by Ella White
“How on earth does Kate keep track of all this?”
Vickie immediately began searching for any thread with Matthew Bae as the original blogger. She didn’t bother to look for every post he ever wrote, as this alone could take days, but it wasn’t difficult to find posts by him. Many of the threads he started were labeled something along the lines of “What Harrison Bell Should Write Next.” As she read through some of them, Vickie began to feel sick to her stomach.
Just as Kate said, they really were simply long diatribes of descriptive crime scenes. The passages covered potential crime scenes from top to bottom, including the body and surrounding environment for evidence pointing to a killer. It would be really beautiful writing if it hadn’t been so gruesome. After only a few posts, Vickie had to stop reading or else she felt she would lose the contents of her lunch.
“No wonder Kate didn’t want him following them around.” She shut off her computer. “It doesn’t prove he could have killed Anthony, but he certainly has the imagination for it.”
Just as Vickie was opening her door, she found herself face to face with Kimberly, who had her arm raised to knock on the door. Kim stared for a minute before gathering her thoughts enough to speak.
“Vickie, Amber is here,” she informed her employer. “She came bursting in, demanding to speak to you. She says it’s about Anthony’s death.”
The two women quickly returned to the front of the café, where a young woman with blond dreadlocks and a tie-dye T-shirt was stepping back and forth between her feet. She looked up as Vickie came into view, and she leaned across the counter.
“Vickie! Vickie! You won’t believe what I’ve found!”
“Slow down, Amber.” Vickie held up her hands in a surrender pose. “Relax. I’m not going anywhere. What did you find out?”
“I heard you were asking about Matthew Bae, from last night?” At Vickie’s nod, she continued. “Well, do you remember a guy with a streak of gray in his hair?”
“You mean Harrison Bell?”
“No! Someone else! Younger. That’s Matthew Bae!”
Vickie thought back to the previous night, trying to picture the person Amber was describing. Suddenly the image of a young man with brown hair that had a streak of gray in it, just like Harrison’s, came to her. It was hard to picture his face exactly, as he had been at the front of the audience during the event and Vickie had stayed at the back near the counter.
“I think I remember him…vaguely.”
“Well I thought it was really strange that he would be so into Bell’s books and appearance, so I followed him home,” Amber informed her.
“You spied on him?!”
“Call it reconnaissance.” Amber’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s staying at The Lazy Owl, the B and B on the south edge of town. You know, the one Gwen owns?”
“Yes, I know the one.” Vickie wrote down the name on a napkin. “I’ve known Gwen for a while. Now I know where he’s staying. Thank you very much, Amber.”
“No worries, Vickie.” Amber gave her a mock salute.
Vickie pulled out her cell phone, intending to first call Gwen to keep an eye on Matthew, and after that she planned to call Rachel.
Chapter 5
“Are you sure Amber said she saw him at this B and B?” Rachel asked into her cell phone as she rushed out of the Carriage Cove Chronicle office. “What was is called again? The Lazy Eye?”
“The Lazy Owl.” Vickie burst out into laughter on the other end of the line. “The Lazy Eye. That’s a great name for a B and B.”
“And Gwen said she would try to keep an eye on Matthew for us?”
“Yes. Hopefully he’s still there.”
Rachel got into her car and switched her phone to speaker so she could talk and drive simultaneously. “How do I get there again?”
“Just head north. It’s on the edge of town,” Vickie instructed her. “Take the road that eventually leads to the freeway. The B and B is right on that street.”
“Cool. I’m on my way. Thanks, Mom.”
Rachel hung up her phone and pulled out of the parking lot, taking the closest road that would lead her north. Thankfully it had a fairly high speed limit, so she was able to drive pretty fast to her destination. It only took about fifteen minutes for her to arrive. As she pulled up, she stared at the strangeness that was The Lazy Owl Bed and Breakfast.
The building was split into three large sections. The middle part had the front door and two huge windows on each side of the door. On the door was a painted frieze in the shape of a beak, if one looked down on it. The windows were strangely circular and shaped like the giant eyes of an owl. The other two sections were to the sides, with painted murals indicating feathers in browns and grays, with horns on the roof suggesting pointed feathers on the head of an owl.
Rachel just stared at the building and couldn’t help but angle her head to the side.
“Someone needs to fire their architect.”
Making sure she had her notebook and pen with her, Rachel walked inside the bed and breakfast. In the front room was a desk similar to the kind one would find in a hotel, but it was smaller and had only one computer. However, that was the most mundane part of the lobby.
The rest of the room was covered from floor to ceiling in various owl decorations. There were paintings of owls, sculptures of owls, small glass owls, music boxes with owls and even a Russian doll set in the shape of owls! A few wooden owls in a flying pose hung from the ceiling, and there were plates that were either decorated with owl artwork or shaped in the form of owls and owl heads. On the desk there was even a porcelain candy dish with an owl perched on the edge.
