Jay’s brow furrowed. “Why is that important?”
“I’m just wondering.”
He smiled. “Sure. She loves it. Wears it on a locket around her neck all the time.”
“Have you seen it lately?”
Jay hesitated. “No, but why is that important? I’m sure she has it somewhere in the house.”
“Could you ask?”
Jay rose from his seat, planted his hands on the desk and glared down at Rachel. “What is it that you aren’t telling me?”
“I . . .” Rachel shook her head.
“Rachel, for me to be an effective lawyer, there can be no secrets between us. Understood? I need you to tell me everything that you know. It’s essential. I need you to trust me,” Jay said. “Or else, I need you to fire me. I can’t work with half truths.”
Rachel took a deep breath, and nodded. Jay was right. Even though her heart, so recently bruised after breaking up with Brandon, screamed at her not to trust men, she wanted to trust Jay. She wanted to confide all her thoughts and suspicions to someone. Even though she’d judged them both initially, over time, she’d come to see both Jay and the sheriff as good, honest men. If only she could get rid of the small seed of doubt that had become lodged inside her, thanks to Brandon. A memory entered her brain. The night she’d slept over at Jay and Emily’s house, she’d been so tired that she’d fallen asleep as soon as she hit the bed. Jay had come and put a blanket over her as she slept. Rachel smiled. Jackson had said that a person’s character came out through the small things they did. Well, that was a sign of Jay’s character—a man willing to do a good deed without asking for anything back. He’d been generous enough to invite her into his house, and he’d believed in her innocence when no one else had. Surely she owed him the truth.
There was one other thing—Sheriff Tanner had said it himself—Jay had an airtight alibi. The day Arthur was murdered, from six a.m. to nine a.m., Jay had been right here in this office, on a conference call with two other lawyers. His secretary Gloria had confirmed it. Jay had also given away his football ring to Emily. Which meant he couldn’t have been the person who dropped it in the alley outside her home. Jay was definitely not the killer. He was a good man. But . . . what if someone he loved was the killer?
“What if the things I tell you lead to a conflict of interest for you?” Rachel asked.
“What do you mean?” Jay frowned.
“I’ve been trying, in my own way, to find out who killed Arthur,” Rachel said. “I’ve been talking to people, and listening carefully both to what they say and don’t say.”
“And?”
“And a lot of things just don’t point to one person being the murderer,” Rachel said. “I’m just not sure . . . that you’ll like who it is.”
“Rachel, one of the reasons I’m the top lawyer in this town is that clients are my number one priority. Right now, that’s you. So whoever the killer is, I promise I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”
“Are you sure?” Rachel asked.
“Absolutely,” Jay said. “Just tell me, please, what your suspicions are. If we can gather the evidence and help the sheriff to put this menace behind bars, I’ll count that as a good day for Swaddle.”
Rachel bit her lip, and took a deep breath. “OK,” she said. “I’ll talk.”
“Great.” Jay smiled, and his face softened a little.
“I know who killed Arthur,” Rachel said. “I think it was Emily. Your wife.”
*****
Chapter 21
The Truth Is A Layered Thing
She’d expected Jay to reel back at her pronouncement. Instead, he stared at her with narrowed eyes. There was no shock on his face, nor anger, nor disappointment. He almost looked relieved, as though someone had finally said out loud what he’d been thinking all along.
Still, his face was grim as he sank back into his chair, and his hand trembled a little as he fiddled with his tie. “Emily,” He said, and winced as though her name caused him pain. “So you think so, too.”
“Too?” Rachel raised an eyebrow.
“Tell your story first,” Jay said. “Then maybe I’ll tell you mine.”
“OK,” Rachel said. “It wasn’t until right now that I really thought about it and put it together, but I’ve suspected Emily for a while. For one, she kept insisting that Arthur wouldn’t have cheated on Audrey even after the letter was common news. Why? Because she wanted to deny the truth. That she was the one cheating with Arthur.
Jay winced, but made a gesture for her to keep talking.
