by Hannah Reed
Hunter sighed as though he had a massive headache. “Homicide can’t be ruled out until the department has more information and determines otherwise. That’s standard procedure. I want to get over to Holly’s house, and offer my assistance. They have a team going through there right now. Nobody can go back inside until they’re satisfied.”
“Where are Holly and her guests supposed to go?”
“That’s their problem. I have my own.”
“What are they looking for over at Holly’s house anyway? It’s not like Nova died there.”
“When they’re done, they’re going to comb the riverbank,” he said, dodging my question. “They probably won’t find anything after all the tromping around. Sally should have been more careful. She just assumed it was natural causes and didn’t take precautions. Like I said, I have my own problems.”
“What exactly are your problems?” I was starting to get even more testy. I’m the one who’d had to deal with finding a dead body.
“It happened right in my backyard,” he said. “That makes me involved on a personal level. I should be heading up this investigation, but how can I when the death occurred right where I live?”
“So you excused yourself from the case?” I didn’t know if cops did that, but attorneys did when they had conflicts of interest. I knew that much.
“I had to, and I had to tell the captain why. This is a huge conflict of interest.” I could sense Hunter was squirming a little. I also sensed he wasn’t telling me something. “What?” I said.
“The captain didn’t know that I . . . eh . . . we . . . lived together until this happened.”
“So now was when you got around to telling her?” I heard the anger in my voice. “When you had to?”
I’d met Hunter’s superior once. She was a formidable human being, tough as nails, probably chewed them for breakfast, but still . . . I was beyond testy now, just thinking about Hunter’s commitment issues.
“You were hiding me,” I said, “like a dog in a no-pets-allowed apartment building.” He didn’t have to say it, because I’m good at filling in the blanks. He hadn’t planned to publically announce our arrangement in case it didn’t work out! In which case, he thought he’d just slip out the back door and nobody would be the wiser. I fumed, letting some of my divorce damage influence my thinking.
“That’s not true,” Hunter insisted. “It’s just that I don’t like mixing my personal life with my professional life, that’s all. Not that I’ve ever had one to share before. Story, I’m learning as I go, and I’m sorry I disappointed you.”
I sniffed.
Hunter sighed again and said, “The best answer, the most logical, is to find Johnny Jay and get him back here to do his job. But until the chopper he took to the Boundary Waters gets back to civilization, nobody even knows where he went.”
I really wanted my man back, the earlier version who had eyed me up with a promising smirk and a twinkle in his eye. This new guy wasn’t nearly as likeable. For a very brief second or two I actually toyed with going into the Boundary Waters myself and dragging the police chief home.
Even if it meant my butt on the hot seat. Which it would, knowing Johnny Jay. He would suspect me of wrongdoing just for being in the vicinity of a dead person, and this time it had happened right in my yard. Handcuffs and jail, for sure.
I cursed the day that man had become our police chief. I’ve had a target on my back ever since.
I sent a silent message to the police chief, threw it up in the air, and wished it Godspeed.
Run, Johnny. Run!
Ten
“Arugula, tomatoes . . .” Milly ticked off a list of supplies she needed for the meal. I was already sick and tired of the whole affair, and we had hardly started. “Red onions. . . .” She had a shopping basket over her arm and added items as she went. “Dijon mustard . . .”
“I have arugula in my garden,” I told her. “I’ll go get some in a few minutes.”
“No hurry. You can bring it to Holly’s when you come.”
Then off she went down aisle four while I picked through the bone-in rib eyes, doing a mental head count and adding a few more steaks for good measure. That way we’d be prepared in case someone unexpected showed up or Max overcooked one. Lots of reasons for spares, especially when your rich sister is paying.
Holly had decided to take charge of dessert, which meant she was pondering which of the local cheesecakes in the frozen food aisle to defrost. We’ve got a rainbow of flavors, so she was good there.
Right then, Patti Dwyre crept up behind me—a bad habit of hers—and said, “I’m starting to think you’re jinxed.”
“Oh, come on, that isn’t fair.”
“The value of my house is going to drop like a rock.”
“Save that sort of talk for Lori and her next rampage. She tells me that all the time.” I almost opened my mouth to ask Patti about the state of her attire at the time of Nova’s death, but decided I had other things on my mind at the moment. Patti could wait.
I set aside the steaks, and debated which potatoes to get. Red or fingerling? I decided on red.
Patti didn’t miss the clues leading up to tonight’s event as she followed me around in produce. “You’re getting ready for that ‘big’ dinner that I’m not invited to?” she asked, using finger quotes.
“You got it.”
“You’re a hard person to stay friends with.”
“Look who’s talking.”
We locked eyes. “What is that supposed to mean?” she said, narrowing hers.
“I really am busy right now.”
“No, really, I insist.” Now the Pity-Party face arranged itself, getting ready to whine.
I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth. Now I was stuck. So I said what had been on my mind ever since we scooped Nova out of the river. “Your pants and shoes were soaking wet when you joined us on the riverbank,” I said. “You have some explaining to do.”
