Death By Darjeeling atsm-1

by Laura Childs

  Tidwell half stood as Theodosia seated herself, then crashed down heavily into his chair. They both kept tight smiles on their faces as Haley set cups and saucers, spoons, milk, and a pot of Dimbulla tea in front of them. But no goodies. Theodosia intended to keep this visit brief.

  Tidwell’s bullet-shaped head swiveled on his beefy shoulders, appraising customers at surrounding tables. “Business good?” he asked.

  Theodosia raised her shoulders a notch. “Fine.”

  “As you know, our investigation into Hughes Barron’s death has been ongoing.” Tidwell paused, pursed his lips, and took a tiny sip of tea. “Where is this from?” he asked.

  “Ceylon.”

  “It would go well with a sweet.”

  “It would.” Theodosia sat patiently with her hands in her lap. By now she was familiar with Tidwell’s oblique tactics. Tidwell blotted his mouth and favored her with a mousy grin. Unless... she thought as she watched him carefully. Unless the man has something up his sleeve.

  “To assure ourselves of a thorough investigation,” Tidwell continued, “we focused much of our attention on Hughes Barron’s business office here in town as well as his place of residence.” He peered at Theodosia over his teacup. “You may be familiar with his beach condominium. Located on the Isle of Palms?”

  Theodosia gave him nothing.

  “Moving along,” Tidwell continued, “I should tell you that we discovered an object at said condominium. An object that carries the fingerprints of one of your employees.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Yes, indeed. And I’m sure you won’t be at all surprised when I tell you the fingerprints—and we obtained a rather excellent four-point match—belong to Bethany Sheperd.”

  Theodosia fairly spat out her next words. “Why don’t you rock my world, Detective Tidwell, and tell me what object Bethany’s fingerprints were found on.”

  “Miss Browning.” His eyes drilled at her. “That information remains confidential.”

  Chapter 45

  Burt Tidwell sat in his Crown Victoria and stared at the brick-and-shingle facade of the Indigo Tea Shop. He had purposely not informed the Browning woman that her dear departed neighbor, Harold Dauphine, had, indeed, died of a heart attack. A myocardial infarction, to be exact.

  He knew Theodosia was probably lumping the deaths of Mr. Hughes Barron and Mr. Dauphine together. Putting two and two together, he mused. A trifle off base in this instance. But overall, she hadn’t performed badly for an amateur.

  Burt Tidwell sighed, reached down to his midsection, fumbled for his belt buckle, and released it one notch. There. Better. Now he could draw breath. Now he could even begin to contemplate stopping by Poogan’s Porch for an early lunch. Perhaps some shrimp Creole or a bowl of their famous okra gumbo.

  Tidwell turned the key in the ignition. The engine in the big car caught, then rumbled deeply. Theodosia Browning had proved to be highly resourceful. True, she was snoopy and contentious toward him, but she had made some interesting connections and suppositions.

  Best of all, she’d rattled more than a few cages here in Charleston’s historic district. That had certainly served his purpose well. After all, Theodosia was an insider. He was not.

  Chapter 46

  “Did you let the police fingerprint you?” Theodosia paced back and forth in her small office while Bethany sat perched on a chair. Bethany’s knees were pulled up to her chin, and her hands worked constantly, nervously twisting her long skirt.

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “Leyland Hartwell said it was okay. Anyway, the police explained that it was to rule me out.”

  “Bethany, you don’t have to be so defensive. I’m not cross-examining you.”

  “No, that will come later,” replied a glum Bethany.

  “We don’t know that at all,” said Theodosia. Honestly, she thought to herself, the girl could be positively maddening.

  The phone on Theodosia’s desk buzzed, and she snatched up the receiver, almost welcoming a diversion. “I understand you had some excitement last night,” said Jory Davis. “The security company called you?” said Theodosia, surprised. “Of course. I hired them.” There was a long pause, then Jory Davis asked quietly, “Theodosia, are you in over your head on this?”

  She waited so long to reply that Jory Davis finally answered his own question. “Sometimes no answer is an answer,” he said.

