“I don’t know anyone who would make that leap,” Echo teased, wrinkling her nose at him.
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Missy didn’t quite sound convinced. “But maybe we should start looking at who else might have reason to poison Carter, if that’s actually what happened.”
“Maybe he just had a heart attack or something, and we’re just jumping at shadows,” Echo proposed.
“Hmm…he’s pretty young for that to be the case, he couldn’t have been more than mid-thirties. The way that Chas and Spencer were acting, though, makes me think that they saw something in that room that made them think he’d been murdered.”
“Well, then, I suggest we keep our findings to ourselves at the moment, until we can find out if anyone else might have reason to kill Carter,” Kel suggested. “And, I’m also going to keep digging up info on Elgin. Whether he killed her manager or not, the young man seems to be a threat to Gingham, so the more we know about him, the better.”
“I agree, that poor girl,” Missy nodded.
“Maybe we could take her out for a girl’s day, get her mind off of things for a while,” Echo said. “I could show her my store, we could do lunch, maybe some shopping…”
“That’s a great idea. She may even want to engage in baking therapy – it always helps me to get busy with something in the kitchen,” Missy added. “I’ll see if she’s up to it. I can just let Maggie handle things over at the Inn, and Spencer can deal with things here.”
“Perfect,” Echo agreed.
Chapter 13
Chas sat across the dining room table from Joey, the bass guitarist, with his notebook open, pen ready.
“So, Carter was laying on the floor when you opened the door?”
“Yep,” Joey nodded, looking sad.
“What did you do when you saw him?”
“I just figured that he had passed out the night before and hadn’t woken up yet, so I told him to rise and shine and kind of nudged him with my foot.”
“What happened then?”
“I thought it was strange that he didn’t move, and that it felt kind of weird when I nudged him.”
“Weird, how?” the detective asked.
“Like, kinda stiff and hard. I don’t know…” Joey shook his head. “Just weird, not right.”
“What did you do then?”
“Well, I started to get worried when he didn’t respond at all, and I noticed that his skin was kind of a bizarre color, so I knelt down beside him and tried to shake him awake. When he didn’t wake up, I started freaking out and felt for a pulse. His skin was cold and gross, it tripped me out when I touched it.”
“What did you do at that point?” Chas looked at him closely.
“I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was totally thrown off, so I went back downstairs to where everyone was eating breakfast, and told them that Carter was dead. Spencer went up to look and called you when he saw the body.”
“Why was your first inclination to go downstairs, rather than to call for help?”
Joey shrugged. “I don’t know, man. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Can you explain why there was a glass with your fingerprints on it, sitting on Carter’s night stand?” the detective drilled him with a glance.
The guitarist stared back for a moment before answering.
“Probably because we had drinks in his room the night before,” he frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“Where did you sit when you had drinks in his room?”
“In the chair beside the window, why?”
“That chair has chrome arms, but didn’t have any of your prints on it. How do you explain that?”
“I had a drink in one hand and didn’t touch the arm with the other,” Joey narrowed his eyes. “Wait, you can’t possibly think that I had anything to do with any of this.”
“You sat in the chair and didn’t touch the arms at all?” Chas raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Apparently not, according to you,” the guitarists jaw muscles flexed.
“How would you characterize your relationship with Carter?”
“We were fine. He had his gig, I had mine, we got along okay.”
“Isn’t it true that you regularly challenged him about the way that he treated Ms. Grant?”
“Well, yeah, when he was being a jerk, I wasn’t afraid to let him know. So?”
“Did those interaction ever escalate into arguments?”
“I wouldn’t call them arguments…disagreements, sure.”
“Ever get physical?”
“Nope, never.”
“If I ask your band mates the same question, are they going to give me the same answer?”
“They should, it’s the truth,” Joey sat forward, clearly agitated. “Are we done here?” he asked, standing.
Chas looked at him thoughtfully, then nodded. “For now,” he replied, closing his notebook.
Joey turned to leave the room, and the detective stopped him with a question.
“Oh, one last thing…did you have a key to Carter’s room?”
The guitarist turned slowly, his face like stone. “Didn’t need one, he never locked the door.”
Chapter 14
Missy came into the foyer of the Inn from the owner’s quarters, with her golden retriever, Toffee, and her maltipoo, Bitsy, on their leashes for a walk. Knowing that the “girls” never failed to lift her spirits with their sweet presence, she brought them out, hoping that she could entice Gingham to go on a walk with her to take the poor girl’s mind off of things.
She found the country music superstar curled up on the window seat in the Wedgewood parlor, staring out the window, looking lost.
“Hey darlin, I’m about to take these girls for a walk on the beach…want to come along?”
“No thanks,” Gingham murmured, shaking her head slowly back and forth, without turning away from the window.
“Come on, sweetie, the fresh air will do you a world of good. Sometimes we just have to make ourselves get out and breathe. It’s the only way you’re going to start healing,” Missy encouraged.