Someone is really obsessed with owls, Rachel thought as she tried to keep her eyes from being overwhelmed. She walked up to the counter to the receptionist. “Hello. My name is Rachel Matheson. Is Gwen here?”
“That would be me,” the woman replied. She was around Vickie’s age, although she had gone entirely gray by this point. Like her bed and breakfast, she wore a dress with owls patterned all over it. It would be a pretty dress if it weren’t already surrounded by so many owl-themed decorations. “I’m Gwen. Vickie told me you might be coming by.”
Rachel nodded. “That’s right. I was hoping I’d run into Matthew Bae. I heard he was staying here.”
“He is, but you just missed him.” Gwen gave her a sympathetic smile. “You mother told me you wanted to talk to him, so I tried to distract him with some owl plates to keep him here a little longer, but he literally just left a few minutes ago.”
Rachel cursed with a snap of her fingers. She glanced around the room again. She couldn’t really blame him for not wanting to stay here any longer than he needed to.
“This was the only lead I had on him…”
“Well, he didn’t check out of his room,” Gwen mentioned. “So I’m sure he’ll be back sometime later.”
“True, but the sooner I can talk to him, the better.” As the two were speaking, Rachel’s phone began to ring. She pulled it out of her purse and looked at the caller ID. “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s the office.”
She answered her phone, and instead of her boss (as she expected) it turned out to be James. “Hey, Rachel. Is this a bad time?”
“No. What’s up?”
“I just made a follow-up call to the police, and the coroner said they finished the autopsy,” he described. “He didn’t find any poison in Anthony’s system.”
“They got the results that quickly?” Rachel’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “I thought it would take a few days, at least.”
“Not when there isn’t anything in the sample,” James explained. “Turns out they test for the presence of a poison first, and then if that comes back positive they search for the type of poison.”
“I’ve never heard of it being done that way before.”
“That’s not all though.” James took a breath before continuing. “The police checked out the garden shears found…well…”
James paused. “Okay. They checked the shears in his chest, and they found traces of tea on the handles.”
“Really? Like the kind you drink?”
“Is there another kind?” James sounded genuinely confused.
Rachel pulled her phone away from her ear for a second, a thought occurring to her. She turned back to Gwen.
“Did Matthew have breakfast here?”
“Of course he did.” Gwen looked a bit affronted by the suggestion that he hadn’t. “He had scrambled eggs and toast. I offered him more, but that was all he wanted.”
“What did he have to drink?” Rachel was going a bit on a hunch, but it was better than having nothing.
“Tea, with honey and milk.”
Rachel scribbled this down on her notepad. “I think I’ve got an idea. Thanks for the call, James.”
“No problem. Talk to you later.”
With the push of a button, she hung up the phone and smiled up at Gwen.
“I’m going to need to ask for another favor, if it’s not too much trouble?”
Gwen blinked. “Of course. What is it?”
“Give him this note for me,” Rachel replied, writing down a request on her notebook and pulling out the page. She passed the paper to Gwen. “I’m going to make him come to me.”
Gwen read the note and chuckled. “This ought to do it. I’ll make sure he gets it.”
“Thanks so much for your help, Gwen.”
Rachel took her time getting back to the Chronicle’s office. It really wasn’t that far from the bed and breakfast, so she probably didn’t have to rush there as much as she had. She did end up barely missing Matthew, so who knows if it would have made a difference whether she had rushed or not.
With a sigh, she headed back into the office and to her small desk next to the entrance. There were tons of desks all over the room, one for each journalist, but Rachel’s had been brought in at the last minute, so it had ended up being the one closest to the door. She plopped down into her chair and set her purse on the floor with a thud. She had already looked through every possible suspect for this case, excluding the ex-girlfriend, whom James was covering for her, so this was the only chance she really had to sit and take a minute to think.
Glancing around the office, she took in the slightly chaotic atmosphere. Even without being the chief reporter on the only murder that had occurred in Carriage Cove in what was probably decades, there were still plenty of stories to be covered and written up. Stephanie was busy with the dog show competition that was going to take place next week, Gary was covering the car crash that had happened two days ago and Sarah was busy interviewing many of the students at the university about the melting of one of the student chemistry labs. James had been researching the protests over the construction of a new mall next to the town’s largest park before he started helping her on this murder case. And those were just a few of the stories she knew were being investigated, never mind the ones she was not as familiar with.
Rachel couldn’t really handle a lot of stress (her response to Anthony’s death was proof enough of that) but she really wanted to lead a stimulating life. That drive was what brought her into journalism to begin with. As a reporter she was able to go anywhere and do almost anything in the name of bringing to truth to the people. She had of course heard stories of biased reporting, but if there was one thing her boss, Henry, was insistent about, it was that each of the journalists had reliable sources for their stories.
The office had really become a second home to her. She sometimes spent more time here than she did at her own little apartment. Everyone running back and forth between desks, in and out of the building, trading ideas and stories, keyboards and typewriters clicking away, printers screaming, phones ringing, papers flying everywhere…the office was really her type of place! It had the ideal balance of chaos and regulation that was perfect for her.
