Lemon Tart

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Jack wouldn’t meet her eye. “I finished the Monday classes at the convention and came back to Garrison to talk to Anne. I had hoped she would take more money and disappear. But she wouldn’t. She was as obstinate as ever and so I . . . I killed her.”

  “What about Ron? He was there that night.”

  Panic crossed Jack’s face, but he quickly repaired it. “Ron came with me, but then I told him to leave when she became so difficult. I did this, Sadie.”

  “You took two cars? Ron drove separately?”

  “Ye-es,” Jack said.

  “Why? If you’re both going to the same place for the same reason, why take two cars?”

  “It seemed better that way.”

  He was such a liar! She didn’t even bring up the fact that both Ron and Jack then returned to the conference without a toddler.

  “And why did you go back to her house last night?” She was leaning forward, staring at him so as not to miss a single nuance of his face. He startled, furrowing his eyebrows for half a second.

  “Uh, I . . . didn’t.” He glanced at the mirrored wall as he answered.

  “You did,” Sadie said. “You went to the closet, fumbled through some boxes and stole some pictures.”

  “How do you—”

  Sadie waved a hand as if parting smoke from the unseen fire she imagined coming from Detective Cunningham’s ears on the other side of that glass. “Why were you there?”

  Jack looked at the table again and eventually let out a breath. “I gave Anne a gift, in the beginning. It was silly, really.” He paused and Sadie feared she’d see some kind of calm look of reminiscence on his face, but instead his pain intensified. “The first time we . . . went out, we went to a waffle house. The next time I went to Boston I bought her a waffle iron. She loved it, and it made me feel like some kind of hero for spending thirty bucks on a kitchen appliance. There was a recipe in the instructions and we made Belgian waffles together a few times—funny, Carrie never lets me cook. She didn’t want me to mess up her kitchen.” He let out a strangled breath. “When I saw Anne a year or so later, after Trevor was born, she brought the box for the waffle maker out of her bedroom. In it she’d collected all the e-mails we’d sent back and forth, a card I sent her with some flowers, and a few pictures I didn’t even know she’d taken. She’d used the box as some kind of hope chest. Last night I . . . I knew I was going to turn myself in and I didn’t want those things found, I didn’t want to hurt Carrie with them. So I took them and threw them in the fireplace when I got back home.” He met Sadie’s eyes. “But I still don’t understand how you know—”

  Sadie cut him off again, remembering the fire in the hearth at Jack and Carrie’s the evening before. “It’s hard for me to believe that such a cold-blooded killer would be so worried about his wife’s feelings.”

  “I’m also an adulterer and a liar,” Jack said softly. “I’m not the man you thought I was, Sadie. I’m a monster.”

  Sadie chilled at the word “monster” and knew that regardless of whether or not he convinced her of it, he truly believed it about himself. “If you really want me to believe this—that Jack Wright, my friend, brother, and neighbor—the coach of my son’s little league team, the man who mowed my lawn, fixed my appliances, stood up at my son’s eagle court—if you really want me to believe you did this, then you have to tell me what you did.”

  Jack was silent and tears filled his red-rimmed eyes again. Sadie ignored the tears on her own cheeks and didn’t break her gaze. She needed to see him tell her this—see him lie to her about it.

  “I killed her,” Jack said, his voice a whisper.

  “You strangled her,” Sadie said pointedly. “You didn’t just kill her—you need to tell me that you strangled her.” She paused and then spoke again, her words deliberately slow as she watched every movement of his face. “You put your hands around her neck and killed the woman you once loved, the mother of your only son.”

  “Yes,” Jack said, his voice cracking. He couldn’t hold her eyes any longer and looked at the table. “I put my hands around her neck and killed the woman I once loved, the mother of my only son.” His voice choked and his chin trembled as he said it. “I did this, Sadie. I did all of it.”

