Poisoned Tarts

by G. A. McKevett

  Savannah felt Dirk tense beside her. The L word during an interrogation was the last thing any cop wanted to hear.

  “Sure, Mrs. Greenaway,” he said. “If you think your daughter has done something illegal, you probably should get an attorney. Although, of course, as soon as you start calling around, it’s out of our hands. We won’t be able to keep a lid on this. Thanks to your daughter’s notoriety, the whole town, the world will know about it in fifteen minutes.”

  “I don’t need an attorney, Mom,” Bunny said with a classic sixteen-year-old eye roll. “They have nothing on me because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Oh, yes, you did.” Savannah fixed her with her best blue laser stare. “You absolutely did. And we have all the proof we need to convict you.”

  “Oh yeah? Of what?”

  “Of the false imprisonment of Daisy O’Neil, for starters. That’s a biggy, a felony, Miss Bunny. And you and Tiffany are both going to do some serious prison time for that.”

  “I’m a minor!”

  “Yes, but that’s a major crime, and the prosecutor is sure that he can try you as an adult. You’re known around the world for how very adult your behavior is. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for a jury to see you as all grown-up.”

  That seemed to take at least one puff of wind out of Bunny’s sails. She sank slightly lower in her folding metal chair.

  “And,” Savannah continued, “then there’s the matter of the murder of Andrew Dante.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about that!” her mother said.

  “She knows everything about that,” Dirk told her. “Your daughter killed Andrew Dante in cold blood.”

  Bunny sniffed and shook her head. “That’s just so dumb. I did not, and you can’t prove it.”

  “I think we need a lawyer,” Mrs. Greenaway said. “I’m going to call one right now, and—”

  “No, Mom, that’s just stupid!” Bunny shouted in her mother’s face. “I don’t need a lawyer. Criminals need lawyers. I’m not a criminal. I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done in the same situation.”

  “And what situation is that?” Mrs. Greenaway asked.

  When Bunny didn’t respond, Savannah said softly. “She’s pregnant, ma’am. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your daughter is pregnant with Andrew Dante’s baby.”

  “She is not! Are you?” She turned to her daughter. “Are you?”

  “No. They’re lying.”

  Savannah shook her head. “No, we aren’t lying. Bunny, you were at the clinic this evening having a consultation about an abortion. Tiffany Dante took you there. She’s pressuring you to go through with it, isn’t she? She doesn’t want to share her father’s fortune with any other siblings. Aren’t you smart enough to know that’s why she’s ‘helping’ you?”

  Bunny’s round little face flushed with anger. “I am too smart! I’m smarter than Tiffany will ever be. I don’t want Andrew’s stupid baby. He turned out to be a total creep.”

  “Bunny! No!” Her mother began to cry. “You are pregnant? Really?”

  “Oh, Mother, catch up, will you? Jeez, you can be so irritating sometimes.”

  “Andrew was a creep?” Savannah prompted. “He didn’t treat you right? He wasn’t willing to divorce Robyn and marry you? That’s what you were hoping for. That’s why you got pregnant in the first place.”

  Mrs. Greenaway gasped, but Bunny just crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Maybe.”

  “Oh, no ‘maybe’ about it,” Savannah continued. “He told you no way on the marriage. And when you realized that you weren’t going to be the new Mrs. Andrew Dante, the mistress of his big mansion with a fat bank account for everything you ever wanted, you killed him.”

  “Did not.”

  “We know that you did,” Dirk told her. “We know a lot about you, young lady.”

  “Like what?”

  Savannah glanced at Mrs. Greenaway and then said, “We know that you had sex with Andrew the day he died. We collected DNA from his…body…and compared it to yours. It’s a match.”

  Lie number one, Savannah thought. Not that it particularly troubled her soul, but she did like to keep track of such things.

  Bunny snickered. “Yeah, right. I watch a lot of those forensic shows on TV. I know all about that stuff. You don’t have my DNA on file. I didn’t give you any samples.”

  “We took it off a soda can that you drank from there at the Dantes’. You threw it away, and we dug it out of the garbage. It had your fingerprints and your DNA all over it.”

  Lie number two.

  Bunny looked a bit less cocky. “You did not.”

  “Did too. And we compared the lipstick you left on his genitalia to a tube of yours. It was a match.”

  Lie number three.

  “Lipstick?” Mrs. Greenaway looked like she might faint at any minute. “On his…oh…no!”

