Murders and Metaphors

by Amanda Flower

  I frowned. It seemed to me that Belinda had kept that promise all the way to the grave.

  Charles settled into a leather armchair that could have held three of him. The chair dwarfed him, making him look very small and even older than he actually was. “I was happy when I saw that Lacey married Adrien, who is a good man. She was just a sweet, cheerful girl. Never screamed or yelled, even when the others did. She always said hello and waved to me when the others ignored me. She was a sweet cricket.”

  A sweet cricket. I felt goosebumps on my arms. There was something my brain was trying to click into place. It almost felt like if I could grasp hold of it, I would be able to discover who had killed Belinda.

  Then it hit me. The passage that the shop essence had wanted me to read came back to my mind. There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

  I had to do everything in my power to make sure Lacey didn’t meet the same fate that Beth had.

  Chapter Eighteen

  If Belinda’s death was related to her sisters, then I needed to talk to each of the other sisters, and I planned to start with youngest. I called my grandmother and told her what I was up to. “Do you know where Adele’s studio is?” I asked.

  “It’s on Sparrow Street,” Grandma Daisy said.

  I told my grandmother that I would be back to the shop as soon as I could and ended the called.

  Adele’s studio was an old Cape Cod home that probably dated all the way back to the same period as Charming Books. I knocked on the door, but as I did, the door fell open.

  “Hello?” I called into the place.

  The house retained its original architecture on the outside, but on the inside the former home had clearly been altered. Many of the walls had been blown out to make one large great room that was brightly lit with large windows and sunlight. Every color of paint in the rainbow was spattered on the floor and walls. I hoped that Adele wasn’t renting the work space, because there was no way she was getting her deposit back.

  “Ahhh!” A scream came from the back corner of the room, which was hidden from the rest of the place by a paint-spattered Chinese screen.

  “Hello? Are you hurt?”

  “Ahhhh!” the scream came again.

  Maybe talking to Adele wasn’t necessary, or maybe I could come back later when she wasn’t screaming her head off.

  “Hey, who’s there?” a voice asked, perfectly calm and composed. A small woman popped out from behind the Chinese screen. She wore a pair of earbuds, and even from where I was standing by the front door, I could hear the pounding heavy metal she was listening to.

  The last time I had seen Adele, she had been ten and blonde. She wasn’t either of those anymore. Her hair was jet-black and fell all the way down her back. She wore a black beret on her head, and it was tilted at a jaunty angle. Both her hair and her hat were splatted with red, yellow, green, and purple paint. So were her clothes, which were also black, or at least they had been. She was the girl all in black that I had seen at the book signing, which meant that she had been there the night her oldest sister died.

  “Who are you?” Adele asked.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Adele didn’t recognize me. “I’m Violet Waverly. I’m friends with Lacey.”

  She nodded. “Why are you here?”

  It was a very good question and one I should have expected her to ask. I didn’t have a good answer, so I settled on the truth. “I wanted to talk to you about Belinda.”

  “No,” she said, and disappeared behind the Chinese screen again.

  I stood there for a second, unsure what to do.

  “Ahh!” she cried from behind the screen again. Her cry made me move, and I peeked around the side of the screen.

  She stood in front of a six-by-six canvas that had a lovely view of the Riverwalk in the village. I recognized the scene immediately even though it was blotted and streaked with red paint. “What are you doing?” I couldn’t keep the horror out of my voice. The Riverwalk scene was so lovely and tranquil, and the red paint ruined it.

  “Starting over. All I can do is start over.”

  “But the painting was lovely.”

  “I hate this painting,” she said.

  I stared at it, and my heart broke a little at the sight of all that red over the lovely woodland scene. “Why? It’s the best of the Riverwalk I’ve ever seen. You captured the heart of the village so perfectly.”

  “That doesn’t matter. There is no point in it anymore. There is no reason to perfect my art when I’m going to be living on the street.”

  “Why do you say that?” I kept my voice as calm as possible.

  Adele dipped her broad brush into the red paint and flicked it at the canvas. It immediately reminded me of blood and brought back the memory of her oldest sister’s death. “Is it Belinda? I can see why you’re upset.”

  She set her brush on the paint spatter table next to her. “My sister is dead, but before she died, she killed me.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You were at her signing. I was there selling books with my Grandma Daisy. I saw you there.”

  She frowned. “I suppose I stood out with all of Belinda’s fancy friends, didn’t I?”

  “Did you get a chance to talk to your sister before …?”

  “No. I almost did, but as soon as Lacey walked in, I knew it was a lost cause, so I left.”

  “You left before Belinda was found.”

  She gave me a level look and wiped her hands on a dirty paper towel. It didn’t look to me like it helped much. If anything, it ground the paint deeper into her skin. I wondered if she walked around all day with permanently blood red–stained hands. “I didn’t hear about the murder until the next day when Lacey called me.”

