Biscuits and Slashed Browns

by Maddie Day

  My eyes widened. I hadn’t expected this reaction when I phoned the Rao house after Christina had left at six-thirty. I’d only wanted to see how they were doing, if they needed anything. I opened my mouth to respond and then clamped it shut again. What could I possibly say? I mused for another second.

  “I’m so sorry you feel that way, Mona. I—”

  “Don’t call me Mona,” she snapped. “To you I’m Ms. Turner-Rao. Or, preferably, nothing. Because I don’t want to talk with you.”

  “I don’t think Sajit killed Connolly,” I rushed to get the words out before she hung up on me. “I’m trying to figure out who the real murderer is so we can get Sajit released. Please believe me.”

  “But you told Lieutenant Bird my husband pushed that awful man. So now Sajit faces assault charges, too! Leave police work to the police, would you? Forget about trying to help. I can only imagine what other mud you can pile on Sajit’s head if you keep trying to assist us.”

  I heard murmuring in the background, and a muffled “No.”

  “And don’t think Turner is coming back to work for you, either,” she added. “Because he’s not.”

  The immediate silence as she disconnected hung heavy in the air. Wonderful. Now I had alienated two worried family members. I tapped on the table. But was Mona’s anger justified? Maybe she was upset for reasons I didn’t know.

  Wait. Turner had said his grandfather, his peepaw, was sick. Mona’s husband’s detention in jail on top of her father being ill could make anybody short tempered.

  I still thought it was odd she didn’t imagine it was worth it to check the hunting shed. Why wouldn’t you look everywhere possible for your missing husband? It was almost like she knew he was there and didn’t want him found. Why? Because she knew what had happened, and that he’d be accused of the murder if he turned himself in? I narrowed my eyes as one idea led to another. Maybe Mona had followed Sajit to the inn and watched his encounter with Connolly. What if Mona herself was the one who brought Connolly to the farm and ran a knife across his throat? But no, he probably outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. Unless she and Sajit did the deed together.

  My brain was going wacko on me. My main worry should be me being without a helper until Danna came back to work, and I was no closer to sorting out the murder.

  Why did I feel the need to sort it out, anyway? This was starting to become a habit I wasn’t sure I liked. Someone is killed. Someone I’m associated with in one way or another. I get involved in figuring out the why and who. It had made sense with the first murder, since I’d been framed for it. The second one was a body in my own store and a subsequent loss of business—first because the restaurant was a crime scene and later from sabotage. In the winter my pal Lou had been a serious person of interest—which was absurd—and then the murderer had had a connection to my building, a lethal connection.

  My involvement had more to do with my affinity for solving puzzles. Crosswords, logic games, the puzzles arising in carpentry—and the most serious of all, the murder case puzzle. I sighed, feeding Birdy before nuking a plate of leftover lamb for my dinner. After I ate, washing down the delicious stew with a cool glass of Pinot Gris, I knew it was time to make a new murder grid. I pulled out the graph paper, a ruler, and a couple of sharp pencils. Meanwhile, Birdy settled in near my feet for a thorough lick fest.

  After ten minutes I gazed at a puzzle with Warren Connolly’s name crossing Sajit Rao’s. Christina ending on Sajit and Sonia Genest going down from Nick Mendes. I worked in Noreen Connolly, Adele, and Oscar Thompson. I added chef knife, Nashville Inn, Rao Maple Farm, Maple Mania, sugaring off. Might as well include Buck Bird as well as Mona and Turner Rao. Was there anyone I’d missed?

  Jotting down Christina’s name made me consider what had happened in her past. How unspeakably awful that Connolly had raped her—and then had the nerve to show up at her restaurant being his usual obnoxious self and wanting to see her. I swallowed down my revulsion. In the four years since I’d known Christina she’d always struck me as happy and well-adjusted. She was a resilient woman to have overcome such a traumatic experience in her past. As many women had.

  Back to my puzzle. At the top I lettered KILLER and MOTIVATION. I’d be a lot happier—heck, I’d be done—when I could add those answers to the puzzle. I sat and stared, tapping my pencil on the pad. Now I had it all laid out, clearly and graphically, what could I do to fill in the gaps?

