by Tonya Kappes
The morning ritual at the coffeehouse had gone pretty smoothly. I even had time to call Aunt Maxi to see what was going on with her secret investigation. I would’ve left her a voicemail on her cell phone if it hadn’t been full.
The coffee had finished brewing. The chicken-and-waffles skillets were already baked and ready for customers. I grabbed the phone and dialed into the shop’s messaging system. With the phone to my ear, I headed to the door to flip the sign to OPEN. It was seven a.m. on the dot.
“Roxy, it’s Camey.” Her voice sounded scared. “I’m in a pickle. Can you please bring me any sort of pastries you have? I’ll pay double. Emily called and told me that she couldn’t make the hospitality sweets anymore… and we have a contract. What am I going to do? Sue her?” There was a pause. “Call me.” The message ended.
I hugged the phone to my chest and tried to calm myself, taking deep breaths while trying to figure out what to do.
“We are just going to have to give her what we’ve got,” I said to Pepper on my way back to the kitchen. I dialed Bunny’s number, and she answered in a groggy voice. “Bunny, can you come in early?” I asked.
“How early?” she asked.
“Now.” I opened the freezer door and started to take out Santa Kisses from Christmas, apple crisp cookies and a few more. Even frozen, they were still good when thawed and baked.
“As in right now?” she questioned.
“Yes. Long story, and I’ll tell you when you get here.” I knew that would pique her interest.
“I’m getting ready now.” She clicked off the phone.
“Of course, she is.” I looked down at Pepper. The peanut butter dog treats were on a shelf at his eye level. “Okay. I’ll bake some.”
Pepper followed on my heels as I carried the loot to the counter and turned down the temperature on the stove. The casseroles were baked at a higher temperature than the sweets. I didn’t have time to try them. This was a dire situation for Camey.
I called my friend. “Camey?”
“Roxy, you got my message. Can you help me?” She barely took a breath between words.
“I can. Send Walker up in about thirty minutes and be sure he can take the coffee carafes and bring my other ones back so we can refill them again,” I said over her whispered “thank you.”
“You’re a doll, Roxy.” There was more relief in her voice than from even a couple of seconds before.
“What did Emily say?” I asked because I’d planned to go see her dad today at the bank to really put my thumb on what was going on.
“She said that the bank had called in her loan, and to kick the poor girl while she was down, the sheriff raided her shop. Hold on.” Her voice was muffled, but I could tell she was telling Walker that he needed to come to the shop to get the goods. “Listen, room five has a leak in their bathroom. I’ve got to go. I’m sending Walker.”
She hung up the phone, and I got my cookie sheets out and really greased them up before I put some of the frozen sweets in the oven.
“Good morning,” Aunt Maxi trilled when she pushed through the kitchen door. “Roxy, honey, you’ve got customers.”
“I do?” I felt like a deer in headlights.
“You do. You serve customers here.” She looked down her nose at me and, picking the fingertip of each of her fingers, plucked her gloves off and tossed them in her purse.
“Gloves?” I asked, quickly popping more cookies and scones in the oven. I pushed the timer on my watch and motioned for her to follow me out to the front of the shop.
“I’ve got to make some very big decisions today on this thing I’m looking into.” She still wasn’t going to tell me what the thing was about. “I saw that you called me last night.” She helped herself to whatever she wanted to eat, and I was perfectly happy with that because while she was back behind the counter, she waited on customers too.
“You need to delete your old messages,” I told her as I made a few more industrial thermoses to have ready for Walker.
“How do you do that?” she asked.
“Are you telling me that you don’t get your messages?” I put some big scoops of my freshly ground summer blend into the big filters. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised to find this out.”
“Roxanne Bloom, don’t you talk out of school.” She handed some change back to the customer she was helping. “Come back and see us,” she told them then retrieved her phone from her big pocketbook.
She fiddled with it until I finished making the coffee and clicked the pots’ switches on.