“I didn’t hold that woman under water, if that’s what you think.”
Patti had a smug look on her face, like she knew something and was about to gloat. She also was hiding something. I was sure of it.
I put my basket down next to the potato bin and grabbed Patti’s arm, heading for the back room where we’d have more privacy.
“She didn’t drown,” Patti said, “And we both know it.”
I really wanted to share what I knew with somebody. My sister was too involved and would freak out. But Patti was the town’s official gossip, an overzealous reporter, and if the verdict came back murder one, Patti was at the top of my suspect list, based on her mysterious whereabouts at the time of death. Still, most of me totally believed Patti didn’t do it. After all, what would be her motive? Besides, Patti was really wound up. If she’d been the one who offed Nova, she would have stayed in the background, which she does all the time, and she’s really good at it.
“Whatever we’re about to discuss about cause of death,” I warned her, “has to stay between me and you. Holly can’t know.”
“You’re kidding right? I’m a reporter now. I’ve learned to keep information tight to my chest.”
“You don’t keep anything confidential. That’s your job. To blab.”
“Besides,” she said as if I hadn’t spoken, “I already know exactly what really happened without any input from you. Nova Campbell was poisoned.”
Okay, now Patti had my full attention. “Who told you that?” I asked her, trying to appear surprised instead of suspicious.
“Nobody. I guessed.”
“That was more than a good guess. Can you please explain how you came to that conclusion ahead of all of us, including even before the medical examiner?”
“I bet Jackson knew the minute he saw her. Because she didn’t have a drowned expression on her face.”
“Which is?”
Patti demonstrated with a lax, calm, openmouthed, sightless expression, making me wonder for the umpteenth time if she had all her m
arbles.
“That’s drowned,” she said. “Here’s poisoned.”
This time she screwed up her face, sticking her tongue way out and bulging her eyes.
I had to admit, that was the exact look on Nova’s dead face, that second one.
“What killed her off?” Patti wanted to know once she put her features back in place. “Strychnine? Cyanide? So many perfect poisons to choose from!”
“It doesn’t have to be murder,” I pointed out. “She could have eaten something that . . .”
“. . . gave her fatal indigestion?” Patti finished for me, the hint of sarcasm telling me she didn’t believe it for one second.
“What about mushrooms? What if she picked and ate poisonous mushrooms?” I did a mental checklist of toxic possibilities—fungi and plants from our area:
Little brown mushrooms—a person has to assume all brown ones are bad since they all look alike.
Lilies of the Valley—even the water in a glass they’ve been kept in is poisonous.
Rhododendrons—don’t use the flowers to make tea if you want to see tomorrow.
Yew trees—American or Japanese, same thing, don’t steep the leaves.
Rhubarb—the vegetable is tasty, but the leaves can kill you.
“She could have ingested a whole host of different things,” Patti agreed. “Ammonia, mothballs, kerosene, insect repellent.”
I took a moment to stare at Patti, then said, “Yes, but I was thinking more along the lines of accidental ingestion. Who would eat anything from your list unless they wanted to commit suicide the hard way? And none of those items make effective murder weapons. Can you imagine trying to slip mothballs into someone’s food without them knowing? Impossible.”
“True, but someone could have given her LSD. Maybe she was hallucinating and thought she was a fish.”
“I have work to do,” I said, realizing this conversation was getting more ridiculous by the minute. I went back out to the produce section and finished selecting potatoes. Patti was still my shadow.
“Let me help you,” she said.
“Milly and I have tonight’s dinner handled, but thanks for the offer.”
“Not the meal, silly, the investigation.”
“I’m not investigating a single thing and don’t get me started on the many reasons why.” Patti knew perfectly well that we’d been in some really scary hot spots in the past, and I wasn’t about to go there again. “After tomorrow,” I told her, “I’m going back to business as usual. In the meantime, I’m not getting involved.”
“But it happened right in your backyard!”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Ha! That boyfriend of yours gave you orders, didn’t he?”
“Hunter doesn’t own me.”
“We’ll see about that.” Patti’s eyes shined with excitement. “To prove he doesn’t control every move you make, you have to help me get inside the inner circle for this story. Tell Holly’s husband that the local newspaper wants to cover the dinner, which is completely true, and I won’t write a thing about the dead body until you say so.”
“The local newspaper doesn’t care about a dinner party.”
“Are you kidding? Dinner with a bunch of suspects!”
I could tell that last comment was a slip because Patti’s eyes did a shifty thing. The woman was not to be trusted. Not one bit. “I don’t have to prove anything to you regarding my relationship with Hunter,” I told her. “In fact, you need to explain to me why you were in the water at the same time Nova plopped in.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Come on, invite me along.”
I didn’t know what to think, my mind was going a million miles an hour. My radar said this would come back murder, and my brain had an issue with Patti. My intuition literally quivered with warning bells. Patti had an agenda, but what exactly was it?
While I worked my brain over for a really good excuse why Patti couldn’t come along, one she’d accept, Holly came into the back room holding a cheesecake. “I’ve been worried about what might have really happened to Nova,” she said to us in a whispery voice. “What if she didn’t have a medical condition after all? What if her death was . . . suspicious?”