Seeing the young woman hesitate, she came over and sat beside her on the window seat. Toffee, gentle soul that she is, came over and laid her head on the grieving girl’s leg, gazing up at her with warm brown eyes. Bitsy seemed to shy away, which was unusual for the feisty dog, and Missy just assumed that she was reacting to the extreme grief emanating from Gingham.
“You’ll be safe, I promise,” she whispered, patting the young woman’s hand.
Gingham took in a deep breath and released it with a heavy sigh. “Okay,” she nodded slowly, unwinding her legs out from under her and getting to her feet, absently stroking Toffee’s silky golden head.
Missy led the way to the beach, walking slowly as Gingham trailed along with her. Once they reached the sand, she unsnapped the leashes from the dog’s collars and let them run into the surf, reveling in their freedom. Seeing the dogs leaping and frolicking in the water, even Gingham had to smile faintly.
“I’m so sorry about Carter,” Missy said, giving her a quick one-armed hug as they strolled along the water’s edge, barefoot.
“Me too,” the young singer nodded, her lower lip trembling. “As difficult as he could be sometimes, I’m really going to miss him.”
“What are you going to do about not having a manager?” Missy asked, hoping that focusing on practical matters might be easier for Gingham to deal with at the moment.
“I’ll probably just have Joey take over for now. He knows more about the business side of things than any of the rest of us,” she shrugged.
“He must be taking this pretty hard, too.”
“I don’t know. He’s been keeping to himself ever since it happened. It’s like he doesn’t want to see any of us right now.”
“Well, I’m sure he’ll come around,” Missy soothed. “People handle their grief in different ways.”
“I just wish that I could stop thinking
about it, you know? It’s like, between Carter dying and some lunatic stalking me, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to focus on my music again.”
“Do you write your own songs?”
“Sometimes. I enjoy it, I just don’t always have the time, but most of my biggest hits are songs that I wrote,” Gingham explained.
“Then maybe you should write about all of this. Put your fear, your anger, all of the things that are churning inside of you, out on paper. Put it to music and sing it out. It might help,” Missy suggested.
Gingham stopped walking and stared at her. “That’s a great idea. How do you know all of this stuff?” she asked, as they started moving again.
“Oh honey, I’ve been around the block a few times,” she chuckled softly. “I bake when I’m stressed, and it seems like the more worked up I get, the better recipes I’m able to invent. Some of the most talented artists produce their best work out of their “blue” periods, where they unleash their feelings on canvas, rather than just wallowing in their despair.”
“That totally makes sense,” the young woman nodded. “I’ll try to write out some of my feelings tonight. In fact, now that you mention it, I’ve had this haunting, melancholy melody rattling around in my mind ever since it happened,” she admitted. “I can put words to it, and it might help me get some of my feelings out.”
“Good for you,” Missy smiled at her.
They spent most of the rest of their walk in companionable silence, enjoying the antics of the dogs and the warmth of the Florida sun on their faces.
Gingham thanked Missy for her help, and agreed to spend “girl time” with her and Echo in a few hours. Missy watched her head up the stairs toward her room, her step lighter than it had been, and smiled at the resiliency of youth.
Chapter 15
Echo’s new neighbor, mortician Tim Eckels was pleased to hear that he’d be getting a body in for processing that had been a potential victim of crime. He dealt with the reality of ordinary death on a regular basis, folks who had passed due to age or infirmity, but he preferred to work with bodies that had some sort of intrigue surrounding their passing. He looked at those corpses as potential puzzles, where he might be able to find something, some clue that had been missed. The introverted funerary expert had been instrumental in helping law enforcement solve criminal cases by discovering tiny details that busy and overworked coroners and medical examiners often missed, so he drew the zipper on Carter’s body bag down with a degree of relish, and a secretive smile, that most would find hard to comprehend.
Every corpse told a story, and this one was no different. He could tell many things from clues that cold, discolored flesh gave him – how a person had lived, how they died, what their dietary preferences had been, their fitness level, and even some darker things, which particularly intrigued him. He knew by looking, that this corpse had preferred alcohol to other forms of food and drink, and he hadn’t been terribly interested in physical activity. Tim never judged folks based upon their inanimate flesh, but unraveling the story of their lives had become a pleasant pastime for him.
After checking over the front of the body carefully, he turned the corpse over to examine the back, where the blood had pooled, post-mortem, darkening the flesh considerably. One particular patch, just at the hairline, caught his attention, and he pushed his glasses further up his nose with one gloved finger, grabbing his magnifying glass with the other hand. Seeing discoloration from blood that had pooled didn’t surprise him, but the location of this particular lividity seemed out of place. Blood typically pooled where the body came into contact with the surface below it, but even if this man’s head had been turned to the side, unless it was propped up by an object of some sort, it wouldn’t pool in that spot, just inside the hairline, on his neck.
Examining the area more closely, Tim thought he saw something significant, and leaned closer positioning the magnifying glass for best resolution. A slow smile spread across his face as he realized that once again he’d found something that the medical examiner had missed. There was a break in the skin that looked very much like the hole left by a hypodermic needle. He used the magnifying glass one more time to verify what he had seen, and was satisfied that his conclusion had been correct. Thoroughly checking the rest of the body, not finding any else out of the ordinary, aside from a bit of puffiness in the extremities that might be explained when the injected substance was identified, he snapped off his gloves, tossed them in a biohazard trash can, and went upstairs to call Detective Chas Beckett.
