Crime and Nourishment_A Cozy Mystery Novel

by Miranda Sweet

  Aunt Margery sighed. “You saw him.”

  “Yup. How long has that been going on?”

  “There is no that,” her great-aunt snapped. “Or at least, there hasn’t been any that since high school.”

  Whao. Angie had been referring to Phyllis, but Aunt Margery was talking about herself. “Raymond Quinn is your pirate?”

  “He was, once upon a time,” Aunt Margery said. “But then I realized that he drank and smoked too much, didn’t bathe often enough, and was never going to do anything but complain about how the Alexander Snuocks of the world didn’t deserve what they had. So I decided that I’d rather have a dream pirate instead.”

  “That’s fair and quite imaginative,” Angie said, admiring her aunt’s resourcefulness. She carried the burritos over to the counter and prepped them on a plate, then stuck them in the microwave. “Hungry?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “So how did he know to find you…oh…that’s where you used to meet him, wasn’t it? On the beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he the reason that you never fell in love again?”

  Aunt Margery twisted her face into a doubtful expression. “Who’s to say I didn’t?”

  “Scandalous,” Angie said. She yawned again. She couldn’t let her aunt know that she knew about Phyllis and Quinn. If it got back to Quinn it would make Angie a liability. “I would actually love to hear all about it, but tomorrow’s going to be a pain. I don’t know how you do it, staying up so late.”

  “I have a great-niece who gets up early and handles all the annoying morning things,” Aunt Margery said. “Oh, you should have seen him.”

  “Who?”

  “Ray. He was quite handsome, back in the day—the very picture of tall, dark, and handsome. He shaved his beard back then, and we were all in love with his dimples…shame that he’s turned out so bitter. Otherwise he would have made someone a good husband.”

  Angie wondered what Quinn would have said about Aunt Margery: “Shame she was so clever…she might have made me a good wife if she’d been a little less shrewish.”

  Something like that, she thought. She yawned again and said goodnight.

  #

  Angie caught a few hours of sleep before her alarm went off. She pressed snooze once, then bounced out of bed—she had to move the freezer bag full of clothes!

  Aunt Margery’s room was downstairs, and the floors creaked. Her great-aunt had sworn that she could sleep through a herd of elephants running around upstairs and not to worry about early-morning creaks, but the last thing Angie wanted to do was wake her.

  But it was hard not to run straight downstairs.

  Once Angie had the coffee brewing, she checked the laundry. The sand had washed out of the blanket and jeans and socks, no hidden pockets of granular sludge in the pockets or anything. It looked like a gray, damp sort of morning outside, so she put everything in the dryer and left a note in front of the coffeemaker: “Please check blanket in dryer isn’t damp.”

  Then, finally, she allowed herself a chance to look in the freezer.

  The bag with the dress looked undisturbed.

  She had to move it—she and her great-aunt pulled things out of the freezer or put things into it every other day, it seemed like. She put it on a shelf and lowered the washer’s lid quietly.

  She filled a travel mug with coffee, turned off the coffee pot and made sure the main lid was sealed (it was insulated and would still be hot by the time Aunt Margery woke up). She popped open the refrigerator door, took out the big container of cream, poured a teacup half full of it, put that back in the refrigerator, and put the carton in a noisy, rustling plastic bag.

  She added another note to the one on the counter: “P.S., took cream, can’t remember if enough at P&P, will pick up more later, cream in cup in fridge.”

  Then she put the bag of burnt clothing in with the carton of cream, grabbed her keys and phone, and left for work.

  Was she going overboard on the cloak and dagger stuff? Probably.

  But Angie could only think of what she would do if she were in Aunt Margery’s position. Two nosy women trying to fool each other for their own good.

  She probably couldn’t be too careful.

  #

  On the way to the bookstore, she pulled over in a parking lot and gently investigated the clothes. The dress didn’t have a tag to it; the seams were a little crooked here and there, as if it had been hand-sewn. The fabric was lighter and stuck to itself. Where the heat had been the strongest, holes had melted in it with charred black edges. Overall it was brown, orange, and rusty red color, with a few teal spots swirled in.

