” the man asked, beginning to sound desperate. “Are you sure you don’t want an ice pack?”

  “I’m fine!” She snapped the words without meaning to. “Sorry,” she said immediately, forcing herself to calm down.

  “No, no, I’m sorry. It’s just, someone got injured here last year and the rates on our insurance went way up. If there is another incident, we won’t be able to afford to keep this place open. I just want to make sure that you really are okay. I know we can’t survive a lawsuit.”

  She blinked. “I’m okay,” she said, finding it uncomfortable to realize that the motel really was struggling. “I’m just going to go back to my room and lay down for a little bit.”

  “Okay...”

  “Charles, didn’t I tell you I was going to get the laundry?” an annoyed voice snapped from the door behind the desk. Ellie turned to see Annie Maple standing there, her hands on her hips. “Those are my personal things, and now they are spread across the floor for the whole world to see.”

  Glad that Mr. Maple’s attention was no longer on her, Ellie began to back toward the door, only to freeze again when the woman’s words hit home. Those were her clothes? That didn’t explain the blood on the shirt at all. She tried to remember what Annie had been wearing the day she had first checked into the motel, but drew a blank. She had been too desperate to get a room and get off her feet to pay any attention to another woman’s clothing.

  “Sorry, dear,” her husband said. “I was just trying to help. You seemed so upset ever since Richard was killed.”

  “This is my stuff,” she muttered. “My shirt, where is my shirt…”

  “What are you talking about?” her husband asked.

  “I had a shirt in here that I wanted to keep track of, that’s all,” she said, biting her lip as she searched through the pile of laundry.

  “It’s all here, dear,” he said. “I’ll help you get everything sorted out. You just sit down. There is no need to worry.”

  He crouched down and began to pick up clothes. When he grabbed a white shirt and turned it over to begin folding it, Ellie saw the blood stains on the front of it. Her heart began to beat faster. What was going on?

  She saw Mr. Maple freeze when he noticed the stains on the shirt. “Annie, is this blood? What happened? Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I’m fine,” his wife said quickly. “It’s not my blood…” She slammed her mouth shut, eyes darting nervously to Ellie. Ellie saw Mr. Maple glanced down at the shirt, then looked back up at his wife. She took a hesitant step forward, not quite sure what to do. There was definitely something going on, but she couldn’t put the pieces together quite yet.

  “Whose blood is it, Annie?”

  Annie’s face went pale. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped. “I spilled some tomato sauce on myself, that’s all.”

  “I’ve been married to you for thirty years. I know perfectly well what stains from tomato sauce look like by now, and this isn’t it. This is blood, Annie, and a lot of it. What on earth happened?”

  “Nothing!” the other woman shouted. Her gaze started to Ellie again. She seemed to forcefully rein her temper in. “Nothing, dear. It must just be mud or something. We can talk about it later.”

  Her husband ignored her, still frowning down at the shirt. Ellie wasn’t sure what to do. Should she leave? Should she go back to the motel room and have her grandmother call the police? What if she left, and something bad happened to Annie or her husband? She still wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

  “Is it… Richard’s?” Mr. Maple said, looking up at his wife and blinking slowly, as if he didn’t want to believe it. And he inhaled sharply, but didn’t say anything. He seemed to take her lack of denial as an answer. “Oh, Annie, what have you done?”

  “He was going to close the motel down,” the older woman said, her voice choked. Ellie’s skin prickled at the confession. “I couldn’t let him. I know how much you love this place. He told me exactly what was wrong with it, and I figured that if we had more time, we could fix it. If I was able to stop him from turning in the results, we might be able to keep this motel up and running.”

  “Oh, Annie…” The older man shook his head sadly. Ellie could see that his hands were shaking now. He let the shirt fall to the floor in a heap. “I can’t believe you would do something like this.”

  He sounded heartbroken, and Ellie couldn’t blame him. He had just mentioned that he had been married to Annie for thirty years. Ellie tried to imagine what it would be like to have been with someone for so long, only to have them do something like this. She couldn’t fathom it.

  “I did it for you,” the woman said, as if that was supposed to make things better. “You love this place so much. I couldn’t let him take it from you.”

  “I can’t believe you killed someone,” Mr. Maple said, his voice breaking. He got to his feet and took half a step back, then seemed to remember that Ellie was there because he snapped his head around to look at her, his eyes widening.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I’ll… I’ll go call the police,” Ellie said, taking stumbling steps backward, desperate to get out of there.

  “Charles, don’t let her go,” Annie said, the woman’s voice now tinged with panic. “They’ll send me to prison. We have to stop her.” When her husband hesitated, she added “Think of what I did for you. Don’t let it be for nothing. You have to help me keep her from saying anything.”

  “You’re insane,” Ellie bit out. “He’s not going to help you kill me just because it…”

  She broke off, seeing a strange sort of resolve filling the man’s eyes. Her blood turned to ice in her veins. After thirty years of marriage, why would she expect Charles Maple to suddenly turn against the woman he loved and let her spend the rest of her life in prison? For some people, love really did conquer all.

