Beeline to Trouble

by Hannah Reed

As much as I’d enjoyed the game, though, I really hadn’t been very good at it, always focusing on one suspect from the very beginning instead of spreading out my suspicions. Food for thought, I decided. I didn’t want to fall into the same old losing strategy.

  My game-playing fantasy was interrupted by Gil. “This certainly has been awkward.” He glanced at me. “Story might as well know, everybody else does.”

  Camilla saw me glance at her and actually had the decency to show some discomfort. I tried not to smirk and thought I did a pretty good job of refraining. I made a mental note to find out if she really did have special permission to pick wildflowers. I doubted it, but wanted to confirm that she’d lied to me.

  “I heard about your alibis,” I said to Gil, keeping my voice neutral, thinking these two sure seemed overly blabby about their personal affair.

  Gil went on, “Nothing like having your dirty laundry exposed.”

  His lady love shot him dagger eyes. He noticed and tried to backpedal. “Not that I’m calling you dirty laundry.”

  Camilla got up and left the table.

  “You certainly stuck your foot in your mouth this time,” Max said to him, filling a cup with coffee from a carafe and handing it to me. I smiled my thanks. Max was a true gentleman. Holly had chosen well.

  Max frowned at Gil. “Both of you know that Savour Foods discourages this kind of involvement between employees.”

  “It’s not like one of us is the other’s supervisor,” Gil argued. “Based on how little we liked or respected the woman, it’s lucky we even have alibis, or we’d be the primary suspects. I really wish I hadn’t ever handled that juice jar.”

  I came to full attention after that remark. “Your fingerprints were on the jar?”

  Max answered, “Gil wrote a note on the jar with magic marker: Don’t drink. This belongs to Nova.”

  “I was trying to be helpful,” he said to me. “Nova got all possessive and combative over every little thing.”

  “That must have looked to Johnny Jay like you were warning away others, so the correct person would be poisoned,” I said, wondering why Gil wasn’t in custody.

  “This is ridiculous.”

  He got up and went inside.

  Max apologized to me for his employees.

  “Not necessary,” I said. “You aren’t responsible for their actions.”

  “Those three never worked well together. I should have split them up long ago. Although I guess two of them worked together too well!”

  “What was the main problem?”

  “They were in such competition with each other. A little competitiveness is healthy, but theirs bordered on cutthroat, each of them taking credit for successes they hadn’t earned, backstabbing each other, forgetting what it means to be a working team.”

  Holly overheard her husband and joined us. “Poor Max,” she said, standing behind him and rubbing his shoulders and neck. “They fought like children.”

  “I could never get through this without your support,” Max said to her, then to me, “It’s not easy being away so much.”

  At that I thought more about Max and my sister, how they rarely shared this aspect of their marriage with me, the struggles and their unity. Sure, Holly was the first one to gripe when Max was on the road too long, letting me know she loved and missed him, but this was my first insight into her role as a supportive wife.

  And I’d thought she only cared about her looks and avoiding work. My sister actually had more depth than I gave her credit for.

  “Was the new discovery contentious?” I asked.

  “More so than any other. Each of them wanted to take all the credit.”

  Holly kissed the top of Max’s head and sat down.

  A few minutes later, Chance drove up and parked near the carriage house. Effie rose from a kneeling position beside a red rosebush, pulled off the netting protecting her from the big bad spiders, and went over to join her husband. From their body language I got the distinct impression they were arguing. Effie had her finger in his face and her posture screamed anger even though she wasn’t raising her voice. I couldn’t hear a word as much as I tried.

  Chance folded his arms across his chest in defensive resistance and his feet and body were angled slightly away from his wife.

  “Looks like the honeymoon is over for them,” I observed. Even an online matchmaking service couldn’t guarantee a match made in heaven.

  “Relationships,” Max observed, “are never easy.”

  I certainly had to agree.

