Twenty-Five
After cheerful good-byes, Sage left the Broken Broomstick. Ember stared at the fluffy cat on her paperwork, trying to decide what she should do.
Cedric not answering her really threw her for a loop. “Maybe he’s on a call,” she said out loud to Kali and Talako.
Not able to sit still any longer, Ember got to her feet and made her way to the door, grabbing her keys on the way. She was going to pay Jeffrey a visit.
Ember was not surprised when Kali trotted after her, evidently set on following her to Jeffrey’s.
The cat let out a soft meow when they arrived. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? Know thyself, know thy enemy,” Kali quoted as Ember made her way to the door.
“Just a moment,” Jeffrey called from behind the door that Ember knocked on. Looking around Ember kept herself on high alert.
“Ember, what are you doing here?” Jeffrey asked, surprised to find her standing on the other side of the door.
“I need to ask you some questions. Can I come in?”
“Of course.” Jeffrey moved aside and let Ember into his house. Kali snuck in behind Ember, Jeffrey none the wiser. “Would you like anything to drink?”
“No, thank you,” Ember said, turning to look at him.
“Please, come sit,” he said. “I think I know why you’re here.”
“So,” Ember started, fidgeting with her hands. How do you ask someone if they are a murderer? “Since you seem to know why I’m here I’ll just cut to the chase. It has become common knowledge that you have been sleeping around on your wife. Sleeping around with the victims that were murdered.”
“Yes, unfortunately, I was. Not something that I’m proud to admit,” Jeffrey said. “Sheila is the reason that my wife finally decided to file for divorce. You see I’ve never been very faithful to her.”
“So, where were you the night that Sheila and her friends were killed?”
“That’s easy. I was in New Orleans,” Jeffrey explained.
“Do you have proof of this?” Ember asked. It was easy to tell someone that you were in New Orleans but if you didn’t have anything to back it up you could just as easily have been right here, spiking wine to kill off your problems.
“Um, yeah,” Jeffrey answered before he got up and made his way to a desk that had paperwork spread out all over it. “Here it is.”
Ember took a sheet of paper from him and looked at it. It was a receipt for a room at the Big Easy the night of the murders.
“Why were you in New Orleans?” Ember couldn’t help but ask. She needed to know. She couldn’t leave here unless she knew everything.
“I was meeting with my lawyer,” Jeffrey answered her easily. A vision came to Ember then of Jeffrey shaking hands with another man. A large pudgy man dressed in a suit and tie.
“Why didn’t you share any of this information earlier?”
“I was keeping quiet about it because I wanted to beat my wife to filing for divorce. If I were the one to file I would have a better chance at keeping my assets.” Shame radiated off of him in waves. “If she were the one to have filed then she could get me for a lot due to my infidelity.”
“I see,” Ember said, looking down at her hands that rested in her lap.
“I may have not been the best husband, but she was never the best wife either. I have made plenty of mistakes throughout our marriage.”
“I know that there’s always another side to every story,” Ember eased him. She caught sight of Kali slinking her way around the house.
“You know, Lyndsy and I have been friends since we were kids,” Jeffrey explained. “It should have been her that I married to begin with. I lost my way for quite some time but after this divorce is finalized she and I are going to get married.”
“Is that so?” Ember asked him. Lyndsy had never hinted at such a thing. While they had never been the closest of friends, they did discuss major life events with each other on occasion.
“Yes,” Jeffrey said vehemently. “So you see, she would have no reason to kill anyone. She knew all about my past and all of the women that I had been unfaithful with. But ever since her all of that changed. She is the only one that I want.”
The passion that Ember felt coming off of him spoke volumes to the way that Jeffrey felt about Lyndsy. So was Lyndsy jealous of all of these women and she wanted to get rid of them?
“I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong,” Jeffrey said. “She really had no reason to kill anyone. I love her and she loves me. She has forgiven me for my past even though she didn’t have any reason to.”
“I believe you,” Ember told him. Funny thing is, she did believe him. “I think I should be going now.”
“I’ll let you out,” Jeffrey said as they stood and made their way to the door.
Ember turned to Jeffrey when she was on the front stoop. “Thank you for telling me all of this. You didn’t have to but you have eased my mind about you.” She had made enough time for Kali to slink her way back out of the house.
“Of course, I can’t even imagine what you’re going through with your pub and all,” he said. “If there is ever anything that I can do for you, please let me know.”
“I will.” Ember turned back and made her way back to her car. “Come on,” she said, holding the door open for her cat familiar.
“Thanks,” Kali purred. “I really didn’t want to have to walk all the way back.”
“Now we are no closer than when we started,” Ember muttered as she started the car and drove off.
Twenty-Six
Ember made her way back to the pub, unsure as to whether she believed Jeffery’s story or not. A quick call to his attorney was enough to confirm his story, taking him out of the running as a suspect. While the man was a philanderer and a cheat who had never been faithful to his wife, he wasn’t a killer.