  I started a new sheet and titled it QUESTIONS, but before I started writing I shook my head. I should do this on my phone. That way, even if I was out I’d have my questions with me. I opened a notes app and tapped in the heading, then got started.

  What’s Sonia hiding?

  S alibi

  Why daughter so quick to press charges?

  Who stole C’s knife?

  Where victim killed?

  Blood traces

  Nick lying?

  Secrets

  Everybody has a secret or three, but it seemed to me this problem had to hinge on a secret I hadn’t yet uncovered. I set the phone down a bit harder than I should have. It was frustrating not having access to the investigation I was sure—or hoped—Detective Thompson was conducting. Maybe he’d already pulled an alibi out of Sonia. Had already found the murder site. Already knew who stole Christina’s knife. But then why detain Sajit? Despite what I’d said to Mona, I did have a little nag in the back of my mind. Maybe Dr. Rao had killed Connolly, after all.

  I picked up the phone again and added How to get Det Thomp to talk to me to my list. But I wasn’t going to solve access to Thompson easily. And definitely not tonight.

  My phone buzzed with an incoming text. My eyebrows went up. Way up. It was from Turner. He wrote:

  sorry mom so upset—will be at work weds if possibly can

  At least he wasn’t blaming me. He was over twenty-one and owned a car. He’d get here if he could. On the other hand, he lived at home and his family was in distress. A lot of distress. So maybe he wouldn’t show up. I blew out a breath and got up to stretch and grab a couple of cookies, feeling at loose ends. I didn’t have to prep tonight, because we were closed tomorrow. I picked up the novel I’d been reading and set it down again. I didn’t want to escape into someone else’s story, I wanted to solve this one. The outdoor thermometer read forty and it was dark out. Not a nice night for a stroll anywhere. I munched a cookie and wandered through my apartment. I reached for the TV remote but shook my head for the same reason I didn’t feel like reading.

  I paused, as I often did, at a picture of my mom and me, both of us nine years younger. This particular one, which hung in the hall in a teak frame she’d made, was from my graduation from Santa Barbara High School. Adele had taken it. An out-of-focus sea of gold and olive green gowns bubbled behind us. My hair hung long in a mass of dark loose curls, my cheeks were plumper and less defined than they are today, and I marveled at the amount of makeup I’d layered on. Mom smiled straight at the camera, her arm slung over my shoulders, but I gazed at her with a grin both sassy and adoring.

  “Mom, what should I do?” I gazed at her image. “Drop the problem, or keep chipping away at it? I know it’s neither my job nor my circus, but . . .” I waited. I listened. Sometimes when I talked to my mother’s picture, I actually felt some kind of resolution, some kind of answer pop into my mind. Not that I believed she was actually talking to me. I didn’t put stock in the kind of afterlife where such communication was possible. Still, you never knew.

  But when the only thing arising was a message telling me what a long tired day I’d had—a deep yawn—my shoulders dropped. All right, be that way. Yet as I headed back to the kitchen to clean the few dinner things, I heard her voice clearly in my head.

  “Stay safe,” she murmured. “Stay safe.”

  Chapter 24

  I was almost finished putting away my delivery of supplies the next morning when my phone buzzed with a text. The supplies had arrived earlier than usual. Usually the truck swung
by any time after one in the afternoon, but I’d gotten a call at eight saying the driver was on her way. Good thing I was already up, dressed, and caffeinated. I shut the heavy insulated door of the walk-in cooler, making sure it clicked, then pulled out my phone.

  Am outside, want to talk with you was the message from Oscar Thompson.

  I had plenty of questions for him, as well, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t answer them. Curious about what I could possibly tell him, I opened the door and said hello. I guess I might have been a bit overcaffeinated, since my hand was shaky. Or maybe it was nerves about talking to a state police detective yet again.

  He wore the same shiny black suit he’d worn on Saturday and the same ball cap, but today he’d added a red fleece vest zipped up to the neck over the suit in a nod to the cool temperatures. The combination was funny and incongruous, but hey, at least it picked up the red in his cap.

