“Nice,” Leanne said to me with an approving nod. “Good job.”
I smiled, but suddenly there came a noise from above me. I looked up just in time to see one of the huge industrial-style lamps hanging from the ceiling plummeting towards me.
It took my brain a split-second to realize what was going on, and I managed to leap out of the way with a yelp just as the lamp went crashing to the ground a moment later, the sound reverberating across the room. The force of my jump knocked me off my feet and I fell against Leanne, dragging us both to the floor. A small piece of shrapnel scraped against my leg as pain seared through it.
“What in the name of Saturn?” Leanne muttered hazily as I blinked, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
“Are you alright?” a customer asked, peering over the counter as Kaillie rushed out from the kitchen.
“Leanne! Eliza! What happened?”
Aunt Debbie had been speaking with Uncle Bob on the distribution side of the building, but had rushed over at the sound, along with her brother.
Uncle Bob immediately made his way around the counter and reached down towards his daughter.
“Are you alright?” he asked us.
Still slightly dazed, I sat up a little bit and looked at what had happened. One of the lights had come crashing down from the ceiling and was now in the middle of the floor, practically unrecognizable, right where I had been standing a minute earlier. If I hadn’t moved out of the way, I would have been crushed.
Someone was helping me to my feet, and I got up, unable to tear my eyes from my near-death experience. That had been one heck of an accident.
“How did that thing fall?” I heard Leanne ask next to me. “It could have killed us.”
“They were only installed last year,” Kaillie said, frowning. “And we got Yuri, the best contractor in town to install them. He wouldn’t have done a shoddy job.”
Uncle Bob stepped past me to have a look at the wire that had led from the lamp to the ceiling. His face was grim as he held it up.
“I don’t think this was an accident,” he said quietly, and I gasped.
“Someone cut it on purpose?” Leanne asked, and Uncle Bob nodded.
“Yes. About ninety percent of the cable was sliced through cleanly, cut with a knife or some other sort of blade. Only about ten percent is actually torn. I think someone came in here and cut through most of the cable, expecting the rest of it to eventually tear off and crash to the ground.”
I looked over at Leanne, who shared my horrified look.
“But… who would do something like that?” I asked. “When?”
Uncle Bob shook his head. “I don’t know. If the two of you are alright to move, I think we need to clear away from this area and call the police.”
A sinking feeling developed in the pit of my stomach. Someone had tampered with the lamp on purpose?
Aunt Debbie took over quickly and motioned for the customers to head back to the tables. I could hear her reassuring them, telling them that they were in no danger, but that if any of them wanted to take their items to go that wasn’t a problem.
Most of them were trying to look past Aunt Debbie and looked over at Leanne and me, so I flashed a reassuring smile as best I could while Kaillie took Leanne and I to the kitchen at the back.
“What on earth happened?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“I have no idea. I just heard a snap, then I looked up and the lamp was falling. I just got out of the way instinctively.”
“It’s a good thing you did,” Leanne replied. “If you were still under there when it hit the ground you’d be dead for sure. Those lamps are heavy.”
“And Uncle Bob said someone did it on purpose. That means someone just tried to kill you, Eliza.”
My face paled at the idea. It wasn’t the first time my life had been in danger since moving here, and in fact a killer had tried to silence me before, but this was different. That time, I’d had a gun leveled right at me when I had confronted the killer. This time, I was just going about my day-to-day life and almost had it ended in the blink of an eye. Just like that.
Who on earth would have done this to me?
“You realize it was probably whoever tried to kill Karen, right?” Kaillie said softly.
“How could they have gotten in? When did they do it? This might actually be a good thing. If we can solve this crime, that can confirm for us who tried to kill Karen. If it was Andrew, maybe he left his fingerprints on the lamp or something like that,” Leanne said. “It sucks, but it might get us a bit closer to solving Karen’s stabbing.”
I wasn’t quite in a mental state to be looking at the positives to this event yet. Kaillie must have noticed, because she made her way towards me.
“Hey, come on over here and sit down,” she said, motioning to a small bench in the corner that she must have used to take breaks. “Leanne, can you get Eliza some water or something? She’s not looking so hot.”
“Are you hurt?” Leanne asked, grabbing a water bottle from the fridge and bringing it over to me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, I think I have a cut on my leg, but it’s not too bad. It hurt at first, but it’s fine now. I’m just a bit shaken up.”
“That’s understandable,” Leanne said, leaning down to look at my leg. “After all, someone just tried to kill you. But listen, if anything, this just makes me more determined to find out who did this.”
I winced as Leanne moved her finger towards the cut. “Kaillie, you have a first aid kit back here, right?”
“Yeah,” my cousin replied, making her way towards one of the shelves near the door. She grabbed a sealed tub and brought it over to us. Leanne quickly took care of the cut, cleaning the wound, putting a magical potion to heal the cut immediately, and then covering it with a large bandage.
“Thanks,” I said with a smile when she was finished. “I appreciate that.”
