The Minstrel and the Masquerade

by Lila K Bell

  After breakfast and a quick visit to the backyard to let Charlie do his business, I took Mercy for a spin around the city and pulled up in the parking lot of the hardware store. This early in the morning, the place was pretty quiet — just a few dedicated home renovators and Do-It-Yourselfers roaming around — which I took as a good sign. McCallister was far less likely to yell at me when no one was around to drown out the noise.

  I didn’t get to work straight away. For one thing, it wouldn’t do to tackle him before I’d had a chance to scope things out; for another, there were always interesting things to poke around in at the hardware store, and I didn’t want to linger too long afterward if my conversation went badly.

  Hitting the tool aisle, I browsed to see if there was anything in my personal kit that needed upgrading. I may have taken a break from my thieving, but it was obvious my new hobby would keep me in the need for some top-of-the-line gear. More grappling hooks down the road, for example.

  From the aisle, I got a good look at the cashiers, and my gaze fell on a man in a manager’s grey uniform shirt. He was speaking to a red-shirted employee, so I waited until they were finished before I grabbed a new pair of pliers and headed to the cash.

  Court, his name tag read. Convenient.

  Now that I was standing so close to him, I could appreciate how devilishly handsome he was. The kind of man that would stop a woman across a room and make her return to the same hardware store for all kinds of little fix-ups and tips. Thick brown hair, tan skin with a layer of greying stubble, a square jaw, and the sort of arms you could hang from if you had a mind to. He looked like the poster boy for a DIY magazine.

  As he rang me through, I browsed my phone, making a point to stick to the local news.

  “Horrible, isn’t it?” I asked, as though the state of the world offended me on a deep and moral level.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This news about Margery Brooks. Murdered in the middle of a party, can you believe it?”

  He snorted, not even attempting to show any sorrow. “Sure I can,” he said. “The woman was a vampire. I’m glad she’s dead.”

  The surprise I showed was only partially insincere. I knew he hated her, but I hadn’t expected him to be so vocal about it. “You knew her personally, then?”

  “Well enough,” he said, dropping his attention to the price tag on the pliers. I wondered if he realized how he’d sounded, so vehement in his loathing. “Enough to guess that the cops won’t be short on suspects if they want to waste their time figuring out who did it.”

  “Any thoughts on who it might have been?” I asked, the gossip at the hardware store. A role I was happy to play.

  He raised his gaze to meet mine, and I almost took a step back at the fury in the dark brown eyes. Through his rage he smiled, a forced expression full of bitterness that made the hair on my arms stand on end.

  “I don’t,” he said. “But if I did, I would gladly offer to shake his hand. Receipt in the bag?”

  7

  After my encounter with McCallister, I was overwhelmed with a need to wash the bitterness out of my mouth.

  He could deny his involvement with Margery’s death all he wanted, but his attitude toward her was enough to keep him front and centre on my list of suspects.

  I didn’t relish the idea of digging deeper into his life. Maybe I should have spent a bit more time reading his file to figure out what she’d done to earn such a nastygram. At the time I hadn’t wanted to pry, but now I wondered if having more information might have prepared me for his rage. It wasn’t likely I would be lucky enough to get a second peek into his history.

  Preferring not to ask McCallister directly, I made a note to come up with a good pretext and ask Ralph about it when I had a free minute.

  For now, my thoughts turned toward Joseph Marley. Having no idea who he was, I had no idea how to find him, but fortunately I knew people who did. It was both a pro and a con of living in a small town that there were always people who, for one reason or another, knew everyone.

  My friend Lucy Hart was one of those people. She worked for Brookside’s Central Bank, the only financial institution in town the elite trusted with their money. Considering my mother’s taste in people, if Marley was at the party, it was a safe bet he was “one of them.”

  I pulled out my phone on the way back to my car and dialled Lucy’s number.

  “Fi? Is everything all right?”

  I started at the worry in her voice. “Everything’s fine. Why?”

  There was a soft clearing of her throat on the other end. “Well, you don’t often call me just to say hello these days.”

  I grimaced against the small pinch of guilt her not-quite-accusation provoked. She wasn’t wrong. Ever since I’d begun my various hobbies and gained a new perspective on Brookside’s social scene, I’d pulled away from my friends, not wanting to be brainwashed into their inanity again. Oh, I did the yoga and went out for coffee with the girls and all the socializing that was expected of one in my circles and my age group, but I never extended myself. Was never the one who proposed the dinner dates or had people round for appetizers and cocktails.

  For the most part, it had done my mental health a lot of good, but Lucy was one of the people I’d left behind. In some ways she was just as draining as the others, but recent events made me wonder if the only reason she still acted the snob was that she didn’t have any other group of friends to spend time with.

  Perhaps it was time to change that.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t even have that great an excuse. But you popped into my head today and I thought how much I would love to treat you to lunch. Are you free?”

  “I would love that. I usually take my lunch break around noon. Does that work?”

  A glance at my watched showed it was only half past nine. My task at the hardware store had taken me less time than I’d anticipated. “Works perfectly. Is the Tea Room good? I’ll grab us a seat.”

