“I’ll teach her magic that comes in handy in day-to-day life,” Aunt Lucy retorted. “No one ever needed to know how to make a potion that makes your plants grow bigger. That’s just not necessary in day-to-day life.”
“Unless I decide I want to win the contest for the biggest zucchini at the state fair one year,” I said with a grin.
“Now that gives me an idea…” Aunt Lucy said, trailing off.
“Absolutely not,” Aunt Debbie said, her eyes flashing toward her sister.
“You never let me have any fun.”
“You can have plenty of fun, so long as it doesn’t involve using magic to get the best of the regular humans. Anyway, I think I’ll take care of Eliza’s magical education. As long as you’re ok with that, of course,” Aunt Debbie said, turning toward me.
I quickly swallowed the giant mouthful of spaghetti that was in my mouth before answering. “Yeah, that would be great.”
“Perfect. We’ll start tomorrow, after work. After all, I don’t want to lose any time. You’ve got almost a quarter-century worth of learning to catch up on.”
“I still think I’d be a much better teacher,” Aunt Lucy said. “Now, I heard that for all the complaining you do about my way of life, you all managed to get one of your customers murdered at the coffee shop today.”
“Well, it obviously wasn’t any of us,” Leanne replied. “I heard Dorothy was right, and Leonard was murdered.”
Aunt Debbie nodded. “Yes. The medical examiner said he won’t know for sure until he gets the results back from the toxicology test, but that he suspects it was poison. It’s really quite disappointing; I’m worried word is going to get around town that people die from drinking our coffee.”
“I’m worried that word is going to get back to the paranormal world that we did all of this,” Kaillie muttered.
“Well, if he really was poisoned by our coffee, that means there can’t have been all that many people who had access to him,” Leanne pointed out. “I mean, there were us, and what, five customers in the café at the time? It had to be one of them who did it.”
“You’re right,” I said breathlessly. “There weren’t that many people there. And I don’t think all of them even interacted with Leonard.”
“Who was there?” Aunt Lucy asked, leaning forward in her seat expectantly.
“Well, there was Nancy Gerard,” I said. “She was the one who tried to save Leonard’s life.”
“That’s right,” Leanne said. “I don’t think she interacted with him at all until after he began to choke, so she couldn’t have done it. Neither did Joe Cleeves, but if anyone had a reason to kill Leonard it was him.”
“Who’s Joe Cleeves?” I asked.
“He was the man with the beer belly you served about five minutes before Leonard came in. Large cappuccino with extra froth. He’s a property developer who owns a parcel of land next to the property Leonard and Roman live in. He’s been trying to buy it off them, since it borders the water and he wants to build some condos or something on it. By all accounts, Roman was fine with them selling him the land, and really needed the money, but Leonard absolutely didn’t want to.”
“So you think Joe might have killed Leonard over the plot of land?” Kaillie asked, her mouth dropping open. “Surely not. Would he really kill someone over money?”
Leanne shrugged. “People have been killed for less.”
“Yeah, but not on the island,” Kaillie replied.
“Are you really so naïve that you think the greed of human nature doesn’t exist on our little patch of paradise?” Aunt Lucy said. “I could absolutely see Joe killing Leonard to get a hold of that land. He could make millions selling condos there.”
“There’s only one problem,” Leanne chimed in. “Joe was in the coffee shop, but he was sitting at the table furthest from Leonard, and he didn’t leave his seat once. He was working on his computer the entire time. He couldn’t have done it.”
I nodded. I knew who Joe was now, and as far as I knew, Leanne was right. I hadn’t seen him get up from his computer even once before Leonard’s attack had begun.
“I can’t believe this is a conversation we’re having at dinner,” Aunt Debbie said, shaking her head.
“Hey, it’s the first time in years someone has been murdered here, and it was in the café our family owns. You have to let us speculate,” Aunt Lucy retorted. “Who else was there?”
“Well, there was Dianne Mulgrew,” Lucy said.
“Oh, she introduced herself to me,” I said. “She works at the bank, as a teller, right?”
“That’s her,” Leanne confirmed.
“She seemed really nice. She went and spoke with Leonard at one point, right?”
“Yes,” Leanne said. “I saw that as well. But then, what reason could she possibly have to want Leonard dead? Diane works at the bank, same as he does, but she’s there during the day and he’s there at night. It’s not like they would have interacted much.”
I nodded, and made a mental note to try and learn more about Dianne Mulgrew. After all, she had the opportunity to kill Leonard. Maybe she had done it.
“Don Kilmer also had the chance to kill him,” Leanne said. “He walked past the table where Leonard had been sitting while Leonard was in the bathroom. He would have had to have been quick, but he could have slipped something into the mug without anyone noticing.”
“Which one was Don?” I asked.
“The one who ordered two large coffees and drank them himself,” Leanne asked. “How the guy doesn’t die of a caffeine overdose I have no idea.”
I laughed. “That’s right, I remember him. He dropped a couple quarters into the tip jar on his way past Leonard’s table and his hands were trembling.”
“He’s a good guy,” Kaillie said. “He owns the hardware store here in town.”