  I frowned. She hadn’t exactly answered the question.

  “You and Lacey are on speaking terms?”

  “Not exactly, but she does call now and again. I never pick up when she calls.”

  This made me very sad for Lacey. I could see her continually calling her youngest sister with the hope that one day Adele’s anger would soften toward her and Adele would pick up.

  She wiped her paintbrush on her jeans, leaving a swath of yellow paint across the fabric. “There’s no point in any of this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the work I had done will come to nothing.”

  “I’m happy to help any way that I can, and I know Lacey would too. She’s your sister and loves you very much.”

  She laughed. “Can you pay my rent for this space? Because that’s what I need. That’s what Belinda promised she would do because she said I had talent. I should have known that she was lying. I should have known, if I couldn’t make any money, that she would change her mind. I can’t believe I trusted her.” She flicked more paint onto the canvas, and spatter flew everywhere, including on me.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You might want to put on a poncho if you’re going to stand there.” She waved the brush, and globs of red paint fell onto the top of my shoe.

  I looked forlornly down at the shoe that I’d had since college. It was clearly a goner. “It’s fine,” I said, unable to keep the sadness from my voice.

  “I really am sorry,” Adele said, looking as if she might cry.

  I smiled at her. “It really is okay. Both Grandma Daisy and my friend Sadie have been trying to get rid of these shoes for weeks. They will be very happy when they hear the news, and I’m certain that Sadie will love finding a new pair for me.”

  “They are really ugly shoes,” she agreed. Then her face fell. “Belinda always had the nicest shoes,” she said. “What do you think will happen to all her nice shoes?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  She burs
t into tears. Between gasps, she said, “They were really nice shoes.”

  “Are you crying over the shoes?” I found myself asking.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I just can’t believe she’s dead. It doesn’t seem possible, you know? Belinda would be so mad that she was dead, and even madder if she knew that someone had killed her. Do you think she knows she was killed?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling at a loss to comfort the girl. Her tears washed away some of her harsh makeup, and she looked so very young under that hard exterior.

  “And do you know the worst part?”

  I nodded, waiting for her to tell me.

  She wiped away a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand, smearing paint and black mascara. “The day before she died, when she told me that she wouldn’t be paying my rent anymore, I told her that I could …” She didn’t finish her sentence.

  “You told her what?” I prompted.

  “I told her that I could kill her.” She took a breath and said, barely above a whisper, “And I really meant it.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adele was inconsolable after that and asked me to leave the studio. I asked her if there was anyone I could call to be with her, maybe Lacey or a friend? But the young artist said she wanted to be alone with her paints. As I walked out her door, I couldn’t help but realize that she had as good a motive to murder her sister as anyone else did.

  After leaving Adele’s studio, I went straight to Charming Books. The after-school crowd of children and parents were there, so business was brisk. It seemed that every middle-schooler who came into the shop needed a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn right away. Luckily, Charming Books was the kind of shop that, even if we didn’t know what books our customers would want, always came up with extra copies of the books our customers would need.

  The sun had set right at five when the shop closed, and with the loss of the sun, the temperatures outside dropped into the single digits. Grandma Daisy struggled into her winter coat and pulled a hat so far down over her silver bob that it touched the top of her glasses. Then she wrapped a six-foot-long scarf around her face half a dozen times. By the time she was done, the only parts of her that were visible were her glasses and eyes.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you to your house? It’s very cold out there.”

  She pulled the scarf down. “Violet, you act like I’m an elderly woman on my last leg. I am more than capable of walking the three blocks to my home from the shop. It’s not even snowing. The sky is clear with a bright blue moon. I have been making this trek back and forth for decades, and I won’t let you take it from me.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “All right, all right. On the bright side, if you run into Charles Hancock, he will never recognize you in that outfit.”

  She grinned. “Maybe I will start wearing it all year round.” She narrowed her blue eyes. “We were so busy when you got back to the shop, you didn’t tell me how your visit with Charles went.”

  “It was interesting,” I said, thinking of his artifact room. “He knew the Perkins family quite well.” I stopped myself from saying anything more about Charles’s home. He had not outright asked me to keep his secret about his in-home museum, but it felt like a betrayal of sorts to say anything about it. “He’s an old gentleman, really. You might like him better if he toned down the knight stuff.”

  She shook her mittened hand at me. “Don’t you be getting any ideas about Charles and me.”

  “What ideas?” I asked innocently.

  She glowered at me. “I suggest that you spend what time you have tonight reading Little Women. That book will be the key to whatever is going on in this village.”

  As if on cue, Faulkner flew across the shop and dropped a copy of Alcott’s novel on the sales counter. It landed with a resounding thud that echoed through the shop.