  Twenty

  “Any leads yet?” I asked Sally Maylor when she popped into The Wild Clover to buy a soda, leaving her squad car idling outside, as usual.

  “A few loose threads to follow up on, but not much. I’d like to slap cuffs on those two guests, though,” she whispered to me. “Something smells to high heaven. What a relief to turn this whole investigation over where it belongs, in the chief’s lap.”

  “Johnny Jay is after Holly, you know. He’s overfocusing in the wrong place.”

  “Anything you want to share about Camilla Bailey and Gil Green? Something that I might not know yet? Something I can use to help your sister get out from under the microscope?”

  Sally has a heart of gold, almost making up for the heart Johnny Jay is lacking. “They didn’t get along with Nova,” I told her.

  “Check,” Sally said, and I assumed that meant she already had that info on her radar.

  “Both of them have the background to concoct a lethal poison.”

  “Check.”

  “The two surviving coworkers were comingling.”

  That earned a snicker from Sally before she said, “Check.”

  “Camilla went out on an ATV that morning.”

  “And you’re implying . . . what?”

  So I told her about our confrontation. “She could have been searching for hemlock.”

  “Is that all you have?”

  “What about that warning note Gil put on the jar?”

  “I know about that, too.”

  “Convenient that they both alibied each other.”

  “Cops don’t always believe alibis, you know,” she said, popping open the soda and glancing out the window at her vehicle.

  “I didn’t know that!” And I didn’t.

  “You watch too much television,” Sally said, shaking her head in mock disbelief. “You have to stop believing those cop shows. The real world works differently.”

  “I don’t have time for the luxury of sitting in front of the TV.”

  “Hunter keeping you too busy for that?”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” I said with a laugh.

  Soon after that Johnny Jay arrived to do his smoke and mirrors act. “I have three major suspects,” he said from a metal chair next to me in the back room, where he was tilting the chair onto its back legs. I had to fight the urge to give him a shove backward.

  “Nobody invited you into this room,” I said.

  “Where’s that list of mine?” He pretended to check his breast pocket and came up empty. “I don’t need it anyway. Your sister’s on it, for one. The jealous type, isn’t she? Doesn’t tolerate other women getting too close to that husband of hers.”

  “Now who would tell you a dumb thing like that?” Obviously he wasn’t going to take the blatant hint to leave.

  “A reliable source.”

  “Reliable? That fraudulent news article, right? The one written by Patti Dwyre? You should be out hunting for her instead of lounging in my store.”

  He kept going, “Then there’s the husband. Max Paine. Smooth guy, friendly type, but he has an agenda. Maybe Campbell was putting a kink in his style, or she was about to tell the Mrs. a thing or two.”

  “Pure fiction.”

  “Then there’s the sister-in-law.” It took me a minute to realize he was talking about me. “Little sister needs help eliminating some competition, threatening to disrupt her fancy lifestyle. So big sister decides to ha
ndle the problem once and for all. Brings over some poisoned juice. End of problem.”

  “You’ve been watching too many cop shows,” I said, using Sally’s line. “I want you to leave my store right now.”

  “Want to come with me and make a full confession?”

  “Johnny,” I said, leaning in close, “you don’t like me very much, do you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I don’t let personal feelings affect my work.” He glared at me, and I’m happy to report he was the first one to look away.

  He’d answered the question all right, the creep. “It doesn’t affect your work? Really? What a crock,” I told him. “You blame me for everything that happens in Moraine. Your obsession with nailing me for some kind of serious jail-time offense is affecting your work in a big way.”

  Johnny stood up and said, “I’m done with you for the time being, but I’ll be back.”

  After he left, I called Hunter. “How does a person file harassment charges against a cop?” I asked.

  “What did I do now? Can’t we just talk it through?” I heard the amusement in his tone.

  “Not you. I have more interesting ways to handle you. Seriously, how?”

  “Document injuries, take photos, name witnesses.”

