Ben rounded the table and kissed Mom on the cheek. “Good to see you, Angela.”
Mom batted her thickly coated lashes and kissed his cheek in return, then wiped fuchsia lipstick from his cheek. The woman single-handedly kept Maybelline in business. She wouldn’t even get the mail without having her “eyes on.” One thing was for certain: Mom might’ve hated Metamora, but she adored Ben.
“I’m doing better knowing a strong, competent police officer is protecting my girls. How’s my favorite son-in-law?” she cooed.
“Mia’s living with us now,” he said, then backtracked. “Well, she’s living at the house with Cam. I don’t have room for her at the Hilltop Castle gatehouse.”
“Yes,” Mom said, turning her gaze to me. “We’ll have to see about that. You should be under the same roof as your daughter.”
All eyes shifted to me, waiting for my response. It had been about ten months since Ben and I separated. There was nothing scandalous that went on, we simply grew apart. He worked nonstop and I was lost in a town I hadn’t accepted and hadn’t made my mark on. Neither of us wanted a divorce, but I had to be sure we wouldn’t fall back into the same patterns if we started living together again.
Our romance had been a whirlwind, and we were married after two short months. Four years later, our relationship had stalled and we were giving it a much needed tune-up. By no means were either of us ready to trade it in for something new. We had a set movie night. We were having fun together again, and we were finding our way back.
I vowed that Angela Cripps would not sweep in and destroy the progress we’d made. Wasn’t it enough to fend off my mother-in-law? Now I had to deal with my own mom, too? This was suddenly looking like a good time to hop a plane and take a vacation across the ocean. On second thought, the moon might not even be far enough.
“What’s the Hilltop Castle gatehouse?” Mom asked Ben when I ignored her comment. “I thought you were staying at a bed-and-breakfast in town.”
“The man I work for, Carl Finch, he owns the castle that sits atop the hill out on Route 52,” Ben explained. “I’m staying in his gatehouse. Kind of goes with the job, I guess.”
Mom perked up. “He owns a castle?”
“A modern castle,” Ben said. “He had it built.”
“Ambitious. Is he single?” Mom’s eyes narrowed as she shifted her gaze to Monica. I knew that shrewd look. She’d hunt down Carl Finch before the day was out. I liked Carl, but I didn’t necessarily want him as my brother-in-law.
“It just so happens he is,” Ben said and sauntered over beside me. He sat down and, attempting to be discreet, leaned in to whisper, “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about—”
“Andy’s being arrested!” my stepdaughter, Mia, shouted, bursting through the door and running to our table. “They’re putting handcuffs on him and everything!”
“This is what you were going to tell me, wasn’t it?” I asked Ben.
He nodded, tight lipped.
“What on earth could Sheriff Reins be thinking? Andy Beaumont is no murderer!” I shoved my chair back and flung my handbag over my shoulder. “If you’ll all excuse me, I have a murder to solve.”
“Cam,” Ben said, grasping my wrist. “No.”
“A Cripps woman doesn’t know the word no.” I cocked an eyebrow toward Mom and Monica. Both of them nodded and stood up with me.
Solidarity. It wasn’t often found in my family, but when it happened, we were a threesome to be reckoned with.
• Two •
Who’s Andy?” Mom asked as the three of us walked across the bridge toward Ellsworth House. “Is he that handyman you told me about?”
“Yes, and he’s a friend. There’s no way he killed anybody.”
Monica gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t worry. We’ll find out who really did this. I already sent a text to Anna and Logan. They’re going to start digging for information from the high school kids.”
“The high school kids?” Mom asked. “What will teenagers know?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Mia’s been at that school for a little under two months and she usually knows town gossip before I do.”
Mom gave a little shrug. “Back when I was in high school us kids didn’t concern ourselves with the goings on of our parents. We had much more interesting things in our own lives.”
“More interesting than a murder in your town? The second in the same year?” My mother: the consummate contrarian.
