Pride and Premeditation

by Samantha Silver

  Of course, for Muffin, it had more to do with the box of leftover pizza that I was holding then any sort of affection toward me or Peaches. That was fair enough, I thought.

  “Sorry, Archibald,” I said. “It was a busy day today.”

  “It should have been busier,” Archibald replied. “Finally, I have poems ready for publication, and you spend the day dallying about.”

  “Sorry I was trying to find a murderer,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “You’ve been dead for two hundred years. An extra day before I publish your book isn’t going to make a big difference in the whole scheme of things.”

  “Always bringing up my death,” Archibald said. “Just because I’ve been dead for two hundred years doesn’t make my feelings any less important than yours.”

  “Fine, let me go feed Muffin and I’ll come back here in a minute and write down a few more of your poems.”

  Peaches and I made our way upstairs, with Muffin following closely behind just in case one of the slices of pizza happened to fall out of the box. Plus, I was pretty sure he had heard the word “dinner”, and that was a pretty surefire way to get him to follow you.

  As soon as we made our way into the kitchen upstairs, we found Aunt Francine pacing around the room. “Is that ancient idiot still downstairs waiting for you to come back so that you can type out his poetry?” she asked, and I laughed.

  “He is, yes. I’ll go down there and transcribed for him, Peaches can you take care of dinner for Muffin?”

  “Oh! Peaches is here; I didn’t even notice,” Aunt Francine said, floating over toward us. “It’s so nice to see you back in this world, dear.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Francine,” Peaches said with a smile. “It’s nice to be back, although I have to admit I’m still pretty terrified.”

  I left the two of them to their conversation and made my way back downstairs, where I grabbed a legal pad and a pen and plopped myself down on one of the couches as Archibald floated toward me.

  “Right. Are you ready?”

  “All set,” I replied, pen at the ready. Archibald closed his eyes and floated around in a circle as he dictated the next poem he wanted. After about forty-five minutes, I had a total of ten poems written down.

  “That is it,” Archibald announced, and I put down my pen.

  “There are going to be more poems though, right?” I asked, and Archibald shook his head.

  “No, that is the entire collection. I have no more poems to write on the topic, and so this will be it.”

  “All right, well I always thought that poets published large collections of their works at once,” I said, and Archibald scoffed.

  “Of course not! A true artist publishes exactly what his collection requires. Adding in more poetry simply for the sake of padding out the collection would be disingenuous and a watering down of my works.”

  “I guess that actually makes sense,” I replied. “Do you have a title for this collection?”

  “I do. Meditatione Mortis. Thoughts on death.”

  I had to admit, it sounded very 19th-century. Very fancy.

  “So what happens now?” I asked. “What’s the next step?”

  “Now, you have to self-publish it for me. I don’t know what the steps involved in that are, as the woman I heard speak about it didn’t exactly give me a step-by-step breakdown. And, since I’m unable to use the information machine that you use, I will have to leave that part to you.”

  Great, that was exactly what I needed. Another thing on my current to do list. Solving a murder and defeating the Others once and for all just wasn’t enough.

  “All right, I promise I will get it done just as soon as I can,” I said to Archibald. “But for now, I’m going to bed.”

  I made my way back upstairs to find Peaches still talking with Aunt Francine. She was eating some of the leftover pizza, and feeding bits of it to Muffin, who was happily lapping it up and didn’t even seem to notice that I had come in. Peaches and Aunt Francine seemed to be in a deep conversation, so, not wanting to interrupt, I simply shouted out a quick goodnight and made my way into my room.”

  I fell asleep thinking about the murder and trying to figure out who on Earth could have possibly done it.

  Waking up early the next morning, I made my way downstairs while chewing on a couple slices of toast with butter and jam, thinking about the murder once more. Cat and I definitely needed more information. But for now, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get any. After all, it was Sunday morning, and everyone who could sleep through the night was still asleep.

  Instead, I grabbed the iPad out of the back room, and lay down on one of the comfortable couches, deciding to look up what this whole self-publishing thing was all about. I found myself blasted with information, and before I knew it, two hours had passed. I had a general idea of what I needed to do; I knew that my next step was making a cover for Archibald’s book. I sent Cat a text asking if she could take care of that—I knew she had designed her own website for Cat’s Cupcakes, and I had a sneaking suspicion that she had designed the logo for the company as well. If she could do that, she could definitely make a cool, mock leather e-book cover for Archibald’s book of poetry.

  Just before I opened for the day, I got a text from Chase.

  Meet for lunch?

  I sent out my reply a minute later. Sure. Something quick?

  How about the Mexican place you like?

  Sounds good.

  We organized to meet there at noon, and I got up from the couch, getting ready to open the bookstore for the day. I couldn’t wait for lunch with Chase, I wanted to let him know what we had found out about Olivia. To be totally honest, I hadn’t decided if I was going to tell him what Cat and I had discovered about Polly and Iris. After all, on top of not being able to explain exactly how we knew, there was a whole privacy issue there. I knew that this was about a murder, but was it really my place to out somebody when they were still obviously in the closet?

