The Naughty List

by K. J. Emrick

  “It was important to all of us,” Elizabeth said sourly. She had no problem sitting at the table while she griped. “Me especially, because it was my only source of income. I always worked hard for Helen. Never said no to any extra shift she needed me to work. I even slept in those rooms above the shop more than once when I was there extra late and had to open up at six in the morning for people going into work to get their coffee and muffins. Those were some of the best years of my life and then she goes and sells the place and this Tobias Ford swoops in and where am I? Out on the street, that’s where.”

  She dropped her head into her hands and hunched over in her seat. While her attention was diverted from them, Grace caught Darcy’s eye. Her sister lifted an eyebrow at her, and Darcy was helpless to argue with what amounted to an I-told-you-so. This sounded exactly like the reasons why Jon thought Elizabeth made a good suspect.

  “You mean,” Darcy said, “that you’re out of a job because of the fire, don’t you?”

  She came over and sat on the side of the table across from Elizabeth. Her friend was obviously upset, and Darcy did not want her to be upset for the reasons that Jon and Grace were thinking of, but she had to ask. She had to know.

  Elizabeth lifted her head up again, pushing her long hair back from her face, exposing the burn marks there. After coming to Misty Hollow, it had been a long while before she felt comfortable enough to talk about those scars, and how they had happened. “What I mean,” she said to Darcy, “is that Tobias was going to replace me and Kim and even Cassidy the baker. Helen adored Cassidy. She thought he was the best thing since raisin bread and here Tobias was giving us all pink slips.”

  Darcy’s heart sank in her chest. If Elizabeth knew she was being fired, that was a very strong motive to strike back at Tobias. Now she almost wished she hadn’t come along with Grace. She would have been much happier not to hear the things she was hearing.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why was Tobias firing you all?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Beats me. Oh, he gave us all some stupid song and dance about bringing in people he knew from one of his other businesses, but he’s owned the bakery for two years. Why would he be doing that now?” She took a breath and then shook her head. “You know what? I really don’t care. In a way I’m glad the place burned down. He deserved to have it go up in smoke.”

  Darcy cringed. Elizabeth’s motive was getting deeper. Still, motive didn’t equal guilt. She knew that from years of sticking her nose into places it maybe didn’t belong. So the real question to ask here would be—

  “Elizabeth,” Grace asked, before Darcy had the chance to, “where were you yesterday after five o’clock?”

  She looked up, her mouth dropping open and her eyes popped wide, and then her hands pressed flat against the table as she shoved back in her chair. “I knew it. I knew this was coming. I told Pastor Phin last night that the first person they would suspect would be me! I knew it! This town is full of hypocrites and small-minded little toads!” She made a strangled sound in her throat and jumped up to her feet, stalking the narrow length of the kitchen from wall to television set and back again. “I told him the same thing again this morning. I said, I know they’re going to be coming for me, Pastor Phin. It doesn’t matter if I’m innocent or not they’re going to think I did it!”

  “Wait a minute,” Grace insisted, holding a hand out like she could grab hold of Elizabeth’s nervous energy and hold her in place with it. “We’re not here to accuse you of anything.”

  “Yes you are!” Elizabeth shouted. She whirled to face them again. “You came here to ask me about the fire, didn’t you?”

  It might have been Darcy’s imagination, but it looked like the burn scars on Elizabeth’s face were redder than usual. Or maybe it was just that the color had drained from the rest of her face. “Elizabeth,” she said, “no one is accusing you of anything.”

  “She is,” Elizabeth argued, pointing a finger at Grace.

  Darcy looked at her sister. Grace shrugged.

  “Ignore her,” Darcy said. “Listen, Elizabeth, I know you didn’t do this. Just tell us where you were after five o’clock yesterday.”

  She crossed her arms again, and swayed back and forth as she studied the floor. “I left work at five. No customers, so I closed up. Then I left. I heard about the fire and I came back to see my job in flames. That was after seven.”