  Chapter 27

  “Did you catch that?” Sadie said to Cunningham once the ugly gray door closed behind her. What she wouldn’t give for a paint scraper and a Sherwin-Williams clearance sale. The detective looked at her with a guarded expression and nodded. Madsen wasn’t in the observation room with them, which meant luck was on her side—sort of. There was still the pesky matter of Jack taking the blame for something he didn’t do.

  “He doesn’t know she was killed with a drapery tieback. He didn’t do it,” Sadie said, fully assuming that their interest in the tieback earlier meant that the coroner’s report had been rather specific. She looked through the glass and watched her brother, head in his hands, slowly rocking back and forth in his chair. Misery exuded from him and her throat got thick again. Sadie was suddenly grateful that the tragedies in her life had not been directly related to choices she made. How did someone live with the guilt of having put events in motion that ended like this?

  “Then who did?” Cunningham asked, the challenge in his voice showing his frustration. “And why did he confess?”

  “To protect Ron,” Sadie said. It was obvious. There had been a momentary hope during her discussion with Jack that Ron wasn’t the man she felt she’d discovered him to be—but that hope had gone now. Ron may not have been Trevor’s father, and there was some relief there—though if she’d had to choose, she’d have picked him over Jack to have fathered the child—but regardless, she had little doubt that he was, in fact, Anne’s murderer. He was there that night around the time the coroner’s report said Anne had been killed. Jack felt guilty for having involved Ron and felt this would be his penance.

  “Your fiancé?” Cunningham asked, watching her closely.

  “Just call him Ron,” Sadie said. She attempted a small smile, though she couldn’t take the sadness from it. “The engagement is off.”

  “Your brother would go to these lengths to protect him?”

  Sadie furrowed her brow. It was obvious, and yet, ridiculous at the same time. “You heard what he said,” she reminded him. “He said ‘I did this.’ He feels like it’s his fault. He was the one who had the affair and pulled Ron into it, and Anne died as a result so now he feels as if he’s somehow responsible.”

  “Would you do that?” Detective Cunningham asked. She looked up to find him watching her, his eyes seeming to take in every detail of her face. “Would you give up the rest of your life and plead guilty to a murder of someone you cared for simply because you made a mistake?”

  Sadie looked back at her brother. A guard was helping him to stand. Jack shuffled out of the room, his back bent, and more than his forty-six years showing in the slump of his shoulders. Even his hair looked older, duller. “I don’t know,” Sadie said as the door closed without Jack looking back. “I’ve managed to keep myself from having to make those kinds of decisions.”

  “Yet you broke into Ms. Lemmon’s house last night, didn’t you? And you’ve been withholding information again.” His eyes were stones in his hard face as he stared at her. “You’re interfering with a police investigation,” he said. “I should arrest you.”

  Sadie knew her pleading showed in her eyes. “Please don’t,” she breathed. “Please, I’m helping, I’m gathering information—”

  “You’re causing a great deal of trouble, the very least of which is trying to convince me that the man confessing to this murder didn’t do it.” His voice lowered and he leaned forward slightly. She suddenly wondered if it was appropriate for them to be alone in the observation room together. “I’ve asked you,” he said in a tone stretched between warning and compassion, “to please stop, to let us do our job. You have put me in a very awkward position.”

  Sadie was not intimidated and pulled herself u
p to her full height. “You have put me in a very awkward position as well, Detective. You are accusing a man I know to be innocent of a serious crime. I have no choice but to do what I can to prove his innocence.”

  They stood there, him bent slightly over her as she stood tall, refusing to concede her position. Finally, he straightened, the stiff lines of his shoulders relaxing just a bit. “I will consider this a final warning. You need to back out and let us take care of this.”

  “Have you ever had English trifle, Detective?” she asked, surprising him with her out-of-the-blue and completely off topic question.

  “English trifle?” he repeated with a blank look.

  “It’s delicious. I make it every Christmas Eve. It’s cake and custard and Danish dessert layered with fruit and whipping cream. I once assigned six different women at church to make it for our Christmas social. I got back half a dozen completely different variations. One woman added pineapple, another used chocolate cake instead of ladyfingers. One woman stirred it all together so it looked like soup. We were all doing the same thing, making the same dish, but they were all done so completely different.”