“I can’t think of any reason he’d have to kill Leonard,” Lucy mused. “Frankly, I’m surprised that brother of his didn’t finally take him out.”
“Roman?” I asked, and Lucy nodded.
“Yes. The fact that those two still lived under the same roof astounds me. They’ve been at each other’s throats since their mother died.”
“Oh?” Kaillie asked. “I knew they didn’t get along, but I didn’t realize it was so bad.”
“It really was,” Aunt Lucy said with a solemn nod. “You were only a child, so we kept a lot of the worst of it from you, but it was bad. At one point, the two of them got into a fistfight in the middle of Main Street. On a weekend in August. I’ve heard of deer coming out of the forest and causing traffic jams, but that was the first and last time I’ve seen one caused by two grown men going to town on one another.”
“They were fighting over their mom’s wishes, right?” Aunt Debbie asked.
“That’s correct,” Aunt Lucy replied. “The will said that old Roseanne Steele wanted to be cremated, and have her ashes scattered into the Pacific Ocean. But Roman insisted that in the day before she died Roseanne told him privately that she had changed her mind and wanted to be buried in the churchyard along with the rest of her family. There were no witnesses to this statement, so obviously it couldn’t be considered, and Roseanne was cremated, her ashes scattered as per the written will. Roman never forgave Leonard for doing that to their mother, and they fought horribly for years since. I can’t imagine what must have gone down under that roof without us knowing.”
“There was that one time Roman went around with a black eye for a few weeks,” Kaillie said. “I remember thinking he looked even scarier than usual when he walked past me down the street.”
“Yes, that was about three months later,” Aunt Lucy said, nodding. “We all knew Leonard had done it to him. The rumor at the time was that he hit him in the face with a frying pan. Some of us were taking bets as to how long it was going to be before one of them moved out.”
“You say that as if it wasn’t you running the pool,” Aunt Debbie said pointedly to her sister. “And don’t thi
nk I don’t remember that you kept everyone’s money.”
Aunt Lucy shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, the pool is still going. Besides, my money was on one of them murdering the other.”
“Well, you lost,” Leanne said with a grin. “Roman wasn’t in the coffee shop that day.”
“In that case, everyone lost, and as the pool organizer, I get to keep the money,” Aunt Lucy announced. “No harm no foul.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Kaillie said with a small smile.
“Yeah, well, half the people who initially placed bets are dead now anyway,” Aunt Lucy said with a shrug. “And I’m sure the rest have forgotten.”
“There was one other person I saw speaking with Leonard,” I interrupted, wanting to get the conversation back onto the murder. After all, if I was going to try and find out who killed him, I needed to know who my suspects were. “Another man, older, grey hair. Very thin, ordered a coffee and a muffin.”
“Oh, Jack,” Leanne said, nodding. “Jack Frost. And yes, that is his real name. He’s a retired math teacher.”
“He was one of my favorite teachers,” Kaillie said with a fond smile. “He was always willing to stay late and explain a concept you didn’t understand.”
“Yeah, he’s good people,” Leanne confirmed. “Although I do wish he had bumped my C+ up to a B back in tenth grade.”
“Would he have had any reason to kill Leonard?” I asked, and all the other heads around the table shook in unison.
“Nope. Jack’s a good man. You’ll get to know him better soon; he comes in at least a couple of times a week.”
Aunt Lucy gave me a curious look, but I carefully ignored it and slurped up another mouthful of spaghetti. There were three people who could have murdered Leonard Steele. Now I just had to figure out which one of them actually did it.
Chapter 12
The following day I went back to the coffee shop with Aunt Debbie, who got the call just after four in the morning that the crime scene technicians had finished and we were welcome to open up again. I was a little bit worried about what peoples’ reactions were going to be. What if everyone felt the same way as Ariadne Stewart? What if people saw I was the one taking orders and immediately left, thinking I was going to poison them? What if I really wasn’t welcome in this town anymore?
I tried not to think too hard about these things, but it was hard to do so when the first customer of the day walked up to the door, had their hand on the handle, made eye contact with me behind the counter and immediately turned around and walked the other way instead.
“Oh, I’ve got to get out of here,” I said to Leanne. “I’m hurting business already.”
“Nonsense,” Leanne said, taking my hand and giving it a quick squeeze. “So there’s an idiot or two out there who thinks badly of you. So what? You’re a part of this family now, and that means sticking up for one another. We’re not going to just throw you in the back and hide you away just because a few people in town don’t like you.”
“Thanks,” I said, managing a small smile. I did like the fact that she was sticking up for me; apart from Dad I had never really had that in my life before.
“Even if people think you did it, don’t worry. They’ll move on. In a week or two everything will have been forgotten, and they’ll go back to normal. You never know; the cops might even figure out who killed Leonard Steele.”
“You say that like it’s not a foregone conclusion,” I said with a laugh.
“That’s because you haven’t met our police chief, Ronald Jones,” Leanne said. “He makes the navigator of the Hindenburg look like an aerial ace.”
“That much of a train wreck, huh?”