“The evidence all points to her, really. Emily’s café is just across the street from my bakery; easy for her to slip out, hide by my place and call Bobby Lee to distract me when the time is right. Emily has a vested interest in seeing my bakery fail, and she knew that if I got arrested, the bakery would fail for sure. The murder occurred the way it did because Emily had it all planned out from the beginning.”
Jay was breathing heavily, but to his credit, he asked Rachel to continue her thoughts.
“Recently, the sheriff and I found a football ring in the alley outside my home. I was confident that it belonged to the killer,” Rachel said. “I got sidetracked then. I began to consider that you, Paul and the sheriff were all possible killers.”
“Wow . . . is nobody above your suspicions?” Jay smiled weakly.
“Well, the sheriff did mention you had an airtight alibi,” Rachel said.
“That’s right,” Jay said, “I was in here on a conference call discussing the James vs. DefCorp. case with two other lawyers. Giving them a mini-lecture on how I handled it.”
“Exactly,” Rachel said. “So I ruled you out—sort of. It was still possible you were the one who dropped the ring, after all. But then Audrey told me that you had given your ring to Emily. So I began wondering, what if the person who dropped the ring was Emily? You said she wears it around her neck all the time but you haven’t seen it lately. That’s a second clue pointing to her.”
Jay nodded.
“Third, there’s something Emily probably never told you,” Rachel said. “The night before Arthur’s murder, she broke into my house and tried to steal a key. This key.” Rachel placed her aunt’s key on the desk. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but it ties into Arthur’s murder somehow.”
“What!” Jay’s eyes widened as he stared at the key.
Rachel nodded. “She kept it a secret from you. I think you were out of town that night.”
“I was. I only got back at five a.m. the next morning,” Jay said. “Two hours before Arthur was murdered. I went home, showered and then went straight to work.”
“Well, the sheriff went easy on his sister. He believed her totally when she claimed to have seen a different intruder,” Rachel said. “She got off with no charges against her.”
“Wow.” Jay put a hand in front of his eyes. “So that’s it? Emily killed Arthur because she was sick of having an affair with him?”
“That’s what I suspect,” Rachel said. “She’s the one that letter was referring to, but she tried to use it to frame me. It was a two birds one stone sort of situation for her. She’d get rid of Arthur and me in one stroke.”
“Wow.” Jay nodded. “That’s a lot of strikes against her, but it isn’t really solid proof, is it?”
“I do have one bit of proof that simply didn’t strike me until very recently,” Rachel said. “Jackson was talking to me about marble cake and mocha, when I realized.”
“Realized what?”
“At seven a.m. that day, Arthur was on my doorstep with two fresh mochas in hand,” Rachel said.
“So what?”
“So what? So Emily doesn’t open the café until eight thirty. You told me yourself. So where did Arthur get those coffees? He clearly met Emily that day. Why would Arthur meet her so early in the morning? Why would she invite him into the café before it even opened?”
“This is . . . too much to take in,” Jay said.
“Hard? These last few days have been hellish for me.” Jay put a hand against his brow and began massaging it in circles. “Ever since Arthur was killed, I’ve gone around with a suspicious heart. Every time I kiss my own wife, I wonder.”
“That’s the real reason you took me on as your client, isn’t it?” Rachel asked, a sudden thought coming to her. “You invited me into your home, not because it would be a safe place for me to spend the night, but because you didn’t want to spend that night alone with Emily.”
Jay gave her a crooked smile. “That’s right. I was scared of my own wife, and I needed the company. What a horrible thing to admit, isn’t it?”
“It’s also why you were so confident that I wasn’t the one who had killed Arthur,” Rachel said. “All along, you suspected that Emily was having an affair with Arthur, and that she had killed him.”
“Correct.” Jay sighed. “I knew you were being set up. As soon as I heard the facts of the case it was obvious. Someone very smart was trying to entangle you. But there’s only one person who I knew had the motive to kill Arthur and the motive to see you jailed for it. Emily.”