  “And the point of this little culinary lesson?”

  “We all go about things in our own way,” she said. “I won’t tell you how to make your trifle if you don’t tell me how to make mine. Jack’s my brother. I will mind my Ps and Qs, but I will not stop looking for a way to clear him.”

  “Then you should go to jail.”

  “Madsen,” she said, noticing the way Detective Cunningham stiffened when she said his partner’s name, “would put me in jail. But you won’t, because you know that beyond all your procedures and policy and possiblys, that I am helping you.” She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “And you know Jack’s innocent. You can’t prove it, and neither can I, but you know he is. And you’re a good enough cop—a good enough man—to find it impossible to ignore that.”

  They were silent for a few seconds and she watched his eyes, the only part of him that slipped through his training enough to show just how right she was. He couldn’t say it, he wouldn’t say it, and in truth, he shouldn’t say it. But he knew. And he was going to let her go.

  Cunningham finally snapped his gaze away and abruptly headed for the door and pulled it open for her. “What a tangled web we weave,” he said as she passed through the doorway. Their moment was over, but their understanding was sealed. She would do what she had to do, within reason, and he would allow her the freedom to do it.

  Once outside of the small room she turned to him. “You will keep investigating though, right?” she said. “I mean, you see the inconsistencies. You have to take those seriously, don’t you?”

  Cunningham let out a breath. “It’s not my decision,” he said, his voice almost sounding apologetic. “We have a confession and that’s not something my captain takes lightly.”

  “But you still have to find Trevor,” she reminded him, sidestepping the whole Jack-is-innocent argument since she knew he was fully aware of it. “That will keep you on the case, right?”

  “Trevor,” Cunningham said, sounding like a grandfather lamenting his own grandson. “Jack won’t tell us anything about him. He won’t say where he’s been or who he’s with now. All we have is his comment that we’ll find him soon.”

  “Is the Amber Alert still in place?” Sadie asked. She hadn’t turned on the news today, so she didn’t know what was being reported. She should have TiVoed it.

  “It is,” Cunningham said, following her down the hallway, carefully shepherding her out the door. At the glass doors she turned to face him and moved to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear before remembering it was a messy mass of curls. Oh, the humiliation! She felt strangely vulnerable, knowing she didn’t look like herself. She hated that people—including Detective Cunningham—might think she was a dowdy woman.

  “Will you call me when you find something out?”

  He raised one eyebrow, quite a nice eyebrow. “Would you?”

  Sadie blushed at the reprimand. His face was stoic once again, as if their silent exchange of connected allegiance was nothing more than a memory. But then she wondered if he was simply keeping up pretenses, having to live up to the big-bad-cop image he’d spent a lifetime earning.

  “Go home, Mrs. Hoffmiller. Stay home. Knit something if you have to, but my request that you stay out of this is still in force.”

  He turned and walked away from her as she put her hands on her hips in response to his rudeness.

  “I don’t knit,” she said to no one but the inebriated man sitting on the bench to her left. “Those pointed needles are a safety hazard.”

  Chapter 28

  It had long been Sadie’s habit that whenever she found herself passing a grocery store on her way home, she searched her mind for anything she needed. There was nothing quite as frustrating than walking in the door after a long day and realizing you were out of laundry detergent, cream of tartar, or something equally important. Albertson’s grocery store was on her way home from the police station and despite everything, old habits die hard, and she automatically asked herself if she needed anything.

  Lasagna noodles.

  She’d used the last of them on Sunday and would hate to get a hankering and be unable to fulfill it. Though never a very good dieter, she’d found a rule of thumb that kept her from blimping out as her metabolism slowed with age—eat what you want, but not all of it. So, if she wanted cheesecake, she made cheesecake, had a slice, and took the rest to a friend or someone in her church in need of a pick-me-up. If she wanted pot roast, by George she’d have pot roast and freeze the leftovers for a night when she craved a good stroganoff or beef soup. So far the system worked for her—she enjoyed food but didn’t overindulge and could still fit into styles that made the most of her curvaceous hips. However, she became very cranky when a craving drove her to the pantry only to find she had neglected to stock her shelves correctly. She pulled into the parking lot while mentally scanning her cupboards to make sure there was nothing else she needed.

