“We’re coming!” Dana sang out. She flung open the door and said, “Ta-da!”
SuLinn stood in the middle of the room, her dark straight hair up off her neck. She wore a red Chloé mandarin-collar dress.
“Wow!” Sophie exclaimed. “You look beautiful!”
“I know,” she said, her voice gurgling with laughter. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” She whirled. “It was all Dana’s doing.”
Cissy was busy with her bag, but she didn’t look happy. “Can we get going?” she asked, complaint in her voice. “I don’t know where Grandma is. Who knows what mischief she’s gotten herself into.”
Sophie and Dana exchanged a look, and Dana shrugged. Cissy sometimes got her nose bent out of shape if the drama in her own life didn’t take top priority. She was a sweet girl most of the time, and Sophie loved her old friend, but she could be moody.
“Okay, let’s move,” Sophie agreed. “I need to hook up with Josh, who I think has some news for me. He’s in the dining room, apparently. Let’s enter the lion’s den.”
* * *
Thelma Mae Earnshaw plunked down on the prison cot, weak with exhaustion. The place was dusty and her voice was hoarse from shouting. Dang it, you’d think that punk kid in the kitchen off the hall would hear her, but he had those whatchamacallits, those earbuddies in his ears, the things her grandson Phil swore were headphones. Didn’t look like headphones; looked like earplugs, and given that Phil always had them in his ears when she wanted him to listen to her, maybe they were just the same.
She had shouted herself hoarse, and was ready to expire.
How had she gotten into this mess? It was all Rose Freemont’s fault. If Rose hadn’t brought the dumb teapot to the convention to be looked at and admired and marveled over as if it were something special, then Zunia Pettigrew wouldn’t have torn a strip off Rose, and if she hadn’t done that then maybe Mrs. Highfalutin Rose Freemont wouldn’t have torn into Zunia. And if she hadn’t done that . . . well, then it never would have occurred to Thelma to make that little joke about Rose being dangerous, which had landed her in this awful fix.
But that was too far back. How had she gotten into this particular fix? It had started innocently enough, with her snooping around like Miss Ariadne Oliver from the Agatha Christie books or, even better, Mrs. Pollifax from the Dorothy Gilman series of books. Now, that was a senior on a mission—a CIA mission. Ever since she started reading those books she wondered if there really were such things as senior citizen CIA operatives.
A gal could dream, even a gal with an artificial hip. And knee. And gout. She wiggled her big toe, which was hurting something awful.
But that was what had gotten Thelma into this particular jam: her curiosity. She had simply wondered if the killer had hidden out in the basement until everyone was asleep before carrying out his dastardly deed, so she had slunk down there and had a look around. That was almost as good as snooping around people’s homes when they weren’t looking.
The few she had been inside of in recent years were fascinating. Folks would be surprised at what people had in their medicine cabinets and armoires, some things she wasn’t even sure what they were for, like pink fuzzy handcuffs. Who would want handcuffs in their bedroom? No criminals there. Or at least she hoped not, because the handcuffs were in the bedroom of the local church ladies guild president.
Anyhoo . . . she had just been snooping around downstairs when that kid, the one who was peeling carrots in the kitchen, suddenly charged out into the hallway to get something out of one of the storerooms. Thelma had nearly fainted and staggered into this room after pushing the door open. But the door had closed after her and now wouldn’t budge. She had been imprisoned for . . . how long? Felt like hours. She pushed the little knob on her light-up watch and squinted at the face. It had been a good . . . oh, almost ten minutes.
She had found her own way to the basement when she was taking a look-see at the stairs by the check-in desk. She had discovered that there was even an exit, a back door to the parking lot. She knew that because it was propped open to let in air, and she could practically see the shimmer of heat waves rising from the pavement. She was a little confused; could the murderer have run down the stairs and out that back door? Did that mean it could have been someone from outside? But the door wouldn’t be open in the middle of the night; it would be locked. Right? Inn guests had keys to their individual rooms that also opened the front door, which was locked after hours, too.