  “The fire started around six-fifteen,” Grace stated. “That’s when the first call came in to the police station from a passing motorist.”

  “See? I wasn’t there!” Elizabeth said.

  “Maybe.” Grace didn’t sound convinced. “You still haven’t told us where you were from the time the bakery closed at five until when you say you got back to Main Street around seven.”

  Darcy felt like she was standing between the proverbial rock and hard place. Her sister and Elizabeth were both strong-willed women, and neither one of them was giving the other an inch. It was a tug of war of egos.

  If she had to put money down on one side or the other, she was betting on her sister.

  Grace softened the edges of her voice. “Elizabeth, look, I’m just doing my job. I need to know where you were. If you didn’t burn the bakery down, then just tell me where you were and I can cross you off our list and move on to the next name.” Then she spared a sidelong glance for Darcy. “From what I understand, the list is pretty long.”

  Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again, and then took a breath, and then let it out again. She went back to the table and sat down heavily in the same chair that she’d been in before. “I don’t want to tell you where I was.”

  That surprised even Darcy. “Elizabeth, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” she repeated, her head hanging down low, “that I don’t want to tell you where I was.”

  “Why not? Would you rather be accused of arson?”

  “No. I didn’t do that.”

  “Then, Elizabeth… tell us where you were.”

  She didn’t answer. Darcy reached across the table and laid her hand on Elizabeth’s arm. “It’s all right. Please, just tell us.”

  “No. You won’t like the answer.”

  Darcy didn’t know what to say to that. Why wouldn’t Elizabeth just tell them where she was, for Pete’s Sake? What could possibly be worse than being an arsonist?

  “You have to tell us,” Grace said. “I’m not exactly asking for a favor. We need to know where you were if we’re going to believe that you didn’t do this thing.”

  “Grace…” Darcy wanted to say something that could cut through the tension in the room but there just wasn’t anything she could think of.

  “Quiet, sis,” Grace said. “Let me do my job. Elizabeth, where were you?”

  Head still down, Elizabeth gestured helplessly with her hands. “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “You have to tell us.”

  “Grace,” Darcy tried again.

  “Stay out of this, Darcy. Elizabeth, where were you?”

  “I said,” she repeated, her voice rising in pitch, “that I don’t want to tell you.”

  “You have to. Right now. Where were you?”

  “You need to leave.”

  “No, you need to answer me.”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said. Now answer my question.”

  Darcy stood halfway out of her chair. “Grace, please.”

  “You both need to leave,” Elizabeth said, standing up from her chair herself. “Get out!”

  “Tell me,” Grace said, not moving an inch. “Tell me where you were.”

  “No!”

  “Fine.” She stepped around the table, around Darcy, to get to Elizabeth. From a case at the back of her belt she took out a pair of handcuffs. “Then you’re under arrest.”

  “What!” Elizabeth’s voice cracked on that one word.

  Darcy was shocked. “Grace, what are you doing?”

  “I’
m arresting an arsonist.” The handcuffs clicked into place around Elizabeth’s wrists. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “But I didn’t do it!” Elizabeth shouted.

  “Then tell me where you were.”

  “No, I can’t…”

  “Then you’re under arrest.”

  “No, please!”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Grace started to tell her.

  “No!”

  “Anything you do say can and will be used in a court of law.”

  “No, wait…”

  “You have the right to an attorney—”

  “I was placing bets with my bookie! I was gambling on a stupid football game!” She trembled in Grace’s grip, tears pouring from her eyes. “There, are you happy now? Are you?”

  Darcy sank back down into her chair and tried to understand what she had just heard. “Elizabeth, you were… you were gambling?”

  She nodded. Then she lifted her hands up behind her back as best she could. “Grace, can you take these off? Please? I’m not an arsonist. I just… I gamble. That’s where I was. That’s what I was doing.”

