End of the Line_Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  Snapping at him for caring about me didn’t seem to be the right response even if his approach came straight out of a previous century. “Mark and I decided to leave the investigating to Chief McTavish this time.”

  “Who’ll defend him?” Russ asked. His tone clearly said I don’t believe you.

  “He hasn’t been charged with anything yet. If he needs someone to defend him, my parents will do it. And Anderson offered to go with Mark if they bring him in for further questioning until my parents get here.” Anderson had sounded almost giddy about the prospect of working with my dad, right up until he seemed to remember what that would mean for Mark and me.

  Russ harrumphed, but he ended the call. Maybe I should turn my cell phone off. Gossip in Fair Haven was as inescapable as gravity.

  “It’s ready when you are, Nicole,” Isabel said from behind me.

  I must have been standing and staring at my phone for longer than I realized if she needed to nudge me. I pocketed my phone and sat at the tiny table she’d managed to squeeze into the space between her counters while I’d been on the phone.

  I could already feel extra heat creeping up my neck at what she might have overheard. Add that heat to the warmth in her truck, and I’d be close to passing out. Time to redirect attention somewhere else. “You can call me Nikki. Do you prefer Isabel or Izzy?”

  She glanced down at the cupcakes on the table and rearranged them. “Either’s fine.”

  The way she said it made me think she’d never considered it before. Anyone who had a name that could be shortened to a nickname thought about it. Most people I knew had a strong preference. Unless it wasn’t her real name.

  Which was more than a little paranoid. Maybe I should talk to Mark again about me building a defense for him should he need it. Every shadow I saw was going to turn into a monster under the bed otherwise. My brain apparently couldn’t know a murderer was in Fair Haven without trying to find them.

  The sugar from Isabel’s cupcakes was much needed. The way I felt right now, I might have cupcakes with a chaser of candy bars on the way home.

  I’d tested the tiramisu cupcake and was unwrapping the maple syrup cupcake when my phone rang again.

  If it was Russ calling back, he could go to voicemail this time. Him warning me off the case would only make me want to take it on even more.

  This time the display read Mandy instead. I gave my maple syrup cupcake a longing look and Isabel an apologetic one. Mandy had a tendency to keep calling and texting incessantly until she got an answer. “A member of my wedding party.”

  Originally, Mark and I had planned to keep our wedding party to his two brothers, my best friend Ahanti, and Elise. Once Elise married Erik, though, Mark felt he should include him, but once he included him, it felt wrong not to ask Quincey, who’d been Mark’s friend longer than Erik had. To balance things out, I asked Stacey—Sugarwood’s assistant office manager—since she was like a little sister to me, and Mandy. My mom’s reaction of But she’s in her 60s hadn’t dissuaded me. Mandy and I had been through a lot together. The days she got on my nerves were far outnumbered by the days she’d come through when I needed her.

  Isabel waved for me to take the call.

  “Is Mark okay?” Mandy asked after a rushed hello. “I heard they arrested him.”

  Just when I thought the Fair Haven gossip mill couldn’t get any worse. “They didn’t arrest him.”

  “But they found a dead man in his house.”

  Thankfully it sounded like the Fair Haven police officers at least knew how to stay quiet. Mandy didn’t know who had died. It might even be the real reason she called.

  I gave myself a mental kick. That thought didn’t do Mandy justice. She liked hearing gossip, but only because she liked to speculate. She didn’t spread it around. The identity of the dead man would be less interesting to her than how he got there and why.

  Still, I had to squash even the idea that Mark was guilty. “You had a murder in your B&B. That didn’t make you a murderer.”

  “Someone must be trying to frame him, then. I bet it’s an ex-boyfriend of yours trying to stop the wedding.”

  My only ex-boyfriend had at least twenty-five years left on his prison sentence. I could guarantee he wasn’t behind this.

  “How is this going to affect the wedding?” The speed of Mandy’s words made me think she’d been talking while I’d been thinking and I’d missed some of what came in between.

  “It’s not. Chief McTavish will figure out what happened, including that Mark wasn’t involved, and the wedding will go ahead as planned.”

  Mandy’s pause felt like the silence between a lightning flash and the thunder, full of nervous anticipation over how loud it would be. The cupcake I’d just eaten lay heavy in my stomach.

  “I thought someone would have told you,” Mandy said. “Chief McTavish is missing.”

  5

  As I disconnected the call with Mandy, I reminded myself that her source also told her the police arrested Mark. They could be wrong about McTavish as well.

  Please, Lord, let them be wrong about Chief McTavish.

  Right or wrong, I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on cupcakes until I knew.

  I wiggled out of my chair. “Something’s come up. Could you pack me a few samples and my fiancé and I can try them together?”

  Isabel stayed in her chair for a full ten seconds, then rose to her feet slowly. Like she was buying herself time to make a decision.

  I’d gotten the impression that she had a narrow margin of profit on her truck. She was probably doing the math in her head to figure out if she could afford to give me extras for free or if she needed to ask for money. Even though she was putting together the cupcake tree for my wedding, it didn’t mean I should take advantage of her and eat up extra products she could otherwise sell.