  “I should never have let you use that darn landline,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Ellie, beginning to realize that she might be in real danger, started to backpedal. Luckily, she was near the door, and the older man didn’t seem to have quite come to a decision yet. Ellie pushed through the door, then turned and ran back toward their motel room.

  She didn’t stop running until she was inside, shutting the door behind her and throwing the deadbolt. Her grandmother was standing by the window, staring at her in shock.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Ellie panted. “But we need to call the police, right now.”

  Her grandmother’s eyes widened, but instead of questioning her, she reached over to the desk and picked up the phone off of its cradle. She typed the three digits into it and Ellie listened with bated breath as it began to ring.

  “Hello?” she heard the dispatcher say. Nonna handed the phone to Ellie.

  “We’re at the Maple Motel,” she said, quickly giving him the closest intersection. “Please, send someone right away. I think someone’s going to try to kill me.”

  “Please stay on the phone, ma’am. Why do you think someone is going to try to hurt you?”

  Before Ellie could answer, the room went dark and the phone went dead. She could tell by the echoing silence that the power had been shut off. The Maples must have cut the power to the entire building in an effort to keep her from contacting the outside world.

  “This is bad,” Ellie murmured, fear rushing through her. It was different than the fear that she had felt while listening to the older woman’s confession. This was a more primitive fear, the fear of being trapped. There was only one exit in the room, and no other way out.

  “The door is dead bolted, they can’t open that with a key,” her grandmother said. “We can pull the curtains shut and just wait for someone to save us.”

  “We don’t even know if the police are on their way,” Ellie said. “They might have thought it was a prank call. I can tell that the dispatcher didn’t believe me. And besides, I’m pretty sure that they have a master key that can
open any of the locks.”

  “Then what do we do?” her grandmother asked.

  Ellie looked out the window, staring at the diner across the parking lot. The lights were still on inside, even though she thought that the restaurant was probably closed by now. There was a chance that Sarah or another employee might still be there, cleaning up. Then she looked back at her grandmother and squashed down the plan that was forming in her mind. There was no way that she was going to leave the older woman behind, and she knew that her grandmother could never make a run across the parking lot.

  “Ellie, you have to go,” the older woman said, having followed the direction of her gaze.

  “It’s too far,” Ellie whispered. “We would never beat them to the diner.”

  “We wouldn’t,” her grandmother agreed. “But you would.”

  “No, Nonna, I’m not leaving you…”

  “You have to,” the older woman said. “You have to go call for help and make sure that the police are on their way. Just go and run across the parking lot before those two psychos try to kill us in our motel room.”

  “But what if they come after you instead?”

  “I think it’s you they’re after, not me. I’ll be perfectly fine. And besides, you need to get home to Russell, Ellie. I’m not going to be the reason my granddaughter dies. Don’t risk your life for mine.”

  Ellie felt a lump in her throat. She loved her grandmother, so of course she would risk her life for the older woman’s. But she couldn’t deny that her grandmother’s plan was the only one they had. They needed to make sure that the police were on their way, and the only way that they could do that was at the diner.

  “Promise me that you’ll be careful,” Ellie said. “Lock the door when I leave and hide as best you can.”

  “I will,” Nonna said. “You promise me that you’ll run as fast as you can without looking back.”

  The two of them stared at each other for a second, then Ellie pulled the older woman into a tight hug before hurrying toward the motel room door. She knew that every second counted. It wouldn’t take the Maples long to come and try to ensure her permanent silence. Taking a deep breath, she yanked the door open and stepped out it without looking behind her. It wasn’t just her life that was on the line now, it was her grandmother’s as well.

  She didn’t get far. The older couple must have been waiting for her. The instant she stepped out of the motel room, she felt something strike the back of her knees, and she fell down, hitting the same bruises that she had first made when she tripped in the lobby. She hissed in pain. If she survived until tomorrow, she was going to be quite sore.

  “Annie,” she heard Mr. Maple cry out. She twisted her head around, trying to see what was happening. If this was it, then she wanted to see her attackers face to face.

  Annie was standing above her, holding a crowbar. Slightly behind her was her husband, looking pale and shocked… and not at all like he was prepared to bash her brains in.

  “We have to make sure she won’t tell anyone, Charles,” Annie snapped. “Help me with this.”

  Annie raised the crowbar higher, tightening her grip on it. Ellie flinched, reflexively holding up her hands in a weak attempt to shield herself. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the motel room door opening, and felt her heart skip a beat. She did not want her grandmother out here for this.

  She saw Annie tense and at the last second decided to try to dodge the blow. She rolled away, hearing the crowbar clang against the asphalt only inches from her head. It hit hard enough that she knew that if she had tried to block it with her hands, she would have suffered multiple broken bones as a consequence.

  “I’m not letting you tear apart my life,” Annie said. “I’m not going to lose the motel, and I’m not going to lose my husband or my freedom. I won’t let anyone stop me.”