  Okay, then. I didn’t have any injuries to take pictures of. And now that I thought about it, Johnny Jay was very careful when he hassled me. Hardly any witnesses, ever, except maybe Patti once or twice.

  Hunter read my mind over the phone and said, “Lay off Johnny Jay.”

  “What? The guy just left my store. He came here and accused me of killing Nova Campbell.”

  Hunter sighed into the receiver, loud and deep. “Do you and the chief have to go through this every single time something happens in town? Just stay away from him.”

  “He’s the one showing up on my turf.”

  Then I went on to complain about Holly’s houseguests and how nobody seemed to be trying to gather evidence against them, which I didn’t get because in my book this was an open-and-shut case and maybe I should just investigate myself since if I didn’t, a certain vindictive police chief would make life living hell for me and my sister.

  “Besides, if I was going to kill anybody,” I said, finishing my rant. “It wouldn’t be a weekend visitor. The dead body would belong to Johnny Jay.”

  “Are you done?” Hunter asked.

  “Not quite. What about the box of carrot juices from my store?”

  “I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m expecting those to be fine.”

  “In a perfect world, the entire box would be contaminated. But, of course, it would be the only one from the distributor that was, so nobody else would get hurt. That would clear all of us.”

  “I like your world, but it isn’t very realistic, although stranger things have happened. I’ll bring home pizza.”

  “At least something’s going right today.”

  Next up, I had a meeting with Milly to go over the store’s monthly newsletter.

  “Your arugula and tomato salad was fantastic,” I told her. “And the popovers with honey butter were heaven. Let’s put them in the newsletter.”

  Milly beamed like she’d found the golden egg, which was the way she reacted every time I praised her recipes. “We still need to add a few honey-based sweet treats,” she said. “I’ve got several ideas.”

  All of us at The Wild Clover looked forward to sampling her “ideas.”

  “To think of all the times you’ve used ingredients from the wild,” I said. “Like watercress and morel mushrooms. But now with this whole hemlock thing, maybe we should stick to store-bought items in the future.”

  Milly didn’t agree. “You and I know the difference between an edible plant and an unknown,” she said. “We might not be able to identify everything out there, but we aren’t careless.”

  Which was true. In our area, we have some of nature’s tastiest plants growing on our doorsteps (well, almost on our doorsteps). Besides watercress and morels, we have:

  Ramps—these taste like a cross between onions and garlic

  Asparagus—under the electrical wires along roadsides where birds drop seeds

  Puffballs—white mushrooms the size of basketballs

  Chanterelles—mushrooms with a peachy flavor

  Hickory nuts—a real delicacy

  I sure would hate to give up all of those beauties.

  “Milly,” I said. “Water hemlock is really creeping me out. I admit it. You told us not to touch it, right?”

  “Yes, but now that you’ve seen it, you know to stay clear of it.”

  “But it would be okay if I wore gloves?”

  “That would be the only way to handle it safely.”

  “Interesting.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Just curious.”

  While Milly sat at the computer in the back room creating the framework for the next newsletter, I helped the twins unload cases of award-winning Door County wines—cherry (both sweet and dry), panacea peach, cranberry, plum, and Peninsula dinner reds and whites.

  “How come you’re always around to help with wine shipments?” Trent said, laughing. The twins had recently celebrated their twenty-first birthdays and were now officially of drinking age.

  “We really can handle it without you,” his twin brother said with an ear-to-ear grin.

  “I haven’t tried this one yet,” I said, pulling out a bottle of Razzle Dazzle Raspberry.

  We bantered back and forth, but at some point I stopped listening, because the pieces were connecting in my mind. Camilla had been wearing gloves when we had our little tiff over wildflowers. If I could get my hands on those gloves and have Jackson Davis test them for trace evidence, it’s possible he might find a nice sample of a certain poisonous plant.

  That would nail her to the wall for good.

