Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

by Victoria Hamilton

  “How involved were you in the plot?” I asked, slowing to go around a branch that had fallen in the road. I wove around it, waiting for her answer. Involved enough that she’d come in costume to the party . . . the Mardi Gras mask and gaudy costume, complete with gloves. She had been involved enough that she could be going back to jail, I suspected, for more than just the parole violation.

  Wait . . . gloves? “How involved were you, Zoey?” I said, my blood running cold. “Involved enough that you were at the scene of the crime?”

  “Enough. Shut up now!”

  I felt something poke into my side and looked down at the barrel of a gun. I jumped and the car swerved.

  “Geez, will you watch what you’re doing?” she screeched, grabbing the door handle. “Just drive and stay steady, ’cause my finger’s on the trigger.”

  My hands were shaking and the weather was getting worse, and I didn’t know what else to do but keep driving and hope I could figure something out. Zoey with a gun, holding it on me. What the heck was going on? Maybe as I slowed to go through town I could catch someone’s attention. At the edge of Ridley Ridge, as I began to brake, Zoey moved across the seat, put the gun to my head, and stomped on the gas. I had no choice but to stay straight, weaving around the very few cars that were on the road in the storm, and we zoomed past the hospital and out the other side of the town like a greased pig slipping through a narrow doorway. I was terrified, and I struggled to keep control both of myself and the car. I shouted at her to get her foot off the gas, and as the gun wavered away from me, I kicked at her, completely forgetting about her wounds.

  It was all I could do to control the car for a long two or three minutes that felt like an eon as I slowed it to a moderate speed. She still held that gun on me, cursing me out the whole time and telling me to smarten up. Then she suddenly grabbed the wheel and wrenched it hard to the right, sending us and the car careening into a parking lot by an abandoned-looking gas station about a quarter mile past Ridley Ridge.

  I shrieked, but she just laughed hysterically; we bounced and jolted down a rise and slid to a stop in a shower of gravel as I slammed on the brakes. I was shaking badly, my heart pounding and bile rising in my throat, the seatbelt having taken my breath away. I undid it, rubbing my breastbone, which ached from the sudden stop. Before I could collect myself, Les Urquhart dashed out of the gas station, jerked open my door, and yanked me out by the hair. I scrabbled for footing on wet gravel and whacked at his hands, only succeeding in smacking myself in the head.

  “Shut up and get the hell into the station,” he growled, as unlike the lackadaisical man I had met on two occasions as could be imagined.

  “What’s going on?” I gabbled, clucking like a chicken about to lay an egg. Frigid rain poured down, soaking me in moments as he pushed me, stumbling and staggering, toward the door. “What are you doing this for?”

  “Between you and effing Juniper and Davey, you’ve ruined a beautiful, elegant, simple plan.” He wrenched my arm behind me and frog-walked me through a rickety screen door into a dark and musty interior. “Move the car, Zoey,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  He pushed me down on a wheeled office chair that skidded across the cement floor, screeching all the way. As I was about to spring up to bolt, he grabbed me again, shoving me back down on the chair. He was a lot stronger than I ever thought he could be, and he used the weight of his body to hold me down in the heavy vintage office chair, which was more steel than padding, as he efficiently zip-tied my hand to one armrest. “Stop struggling or I’ll kill you, I swear to God.”

  “He’ll do it, Merry,” came a voice out of the darkness.

  I squinted my eyes and peered through the dimness as Les zip-tied my other arm down. My eyes adjusted, and I could make out Cranston.

  “He will,” my faux cousin repeated. “He’s dangerous!”

  Les turned on a small office-style gooseneck lamp on a desk. That’s when I noticed that Cranston, too, was tied securely to an office chair. “What’s going on, Cran . . . What the heck is your real name?”

  He looked scared. His blunt, pudgy face was streaked and dirty, with tear trails running through the dust. He was always so neat and tidy, but now he looked disheveled, like he had slept in his clothes the previous night. “Bob. Just . . . Bob.” His voice cracked and quavered.

  “So, Just Bob, what gives?” I said, trying to keep my own voice from shaking, since he was doing enough quivering for both of us. Les Urquhart had disappeared, but he came back carrying a gun.