The detective listened to the mortician’s explanation and promised to be at the mortuary with the medical examiner within the hour.
When the pair arrived, Tim walked them through his findings, pointing out the significance of the spot of color that he’d found, and directing them to look through the magnifying lens to see the entry point for the needle. Calgon Coroner, Stanley Nichimura was tense and thin-lipped when he looked through the lens, finding the hole that Tim had correctly identified, and gave a curt nod, indicating his agreement.
“Is it a hole from an injection?” Chas asked, staring down the coroner, who had missed something significant twice in a row on a homicide.
“Yes, it certainly appears to be,” Nichimura answered, stone-faced.
“Is there any other possible explanation for that mark?”
“I don’t believe so,” the coroner replied tonelessly.
“When do the tox screens come back from the lab?”
“Should be within the next couple of days.”
“Put a rush on it if you can,” Chas instructed grimly, clearly not pleased.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The detective regarded the new mortician in town with a degree of respect that the shy, solitary soul seldom, if ever experienced.
“Mr. Eckels, thank you for catching that. Your work may be instrumental in solving a homicide,” Chas held out his hand.
Tim shook it, with a slight smile that belied how pleased he was to be recognized for his contribution.
Chapter 16
Spencer received a text from Maggie after breakfast, asking him to come to the kitchen, where she was cleaning up. He jogged from the garage, where he’d been working, to the back door of the kitchen, hoping that nothing else weird had happened.
“Hey, Maggie,” he greeted her. “What’s up?”
She put down the dish that she’d been rinsing and turned off the water, then wiped her hands on a towel, seeming embarrassed.
“Oh Spence, I’m so ashamed to admit this, but…after what happened yesterday, I really don’t want to go upstairs. Just the thought of it makes my stomach churn,” she admitted. “Is there any way that you could clean the guest rooms today?”
Spencer smiled with understanding and went over to give the innkeeper a big bear hug.
“No worries, Maggie. I’ve got it,” he said, heading for the upstairs utility closet.
The police had completed the search in Carter’s room and had collected all of the forensic evidence that they were going to get, so he could clean the room without fear of impacting the ongoing investigation. He knew that Gingham had gone on a walk with Missy, so he figured he’d clean her room first, so that she’d have something fresh and pretty to return to. It was a shock when he opened the door to her suite and found the room in total disarray. Clothing and shoes were strewn everywhere, cosmetics littered the bathroom vanity, remnants of snacks and half-consumed bottles of water covered the coffee table and night stand, and the bed, of course, was unmade.
“She may be adorable, and have the voice of an angel, but this girl is a slob,” Spencer chuckled, shaking his head.
Cutting her some slack because of her recent trauma, he started the process of cleaning up by picking up her clothing and placing it on the bed so that he could access enough of the floor to vacuum. He grabbed the denim shorts that she’d slipped on after the pool party and something fell out of the pocket. He bent over to look at it, and when
he saw what it was, he went to the bathroom to grab a clean drinking glass and a tissue. Kneeling on the floor, he swept the object into the glass with the tissue, then flushed the tissue down the toilet. Putting Gingham’s clothing back exactly as she had left it, he slipped from the room, re-locking the door and hit the number to speed-dial Detective Chas Beckett.
**
Missy was surprised when she came back from her early morning walk and saw Chas’s car in the parking lot. Hoping that that didn’t mean bad news, she made her way to the Inn with Gingham and the dogs, a slow trickle of fear beginning to curl in the pit of her stomach.
“Thanks for getting me out for some fresh air,” Gingham smiled gratefully and gave Missy a hug.
“Oh, you’re welcome, darlin, anytime. I hope you feel better.”
“I definitely do,” the young singer nodded. “I may just go up to my room now and start writing some songs.”
“That’s great,” Missy opened the door to the sunporch, letting her guest go in first.
She followed behind with Toffee and Bitsy, who had dried out on the walk back to the Inn, surprised to find Chas waiting for her, looking grim, in the parlor.
“Hey sweetie,” she kissed him on the cheek. “Everything okay?”
“It will be,” he gazed at her fondly, then swung his gaze to Gingham, who was starting up the staircase to her room.
“Excuse me, Ms. Grant…do you have a moment?” he asked casually.
Chapter 17
Chas sat down on the sofa in the parlor, indicating that Gingham should sit in the chair directly across from him. She didn’t see Spencer standing behind her in the doorway, and the detective gave no indication that he was there.
“Why don’t you tell me about the night that Carter died?” Chas asked, without preamble.
“I really don’t want to talk about that, Detective. I told you everything that I knew the first time that we talked, and it’s really painful to think about,” she opened her eyes wide, looking like a sad, startled doe.
Apple Crisp Murder: A Frosted Love Cozy Mystery - Book 30 (A Frosted Love Cozy Mysteries) Page 5