  “Good morning, Ms. Jordan.” The detective blinked, his mouth in a tense line. “I knocked. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “No. I was in the walk-in cooler. It has pretty thick walls and a noisy air circulation fan. What’s going on?” I supposed I could ask him in, offer him a seat, but this clearly wasn’t a social visit. And by now I knew better than to offer a handshake.

  “I believe I mentioned you are not to go off investigating on your own. Buck told me about your message yesterday afternoon.”

  Busted. “I wasn’t investigating, exactly.” I folded my arms but crossed my index and middle fingers on the hand hidden between my ribs and my elbow. “I’d gone out for a bike ride and I stopped in at the Nashville Inn to say hello.”

  “And you just happened to go all the way around the back of the dumpster?”

  “I was curious. Sajit had told me what happened and I wanted to see the spot for myself.”

  “Dr. Rao told you what happened because you went traipsing into the woods specifically to look for him even though his own wife had said not to. You’re lucky she didn’t slap trespassing charges on you.”

  I stared at him. “But I found him, didn’t I? And you’re holding him for the murder, which I believe is an error. He would still be in a shed in the woods if I hadn’t gone ‘investigating.’” I surrounded the word with finger quotes. “You wouldn’t know where he was, and he’d be suffering even more than he already was from dehydration and exposure. You ought to thank me.” My voice rose in indignation.

  He pressed the air with a flat hand a couple of times in a “slow down” gesture, gazing at a spot just over my left shoulder. “Look, it’s good you found him, all right? But it was a rogue act. You could have asked us to go out there and check on his well-being.” He kept his voice so level it was almost robotic. “We would have been happy to.”

  I mentally rolled my eyes at “rogue act” and tried to keep from actually looking exasperated. I gazed at him for a second with a sudden inspiration. He could have blown up at me and didn’t. Maybe if I started acting a little nicer I could get him to share information. I’d been in the Midwest long enough to have absorbed a few niceness lessons. “It’s cold out here. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee, Detective?”

  I could almost see his brain calculating pros and cons. He finally followed me in, clomping his cowboy boots on the wooden floor installed a century and a half ago.

  “I’m not open on Tuesdays but coffee brews up in just a couple of minutes. Have a seat anywhere.” I bustled off to make half a pot, since I didn’t believe in wasting plastic pods a zillion times a day, not even two or three a day in my apartment kitchen. After the dark brew had started dripping, I turned back. But he hadn’t taken a seat. Instead, hands clasped behind his back, he perused the cookware area, as well as the shelves against the wall featuring most of the country store artifacts I’d inherited with the place. I strolled over to join him.

  “Interesting collection. What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a device with a brown ceramic goblet-shaped bowl screwed on top of a glass jar. A metal lever reading JUBILEE was attached by a hinge to the top of the bowl.

  “It’s a cream maker. Apparently at a time when things like cream were strictly rationed, housewives would combine milk and butter in this thing and emulsify them into cream.” I shook my head. “Yeah, don’t ask.”

  One of his eyebrows raised and lowered but he took another step. “And that?” He scrunched up his face as he peered at the wall.

  I picked up the handle of the implement he was examining. The handle ran perpendicular to two side-by-side spiraled coils of a thick metal, each curling in the opposite direction. “Potato masher. Isn’t it pretty?”

  “It looks like art.”

  I glanced at him. I guess it was my day to be surprised. He seemed too logical to be considering the artistic merits of a vintage kitchen implement. But he was right. “Beauty and function in one package.”

  “This one’s dangerous.” He picked up a device by its crosswise handle, which was attached to a sharp metal spike about fifteen inches long. Five inches from the point two other sharp spikes emerged, which corkscrewed around the straight spike in the middle. “Looks like a kind of auger.”

  “Sugar auger. You’re right. They used it to break up packed-down sugar or fruit in casks or barrels. I guess they stuck it in and turned it.” The coffee machine made its last hisses and sputters. “Coffee’s ready.”