She surveyed her surroundings in the dim light of one lamp, which she had felt around for and turned on. It was prison-like, for sure, but not bare. There was the cot she was sitting on, as well as some boxes piled against the cinder-block wall. The boxes contained food: canned tomatoes, beans, vegetables, soup and cases of dried pasta. So if she could find a can opener, she wouldn’t starve.
But there was no bathroom, and her bladder at that moment decided to warn her that she needed one pronto. Tears welled in her eyes. All alone, and even her granddaughter probably wouldn’t notice she was missing until they finally opened this storeroom to get some canned tomatoes one day and found her desiccated body. She lay back on the torture rack that was the cot and resigned herself to her fate.
* * *
The moment they entered the ITCS luncheon, SuLinn took Dana by the arm and went around introducing her to people, ending up near the two sisters, who appeared to be exclaiming over SuLinn’s new dress. Dana was smiling and nodding, but she kept stealing glances over her shoulder. Sophie suspected she was looking for Detective Eli.
“Where the heck is Grandma?” Cissy asked as they scanned the convention dining room.
“Let’s ask Nana if she’s seen her,” Sophie said.
The room was poorly set up, Sophie thought, glancing around. The flow was bad from a waitstaff point of view: no room to move all the way around tables, haphazard and inefficient. But she was not here to critique the room; she was here to find her grandmother and godmother.
“There they are,” she said to Cissy, who was waiting and following her friend’s lead.
Her grandmother and Laverne were at a table with two other older women, all with their heads together.
“My Sophie!” Nana exclaimed, looking up and beaming when she saw Sophie.
She looked tired, Sophie thought, examining her petite grandmother as she squeezed between a couple of tables that were too close together. Nana should have been home by now from her weekend away with her feet up, a cup of tea in one hand and a Murder, She Wrote book in the other. Sophie hugged her grandmother and Laverne.
Nana introduced them both to the two other ladies, Mrs. Littlefield and Miss Benson. They had a moment of polite conversation.
“It is good to see you, Cissy!” Laverne commented. “You look very pretty today.”
Cissy’s mood improved immediately, and she did look pretty, Sophie thought, glancing at her friend, who wore a sundress and sandals, her hair in a waterfall bun. Since her disastrous engagement a few months before to a man who was now charged with being an accessory to murder, she had come out of her shell some. She was now dating a local police officer, Wally Bowman, one of their childhood friends who had always been secretly in love with her.
She was still the same Cissy, prone to feeling underappreciated and sometimes self-pitying; however, those were minor character flaws. Sophie worked hard to stay aware of that. Maybe that was why she appreciated the smart, sophisticated and occasionally snarky Dana so much, though they had never been friends as teens.
“We were wondering if you’d seen Mrs. Earnshaw lately,” Sophie said, her gaze going back and forth between the two women.
“I haven’t. Have you, Rose?” Laverne said.
“I saw her,” said Miss Benson, a gaunt, tall woman in her early seventies. She had a sour expression on her face. “I’ll never forgive myself, Rose, for letting that woman take me in about you. She is a bi
t odd, don’t you think?”
Cissy’s pale cheeks pinkened. “My grandmother is not odd. She’s . . . imaginative.”
Sophie glanced over at her in surprise. Good for you, Cissy! she thought. Thelma was odd, but she was Cissy’s grandmother, and family stuck together.
“Yes, well, I was heading to the loo and saw her imagining herself down the stairs to the basement,” the woman said tartly. “Whatever on earth she would want in the basement I do not know. That peculiar woman has been avoiding everyone since her little charade came to such a bad end.”
Laverne stood. She was a tall woman, and though in her seventies, strongly built, imposing in her occasional severity. “That is enough, Faye Alice,” she said. “This poor girl is worried about her grandmother, who is our friend.” She turned to Cissy and touched the younger woman’s arm. “I’ll go with you to see if we can find her,” she offered.
Sophie stepped in, giving Laverne a grateful smile. She would never have been able to censure the other woman—she had been raised too well—but Laverne, the woman’s peer in age, did it splendidly, and Sophie could see that Cissy appreciated it. “It’s okay, Laverne,” she said. “I’ll go with her. I know my way around downstairs since that’s how I came in last night.”