“You’re lucky you got away with just that scratch,” Leanne said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it. It also means someone broke into the coffee shop. And they had to have done it in secret, or else we would have noticed. It’s not like the window in the door was broken this morning or anything like that.”
“Right,” I said. “You didn’t notice anything strange when you unlocked it this morning?”
“No,” Leanne replied. “On the other hand, I can’t guarantee that I would have noticed anything out of the ordinary at all. I’ve unlocked that front door in the morning probably over a thousand times in my life. I tend to do it on autopilot now. If the door had been unlocked and I just turned the key around an already unbolted door I might not even have noticed, to be completely honest.”
“That makes things harder,” I said with a frown. “What about back doors?”
“There’s one here,” Kaillie said, motioning to a door on the side wall. “This one leads to the alley at the side, which makes it easy for me to take out the trash when I’m baking. But there’s no way to unlock it from the outside, and I’m one hundred percent sure it was locked from the inside when I got here this morning.”
“The other option is from dad’s side in the warehouse,” Leanne mused. “There are a few entrances there, including the rolling door that leads to the loading dock at the back. Whoever did it probably came through there.”
“Do you know if Andrew has any particular lock-picking skills?” I asked, and Leanne shook her head.
“I’m afraid I don’t have a clue. I never heard about it. If that sort of information ever got out he’d probably lose his job as the manager at the recreation center. After all, you can’t have someone with a criminal record working around so many kids like that.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “I’m guessing this place doesn’t have security cameras?”
Kaillie gave me a sad smile. “Unfortunately, no. Heck, we don’t even have an alarm system. It’s not like we have a sky-high crime rate here on Enchanted Enclave. And while the coffe
e here might be delicious, it’s about the only thing on the premises that would be worth stealing after hours that you could do without being noticed. The coffee machine would take a while to unhook, and the roasters in the back are worth a lot of money but also weigh a ton. Literally.”
“And up until now we never considered that someone might break in and try to kill one of us,” Leanne added quietly.
The three of us sat in silence, absorbing those words, until a minute later the door to the kitchen opened and in walked Detective Ross Andrews.
Chapter 20
“Hello, ladies,” he said in greeting, nodding to each one of us in turn. “I’m wondering if I could speak with the three of you about today’s events.”
We nodded, and his eyes immediately fell on the first aid kit, and my left pants leg which was rolled up to my knee, exposing the bandage.
“Are you alright?” he asked, concern written all over his face.
“I’m fine, thanks. It’s just a scratch.” The intensity of his stare made my face redden slightly, and I found myself wishing that he would reach down and touch my leg. What on earth was wrong with me? Just because he was good-looking didn’t mean I had to practically slobber all over him.
“Are you sure? I can take you to the hospital if you’d like. They can give you stitches if you need it.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but seriously, it’s fine. Just a scratch, that’s all. It could have been a lot worse though.”
“I saw,” he replied, his expression grim.
“So your being here confirms it – Dad was right and someone did slice the wire on the lamp, rigging it to fall on Eliza.”
Detective Andrews nodded. “That’s right. When I first heard about what had happened I hoped it was a hoax. After all, surely nobody would do anything like that here in Enchanted Enclave. But I had a look for myself, and there’s no way it was anything else. Which one of you unlocked the front door this morning?”
“I did,” Leanne said. “Eliza and I got here about five minutes before Aunt Debbie, and I was the one with the key of the two of us.”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“No, but I was saying to the others before, I’m not sure I would have noticed even if there was something. I basically open up the front door on autopilot. Still, I’d look at the back entrances. The door between the warehouse side of things and the coffee shop is never locked, even at night, so whoever did it may have come in through there.”
“How did they get up to the wire?” I asked. “After all, it was pretty high up. He would have needed a ladder to get up there.”
“There is one in the warehouse side of the building, which lends credence to Leanne’s theory that he may have come in through an entrance on that side. I’ll go over there next. Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill you?”
I squirmed in my seat. After all, the answer was yes: whoever had stabbed Karen. But admitting that to Detective Andrews would mean admitting that I had been investigating the attack on Karen, and I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to be a big fan of that if I told him.
Still, I came inches away from being crushed to death by an industrial lamp today. As much as a part of me wanted Detective Andrews to be pleased with me – and I pushed away the feeling that it was more than just the same normal desire I always had for everyone to like me – I figured he’d probably be less pleased if the person who had tried to first kill Karen and then kill me eventually succeeded.
“It might be Andrew Lloyd, who I’m pretty sure stabbed Karen,” I replied. Kaillie looked horrified, like someone had just told the principal she deserved to get detention, while Leanne just nodded grimly, obviously agreeing with my assessment that Detective Andrews should know what we had been doing.
If he was angry, his reaction didn’t betray it. In fact, the only reaction he had at all was raising a single eyebrow. “And why do you think the person who stabbed Karen may have tried to kill you, too?”