“Hey, Rachel.” She turned her head to see a glasses-wearing young man. “How’s it going?”
“All right, I guess. Thanks for the call earlier, James.”
“Did you find anything helpful at the B and B?” James inquired.
“Not specifically, but your call gave me an idea,” she replied. James waved his hands, gesturing for her to continue. “I left a note with the owner, asking Matthew to meet my at my mom’s café later today if he was available.”
His right eyebrow rose. “How do you know he’ll come?”
“I lied,” Rachel said with a laugh. “I wrote that I was a blogger writing about Harrison Bell and wanted a fan’s input about the rather grizzly events that have taken place.”
“Well it’s not exactly a lie,” James conceded. “And if he really is as obsessed with Harrison Bell and his books as he sounds, that’s exactly the kind of bait he’ll bite.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Rachel sat up straighter in her chair. “Have you found anything else?”
“That’s why I’m here. The ex-girlfriend, Chambers?”
“Yeah? What about her?”
“Apparently she was his assistant before Kate was,” he described. “She worked with him on his books, brainstorming ideas, coming up with dialogue and things like that. She was not happy that Harrison Bell did not credit her as a co-author for the novel.”
Rachel nodded. “Understandable. I wouldn’t like that much either.”
“I even spoke with her about it and took a statement.” James passed her three full sheets of notepad paper. “She had a lot to say about it.”
She looked over the statement, taking into account that James had to write very small to get all the information to fit.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. She seems to think she’s got a real case for it.”
“That’s motive enough in my book, but what about means and opportunity?”
“That’s where her alibi kicks in.” James shook his head. “She was in the hospital in New York last night. She just had an appendectomy.”
“Ouch. That’s a bummer to say the least,” Rachel grimaced. “That explains why we couldn’t get a hold of her for so long. Guess she’s off the list. That leaves just Matthew Bae or Harrison Bell himself.”
“The more I hear about this guy, the less I like him,” James commented.
“Same here,” Rachel agreed. “And his books are so good too. Even if he didn’t kill Anthony, I’m losing interest in him as a person.”
James made a noise of agreement. “Hey, how are you holding up anyway?”
“About Anthony?” Rachel pointedly stared at her computer.
“Yeah, about him.” James shifted his weight between his feet. “I’m not trying to be a pest or anything, but…”
He trailed off for a second, and Rachel turned her gaze back to him. “Yes?”
“Well, I just wanted to let you know that I’m here if you ever need to talk.”
Rachel gave him a strained smile. James really was a sweetheart sometimes.
“I do appreciate it, but I’ve got to work through it on my own first. Sort out my thoughts.”
“Hey, no pressure or anything. It’s cool.”
James turned and headed back toward his desk, but Rachel called his name and he looked over his shoulder.
“Thanks, James. Even just for offering.”
He was smiling again as he turned around and walked on.
Chapter 6
“Okay, so everyone understands the plan, right?” Rachel asked Vickie and Kimberly.
“We’ve got it, Rachel.” Vickie gave her a tired smile. “You’re interviewing Matthew Bae under the guise of a blogger reporting on Harrison Bell’s arrest.”
“In connection to the murder,” Kimberly added.
“Right. And we’re going to prove he’s a tea drinker,” Rachel continued. “Do you have the copy of the book, Mom?”
“I left it in the back. I wanted to make s
ure no one bought it before this. I’ll go get it now.”
As Vickie headed to the back room, Rachel turned back to Kimberly. “Do you have the tape recorder?”
“Right here.” Kimberly passed the item to her. “Are you sure you don’t want to hide it under the table or something?”
“And take the chance a lawyer might try to get it thrown out of court because we secretly recorded Matthew without a warrant?” Rachel shook her head. “No way.”
“Wow, you’re thinking ahead.”
“It was Mom’s concern, actually. She reminded me about evidence being thrown out because it wasn’t legally obtained.”
“That would be the last thing we need,” Vickie proclaimed as she returned to the front of the café. “We don’t want to let a killer get free just because we didn’t follow protocol.”
“You sound a lot like that Chief Miles person,” Rachel commented.
Vickie paused and laughed. “I guess I do. Maybe she’s rubbing off on me.”
“You’ve only met her once!”
“In any case,” Vickie redirected, “I’m going to be serving the table, and Kimberly is going to be watching from the side, next to the phone in case something goes wrong.”
“I don’t get to be under cover with you?” Kimberly pouted.
“Not today, no.”
Kimberly groaned melodramatically as Rachel took the book and walked over to one of the tables next to the window. She looked down at the novel.
“Good thing I’ve already read this.” She gave her mother a sarcastic smile. “I think this is the first time I’ve finished a mystery novel before you, Mom.”
“Yeah, rub it in, why don’t you?” Vickie played along. “I’ve already ruined the ending for myself by reading the summary online. I feel bad enough about that as it is.”