Cooking Spirits: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

by Joanne Pence

  Marilee put them in the back porch and shut the door, then turned towards Paavo, arms folded. “Those are my cats and no one else’s!”

  “The cats have microchips in them. Something tells me the chips in those cats would match Gaia’s.”

  Her voice turned low and lethal. “You will not touch my cats! What is this about?”

  Paavo went over to the sofa and sat.

  Yosh quietly backed up to a wall out of Marilee’s line of vision, folded his arms, and listened.

  “Did you know,” Paavo began, “that Gaia was in love with Taylor?”

  Marilee gave a harsh, hacking laugh, then sat in a stiff-backed chair facing him. “Love? Childish infatuation was more like it. Anyway, I’m the one who told you about it, if I remember correctly.”

  “You said he once tried to kiss her in the office. Of course, he immediately knew she wasn’t you.”

  Her eyes hardened. “I never said that. And anyway, who cares? Why are you bothering me with this old news, Inspector?”

  “Taylor could never be fooled by Gaia pretending to be you,” Paavo said. “Everyone who knew her said Gaia was just about the most boring woman they had ever come across, while everyone who knew you, Marilee, said you were vivacious and fun. You have imagination. Look at your books, your house. The art work you have here, the sculptures. Everything about you reeks of interest and of life. Gaia could never fool anyone that she was you.”

  Marilee’s face reddened. She stood. “I’m sure she never tried to! Now, I’d like you to leave, Inspector.”

  “Actually, you’re wrong,” Paavo said, leaning back with his arm flung across the back of the sofa. “Taylor told a friend that Gaia once pretended to be Marilee. Taylor said he found her pathetic and disgusting.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! He knew. That weekend at the beach cabin—the last weekend he was alive—Gaia was there instead of you. She pretended to be you, but even she knew she couldn’t pull it off. Taylor left a day early, on Saturday instead of Sunday. He was so upset that instead of going home, he went to his favorite bar in the Financial District. His usual bartender wasn’t there that night, so he had no one to tell exactly what had happened. But he didn’t need to tell anyone because his actions said it all. He left the cabin, left Gaia alone. Anyone of us could put two-and-two together and understand how Taylor felt about Gaia trying to fool him.”

  “No!” Marilee screamed.

  “He must have found her pathetic. He probably hated Gaia then, swore he would have her fired. She’d lose him and everything that meant anything to her.”

  Yosh walked into the great room from the kitchen area. “No meat,” he said.

  Marilee spun around to face him, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

  “No meat in the refrigerator?” Paavo said. “How can that be, when everyone knows Marilee likes meat? She and Taylor often grilled sausages, hotdogs, and big juicy hamburgers at the beach house.”

  “I’ve decided to eat healthier,” Marilee said, backing away from Yosh as her eyes darted between the two detectives.

  “Oh? Since when?” Paavo asked. “Since two weeks ago?”

  She slowly sat down again, her voice little more than a whisper. “No, that’s not true.”

  “It is true. Gaia pretended to be Marilee with Taylor. Not only that, but she moved here, into your house, used your shampoos, wore your clothes, burned your incense. Then she went to the cabin and met Taylor. But smells and clothes weren’t enough. He left.

  “Somehow Gaia convinced him to meet her in San Francisco—maybe by pretending to be Marilee again, maybe telling him crazy Gaia might harm them both. However she did it, she convinced him to meet her in an alley. There, still pretending to be Marilee, Gaia threw herself in his arms, and then stabbed him. She was a big woman, and she was strong.”

  “How terrible of her!” Marilee’s chest heaved with emotion. She turned pale and appeared faint. “I always knew something was wrong with her, but I didn’t think it was that serious.”

  “That isn’t the half of it,” Paavo said. “Looking back at what happened to your parents, I can’t help but wonder about their accident.”

  Marilee’s eyes widened. “My parents?”

  “In Gaia’s home, we could find no photos, photo albums, or anything else about your parents, as if she wanted to erase them from her mind. Your parents were killed when their car went out of control on the way home from Jenner, but your father was a slow and cautious driver, and he knew that road well. The car caught fire, so little was done to investigate the accident. Was it truly an accident, or had the car been tampered with?”

