Fatal Fiction (A Book Barn Mystery)

by Kym Roberts

  Out loud.

  Then he asked if I understood my rights and, when I nodded, he told me he needed a verbal acknowledgment.

  “Yes” came out of my mouth in vibrato form.

  I signed my name and gazed down at the signature, which looked more like the chicken scratch of my five-year-old students than that of a teacher with a bachelor’s degree. I looked up at the two-way mirror on the wall. Sheriff Mateo Espinosa was behind that glass; I just knew it. He was watching me suffer. I could tell from the detective’s posture and the sweat on his head that he patted dry with a folded hankie. He was almost as nervous as I was.

  Almost.

  The interview started off friendly enough; at least his false smile showed some level of concern for my comfort. But then he started quizzing me about Marlene, my belt, and her scarf. It was at about that time that a light bulb turned on inside my brain. I was Hazel Rock’s public enemy number one. If I didn’t shut this down soon, I was going to end up living in this hellhole.

  I requested a lawyer quicker than the high school quarterback would be saying “hut, hut hike” later that night. I glanced back at the sheriff hiding behind my reflection as we left the room and scowled. He didn’t deserve a wave.

  Once inside my cell, I tried to remember a name, any name, of a local attorney. My mind drew a blank—except for one.

  Cade Calloway Senior. It’s eye-opening to find that you’re not quite desperate enough to dial your ex-boyfriend’s father for help. I wondered what my limit would be before I buckled and dialed the number. Then again, the fear of him laughing and hanging up just might keep me from ever making that call.

  There had only been one other time when I’d even considered risking the senior’s ire: four years earlier, when Cade wasn’t mayor but an up-and-coming NFL star. Not only had Cade gone on to play college ball but he’d ended up being chosen in the first round of the NFL draft. He would have been famous except for one hit. One sack he never saw coming. One play that ended his career and could have cost him his ability to walk.

  I’d seen the story when it hit the national news. The vicious collision seemed to be on replay over and over again as they told about the injury—two broken vertebrae and a torn ligament in his neck, but no prognosis to go with it. At the time I’d been frantic. Searching every media outlet I could find for a report on his condition, I’d been close to ditching my life and coming home. It’d been my aunt who’d finally made the phone calls that calmed me down. Cade would make a full recovery, but the team and the league weren’t up for taking the risk of keeping him on the roster despite his eagerness to get back on the field.

  If I’d made it through that low point, surely I could make it through this . . . this temporary misunderstanding of the truth.

  The phone rang on the opposite side of the glass and the deputy’s voice broke through the mumblings of the drunk in the cell next to me. The deputy looked up at me, her deep-set eyes never giving a hint as to what she thought of me or the charges I faced. She nodded as if she understood some important fact that decided my fate and reached for something under the desk. My cell door clicked as she called out, “Ms. Warren.”

  I shot to my feet and approached the glass door framed with steel as it slid open, knowing that someone—probably my daddy—had straightened everything out and I’d be walking away from this miserable hole in a matter of moments.

  The deputy nodded toward the black plastic phone on the wall that looked as if it came straight out of the 1970s. “I’m transferring a call for you. You can pick it up over there once it rings.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I welcomed the chance to hear a friendly voice, despite having to use the nasty jail phone to hear it.

  Even though I expected it, the din of the ring startled me, and I heard my neighbor in the cell next door snicker. Ignoring something that sounded like an antiquated catcall, I grabbed the gummy receiver and held it up: not too close to my ear, but close enough to hear the person on the other end.

  “Hello?” My voice wobbled suddenly and my eyes were rimmed with unshed tears. My daddy was finally coming to my rescue.

  “Charli, don’t worry, honey; I’m going to get you out of there.”

  My tears stopped. Unless my father had received a sex change in the past ten years, the very feminine voice on the other end wasn’t him. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Scarlet. I saw what Mateo did to you and I followed you to the station. He’s gone and messed up everything. I’ve been waiting for the past two hours for that man to get off that fine butt of his and come talk to me in the lobby. You would think he didn’t know what he was doing, the way he’s handling this case.” She sniffed, and I realized she was getting emotional for a completely different reason than I was. “The whole town is in an uproar over Marlene’s death. Some people are talking about capital punishment, like they want to bring back the gallows or something.”

  The blood drained from my face. I felt it seep through my body, heading to my core to keep my heart pumping. If it didn’t, I would have died on the spot.

  “But everything’s going to be okay. I pulled my video from the store and brought it to Mateo. He’s viewing it now with the detective assigned to the case. He’ll see exactly what I saw. You entered the Book Barn ready to conquer your demons from the past and three minutes later you ran out of that store like those evil spirits got the best of you and were trying to suck the blood out of your body or lop off your head.”

  I cringed at the thought of getting my head lopped off just as Scarlet paused long enough for me to ask, “Why?”

  “Why . . . what?”

  “Why are you helping me?” It didn’t make any sense.

  “Because we were friends in high school. We still are.”

  I wanted to say we weren’t friends then or now. I hadn’t even noticed her, except when her constant chatter had filled my brain beyond capacity back when I visited the principal’s office almost as often as some people visit the beauty shop. But the voice on the other end of the phone believed I was innocent, and that was as friendly as it got in Hazel Rock.