“Come back after you find her, Sophie,” Nana said. “I know Josh wants to talk to you.”
Sophie led Cissy out of the convention dining room and toward the door to the basement, but as she started to open it, Bertie Handler popped out from behind the check-in desk.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” he cried, flapping his hands at them. “That’s for employees only.”
Detective O’Hoolihan and a uniformed officer were coming through the front doors of the inn just then, as Sophie explained to the inn owner what they were doing. “We just want to check,” she finished. “Someone noticed Mrs. Earnshaw going through this door, and she hasn’t been seen since.”
“Having spoken to the lady in question, I would say she’s fully capable of not just going downstairs, but getting herself into trouble while there,” O’Hoolihan said.
Cissy bridled and was about to respond, but Sophie grabbed her arm and squeezed, since what he said helped them. “I’m sure you don’t want to be responsible if she’s hurt and unable to call for help. We’ll just take a quick look around and be back up in two seconds.” Sophie pulled her friend through the door as the detective engaged the innkeeper, asking him a question about something.
A fluorescent light flickered in an annoying jittery beat at the top of the cement stairway as the two descended. She led Cissy to the kitchen. “Hey, guys,” she said. The prep cook, chopping onions, did not respond, but the two guys at the stove and grill looked around. “Has anyone seen an elderly lady down here wandering around? She may have poked her head into the kitchen at some point.” Sophie knew enough not to say it out loud with Cissy right there, but everyone in Gracious Grove knew that Thelma Mae Earnshaw was a snoop and could not be trusted alone in anyone’s home or establishment.
Both shook their heads with identical mystified expressions.
“While we search for her, can you check with your buddy?” she said, indicating the guy who hadn’t looked around. She could see earbuds in his ears and a cell phone tucked in the pocket of his apron. He nodded his head in time with the beat in his headphones.
Tugging Cissy after her, she explored the warren of hallways, opening doors, finding the bathroom and storerooms and especially checking the walk-in freezer. She was immensely relieved to find no one in it, because she hadn’t put it past Mrs. Earnshaw to get trapped in such a spot. There was one locked door, though. She stopped at it, Cissy at her side, and shouted, “Mrs. Earnshaw? Are you here anywhere?”
“Grandma!” Cissy shouted. “Grandma, are you here?” No sound. Cissy shrugged. “I guess she’s not here. Let’s go back upstairs. Maybe she went shopping or something.”
But Sophie stubbornly held her spot. She had a feeling. “Quiet for a moment,” she said. There was a faint scratching sound on the other side of the door, Sophie thought. This was the very room Melissa had jokingly pointed out as Bertie’s panic room. She tapped on the door and called out, “Mrs. Earnshaw? Are you in there?”
A weak voice answered, “Help! I’ve been in here all day. Help!”
“Grandma?” Cissy cried, putting her ear to the door. “Grandma, are you okay?”
“Get me out of here!”
“This is the exact same room I got locked in when I was a teenager!” Cissy wailed, both hands on her head. She began crying, Mrs. Earnshaw was howling, and the two kitchen guys were in the background doubled over with laughter. Sophie shot them a dirty look. “Can one of you guys help? Unlock this door.”
One said, “We don’t have keys. We’re just the kitchen help.”
“You’re the chef here!” she exclaimed to the older of the two, guessing based on his seniority. “Surely you must have keys.”
They shrugged and slouched back into the kitchen. Sophie’s ire burned, but she was mostly concerned with Mrs. Earnshaw, who was howling even louder now, repeatedly, “Get me out of here!”
“Cissy, stay here by the door and I’ll get Bertie.”
She threaded through the halls and took the stairs two at a time then bolted through the door to the check-in desk. Pastor Frank was there, and he and Bertie looked to be in some kind of heated discussion, but Sophie didn’t have time to wait.
“Mr. Handler, come quick! Mrs. Earnshaw got herself locked in your panic room.” The moment she called it that she wished she had said it differently, because his expression changed to anger.
“My what?”
She impatiently hopped from foot to foot. “Whatever you want to call it . . . the locked room downstairs.”