  When she didn’t answer, he continued. “We also know that Gaia hated Marilee. I wondered how every trace of ‘Urda’ had been eliminated from government databases, until I learned that Thomas Greenburg had first been known as a hacker. He could hack into anything—including government databases. Gaia gave him $300,000 to obliterate any trace of Urda. That’s a lot of hatred. It was odd, everyone said, how simple Gaia’s job was at Zygog, and that she was one of the few people allowed to come and go as she wished there.”

  “I know nothing about that,” she said.

  He stood. “You should…because you’re Gaia. You hated Marilee, hated having an identical twin who was more liked, more loved, more alive than you had ever been. Both of you lived in a symbiosis of hate. Intimate hate.”

  She clutched the chair arms. “No, you’ve got it all wrong!”

  He paced as he spoke. “The way I see it, Marilee began all this as a grand joke on a hated twin. First she stole the man you loved. You must have decided you could make it work for you at first, since you cut your hair to look like Marilee’s. Maybe because Taylor now paid some attention to you at work—you shared secret smiles or whatever. It was more than you ever had in your life, and it might have been enough.”

  The woman bowed her head, shut her eyes, and covered her face with her hands. “It’s not true,” she whispered.

  “Two weeks ago, everything changed. Maybe what started out as a joke turned into love for Marilee as well. What happened, Gaia? Did she tell you she planned to confess everything to Taylor? Tell him she wasn’t the woman he worked with, but an identical twin sister? You knew that once she did, Taylor wouldn’t care about you any longer, and your quiet, secret little love life would fall apart. But Marilee, who you hated, would be happy.”

  Paavo continued, “You couldn’t have that. You bought the freezer, invited Marilee to your house, and probably slipped her enough sleeping pills to subdue her so you could then force her to take a lethal dose. You put her in the freezer, and probably would have left her there except for one thing. When you went to the cabin to meet Taylor, he knew something was terribly wrong. You weren’t the woman he loved. He returned to San Francisco, troubled and confused. You knew he would start asking questions. Evidence that you had a twin, and that you killed her, could eventually come out. So you had no choice but to kill Taylor as well.

  “You could have gone on, gone back to living as Gaia and probably it would have been damned difficult to figure out who killed Taylor. But you hated your life, and had always envied your sister’s. So you decided to become Marilee. You put Marilee into a hot tub of water where her frozen corpse defrosted. That was why the medical examiner had such a difficult time assessing the time of death. You knew that eventually someone would look for Gaia and find her body.

  “But you couldn’t leave your cats to starve. You brought them here.”

  Yosh stepped a bit closer, ready to move if she tried to escape.

  Paavo stood. “Gaia Wyndom, you’re under arrest for the murders of Marilee Wisdom, aka Urda Lee Wyndom, and Taylor Bedford. You have the right to remain silent…”

  “No!” she screamed over Paavo’s statement of her rights. “It’s not true! I’m not Gaia! I’m Marilee!”

  When he finished the Miranda rights, he added, “An analysis of hair shows that the person found dead in the bathtub wa
s a meat eater, while you, Gaia, proudly proclaim yourself a vegetarian. Now that you’re under arrest, we’ll have your fingerprints. Identical twins don’t have the same fingerprints. Your deception will be unmasked. You can count on it. Let’s go.” Paavo took her arm, making her stand, and hand-cuffed her.

  “Wait!” She looked around, wild-eyed. “You can’t do this! What about my cats? They need me!”

  He hustled her out the door.

  “They need me!” she cried, with tears running down her cheeks.

  “We’ll take care of them,” he said.

  “No! Don’t give them to the Humane Society. What if no one wants them? They’ll kill them!”

  “You should have thought of that before you murdered two people,” he said as he pushed her into the back of the car.

  o0o

  From time to time, Paavo had talked to Angie about being on a stake-out. His main recommendations were to drink little water, have some strong coffee on hand in case you get sleepy, and food in case you get hungry.