  I reached for my purse. “I’ll pay you, obviously.”

  Isabel held out her hand in a stop gesture. “Don’t worry about it.” She lowered her hand to her side, but her fingers tapped a barely noticeable beat on her leg. “Is everything…Are you okay?”

  There was something in her voice, like she was asking me something deeper than the actual question. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

  And as nice as she seemed, I didn’t know her well enough to share the whole strange affair with her. She overheard enough already.

  “Everything’s fine. It’s just a case I’m working.”

  I needed to be careful. This lying thing was getting out of hand.

  She nodded, but it wasn’t an I believe you nod. It was an I’m accepting you don’t want to talk about it nod.

  She packaged up two of each of the flavors. I’d already decided I wanted a maple syrup cupcake, but Isabel suggested we offer at least three options. Not everyone liked maple, she said. The other contenders were tiramisu, cookies and cream, white chocolate raspberry, and lemon meringue pie. I’d told her I didn’t want the traditional chocolate and vanilla, so she’d suggested some of her most popular cupcakes as options.

  She passed the cupcake carrier to me, but didn’t meet my gaze. “There are people who can help if you find you’re in a situation and don’t know how to get out.”

  She said it quietly and casually, as if she were saying Make sure to try them all.

  It took a second for it to click in my brain what she meant. She thought that Mark might be a danger to me.

  I tucked the cupcake carrier securely into my body. “It’s not what it probably sounded like. My fiancé wouldn’t hurt me or anyone.”

  Isabel unlocked the door and gave me the same nod she had before when I’d told her everything was fine. “Be sure, okay? They call them red flags for a reason.”

  Instead of calling Mark, I drove straight to Elise and Erik’s house, where Mark was staying until the police released his home. We needed to find out if what I heard about Chief McTavish was true. And if it was, I didn’t want him to be alone when he heard the news.

  I
turned onto Elise’s street at almost the same time as another car turned into the driveway. A woman wearing a Fair Haven police uniform, her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, stepped out of the car. Elise.

  In the middle of the day. Driving her personal vehicle rather than a police cruiser when she should be on duty.

  There was no scenario in which this was a good thing.

  I sped up and swerved into a spot in front of the house before Elise could reach the door. My tire scraped along the curb, and Elise spun around. She came down one step and waited.

  I stopped in front of her without climbing the steps.

  She smoothed both her hands over her already-smooth hair. “What are you doing here?”

  Elise had always struggled to hide her tells. The fact that she asked me what I was doing here was a dead giveaway that she didn’t want me to ask what she was doing home in the middle of the day. She’d have been less obvious if she’d simply assumed I was here to see how Mark was doing.

  I’d been right to assume that her coming home now wasn’t good. “I heard Chief McTavish was missing.”

  Elise’s shoulders slumped, but it looked more like relief than shame to me.

  “I don’t know how much time we have,” she said, “but I’m glad you’re here.”

  The tendril of hope that Mandy’s information had been wrong withered and died. Elise hadn’t denied that Chief McTavish was missing.

  I’d at least been partly prepared for it. Her response, though, suggested she wanted support for whatever had brought her home.

  I braced a hand against the railing. “How much time we have until what?”

  “Until they come to arrest Mark.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if she somehow hoped I wouldn’t hear her. Or maybe she didn’t want Mark to overhear.

  Either way, she had to be overreacting to Chief McTavish’s disappearance. Unless they’d found some irrefutable evidence that Mark was involved with his disappearance—and they couldn’t have that—they shouldn’t be arresting him for anything else yet. Yesterday, Quincey seemed certain that someone was trying to frame Mark, and he’d expected that to be the direction the investigation took.

  “What makes you think they’re coming to arrest Mark? Quincey—”

  “Quincey isn’t running the investigation. Neither is Erik. I’ll explain inside.”

  Elise retreated up the stairs and opened the door for me. It wasn’t until she offered to take the cupcake tray from me that I remembered I was holding them. I didn’t have an appetite for them now.

  Mark came around the corner and stopped. His gaze jumped back and forth between us, landed on the cupcake tray, then came back up to our faces. “I’m guessing this is about something more serious than a problem deciding between the cake flavors.”

  Elise laid the cupcake tray on the bench by the door where they hung their coats. “Chief McTavish is missing, and I’ve been temporarily relieved of duty. Erik, too. Erik’s still at the station, making calls and trying to reach whoever made the decision, to reason with them, but he doesn’t think it’ll help. Things have gone too far. We’re all under suspicion.”

  She waved us farther into the house. Once in the living room, she actually drew the curtains closed. Under any other circumstance, her old-movie cloak-and-dagger air would have struck me as funny, but it felt like I’d forgotten my sense of humor in the car. Or, more accurately, back in Isabel’s food truck when Mandy told me Chief McTavish had gone missing.

  “They’ve sent in outside investigators,” Elise said. “All Fair Haven officers are banned from accessing anything to do with this case. Quincey’s still working, but they’ve sent him on traffic duty. They didn’t directly say so, but it seems like they think we either helped Mark commit the murder or we’d tamper with evidence to let him get away with it.”