  Grace hesitated long enough that Darcy knew she was considering arresting Elizabeth anyway, but then she unlocked the cuffs, and put them back on her belt. “Why don’t you take a seat and tell us everything.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Elizabeth said, and then stopped. She stood where she was, not sitting down, and not saying anything else.

  “Elizabeth,” Darcy said gently. “We’re all friends here. If you’re in trouble…”

  “In trouble.” She laughed at the way Darcy had said that. “I’m in debt, is what I am. Darcy, I owe so much money to these people now that I can’t breathe. I had to sell my house. I have to keep making bets to try and keep up with what I owe. I’m so close to breaking even it hurts and there’s nothing I can do about it except keep going to try to make at least a little bit more.”

  “So that’s where you were yesterday?” Grace asked her. “After you closed the shop you went gambling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have anyone who can vouch for you?”

  She sighed. “Pastor Phin was with me at the bakery when I closed up. He’d been there most of the afternoon. Then he was there, at the fire, when I got there. He can tell you.”

  “And only your bookie saw you in between?”

  “Yes.” Finally, Elizabeth did sit down, slumped in her chair, fiddling with her hands in her lap. “I went to place my bet, and then I came back here to my apartment and watched the game. You want to know the really funny part? I lost. I’m more in the hole now than I was last week.”

  Grace took one of the empty chairs. “Elizabeth, if you have a gambling problem, there are services that can help. Gamblers Anonymous, and counseling centers, and if you tell us who this guy is that you’ve been placing bets with we can get him arrested.”

  She shook her head to that. “I’d still owe him the money. And I don’t have a problem! I have to pay him back, that’s all. I have to earn enough to pay him back. That’s why I needed my job at the bakery so badly.”

  “But Tobias fired you,” Grace said. It wasn’t a question.

  Elizabeth sighed. “I know. It makes me look guilty, but I’m telling you I didn’t do it. I was going to beg him to let me keep my job, but if that didn’t work I put in my application everywhere I could think of. I need to work. I need to earn my money.”

  Grace chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Well. A good police officer would wonder if maybe somebody paid you to burn the bakery down as part of an insurance scam. Thing is, looking at this place—” She waved a hand at the room around them. “—and hearing how desperate you are for money, I doubt seriously that you’ve taken money for anything like that.”

  “Of course not,” Elizabeth snapped. “I’m not that kind of woman. And I loved that bakery.”

  That was true, Darcy thought. She looked across the table at Grace. Silently, they agreed that whatever crimes Elizabeth might have committed with her gambling, and however it might have ruined her life, she was not their arsonist. She didn’t have much of an alibi, but Darcy was sure that with a little more time they could get her to give up the name of the bookie. That was a crime, yes, but it wasn’t arson.

  Grace shrugged again. This time, she was admitting to Darcy that she was wrong.

  As Elizabeth held back her tears, trying to keep her rough-as-sandpaper composure, Darcy and Grace stood up from her kitchen table. From a pocket, somewhere inside her coat, Grace pulled out a little white rectangle and placed it down on the cracked white laminate. “This is my business card. If you want to talk to me about your bookie, I can make him stop, but only you can make yourself stop gambling. If you want help with that, well, you can call me for that too.”

  She didn’t say anything, but Elizabeth did reach out and slowly take the card, holding it in her hands while Grace and Darcy let themselves out.

  ***

  In a very short while, Grace pulled up in front of the bookstore to let Darcy out of the car. It had been a very quiet ride. Neither of them had much to say. Grace promised Darcy that she would tell Jon he could cross at least one name off their list of suspects. Darcy was glad to hear it, but she knew there were still four other names to go. Was the real arsonist even on the list?

  “Darcy…” Grace put the car in park and leaned forward on the steering wheel. “You know I wasn’t actually going to arrest Elizabeth, right?”

  “To be honest, sis, I wasn’t sure.” Darcy traced a line of frost along the bottom of the car window with her finger. It hadn’t warmed up like it was supposed to and now it looked like whatever rain had been forecast for them was going to come down as snow again. “You did put handcuffs on her, after all.”

