A Fatal Competition (A Rose Harbor Cozy Mystery Book 1)

by Ella White

  “Chief Wyatt did this?” she said, practically hissing.

  “Yeah.”

  “When? When did he get a chance to do this?”

  “When I went to go speak with Maura,” Lydia explained. “He showed up at the end, grabbed my arm and told me to keep out of the investigation.”

  Lydia wasn’t sure she had ever seen an angrier look on her best friend’s face. Gwen headed straight to her bag and took out her camera. She turned on as many lights in the kitchen and dining room as she could before snapping multiple pictures of Lydia’s injured arm.

  “Hold your arm over your head,” she instructed Lydia, who obeyed her without protest.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Taking photographic evidence,” Gwen answered. “If I show these to my boss, he’ll absolutely want to put them in the paper.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Lydia, you know that guy loves you.” She laughed. “Of course he will.”

  “I remember. I helped him with that emergency funeral arrangement for his grandfather.”

  “Not just that. You’re nice to lots of people, so of course they’d hate to hear that the chief hurt you in any way.”

  Gwen finished taking her photographs and then went to the refrigerator to grab some ice. She put a few ice cubes into a plastic bag and then covered that with a washcloth. Gwen passed it to Lydia, who then pressed the ice bag against her arm.

  “You keep your pain relievers in your medicine cabinet in your bathroom, right?” Gwen asked her.

  Lydia nodded, and Gwen was off. Melvin walked back into the room, carrying the beaded feather hair tie in his mouth. He jumped up onto Lydia’s lap and curled up on her legs. He dropped the hair tie onto the table and meowed.

  “Yeah, I know, Melvin,” she said, scratching him behind his ears. “It’s not a bird though. It’s a hair tie.”

  “Where did that come from?” Gwen inquired as she returned to the dining table, medicine in hand.

  “Melvin found it this morning,” Lydia explained. “I think he picked it up around the crime scene at the shop.”

  Gwen passed the pills over to Lydia before taking the hair tie in her hand and inspecting it closely.

  “It reminds me of the type of thing Bethany wears,” she said. “I think she was wearing one like this today in fact. Think it’s hers?”

  “It could be,” Lydia acknowledged.

  “That means that she was probably at the scene of the crime!” Gwen declared. “Or maybe it was left on Meredith’s body, which shows that Bethany was around at the time Meredith was killed.”

  “Maybe, but it is just more circumstantial evidence. If something more believable doesn’t show up soon, Chief Wyatt is going to be knocking at my door.” Lydia groaned. She continued to pet Melvin, and his purring grew louder and louder as he enjoyed his owner’s attention. “If only I hadn’t gone to see Maura, I wouldn’t have run into him and…” She trailed off, looking away into the distance at nothing. Gwen watched as her friend’s mind focused on something other than the present moment. After several seconds she waved her hand in front of her face.

  “Lydia? Hello?” she called to her. Lydia’s eye suddenly became focused again. “What’re you thinking about?”

  “When I was talking to Maura, she talked about how she and Meredith grew up treated like sisters,” Lydia explained. Let me play that part again.” She pulled out her cell phone, rewound the clip and they listen very closely. “Well apparently Meredith was treated much better than her. She likened her own treatment by her parents to that of a pet.”

  “Sounds like Meredith was a pain in the rear from the very beginning,” Gwen commented. Then she realized the importance of this information, and her eyes widened. “Wait, you don’t think…”

  “Maybe Maura was the one who killed her own cousin, out of sibling-like jealousy?” Lydia summarized. “Why didn’t I think of that sooner? She could be framing me for the murder since I’m Meredith’s main competition.”

  “And with a motive like that? It makes perfect sense!” Gwen finished for her. Her enthusiasm soon disappeared though. “Let’s think this through. They always talk about a murderer having the means, motive and opportunity to kill someone. We’ve already got motive down.”

  “Well opportunity is easy,” said Lydia. “Meredith and Maura are cousins. They probably spend a lot of time together. Maura could probably kill her anytime.”

  “And as far as means is concerned,” Gwen reasoned, “Meredith was a florist, but how much do you want to bet that Maura knows about PestBeGone, too?”

  “I won’t take that bet. I’d believe it,” Lydia accepted.

  “Maura is just as much a suspect as Bethany is!” Gwen announced before immediately calming down again. “But the problem left is how to prove it.”

  “We need that solid evidence you talked about before,” Lydia mentioned. “Fingerprints or DNA, or something like that. Otherwise Maura could easily get away with this, and Chief Wyatt will not listen to my recording without prove. And there is one way to get that kind of evidence,” Lydia suggested. “How do you feel about a little investigating ourselves?”

  “Investigating? Where?”

  “The Purple Petal. Where else?”

