by Cora Wilkins
She passed it to Kaye, and I leaned over and had a look as she opened it and leafed through it. “Hmm…it says she was having dinner with someone called ‘DT’ four days before the wedding. Any idea who that might be?”
“No. She often wrote people’s initials in there to save time.”
We had a flick through the rest of the diary, but nothing else stood out.
“All right. Mia, thank you so much,” I said. “I really think you should hand that diary in to the police now that you’ve remembered it. It could help them.”
She nodded and gave us a watery smile before walking us to the door, and Kaye and I sat in silence on the drive back to the cupcake shop. Up until now, we’d barely even considered the possibility that the killer was anyone other than Mia or Amy, but now we weren’t sure it was either one of them. Mia had seemed too genuinely upset and willing to help, and from what she’d said, Amy just wasn’t capable of killing. Of course it was still possible that she was wrong about Amy, but I had a strong instinctual feeling that we were barking up the wrong tree after seeing the diary.
Something told me that this ‘DT’ person she was having dinner with a few nights before Mrs. Barnaby’s wedding had something to do with her death. Perhaps it was a man she had been seeing; maybe even the mysterious on and off lover Mia had mentioned.
When we were back in the store, we filled Tori in on what we knew.
“Didn’t the police say the killer was probably female?” she asked. “I still think Amy is the most likely suspect, honestly.”
“Yes, but think about it,” I said. “What’s the best way to cover up a murder?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You make it look like someone else did it. If you’re a man and you want to kill someone, the best way to avoid suspicion would be to make it look like a woman did it. Hence the poison; a very female manner of murder, like Officer Bobby said. I think Zara might have been seeing a man who ended up killing her.”
“Not only that,” Kaye said, nodding in agreement. “In something like ninety percent of cases of violence against a woman, it turns out to be the man she’s involved with who did it. It’s an age-old cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason.”
“Hmm. I guess you guys have a point,” Tori replied. “So who’s this DT person?”
“That’s the million dollar question,” Kaye replied. “What about David Tanner from the post office?”
“He’s seventy-one,” I said. “I highly doubt she was seeing him! Besides, he broke his hip a couple of weeks ago. As far as I know he’s still laid up in bed. There’s no way he made it to the wedding reception and poisoned her drink.”
“What about her ex-husband? She said he used to hurt her. Maybe he came back and asked to meet with her for dinner, and then sneaked into the wedding reception a few days later to kill her.”
I shook my head. “No, his initials are T.K.”
“Your last name is Thurston, right Kaye?” Tori interjected. “And your husband’s name is Daniel.”
My eyes widened, and I half expected Kaye to slap Tori for even suggesting her husband had anything to do with the murder. Instead she simply laughed.
“Good sleuthing, Tori, but I’d know if my husband was having an affair and then decided to kill the other woman. Besides, he was with us at the reception around the time when the killer must have poisoned Zara’s drink. It couldn’t have been him.”
Tori’s face went bright red. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse your husband of murder. I don’t know why I even said that.”
“It’s fine. In cases like this, everyone’s a suspect!” Kaye said with a smirk. “What about Captain Treloar? His last name starts with T. What’s his first name?”
“Glenn,” I said with a sigh. We were getting nowhere. There were hardly any men in town with the initials DT, and I was beginning to think I was wrong about my theory. Perhaps ‘DT’ wasn’t even a person’s initials. Maybe Zara had been having dinner with a dolphin trainer?
Suddenly an idea struck me like a bolt of lightning.
“Oh!” I said. “Remember Zara’s last words to us? When she was lying on the ground trying to breathe, that is.”
“No, what were they?” Tori said, eyebrows knitted together.
“She was saying ‘I think it was the…’ but then she never finished her sentence. At the time I thought she was having an allergic reaction to something and trying to say that it was ‘the salmon’ or ‘the cupcake’. But what if that isn’t what she was saying? What if she wasn’t trying to say ‘the’ something at all?”