  As she examined the dress, she noticed about half the teal spots were covered with a big stain. She scratched at it with one fingernail. Whatever it was, it had charred up from the fire and was now flaking off. Even after it was gone, it left behind a dark smudge.

  So…her aunt had gone out to the beach to burn a dress. Why? Were they the clothes that she had dated Raymond Quinn in, all those years ago?

  No. Angie had seen pictures of her great-aunt back in the Seventies: she was short but much more slender, bosomy on top, and definitely not big enough through the hips to fit this dress.

  The dress had to be old. Angie hadn’t seen her great-aunt wear it before.

  Wait.

  She went back to the dress, lifted it carefully to her face, and sniffed it. It smelled like burnt wood and slightly of burnt plastic. The flaking stains smelled a little different, but she didn’t recognize it.

  Which meant she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t blood.

  Oh no. A feeling of dread, like a thousand needles pricking her skin.

  There were better ways to get rid of clothes that didn’t fit you anymore and that you hadn’t worn for years. Like donating them to a thrift store, or cutting them up for craft projects, or even seeing if Ruth wanted them to sell them online as vintage.

  Or even just throwing them in the trash.

  Aunt Margery had gone out to the beach last night not just to meet up with Quinn, but to burn clothing—and not just any old clothing, but stained clothing. Stains that seemed like they might be blood.

  She had done it in a way that should have carried the ashes out into the bay, too. Anything left behind would be just another negligent act by tourists. Nobody would bother to, say, bag up any remaining fibers and test them for bloodstains.

  Angie slipped the dress back into the bag and sealed it.

  Her great-aunt had been out of the house late on the night of the third. Out on the beach waiting for her pirate, she said, who Angie now knew to be Quinn.

  Had the two of them killed Alexander Snuock together?

  Chapter 10

  Imagination, Supposition, and Memory

  The morning was a tense one. The plastic bag with the clothing went into Angie’s trunk in the spare-tire compartment, under the carpeting.

  Angie worked through the morning rush, which showed no signs of slowing down after the holiday weekend. It took all she had to stay focused on the task at hand. A day off, she kept telling herself. All she needed to stop being so paranoid was a day off. That was it. But who could relax, let alone sleep, with Pastries & Page-Turners as busy as it was? And then there was the slight detail of incriminating evidence for a murder lying in her trunk.

  In the back of her mind, she worried at the same scene over and over again. As she pulled espresso shots and foamed milk, she imagined Raymond Quinn and her great-aunt driving up to the Snuock mansion together. Aunt Margery rolls down her window and presses the intercom button.

  “Who is it?” Snuock calls.

  Quinn bellows, “It’s me,” and then adds a number of epithets.

  Alexander Snuock gives a wicked chuckle then opens the gate. The two of them drive to the back door and are admitted to the house. Snuock chats pleasantly and says, “Would you like something to drink?”

  Angie tried to remember whether she had seen any drinks in the
study. She didn’t think so, or at least she didn’t remember seeing a cluster of three glasses, which she thought would have stood out in her memory.

  And so Aunt Margery would have said, “This isn’t a social visit, Alex, and you know it.”

  Snuock chuckles again and says, “Then let’s get to business. Upstairs. In my study.” They could have discussed things in the kitchen, but Snuock would have had to show off. He couldn’t have helped himself: how often did you get to humiliate a lifelong enemy in your own home? Just leading him through the house would have allowed Snuock to rub Quinn’s face in his wealth.

  They go upstairs and Snuock sits behind his desk. If there were other chairs to sit at, Angie had never seen them during one of her book drop-off visits with Snuock previously. It wasn’t a comfortable room. Every time she had been in Snuock’s office, she had been forced to stand the entire time .

  So Aunt Margery and Quinn stand on the other side of the desk.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Snuock asks.