  Bob glanced fearfully at Les, who waved the gun casually, and said, “Go ahead, tell her. Tell her all about it while I figure out what to do.”

  I didn’t like the hint of desperation in his voice, but I thought I’d just ignore that for the moment and try to keep everything calm. “I don’t know anything at this point, you know,” I said to Les. “Not a thing!”

  “Right,” he said, glaring at me through squinty eyes. “Nice try. You spend half an hour in the park with the damned sheriff of Autumn Vale, he suddenly up and calls the Ridley Ridge PD to pick me up for questioning, and I’m supposed to believe you don’t know anything?” Sarcasm and disbelief threaded through his tone.

  “How do you know all that?”

  “You have some enemies in Autumn Vale, or didn’t you know that?”

  I thought of the woman who had screeched at me that I was ruining things. “Who is that woman and why does she hate me?”

  He chuckled. “What, you don’t like my mom? Well, she doesn’t like you, either. She thinks you are a snippety know-it-all from New York, and my aunt Minnie thinks so, too. My brother hears all about you from those losers, Zeke and Gordy, and he thinks you’re some kind of nutcase, fixing up that dump and thinking anyone is going to buy it. My brother’s wife works at the police department in Ridley Ridge. I have a lot of family!”

  “So . . . your aunt is Minnie, the local postal worker and the town gossip.” It gave me the creeps to think about how he had been monitoring my every move. I didn’t have anything else to say to Les, so I turned to Cranston—or Bob. He was terrified, and I wondered why Les was holding him. Would he kill the con man? Sure, he had departed from the script, but that was not a killing offense. Or was it? The story was beginning to make sense in my head. Davey Hooper had, after doing the requisite research, recruited this fellow to play the unacknowledged grandson of Melvyn Wynter. “So, Bob, what happened? Why did you change up the script Hooper had given you?”

  “I just thought . . .” He trailed off on a sob. “P-poor Davey . . . he was an old friend.”

  “Old friend? Nice company you keep.”

  He scuffed the dusty floor with one foot. “I won’t speak ill of dead,” he said, a little huffy. “I think the company he kept—him and his sleazy brother, Dinty—was much worse!” He shot a look of fearful hatred toward Les. “Anyway,” he continued, taking in a deep shuddering breath, “Davey was smart, but this time I just thought he was being shortsighted. You’ve got a lot of friends, Merry, a lot of rich friends!” he said, earnestly, like it was news to me. “It was an opportunity. I figured, why not do both? You know, score off you and mine your rich friends, a kind of side business. Davey didn’t see it that way, so I just kept him happy, told him what he needed to hear, and stayed out of his way while I conducted a little . . . a little personal business.”

  Les snorted.

  “Personal business as in trying to rip off my friends,” I said.

  Zoey slipped in through the screeching screen door and kicked it shut as the wind wailed outside; she perched on the edge of the steel desk, pushing aside the old gooseneck lamp, and fired up a cigarette. She had my purse—an older Balenciaga bag that Leatrice had given me when she was in a good mood—and casually overturned it, going through the contents on the desk. I gritted my teeth. I do not like people pawing through my things. She held up a Lancôme coral lipstick a
nd nodded. “Not bad!” She lipsticked her mouth, so that was one lipstick I would be tossing out. I noticed she exhibited no trace of the pain she had claimed to be experiencing. She could have had a career on the screen if she had stayed out of trouble, that’s how convincing her pain and fear had been to me. I stifled my natural reaction, which was to tell her to leave my stuff alone, and turned away.

  How was I going to get out of this? It didn’t seem like Les had any plan, and that was almost more scary than if he had. It left his responses wide-open, and he could flail widely between ransoming us and killing us. Or me. I doubted anyone would pay to get poor Bob back. How could I turn this situation to my benefit?

  I decided to let my mind work on that in the background while I kept the info stream flowing. “So Les, the night of my party, you and Davey and Zoey came to the castle to corner poor old Bobby here, and let me guess . . . Hooper kicked up a fuss? Was that his downfall?”

  Zoey shifted on the desk, and said, “Poor Davey . . . he really thought I was into him, you know? Thought I was a solid-gold good luck charm, me and my daddy’s money. He played the badass, but he wasn’t truly a tough guy, just a kinda pretend tough guy.”