“The one you locked me in the night Zunia was butchered!” Pastor Frank said, his cheeks bright red.
Sophie’s gaze swiveled to the pastor. “He had you locked in that room? Why?”
Bertie glared at him, his gray eyes bulging and bloodshot. “I told you not to say anything about that. I apologized for forgetting you, now shut up!”
The pastor backed away from the desk, watching the innkeeper. “I’m sorry, Bertie, but—”
“What’s going on here?”
It was Detective Hodge. Sophie turned to him in relief and explained the situation without referencing the conflict between the pastor and the innkeeper, though her mind was going a mile a minute on that subject. Why would the innkeeper lock the pastor in a room downstairs? Was the pastor afraid of Bertie, as he appeared to be?
But back to the matter at hand.
The detective held out one hand to Bertie and snapped his fingers. “The keys!”
“I’ll do it. I’ll unlock the door!” he said, with bad grace, pulling a ring of keys out of his pocket and selecting one.
“Just give me the keys,” the detective said, holding his gaze. The innkeeper obliged without another murmur.
Sophie led the way. They found Cissy almost hysterical and Thelma still howling behind the locked door. Detective Hodge unlocked it and Thelma burst from the room, falling into Eli’s arms. She looked up.
“Who are you?” she asked, righting herself and pulling away, settling her floral muumuu around her ample midsection.
Cissy, weeping, threw her arms around her grandmother. “Are you okay, Grandma? I was so worried!”
Thelma shrugged her granddaughter off and stared at the detective. Sophie introduced them.
“You’re one of Laverne’s nephews?” Thelma said, eyes wide. “You’re a tall drink of water, aren’t you?” She turned to her granddaughter. “What are you crying for? I’m the one who was locked away.”
Sophie stepped into the room, curious, as Bertie Handler hustled down the hall toward them. The windowless room was smallish and lined with piles of boxes, mostly canned and dr
y goods, as well as some office supplies. But there was a cot and magazines, a lamp, which was on, a flashlight and some rumpled bedding.
“Nothing to see here,” Bertie said, entering and trying to shoo her out.
“Is this where you were hiding the evening Zunia was killed? I was told that you were going to hide in the cellar if the storm got bad, and it did get bad, bad enough that the thunder and lightning set off the fire alarm, I understand.” She met the innkeeper’s gaze. “But . . . no, because Pastor Frank said you locked him in here that night. What was that all about?”
“Yes, what was that all about?” the detective asked.
“I told the other fellow, Detective O’Hoolihan, what happened,” Bertie said, crossing his arms over his chest, beads of sweat erupting on his forehead and balding dome. “Frank got into a tiff with Mr. Pettigrew. I had to separate them and locked Frank in here. I forgot about him for a while, but when the storm hit in the middle of the night I came down here. He was gone, though, and the room was unlocked. He got out somehow, and that is the truth! I told the cops everything.”
“Pastor Frank was out when you came down?” Sophie said. “How was that possible if you had the key?”
“I don’t know, I tell you!” He covered his eyes with shaking hands and moaned, “When is this going to end? Why me?”
“For Pete’s sake,” Thelma said, making a rude noise, tongue thrust out. “What a crybaby. I’m the one who got locked in there. Durned lock must be faulty, ’cause I just fell against the door, it opened, I fell in and the door locked behind me.”
So even if Pastor Frank was locked in here at the time of the murder, Sophie reasoned, it didn’t eliminate him as a suspect, not if the lock was faulty.
“How long were you in there, Grandma? You said all day, but that’s not true.”
She shrugged “That isn’t important. I need a bathroom, and fast, or you’re gonna have to clean up a puddle.”
The detective cleared his throat as Cissy supported her grandmother down the hall. Sophie glanced over at him suspiciously, wondering if he was stifling a chuckle; however, his expression was sober and serious. Bertie started to follow the two women, but Eli grabbed him by the sleeve. “Wait just a minute. Miss Taylor had a good question that you didn’t answer. If you didn’t let the pastor out, who did? He says you let him out; you say he was gone when you came down. So . . . was the door still locked when you came down to let the pastor out?”
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