  “You can’t raise our rents like this,” Quinn says.

  “Oh, yes I can.”

  Then the two of them argue back and forth like a pair of children for a few moments. “No you can’t.” “Yes I can.” Finally, Aunt Margery would have broken it up. “Boys!” she would have said. And then she would have quoted a book at the two of them: something sharp and humiliating. Maybe some Oscar Wilde.

  Then things suddenly go downhill. The Rubicon has been crossed somehow, and now the lifelong enmity between Snuock and Quinn turns deadly.

  Snuock had proof that Quinn was sleeping with his ex-wife. Given what Angie knew now, it couldn’t have been anything else. Not only was Snuock raising the rents on his tenants with the intention of driving Quinn out of business, but he had also intended to cut off Phyllis’s allowance, leaving both of them bitter and impoverished.

  In Quinn’s eyes, Snuock would have just added insult to injury. In Angie’s hypothetical scenario, Quinn walks menacingly up to the desk, leans over, and grabs Snuock by the collar…Snuock has just called Phyllis something ugly.

  “Take it back,” Quinn says.

  Snuock refuses.

  Aunt Margery tries to settle things down. Neither man is having any of it.

  Snuock jerks himself out of Quinn’s grasp. Quinn starts to move around the desk. Snuock reaches over to the broad windowsill where he keeps his antiques for display, surrounding himself with history as well as wealth. He picks up the antique Russian revolver.

  Snuock aims it at Quinn. “Not one step closer,” he would have said.

  “I’ll kill you,” Quinn swears.

  They wrestle. Aunt Margery tries to pull them apart. Really, she’s effectively trying to save Snuock from getting strangled. Quinn is so much bigger than Snuock that if it weren’t for the gun, Snuock would have already been dead.

  The gun goes off. Snuock’s eyes widen and he slumps down onto the floor, coming to rest where Angie and Valerie found him. The gun falls beside him.

  Quickly, Aunt Margery takes her dress and uses it to wipe the fingerprints from the gun. She and Quinn flee.

  There’s blood all over their clothing.

  She hides it for several days…then takes it out to the beach and burns it. She’s furious at Quinn, both for the affair and for…the accident.

  They argue. Quinn storms off the beach. A few minutes later, the normally rock-solid Aunt Margery kicks some sand over the fire and follows. If things hadn’t gone so badly, she might have remembered to check that the clothing had been completely burned.

  Over and over the scene played in Angie’s mind. It was possible. It was even plausible.

  She remembered Aunt Margery cautioning her that she should figure out what she wanted to happen with regard to Walter’s arrest. Now her words took on an extra meaning.

  What did Angie want to come of this?

  The morning stretched on, seeming to get stranger and stranger as it went. Both Mickey and Jo came in several times to check up on the pastries—and Angie it seemed. Jo brought the news that Walter had been officially charged with the murder of his father, murder in the second degree. Angie couldn’t take it in, after feeling so hopeful that she could give him an alibi for the third, this was just too much. Instead of acknowledging what Jo told her, she tried to explain her idea about the cupcakes, while Jo watched her cautiously.

  She knew she wasn’t making any sense. She’d been drinking too much coffee that morning, so much coffee that she had reached a point where she felt that she was moving with complete clarity and calm, but knew that she shouldn’t be trusted with heavy machinery. Captain Parfait butted her in the ankle several times throughout the morning. He even brought her a gray yarn “mouse” that had been liberated from her bookmarks, a special fuzzy that had been hidden away for months, apparently.

  Nine o’clock passed, then ten. Eleven o’clock approached.

  Soon, Aunt Margery would arrive at the bookstore.

  #

  When the back door opened at eleven fifteen, Angie’s arms popped up with gooseflesh.

  The bookstore was relatively empty, with only two customers wandering the shelves, and neither of them likely to finish or need a cup of coffee any time soon.

  In the last few moments, Angie had come to a decision: she would confront her great-aunt. She was going to drive herself mad otherwise.