  “What makes you think Maura will let us look around the store?”

  “She doesn’t have to know.”

  Gwen nearly gasped. “You want us to break in and look for evidence?”

  “Like the murder weapon, the right pesticide,” Lydia confirmed. “Exactly.”

  “You can’t be serious! That’s illegal! It’s breaking and entering!” Gwen declared. “We can’t go searching for that kind of thing! And it wouldn’t be allowed in court without a warrant anyway!”

  “Do you want me to go to jail for Meredith’s murder or not?” Lydia pressed her, her tone deadly solemn. “This might be the only way to clear my name!”

  Gwen looked down at Melvin and their abandoned food, which had long since gone cold. Melvin gave her the deepest meow she had ever heard. No, she did not want her to go to jail! Not for something she didn’t do! And not when the real killer was still out there!

  She finally looked back up at Lydia. “Let’s do it. But we need a plan.”

  Chapter Seven

  Rose Harbor, Oregon was not the same at night as it was during the day, Lydia quickly decided. Without the sun in the bright sky, the streets all seemed more grimy and ominous, even with the flickering streetlights. She was used to seeing cars rolling back and forth on the roads, but at this time of night the streets were pretty much abandoned. The Purple Petal was no different, with its lights out and curtains drawn to block any view of the plants inside.

  Lydia and Gwen had to wait for it to get completely dark before they headed for Meredith’s flower shop. Gwen, the elder of the two by a few months, couldn’t help but feel really strange breaking into a place like this, even if it was the shop of Lydia’s former business rival…even if it was to try to clear her from being framed for Meredith’s murder…. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t that strange considering the circumstances.

  Lydia, on the other hand, was both a little nervous and a little excited. This was the kind of thing she had read about in all her mystery novels, or watched on all of her mystery television shows! She felt like a true detective! Now to just not get caught while looking for evidence…

  “You ready?” Lydia asked Gwen as she hid in an alley leading to the back of the store.

  “I think so,” Gwen replied. “I can’t believe we’re doing this! And you’ve got Plan B ready?” Gwen asked.

  “Yeah,” the amateur sleuth answered, patting the item in her pocket. “It’s all set.”

  “That was a really good idea,” Gwen complimented her. “Glad you thought of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  They headed for the back doorway, the emergency doorway, next to a long alleyway that went behind the flower store. With Gwen standing watch, Lydia put on
a pair of latex gloves and pulled out a few hairpins. She held a small flashlight between her teeth as she put one hairpin inside the keyhole, giggled it into place and then added another pin. She angled this one up and down as she tried to tweak the lock.

  “I didn’t know you knew how to pick locks,” Gwen commented.

  “I taught myself when I was seventeen,” she explained, her voice slightly muffled from holding the flashlight in her mouth. She was able to beat the lock in no time at all.

  Inside The Purple Petal, everything had been tied up and shut down for the night. The plants had been freshly watered, the cash drawers had been locked away and the curtains drawn over the exhibits. Overall the place was very quiet and empty, despite all the flowers and other plant life kept there. There were a few sun lamps lit over some of the plants that were used to longer days, but other than that the place was dark.

  Lydia passed another pair of gloves to Gwen. “So, what should we be looking for?”

  “What do I need these for?” Gwen asked, not taking the gloves.

  “It won’t do any good to find the right kind of evidence if it has our prints on it,” she said, and she practically shoved the gloves into Gwen’s hands. “Anyway, what kind of evidence might be here…?”

  “Well, wouldn’t looking for the pesticide be a good idea?” Gwen suggested.

  “That’s right!” Lydia declared. “It’s bound to have Maura’s fingerprints on it, and there might be Meredith’s DNA on it, too.”

  “Is that how we can know if Meredith drank it?” Gwen speculated. “What if it wasn’t in the bottle?”

  “Call it instinct, but I think the pesticide bottle is what we need,” Lydia insisted.

  The two began to comb the store, searching up and down, through the vines, branches and petals, to see if they could find the pesticide or anything else that might point toward Maura as the killer.

  About twenty minutes passed and they weren’t any closer to finding anything suspicious. Not a stone or plant was left unturned or unexplored. Nothing.

  “Maybe in the office?” Gwen proposed.

  “It had a bigger lock on it than the back door,” Lydia informed her as she led her to the door she had been to earlier that day, where she knew the office was. “Maybe I can pick that.” Lydia took a close look at the door handle and the lock. It was bigger than the last one, but she simply grinned.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s a lot like my dad’s office door.”

  “Why did you break into your father’s office?” Gwen inquired, a bit aghast at the new facts she was learning about her old friend.