Tori looked at me with an expression usually reserved for small children and the mentally unstable, and Kaye furrowed her eyebrows, trying to comprehend what I was saying.
“Oh,” Kaye finally said. “Oh.”
Tori folded her arms. “Mind filling me in on what I’m missing?”
“Theodore!” I said. “I think she was trying to say ‘it was Theodore’!”
“Who’s Theodore?” Tori asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Deputy Ted,” Kaye replied. “His mother and sister came in to the Sweet Shoppe with him a couple of weeks ago, and his mother kept calling him Theodore. Ted is just short for his real name.”
“Oh…” Tori replied, her eyes widening.
“So maybe Zara was seeing him, and maybe she called him Theodore as well. After all, Ted did say that he’d been seeing someone recently. We thought he was just saying that to get his mother off his back, but what if it was true? What if it was Zara?” I said.
“D…T…Deputy Ted. Or Deputy Theodore,” Tori said slowly. “You might be right. He was standing near the table in the photos as well. He could’ve surreptitiously slipped something into her drink quite easily.”
“Also, Mr. Palmer told us that the gardener who maintains the lawns around the police station had been in recently to buy some fertilizer. Maybe Ted took some from his supply at the station shed to get the cyanide?”
Kaye pressed her hands into a V-shape on counter in front of her. “This is all just circumstantial evidence,” she said. “Even though it does all fit, we can’t just go and accuse him of it. What if we’re wrong? Then we’re just the three crazy harpies who accused one of our local boys in blue of being a psychopathic murderer.”
“So what do we do?” I asked, racking my brains for an idea. “We can’t just do nothing. Sure, we might be wrong, but we might be right.”
She sighed. “I suppose so. Let’s take a break to get this place cleaned up, then we’ll have a cupcake and think about it.”
I helped Tori clean up the kitchen while Kaye wiped down the tables and counter in the front, and the door tinkled a few minutes later.
“Kaye, can you grab me a chocolate cupcake when you’re done serving the customer?” I called out. “And a vanilla fairy cupcake for Tori?”
We were met with silence and then the sound of something crashing to the floor, and we raced out to see Kaye standing there, stunned into immobility. She had dropped a tray, and luckily it was empty, otherwise there would have been crumbs and frosting all over the floor.
“Kaye, are you all ri…” I began to say before looking up and realizing what had startled her. It was Deputy Ted himself.
“Err…hello, Ted. What can we do for you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as light as possible. Truthfully, I wanted to leap across the counter and pummel his chest with my fists, crying ‘Did you murder Zara? Admit it, you sociopath!’, but thankfully I managed to keep myself under control.
“Afternoon, ladies,” he said with a smile. “We’re all working mighty hard on this case down at the station, and it’s really built up an appetite. I thought I’d come down and see what cupcakes you still had left today.”
When none of us moved for a few seconds, he raised his eyebrows. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Kaye said, looking flustered. “We’re just all a bit on edge after what happened to Zara.”
“I understan
d. It’s a very hard time for all of us,” he said, and I thought I saw a tinge of sadness in his eyes. Remorse, possibly?
“Have you…um…made any progress in the investigation?” I asked.
“We brought in Amy McNamara earlier on. It’s not looking good for her. As you ladies informed us, she threatened Zara only a few days before her murder, and a few witnesses reported seeing her not far from where Zara’s champagne was sitting at the reception. She also recently purchased fertilizer, which we think could’ve been used to obtain the cyanide.”
We already knew all of this, but we played dumb and nodded. “Wow, I see,” Kaye said. “Anyway, which cupcakes did you want? Just whatever’s left?”
He nodded. “Yep, that’ll do.”
She removed the day’s remaining cupcakes from the display case and put them in a white cardboard takeout box, and I noticed her hands were shaking as she did it. Luckily, Ted didn’t seem to notice, and he smiled, paid us and finally left.
“I can’t believe he’s acting so normal,” Tori said, her eyes narrowed.