  I really hoped that I wasn’t going to have to.

  After a relatively busy morning thanks to a tour group that stopped by, I closed up the shop just after noon and made my way to the Mexican place that I absolutely loved. I hoped that Cat not coming by at all in the morning meant that she was getting busy again at the cupcake shop.

  This time, I was the first one to arrive for lunch. A waitress came by to take my order, but I asked her to hold off for a couple of minutes until Chase got there. He sat down in front of me about ten minutes later, apologizing for being late.

  “Sorry, I was on the phone with the medical examiner.”

  “No problem. Does that mean there’s some new information about the case?”

  “Yes,” Chase replied, his face darkening. “And I have to say, it’s not good.”

  “Really?” I asked, leaning across the table. I needed to know exactly what it was Chase had found out.

  Chase nodded. “Remember how neither one of us knew how the cyanide had gotten into Vanessa’s house?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I know Kyle, her fiancé, admitted to Vicky that he was there that night, but he said he didn’t go into the house, and besides, there was no way he could have been the killer. He wasn’t at the bookshop the night of the murder.”

  “I know,” Chase said. “There is no way Kyle planted that cyanide there, because the person who bought it was Vanessa.”

  I sat there stunned for a moment, while the waitress came back a second time, having noticed Chase’s arrival, and asked for our orders.

  I barely remembered placing an order for a quesadilla—with extra pico de gallo on the side—but as soon as the waitress left, I leaned forward and began to press Chase for details.

  “What do you mean, Vanessa bought the cyanide herself? Cat and I looked at her email, there was no record of her having ever bought any.”

  “She must have deleted the email for some reason,” Chase said. “Maybe she didn’t want anybody to know what she had planned. To be honest, it seemed to me
to be so unlikely. And yet, last night, someone at Vanessa’s bank faxed over her statements for the last six months. I had asked for them a few days ago; standard operating procedure.”

  “And what, one of the entries was just labeled cyanide?”

  Chase gave me a wry smile. “Give me a little bit more credit than that,” he said. “Most of the charges on her credit card appeared to be pretty normal—she drank a lot of Starbucks and spent most of her disposable income at Victoria’s Secret.”

  “Lucky Kyle,” I muttered to myself, earning a small laugh from Chase.

  “Anyway, there was one charge to a chemical supply company that definitely didn’t fit in with the others. So, this morning, I gave them a call and asked for the details. It turned out that Vanessa ordered the cyanide; she had faxed them an order on letterhead from the community college, claiming that she was an assistant with the science department and that they needed the cyanide for their supplies.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “That seems a little bit strange,” I said. “How do we know that it was really sent to Vanessa?”

  “I thought about that myself,” Chase said. “After all, it would have been pretty easy for somebody to fake her name and order the cyanide. But, the credit card that was used to order it was in her name, and the cyanide was shipped to Vanessa’s address, and the shipping company required not only a signature on delivery, but also identification from the person who signed for the package. I called them up as well, and they swear that the person who delivered the package checked identification before handing it over. By all accounts, Vanessa really did order the cyanide.”

  “So does that mean she actually did commit suicide?” I asked in barely more than a whisper. I honestly couldn’t believe it.

  Chase frowned. “All the evidence points that way. But still, there are questions, things that don’t make sense to me. For example, why would she wait until the book club night to commit suicide? She could have just as easily done it in her own home. Plus, if she had committed suicide, why not bring the entire vial of cyanide with her? Why only take a little bit, and leave the rest in her dresser drawer?”

  I nodded. “All very good questions.”

  Chase sighed. “Unfortunately, they’re all questions I don’t get to ask anymore. I had to alert the medical examiner as to my new findings, and as a result, the County Medical Examiner has determined that Vanessa’s death was a suicide. That means it’s no longer an open homicide investigation, and I have to move on.”

  “Wait, so does that mean if she was still murdered than whoever did it gets away with it?”

  “Well, there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t justify investigating a murder that isn’t actually classified as a murder. If however, new information came to light, perhaps information dug up by a member of the public and brought to my attention, then the medical examiner could change their findings once more, and this would once again be a murder investigation.”

  “Hmm, so all you need is an enterprising member of the public to somehow find evidence that this was a murder after all?” I said, wiggling my eyebrows at Chase.

  The waitress came by with our food just then, as my boyfriend laughed at me.

  “Yes,” he said, when the waitress had left again. “That is what I need. But keep in mind, it may actually be exactly as it appears. There is a very real possibility that Vanessa simply committed suicide, and chose a rather unorthodox way to do it. We may simply never get an answer to our questions.”

  “I get that,” I said. “But I agree with you. There are just too many questions, and something about this seems wrong. I’ll let Cat know, and if we find anything, I’ll make sure that you find out about it so that if somebody did kill Vanessa, they can be brought to justice.”

  Our attention then turned toward food, and Chase and I ate in silence for a couple of minutes, each one of us caught up in our own thoughts.

  “Did you see that Frank won the election last night?” I asked eventually, shooting Chase a grin.