  I tried not to think too hard about the fact that my intentions were far from altruistic. Bribing someone with food seemed unfair when the other person wasn’t aware of the pretense.

  But who said lunch could only serve one purpose? If it helped me reconnect with an old friend, then even if she wasn’t able to help me track down Joseph Marley, I would consider the meal well worth the cost.

  To fill the time before our meeting, I returned home and printed off the guest list and the photos Sybil had emailed me. I didn’t know what I might need to jog Lucy’s memory, so it seemed smarter to have everything on hand.

  On my way back down, I bumped into Bea and Gramps as they returned from their morning dip in the pool. Gramps’s silver hair was still wet, and Charles had the fluffy appearance of a pup that had recently been thoroughly rubbed down with a towel. His tongued lolled out the side of his mouth, and his tail was wagging a steady beat against Gramps’s leg. He raised his paw at me in greeting, and I gave him a scratch behind his ear that seemed to satisfy whatever it was he wanted from me. Three weeks we’d shared a house, and I still didn’t have the least idea what to do with a dog. Fortunately, Gramps was on it, and Charlie looked even better than he had when I’d rescued him from Coleman’s crime scene.

  Bea didn’t look any less relaxed than the other two from their visit to the pool, looking lovely and smiling in a bright turquoise muumuu that brought out the fairy magic I swear lives under her skin.

  Bea Thompson had been Gramps’s home care nurse for the last five years, ever since his hip surgery decreased his mobility. She was in her mid-forties, with the warmest smile you’ve ever seen and a knack for baked goods that left me amazed I wasn’t two hundred pounds heavier. I loved her as much as I loved Gramps, and more than once since she’d joined us did I wish I was part of her family instead of my own.

  “Heading out already?” Gramps asked as he hobbled into the kitchen. He always moved with his cane after swimming, tired out from the exercise that kept his limbs strong and limbe
r. As though he understood his new owner’s limitations, Charlie kept to Gramps’s good side, his unruly tail well away from the cane.

  “Already been out,” I said. “Came back and am leaving again.”

  “What’s on the agenda, chickadee?”

  “Meeting a friend for lunch. Catching up on old times.”

  Gramps and Bea exchanged a look. She rolled her gaze toward the ceiling, but said nothing as she started the coffee.

  “What?”

  Gramps settled at the kitchen table, and left Bea to give me a look that told me not to get myself into any trouble. Charlie settled at Gramps’ feet and, I swear, gave me the same look.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, crossing my arms. “I’m not always doing something I shouldn’t. It’s not even noon, yet. How could I do anything so horrible in the middle of the day?”

  “Honey pie, you are the type of person who steps outside and brings the troubles of the world down on her shoulders,” Bea said. “You’re also lucky enough to somehow come out of it without a scratch on you, but how long is that going to last?”

  I sat down across from Gramps. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She’s not wrong, chickadee,” he said. “This whole thing with Margery Brooks. You can’t tell me you’re not the least bit curious about what happened.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but the words refused to come. “Well, how can I not be? She died at my party. And someone there did it. Don’t you want to know who it was?”

  “I’m curious enough to want to pay my respects and hope the police catch the guilty party,” Bea said. She set two cups of coffee on the table for her and Gramps, then nodded at me to ask if I wanted one. I shook my head, and she returned to the kitchen to prepare their snack. My stomach grumbled, but my lunch date was waiting.

  I pushed myself up from the table and came around to kiss the top of Gramps’s head. “I promise, I’m not doing anything stupid or anything that can get me into trouble. It’s just lunch.”

  Bea snorted. “And I’m just the Queen of the Caribbean.”

  I went over and threw my arms around her neck. The top of her head only just reached my nose. “Thank you for caring.”

  She squeezed me back. “I don’t thank you for making me worry, but I suppose you’re old enough to take care of yourself. Make sure you actually eat something. You’re skin and bone under these cheap T-shirts of yours.”

  I gave her my solid promise, feeling good that I’d be able to keep at least one, then headed out to my lunch date.

  8

  Lucy met me at Jennifer’s Tea Room. I’d grabbed a seat in the sun and rose to give her a hug when she came in.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” I said.

  “Thanks for the excuse to get out of the office. Any opportunity I have to avoid my manager’s in-depth description of his lunch meat is one I’ll happily take.”

  Her nose wrinkled as she spoke, and we shared a laugh.

  Jennifer herself came to take our order, and not long afterward, high tea was set in front of us with sandwiches, scones with cream and jam, and a few little desserts on top. It was one of my favourite treats, and not one I indulged in often.

  “This is on me, by the way,” Lucy said as we tucked in. “To make up for the way your birthday party ended. I still can’t believe what happened.”

  She brushed her auburn curls out of her face and bit into a roasted red pepper and hummus sandwich.

  “I’m reeling a bit myself,” I said. “It’s still hard to believe that someone in this city had enough rage to poison someone in front of a room full of people.”

  It was a thought that had haunted me since the party. Coleman’s murder had been shocking, the first in a while, but it had been a crime of passion. This… someone had planned it, timed it, and escaped detection. Far more cold-blooded than an attack in a fit of anger.