Tapping her pen against her lip, Ember realized that she was no closer now to solving the murder of four people than she had been a day ago. It was looking more and more to her like Laura was the original target and the other three were just collateral damage. She hated to look at people that way, but if she didn’t solve this, she might lose everything and end up in jail herself.
Kali, who was once again lazing away the day in the sun on the kitchen windowsill, raised her head when Ember made a noise of frustration.
“What happened? Did you figure out something important?”
“Nope, that wasn’t an epiphany noise, it was a frustrated, pull my hair out noise.”
“Well, now that’s not going to solve anything. Tell me what you got.”
Ember spent twenty minutes relaying her conversation with Jeffery, then Jeffery’s lawyer to her familiar cat, then sat waiting on her to digest what she was told and give her opinion.
“Well,” Kali said, after taking a few seconds to clean herself. “Maybe a visit to Laura’s house would garner you some answers.”
Ember raised her eyebrows at the cat. “Would you care to play lookout?”
“Nope, not this time. Maybe you should call Cedric instead and let him handle it.” Kali looked like she might be regretting telling Ember to go snooping once again. “You’ve already almost been caught one time, and it’s not going to look really good for you to be in the murder victim’s own house, when you’re a suspect.”
Ember waved off her objections. “This was your idea. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Nope, I don’t look good in orange.” Kali spun around in circles a couple of times and then dropped with a grunt back onto the windowsill, closing her eyes. In her opinion the subject was closed, and certainly not up for debate.
Ember stuck her tongue out at her familiar and went to change into something a little more conservative to break into yet another person’s house.
Dressed in jeans and a black shirt, Ember made her way to Laura’s place. Since it wasn’t in the middle of town, it wasn’t quite as hard to remain unseen as she went. Sneaking i
nto the house, she paused a second to get her bearings.
You could say a lot of things about Laura and her character, but the woman did keep a neat house. Everything was in its place and everything had a place.
Spotting some envelopes on one side of a supremely organized desk in the den, she started to walk over, only to realize the curtains in the room were wide open and the window faced the street. Anyone coming down the street could easily glance over and spot a lone woman in the house of a woman that had been dead for a bit now.
Squatting down on the floor, she crept over to the window, reaching up to pull the curtains closed with a yank of the ties holding them back in their brackets. The curtains drifted closed, plunging the room into total darkness. “No wonder she had these curtains open,” Ember muttered.
Reaching into her bag, she pulled out the flashlight she had popped into her purse as an afterthought, then made her way over to the desk once again. She rifled through the envelopes, finding nothing but bills, fliers, and some coupons for buy one get one pizza at the pizza parlor in the next town over.
Making sure to put the mail back in the exact spot she had found it, she wandered into the kitchen. The only thing she found there was proof that Laura was not any kind of a cook. She had takeout menus from every place in town plastered on the fridge
She looked through the rest of the house, then went back into the den for one last look around. Nothing. Just as she was about to give up and admit there was nothing in Laura’s house to point towards why she was murdered, she noticed a drawer in the desk she hadn’t before.
The drawer was jammed, and it took Ember a few precious minutes to unstick it. It made a super loud noise as it burst open, the sudden movement catching her off balance and sending her to the floor on her behind. Ignoring the wound to her pride, she stood up, rubbing her backside for a second, and then started pulling things out of the drawer one at a time.
After rifling through the usual papers, she found a tablet tucked way in the back of the drawer, where it seemed to have been forgotten. The tablet was dead, so she had to rifle around until she found the charger, then wait for it to power up. Scrolling through the usual social media sites, she found nothing of interest.
It was when she checked the woman’s email that things got interesting. Name after name popped up of men about town. It seemed that Laura was a very busy girl indeed and had been having an affair with more than one husband in the area. The last email she opened was from Mark Denners, and the things in that email made her blush.
Deciding that she had had quite enough of delving into Laura’s private life and feeling a little shaken and sick to boot, Ember checked to make sure everything was as she found it, slipped out the back door and headed back to the pub to digest the information she had uncovered.
It seemed that the suspect list of who killed the three continued to grow and she needed to weed through it and decide who had killed Laura and her friends.
Twenty-Seven
When she got back to the Broken Broom after snooping in Laura’s house, Ember sat down heavily at the bar. She’d never been more grateful to find the pub perfectly empty. Her head was reeling so dizzily, she could really use the space and quiet just to get her thoughts in order.
“What did you find?” Kali asked, trotting up to Ember.
Ember broke down everything she’d found in Laura’s house, particularly the tablet and the many names she’d discovered there.
“So Laura was carrying on some indiscreet, inappropriate correspondences with various people around town,” Kali said slowly. “That lines up with what we already knew about her.”
“I know,” Ember said, discouraged. “I’m not sure I discovered anything in her house that we hadn’t heard through the grapevine. Still, it could be valuable just to confirm it.”
“Have you told Cedric?”