  “I promise,” Theodosia said, “to share absolutely everything with you tonight. And to listen carefully to any lawyerly advice you choose to impart.” She paused. “Truly.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jory Davis, seemingly appeased by this. “I await our evening with bated breath.” His voice was tinged with faint amusement.

  “Can I please go back to work?” Bethany asked. She noted that Theodosia had long since hung up the phone but was standing there in the strangest way, staring down at her desk, seemingly lost in thought.

  Theodosia looked up. “What? Oh, of course, Bethany.”

  Bethany jumped up to make her escape.

  “You don’t have any idea what Tidwell was talking about, do you?” Theodosia called to her back.

  Bethany spun on her heel. “About my fingerprints? No. Of course I don’t.” She gazed at Theodosia, the expression on her face a mixture of hurt and humiliation. “I think... I think this should probably be my last day here,” sniffled Bethany.

  “Bethany, please.” This was the last thing she wanted, to upset Bethany in any way, to foster more bad feelings.

  “No. My being here has become entirely too problematic.”

  “As you wish, Bethany,” said Theodosia. She waited until Bethany pulled the door closed behind her, then sat down in her chair and sighed. What in her wildest dreams had told her she could possibly solve Hughes Barron’s murder? She had followed her leads and hunches and ended up...nowhere. If anything, there were more unanswered questions, more strange twists and turns. Now some mysterious object had been found at Hughes Barron’s condominium, something the police had run tests on and found smatters of Bethany’s fingerprints!

  Theodosia pulled her desk drawer open and hoisted out the Charleston phone directory. As the book thudded on top of her desk, she quickly flipped through the front pages. Just past the directory assistance and long-distance calling pages, she found the number she wanted. The Charleston Police Department.

  She dialed the number nervously, knowing this was a long shot.

  “Cletus Aubrey, please,” she told the central operator when she came on the line.

  “Which department?” asked the disinterested voice.

  “Computer records,” said Theodosia.

  “You don’t have that extension?” The operator seemed vexed.

  “Sorry, I don’t,” said Theodosia, feeling silly for apologizing to an operator whose job it was to look up numbers.

  Cletus Aubrey was a childhood friend. He had grown up in the low-country on a farm down the road from the Browning plantation. As children, she and Cletus had spent many summer days together, romping through the woods, wading in streams, and tying pieces of string around chicken necks and trolling creek bottoms to catch crabs. Interested in law enforcement early on, Cletus had received encouragement from her father, Macalester Browning. And when Cletus graduated from high school, he went on to a two-year law enforcement program, then joined the Charleston Police Department.

  “Mornin’, Cletus Aubrey.”

  “Cletus? It’s Theodosia. Theodosia Browning.”

  She heard a sharp intake of breath and then rich, warm laughter.

  “As I live and die, I don’t believe it. How are you, Miss Browning?”

  “Cletus, exactly when did I become Miss Browning?”

  “When you stopped running through the swamp barefoot and started running a tea shop. Listen, girl, it pleases me to call you Miss Browning. Reminds me of how you followed in the graceful footsteps of your Aunt Libby. And, by the way, how is Aunt Libby?”

  “Very we
ll.”

  “Still treating her feathered friends with all manner of seed and millet?”

  “She’s extended her generosity to woodchucks, raccoons, and opossum, too.”

  Cletus Aubrey chuckled again. “The good things in life never change. Theo, Miss Browning, to what do I owe this blast from the past, this walk down memory lane?”

  “Cletus, I have a favor to ask.”

  “Ask away.”

  “You used to work in the property room, am I correct?”

  “For three years. Before I went to night school and turned into a computer nut.”

  “How big a deal would it be to snoop around in there?”

  “No big deal at all if I had a general idea what I was on the lookout for.”

  “Let’s just call it a mysterious object found in the home of a Mr. Hughes Barron.”

  “Uh-oh, the old mysterious object search. Yeah, I can probably pull that off. What was the name again? Barron?”

