Kali shrugged her shoulders. “It’s cute.”
Ember shook her head and laughed. “Well, I’m off to bed. There’s something I’m not seeing in this case and a good night sleep will help clear my head. Tomorrow is a new day and hopefully by the end of it I will no longer be a murder suspect.”
Twenty-Two
The smell of fries mixed with the malty aroma of craft beer hit Sage like a welcome hug as she pushed open the heavy entrance door to the Broken Broom.
Ember was behind the bar cleaning, as always, and raised a hand in greeting. “Hi Sage. Long day?”
“Is it that obvious?” Sage asked, curling her lip. “Honestly, my new sales girl is so dense. I have to explain everything to her five times before she gets it. I needed to be free of her for a while. Anyway, less about me--how are you doing?”
Ember shrugged her shoulders and glanced around at the empty booths and tables. “Not great if I’m honest, but hopefully it’s only temporary.”
Sage’s phone pinged to announce she had a message. “Sorry, I’m just going to check this,” she said to Ember, who continued with her cleaning.
Ember watched Sage’s expression change as she stabbed at her phone. “Everything okay?”
Sage looked up. “Yes, it’s a reminder from Lyndsy about her birthday party. I assume you received an invite too?”
Ember nodded. “I did but I’m not going.”
“Why not? Come on, you could do with a little fun in your life.” Sage perched herself on to one of the stools by the bar.
“I’m not sure that turning up at the party of someone who is on my suspect list as a murderer is what I would call fun.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea. Just think about it, you can have a cheeky snoop around her house while you’re there.”
Ember touched her nose and furrowed her brow. “Mmmm, I’m not sure.”
“Well you need to get her a birthday gift at least. I know there’s tension between you at the moment but it would make you seem petty if you didn’t get her something, especially if you refuse to go to her party.”
“I’ve already given her a gift,” Ember said shortly before turning to replace some of the optics.
“Really? What did you get her?”
Ember turned back looking rather pleased with herself. “I got her one of those handmade tote bags from the new shop at the edge of town. Colleen’s or something, I think it’s called.”
Sage’s hazel eyes lit up. “Oh, wow, I really love those.”
“Me too,” Ember enthused. “The woman who makes them is really nice. I had a lovely chat with her. She had so many different designs, it was really tough to choose one.”
Sage sat back on her stool. “Please tell me you didn’t get the one in the window with the embroidered wine bottle and glass on the front?”
Ember’s laugh came out as more of a splutter. “Oh my goodness--no I did not!”
Sage’s hand covered her mouth as a customer came up to the bar.
“You girls sound like you’re enjoying yourselves,” said Harry, a tall white-haired man who had been coming to Ember’s bar regularly since she opened. “It’s good to see you laughing, Ember.”
Ember smiled and passed Harry his usual bottle of beer. “Thanks, Harry. There’s not many situations that can’t be lightened by having a giggle with a friend.”
“Not much of a giggler myself,” he said, taking the bottle from her and leaving the cash on the bar, “but I know what you mean.”
Ember turned back to Sage. “Maybe you shouldn’t go either, Sage. I mean if Lyndsy was the one who put the poison in that bottle and she’s angry at me, then who knows what she could do to you?”
“Nah, I’m convinced that she’s innocent and even if she was the murderer, she wouldn’t be stupid enough to poison me at her own party.”
Ember leaned both elbows on the bar and pursed her lips. “That’s true. Any party that ends in a dead body sprawled out on the linoleum is gonna suck.”
“Erm, yes… even more so if the body in question was mine!”
Ember sniggered and patted her friend’s hand.
“Besides,” Sage continued, “I think it’s more likely to be Jeffrey than Lyndsy. He just seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about killing someone.”
“I’m not sure,” Ember said with a sigh.
“Let’s look at the facts.” Sage sat forward and began stabbing her finger on the bar to emphasize her point. “For one thing he’s egocentric and thinks the world revolves around him.”
“True enough.”
“Plus, I can imagine him thinking of someone being in his way as a bug that needs to be squashed under foot.”
“True again,” Ember agreed, “although, I can’t see him wanting to get the sole of his shoe dirty.”
Sage grinned. “You’re right there. He wouldn’t want anything ruining his Prada loafers.”
“That’s what’s bugging me about him as a suspect,” said Ember, “the fact that I think he would choose a more violent method if he was to kill someone. I can imagine that he would want them to know it was him before they died. He’d want them to see his face and watch him stab them with a knife or something equally aggressive.”
Sage nodded in agreement. “You may have a point. I could see him loving that kind of masculine power.”
“Exactly!” Ember said, picking up her drying cloth. “Plus, about seventy percent of all poisonings are carried out by women so he doesn’t fit the profile.”
Sage narrowed her eyes. “Really? Is that a fact or did you just make it up?”
“I think I may have read it somewhere but let’s face it, it’s probably true.”
“Well, I think we should put him at the top of the ‘suspect’ list,” said Sage.
Ember pulled out a pad from under the bar. “You know, I think you could be right.”
