“Thank you, Miss Nichols,” he keeps gushing. “You don’t know what this means to me.”
I nod and bite back a smile. He really is a sweet kid. “That’s okay, Michael. It’s the least I can do to give you some peace of mind. Go on now. I’ll let you know when I find anything.”
I shut the door and collapse back against the wall with a heavy sigh. What did I just get myself into? David would have a canary when he found out about this.
I drag my carcass back to the couch, and this time, I topple full length onto it. I fling my arm over my eyes and draw in a shaky breath. Some private investigator I turned out to be. My own son is trying to make me into the next Columbo and I can’t even charge my very first client to take his case.
Never mind. Michael is a high school kid without a single relative to speak of in the world. I can’t take his college money to investigate a murder I’ll probably wind up investigating anyway. I’m too nosy to keep my sticky fingers out of it, especially now that I know some of the pertinent details.
So Jose was murdered with some obscure poison laced in his muffin. He was gluten intolerant and followed a Paleo diet, so he wouldn’t have eaten that muffin unless some social pressure induced him to do so.
That begged the question. What could have happened between nine o’clock in the morning and seven-thirty at night? Something made him go home, eat a muffin, and die in time for the killer to position his body in that bizarre ritual.
Unless, of course, he was killed somewhere else and transported back to his own house. Somehow I doubted that, though. Jose wasn’t a small man, and dragging a dead corpse into a house would have left too many clues.
The killer would have kept it simple. They would have poisoned Jose on the spot, positioned him in that ritual for some reason only known to themselves, and left before Michael came home.
A voice startles me out of my thoughts. “It’s a pretty interesting case, isn’t it, Mom?”
I bolt to my feet and charge past Zack on my way to the stairs. “No, it isn’t, and I’m not investigating it. Now I’m telling you to take down that website and don’t do anything like that again. Don’t tell anybody else that I’m a private investigator for hire or any other nonsense like that.”
I flee to my room and shut myself in. I resist the urge to slide the armchair in front of the door, but I sure want to. I can’t be a private investigator. I can’t take other people’s money for something I wasn’t trained to do.
I’m a candy store owner. That’s all I ever wanted to be, and that’s all I ever will be. End of story.
4
I sleep late the next morning. It’s Zack’s day at the store, thank Heaven, because I don’t think I can face another day on my feet. I thump downstairs in my pajamas at ten o’clock. I don’t finish my breakfast and coffee until eleven-thirty. I revel in my laziness and the decadence of doing absolutely nothing. It’s wonderful.
A plop against the porch makes me go outside to pick up the paper. When I stand up, my eye falls on the big house at the end of the block. Something weird happened in that house the day Jose Santiago died.
I narrow my eyes at the big white edifice. I made myself a solemn promise that I wouldn’t get out of my pajamas all day, but something about the place tickles my curiosity—again. I duck up to my room and change into jeans and a T-shirt. Then I saunter on down the block to see what I can see.
A strip of yellow tape sections off the yard. Crime Scene: Do Not Cross. I cast a fleeting glance around the neighborhood. No one’s around. Besides, who would rat me out to David Graham if they did see me cross it?
I skip under the cordon and race for the front door. To my surprise it’s unlocked, and I slither inside with my heart in my mouth. I shut the door and wilt into the corner to catch my breath. I’ve never gone this far to investigate anything before. I’ve done a lot of less-than-smart things, but I’ve never actually broken the law.
Once inside, my natural curiosity rapidly wipes out any guilt over what I just did. The first thing I see is the sitting room with the pentagram drawn on the floor. An outline in white tape displays where Michael found the body.
Now that I get a good look at the room in the cold, harsh light of day, it starts to ring bells in my head. Someone set this up to make it look like Jose was involved in the occult when those closest to him knew he wasn’t.
I pull out my phone and take a few pictures. Don’t ask me why. Then I scroll over to my browser and Google occult rituals.
A bunch of weird pictures come up. I switch to Images and look for anything resembling this scene. What was the killer trying to accomplish? Were they creating a spell using Jose’s dead body?
Then I see it. I expand the picture. It looks exactly like Jose’s sitting room. I zero in on the pentagram. Even the candles at the points of the star, the smudge stick burning overhead—it mirrors the crime scene exactly.
I tap the image and navigate to the webpage. WitchesWizardsEtCetera.com. I note the same image on five other websites, including several copies pinned on Pinterest.
I turn toward the parlor where I first saw the police officer questioning Michael. I poke my head through the door when a loud tread startles me out of my wits. I barely have time to spin around when the house door flies open and David Graham barges in.
My hand flies to my heart. “Holy smokes! You scared me.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “I don’t even want to know what you’re doing here.”
I wave toward the sitting room. “I was just looking.”
“Uh-huh.” He smacks his lips in annoyance. “I should have known you wouldn’t take any notice of that cordon tape out there. I ought to haul you in for trespassing and obstruction of justice.”
I hang my head. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”
I head for the door. His arm shoots out in front of me. “Hold it, you.” When I stop and look up at him, he purses his lips. “As long as you’re here, we might as well take a look around together. Maybe that will keep you out of trouble.”