Ember shrugged. “I’m not sure there’s any use in it. Besides, I don’t exactly want to confess that I’ve been breaking into people’s houses.”
“Surely he already suspects you of it,” Kali remarked wryly.
“Yes, but there’s a lot of plausible deniability between knowing and suspecting.”
“Still, maybe his people can get their hands on that tablet. There could be something in those correspondences, something you didn’t come across yet. Don’t they have digital forensics or something these days?”
“You watch too much television,” Ember answered.
“It’s your fault for continuing to pay for cable,” Kali said. “You never watch it. What am I supposed to do, just let it go to waste?”
Ember waved Kali off with a smile. She did have a point, however. It was possible Cedric and his team would be able to make more of that tablet--and the information it contained--than Ember had been able to do.
She pulled out her phone and gave him a call, trying not to be nervous about the fact that, the last time she’d called him, he hadn’t picked up.
The thought that he was in some kind of danger reared its ugly head again. So did the thought that he was irritated her and had rejected her call because he simply didn’t want to talk to her.
Or that he thought she was being overly dramatic and didn’t want any part of the chaos that was her life.
Or that she should keep her nose out of the case, and he shouldn’t continue looping her into it.
Or, worst of all, that she had wormed her way up to suspect number one, and he could no longer chat with her personally or else risk losing all his objectivity.
Basically, Ember’s anxiety had manifested a large variety of nervous narratives she had to shove to the side, even as the phone rang and rang and rang.
Finally, just as Ember was losing heart and about to hang up, Cedric answered.
“Sheriff Jamison.”
She let out a relieved sigh. “Cedric, it’s me. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Just leaving a meeting now,” he said. “What’s up? Is there an emergency?”
“Not an emergency, exactly,” she told him. “But I think I found something that could be helpful to you. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. If you have the time, would you swing by the Broken Broom so we can talk about it?”
“Put the coffee pot on and I’ll be there in ten,” he said, then hung up.
Ember smiled and went to do as he’d asked.
“A little coffee and a chat about motives for murder with the local sheriff,” Kali said teasingly. “Sounds very cozy indeed.”
“I don’t want to hear you making kissy noises at us, all right?” Ember pointed her finger at Kali, accusing. “I know you were thinking about it. Besides, it isn’t like that between Cedric and me. What do you take me for, anyway? The next Laura Hall?”
“Does singing ‘Kiss the Girl’ count?”
“Yes, it does,” Ember said, but she was distracted now, barely paying attention to Kali’s humming. Thinking of Laura Hall again, her memory had flashed back to that tablet. One of the names in particular snagged her attention….
Quickly, she ran to grab the notebook where she had written down her entire list of suspects and clues. She paged through, looking back and forth, mind racing.
By the time Kali rejoined her, Kali’s playful humming had stopped. She looked serious, and she sounded grave yet excited when she piped up, “What’s going on, Ember? What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Ember said. “But I think I might have just figured out this entire case.”
Ember got to her feet and started for the door.
“Wait!” Kali called after her. “Cedric is headed here, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Ember stopped, digging in her pocket for her phone. She was so eager and agitated that she almost dropped it twice before she managed to pull up Cedric’s contact information again.
This time, he answered on the second ring.
“What’s up?” he asked. “I’m headed your way, I promise. Just getting in the car now.”
�
�Don’t come out to the pub,” Ember told him.
“What? What do you mean?”
She told him where he should meet her instead. Luckily, it wasn’t far. If he was nearly at the Broken Broom, then it shouldn’t take him long to meet her where she was going.
In fact, she might have to hurry if she was going to get there on time. The thought of Cedric showing up without her, potentially having to face off against the murderer alone, sent a cold shock of fear through her.
“Why am I headed there?” Cedric asked.
“Because that’s where the murderer is going to be,” Ember explained, already heading out onto the sidewalk, Kali trotting at her heels. “I’ll explain everything, I promise, I just don’t have the time now.”
“Okay,” Cedric said, voice enviably calm. He really was a good sheriff, Ember couldn’t help thinking, level-headed in a crisis. “We’ll meet out front? Don’t go rushing in without me.”
“I won’t,” she promised. “Just hurry.”
Twenty-Eight
“The liquor store?” Kali asked, confused, as she and Ember drew up in front of it.
The storefront was only a short ways down the main drag from the Broken Broom, so it had taken just a short job to reach it. Even so, Ember and Kali were both a little out of breath. On top of that, Ember worried that they had drawn too much attention to themselves, running through the whole downtown district in the middle of the day.
Ember was feeling antsy. Any second now, she and Kali might be spotted out the front windows of the ABC liquor distributor’s shop. Cedric had told her to wait for him before doing anything, but what if the killer came right out for a confrontation?
What would she do then?
Luckily, Ember didn’t have long to worry and wait. Cedric’s cruiser came pulling up within two minutes of Ember’s own arrival, and he climbed out, looking at the shop in confusion.
Dramatic Paws (Kitten Witch Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 9