  Too afraid to believe my good fortune, I asked, “So you have a video?”

  “Yup, from the minute you stepped out of the cab and got sprayed with dirt to the sheriff putting his hand on the back of your head and tucking you into his patrol car. Everything is there, plain as the pink armadillo that watched the entire scene from the doorway of the Book Barn.”

  I was beginning to hate that rodent. She was the real Book Barn Princess. Yet, at the same time, hope began to blossom in my chest. “Then you got the killer on tape too?”

  “Well . . . I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Her hesitation kept that good feeling from spreading. Scarlet wasn’t telling the whole story. Which meant it was probably a story I didn’t want to hear. I asked anyway. “Who else was on the video?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Charli. It’s his store; I’ve got him on video coming out of The Barn for the past two years. It doesn’t mean he committed murder.”

  Don’t ask, don’t tell wasn’t an option for me. I’d quit hiding my head under rocks at the age of seventeen. My determination to get at the truth, however, didn’t eliminate the warble in my voice. My question came out more like a whisper. “Who was on the video, Scarlet?”

  Scarlet started backpedaling and I closed my eyes, waiting for that ax to fall. “I don’t think he did it, mind you, but the sheriff’s got it stuck in his head that your dad killed Marlene. And I’m pretty sure Mateo thinks you’re covering for your dad while he hightails it out of town. I personally think our sheriff has lost his mind. You’re not a killer; you’re Princess Warren.

  “Your dad is the town encyclopedia. If any of the kids needed a book for a report, your dad would find it. Without a library, your family’s store was the only place the kids in Hazel Rock had before the internet took over. And you were our head cheerleader in your junior year, for Pete’s sake. That’s
no easy task in the state of Texas.”

  I wanted to agree with her, but the part of me that grew up in Colorado laughed at the idea of cheerleading being that important to anyone.

  Scarlet didn’t notice the strangled noise from my end of the phone and continued on with a litany of superfluous reasons why I couldn’t possibly be guilty of murder or aiding and abetting a killer. All of which made me sound more like a Barbie doll than a real life human being.

  “You would have been a shoo-in for prom queen if you hadn’t left town. Bless your heart, you were practically engaged to our mayor. What prom queen, first lady goes around killing her daddy’s lover?”

  I was starting to get the feeling that at some point during high school, Scarlet had put me on a pedestal on which I certainly didn’t belong. I wasn’t sure if she believed in my innocence or just believed someone with my popularity would never stoop so low as to commit a violent crime. Except Scarlet was forgetting one important fact that the rest of the town seemed to remember clear as day: I stopped being all of those things two weeks before I left town. Hazel Rock’s darling daughter had turned into Hazel Rock’s version of Belle Starr—a brazen woman known for scandalous love affairs and her ability to rob a man blind without batting an eye.

  “Charli?”

  I let go of the past that obviously still haunted me, and focused on who was going to get me out of jail. Not my dad, who’d apparently taken my place as the number-one suspect. Not Cade. Certainly not the sheriff. “I’m sorry; did you ask me something?”

  “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Unable to come up with anything else to say, I murmured a soft, “Thanks,” and hoped she’d just let the subject drop. If I was going to be released and my dad was MIA, my means of escape was disappearing faster than it took Cade to turn his back on me. I needed to develop a plan to get home. Fast.

  “It’s not like the video shows anything,” Scarlet continued. “Just him running out of the store and hopping into his truck. There could have been a hundred and one other reasons he was running like that.”

  I’m sure there were a thousand reasons why my dad had run out of the book store . . . but I wasn’t going to think about the one reason that would make me stay. Because if I thought he was running out of the store to go to the airport to pick me up, the guilt would take over.

  “You’re sure the sheriff is going to release me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sitting out in the lobby waiting to pick you up.”

  The woman I barely remembered from high school was waiting for me to get out of jail when there wasn’t a soul back in Colorado, other than my aunt, who would dream of coming near me if they knew I’d been arrested on suspicion of murder. In fact, I’d probably lose my job just for being connected to this case. My principal was going to enjoy seeing me pack my bags and say good-bye to all the little five-year-olds who gave me my first gray hair. (I’d plucked it during my lunch hour after one of them had pointed it out to me in the reading circle.)

  Would I miss my students? I bit my lip and pondered that question while Scarlet rattled on about my dad’s innocence and Mateo’s bullheaded stubbornness. I was surprised at her passion on both subjects and my desire not to think about either one.

  I didn’t want to be rude, yet I also didn’t want to hold the phone any longer than I had to. And I certainly didn’t want to return to that ten-by-ten cell that smelled like someone had defecated all over the walls and floor.

  “Do you know when the sheriff is going to let me go?”

  “Ms. Warren?”

  I turned around as the deputy pushed the brown paper bag containing my purse, belt, and bootstrings across the Formica countertop.

  “Yes?”

  “Detective Youngblood just called and said you’re free to go.”

  “Scarlet!” I said into the phone, “They’re letting me go!”

  “I just told you that.”

  She had, but I hadn’t believed it was true until the deputy began opening the bag with Warren written on the outside in black Magic Marker.