I keep my voice contrite, although inside I’m leaping for joy. “I’ll do my best to behave. I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he returns. “Now what have you got?”
I turn toward the sitting room and draw out my phone. “Take a look at this. The room was set up exactly like these scenes from the net. Someone went to a lot of trouble to copy them.”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, Michael says his father wasn’t involved in the occult. That means someone else set this room up to make it look like he was.”
He glares down at me. “‘Michael says’? When did you talk to him?”
“Yesterday. He asked me to look into his father’s case. That’s all. Zack set up a website advertising me as a private investigator for hire, but I already told him I didn’t want to do that. I told him to take it down, but he ran into Michael at the police station the other day. He mentioned me and Michael asked me to take a look. That’s all. He wanted to pay me to do it, but I said no.”
David’s features go hard and cold. “I certainly hope you don’t take any money for this.”
“I won’t,” I pipe. “I’m not good enough to be a professional investigator anyway.”
“I didn’t say anything about you not being good enough,” he returns. “If you took money to work on this case, I couldn’t be involved with you the way I am.”
I stiffen. “What do you mean by ‘involved’?”
“I mean ‘involved’ in any way. I couldn’t be talking to you about this case. I couldn’t be helping you and letting you help me. I couldn’t be involved with you on a non-professional level, either. I wouldn’t be able to ask you out on a real date this Saturday night. I couldn’t come to your house and pick you up at eight all dressed up and take you to a fancy restaurant in Peterborough, and I couldn’t take you out to a stage show at the Cabaret, either. The department wouldn’t allow it.”
I stare at him, my mouth open in shock. “Are you asking me out on a date?”
“That depends on whether you’re a professional investigator working on the same case as I am.” He leans in to inspect me. “Are you a professional investigator working on the same case as I am?”
I color and lower my eyes. “No, I’m not, when you put it like that. I’m just a concerned neighbor helping out a poor high school kid who has lost his only parent.”
“That’s good. Would you like to go on a real date with me? I was thinking I could pick you up at eight on Saturday all dressed up and take you to a fancy restaurant in Peterborough. After that, I was thinking I could take you to a stage show at the Cabaret. I hear the new Josephine Baker Revue is really hot right now.”
I have to laugh. “I’d love to go on a date with you Saturday night.”
“Phew!” He runs his wrist across his forehead. “Now that we got that out of the way, can we go back to talking about the case?”
“Sure. Do you see what I mean about the crime scene being staged to copy this web page?”
He nods. “It does look fake. I thought it looked fake when I first saw it. It’s too cliché to be a real occult ritual. Let’s take a look around the house and see if we turn up anything unusual.”
“Did the forensics people remove anything?”
“They took some samples of the sage we found burning over the pentagram,” he tells me. “They also found some crumbs of the dreaded blueberry muffin in the kitchen. They tested it and matched it to the muffin in Jose’s stomach. Other than that, they just dusted for prints.”
“Did Michael tell you his father was gluten intolerant?” I ask. “He said his father never ate blueberry muffins unless he didn’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. Like at a birthday party or whatever.”
“That tells me he knew the killer. The killer must have brought the muffins over here and stood there watching to make sure Jose ate one of them. Jose must have felt some obligation to the person if he violated his dietary restrictions to spare their feelings.”
“Who would do that?” I ask.
“I don’t know, but I don’t really see a stranger getting into the house and pressuring Jose to eat a blueberry muffin against his will. He must have known the person pretty well. He must have felt some sort of compulsion to protect the person’s feelings.”
I shake my head and turn away. “I don’t get it. Something doesn’t fit.”
“Let’s split up,” David suggests. “You take the downstairs and I’ll take the upstairs. Let me know if you turn up anything unusual.”
He climbs the stairs and disappears. I lingered in the entrance hall and surveyed the house. It was a nice house, and now it was empty again. First, a killer lived here, and now a man was dead, poisoned in this very house.
I amble to the kitchen, but I don’t really expect to find anything there. Whoever set up the sitting room to resemble a magical ritual went to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks. They wouldn’t just leave a blueberry muffin lying around like a smoking gun.
Of course I don’t find anything. I search the whole downstairs and turn up nothing. The place gives me a queer sensation down the back of my neck. It’s too clean—far too clean for a single father and a high school boy to have been living alone.
Of course, they only moved into the house last week. Maybe they didn’t have time to leave the toilet seat up. Still, this house stood empty for months before Jose bought it. It should have shown at least some sign of dust on the windowsills—something, anything.
Cruising through the rooms, I get the distinct impression the killer cleaned the place up before he left—or she left. Who would do that? Someone who cared a lot about leaving a clean house behind him—that’s who.
I make a mental note to ask Michael about that. He’ll be able to tell me if the house was noticeably cleaner when he found his father. Then again, a teenage boy might not notice that sort of thing.
I meander back to the kitchen. Nothing to see here. I lean against the counter for a while just waiting for David to come back down. Maybe he’ll have found something.