“Here.” I took the phone and swiped my finger left, right, and sideways to get to her messages. I handed the phone to her. “Now, you click on the ones you want to hear,” I said just as the timer on my watch went off. “Delete the ones you don’t.”
The kitchen was warming and filling with the scents of apple and cinnamon as well as some peanut butter.
“Delicious.” I was pleased to see the nice tan skin on the cookies. I couldn’t help but pick up one of the warm apple crisp cookies and pop the hot sucker in my mouth. “Mmm, that’s good.”
“Roxy!” Aunt Maxi scared me to death.
“What? They’re my cookies.” I felt like a scolded child after she’d caught my hand in the cookie jar.
“No.” She hurried over to me with the phone stuck out in front of her. “You aren’t going to believe who called me.”
“Who?” I asked and took the phone from her.
“Hit the last message,” she demanded. I was smart enough to know that when Aunt Maxi’s voice sounded that way, she meant business, and I did it.
“Maxine, this is Hillary Canter. I heard you were the one that I needed to call for an article on the ‘Sticky Situation’ page in the paper.” There was a sound in the background that I couldn’t make out very well. “I’ve got a scoop for you that’ll make your mouth water.” Then the phone clicked off.
“Play it again.” She pointed.
I replayed it.
“The time on that message is three forty-five a.m.” She began to shake. “I think I was the last person she called.”
There was suddenly a shift in the world that I could feel clear down to my toes.
“What was that sound when she paused midway through?” I asked. Aunt Maxi gulped. “Do you think she was calling you about the wedding?”
“I do. I think she was going to tell her side of the story. The big fight between her and Pam in here yesterday was the talk of the town.”
“It was?” No wonder Spencer had dragged her and Emily into the department. “I think you need to give this information to Spencer. It totally gives Emily an alibi. Now, I just need to find out where Babette was that night.”
“She didn’t tell you?” Aunt Maxi asked as if I was Babette’s keeper.
“I didn’t ask.” My eyes scanned the coffeehouse. “Yet.”
***
Pepper jumped up on my leg, bringing out of my thoughts. Ever since Aunt Maxi had left, I couldn’t stop thinking about the voicemail and the sound that was in the background. At first, the sound was just a strange sound. Given the circumstances, Aunt Maxi and I listened a few more times, and the sound started to take on the sounds of hiccups. It was weird, and I chalked it up to my having a very active imagination.
“Do you need to go outside?” I asked Pepper.
The word alone excited the pup into a frenzy. He did circles, yelped, and jumped a few times until I got the leash from the hook.
“Do you think you’ve got this covered?” I asked Bunny as I bent down to clip the leash on Pepper. A good walk down the pier was what he and I both needed, but for very different reasons.
“Lord have mercy, Roxy. You know I’m good,” she said in a voice thick with sarcasm. “You’re gonna go look around, aren’t you?”
“You never know. It’s a good opportunity to go take Pepper on a walk and maybe stop by to see Big Bib.” My cell phone rang, and I scurried outside to answer it when I saw it was Mama. “Hey, ho
w’s your client?”
“That’s what I was calling about.” She paused as if she were struggling to find the right words. “It’s. . . I don’t want to talk over the phone. What if I meet you for lunch at the Bean Hive?”
“That’s fine. I’m always there,” I said as I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Spencer was walking out of All About the Details and coming toward me. “Come, Pepper,” I whispered and tugged on the leash for us to walk the other way.
“You’re walking Pepper?” Mama asked.
“Roxy!” Spencer yelled. “Roxanne!”
“Who’s that?” Mama asked, sounding a bit confused.
“It’s Spencer, and I was hoping he didn’t see me,” I grumbled and stopped after he yelled my name again, adding that he knew I saw him. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
I clicked off the phone and turned around, practically running into him.
“Why didn’t you stop when I called you name?” His features hardened. “I know you heard me because you suddenly acted like one of those crazy speed-walking people in the mall.”