  As she drove to the house at 51 Clover Lane, she had filled her tote with a thermos of espresso, a packet of almonds, five varieties of energy bars, two apples, homemade chocolate chip cookies, Doritos, two types of Cadbury bars, plus crossword puzzles and Sudokus. After her visit to Carol Steed, she had a strong feeling that she needed to keep an eye on the woman.

  She might be crazy, but she wasn’t stupid and might have figured out what Angie was up to.

  Angie unlocked the door and walked into the house.

  The furniture had been haphazardly moved around. A dead mouse lay in a candy dish on the coffee table—not the candy dish she had replaced. That one was gone. She had seen this dish in Carol Steed’s living room.

  She wondered if Carol thought she wouldn’t recognize it, or if Carol purposefully tried to intimidate her.

  Or had these actions been designed to make Angie think the house was haunted? To get her to abandon her wish to buy the house?

  For all she knew, Carol Steed had been watching her come and go from the house all week, and decided to scare her off. Carol surely still had a key to the house. Very likely, she had broken the candy dish and even knocked over the vase in the living room while Angie and Stan were out on the back deck!

  She had probably scared off all earlier prospective buyers as well. Angie heaved a sigh of relief. She told herself not to worry any longer about the occult or the supernatural. Everything had been caused by one crazy old woman filled with guilt and madness.

  Even as she tried to convince herself of that, however, some events weren’t explainable.

  Angie decided to simply ignore them.

  She picked up the candy dish and put it and the dead mouse out in the back yard. When she came back in, she made sure she locked the sliding glass door. Then she opened the garage door and drove her Mercedes inside, shutting the door behind it. That way, unless Carol had been sitting at the window and saw her pull in, she wouldn’t know Angie was there.

  Angie went through the house, checking and double-checking that all doors and windows were locked, and then pushed a chair in front of the window in the den. It faced the street, and Carol Steed’s home.

  Now that she was set up for her vigil, Angie phoned Paavo. He picked up on the first ring—a rarity.

  “Guess where I am?” she said.

  “Do I have to?”

  “I’m in the Sea Cliff on a stakeout.”

  “Stakeout?” Paavo’s voice was a mix of long-suffering and gloom.

  “I’m convinced that Carol’s been coming in here to sabotage a sale, and I want to catch her. Anyone who puts a dead mouse in a candy dish deserves to be caught.”

  “I don’t want to know about any dead mice. What I do know is that you shouldn’t be confronting a crazy woman who may be a murderer.”

  “Well…maybe I need my favorite detective on stakeout with me. I’ve got goodies.”

  “I’m sure you do. And you should take them and yourself home. Now.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “With good reason! Anyway, I just made an arrest in my double homicide. I’ve got a few more things to wrap up and I’ll be there. Be careful. Take no chances.”

  “You know me, I’m always careful.”

  “Since when?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said with a big smile as she hung up.

  Two hours later, she realized how incredibly boring this stake-out business could be. She had worked two crosswords and three Sudokus, ate an apple, an energy bar, half the packet of almonds, and drank the equivalent of three espressos. The candy and cookies were calling to her, but so far, she had succeeded in saving them for Paavo. All in all, this might be a waste of time. She had just about decided to go home when she heard a noise in the house, and what sounded like footsteps on the hardwood floor.

  Footsteps that were coming closer…

  o0o

  After he finished processing Gaia Wyndom and explaining the case to the District Attorney, Paavo returned to Homicide.

  He found a report from the crime scene technician. Few prints had been found at the crime scene, and none matched Carol Steed’s. He expected that the original homicide inspectors would have discovered it if the landlady’s prints had been found at the crime scene.

  Despite that, he found Angie’s arguments convincing. He wanted to talk to Carol Steed, and phoned the mental institution listed as her residence.

  He was told she remained on home leave as Angie suspected.

  Since this was a cold case, he telephoned Lt. Eastwood to explain what he was doing and that he planned to reopen the case. He got Eastwood’s voice mail.