I slid an eyeball from her to Patti, a signal to Patti to shut up about poison. Thinking Nova had died of poisoning wasn’t going to make my sister feel better, probably worse. And then she’d flip out about that.
Patti caught my warning. Thankfully, my sister missed it.
“You wondered how she could drown in two feet of water, right?” Holly went on. “What if somebody held her under? Sally Maylor asked me some pretty strange questions.” Then my sister did a theatrical gasp. “What if she was murdered, and I’m a suspect? And I wasn’t in the honey house with the rest of you, so that’s even worse. OMG, I’m going to faint.”
“You better sit down,” I said, taking the cheesecake from her and placing it on my desk.
“The police questioned you?” Patti said, smelling a story. She produced a notebook and flipped to a fresh page. “Tell me about that.”
Ever since Officer Maylor had left to track down Holly with more questions, I’d been too busy to get Holly alone and ask her about their exchange. And now here Patti was, right in the thick of things, actually thinking she would take notes.
I grabbed the notebook from her. “This whole conversation is off the record,” I said. “You aren’t writing a single thing down, now or later. Agree or forget it.”
We locked eyes again. I won. She nodded.
“The cops will put me at the top of their suspect list,” my sister said. “Sally asked me if we got along. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Nobody knew how you really felt.” Except me. And now Patti, I could have said. Which wasn’t really a good thing, so I added, “And it wasn’t that you didn’t like her. How could you, barely having met her?”
“That’s right,” Holly said, visibly relaxing. “I bet Sally asked everybody that same question.”
“She asked me the same thing,” I said, seeing even more relief. “Sally told me she was going to look for you. Did she find you?”
Holly nodded. “She wanted to know every single detail about the morning and why I didn’t stick around for the tour. See, this is like a real murder investigation.”
“They’re still just speculating about how Nova even died. They don’t have any proof of anything. We don’t, either. Unless you’ve heard something I haven’t.”
“No,” Holly sniffed. “I haven’t heard anything more.”
“Then you have absolutely nothing to worry about,” I said as Holly’s cell phone rang. My sister answered it and listened, growing visibly paler under her usual perfect tan. When she hung up, she told me what I’d already heard from Hunter. “That was Max,” she said. “The police are at our house. Searching it.” Her bottom lip quivered.
Patti addressed Holly. Instead of her whiny, poor-me voice, she sounded strong and competent. Her new job was working wonders for her personal growth. “I can help you out,” she said. “I even have a press pass.”
“What does your press pass have to do with anything?” Holly glanced at the homemade pass dangling from Patti’s neck.
“It gives me more free rein than an ordinary citizen. If you’re worried that Nova Campbell was murdered, I can circulate and ask questions while I’m covering the dinner. People will talk to me. People like to see their quotes in the paper. I’ll ask each of them where they were when the victim died and what went through their minds when they realized she was dead. Then if she was murdered, we’ll be a step up on who did it.”
“I can tell you exactly where everybody was,” I said, thinking Patti could be overly dense when it came to espionage. “They were all in my backyard. And you’re going to control yourself until the ME rules one way or the other. What part of ‘off the record’ didn’t you understand?”
“Just because she died there doesn’t mean . . .” Patti remembere
d our pact about keeping the poison secret because of Holly’s stressed out condition.
“I’m really hoping she had health-related issues,” Holly said to Patti. “Let’s try not to make a big deal of it yet. And I don’t want you writing anything that isn’t true.”
“Then you better let me at the truth. It might totally clear you.”
“That’s a thought,” Holly said, not giving it any thought at all.
“What kind of cheesecake did you pick?” I asked Holly to change the subject.
“A mix of wedges—New York, chocolate caramel and pecan, chocolate Amaretto, Black Forest cherry.”
Then I remembered something Holly had mentioned earlier, when she asked for help with her guests. Besides Nova’s carrot juice, one of the others had some kind of dietary restriction. “Remember your list,” I said. “Someone can’t have cheesecake. Lactose intolerant.”
Holly sighed. “Thank you. I totally forgot. Camilla can’t eat any cheesecake.”
Patti grinned and went after her gig from another angle. “Let me come tonight,” she said to Holly, “and I’ll bring another dessert, one that’s lactose-free. I’ll even serve. You won’t have to lift a finger.”
“Fine,” my dizzy sister said.
A few minutes later, from the back room doorway, I watched them wander off, heads together, suddenly best buds. That’s when my mother showed up and she didn’t look one bit happy.
“I need to talk to you,” she barked. “Right now.”
Eleven
It’s no secret that my mother and I have issues. Call-ing our relationship “complex” would be a huge under-statement.
Unlike some parents, Mom never wanted to be my best friend. Which is fine—I’ve seen moms like that, and it’s not easy on the kids when Mom wants to wear their clothes. Or hang out with them. Or insist on knowing every single detail regarding their daughter’s boyfriends or social circle as though the parent is one of the kid’s best friends.