“I was on the phone with my mom.” I took a few steps over to where Pepper was smelling a plank. “What’s going on with Hillary’s murder?”
“We found a photo of a cake that Emily Rich had designed. I heard Hillary hadn’t been so nice about Emily baking the wedding cake.” He was divulging more information than he normally did, which put me on alert. “Did you know that Emily was having money issues?”
“Are you asking me for your investigation?” I pushed a strand of my curls behind my ear.
“What if I was?” he asked. “Not that you have any business whatsoever looking into this, but you do play the lawyering-up card a lot. I figured we might as well work as a team. People talk to you more than they talk to me.”
“Go on,” I encouraged him.
I wasn’t going to lie. It felt good that he finally seemed to be listening to me about how coffee and a little sweet treat make people feel comfortable. That level of what I liked to call “the feels” was when people started to talk. There was a lot of gossip going around the coffeehouse about Hillary and her family’s finances.
“I’m not asking you to go undercover and put yourself in danger.” His voice was tight as he spoke. “I’m just asking you to call me if you hear anything strange.”
“For starters, I think Hillary’s last call on her cell phone was to Aunt Maxi.” We walked past Walk in the Bark. Pepper tried to tug us across the boardwalk to get inside. He knew that Morgan Keys, the owner, would give him not only some good scratches but a few treats. “On our way back,” I promised him. I had to fight him the entire way past Touched by an Angel Spa and The Crooked Cat Book Shop.
“We couldn’t find her cell phone.” His words sent chills to my bones. “Her parents signed a release of records since they paid for it, and Gloria sent in the warrant. We should have them back by the end of today. Why do you think she called Maxine?” he asked.
We walked down the ramp toward the parking lot of The Watershed. There was a nice grassy area along the shoreline where Pepper loved to run and smell. It was good for us to go here a couple of times a day so he wasn’t so cooped up in the coffeehouse.
“She left a message after three thirty a.m., which means that Emily Rich was in no way involved in killing Hillary because she was at Jean Hill’s orchard, milking the cows and goats and whatever else could be milked so she could pay off some debts.”
I bent down and unclipped Pepper’s leash. While I did that, Spencer pulled out his little notebook and scribbled away.
“Yeah, we released her last night after we checked her alibi. I did call the coroner, and he said Hillary took her last breath around four a.m.” He sucked in a deep breath and gazed out over the lake. “Pam doesn’t have an alibi. The evidence is piling up against her more and more, with the arguments and the fact that Hillary was going to pay off the rest of the wedding.”
It took a lot for me not to say “I told you so,” but we were all adults, and I was kind of digging the fact that he wanted my expertise, advice, and help.
“Hillary was a hard one to take. She even knocked my coffee shop.” I held my hand up over my brow to shield the bright sun so I could watch Pepper play in the shallow edge of the water. “I heard her family was having financial problems, which I found odd since she was going to pay for the wedding.”
“You did?” His brows furrowed. His eyes shifted from left to right a couple of times before he clamped his mouth shut and flipped through his little notebook. He dragged his finger down the page and said, “I interviewed her parents, and they didn’t mention it.”
“Maybe it’s not true. Again, I hear a lot of gossip, and though it’s just lips flapping, I’ve always found that there was some truth in there somewhere. You just have to weed it out.”
“Mr. Canter was full of himself. He can strut while sitting down.”
I laughed.
“Seriously, all joking aside, what about your friend Babette? I keep asking her to help me, but she keeps saying the she had nothing to do with it. She was at home, where she lives alone, so no one can prove it. Her coat was on the victim, though she claims she left it at her shop, and Jana said that Hillary and Babette had that big blow up.”
“Hillary said she had a big scoop for Aunt Maxi’s gossip column, which makes me think it was about Pam or Babette.” A pontoon boat was motoring down the lake toward the boat dock, which made me remember that I wanted to talk to Big Bib about the incident with Babette and his girlfriend years ago.