  “What happened in your life that you prefer the kind of guy who is only after you for your money, as opposed to someone who might give a damn about you?” I asked brightly.

  I didn’t see it coming. Les struck me, hard; I yelped and felt a burst of pain across my jaw. I skidded backward on my wheeled chair and hit Bob, who cried out in fear.

  Zoey chuckled, and the chuckle turned into gales of laughter as she saw my no doubt dazed expression. “Now see, that’s worth it all right there!”

  “I told you,” Bob whimpered and pushed his wheeled office chair away from me as if I had some kind of communicable disease. “Don’t make him mad.”

  I stretched my jaw, wishing I could touch it. Okay, so it hurt, but no teeth had been damaged. However, I’m no idiot and I don’t like pain. I would never make it as the kick-ass heroine of an action drama. My tone was milder when I said to Les, “So you came to my party to corner Bob, and things got out of hand?”

  Les, hoisting himself up to sit cross-legged on the desk next to Zoey, looked at me with an expression holding some respect. Maybe the fact that I wasn’t whimpering like Bob made me look a little more stoic. If he only knew that inside my guts were quivering like jelly. He took the cigarette from his girlfriend and lit a joint, inhaling and holding the smoke in his lungs as he handed the butt back to Zoey.

  “Just bad timing. It was all cool, but then Davey overheard something I said to Zoey,” he said, exhaling a great cloud of smoke, the grassy herbal smell drifting toward me. “For a while I had been the only one talking to Davey and the only one talking to Bob, so I was the go-between, but I was playing both ends. You know how it is. He figured it out and then started kicking up a fuss with Bobby, here. Said he didn’t appreciate the crap little old Bobby was pulling behind his back. I would have made our whiney friend here pay, but Davey was cut from different cloth and decided to ice him.”

  “Imagine that . . . a con man who didn’t like being conned.” I wasn’t sure I bought Les’s explanation completely. Davey Hooper was planning to kill Bob? I didn’t think so, but I would bet that’s what Les had told Bob to keep him quiet about the whole affair. Les, defender of the helpless . . . right. “Why do I think that maybe it was you who suggested killing Bob, and Davey who kicked up a fuss?”

  Bob moaned in fear, but Les, mellower now, ignored my interjection. “Anyway, Davey heard me tell Zoey that we needed to cut Davey out of the con somehow. Course, I didn’t know that then, did I, that Davey overheard? Or things would have gone a whole lot different. When Davey asked him about it, Bobby here used it to get himself off the hook and got Davey all worked up about me intending to cut him out of the payoff.”

  “So you killed Hooper, just like that?”

  Bob whimpered and scuttled even farther back until he was in the shadows. Apparently being a good con man did not make him physically gutsy.

  “Course not,” Les said, taking another drag and relaxing even more. “Things were getting complicated, though. Davey told Zoey’s papa that she was there at the party, after Channer confronted him. When Davey told me what he’d done, I wanted to deck him. Zoey had to stay out of sight after that, because the moron was wandering around looking for her while ducking out of sight of you.” He chuckled and stared at me, his eyes half closed in stoned mellowness. “Channer told Davey he didn’t want to listen to your freakin’ sales pitch again! Said you made him want to tell you your castle was a piece of crap in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Ticked me off, having to stay out of sight of Daddy. I’d been having so much fun playing tag with those dumb local bimbos!” Zoey said, with an exaggerated pout. “Les, can I get my cell phone back now? I want to check in with a couple of friends.”

  “No. You’re not using it until we get some money and get out of this hellhole.”

  She slumped down and pawed through my stuff some more, surreptitiously taking my cell phone and thumbing through it. I desperately wished she’d accidentally dial 911 or something. Where did he plan on getting money? I wondered.

  “Anyway, I got Hooper settled down . . . told him it was just a misunderstanding,” Les said. “But he was bringing me down, saying he just wanted to get the con done and be gone. If Bob and I went along with his original plan, he’d forgive and forget. Forgive and forget! He didn’t even freakin’ care about getting the old dude who killed his bro. Can’t stand lack of loyalty. Brothers should stick together, you know? If someone was in any way responsible for my brother dying, I’d gut him like a pig.”