“He’s old as dirt, an alcoholic, and once famously caught a couple of tourists transacting a drug deal underneath the window outside his office. He told them to keep it down and slammed the window shut. One of the other officers heard the commotion, wondered what was going on in the alley outside the police station and found the culprits.”
“Wow,” I said, giggling. “How does the guy still manage to have a job?”
Leanne shrugged. “The fact that this isn’t exactly a high-crime area, I guess. There hasn’t been a murder in years, burglaries are virtually unheard of, and petty crime is basically the only thing that happens here. It’s not a great idea to commit a crime on an island where the only way out is via a ferry that runs a couple times a day.”
“Fair enough, but shouldn’t he still have been ousted years ago?”
“Probably, but he’s never screwed anything up badly enough to get fired, or have it suggested that he retire,” Leanne said with a shrug. “The drug thing was bad, but they managed to sweep it under the carpet in their report, so the higher-ups that make these decisions never found out about it.”
“So there’s basically no chance that the person who actually killed Leonard is going to get caught,” I said, frowning. “That sucks. That means everyone is going to think I did it.”
Leanne gave me a sympathetic look. “It will go away. I promise. This is a good place, and most of the people who live here are reasonable. I know it sucks, but people will start coming back.”
I nodded, distracted by the entrance of Janice, who flashed me a huge smile as soon as she saw me. “Eliza! So nice to see you again.”
“Thank you, same to you,” I said, giving her a warm smile. Maybe Leanne was right: not everyone was going to automatically assume I was a killer.
“It’s such a shame what happened to Leonard yesterday. I’ve heard he was murdered. Can you imagine? Who would do such a thing?” Janice shook her head sadly.
“I don’t know, but I hope the killer is found,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” Janice said. “It terrifies me to think someone willing to go to those lengths is living among us here on the island. Of course, I’d feel quite a bit better about things if we had stronger leadership in the police force, but at least a few of the detectives the chief has working for him aren’t idiots. Hopefully they figure it out.”
“I think they will,” Leanne said. “This is a small town, and there weren’t that many people who had the opportunity to kill him.”
“Yes. I’ll put it out to the universe that the killer be found, and hopefully the cosmos will answer.”
Janice placed her order once more, which Leanne had already been making for her, thanked us, and left.
“See? That wasn’t so bad,” Leanne said to me. “Don’t let the people who don’t know you get you down. They’ll come around.”
I really hoped Leanne was right.
For the next few hours I continued to take orders. We began to get enough customers that I no longer had time to worry whether or not any of them thought I was a murderer, and I made sure that when I poured the brewed coffee into cups from the large containers I did it from the side so that the customers could see I wasn’t slipping poison into their drinks.
During a quiet period, a familiar-looking woman walked in. I recognized her; it was Dianne Mulgrew, the woman who had stopped and had a chat with Leonard while he was drinking his coffee.
“Hello, welcome to Cackling Witch Coffee,” I said to her. “What can I get for you today?”
“A twelve ounce latte and a blueberry muffin, please,” she said to me, handing over a bill. Her eyes darted over to the table where Leonard had been sitting the day before, where he had died.
“It’s such a tragedy, isn’t it?” I offered in a quiet voice.
“It truly is. I was speaking to him just a couple of minutes before it happened.” Dianne shook her head.
“What were you speaking with him about? You two worked together, right?”
“Well, we both worked at the bank, that much is true. But we didn’t work together. He was the security guard, so his shift started right as mine ended at the end of the day. I knew he was seeing the doctor about his heart, and I hadn’t seen him since, so I was just asking how he was doi
ng.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said. “I didn’t know him at all; yesterday when I served him was the first time that I met him.”
There was a slightly awkward pause for a moment. “Of course, right. Well, he told me he was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Frankly, I was surprised he wasn’t diagnosed earlier, given how cantankerous he could be. He even showed me the pills he had to take and complained about the doctors making him take them.” Dianne smiled sadly. “I mentioned to him that they were obviously good for his health, and Leonard complained that his bad ticker came from his father’s side of the family, but that he wasn’t going to let genetics get the best of him. Then he swallowed one of the capsules whole and said the pharmaceutical industry could go to hell, and that for what that pill cost, it should taste like maple syrup. That was Leonard. It’s sad to think that was the last conversation I’d ever have with him.”
“It sounds like you were fond of him. Not a lot of people in this town were, from what I’ve heard.”
“Oh, I was. Leonard was a grouch, no doubt about that. There was a reason he worked at night, when he didn’t have to interact with other people. And the whole situation with his brother was awful. But he wasn’t a bad person, deep down, so I always tried to be nice to him. You never know what someone else is going through, after all.”
“My dad always said that,” I said softly, finding the tears coming to my eyes yet again. I still cried so easily at the thought of him. I blinked back the tears and took a deep breath to steady myself.
“He sounds like a smart man,” Dianne said. “That’s why I was always nice to Leonard. As far as I knew, he never did anything really bad to anybody, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
“Well, hopefully the police will find out who did this.”
“I certainly hope so,” Dianne said as Leanne brought her coffee over to her. “He may not have been the easiest person to get along with, but as far as I know, he never did anything to deserve to be murdered.”
A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3 Page 7