I held my hands up. “Wait a minute. Kaye was right earlier. We might be wrong about Ted, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. We don’t even know if he actually was seeing Zara. We need to confirm that he was before we take our suspicions anywhere.”
“How do we do that?”
“Well, his mother and sister are probably still in town. Why don’t we go and visit them? His mother was harassing him so much about seeing someone, so if he really was seeing Zara, he might have told her.”
“Good idea.”
***
Ted lived just down the road from me and we figured Amelia and Evie would be staying with him, so we headed over there and knocked on the door. Amelia answered, smiling as she saw us.
“Why, hello! You’re the candy and cupcake ladies!”
“Yes, we are,” I said, forcing a polite smile. “We were just wondering if we could talk to you and Evie about Ted.”
“Evie went out for a walk,” she replied. “What’s this about?”
“Errr…we were thinking of setting Ted up with someone we know,” Kaye hastily lied. “So we were wondering if you knew if he was actually seeing someone already.”
“Oh, I see. How lovely of you. Come in, come in. We’ll chat.”
She let us in and directed us into the lounge room. “Would any of you like some tea?”
“That’d be lovely,” Tori said.
Amelia bustled away, then returned from the kitchen a moment later with a floral-patterned teapot and four china cups. She smiled as she poured us all some tea. “So, you might know someone who would be interested in my Teddy Bear?”
“Er…yes,” Kaye said. “But like I said, we just wanted to make sure he wasn’t already seeing someone. Otherwise we’d just be wasting our friend’s time in introducing her to him.”
“Yes, of course. Well, I do know that he was dating a woman until quite recently. Very recently, in fact. But that’s over now.”
“Do you know who it was he was dating?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes. “Why does that matter?” she asked, her voice noticeably cooler.
“Oh, it doesn’t,” I said breezily. “Just curious.”
“Was it Zara Keilson?” Tori asked, and Kaye and I glared at her. Way to be subtle, Tori! I thought.
Amelia’s hands started to shake, and she abruptly stood up. “I see what this is. You’re trying to accuse my Theodore of hurting that lady.”
“No, no!” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “It’s not like that.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Amelia replied, grabbing her handbag. “I have a mind to go down to the station right now and tell him what you’re saying about him!”
“We aren’t saying anything about…” Kaye began to say before reaching out to catch Amelia. She’d taken two steps forward and tripped over the coffee table in her haste to leave.
“Amelia, are you all right?” Kaye asked, helping her to her feet.
“Here,” I said. “Let me get your bag for you. Then we’ll leave, okay?”
As she’d stumbled, Amelia had dropped her handbag and several items had flown out of it. I scooped them up in my hand, and she cried out.
“No, leave it!”
I was about to put the things down when I realized what I was holding in my right hand. A small, cylindrical plastic container filled with a dark grey powder.
“Oh….oh my…” Kaye stuttered. “It was you!”
Amelia snatched her bag away from me and reached into it, pulling out a small pistol which unfortunately hadn’t already fallen out.
“If you had behaved like proper ladies and minded your own business, then none of this would be happening,” she said, cold seeping into her eyes. “You should’ve left it alone. That woman deserved to die for hurting my Theodore.”
“How did she hurt him?” Tori asked, trying to buy time for us as we nervously backed away, our hands in the air.
“She refused to let anyone know they were dating. Sick of people gossiping about her, or so she said. Really, she just wanted to string my Theodore along. The other night he told her he was tired of the games, and he wanted her to commit to him or that was that…he’d be done with her. She said no, and my poor boy was brokenhearted. I couldn’t let her treat him like that! She had to die!”
“And I thought my mother was a bit crazy,” Kaye mumbled.
“What?” Amelia said, her voice shrill.
“Nothing…err, I was just saying, surely Ted must suspect what you did if he knows you heard the argument with Zara?”