  “Not everything was sunshine and rainbows at my house growing up,” she hinted, but she didn’t say anything further about the topic. She stuck her tongue out of her mouth as she focused on the lock, breaking two hairpins in the process. It took several more minutes than the back door lock, but Lydia eventually managed to get it, and she turned the knob to open the door. She smiled at Gwen. “See? No sweat.”

  Lydia had forgotten that so much of the office had been packed away, and there were quite a few boxes that were actually missing from when she had been there before. Therefore it was hard for them to know if any evidence was there. It was possible that it had already been removed, in which case they were just completely out of luck.

  “Nothing here either,” Gwen muttered. “Where could that pesticide be?”

  “At my store, I always lock it up when it isn’t being used,” Lydia stated. “I don’t want to take a chance that anyone, like someone’s child, would get into it accidentally. That would be really dangerous.”

  “As evidenced by the death of Meredith Blake, who died by pesticide ingestion,” Gwen confirmed. She glanced around the office and huffed. “Maura wasted no time taking over, huh?”

  “I thought the same when I saw this,” Lydia concurred. “It certainly makes her more suspicious. Why would you move into someone else’s work so soon after their death?”

  “And when you claim to be angry and grieving over her death?” Gwen finished. “Where do you lock up your pesticides?”

  “In a locker in the supply room,” Lydia answered. “Let’s see if Meredith had one here. She should have.”

  The women left the office just as they found it and resumed their search for the pesticide in the back room. They found a supply closet fairly easily, filled with boxes with various materials for gardening: spray bottles, fertilizers, pots and planters, hoses, weeding and planting tools, and of course pesticides.

  “Over here!” Lydia called to her friend.

  They searched through the box full of insecticides of all kinds, but all the ones labeled PestBeGone were new and unopened. None of them could be the bottle that contained the liquid used to murder Meredith.

  “Man, we are just having the worst luck,” Gwen complained.

  “There might not be anything here that can point to Maura as the killer,” Lydia deduced, sighing as they left the supply storage. “What am I going to do?”

  “We keep looking, that’s what,” Gwen insisted, emphasizing the word “we.” “There has to be something here. The question is what?”

  “I still think the pesticide is the thing we need, but we just don’t know where it would be,” Lydia concluded. “Wait. We’re going about this all wrong,” Lydia realized. “Putting the pesticide away in a supply closet is what most would do, because they’re a responsible person who would want to make sure everything was put away properly before closing up for the night. But is that what Meredith or Maura would do?”

  “No, I guess not,” Gwen granted. “Well, if we presume that Maura is as unthinking and uncaring as Meredith was…I feel awful for speaking badly of her when she’s dead.”

  “Me too, but we need to stay focused,” Lydia pressed her.

  “You’re right,” she agreed.

  “So if I were Meredith and I was not as concerned about the safety of my customers, I probably would have left the pesticide bottle out on a display somewhere.”

  Returning to the main part of the store, the two decided to take another look around. They must have missed something the first time around.

  As Gwen was searching through the cash register area (all the while making snide comments about the unprofessional reading material she found behind the counters), Lydia was trying to place herself in Meredith’s shoes. If she were her rival, where might she leave a bottle of pesticide?

  She eventually headed over to the tree section, where multiple little saplings were kept in small pots. Lydia noted that the trees wouldn’t be able to grow properly because their roots were too restricted by the little containers. Poor trees. As she examined the saplings, she spotted a green spray bottle with red lettering that labeled it as PestBeGone, and the various types of rodents and insects depicted on the label were crossed out in red. It was stuck between the trees, covered by some branches.

  Lydia reached between the branches, getting her gloves stuck on the leaves in the process, but she managed to grab the bottle and bring it out. She called Gwen over, who saw that she had a used bottle of PestBeGone. Gwen smiled.

  “Where was it?” she asked.

  “Behind the trees,” Lydia responded. “Hmm, what a strange place to put a bottle of pesticide, even by accident, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yeah,” Gwen joked. “Don’t you know that’s where I always put my pesticide at home?”

  “I think we’ve found the murder weapon,” the amateur sleuth proclaimed. She paused for a second. “You know, Gwen, I’ve been wondering something.”

  “What?”

  “So we’re saying that Maura poisoned Meredith with this pesticide, right?”

  “Right. That’s what the autopsy showed.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure Meredith would have recognized a strange tasting liquid if Maura put it in one of her drinks,” Lydia rationalized. “So wouldn’t that mean that the killer would have had to force the pesticide down her throat?”

  Gwen tho
ught for a second. “Yeah, that makes the most sense.”

  “Then wouldn’t Meredith have fought back against her killer?” Lydia theorized. “In order to make her drink it, the killer would need her to have been really still…or restrained.”

  “Do you think we’re dealing with two killers?” Gwen asked. “The actual killer and an accomplice?”

  “Wouldn’t there have to be two?” Lydia wondered out loud.