  “So Davey, Les, and I were out in the smoking pit arguing,” Zoey said, tucking my cell phone in her skirt waistband.

  He shot her a look and she shrugged and went back to smoking and pawing through my stuff.

  “No one else?”

  “Too damn freezing, I guess, and not many of your hoity-toity crowd smokes,” Les said, watching me. His eyes were cold, and I thought I could see him calculating what to do.

  “You were there, Zoey, while the whole thing went down?”

  She nodded but didn’t look up. She picked up my silver compact, a gift from Miguel, and opened it, checking herself out in the mirror. I bit my lip to keep from telling her to put it down. She took a tissue, licked it, and began blotting the dark streaks of makeup off her cheeks.

  Les continued his story. “Davey got on my case about Zo. I looked over and saw the coffin sitting there, where a bunch of your goofball guests had dragged it and the mannequin.” He paused and smirked. “Seemed like a good idea—serendipitous, you might say—so I took care of it.” He drew his thumb across his throat in a cutting gesture and made a graphic slitting and gurgling noise.

  Bob started crying, and Zoey glanced over at Les uncertainly. She was trying to be Miss Tough Girl, but she wasn’t selling me on it. She flashed a look at me, and she looked so old, so detached, and yet . . . so scared. She looked frightened and hopeless. I wondered, had Les chosen the Sweeney Todd costume for that reason, knowing what he planned to do?

  “So, the handprint on the wall . . . it was yours, wasn’t it, Zoey?”

  “She did her bit, didn’t you, good girl?” Les said, patting Zoey on the shoulder. “She helped me get Davey into the coffin.” He broke out in laughter. “My God, that was funny! Poor old Davey bleeding like a stuck pig and both of us trying to stuff him into the casket, arms flopping around! We dragged away the dummy, acting like it was a drunk guy we were helping out. Your dumbass doormen, Zeke and Gordy, were too busy looking after two girls, and no one else thought anything of it when we left.”

  “You left alone? What about Juniper?”

  Les shrugged. “She wasn’t with us.”

  “She was helping me,” Bob said in a tiny voice. “I wasn’t feelin
g well, and she helped me. She’s not a bad girl, you know.”

  Aha! Had Juniper begun to wonder after she heard about Davey being killed if Bob had been distracting her to keep her away from the scene? Or had she even put two and two together and begun to think he was involved in the murder itself? That would account for her freak-out when she saw him at the castle.

  “Not a bad girl? Are you kidding me?” Zoey shrieked. “She’s psycho! She tried to kill me with a knife, and if that isn’t psycho, I don’t . . .” She stopped before she finished and glanced over, eyes wide, at Les, who glared at her with narrowed eyes.

  “So, now, what do we do with you?” Les asked, glancing at me and then taking out a knife and cutting his fingernail, paring it like an apple. His gun lay on his lap like a favorite puppy.

  I was attached to an office chair in a dim back room with a killer, his clueless girlfriend, and a useless con man who was quietly snuffling away in the corner. What was I going to do? I needed to keep alert for any way out of this, because I had a feeling Les would come to the conclusion that his best bet was to snuff both Bob and I.

  Stay alert; that was good advice to myself, and I took it. As well as excellent vision, I have pretty good hearing, certainly better than a stoner. I heard, through the wail of the wind outside, what sounded like the thrum of a heavy motor, but that suddenly stopped.

  Was it possible? Was rescue close at hand?

  And then, above the wind, I heard a megaphone-amplified voice, gruff and sexy, say, “Les Urquhart, we know you’re in there, and we know you have a hostage. If you come out with your hands up before anyone else gets hurt, we might be able to cut you a deal.”

  It was Virgil!

  But . . . really? Did they honestly think that Les was going to play nice with so much at stake? Bob, still whimpering, dragged his chair across the floor toward the door, and Les jumped down from the desk to stop him, but he tripped and fell flat out on the floor as his gun skittered across the cement. I stood as best as I could and with one mighty swing I lifted the office chair and flung it down on him, forgetting that, because I was attached to it, that swinging motion would take me flying, too. The weight of that old steel office chair carried me with it, and I flew on top of Les, just as Virgil, my hero, burst into the deserted gas station office, gun drawn.