  On the one hand, Aunt Margery might confess. On the other, she might have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  Her stomach wrapped up in knots, Angie walked into the back room and said, “I need to ask you about something.”

  Aunt Margery straightened up from where she was going through the boxes of books that had arrived in the mail. “Yes?”

  Was her voice especially sharp that morning, or was Angie just imagining it?

  “Why did you try to burn that clothing last night?”

  Aunt Margery, her back still turned, froze.

  “I finally got a good look at the dress this morning, and it was stained with blood. I heard some of what you and Quinn said to each other last night. I know that he was sleeping with Phyllis.”

  “Is that what you think?” Aunt Margery said.

  “That’s what I heard. I think the two of you,” she swallowed, “were involved in a terrible accident.”

  “An accident.”

  “An accident,” Angie said firmly. “Otherwise, it would have happened differently.”

  Aunt Margery finally turned around. Her face was pinched in places, and a rash of red and white blotches covered her cheeks. “Is that what you think?” she repeated.

  “Given what I know now, yes. Unless there is something else you want to tell me.”

  Aunt-Margery lifted her hands to her face. Angie couldn’t tell whether her great-aunt wanted to scream or cry. She had never seen her look so desperate.

  “And what am I supposed to tell you?” said Aunt Margery. “Huh? Have you even considered what kind of position it would put you in if you really knew who murdered Snuock?”

  Angie’s palms went flush and damp. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She wanted to know the truth. Isn’t the truth what mattered? And was this her aunt admitting that she and Raymond had murdered Snuock? She suddenly felt claustrophobic in the small back room.

  Aunt Margery continued, “I can see you haven’t considered the consequences. You never have.” There was that parental tone—the one Angie’s own parents never used—the tough love.

  “I didn’t go to eavesdrop on your conversation last night. I just happened upon it, and I can’t do anything about what I know now.”

  “I understand.” Aunt Margery tilted her head and looked pensively at Angie. “You can’t do anything about what you don’t know either. So let’s not talk anymore about it.”

  And then she walked toward the back door, opened it, and went out.

  #

  Angie’s calls to Aunt Margery went straight to voicemail. She packaged up the clothing in
a cushioned mailer envelope, sealed it, and put a note on the front: Do not send, still looking for address. She puttered, but everything she touched seemed to go badly. She even dropped a first edition hardcover (thankfully not signed) and bent some of the pages. At two o’clock, she finally gave it up and closed early.

  Aunt Margery wasn’t at home. Her car was gone, and Angie didn’t see any signs that she’d been back. The door of her room wasn’t locked. Angie went inside and stood there, afraid to touch anything. Curiosity was almost killing her, but she didn’t dare upset Aunt Margery any further.

  After pacing the kitchen for a few minutes, then lying down on top of her covers and trying to sleep, Angie got back in the car and drove back to the parking lot behind the bookstore. Fortunately, she didn’t see Jo at the back door—she didn’t know if she’d be able to keep it together if she saw her best friend. And the last thing she wanted was for Jo to go marching off to confront Aunt Margery, demanding “the truth.” Instead, Angie walked to the back door of Ruth’s shop. She hesitated with her hand on the knob, then turned it and went in.

  Next to the door was the wall full of old photographs. Angie looked it over, this time being more thorough, gently lifting photos to get at those in the lower layers.

  One of the photographs fell down anyway and fluttered to the floor.

  A hand reached down and picked it up. Ruth was standing beside her.

  A glance at her face told Angie that she knew what had happened between Angie and her great-aunt.

  “I’m looking for something,” Angie said.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Ruth said. “I’m…this is just impossible, you know that?”

  Angie ignored her for the moment. She’d found it: the photograph of Quinn next to Dory, in front of a boat. She hadn’t known, when she had seen it the other day, who the tall, handsome man had been, but now it was obvious: her great-aunt’s handsome pirate…who had been dating her best friend at the time.

  “A love triangle,” she said. “Where did Alexander Snuock come into all of this?”