Dying for Devil's Food

by Jenn McKinlay

  “Did you murder Cassidy Havers-­Griffin?”

  “No,” Mel said. She was pleased that her voice was level and calm and perfectly controlled. She was ready to jump out of the hot seat now but the questions didn’t end there. Instead, Don asked her several different ways if she had harmed Cassidy, had wanted to harm Cassidy, or had someone else harm Cassidy. It rattled Mel and she started to feel as if she was going to crack under the strain of repeating herself.

  Finally, when she thought she might rip the gauges and wires off of her body and run screaming from the room, Don announced that they were done. Mel sagged back against her seat and she saw both Stan and Joe slump where they were standing. Mel glanced at the clock on the wall. She had been questioned for forty-­five minutes. It had felt more like forty-­five hours.

  Don helped her out of the rig and then he said, “I’m going to review the charts and I’ll have a result for you shortly.”

  “Oh, okay, thank you,” Mel said. She crossed the room and Joe hugged her.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “That took guts.” He kissed her head and Mel leaned against him.

  What if she failed? Would Uncle Stan have to lock her up right then and there? She glanced at her uncle. He was chewing an antacid tablet as if it had done something to offend him. He stared at Don, who seemed oblivious to the three of them as he reviewed Mel’s results.

  Mel watched the clock. The room was silent. Don clicked through his monitor. He went back and forth, checked what looked like scribble lines of blue and red to Mel. What did it mean? Was that dark spot an indicator that she had lied? She felt herself begin to sweat even though the room was on the chilly side.

  Finally, Don turned around and with a small smile, he said, “You passed.”

  “Thank god.” Uncle Stan collapsed against the wall. Mel hugged Joe, burying her face in his neck. He squeezed her tight and then released her so she could hug Uncle Stan.

  “I knew you would pass but on the very slight chance the test went wonky, I did not want to have to explain this to your mother,” he said.

  Mel laughed. She understood completely. Both she and Joe shook Don’s hand and as they departed Detective Martinez entered the room. It was clear from her face that she was eager for the results.

  “Well, am I taking her in?” she asked.

  “No,” Uncle Stan said. “Mel passed her polygraph. We can now focus our efforts elsewhere.”

  Tara glared at Mel. She stepped forward, blocking the exit. “These tests are only ninety percent accurate,” she said. “So don’t think you’re completely in the clear as yet.”

  “Actually,” Don said. “The test is only as accurate as the examiner. I have a ninety-­nine percent accuracy rate, and I’ll be writing up a detailed report of this exam if you have any more questions.”

  Mel could have kissed him.

  Tara was unmoved. “That still leaves a one percent margin of error.”

  Mel glanced at her. She was so over this woman being a pain in her behind. “I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not in the one percent, but knock yourself out . . . please.”

  Both Joe and Don snorted at her play on words. Uncle Stan ducked his head and Mel knew he was hiding a smile.

  “Come on, cupcake,” Joe said. “Let’s go home.”

  Mel put her hand on his cheek and then she kissed him. Just having him in her corner made her believe that everything was going to be okay.

  “Yes, let’s. I’m sure the kids are wondering where we are.”

  A few months ago, they had adopted a dog from an author who had been murdered. Her name was Peanut and she was a handful. Thankfully, the cat they had rescued prior to that, Captain Jack, had finally taken to the dog, but the two of them were prone to mischief when left unsupervised for too long. Mel wasn’t sure who the ringleader was just yet, but if she had to place a bet, she would have said it was Captain Jack. At the moment, she’d welcome the normalcy of a shredded pillow or a puppy in the garbage, because even though she’d passed the polygraph, she knew the fallout from Cassidy being murdered at their high school reunion was far from over.

  * * *

  “This might be your craziest idea yet,” Angie said. She was sitting shotgun in Mel’s Mini Cooper. They were parked diagonally across from Danny Griffin’s house, watching the comings and goings. They had borrowed tennis visors from Joyce, Mel’s mother, so that their faces were covered and they looked like two ladies on their way to play tennis instead of two cupcake bakers on a stakeout.