  “Have you heard any more about it?” Lucy asked. “I’ve seen a few reports pop up in the news and on social media, but the police have been pretty tight-lipped about the details.”

  If Jeannie or Frances had asked me, I would have believed they were stocking up on their gossip. More than once lately, Lucy had struck me with her lack of interest — more importantly, her discretion — in all the town’s juicy details. I couldn’t remember if she’d always been that way and I was just noticing now, or if we were both growing up, leaving our friends to languish, immature and heads full of news, behind us.

  “From what I can tell, they’re leaning toward it being one of her clients,” I said. “A bunch of them had grudges against her.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really? That’s a funny way to do business. Having the other spouse bitter would make sense, but her own clients?”

  “She had a weird set of priorities.”

  Lucy pondered that as she moved to an egg salad sandwich. I was eying the cucumber and cream cheese with a wish that there were a dozen more of them on the plate.

  As we ate, we discussed the party, the ongoing renovations of the old City Hall building, which were well underway but buried under so much tarp and scaffolding no one had been able to get a good look at the changes. We talked about our friends, their weddings, their babies — the sorts of subjects one would expect two women to chat about over lunch. The conversation didn’t veer back toward the case until we’d hit the scones, though it wasn’t in a manner I would have expected.

  “I saw Sam at the party,” Lucy said as she sipped her chamomile tea. “He hasn’t been around in ages. I didn’t realize you were talking to each other again.”

  She kept her gaze on the sandwiches, but I picked up the underlying tone.

  “Circumstances recently brought him back into my radar,” I said, and left it at that. She didn’t need to know he’d found me standing over Barnaby Coleman’s dead body. To date, only a small handful of people knew that particular detail, and I preferred to leave it that way. I glanced at her from under my eyelashes. “He’s looking good, isn’t he? Sure fills out that uniform pretty well.”

  The hint of red on the edges of Lucy’s cheeks made me smile. Sam Robinson? I never would have guessed.

  He likely didn’t know, and I didn’t intend to spill the beans.

  But that wasn’t to say I wouldn’t come up with a way to bring them into the same room again. I’d already planned to spend more time with Lucy and introduce her to a better calibre of friends, and, as far as I was concerned, Sam was tops.

  Lucy cleared her throat. “I can’t say I’ve had the chance to form an opinion. Too bad he wasn’t dressed as an officer for the party. He would have been perfect, considering…” Her eyes widened and she covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry, that was tactless.”

  “No need to apologize. You’re not the only one who can’t get Margery’s murder out of your head.” I saw the opportunity to steer the subject where I wanted it, and I grabbed it. “The fact that it was likely someone who was there that night, someone invited — it’s been keeping me up at night.”

  “I can imagine.” Lucy shuddered.

  I made a show of looking around the room, and then leaned over the table toward her. “I actually went through the guest list to see if there was anyone who stood out. I know it sounds silly, but I felt I had to do something, you know?”

  “Absolutely.” I don’t know if Lucy was aware that she’d leaned in and dropped her volume to match mine, her gaze following a similar trail around the room to make sure no one was paying attention. “I probably would have done the same.”

  “On the list was a man named Joseph Marley. I’ve never heard of him before, but obviously Mother knows him. Does he sound familiar to you at all?”

  Lucy bit into her scone, and silence descended over the table as she chewed. I took advantage of the time to enjoy my own snack, savouring the hints of strawberry and vanilla that popped over my taste buds.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s the owner of The Green Grocer. CEO of the chain, I think.” Rec
ognition flooded her gaze, and she set her scone down as she leaned in closer. “You would know his house for sure. We used to bike past it and wish we could marry whoever lived there one day. The one in Stonegate with the giant gazebo out front covered in ivy.”

  “Oh yeah…” I said. A slew of old daydreams ran through my head.. No matter what I thought possible of the man living in the house, I would always have a soft spot for the beautiful two-storey with its cedar porches, dozen windows, and sunroom, complete with the gazebo out front and the in-ground pool and sauna in the back. I’d been there once for a Christmas party, so I must have met Joseph Marley at least once in my life.

  Lucy’s expression changed from excited to horrified. “You don’t really think he could have killed her, though, do you?”

  From what I was learning, it wasn’t safe to rule anyone out unless the evidence was there, but Lucy didn’t need to know that. Goodness knows, I often wished I could hang on to my naive believe that I knew the sort of people who lived in Brookside.

  I forced myself to smile. “Either way, the police will track down whoever did it, I’m sure. Then we can all sleep better at night.”

  ***

  While I was more than certain the police would, in fact, find Margery’s murderer, I wasn’t about to let them have all the fun. I had a puzzle laid out in front of me and I wanted to go as far as I could to piece together the answers.

  I didn’t need to uncover the whole truth. As I’d learned with the Coleman murder, it wasn’t fun to be trapped in a small space with a person who’d committed murder once before. They were far more likely to try it a second time. Only a few quick reflexes and an ability to hold my breath had gotten me out of trouble last time, but I wouldn’t trust my skills to save me again.

  No, the police could bring in the killer on this one. I just wanted to come up with a solid list so I could form my own conclusions. If the person I deduced to be the murderer turned out to be the person the police picked up, I would call it a win.