“Why was she on the boardwalk at three thirty a.m.? Who was she meeting? What did she want to tell Maxi?” He asked all the questions I’d been asking myself. “I asked her father why he thought she was on the boardwalk so early in the morning, and he said that he never kept tabs on her. She was a grown woman.”
“Aunt Maxi said she was going to come down and let you listen to the message.” I remembered the funny sound in the middle of it. “There’s something I can’t make out in the voicemail. Hillary didn’t sound distressed, and in the middle of her message, there was a hiccup sound in the background or something.” I shrugged. “I keep telling myself it was my imagination getting the best of me, since I really want to find this killer.” I clamped my lips together.
“No, no.” Spencer waged his finger at me. “You will not find a killer. I said ‘gossip.’ I want you to listen to the gossip in the safety of your coffee shop.” He gave me a stern look. “Got it?”
“Got it.” I saluted him. “Pepper! Let’s go!”
Before Spencer left, he confirmed Aunt Maxi’s cell phone number. He was planning to call her, but I knew he would get the voicemail-is-full message.
On our way back down the boardwalk, Pepper wasn’t about to let me pass up seeing Morgan. His leash was a long, retractable one, and he had it extended and taut to the fullest before I’d even made it to the edge of the Crooked Cat Book Shop.
Morgan greeted us with her bright smile. “Someone was scratching on my door, and I wondered if it was you,” she said to Pepper. Her brown hair looked pretty as it fell down over her fair skin. “Can he?” she asked before she gave him a treat.
“He’d be mad if you didn’t.” It gave me joy to see how happy Pepper made people. He was so sweet and gentle.
“Come on in.” She didn’t even have to say it because Pepper had already run into her shop and sat next to the counter where she kept the treat jar.
“Just for a minute. I’ve got to get back,” I said, walking inside the door to wait for Pepper to grab his treat. “Did you change things around?” I asked.
“Yes. I try to do that every year before the big tourist season comes. More and more people are bringing their animals to the lake, so I decided to make a whole section of dog life vests and goggles.” She walked over and held up a life vest with four armholes. “Aren’t they the cutest?”
“This must’ve taken a long time.” I looked at the wall and the three
rows of shelves she had dedicated to the boaters’ animals to match their owners’ aquatic lifestyle.
“It took me all night.” She popped the lid off the jar.
The sound alone made Pepper squirm with delight. I couldn’t help but smile at how cute he was. His little mustache quivered with anticipation of what she had in her hand when she bent down. She opened her hand, and he gently took it from her palm and darted off to the back corner where there was a dog bed.
I gasped. “Pepper!”
“He’s fine.” She waved off my concern.
“His paws are wet from getting into the lake surf.” My brows furrowed. “Oh, well. We need another dog bed.” My jaw dropped. “Did you say ‘all night’?” I asked.
“And for the past couple of days.” She sighed.
“Did you hear about Hillary Canter?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “What about her?”
“She was murdered on the boardwalk a couple nights ago. Strangled.” I watched as her brown eyes grew bigger. “Around three thirty a.m., to be exact. Were you here then?”
“Here? Yeah. I thought I heard something. I looked out the window and didn’t see anything. It was strange, too,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘strange’?” I asked.
“I swear I heard someone with a bad case of the hiccups.” She confirmed that my imagination hadn’t taken over when I’d listened to Aunt Maxi’s voicemail.
“Do you mind calling Spencer at the sheriff’s department and telling him that?” I asked.
“Not at all.” She shook her head. “That’s awful.” Her brows dipped. “I’ve been so wrapped up in this shop that I haven’t even looked at the paper or watched the news.” She opened a drawer from the counter and looked through it before she pulled out a calendar. “Tonight is the Southern Women’s Club monthly meeting. Beverly Canter is the president. I wasn’t going to go, but I think I will now.”
“Tonight?” I asked, wondering if I should go and pretend to be checking out the club.