  “Don’t leave. I’ll be out ASAP.” I hung up the phone without waiting for an answer. My faith in the truth had returned, along with my belief that it was time to get the heck out of Hazel Rock.

  Chapter Five

  “What is that?”

  “It’s my car.”

  I watched Scarlet open the driver’s door that was literally the entire front end of her little white car. It was so teeny, it looked like a vintage toy from the 1950s, minus the windup knob on the back. Although neither of us were what I would consider large, it was going to be a tight squeeze. We were lucky I didn’t have any luggage.

  Scarlet slid across the seat and I climbed in after her.

  “Did you make this car?” I asked.

  Scarlet grinned like a pet raccoon. “It’s a 1958 BMW Isetta. It’s got one cylinder and thirteen horsepower.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She rotated the key in the ignition and the engine turned over. I swore, it sounded like there was a sewing machine mounted in the trunk. Not an adult sewing machine—one of those E-Z Stitch sewing machines for little girls.

  “I think my dad’s lawn mower has a bigger engine.”

  “Maybe, but this car is one of the original gas savers. It gets better gas mileage than most hybrids . . . and it’s cute.”

  I looked around at the interior. It was cute, for a marshmallow on wheels. The exterior was solid white, with a small black circle on each side with a red letter S in the middle. The front windshield left me feeling exposed. The large rear window and the side windows that slid backward to open didn’t help. I was pretty sure I’d ridden a few carnival rides that had cars like this attached to a wheel that rotated at slow speed. They called them Ferris wheels.

  Scarlet pulled back the black cloth moon roof that covered the entire top to let in the evening breeze. I buckled my seat belt as she turned the radio on to a local country music station that made me feel even more claustrophobic as the tune bounced around the interior. “I don’t think your car would look too cute under a semi,” I said over the twang of a man singing to the woman who’d deserted him.

  “It actually fits underneath no problem.”

  “You’ve tried it?”

  “You only live once.”

  “I’d like to live longer than today.” I gripped the handle on my side of the car as she zipped backward out of the parking spot and then drove down the road with more speed than I thought the car was capable of.

  “I didn’t realize you were so . . .” She stopped. I think it had just hit her that she really didn’t know me at all.

  “A stick in the mud?” I offered. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been called that.

  She shook her head. “No, I was going to say afraid to try something new.”

  “What? I’m not afraid to try new things. I went skiing once.” It was on the bunny slope, but I did it. “I’ve ridden a snowmobile.” When that didn’t impress her, I added, “And I’ve jumped off a cliff into a freezing cold lake for a polar plunge.”

  Her eyebrow rose skeptically.

  “Okay, so it wasn’t a cliff, but it was a rock at least six feet tall and the water was like ice!” I didn’t tell her that I was the one who’d called it a polar plunge. Everyone else called it a summer swim in the month of July.

  That big grin appeared on her face again and I got the impression she knew I was holding back.

  I added the shocker I’d been saving for last as she pushed the pedal to the floor and passed a Crown Victoria I swore belonged to Sheriff Espinosa. “I’m the only teacher at Bobby V. Merrill Elementary who sits in the cutie pie booth at the school auction and takes countless whipped cream pies in the face every year.”

  Scarlet looked at my hair.

  “I cover it with a shower cap.”

  “When’s your school auction? I’d love to see that.” She pulled in front of the cruiser and the headlights flashed bri
ght for just a second. Scarlet waved in the rearview mirror.

  “It’s this weeken—” I started.

  Scarlet began laughing so hard, I thought she was going to roll the car over.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask cautiously.

  Cars honked as we buzzed by, doing at least ten over the speed limit. Nobody actually does the posted speed limit in Texas. It’s an unwritten rule that you drive ten miles an hour over the number on the sign. The cops pull you over at twelve. Scarlet glanced at me as she tried to keep her eyes on the road.

  “After what happened today, I needed a laugh like that.”

  “I could certainly use a laugh like that myself if you’d tell me what was so funny.”

  She was shaking her head again. “That’s why you came to Hazel Rock.”

  “What?” My voice kind of squawked. It does that when I realize I’ve been caught in a lie.

  “That’s why you came back to Texas—to miss eating a bunch of whipped cream like a starving hog when he sees a troughful of slop for the first time.”

  I huffed my indignation. “I don’t eat the whipped cream . . .” When her grin increased in size, I realized I’d denied the wrong part. “And I didn’t come back to Texas to miss the school auction . . . it just happened to be on the same weekend that my daddy needed me to be here. If I hadn’t missed my flight, I would have been back in time.”

  That wasn’t what I’d told my principal, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. And whether or not Scarlet learned the truth was irrelevant. I’d missed my plane; no whipped cream for me.

  Scarlet persisted. “So you would have gone back this afternoon and done the pie-in-the-face routine?”

  I skirted around the question. “It’s for a good cause.”

  “Un-huh.” Scarlet took the exit for Hazel Rock and stopped at the end of the ramp. “So you volunteer for this cutie pie booth every year?”

  “Well, I . . . I . . .”

  “Or you get chosen ’cause you’re the only single teacher, right?”