  “And,” Savannah continued, on a roll, “we know that it was you who left the note on the refrigerator that was supposedly from Andrew, saying he was on a plane to London. And after Robyn saw the note and threw it away, you dug it out of the garbage before we could find it and disposed of it another way.”

  “Nope. I didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes,” Savannah said. “And then there’s the clincher. The gun.”

  “What about the gun?” Bunny wanted to know.

  The girl was far less calm now. In fact, she was breathing so hard and fast that Savannah thought she might hyperventilate at any moment.

  “The gun that you stashed under Tiffany’s bed. Nice touch, that. But it had your epithelials on it.”

  Lie number four.

  “What are those?” Mrs. Greenaway asked cautiously, as though she was afraid to hear the answer.

  “Oh, Mother, just shut up.” Bunny looked absolutely miserable, which was fine with Savannah. Better than fine, in fact. Her Halloween was just getting better by the minute. “I know what epithelials are. They’re like cells that come off of your hands when you touch something. They can get DNA out of them.”

  “Gee, you could be a CSI tech when you grow up,” Savannah said. “Oh, wait…I forgot…You’re going to be in jail.”

  “I don’t see why I should go to jail,” Bunny said. “I really don’t. If people knew how he treated me, they wouldn’t blame me for anything I did to him. He was so rude! I did everything he wanted…even that morning, and then he called me very nasty names and told me he didn’t want me or our baby.”

  “So you got the gun and made him go sit in one of the coffins on the patio,” Savannah said. “Was he scared?”

  Bunny shrugged. “Yeah, a little. But he kept saying I shouldn’t be stupid, acting like a dumb kid, waving the gun around like that. He sat down in the coffin like I told him to, but he didn’t think I’d really do it. Boy, I’ll bet he was surprised.”

  The nasty smile that crossed her young face sent a chill through Savannah. She had seen some pretty evil people in her day, but this girl was so young. It usually took a lot longer for a soul to become embittered to that degree.

  “Why the wooden stake?” Dirk asked.

  “Because he drove a stake through my heart!” she said. “Do you know how it feels to love somebody so much, to do everything they want you to do and then be told to just go away, just get lost?”

  Mrs. Greenaway clapped her hands over her face and shook her head back and forth as though she simply couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She kept whispering, “No, no, no, no.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Bunny said to her. “I did it, and I’m not ashamed either. If you’ve ever felt like I did, you’ll know exactly why I killed him. That’s why no jury will convict me of murder. If there’s even one woman on there who’s been through what I have, she’ll understand and vote not guilty. And that’s all it will take for me to get away with it.”

  Savannah sighed. “Oh, Bunny. We’ve all been through what you went through. We’ve all loved and lost. The difference is
we didn’t murder our former lovers. We might have felt like it, but we didn’t pull a gun on him, make him sit in a coffin, put a bullet through his heart, and then drive a stake through it for good measure. You blew it, kiddo, bigtime.”

  “Well, he deserved it. And I’m not sorry, and I’m not ashamed.”

  “That’s too bad,” Savannah said softly. “’Cause you really oughta be…for your own sake, if for no one else’s. You really ought to be ashamed.”

  Chapter 22

  Savannah looked around her backyard at her guests who were having a good time, eating her food, soaking in a bit of Southern hospitality, Southern California style.

  Daisy and her mother were hanging out by the barbecue grill, getting to know Ryan and John. Tammy and Gran were sitting on a swinging bench seat that Dirk had suspended from a tree branch in honor of Gran’s visit. She always missed her porch swing when she came to visit.

  And Dirk was lying on the grass, his Dodgers cap over his face, hands folded on his belly.

  He looked a little like Andrew Dante had in his coffin, but Savannah decided not to mention that to him. The case was finally closed, and it hadn’t been a particularly pleasant experience. Everyone present was all too happy it was over.

  Two days ago, the prosecutor had announced that he would, indeed, be trying both Tiffy and Bunny as adults, and the media was going wild. It was the lead story on every television and radio news broadcast and on the front page of every newspaper and tabloid in the country.

  But here in Savannah’s backyard, among her various flower gardens, with barbecue smoke and lively, friendly conversation floating on the breeze, all was well, calm, serene.

  She walked over to Gran and Tammy and sat down on a chair beside their swing. “What are you two hens clucking about over here?” Savannah asked them.

  They looked at each other, guilty grins on their faces. “Uh, well,” Gran said. “I was just telling Tammy that I talked to Martha on the phone this morning, and it seems she’s come into a bit of a…um…inheritance of sorts.”