  He didn’t like waiting, but after all, the case had sat in storage, unresolved for thirty years. What difference could a few more minutes make?

  o0o

  Angie peeked out of the den. She didn’t see anyone in the living or dining rooms.

  She put on her jacket, stuffed the food, thermos, and puzzles back into her tote bag, grabbed her purse, and hurried across the living room to the kitchen and through the mudroom.

  She swung open the door to the garage and saw Carol Steed standing in front of her car. She held a revolver. “Going somewhere?” Carol asked.

  Angie slammed the door shut and started to run, then reached back and turned the deadbolt just as a gunshot created a hole in the door, missing Angie by inches. Now, she did run, sure Carol would have a key to the lock.

  Back in the living room, Angie heard the whirr of the automatic garage door opener. Carol must be expecting her to go out the front door, to try to reach neighbors, other people. If she ran out to the front of the house, Carol would gun her down.

  Instead, she dropped her belongings and fled out the sliding glass door to the back yard.

  She ran toward the fence. It was about four and a half feet tall; high enough to keep small children in, but not so high as to obscure the ocean view. Somehow, she’d have to climb over it. She wasn’t much of a climber, but knowing a crazy person with a gun stalked her, despite the smooth leather platform soles on her high-heel boots, she scrambled up and over it.

  She crouched down and snuck along the side of the fence toward the cliff. Everything in her wanted to go in the direction of the street instead, but she believed Carol waiting for her there.

  She hoped to find a place to hide somewhere along the very backside of the fence where it ran along the cliff’s edge. But Paavo had said he would try to get there soon. He’d see the garage door open, Angie’s car inside it. He’d see the open sliding glass door.

  But would he see Carol and her gun?

  What if he didn’t? What if came here concentrating on finding Angie and because of that, he got shot…or worse?

  She had to go back, had to find a way to warn him and make sure he was safe.

  She froze, torn by what to do, which way to run, when the choice was made for her.

  o0o

  Paavo parked in front of Carol Steed’s h
ouse at 60 Clover Lane. He had grown tired of waiting for Eastwood’s approval and decided to talk to Steed on his own—no harm in talking to someone.

  As he walked up to the front door, rang the bell and knocked, he saw the open garage door across the street at 51 Clover, Angie’s car inside. He shook his head. Despite his warnings, he could well imagine her wanting a front row seat to watch Carol Steed’s possible arrest.

  No answer. He knocked again, but the results were no better.

  o0o

  Carol Steed held the gun on Angie. “Why did you have to get involved in all this? Everything was fine in my life, and then you started prying.”

  Angie stood, her hands raised. “Please put the gun down, Mrs. Steed. We need to talk.”

  “I want you to walk towards the cliff.”

  Angie backed up a few steps, as directed, then stopped. “I thought you loved Eric. Why did you kill him?”

  Carol’s brows tightened, her face filled with emotion for a second or two, then she regained control. “He wouldn’t give her up!” she cried. “He was young, and so foolish!”

  “It must have been hard on you,” Angie said, trying to control the shaking of her voice.

  “I wanted Eric to tell Natalie that he loved me, to tell her that Enid was our child. He refused. He married her only because she was rich, you know. He loved me, and would always love me. But he wouldn’t explain that to her! No matter what I said, he wouldn’t tell her he loved me.”

  “You made them walk out here to the cliff?” she asked.

  “I told him I’d made a mistake, loving him, doing everything for him! I even got rid of Edward. Poor Edward. But Eric and I loved each other. We lived together until he brought Natalie into my house! Then, I was supposed to go back to the little shack, stay out of his life. Even after he’d gotten married, he’d come to visit me now and then. He’d play with Enid. But then, he said he and his rich wife were building a big house. He would leave me. He told me it was better that way.

  “I couldn’t stand it! I couldn’t bear to lose him. I put my gun to his head. Oh, he told me he loved me then! Yes, he swore it. He told Natalie everything—how he loved me and Enid, how he would stay with us, divorce her. But then he told her I’d killed Edward!”