  “See, Faulkner agrees with me,” Grandma Daisy said.

  After my grandmother left, I took her advice and sat down on one of the two couches by the hearth with the novel and a legal pad. I set the book in the middle of my lap. Emerson jumped onto the coffee table as if in anticipation. Faulkner too seemed interested in the proceedings, as he swooped down from the birch tree and settled on the corner of the hearth. He held his wings out from his body as the fire warmed his feathers.

  I glanced at my two companions. “Are we all settled now?”

  The cat and crow stared at me expectantly. I shook my head. If my friends back in Chicago could have seen me now, looking for guidance from magical books and talking to animals, they’d have had me committed.

  I lay the book open in my lap to the passage that the shop’s essence had last shown me. Nothing happened. “Come on,” I said to the tree. “Why are you making this so hard this time?”

  Still nothing. The front door of the shop opened, and a gust of cold wind ruffled the pages of my book, causing me to lose my place. I jumped up. Had I forgotten to lock the front door after Grandma Daisy left? “The shop is closed!”

  “Then you might want to turn around the OPEN sign and lock the door,” Grant Morton said. He held a narrow bottle of ice wine in his hand.

  I scooped Little Women off the floor and held it to my chest. “What are you doing here, Grant?”

  He smiled and held up the bottle. “I brought this by as an apology gift. My parents gave you a hard time the other night.”

  They had. I couldn’t deny that. “They were understandably upset.”

  He set the wine bottle on the sales counter. “They are always upset.” There was a hint of bitterness in his voice. “And I am sorry about how they acted. I don’t want the winery to have a bad reputation. It has so much potential.”

  “National potential?” I asked.

  He smiled.

  “You said you were going to take the ice wine to the national market.”

  He nodded. “I’m starting with specialty stores, but if it goes well, the sky is the limit. It’s the first time Morton Vineyards has tried to do this. My parents don’t have the same vision.”

  “But you and Nathan do?” I asked.

  The fire had died down, and I shifted the logs with an iron poker.

  “I do. Nathan has nothing to do with this deal.” He started to pace. “He’s like my parents, really. They are all too afraid to branch out. They think what we’re doing is enough. It never is. You can always push further.”

  I set the poker back in its stand and studied him. “And Belinda’s death. What impact will that have on your plan?”

  He snorted. “Nothing. I’m sorry she died, but it has nothing to do with my family business.”

  “Does the name Joel Redding mean anything to you?”

  He snorted again. “You mean the private investigator Sebastian hired?” He rolled his eyes. “The man is a nut, carrying around a guitar case all the time. He came to the winery this afternoon. He wanted to see where she died. I kicked him off the property. He’s not a cop, and I don’t have to give him access to anything.”

  “Don’t you care what happened to Belinda?” I asked.

  “Not enough to dwell on it. I’m sorry that it happened, even sorrier that it was on my family’s land, but I didn’t know her, not really. No one can expect me to be sad. The only shame for my family is the loss of publicity from her article. She was writing a piece on the wineries in the village. I had hoped to announce our move to a national market through that article.”

  “The magazine found another sommelier to write the article,” I said.

  “They did? Who?”

  “Jake Zule.”

  “Really? I’ve never hear of him.” He looked like he wanted to say more when the front door opened again. I would really need to lock it.

  “Violet, I know you have been crazy busy today, so I baked some cookies for the Red Inkers meeting tonight. I just wanted to drop them off early so I didn’t forget them. You know how absent-minded I can be.” Sadie floated into the roo
m holding a tray of cookies. She froze in place when she saw Grant standing there.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. This was the worst possible time for Sadie to drop by early.

  “Sadie,” Grant said. “It’s nice to see you.”

  She blinked and seemed unable to talk.

  Grant smiled in the way a person would at a misbehaving child. “You must have one of your writing meetings tonight. Are you still working on your little novel, Sadie? It’s such a sweet hobby.”

  Grant’s comment seemed to shake her from her stupor. “It’s not a hobby.”

  He laughed.

  I clenched my fists at my sides. “Grant, I think it’s time for you to go.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Yes, you did,” Sadie said. “You always do. I wish I had seen that sooner.”

  A strange look crossed his handsome face. “I do too.” He walked out of the shop without another word, slamming the door behind him.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Sadie.

  “I will be. Someday,” she said. “I should have known Grant wasn’t the right guy for me. He never thought I was going to be a writer.”

  “You are a writer.”

  She gave me a watery smile. “Okay, a published writer. He always called it my hobby. I thought it didn’t bother me. I told myself that it didn’t bother me, but hearing him say that again, I realized that it bothered me a lot.”

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” I said. “If a person loves you, he should believe in you and your dreams.”

  She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Right.” She gave her head a little shake. “I’m going to go back to my shop until the meeting. I just need some time.”