Monica, paying no attention to us, nodded down the street. “Who’s that? I’ve never seen him before.”
In the distance, a man walked toward us with a dog on a leash. A big gray dog. Possibly bigger than Brutus, Ben’s beast. “I don’t know. Must be a tourist.”
“Hmm …” Monica stared at the man with interest. “Look how well he handles his dog. I wonder where he learned that.”
“Somewhere they train dogs,” I mused. “Something I need to invest in.”
When we reached my house, Cassandra Platt was sitting on my front steps, crying and swatting away the bees that live in my porch columns. Cass and Andy started dating soon after he came to town.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her, taking her hand and tugging her to her feet. “We’ll get him out of this.”
“Come inside,” Monica said, opening the door. As soon as it was wide enough to let the dogs out, they charged through, slobbering and barking at their visitors.
“Get down!” Mom shouted, swatting Gus, the giant Newfoundland, with her handbag.
Cass, on the other hand, knelt down and had one arm around each of my twin mutts, scratching behind their erect, abnormally small ears. Wiry hair flew in the breeze, and their stout, tank-like bodies quivered in pleasure. “Did you name them yet?” she asked, smiling and snuffling back tears.
Dogs were always good for what ailed you.
“Not yet. Nothing seems quite right for them.”
Mia’s puppy, Liam, a tiny, white fur ball, came scampering to the door barking his shrill yip, trying to round up the canine troop of which he’d designated himself leader. The others ignored him, as usual.
“I cannot believe you have all of these wild animals in your home!” Mom said, brushing dog hair from her slacks.
I ushered the dogs and humans inside and down the hall to the kitchen, where I let the dogs out the back door and sat everyone else at the table. “Cass, why did they arrest Andy? What evidence could they possibly have?”
She took a deep breath and filled us in. “He called me this morning all shaken up. He stopped out at Landow Farm to ask Butch some questions about modern farming. He was filming when Butch opened the door. Butch had a fit and shoved Andy’s camera in his face. It gave him a black eye! Andy said Butch ranted and raved about trespassers and his right to privacy on his own property, then he called the cops. Andy was gone before they got there, but that’s why Reins questioned him to begin with. He’d been out to the farm this morning, and when he saw Andy’s black eye, he assumed Andy and Butch were fighting just before Butch was found dead.”
“That would be the most obvious situation to have happened,” Mom said.
“But it didn’t,” Monica was quick to interject. “Andy would never do that.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply …” Mom trailed off, clutching her necklace.
“Of course he didn’t do anything.” I rounded the counter and opened the pantry. This day called for some of Betty Platt’s cookie’s from Grandma’s Cookie Cutter, the bakery two doors down that I found impossible to stay out of. I piled fat molasses cookies onto a plate with some chewy chocolate chip and set them in the center of the table. “Nobody saw Butch after that, Cass?”
She shook her head. “I guess not. He lives alone, and all of his farm hands were out in the fields working.”
This situation was bad. The black eye and trespassing call gave Andy motive in the eyes of the law. “Andy was here alone when Butch was shot, wasn’t he?” I asked, knowing Mia would have been working at the Soda Pop shop until lunch, when she’d come home to find him being hauled away.
“Yes,” Cass said, breaking a cookie into pieces and dropping them on a napkin. “He has no alibi.”
I felt like that cookie looked. How in the world would we get Andy out of jail when the police believed he had the motive and the opportunity? We would have to find another suspect. Someone wanted Butch Landow dead, and all I had to do was figure out who.
“What do you know about Butch, Cass?” I’d never met the man myself. He kept to himself, and was known to be reclusive.
“Not too much. His ex-wife, Phillis, is Fiona Stein’s cousin. Fiona’s husband, Jim, is—was—good friends with Butch, I think.”
Monica tapped her fingernails on the table. “So it stands to reason that if Jim Stein was friends with Butch, then his cronies—Stew Hayman and Jefferson Briggs—would be friends with him, too.”