“Because with me out of the way, Emily would be free to buy the bakery and expand her own café as she had planned all along,” Rachel said. “Right?”
Jay nodded. “I . . . I still don’t like even thinking this way. I feel so disloyal and yet . . . Emily was disloyal to me.” He sighed. “She broke my heart. If it weren’t for Ollie, I’d have moved out of the house that very day.”
“Did you—do you have proof she cheated on you?”
“Not exactly,” Jay said. “As a matter of fact, I was trying to get proof. I had suspicions. I caught Emily texting Arthur one night when she thought I was asleep. I couldn’t see what she was texting him, but what could it be at two a.m.? There’s just one obvious answer.”
“Then what?”
“It kept happening for a while—I’d walk into the room and she’d hang up the phone. I’d ask her who she was talking to and she’d lie that it was business related. Now, I’m a lawyer. I’ve seen how women are favored in divorces. I knew that to get custody of Ollie, I’d need solid proof that Emily cheated. So I kept pretending I knew nothing, and kept trying to gather proof. But then, all of a sudden, Arthur was dead. I didn’t know Emily could do such a thing.” Jay licked his upper lip and shook his head. “You know the crazy part? I still love her. Even with all this poison inside my mind, I still love Emily more than anything in the world. I just . . . I can’t believe she turned out to be so evil.”
Rachel felt a shiver go down her spine as she heard Jay confess to still loving her. Casually, she leaned forward and rested a hand on the key she’d placed on Jay’s desk. He noticed and gave a short laugh.
“Don’t worry. Even if I love her, I value right and wrong. Those who do evil must be punished, it’s the core tenet I live by. It’s going to be very hard on Ollie and me, but we’ll survive. Emily has to go to jail, and I’ll make sure she does.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
“Don’t be.” Jay sighed. “This is just really messy. We have to go talk to the sheriff.”
“Do you think he’ll arrest her?” Rachel asked. “I mean . . . I don’t know if we have enough proof.”
“He’ll have to do something,” Jay said. “Probably call the state police and hand the case over to them over conflict of interest. I won’t let the sheriff protect Emily if she’s the killer. I don’t think he’ll want to protect her if that’s the case. Poor Scott will be quite devastated though. Emily’s all the family he has left.”
Jay’s hands began trembling again, and Rachel reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Stay strong, Jay. You must do this.”
“I must. You’re right.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I need some fresh air. Just sit here a minute, will you? I’ll go to the pantry and get some coffee for us both.”
He moved away from the desk quickly, and slammed the door behind him. Rachel suspected from the way his shoulders trembled that his urgent need to get away was only a ploy, poor Jay was hiding an urge to cry.
He’d slammed the door so hard that a bunch of papers slid from his desk onto the floor. Rachel sighed and picked them up, placing them back on the table. Poor Jay. She had felt so shattered when Brandon went behind her back to sell the company. She imagined that Jay would be feeling much worse. His entire world now had a huge crack in it, all thanks to Emily’s greedy and evil actions.
As she placed the papers back on the table, something caught her eye. She picked it up and smiled. A small tape recorder. How old-fashioned! She supposed Jay used it for his work as a lawyer. As she held it in her hand, however, a sudden suspicion washed over her.
Hesitantly, she clicked play on the recorder. Jay’s soothing voice came out. In the case of Walter James vs. DefCorp., there’s a lot of interesting . . .
Rachel clicked off the recorder almost immediately. Her head was spinning, and she had to clutch at the side of the table to keep from tipping over. She’d made a horrible mistake. A huge mistake.
Emily wasn’t the killer. No. She should have seen it all along. if Emily had been the killer, she wouldn’t have left all those obvious clues behind. Those clues were left by a maniacal genius who wanted Emily to be arrested for the crime.
The clues were left by Jay himself. It was all a plot to frame Emily.