Twenty-Three
It had just started to rain that evening when, to her surprise, Ember received a call from one of her waitresses, Tara, telling her to expect a large party at the pub.
“How large?”
“I don’t have a final count,” Tara said. “It’s my family, some neighbors, friends, friends of friends. We were planning to have a cookout but the rain drove us indoors. I’ll warn you, they’re hungry.”
Ember didn’t have anyone to work the kitchens, but luckily the pub food was mostly pretty easy to make, and she thought she should be able to handle a rush by herself.
Cooking while waiting the tables, however, sounded distinctly less appealing.
“Feel like picking up a few bucks?” she asked Tara.
So Tara came in twenty minutes later, leading a group of what must have been twenty rained-on people, all chattering as they poured in the front door. Ember helped them push a handful of tables together, and before long the pub was positively bustling.
If Ember closed her eyes and just listened to the sounds of so many people chatting and enjoying themselves, she could almost pretend it was the old days again.
Kali gave Ember a dirty look from the shelf under the bar where she was curled up behind some unopened rolls of receipt paper. The truth was that she’d been enjoying all of this one-on-one time with Ember, where she could roam the pub and talk openly. Now that she had to put on her normal cat act--and a hidden cat, at that--she was feeling a little irritated.
“You just stay put,” Ember told Kali in an undertone, scratching her chin. “I’m sure they won’t be long.”
Once Tara brought up her family’s orders Ember got started preparing the food. Working together, the two carried the plates out to the waiting customers, who thanked them warmly and then dug in.
After that, Tara lingered around the table, joining in the chatter, and Ember hung out in the kitchen to give the family some privacy, helping herself to a glass of iced raspberry tea.
“I need an appletini,” Tara said, coming up to the bar. “They’re Aunt Midge’s favorites. She says sh
e loves the way we do them here.”
“You want to shake it up?” Ember asked.
Tara shrugged. “I don’t know how.”
“All right, I’ll show you.” Ember left her glass of tea behind and went into the bar with Tara. She showed her the proper way to mix one of their specialty appletinis, then poured it into a tall martini glass and sent Tara with it back to her family.
Then, she returned to the kitchen, planning on putting down a fresh basket of fries. The way Tara’s family was making its way through their current orders, she thought they might be requesting a refill soon.
Before she lowered the basket into the fryer, however, she reached out for the tea she’d left on the counter.
Just then, Kali leapt up onto the kitchen counter and smacked the glass with one paw, hard enough to send it spilling out over the counter.
“What in the world?” Ember asked, looking at Kali, startled.
Kali, dutifully playing her method cat role, meowed significantly, gesturing toward the glass’s spilled contents with a glance.
The tea had already spilled out in a large puddle that was spreading rapidly across the counter and dripping onto the floor. What remained in the glass, in and amongst the cubes of ice, was a sludgy, dark, syrupy substance.
Ember knew the tea recipe well. She had made this batch herself. There was nothing like that in the entire process.
“Everything all right?” Tara called back into the kitchen.
“Yes,” Ember shouted, struggling to keep her voice from shaking. “Just fine! You folks need anything out there?”
“Some more fries would be great,” Tara said, then whisked away, back to the tables.
The last thing Ember needed was for the only customers she’d had all night to hear that there had been a poisoning attempt in the pub while they were enjoying their sodas and appletinis.
Still, Cedric had to hear about this right away. After she started the french fries, she pulled out her cell phone and gave him a call.
As she waited for him to pick up, she walked across the kitchen, checking the back door that led out into the alley behind the pub.
It was unlocked.
Luckily, Cedric was sensitive to Ember’s request that he and his forensic team enter discreetly. They came in the back way, and Ember was able to close up the kitchen door so that her customers could be none the wiser.
The customers finished their meal and thanked Ember for hosting such a large group at such short notice.
“Why don’t you go with them?” Ember asked as they started trickling out of the shop.
“Don’t you want help bussing the table?”
“No, no,” Ember said, eager that Tara shouldn’t enter the kitchen while Cedric and his team were in there. “I’ll handle it. You just take the tip and have a nice night.”
Luckily, Tara didn’t push her on it. Within minutes, the main floor of the pub was empty again.
After a minute, Cedric came out through the kitchen door. “Is everyone gone?”
Ember nodded, then started stacking the plates so she could take them back to the kitchen to be washed later.
Cedric sighed and raked his fingers anxiously through his hair. “All right. The forensic guys are taking the glass and its contents. Preliminary test says it’s probably belladonna toxins in there. You said Kali saved you?”
“She sensed it,” Ember said. “She knocked it over before I could drink it.”
“Then it wasn’t in the drink to begin with.”
Ember shot him a duh look. “I don’t serve belladonna in my raspberry tea, Cedric. Despite what people in town might say.”
“I’m just checking on the timeline. Someone must have come in, poisoned your drink, and then left by way of that back door all while you were mixing up that cocktail.” He took in a deep breath, then let it out as a noisy sigh. “You’d better be careful, Ember. It’s pretty clear to me that someone thinks you’re getting a little too close to the truth behind this case.”