  I spent some time trying to picture the scene, focusing on the gloves Camilla had been wearing, but I must have been too angry to have paid much attention. All I knew for sure is that they weren’t colorful or flowery, so they must have been a nondescript neutral color.

  After making sure everything was operating smoothly at the store, I drove over to Holly’s house again.

  Twenty-one

  “You want to take out a four-wheeler?” Holly said, standing barefoot on her patio, wearing short-shorts and a halter top.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Where are you planning to go?” she asked.

  “Just riding around.” I dodged. “It’s a nice day, thought I’d explore a bit, feel the wind in my hair.”

  “I’ll come along,” my sister said. “Max took Gil and Camilla up to Holy Hill.”

  Holy Hill is a nearby basilica, and one of our most spectacular landmarks, not too far from where Hunter had lived. People make pilgrimages year-round to the National Shrine of Mary and its tower with a breathtaking panorama of the Kettle Moraine area. Max and guests could be gone for hours.

  Effie walked toward us from the carriage house. “I heard you say something about an ATV,” she said. “If you plan on riding, I have to warn you, it’s going to rain.”

  We all looked up at the sky. Sure enough, black clouds were rolling in fast.

  “A short ride then,” I said.

  “I’ll put my shoes on,” Holly said, heading for the house.

  “And I need to borrow a pair of gardening gloves,” I added to her retreating back, not ready to elaborate, not wanting her to know of my suspicions until I had more concrete proof. But Effie cocked her head to the left, watching me, and I felt more of an explanation was necessary. “In case, I, uh, find, uh, an injured animal or something. That happened once. I came across a cooper’s hawk with a broken wing. If I hadn’t had a pair of gloves along, I wouldn’t have been able to rescue it.”

  Which was a true story, so my cover had the ring of credibility to it.

  “I think there are a few pairs of gloves out there on the worktable,” Effie offered. “Help y
ourself, but don’t forget that some animals around here are rabid. If you spot a normally nocturnal animal, like bats or foxes, during the day, stay away.”

  Holly bounced out then, and we went to the outbuilding where she and Max store all their toys. Besides several four-wheelers, they also own a Jeep for all-terrain fun, commercial-grade lawn and garden equipment, and two snowmobiles.

  While my sister fired up one of the ATVs, I spotted several pairs of gloves on the worktable where Effie had said they’d be, and decided that once we returned from our ride I’d confiscate every glove on the premises. I had tucked a plastic bag in my pocket exclusively for that roundup job and was pretty excited about turning my find over to Jackson for analysis.

  That was the beauty of being an average citizen instead of law enforcement. Hunter would have to go through all kinds of red tape to get his hands on somebody else’s gloves that might have been used in a murder. But me, since I have no authority, I also have no responsibility. I can do exactly as I please without ramifications. Well, almost as I please.

  With me in the driver’s seat and Holly sitting behind me, we roared down a path that connected to a trail which in turn led through the countryside. It was the same trail Camilla had followed the day we’d met under those far from ideal circumstances. To think she’d probably gathered her poison right after that meeting, or even before! The thought made my skin crawl. That flower bouquet in her fist must have been a distraction for anybody wondering what she was really up to.

  At first, the air smelled of freshly mown grass. We waved to Chance out on a riding lawn mower. Then the air blowing in my face changed to fragrant pine as we entered a copse of evergreens. The trail had been recently groomed, thanks to volunteers who worked together, claiming sections to patrol and manage.

  “I smell mock orange,” I called out as the heady aroma of orange and jasmine assailed my senses, reminding me of the white mock orange flower my grandmother had worn in her hair.

  Much too quickly we arrived at the scene of the Camilla/Story conflict. I turned off the engine, waited for Holly to swing off, then walked her over to the spot. I decided to tell her all about our first meeting, all the details as I remembered them, gloves and all. Earlier, I hadn’t wanted to stress her out any more than she already was (which was plenty), but now it seemed like the appropriate time to clue her in.