“He has no idea,” she said stiffly. “They had the argument outside the house after dinner. He had no idea I overheard it all. He thought I was in the spare room with a headache.”
Goose bumps cropped up all over my arms as she continued to wave the gun at us, and my heart raced as I considered our next course of action. Or rather, her next course of action. Surely she couldn’t just shoot us all. She may have done a decent job at covering up the fact that she’d murdered Zara, but she couldn’t exactly cover up three more homicides right inside a policeman’s house…could she?
“Amelia,” I said softly. “Just put the gun down.”
“No,” she said, steeling herself and aiming it right at me. I squeezed my eyes shut, and suddenly a male voice rang out.
“Yes,” the voice said. “Drop it right now! I’ve got my own gun and a much better aim than you, Mom.”
My eyes flew open, and Amelia whirled around. Ted was standing in the doorway, his face etched with a mixture of grief and rage.
“Teddy Bear….you wouldn’t hurt your own mother!” Amelia said.
“I don’t want to, but I’ll be forced to if you hurt anyone else,” he said, his eyes fixed on her. “Drop. The. Gun.”
“Oh, Teddy…I was just trying to protect you!” she cried. “You have to understand!”
Seeing so much rage in her son’s expression must have finally made her realize the gravity of her actions, and she dropped the gun and crumpled to the sofa.
“I was just trying to help,” she sobbed, her faced buried in her hands. Ted picked the gun up to make sure she couldn’t touch it again, and he looked over at us.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through this, ladies,” he said. “I only just realized.”
“How did you realize?” Kaye asked. “And why didn’t you tell anyone you were seeing Zara?”
He shrugged. “It’s a long story. At first we kept it a secret because she thought her own reputation might harm mine, and she was tired of all the gossip. I kept telling her I didn’t care, but the more I did, the more I somehow pushed her away. She refused to commit. So the other night after dinner I told her I needed more, and if she wasn’t willing to give me that, then it was over. She said no and walked away.”
“Did the rest of the police know?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I admitted our relationship straight af
ter she was murdered, just so they wouldn’t think I was trying to hide anything. But…I never thought my own mother would do this.”
“What made you figure it out?” Tori asked.
“Only half an hour ago, I was chatting to the maintenance guy at the station. He happened to ask how my garden was going and mentioned to me that last week my mother had asked to borrow some fertilizer from his supply, claiming she wanted to help out with my garden. But as you can see, I don’t even have a garden. From there I realized it must have been her, and she’d gotten the fertilizer from him so no one would see her buying any…to cover her tracks. I realized she must have overheard my argument with Zara the other night, and she must have slipped the poison into the drink when Evie, Bobby and I were engrossed in a conversation at the reception. I was right there….God, I feel like a complete idiot. I wanted to believe I was wrong, but when I walked in here just then and saw her pointing a gun at you three…well, I knew I was right.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Kaye said. “Who’d suspect their elderly mother as a murderer?”
“The worst part is…Zara probably thought it was me,” he said, his voice choking up. “As she lay there dying, she must have been thinking that I’d poisoned her out of revenge.”
None of us told him that he was probably right, considering Zara’s final words to us. He was really much better off not knowing.
Amelia continued to sob, and Ted glanced at her.
“Sorry, Mom. I’m going to have to take you in.”
***
It had been two weeks since Zara’s funeral, and the town was finally beginning to settle down after all the drama. Amelia was locked up and awaiting her trial, and Ted let us know that a psychiatrist had diagnosed her with an early form of dementia; one which was known to occasionally bring about severe personality changes and erratic behavior, which could have led to her psychotic actions.
Seeing as his own mother had been the murderer, he had offered to resign as Deputy, but the town had rallied around him with support, saying there was no one better for the job and that it wasn’t his fault.
Mrs. Barnaby had been upset that the whole event had spoiled her day, but she was more upset that poor Zara had been killed. Right now, she was off on her honeymoon with Mr. Armstrong, and I was happy to hear that it was going well with no one else dropping dead around them.