Twenty-Four
“Yesterday’s business was good,” Kali said hopefully as Ember sat going over her earnings and expenses projections for the fifth time in a week.
“Yeah,” Sage piped up. She was sipping a latte and nibbling at a black cherry scone across the table from Ember, enjoying her lunch break from the general store. “I heard basically Tara’s whole family came in.”
“Sure,” Ember agreed. “It was good to be busy again, all right. Never mind that being busy was what left me vulnerable to almost being poisoned.”
“I wouldn’t let you drink poison,” Kali said. “I’ve got finely honed instincts.”
“If only you’d seen the person who put the poison in the drink,” Sage said. “Could you tell who had been in the kitchen? Could you, like… smell them, or anything like that?”
Kali sniffed archly. “What do I look like, a dog? I only smelled the belladonna.”
Ember wasn’t listening to them. She was staring at the grim projections in her book. Last night’s business had been good, sure, but not good enough to keep them open. Not even as good as a regular night before this whole mess began.
“If this keeps up, we won’t be able to keep our doors open,” Ember muttered.
Talako, who had been hovering nearby for a while, made a mournful sound.
“I know,” Ember said. She understood why Talako was so concerned about the pub. It was a family business and had been for generations. Talako had nearly as much love for it as Ember herself did.
It was Ember’s great grandmother who had first opened the Broken Broom. It still held some of that wonderfully old-fashioned charm. Throughout all her childhood, Ember had felt like stepping into the Broken Broom was as special and magical as stepping into an entirely different place and time.
The pub didn’t become any less special over the years, even as Ember had grown old enough to take on the responsibilities of running the place herself.
If anything, it had just become more magical and special. More of a vital connection to her family’s past, and her own, and the history of Cauchemar.
“You’ll be alright,” Kali said, stepping on top of the accounting books as though she was trying to block their bad news with her fluffy body. “We just need to figure out who the real murderer is. Once the case is settled, the customers will come back and everything will be fine.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out the identity of the murderer,” Ember objected. “I haven’t made any headway.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Sage said. “Trying to poison you was a pretty desperate, reckless move. The killer wouldn’t have risked something like that unless they were worried that you were getting closer to the truth.”
“That’s what Cedric said,” Ember conceded. “But I don’t know what I’ve been doing that’s been bringing me closer to the truth.
“He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious,” said Kali, in the tone of voice she used to indicate she was quoting something. It sounded like another Sun Tzu to Ember, but she didn’t want to give Kali the satisfaction of asking.
“Okay,” said Sage, clapping her hands together. “Let’s talk it all through. What do you know? What are your theories?”
“Lyndsy and Jeffrey both have motive,” Talako answered. “Lyndsy was tortured by these women, and harassed and used by this man. Jeffrey had been involved with all the women, and was being blackmailed by one of them.”
“But if it was Jeffrey, that doesn’t explain why he would have wanted Jake dead,” Ember said.
“It could have been an accident,” Sage suggested. “Jeffrey poisoned the wine, it was served to the women, but then Lyndsy didn’t realize and also poured it out for Jake.”
“Or,” Ember said, “Lyndsy was in on it all along, and Jake was her own personal little improvisation.”
“They have been hanging out together a lot lately,” Kali mused. “I’d say they’ve been behaving like co-conspi
rators. Or more.”
“Do we really think Lyndsy would get involved with a married man?” Ember asked. Before all of this began, she really wouldn’t have said Lyndsy was the type.
“Oh, I forgot to mention!” Sage started, eager. “Word around town is that Jeffrey’s wife is filing for a divorce from him. I guess she’s finally tired of all his philandering.”
“That’s interesting,” Ember said. It gelled with what she’d found at Jeffrey’s house. “I wonder if she told him she was leaving him before the murders. That might have been enough to trigger it. Especially considering what Kara said about the blackmail.”
“He could have felt like he was backed into a corner,” Kali agreed.
“Well?” Talako asked, turning to Ember. “What do you think?”
Ember considered. Finally, she said, “I think I’d better talk to Jeffrey about all of this.”
“Is that wise, considering you’re a suspect yourself?” Sage asked.
“And what if Jeffrey is the murderer, and when you try to talk to him he makes another attempt on your life?” Kali added.
“It might be best if you didn’t go to talk to Jeffrey alone,” Talako advised.
“All right,” Ember conceded. “How about if I give Cedric a call? I doubt Jeffrey would try anything if I brought the sheriff with me.”
“Will Cedric go along with you continuing to insert yourself into the investigation?” Sage wondered aloud. “I thought he was trying to keep you out of it.”
“After last night, I’m sure he’ll agree that I’m in it whether I want to be or not.” Ember took out her phone and pulled up his contact information. “But I guess we’ll see what he says.”
Except that when she dialed, the phone rang and rang until it eventually went to voicemail.
She hung up rather than leave a message, feeling suddenly nervous. Cedric almost always answered her calls. And after last night’s emergency, wouldn’t he have been even more sensitive to picking up calls from Ember, knowing someone was potentially trying to kill her?
Dramatic Paws (Kitten Witch Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 8