  Ellie scrambled backwards, trying to get away from the crazed woman. She was raising the crowbar again, and her husband was still standing back, his eyes wide and his face pale.

  She was just about to brace herself for the next attack when her eyes went wide at the sight of Nonna standing behind Annie with her walker raised over her head. The other woman must have seen her gaze, because she spun around just a split second too late. Nonna brought the walker down, the aluminum frame clashing against the crowbar. She hadn’t dealt the blow with much force, but the shock of it had been enough that Annie released her grip on the crowbar and let it fall to the ground. She stumbled backward into her husband.

  “Hurry, Ellie,” Nonna said. “Come here.”

  “Don’t try to hide,” Annie spat at them. “You can’t call the police. We shut the power off. There’s nowhere else to go. I’m not letting you tell anyone what I did.”

  She tried to take a step forward, but now Ellie saw Mr. Maple’s hand on her arm. The older woman looked back at her husband in surprise. He simply shook his head at her.

  “That’s enough, Annie. I’m not a killer. I didn’t think you were either, but I’m not going to let you do this to anyone. They did nothing wrong.”

  “Don’t you get it? I’ll go to prison if we let them get away. You’ll never see me again.”

  “I would rather be married to a woman in prison than be married to a murderer.”

  He seemed to be purposefully ignoring the fact that his wife had already killed one person, but Ellie wasn’t about to interrupt to point out the flaw in his logic. She saw Annie’s breath catch and tears appear in the other woman’s eyes.

  “All we have to do is make them disappear, then we can have our life back to normal,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t want to go to prison, Charles.”

  “I’m not letting you do this,” her husband said sadly, pulling her back so that he was hugging her, restraining her even more securely than when he had simply had his hand on her arm.

  Ellie realized that she could hear sirens off in the distance. The dispatcher must have believed her enough to send police to their location, and she felt a rush of relief. Slowly, keeping a wary eye on the Maples, she got to her feet, moving to stand by her grandmother. She was shaking, with adrenaline still rushing through her body. She didn’t think that she had ever been so close to death before, and she certainly didn’t want to ever be so close to it again.

  Epilogue

  We’re in Maine,” Ellie said, smiling over at the older woman next to her. Nonna beamed, looking around.

  “We really are going to make it home today, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we will,” Ellie said. She couldn’t wait to see Russell again. So much had happened during the trip. The murder, the affairs, even the car wreck. She wanted to tell her husband about everything in minute detail.

  Thinking about Russell made her think about Charles and Annie Maple, as well as Rob and Sarah. She couldn’t imagine ever betraying Russell by murdering an innocent person or having an affair. Even if her own morals and beliefs prevented her from doing anything of the sort, she knew that the thought of Russell’s great disappointment in her would be enough to keep her from doing anything of the sort. She loved him, and she never wanted him to look at her and see a bad person.

  Luckily, compared to the beginning of their trip, the rest of it had seemed uneventful. She and her grandmother had spent a long couple of days driving up the East Coast of the United States in the still somewhat damaged car. The first day after leaving the Maple Motel they had both been quiet and brooding. They had witnessed a thirty-year marriage get destroyed, had helped solve the murder, and Ellie had found herself face to face with a dead man yet again. The latter seemed to be becoming a habit, and it was a habit that she wanted to get out of, quickly.

  With any luck, this coming summer would be a relaxing one. She would have her grandmother living right next door to her, and Russell had promised to take weekends off whenever he could. With him, the animals, and her best friend, she knew that she would never be lacking company. The pizzeria was bound to be busy, and with the new cons
truction beginning on the hotel that her friend Joanna’s husband was building, the little town was sure to be getting its fair share of extra tourism.

  No matter how busy it was, as long as she could avoid getting involved in any cases, she was sure that it would be relaxing compared to the last summer. She would be at home with the people she loved and trusted. She could forget about dead bodies, murders, and betrayal. If there was one thing that she was sure of, it was that she could trust the people that she had come to think of as family.

  Also by Patti Benning

  Papa Pacelli’s Series

  Book 1: Pall Bearers and Pepperoni

  Book 2: Bacon Cheddar Murder

  Book 3: Very Veggie Murder

  Book 4: Italian Wedding Murder

  Book 5: Smoked Gouda Murder

  Book 6: Gourmet Holiday Murder

  Book 7: Four Cheese Murder

  Book 8: Hand Tossed Murder

  Book 9: Exotic Pizza Murder

  Book 10: Fiesta Pizza Murder

  Book 11: Garlic Artichoke Murder

  Book 12: On the Wings of Murder

  Book 13: Mozzarella and Murder

  Book 14: A Thin Crust of Murder

  Book 15: Pretzel Pizza Murder

  Book 16: Parmesan Pizza Murder

  Book 17: Breakfast Pizza Murder

  Book 18: Halloween Pizza Murder

  Book 19: Thanksgiving Pizza Murder

  Book 20: Christmas Pizza Murder

  Book 21: A Crispy Slice of Murder