  “That’s true,” she admitted, “but I only did it to scare her. Look, I know the things I do don’t always seem fair, but sometimes police officers need to be hard on people to get them to do the right thing.”

  “Is that what you were doing?” Darcy asked her. “You were being cruel to be kind?”

  “In the right measure,” Grace agreed with a smirk. “I wouldn’t have used a song lyric to describe it, but yeah. That’s the basic concept. Elizabeth’s in real trouble. If she’s in as deep with that bookie as she seems to be, then she needs someone to help her. She wasn’t going to tell me anything unless I scared her. It was for her own good. Look, I’m sorry if it upset you.”

  Darcy understood what her sister was saying, even if she didn’t want to admit it. She’d seen Jon use scare tactics on plenty of suspects before. It just hurt seeing it done to a friend.

  “It’s all right, Grace,” she decided. “We need to find out who burned the bakery down. And, I agree with you that Elizabeth needs help. Whether or not she’ll take it is another matter.”

  “That’s her step to take, sis.”

  “I hope she does.”

  “Me, too.”

  They sat there a moment longer, staring out the windshield at the overcast sky. Down the street was the taped off section of sidewalk in front of what used to be the bakery. As days went in Misty Hollow, this had not been one of the better ones.

  “So what now?” Darcy asked after another few seconds had passed.

  Grace resettled herself in the driver’s seat. “Now, you go take care of your bookstore, and I go back to the station to see where the investigation is at. You let the police do their job. For a change,” she added with a sarcastic grin. “Hopefully Jon and Wilson have made some progress in finding either the driver of the Iroc or this Edmund guy. I’ll let you know what’s going on. Or Jon will, I’m sure.”

  “And you’ll try to come to dinner this week?”

  “Sure, sis. Just don’t hold me to that.” She leaned over and gave Darcy a hug. “By the way, have you heard from Mom?”

  “No.” Darcy had sent their mother a few text messages in the last week but she hadn’t heard anything back. Tha
t wasn’t all that unusual for Eileen. Their mother had a habit of becoming very wrapped up in her own world and ignoring everyone else. “How about you? Have you heard from her?”

  “No.” Grace sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll get a call on Christmas, right?” She put the car in gear and switched the signal light on even though there was no other traffic on the street. “That’s what she’s done the last three years. I’ve just been thinking of her recently, and I was wondering… if you had been too.”

  Darcy thought she must be wrong, but she really thought that perhaps she’d heard a bigger question behind what her sister had just asked. “You mean, does it signify something if you start thinking about the people in your life just out of the blue?”

  “Well… yeah. You’re the one who knows about this stuff, right? Not me.”

  She tried to keep the smile out of her voice but it wasn’t every day that Grace asked Darcy to explain things related to her gift. In fact, it almost never happened. “It could just be that it’s Christmas, and we’re all thinking of our family right now. Or, sometimes we think about people when they need our help, or when we’re about to see them, or when—”

  The end of that sentence was going to be, when someone had died. Darcy stopped herself from adding that part. Their mother wasn’t dead, and even thinking of such a thing was too upsetting.

  “Right.” Grace tapped a finger against the steering wheel. “I’ll try to call her again tonight. If she doesn’t answer, I can always call our step-dad.”

  Darcy rolled her eyes. “I’m never going to get used to calling him that.”

  “I know, right?” The sisters laughed together, and it felt good to have that moment with each other before getting back to the real world.

  “Hey,” Grace called to her as she stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Remember, stay away from Tobias Ford.”

  “I will if he will.” Darcy closed the car door, and waved as her sister pulled away.

  Inside her shop, the bookstore was full of people. Mostly it was tourists, as near as she could tell, and she was sure they had come into town to gawk at what the fire had done to the bakery and maybe even catch some of the latest gossip about the investigation. In a tourist town, tragedy had its upside. Darcy had figured that one out a long time ago. That didn’t make it any easier to take when it struck.