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve had some doozies before,” Mel said.

  “True, but we’ve never done surveillance on a wake before,” Angie said. “It feels wrong somehow, like we’re stepping over some invisible line of decency—­oh, hey, there’s one of the mean girls now. Is that . . . nah . . . yeah . . . it’s Betina Klipenger. Look at her! She was always so flat-­chested in high school. Do you think she’s had some work done?”

  Mel glanced out the window at the lanky blond making her way down the sidewalk to the posh house set back from the road. Wow.

  “I’m thinking her front side is going to get to the house five minutes before she does,” Mel said. “So, that’s an affirmative on the work.”

  “I heard she married an elderly podiatrist,” Angie said. “He must have a fetish.”

  “And it ain’t for feet,” Mel said.

  Angie snorted and held up her hand. Mel gave her a high five and they resumed watching the house.

  “You know, it’s helpful to see who’s here, but we really need to know what’s happening inside at the wake,” Angie said.

  “Yes, but if I go in, Dwight Pickard will probably freak out and I’m not sure that Brittany Nilsson or Lianne Marsten would be that thrilled to see me, either,” Mel said.

  “It’s still early,” Angie said. “I mean it technically doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes. We could go in, give our condolences to Danny, and then hide so we could see everything that’s happening.”

  “Because that’s not weird or obvious,” Mel said. “Hang on, here comes Megan Mareez.”

  “She looks awful,” Angie said.

  It was true. Megan was carrying a large tray of what looked like bagels. Her long dark hair was twisted into a messy knot on the back of her head. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. Her dress was a long, baggy, sacklike thing in a muted print pattern of blue and purple paisley.

  “Well, Cassidy was her best friend,” Mel said. “It has to be an awful shock.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Angie said. “Megan was always an outlier in Cassidy’s mean girl group. I mean, she was with them, but she wasn’t one of them.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mel said. “When Cassidy was at her worst, when she was vicious and cruel, Megan always seemed to be sympathetic to the victim. I always felt like she was trapped and didn’t know how to break free.”

  “Well, trapped or not, she didn’t do anything to help the victims of Cassidy’s bullying,” Angie said.

  “No, that’s not true,” Mel said. “She did try to help, and she took no joy from Cassidy’s meanness, not like some of the others.”

  “Like Betina?” Angie asked.

  “Yeah, she was pretty horrible,” Mel said.

  “And yet, she was the first to show up at grieving widower Danny’s door and no sign of her foot doctor husband with her,” Angie said. “Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “You mean you think she’s trying to make a play for Danny?”

  Angie shrugged.

  “Okay, so we’re agreed that Betina is awful and possibly making a play for Danny, which wouldn’t be a shock because of her old foot doctor husband,” Mel said. “And what do we know about Megan?”

  “I heard last night that she’s been engaged twice but unable to
wrangle either fiancé down the aisle,” Angie said. “She’s into high-­end real estate and is making a fortune with her own business that caters exclusively to a wealthy clientele.”

  “So, she’s living large,” Mel said. “Any whispers about a rift between her and Cassidy?”

  “None that I heard, but I’m not really in the inner circle,” Angie said. “Most of what I picked up was from eavesdropping.”

  “Gotcha,” Mel said. “Oh, man, hunker down.”

  Angie glanced out the window in the direction Mel was looking. Striding up the sidewalk in perfect sync was the pep squad with Brittany in the lead and Lianne just behind her to the right. Instinctively, Mel and Angie lowered themselves in the front seat of the car.

  As Brittany and her crew marched past, Mel watched as they moved exactly as they had in high school at the pep rallies, with a purposeful stride in lock step with each other from the angles of their chins to the range of swing in their arms.