  “Yes. B-A-R-R-O-N.”

  “The first name is Hughes?”

  “That’s it,” said Theodosia

  “One of the guys who works in property owes me twenty bucks from a bet he lost on last week’s Citadel game. I’ll harass him and have a look around. Kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Cletus, you’re a gem.” “That’s what I keep telling my wife, only she’s not buyin’ it.”

  Theodosia was deep in conversation with one of the sales reps at Frank & Fuller, a tea wholesaler in Montclair, New Jersey, when the other phone line lit up. It was Cletus calling back.

  “You ain’t gonna like this, Miss Browning,” he began.

  “What was it, Cletus?”

  “Some tea thingamajig.”

  “Describe it to me,” said Theodosia.

  “Silver, lots of little holes.”

  “A tea infuser.”

  “You sell those?” asked Cletus.

  “By the bushel,” Theodosia said with a sigh.

  Chapter 47

  The last six months of sales receipts were laid out on Theodosia’s desk. Haley had tried to stack them, month by month, in some semblance of order, but there were so many of the flimsy paper receipts they kept sliding around and sorting into their own piles.

  “This is everything?” asked Theodosia. In an effort to gain some control and a slight appearance of tidiness, she had pinned her hair up in a bun, much to Haley’s delight.

  “You look like a character out of a William Faulkner novel,” Haley quipped. “All you need are Drayton’s reading glasses perched on the end of your nose.”

  Theodosia ignored her. “These are all the sales receipts, correct?”

  “Should be, unless you want me to pull computer records, too.” Haley sobered up. “We don’t need to do that, do we? I think it would just duplicate efforts.”

  “If the two of us go through these, we should be able to sort out sales receipts on everyone who purchased a tea infuser.”

  Because the Indigo Tea Shop maintained a customer database for the purpose of sending out newsletters and direct mail, customer names and addresses were almost always entered on sales receipts.

  Haley looked skeptical. “Which kind? Spoon infusers, mesh ones with handles, tea ball infusers?”

  “All of them,” declared Theodosia. “You take these three stacks, I’ll take the others.”

  “What about infuser socks?” asked Haley.

  “Anything having to do with tea infusers means infuser socks, too.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m just double-checking. I’m worried about Bethany, too.” Haley bent diligently over her stacks of papers.

  “You’re sure Bethany didn’t fill in here before six months ago?” asked Theodosia. She was concerned about the window of time they were checking.

  Haley squinted thoughtfully. “Before last May? No, I don’t think so.”

  Two hours later, they had sifted through all the receipts and found, amazingly, that the Indigo Tea Shop had sold almost fifty tea infusers in the last six months.

  “Now we’ve got to try to rule some people out,” said Theodosia, overwhelmed at the sheer number of receipts just for tea infusers.

  “Such as?” said Haley.

  “Tourists, for one thing. People who stopped by for a cup of tea and made a few extra purchases.”

  “Okay, I get it,” said Haley. “Let me go through these fifty then. See what I can do.”

  Fifteen minutes of work produced a modicum of progress.

  “I think we can safely rule out about thirty of these,” reasoned Haley. She indicated a stack of receipts. “These customers are all from out of state and fairly far-flung. California, Texas, Nevada, New York...”

  “Agreed,” said Theodosia. “So now we’re down to local purchases. Who have we got?”

  Haley passed the remaining handful of receipts to Theodosia. “Those two sisters, Elmira and Elise, who live over the Cabbage Patch Needlepoint Shop. Reverend Jonathan at Saint Philip’s. A couple of the B and Bs.” Theodosia studied the culled receipts. “Mostly friends and neighbors,” she said. “Not exactly hardcore suspects.”

  “Lydia at the Chowder Hound Restaurant down the street bought three of them,” said Haley. “Do you think she had it in for Hughes Barron?”

  “I doubt she even knew him,” murmured Theodosia. “Okay, Haley, thanks. Good job.”

  “Sorry we couldn’t come up with something more definitive.” Haley hesitated in the doorway, feeling somehow that she’d let Theodosia down.