“Well, the thing is, we may have been asking a few questions here and there,” I offered, trying to sound as casual as possible. “After all, working in the coffee shop you get to know a lot of people, and right now everyone is asking about the murder. So it’s come up a lot in conversation.”
“Right, I’m sure that’s all it is. Someone wants to kill you because you contributed to the local rumor mill in your coffee shop.”
“Ok, so we may also have gone and had a chat with a few people who may have had a reason to want Karen dead,” I admitted. “It’s possible that one of the people we spoke to – who almost certainly tried to kill Karen – decided we were on the right track and wanted to take care of the problem.”
I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was the problem in question.
“And now we’re getting to the crux of it,” Detective Andrews said. “You seriously shouldn’t be going around investigating this. I’m telling you, as a police officer, I can do my job.”
“We know you can, but it’s not like Chief Jones is the sharpest tool in the shed,” Leanne argued. “And he’s still in charge overall. Besides, four heads are better than one, right?”
“Not when only one of those heads has actual law enforcement experience, and the other ones are now potentially becoming the wannabe killer’s next targets,” Detective Andrews pointed out. “Look, I actually understand why the three of you have been looking into this, but you can’t keep doing it. It’s too dangerous, and one of you is going to get hurt.” He looked pointedly at me. “Or worse.”
“Message received,” Kaillie said, nodding. “Don’t worry, we want to be good. We’ll do the right thing.”
“Speak for yourself,” I heard Leanne mutter under her breath, but when Detective Andrews looked over at her she just flashed him a million-watt smile.
“Alright, well, tell me who it is you spoke to,” Detective Andrews said.
“Kaillie spoke to Andrew, from the recreation center,” Leanne said. “He’s our number one suspect right now.”
“Is he, now?” Detective Andrews asked.
“Yes,” I replied firmly. “He was seen arguing with Karen not long before she was stabbed. She won’t tell us what they were arguing about, but it was definitely something. Plus, he got super defensive when Kaillie started talking to him.”
“Perhaps it was because you accused him of stabbing a woman. Most people don’t take too kindly to that, especially when it’s just a member of the public doing it. After all, you’re not cops.”
“It was more than that,” Kaillie said slowly. “He barely even allowed us to get to the accusatory part. As soon as we started talking about Karen all of his defenses went up, and he wouldn’t say anything else, just told us to get away from him.”
“Alright,” Detective Andrews said. “Who else have you spoken to?”
“Gary Vanderchuck,” Leanne replied. “That’s it.”
She wisely didn’t mention Kyle, and I was glad for it. After all, his place had been broken into, and I was there when Detective Andrews had gotten the phone call about it, and if Detective Andrews knew we were considering Kyle as a suspect he might also start to wonder if we were the ones who had broken into his place.
“Why don’t you think he did it?”
“He has an alibi,” I replied without skipping a beat. “He was at a conference in Seattle when Karen was stabbed.”
Detective Andrews raised his eyebrows. “You certainly have been busy. I’ll give you credit for thoroughness.” Still, I couldn’t help but feel like there was something in his look that I was missing, like he knew something I didn’t. He probably wouldn’t be thrilled if I grabbed his notebook and started flipping through it.
I figured we could do without admitting we were looking inside the owners’ cars to check for blood, as well. Detective Andrews had probably done that himself, among other things.
“Alright, well, who do you think did it?” I asked. “Surely at this point yo
u’ve got a prime suspect. Do you think we’re on the right track, or do you think we’re way off base?”
Detective Andrews smiled at me, and butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “You can’t honestly think I’m going to tell you that, can you? That’s confidential. I can confirm that I have a number of persons of interest who are being considered as likely culprits in the attack on Karen. But what about anyone else? Can you think of others who might want to hurt you?”
I shook my head. “No. The most dangerous thing I’ve done apart from looking into the attack on Karen is a yoga class last week. And the only person who wanted to kill me after that ended was myself.”
I got a laugh from Detective Andrews for that little quip. “Alright, so no disagreements with anyone else?”
“Definitely not. Not even by a customer at the coffee shop who short-changed me. I’m telling you, there’s only one person who could have wanted me dead: the person who tried to kill Karen.”
“Got it,” Detective Andrews said, and turned to Leanne. “What about you? After all, the both of you work behind that counter together. It’s possible the killer was going after you instead.”
“Sorry, I’m my usual charming self at all times, and no one wants to kill me. Well, apart from Eliza for dragging her to the yoga class in question, but I can say with confidence she didn’t do it.”
“Because it could have maimed her as well?”
“Oh please, if the lamp had killed me at least I’d never have to step foot in that studio again,” I muttered in reply.
“Because Eliza stomps around like an elephant at home and I would have heard her going out,” Leanne said with a grin, and I stuck my tongue out at her quickly. Detective Andrews laughed.
“Alright. I think the two of you are right then, if there was no one else you’ve had any disagreements with this probably has to do with the attempt on Karen’s life.”
“Do you know who broke into her house the other day?” I blurted out before I convinced myself it was a bad idea. “We heard someone did.”
A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3 Page 27