  “I always felt like they were going to come up to me and yell, ‘Be happy, damn it, this is a pep rally!’” Angie said.

  Mel laughed. “I know. They are fierce about their cheer. I’m only surprised they didn’t put on the uniform for old time’s sake.”

  “Let’s just hope they don’t decide to do a human pyramid on Danny’s front lawn,” Angie said.

  They craned their necks watching the women march up Danny’s walkway, stopping only when they got to the front door. Mel could just see over Brittany’s head that it was Danny who opened the door to them. He looked pasty pale and sunken-­eyed, as if he hadn’t slept at all; but was it from grief or guilt?

  Mel watched as he hugged Brittany, Lianne, and then each of the pep squad women as they walked past him into the house. When he shut the door, Mel was immediately swamped by the same feeling she’d endured through most of high school, of being on the outside looking in. It made her feel petty and small. She hated it.

  She glanced at Angie and noticed that she had a thoughtful look in her eyes. She wondered if Angie had felt as left out as she did in high school. She doubted it. Angie had always been more popular with their classmates than Mel was; in fact, there were many nights that Mel lay in bed worrying that her best friend was going to change her mind and dump her for the popular kids, but Angie never had. She never knew if it was her or Tate or the combination of her and Tate that Angie hadn’t wanted to give up and right now she realized she really wanted to know.

  “Angie, how come you never dumped me and Tate?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could have been in the ‘in crowd,’” Mel said. “They always invited you to the parties and you got asked out by all of the hot guys. Why didn’t you ever dump us for them?”

  “Um, because they suck,” Angie said. “I mean, seriously, why would I want to hang out with those creeps when I had you and Tate, his parents’ home movie theater, all the junk food I could eat, and people who wouldn’t talk trash about me the minute my back was turned?”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” Mel said. She was grinning at her friend like an idiot.

  “Plus, I have seven, SEVEN, older brothers,” she said. “The last thing I needed was another pack. I just wanted friends, true friends, real friends, best friends.”

  Mel reached across the seat and hugged her. Angie hugged her back.

  “I’m so glad your parents moved to Arizona when they did,” Mel said.

  “Me, too,” Angie agreed.

  Mel glanced back at the house. She felt bad about doubting Danny. He might have been one of the popular ones, but he’d always been nice to Mel despite what Cassidy and the others said about her. She owed him for that. Then again, the man had married Cassidy.

  How could he not have seen how awful she was to everyone else? Maybe he had walked into the marriage blind, but Mel was betting that he slowly came to realize what a nightmare he was married to, and maybe he had begun to feel trapped.

  Perhaps he couldn’t think of any way out besides murder. Could the boy she had known, the teen she had tutored in English, really have murdered his wife? She had a hard time believing it. Her inner teenager soundly rejected the idea that her former crush could be a cold-­blooded killer, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. As Mel had come to realize over the past few years, you never really knew what a person was capable of when their back was to the wall.

  She and Angie had resumed silently watching the house, when the door behind Mel was yanked open and a person jumped into the backseat. She and Angie both let out a startled scream and whipped around to find Tucker Booth sitting there, smiling at them.

  “Tell me, ladies, what are we up to today?” he asked.

  Eight

  “Ah!” Mel put her hand over her heart. She wanted to make sure it hadn’t stopped from fright. “That was totally uncool, Tucker.”

  He grinned at her. “You should see your face.”

  “No, you should see your face when it kisses my knuckles,” Angie said.

  Tucker gave her a wide-­eyed look. “Still have the DeLaura temper, I see.”

  Angie blew out a breath. She closed her eyes for a second and her face became serene. Slowly she opened her eyes and said, “Well, I’m a Harper now, so I guess it’s more of a Harper temper these days.”

  She tossed her hair with her left hand, letting her diamond wedding band sparkle in the sunlight. Tucker let out a low whistle. “So, it’s true what they say about Harper. He’s a money machine.”