  “I did,” Chase replied, breaking into laughter. “I woke up this morning to find a police report on my desk that I wasn’t really expecting. It turned out Denise got drunk, and broke one of the windows to the conference center while trying to get to Frank and accusing him of rigging the election.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Are you serious?”

  Chase nodded. “One hundred percent. If it wasn’t for the damage done to the conference center, it would actually be quite funny. I’m surprised you don’t already know about it; your cousin was the one who called the police. When we got there, Denise was yelling at Cat, calling her a traitor and other worse words, while Cat had her phone out and was recording the entire incident.”

  I put my head in my hands. “Of course, that sounds exactly like Cat. I bet that video is on the local Facebook group already. I haven’t checked it this morning, but I bet Cat doesn’t want me to know she did it. She knows that I don’t necessarily agree with her egging on Denise at every opportunity.”

  “Well, thanks to her phone call Denise spent the night in the lockup, which probably wasn’t exactly the election night she had in mind for herself.”

  “It’s the night she deserved if she vandalized the conference center though,” I said, and Chase nodded his agreement through a bite full of burrito.

  It appeared that all of the excitement of the election hadn’t exactly ended when the votes were tallied.

  Chapter 17

  When I got back to the bookshop, Cat was sprawled comfortably on one of the couches, reading a new copy I’d just gotten in of Big Little Lies.

  She grinned at me when I looked up. “Have you seen it yet?”

  I shook my head. “No, Chase just told me about it at lunch.”

  “I wanted to tell you about it earlier, but we were actually busy at the coffee shop this morning.”

  “That’s good,” I said, while Cat pulled out her phone from her pocket. “Hopefully that means things are starting to go back to normal, as people realize that they’re not going to die by eating at your cupcake shop.”

  “Hopefully, but I’m still turning over about 20 percent less inventory every day than I did this time last week.”

  Cat held her phone out to me, and I pressed play on the video that she had left open. It was dark, so the video wasn’t the best quality, but I could make out Denise stumbling around near the entrance to the conference center.

  “It’s a travesty,” she slurred, grabbing onto a nearby lamppost to keep her balance. “An absolute travesty. I don’t know what you cheaters did to cheat the election, but there is no way I lost, you idiots must have done something.”

  “What did we do, Denise, other than not voting for you?” I heard Cat’s voice snicker in the background.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know exactly, but I know you did something,” Denise hissed. “I couldn’t have lost. Couldn’t! And those idiots are all in there celebrating, like there’s something to celebrate tonight.”

  “Well, I personally think this is a great night to celebrate, for a number of reasons,” Cat said, and I could practically feel her grinning behind the lens.

  “This is bull!” Denise shouted, grabbing a rock.

  “Hey, wait!” Cat said, and the video disappeared for a second as Cat obviously tried stopping Denise from doing whatever she was about to do. A second later there was a smash, and the video showed Denise once more, standing in front of a broken window this time, a huge smile on her face.

  “There! That’ll show them,” she said, before leaning over a hedge and vomiting. That was where the video cut out.

  “Gross,” I said, laughing, handing the video back to Cat. “That woman definitely needs to learn not to go out in public when she’s been drinking so much.”

  “I know, right? I only went back because I realized when I got home that I’d forgotten my bullet journal at the conference center; I was showing it to Karen, from Pickles’, and I must have set it down on a table and f
orgotten about it. It was when I was on my way back that I ran into Denise.

  “She’s going to be pissed at you for videoing that when she gets out of jail,” I said, flipping the sign on the door back to ‘open’.

  “Good,” Cat grinned. “That woman has spent so much of her life trying to make me feel miserable, it’s about time she got some of her own medicine.”

  “Hey, speaking of, there’s an update on the case from Chase.”

  I told Cat what Chase had told me, and she frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know,” I replied. “I actually agree. I don’t think Vanessa committed suicide, but there are just so many questions that need solving.”

  “And now we’re the only ones who can solve them,” Cat said. “After all, you heard the man. He can’t investigate this case anymore. There’s other police stuff to do in Sapphire Village, and after last night he’s probably going to have his hands full answering why a mayoral candidate ended up in prison.”

  “I just wish we knew for sure,” I said. “Was Vanessa really murdered, or did she kill herself?”

  “We need to ask the people she was closest to,” Cat said. “We know where Polly lives, how about Kyle, her fiancé?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I can probably get his address from Chase though.”

  “Okay,” Cat said. “How about this afternoon I go and see Polly, and you go and see Kyle? After all, you’ve actually met him before.”

  “And you want us to find out if it was likely that Vanessa killed herself?”

  Cat nodded. “Exactly. I mean, it’s in every basic psychology textbook. Was she acting differently than normal? Was she making plans for the future? Those are the sorts of things we need to find out.”

  “Sure,” I nodded. “I can ask. Kyle seemed pretty open to talking to me about Vanessa. Actually, instead of going to see them separately, we should just go to the funeral. It is this afternoon, after all.”

  “Is it really?” Cat asked, and I nodded.