  The morning snow had stopped, leaving a steely gray sky and a few inches of snow behind—another reason to get her groceries now, in case the snow came back later. It was only as she scanned the parking lot to find a space that she remembered this had been the store where Anne worked. It wasn’t the grocery store Sadie frequented; it was a chain and she preferred to support Sammy’s on Mount Ridge since it was locally owned. She slid her car into a space between a Cadillac and a Pinto and paused with her hands still on the steering wheel.

  What could she possibly gain from talking to the people Anne worked with? There was no real answer—she could learn a lot or she could learn nothing. All she could do for sure was her best. She did feel the tiniest bit of apprehension, but the memory of Jack being handcuffed made it hard for her to swallow as she got out of the car. A blast of cold wind took her breath away and she shivered, glad she hadn’t left her jacket at the police station.

  She hunched her shoulders and peered at the sky, wondering if it would snow any more today, or if the weather was just taunting her.

  It took less than five minutes to find the lasagna noodles and remember that she also needed some nutmeg and a few lemons—Anne had used her last one for the mystery tart. Then she got in the express lane and began putting her items on the conveyor belt. She knew the clerk, though they didn’t have a good history. Melba Browton’s son was quite likely the worst student Sadie had ever taught. It had only taken one parent meeting to realize he’d inherited his mother’s personality charms. His name was even Damien, which she believed meant “devil” in Italian, or maybe Portuguese. Regardless, it was fitting. Sadie scanned the other check stands but knew it was too late to choose a different lane. Picking up her items and moving would be overtly rude.

  “How are you guys holding up, Melba?” Sadie asked sweetly as the clerk scanned her first item.

  Melba looked up, staring at Sadie from behind her glasses. She was a thi
ck woman, with middle-aged skin to go with her middle-aged figure. Her red hair was tightly curled and looked as if it were glued to her head. It had been a decade since Sadie had taught Melba’s son, but Melba still wore the exact same hairdo. “Holding up?” Melba repeated.

  “Well, with what happened to Anne Lemmon,” Sadie said. Wasn’t it obvious? They’d lost a comrade, a fellow employee. Surely it stung a bit.

  Melba shrugged. “I said I wasn’t gunna take any of her open shifts,” the woman said. “She weren’t nobody that ever tried to help me out.”

  Sadie stiffened. Was there no respect for the dead at all? “Oh,” she finally said, opening her purse and pulling out her wallet. “So you two weren’t friends?”

  “Hardly,” Melba said. “She was nice enough to the customers, but she let us know from the start that this weren’t no career for the likes of her.” She snorted and hit the total button. “Last I heard she was quitting anyway.”

  “She wasn’t, uh, close to any of the other clerks then?”

  Melba looked up at her this time and eyed her with suspicion. “Why d’you care?”

  “I’m just curious.” Sadie handed over a twenty-dollar bill. “It’s been a long time since Garrison had a murder is all.” The last one was a teenage kid almost eight years ago who killed his girlfriend and then himself. People still talked about it—usually when their daughters were dating a boy they didn’t like.

  “Yep,” Melba said. She opened the till, counted out Sadie’s change and handed it back to her. “Y’all have a nice day,” she said without a smile before moving onto the next customer—an order well over the ten-item limit. Melba glared at the customer who was breaking the rule.

  “You too,” Sadie said. She retrieved her grocery bag and looked around the store, trying to think of anything else she could do, anyone else she could talk to. To her surprise another clerk in the next lane was watching her. As soon as Sadie met her eye, however, the girl looked away. But there was something in her expression that caught Sadie’s attention. The girl was close enough to have heard the exchange with Melba.