  “Partly,” Angie said. “Mel is the creative talent, I am the labor, and Tate is the financial genius.”

  “I always knew you outcasts were going to return victorious,” Tucker said.

  “Sure you did,” Mel said. She didn’t have a beef with Tucker but she knew his high school years had been spent chasing after Cassidy, and she didn’t think Cassidy’s death could be sitting this easily for him. The question was, what did he want from them?

  “What do you want from us?” Angie asked. Always the direct one.

  “Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just saw you sitting here in the old lady hats and wondered what was up. You know as far as disguises go, those are pretty lame.”

  Angie flipped down the car sun visor. She studied her reflection. “I thought they were pretty good for before coffee.”

  “Yeah, no,” Tucker said. “So, are you two going in or what?”

  “Oh, hell, no. Dwight Pickard would make a scene, you know he would,” Mel said. “We’re just watching.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “Not what, who,” Angie said.

  “Sorry,” he said. He rolled his eyes. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Cassidy’s murderer,” Mel said.

  “What?” Tucker’s eyes went wide behind his wire-­framed glasses.

  “Yeah, we think Cassidy was murdered,” Angie said. “And we think it was someone at the reunion.”

  “Whoa.” Tucker shoved his fingers into his short cropped curls as if trying to keep his brain from exploding. “I can’t. Why would you even think this?”

  “Because according to Danny, Cassidy didn’t have anything physically wrong with her,” Mel said. “But she sure had a lot of enemies.”

  “Like you,” Tucker returned.

  “What are you saying there, Tucker?” Angie asked. She flexed her fingers before balling them into a fist.

  “Hey, now,” he said. He raised his hands in innocence. “I’m just saying what everyone knows to be true. If anyone had a grudge against Cassidy, it was you, Mel. She hated you; like, really, really hated you.”

  Mel blew out a breath. “I know. What I never understood was why. What did I ever do to Cassidy?”

  “You were the embodiment of everything she was afraid to be,” he said.

  “Fat?” Mel asked.

  Tuck
er shook his head. “Invisible.”

  Mel stared at him. “I was hardly invisible. Believe me, I tried. But whenever I hid in the shadows, Cassidy invariably pulled me out and made a mockery of me. My god, she made my life hell.”

  “She did that because she resented you for not needing to be in the spotlight,” he said. “She was like a sunflower, incapable of surviving without the sun shining directly upon her all the time, twenty-­four-­seven. But you, you were happy with just two good friends, old movies, quiet weekends spent doing whatever you wanted. She hated you for being content, for not needing the adulation of many like she did.”

  Mel stared at him for a moment. Could that be true? Had Cassidy hated her because she’d been okay with herself? Nah. “It really was my weight, wasn’t it?”

  Tucker shook his head at her and then stared her right in the eye and asked, “So, did you kill her?”

  “No!” Mel insisted. “Why would I be sitting here trying to figure out who killed her if it was me?”

  “Because you’re trying to find someone else to blame it on,” he said.

  “Someone like you?” Angie asked. “We all know how in love you were with Cassidy in high school. Maybe seeing her married to Danny Griffin was more than you could take and in a fit of rage last night you murdered her.”

  “Fit of rage?” he asked. “Do I really look the type to lose it over a girl from fifteen years ago? I don’t know if you know this or not but I’m ecstatically happy with my life in California. I’m successful, I have a huge house on the water, and a girlfriend, Kayla, whom I love very much. Plus, have you seen Kayla? There is no reason for me to pine for someone who never paid any attention to me and there’s certainly no reason for me to murder her. Mostly, seeing Cassidy again made me feel . . . well, sorry for her.”

  “But you still care about her,” Mel said. “I saw you trying to mediate the altercation between her and Danny.”

  “Of course I care. You never get over your first crush,” Tucker said. “But that’s all she was. That’s all she could ever be. Cassidy didn’t have enough love in her to give it to anyone else, and that included Dan.”