  Crap. No, double crap. And even that wasn’t strong enough to express what this meant. The courts might operate under innocent until proven guilty, but the police didn’t. Quincey and the other Fair Haven police might have made an exception with Mark. Outside officers wouldn’t, which was likely why they’d been brought in.

  Mark stood in the middle of the room, rubbing the stubble on his chin with one hand. The fact that he hadn’t shaved today spoke volumes about his emotional state.

  I slid my hand into his and squeezed until he looked down at me. I waited for him to focus on me. “We’ll fix this. Other than Troy being in your house, they don’t have any evidence against you. My parents have won cases with ten times more concrete evidence than that against their client.”

  Elise was smoothing her hair again, like even one strand out of place would cause the rest of her to go to pieces. “They have more evidence.”

  I knew my head was shaking, but it felt like I watched it happen from the outside.

  “They can’t have evidence.” It was Mark’s voice speaking, but he said what I’d been thinking. “I didn’t do this.”

  “I know that.” Elise’s words came out sharp and loud. “But they do.”

  The snap in Elise’s voice reminded me too much of what often happened between clients and their families when dealing with a criminal charge and having to mount a defense. Tempers grew short, doubt crept in, and isolating the ones who cared about you most became much too easy to do. Many relationships didn’t survive a criminal trial, even when the defendant was declared not guilty.

  I’d found the kind of family I’d always longed for in the Cavanaughs. I wanted to marry Mark, but I wanted to marry into his family as well. I refused to allow this to destroy them.

  Besides, Elise had made it sound like they could be coming to arrest Mark soon. We didn’t have time to waste bickering amongst each other. We needed to know what we were up against. Then we needed to prepare an explanation for whatever they thought they had against him. It couldn’t be conclusive evidence. There’d be holes.

  I held Mark’s hand tight and reached my free hand toward Elise in a placating gesture. “We’re all in agreement that Mark didn’t do this. What evidence are they claiming they have?”

  I picked the word claiming intentionally. It didn’t accuse any individual officer of lying, but it also made it clear that I believed they couldn’t possibly have any real evidence against Mark.

  Elise drew the curtains tighter and flicked on a lamp so forcefully it wobbled. “They found a burner phone in the back of Mark’s bedroom closet. It had a text to Troy’s phone the night Troy died, saying Meet me at my place.”

  My legs suddenly felt as stable as melting wax, and my vision went blurry at the edges.

  Mark let go of my hand and sank into the nearest chair. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  Elise had stopped talking, which was good, because I wouldn’t have been able to hear her over the buzzing in my ears.

  A lawyer doesn’t panic, Nicole, my mom’s voice lectured me over top of it all. Panicking loses cases.

  And for the first time, I was glad my parents had drilled their teachings into me so thoroughly that I still heard them when they weren’t around. I had to pull myself together and be lawyer Nicole. Lawyer Nicole was strong. She could handle this.

  “Were there fingerprints?” My voice still sounded thready and far away.

  Elise shook her head. “Wiped clean.”

  Too bad it didn’t have the real murderer’s fingerprints on it, but whoever planned this was too smart to leave their prints behind. Wiping it clean, in my opinion anyway, still suggested the phone didn’t belong to Mark. He wouldn’t have had any reason to wipe down his own phone, especially if he also intended to hide it. I knew that was the argument my parents would make if he were their client. And it sounded like he soon would be.

  I knew better than to ask how Elise got the information. The outside investigators hadn’t been entirely wrong to place her on leave. Before they had, she’d obviously been digging into the case when she shouldn’t have been. She would never hav
e done anything illegal the way they suspected, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d pushed the lines to help someone important to her.

  I rested my hand on Mark’s back. He hadn’t looked up yet. “The killer could have planted it after killing Troy,” I said.

  Elise’s eyes looked watery, like she was trying not to cry.

  Oh no. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “They found the scalpel used to…”

  I could almost hear the words slit Troy’s throat teetering on the edge of her tongue. Thankfully, she seemed to want to say them as little as I wanted to hear them said.

  “Used to kill Troy,” Elise continued, “in the trash can by the road, like Mark was hoping it’d be collected before the police found it.”

  There could be only one reason that would make Elise fight tears when the cell phone hadn’t. The words hurt coming out of my mouth. “It had Mark’s fingerprints on it.”

  6

  Mark’s back muscles shuddered under my hand, and Elise stared at me.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was wrong and her stare meant she was shocked I’d even suggest it. But I couldn’t assume anything.

  I straightened. “Elise, did the scalpel have Mark’s fingerprints on it?”

  She nodded once, quick and sharp.

  That was going to be hard for even my parents to explain away in court.

  It was hard for me to explain away.

  Maybe you shouldn’t be trying so hard, the annoyingly logical voice in my head said. Look where that got you with Peter.

  Breathing became enough of a challenge that I had to order my body to draw in air and let it out again. I sent up a quick prayer for wisdom. I needed more than I had on my own.