  Savannah raised one eyebrow. Gran’s best friend, Martha, was Gran’s age—in her eighties. “Oh? Did her grandmother finally pass away unexpectedly and leave her a chunk of money?”

  “Something like that,” Gran replied coyly. “I think she’s going to replace that old blunderbuss of a car of hers and get herself a brand new Cadillac!”

  “Ah, how nice for her. And how about you, Granny Reid?” Savannah said. “Are you going to be coming into any unexplained money in the near future?”

  “I can’t really say,” was the sly answer. “But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the next time you come visit me, I have some new windows in my little house. Those old ones get stuck all the time, and I dang near suffocate in the summertime.”

  “Well, won’t that be nice for you and Martha.” Savannah laughed and shook her head. “Are you two hungry yet?” she asked.

  “Starving,” Gran replied. “It’s been so long since breakfast that my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”

  “Well, the steaks will be done in a few minutes. You eat one of those, a few ears of corn, some big scoops of potato salad and finish it off with a whomping bowl of that homemade peach ice cream…and that should take the edge off that hunger.”

  “It’ll make a serious dent, to be sure.”

  Savannah smiled, reached over, and took her grandmother’s hand. “You and I have some catching up to do in the visiting department. Where do you want to go? Disneyland?”

  “Always. It’s been too long since I’ve had a Mickey and Minnie sighting.”

  “We’ll take care of that next week.”

  “Actually,” Dirk said, sitting up and brushing the grass off his arms, “if you could get to Disneyland this week, I have a suggestion as to what you girls might do next week.”

  “Oh?” Savannah couldn’t help being intrigued. Since when did Dirk act as social director for anyone? Anyone at all? “And what would you recommend?”

  He grinned, walked over to the chair where he had tossed his jacket, and fished around inside one of the inner pockets.

  He walked back to them, a shiny golden envelope in his hand. Laying it in Savannah’s hand, he bent over and kissed the top of her head. “There,” he said. “That’s for you.”

  “For me?” She looked down at the envelope. “Why?”

  “Because you mentioned to me…quite recently…that I never buy you presents unless I have to. And I realized that’s true. So I figured it was time I changed that. I bought you a present.”

  She was dumbfounded. “You?”

  “Don’t be a smart aleck, or I’ll take it back. Open it up.”

  As she pulled the fancy silver seal off the back, he said, “You helped me a lot with that case. You all did. So that’s actually for all three of you. All of my girls.”

  Savannah reached inside and pulled out three gift certificates.

  “Oh, oh, oh…Dirk! These are for…oh…I don’t believe it! Gran, Tam, he’s bought us all a full day of beauty at Euro-Spa in Twin Oaks! Facials, manicures, pedicures, massages! Can you believe it?”

  “Full days of beauty!” Tammy leaped off the bench and threw her arms around his neck. “No way! Dirk!”

  A moment later, he had Gran and Savannah hugging him, too.

  “How could you afford that?” Savannah asked, while kissing his cheeks. “What did you do, sell your house trailer?”

  “Naw, I couldn’t have gotten that much for it.”

  “Did you finally have a winner in the lotto?” Tammy asked.

  “Hey, I make good money, you know,” he said. “And you may have noticed that I never, ever spend any of it.”

  Gran nodded. “Uh, yes, we did notice you squeeze a nickel pretty tight before lettin’ it go.”

  “Well, I decided you deserved it. All of you. So, go get rubbed the right way for a change…on me.”

  Gran and Tammy finally let him go and hurried across the yard to show their gift certificates to Ryan and John. But Savannah remained behind, still hugging him close, her arms tight around his waist.

  “Thank you, buddy,” she said. “This means a lot. You’re the best.”

  Dirk looked down at her, his eyes warm with affection and more importantly, respect. “No, babe, you are,” he said. He nodded toward Daisy, who was standing next to her mother, her beautiful red hair shining in the afternoon sun, her pretty face lit with the pure joy of living.

  “This time, we did it,” he said. “We got to her in time. We saved this one.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder and nodded, too emotional to talk. When she could finally trust herself to speak, she said, “We sure did. We can’t always save them all. But once in a while, we can pull one back from the edge…and that makes it all worthwhile.”

  “It does.” He kissed the top of her head. “It really, really does.”

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  Copyright © 2008 by G.A. McKevett and Kensington Publishing Corporation

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