  “That’s all right,” said Theodosia. “Thanks again.”

  Theodosia reached for the clip that contained her thick hair and yanked it out. As her hair tumbled about her shoulders, she thought of all the things she had left undone at the shop, how she’d even missed this week’s therapy dog session with Earl Grey.

  Her heart caught in her chest. Earl Grey. The dog she’d found cowering in the alley out back, the dog that was her dear companion. Someone, quite possibly the person who had murdered Hughes Barron, had threatened to poison Earl Grey if she didn’t back off.

  Okay, Theodosia thought to herself. Following up on these sales receipts was going to be her last effort. And if it didn’t pan out, she would back off.

  Sitting in her chair, trying to focus, Theodosia leafed through the stack of twenty or so receipts Haley had culled out.

  Lydia at the Chowder Hound. Could she have had any sort of connection to Hughes Barron? Or, for that matter, any of the possible suspects? Her gut feeling told her probably not.

  And Samantha Rabathan had bought a tea infuser a few months ago. Theodosia pondered this, thought about probable connections. What if, just what if Samantha purchased the tea infuser for the Heritage Society?

  Samantha was kind of a goody-goody that way. When she wasn’t out winning a blue ribbon for her spectacular La Reine Victoria roses or flitting about being a social butterfly, she spent a good portion of her time as a volunteer with the Heritage Society. She worked in the small library and helped the development director entice new donors.

  So it was possible that Timothy Neville might be behind this after all.

  Timothy Neville could have done away with Hughes Barron and somehow planted the tea infuser with Bethany’s fingerprints as false evidence. He knew her prints would have thrown the police off the track. That is, if the police ever got onto that track in the first place.

  Well, there was only one way to find out. She would go and ask Samantha if she’d bought a tea infuser for the Heritage Society. Samantha might think it a strange question, but she’d probably be too polite to say so.

  Chapter 48

  Paved in antique brick and bluestone, accented by a vine-covered arbor, Samantha Rabathan’s garden was a peaceful, perfect sanctuary. Flower beds arranged in concentric circles around a small pool had lost much of their bloom for the season but, because of the great variety of carefully selected greenery, still conveyed a verdant, pleasing palette.

  “Yoohoo, over here, dear
,” called Samantha.

  She had seen Theodosia approach out of the corner of her eye, had heard her footfalls. Still on her hands and knees, Samantha looked up, a smile on her face and pruning shears in her hand.

  “Artful pruning in autumn makes for healthy flowers in spring,” said Samantha as though she were lecturing a garden club. She was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, even though the afternoon sun kept disappearing, without a moment’s notice, behind large, puffy clouds.

  Theodosia gazed about. The garden was beautiful, of that there was no doubt. At the same time, Samantha’s garden always seemed a trifle contained. So many of Charleston’s backyard gardens felt enchanting and mysterious because of their slightly wild, untamed look. Vines tumbling down crumbled brick walls, tree branches twining overhead, layers of lush foliage with statuary, rockery, and wrought iron peeking through. These were the places Theodosia thought of as secret gardens. And there were many in the old city.

  “How is everyone at the tea shop?” Samantha inquired brightly.

  “Good,” said Theodosia. “Busy. We’re right in the middle of inventory, so everything’s a muddle.” She thought this little story might help deflect any flak concerning her tea infuser inquiry.

  “Sounds very tedious,” said Samantha as she picked up a trowel, sank it deep into the rich turf, and ousted an errant weed.

  “Only way we can get a handle on reorders,” said Theodosia as Samantha tossed the weed into a carefully composed pile of wilted blooms and stems.

  “Samantha,” continued Theodosia, “did you purchase a tea infuser for the Heritage Society?”

  Samantha finished tamping the divot she’d created, stood up, and gave a finishing stomp with her heel.

  “Why, I think perhaps I might have. Is there a problem, Theodosia? A product recall?” Now her voice was tinged with amusement. “Tell you what. Come inside, and we’ll have ourselves a nice cup of tea and a good, friendly chat.”