“I’ve never heard Stew mention him,” I said, referring to my father-in-law. “Not that he and I have a lot of conversations about who he pals around with.”
“What about this Phillis?” Mom asked. “It’s always the ex.”
Cass shrugged. “I’ve only met her a couple of times. She and Butch were still married then. I think they’ve only been divorced for a couple of years.”
“We need to find out about her. Fiona is our best contact for that,” Monica said, catching my eye.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “That woman has no love for me. She harasses me every month to pay my fines to the Daughters of Historical Metamora for the unapproved colors I painted my house.”
Cass let out a small chuckle. “At our last meeting, they were talking about how much money we were short and how we wouldn’t be able to fund our annual matching sweatshirts to wear to Canal Days. Your mother-in-law was hot under the collar about you not paying your fines.” Cass grinned, wiping the last stray tear from her cheek. “I say good riddance to those ugly sweatshirts.”
“Don’t let Irene hear you say that.” I couldn’t help the surge of glee that spread through me at the thought of ruining my mother-in-law’s plans. She and her Daughters of Metamora gang ruled the town with an iron fist. Or tried to. I wouldn’t be bullied by any of them.
Monica drummed her fingers on the table again, eyeing me. “Well … maybe if you took Fiona a check for their sweatshirts she’d be willing to have a chat about her cousin.”
“Where, exactly, am I going to get a check that doesn’t turn to rubber the minute I touch it with ink? I don’t have the money to pay Irene’s fine even if I wanted to. Which I don’t, I might add.”
“Cameron Corrine Cripps,” Mom said. When she pulled out the triple C’s, I knew I was in for it. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times. You win more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”
“I bet you have a lot of honey in your porch columns,” Cass said.
I snorted. “That’s about the only thing keeping this house together.”
“I’m serious!” Mom whacked her palm on the table. “Pretend to like this woman even if you can’t stand the sight of her. I’ll give you the money to pay the fine, and I’ll butter up Irene. Monica can work on that Carl Finch fellow.”
Monica leaned forward a bit. “What does Carl Finch have to do with this?”
“Nothing,” Mom said. “But he’s rich and single, isn’t he? I swear, I don’t know how you girls survive for one day without me.”
“It’s a mystery,” I muttered, shoving a bite of cookie past my lips before I said something I’d end up regretting.
Across the table, Cass focused over my shoulder. “That’s Andy’s video camera.”
I turned around to find it sitting on my countertop beside the toaster. “Wouldn’t they want that for evidence?”
“In this clown cop town?” Mom said, smirking. “It’s a miracle they even thought to question Andy, let alone come up with a motive. You can’t expect them to take evidence too, can you?”
“Sheriff Reins is a good police officer,” I said, thinking it sounded a bit over-reaching out loud. Reins was a qualified, dedicated officer. Whether he was a good one was up to interpretation and circumstance.
Cass got up and hustled over to where Andy’s camera sat. “It still has the tape in it. Let’s watch it and see if there’s anything that proves he’s innocent.”
I followed her into the living room. “I hope you know how to hook it up to the TV.”
“I’ve watched him do it a hundred times at least.”
Mom and Monica came in and took a seat on the couch. I sat on the floor beside Cass and turned the TV to video input while she hooked up one end of a cord that looked like my phone charger to a slot in the back and the other to the camera.
The screen went blue, then popped on with an image of a gravel driveway leading up to a ramshackle old farm house.
“Here we go,” Cass said.
The picture was shaky as Andy walked up to the door of the white house. His arm came into view as he reached forward and knocked.
“Why would he want to record this?” Mom asked. “Who cares about a guy answering his front door?”
“It brings the viewer into the moment,” Cass answered. She’d obviously learned a lot about filming documentaries over the past almost-year that she and Andy had been together.