*****
Chapter 22
A Conference
An hour later, Scott strode into the bakery, his sheriff’s hat tilted slightly on his head from when he’d hurriedly put it on. He looked irritated and was a bit snappy as he said, “Why did you call me here, Rachel?” He paused suddenly. The oven was on in the kitchen, and Emily sat drinking a mocha at the table. She looked neat as always, her hair in a chignon, and her blue jeans, and black shirt looking impossibly posh on her.
“Emily?” He frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m in the dark as much as you are,” Emily said. “All I know is that an hour ago, Rachel told me to get over here as fast as possible.”
Rachel stood by the kitchen counter, wearing an apron dusted with flour. Her hands had white and brown cake batter on them.
“Been baking a cake?” Scott looked down at her hands pointedly.
“Sorry,” Rachel said. “There’s just nothing else that helps me think and calms me down all in one go. Baking is as helpful as Zen meditation. You should try it sometime.”
“Thanks, but the only part of baking I like is when the cake comes out of the oven and goes into my mouth,” Scott said. He sniffed the air. “Smells wonderful, by the way. What’s cooking?”
“Marble cake,” Rachel said. She looked carefully at Emily, whose expression remained neutral, except for the slight downward twitch of her lips.
“It’s my aunt’s recipe,” Rachel said. “A very good recipe too, as Emily well knows.”
“Did you just call us here to talk about cake?” Emily snapped. “Or was there something important you needed to tell us?”
“There’s something important you need to hear,” Rachel said. She wiped her hands with a towel and brought out the tape recorder she had found on Jay’s desk.
“What’s that?” Scott frowned. “Another piece of evidence you’ve dirtied?”
“I’m sure this will be admissible in court,” Rachel said. She clicked on the player, and Jay’s voice filled the room, speaking of James vs. DefCorp. She clicked pause and looked expectantly at both Scott and Emily.
Emily looked at Scott and then stood up. The tips of her ears were red. “You know, you could be arrested for stealing Jay’s property. My husband has been nothing but kind to you, and this is how you repay him? What’s the meaning of this!”
But Scott’s mouth had fallen open and he was staring at the recorder. “No,” he whispered.
“It can’t be.”
“The perfect alibi,” Rachel said.
“The perfect alibi,” Scott echoed. “Wow.”
“What are you two blabbering about?” Emily asked.
“Jay claimed that when Arthur was murdered, he was locked in his office,” Rachel said. “He claimed to be on the phone between six and nine a.m., speaking to two other lawyers.”
“I thought it was a legitimate alibi,” Scott said. “His secretary, Gloria, confirmed that he’d been locked in his office and the other two lawyers confirmed he’d been talking about the James vs. DefCorp. case.”
“It’s like a magic trick. He was there and he wasn’t,” Rachel said. “He played the tapes instead of speaking and clearly slipped out somehow.”
Emily’s mouth had dropped open too, and there was fear in her eyes. “My Jay isn’t a liar,” she said. “I mean, why would he do this? There must be an explanation. There has to be.”
“Emily, he knew,” Rachel said. She gave Emily a meaningful look.
“Knew what?” Emily looked bewildered.
“He knew all about you and Arthur,” Rachel said. “It’s going to be tough, but it’s best if you admit it. You were having an affair with Arthur.”
“What!” Emily shot up, knocking back her chair. At the same time, the back door in the kitchen burst open, and Jay walked in.
“There you are, I’ve been looking all over town.” Jay paused, and his eyes flicked from Scott to Emily, and back onto Rachel.
“What are they doing here?” Jay asked. “Why did you run out of my office that way? I had to wait a bit before I could follow you because a client came in. But there was a lot we still needed to talk about.”
“She’s mental, Jay,” Emily said. “Don’t believe a word she says. She’s unhinged. She’s claiming that I had an affair with Arthur. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?”
Jay refused to meet Emily’s eyes. Ignoring her, he stepped into the kitchen and shut the door behind him.
“Jay . . .” Emily’s voice trailed off. “You’re not serious. You don’t believe I had an affair with Arthur, do you?”
Murder & Marble Cake Page 11