I stick my head out the back door to check the yard for anything noteworthy. Nothing there. I never saw a more boring and not-noteworthy yard in my life.
Just before I pull my head inside, my eye falls on the trashcan standing near the back door. On impulse, I lift the lid and what do you know! A white box lies open on top of all the household trash. A bed of white tissue paper displays a dozen long-stemmed roses lying in a magnificent bunch. A length of gold ribbon bedazzles their thornless stems.
I blink down at it. A dozen roses? A card tucked inside reads, For Jose, With Love, in embossed calligraphy.
I swallow hard. Someone sent Jose a dozen roses, and he threw them away. Jumping Jehosephat, Batman! This is something to put in the evidence scrapbook.
I swing off the back step and lift up the lid to the recycling bin. Egg cartons, newspaper scraps, plastic steak trays—all the usual stuff piles almost to the top. I put my hand inside and lift a bunch of recycling out of the way and let everything trickle back one piece at a time until I see something.
A wad of greeting cards peeks out from under the milk jug. I pick one up.
Dear Jose,
I have told you how I feel about you, and I hope you feel the same way about me. Would you like to go out sometime and get to know each other better? I could call you, or we could talk about it when I see you tomorrow morning. Love, T.
Love? Someone was in love with Jose, but he obviously didn’t feel the same way. He wouldn’t have thrown her flowers and cards away if he did. I’m assuming the secret admirer was a woman, but I suppose it could just as easily have been a man.
My heart starts to thump. Just wait until I tell David about this! If Jose had a secret admirer he didn’t much care for, that could explain why he ate her muffin—or his muffin—even when he didn’t want to. Maybe he already felt bad about rejecting her/him. He didn’t want to drive the dagger home by refusing to eat his/her muffins.
A female killer would also explain why the house is so spotlessly clean—not that a man couldn’t be a neat freak, too, mind you. It just makes more sense that a woman would go through all this trouble—baking poison-laced muffins, creating this elaborate ritual display to cover her tracks, and then cleaning the whole house on top of that.
David sticks his head through the door. “What did you find?”
I can barely get my breath showing him the flowers. “Take a look at this. Someone was in love with Jose.”
He inspects the card in the flower box and the stack of love notes in the recycling bin. “Looks to me like he didn’t return the favor. He threw her messages out with the trash.”
“Do you really think it was a woman?”
“Take a look at the handwriting.” He ignores the card that came with the flowers. A computer printed that. Anybody can see that. He holds up one of the love notes. “No man wrote that.”
He’s right. The gently sloping cursive shows all the hallmarks of its fastidious owner. Of course the person who cleaned this place up had immaculate handwriting. They took the greatest care with every detail of their murderous operation.
David collects the flower box and all the cards. We rifle the whole recycling bin to make sure we find them all. “These are evidence. I’ll take them back to the station. We might be able to fingerprint them, too.”
I trail him out to his squad car. I don’t feel so nervous crossing the cordon this time, not with him by my side.
He puts everything in the back seat before he straightens up to face me. He raises one eyebrow. That expression always makes my insides squirm. “Do me a favor and don’t get into any trouble, okay?”
“Who? Little old me?”
He suppresses a grin. “Yes, little old you. I know how you are. You won’t let this case alone, now that you’ve got a corner of it in your greedy little jaws. Just try not to get your leg broken or hit o
ver the head or anything like that. Do it for me, even if you can’t do it for yourself.”
“Can I just ask you one question? Then I’ll leave it alone—I mean, I’ll leave you alone. I don’t promise to leave the case alone. That would be lying.”
His chin falls onto his chest. He closes his eyes and sighs. “What is it?”
“Could you tell me the name of the poison that was used to kill Jose?” I ask. “That’s all I want to know. Then I’m out of your hair.”
“All right. If that’s what it will take to pacify you, I’ll tell you. It’s called Gelsemium. Apparently, it’s a plant extract from…. let me see.” He takes out his notebook and flips the pages. “Here it is. The Latin name for the plant is Gelsemium elegans. The common name is heartbreak grass. It’s native to Southeast Asia, and when it’s ingested, it stops the person from breathing. According to the internet, it gained notoriety when it was used to assassinate some Kremlin officials during the Cold War.”
“Wonderful,” I murmur.
“Yeah. There you go. Now run along to your computer and don’t bother me—unless you find the killer, of course—in which case call me as soon as you can.”
I laugh out loud. He blows me a kiss, gets into his car, and drives away.
5
I flip the Open sign on the candy store’s front door, and within seconds, Stacy Koontz from the Happy-Go-Lucky Café next door comes hustling through it. She peeks over her shoulder and lowers her voice to a whisper. “I heard that new guy was killed by devil-worshiping witches or something like that. Is it true?”
“Come on, Stacy,” I chide. “There are no devil-worshiping witches—not in West End, anyway. This town couldn’t open its eyes long enough for that.”
“You’re wrong, Margaret,” she whispers. “There’s a coven over in the west side of town.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Stacy,” I exclaim. “Who are you trying to kid?”
The Sweets of Doom Page 3