  “You might want to lock the auger in a glass display case, Ms. Jordan. It could be a lethal weapon.” He tore himself away from the antiques.

  A minute later I sat across from him as he added sugar in no need of an auger and stirred.

  “So did you come by just to tell me to butt out of the case?” I kept my tone light, and glanced at him over the top of my own coffee mug.

  “In part. Also, I assume because of your experience as a chef, you seem quite close to several of the personalities in this case. Ones I can’t convince to tell me anything of substance.” He still didn’t meet my eyes but at least he was talking.

  It sounded like he wanted my help. “Which personalities, for example?” I cocked my head, assuming he meant Christina.

  “The Rao family. Mendes. Ms. James. They all clam up around me, despite my needing to know what they know.” He lifted a shoulder and dropped it.

  “What about Sonia Genest? She didn’t like Professor Connolly at all.”

  “Her, too. She won’t say where she was Friday night.” He slurped up his coffee like he’d been in a caffeine-free desert for forty days.

  “Exactly. Did you hear about her date with Nick Mendes Saturday night?”

  My question got his attention. He looked me in the face for the first time. “No. What should I have heard about this date?”

  “After I learned Christina’s knife was involved in the murder”—I watched the detective but he didn’t show any surprise at learning I knew, so I went on—“I stopped into Hoosier Hollow to see if Christina was all right. She wasn’t there, since she was still with you and your team, but I spied Sonia and Nick sitting at the bar together.”

  “By the way, just so you know? I don’t officially suspect your friend Ms. James.”

  Whew.

  “We’re very interested, however, in discovering how her knife went missing. Did she tell you how or when it happened?”

  He was being unbelievably forthcoming with me. I might as well tell him the truth. “No. I asked her yesterday when she first missed it but then we started talking about something else and never got back to it. Anyway, I chatted with Sonia and Nick for a few minutes Saturday night, and it looked like they hadn’t known each other but were making up for lost time fast.” But why hadn’t Christina told Thompson when she’d realized her knife was gone?

  “And I should care about this date between Genest and Mendes why?” he asked.

  “When I mentioned the murder while I was talking with them, Nick excused himself to the restroom for a while. Sonia was quite plain about how much she disliked Connolly and alluded to the fact that Ni
ck had a beef with him, too. But she didn’t say what.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Did you press her to say where she was Friday night?” I asked.

  “Of course I did. She refused and I’m not happy about it. Now my team is going to have to waste time asking any number of her neighbors and associates if they saw her, whereas if she’d just handed over the information, all we’d have to do is confirm it.”

  “Can you tell me what you’ve learned about Nick? He and the professor are both from Boston.”

  “Nothing yet. But we have feelers out with the Boston PD as well as with a couple of other contacts I have.” He wrapped both hands around the mug. “This coffee certainly tastes better than the sludge they serve at the South Lick PD.”

  “What is it about police coffee?” I smiled. “Have you talked with Turner away from his mother? He’s a smart, forthcoming young man. I imagine he might open up to you more if you can convince him to come in on his own. I know Mona is angry at Sajit being held, but Turner isn’t a minor.”

  “I’m working on him.” Thompson removed his cap and laid it on the table.

  His dark hair was wispy, barely disguising a pale scalp, and cut longer than I would have expected. No wonder he wore a hat in this weather.

  “I’m also looking into Ms. Turner-Rao as a possible person of interest.” He gazed at my right shoulder. “Being the wife and all.”

  “Do you have any evidence against her?”

  “She seems to have had a few run-ins with Connolly in years prior.”

  Interesting, but not evidence. “In an adversarial way?”

  “We are still gathering the facts.”

  “And I gather she’s not talking about it.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  I pictured the puzzle I’d sketched out last night. “And what about Dr. Rao?” It couldn’t hurt to keep asking questions while Thompson seemed to be on a roll talking. Compared to the last time we’d met, he was a real Chatty Cathy this morning. “You can’t hold Sajit for long if you don’t have any real evidence linking him to the crime, right? Buck said all you have is an eyewitness who saw Sajit and Connolly go behind the dumpster.”