Andy knocked again, and the door opened. A lean, grizzled older man stood in the doorway. I didn’t recognize him as the man on the bench, but I’d only seen him lying on his stomach, so this was the first I’d ever seen his face. His skin was leathery, and thin lips tightened into an angry line.
“Get that camera out of here! Who sent you? Arnie Rutherford? I’ve had enough of you trespassers on my property! Leave! Now!” Butch’s hand came up fast toward the camera and the picture went black.
“Hey!” Andy shouted, and the sound of scuffling came through my speakers. The picture came to life again with the green needles on a box bush whizzing by in an arc, then a cracking noise as the camera hit the ground, then all we could see was a sidewalk, sideways on the television, Butch retreating back inside, and the door slamming shut.
“Gah! My eye,” Andy said to himself, and the camera was righted. He must’ve grabbed it. Then the screen went black.
“That must be it,” I said, looking at Cass. But the words were out of my mouth no more than a second when the video came back on.
“Please don’t be busted,” Andy said, gazing into the eye of the camera. He gently brushed the edge of the lens. Then the video went black once more.
“Wait!” Monica hopped up off the couch. “Rewind that part. Is there a slow motion?”
“Probably,” Cass said. “Let me see.”
She rewound the footage and pressed play. Andy’s face appeared again.
“Right there!” Monica yelled, darting toward the TV. Her finger touched the screen behind Andy’s shoulder. “See them? In the distance. I think those are two men.”
I leaned forward, closer to the TV and squinted. I really needed to get to an optometrist. “Maybe …”
“Beside the trees?” Cass asked. “Yeah, I think I see two men.”
Mom came up behind me and leaned in over my head with a hand on my shoulder to get a better look. “One is a little taller than the other. It’s hard to make out any features when they’re against those trees.”
“Can you zoom in?” Monica asked.
“I wish I knew how to work this thing.” Cass pressed buttons on the camera and my television and managed to fast forward, change the screen aspect to letter box, and bring up closed captioning in Spanish. “Ugh. I need directions. They can’t keep And
y forever, right? I mean, I’ll be able to talk to him soon, won’t I?”
“Of course,” I said, patting her leg. “We’ll tell him about this and we’ll find out who those two men are.”
“Don’t forget Arnie Rutherford,” Mom said. “He’s the first person who sprung to our murder victim’s mind when he saw Andy.”
“Whoever he is, he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” I said, getting up, and finding that with each passing year the floor was farther and farther away from a standing position—or at least harder to lift my weight off of.
I retrieved my laptop from the dining room table and sat between Mom and Monica on the couch. Cass went around to the back where she could lean over and watch as I typed Arnie Rutherford into the search engine.
“Attorney at law,” I read, clicking on the website link. “A real estate attorney.”
“Why would Butch think Andy was a real estate attorney?” Cass wondered out loud behind me.
“Well, that’s an easy one,” Mom said. She shifted her gaze from each of us in turn, then shook her head. “Hello, girls! His ex probably wants the farm!”
I quickly came to the next logical question. “So if she couldn’t get it from him, who gets it now that he’s dead?”
“I think you better pay Fiona Stein a visit,” Monica said. “Sorry, Cass, looks like you’ll have to wear an ugly sweatshirt to Canal Days after all.”
“If it proves Andy’s innocence, I’ll wear one every day for the rest of my life.”
“Young love,” Mom said, and reached over and squeezed Monica’s hand.
“Carl Finch isn’t young, Mom,” she said.
A cacophony of barking started up in the backyard. I hopped up, thankful for the distraction before Mom tried to tangle me in her matchmaking web. “Gotta let the dogs in. Duck and cover.”
The sound of Mom and Monica bickering was quickly overtaken by hearty barks and Liam’s shrill yip. Never in the four months since adopting my furry friends had I been thankful for the holy ruckus they made. Until now. How could I have forgotten what living with my mother and sister under the same roof was like?
Canal Days Calamity Page 2