“If she’s your best dove, then it’s worth it,” Kimmie said, adding without preamble. “I saw Owen arrive at the shop.”
Ingrid fingered the bills in her wallet, clearly debating the tip she hadn’t placed.
“He had company.”
Ingrid pulled out a five-dollar-bill, placed it on the money in front of Kimmie.
“It was that blonde that used to come out with Emily when you didn’t.”
Ingrid choked, snorted and choked again. She took a long haul of a breath in and started hacking, unable to catch her breath. When she finally recovered, tears were running down her face. “Did you just say that Melinda was on the island with dickhead before he was dead?”
“If she’s the big-haired, big-boobed, forty-something, then yeah.”
Ingrid pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, dropped it on the pile and said, “You can have the apartment for free. Creepy gallery guy is moving.”
“Oh,” she grinned her evil, machinating grin and said, “I saw his light on, too. That guy creeps me out. And I’m holding you to that apartment.”
Ingrid paused, considered giving Kimmie more money and remembered that she just got the apartment for free. Ingrid and her big mouth.
“Um, that doesn’t include utilities and also, yeah, art gallery creepster has a stay-away-from-me, never-find-me-in-a-dark-alley vibe.”
Ingrid opened the door, looked around the downtown area, grinned wide as she pulled out her phone and shot a group text to Emily and Gabe, “Yo! Guess what whorish sister-in-law was sneaking around on the island with señor sleaze bag? That’s right, it was Melinda. Let’s have lunch sometime, m’kay? Please let it be her who killed sleaze-o. There’s no one I’d rather see in an orange jumpsuit. Keep your hands off my man, Emily. Gabe, dream of me. Hugs, I’m off for either booze or chocolate depending on which demon wins the battle on my shoulder. P.S. Kimmie saw it all. She’s taking creepy gallery guy’s apartment once he goes. Her rent is free. My bad on the whole trying to blackmail the nail lady and getting taken to the cleaners. Good thing Sheriff Hotpants has such a reliable job. XOXO”
•
Saturday Afternoon
Emily stared at the age-yellowed walls of the police station’s interview room, tapping her purple fingernails. She checked her cell phone for the thousandth time. Still no phone call or text from Davis. And Melinda wasn’t answering either. Sheriff Gabe stuck his head back in the door.
“Any word?”
“No,” Emily sighed. “I can’t reach Davis or Melinda. I knew she wasn’t coming, but she assured me that he would still be here.” She motioned for him to come in. “Just come in and ask whatever questions you want.”
He stepped inside the room, gently closing the door behind him. He was always so damn polite. Ingrid could pick someone worse to hook up with than this small-town classic nice guy.
“Emily. Are you sure you want to waive your right to have an attorney present?”
She rolled her eyes. “Gabe. Seriously. It’s me. Remember, the girl that helped you through high school English. I didn’t kill Owen. And you know it. And I know you know it. I’m not worried. All right? Just get on with it, okay?”
He smiled, pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Okay, Em. I’m going to record this. This is just a formality. I know I took your statement yesterday but this gets it on the record.”
He pushed a button on the recording device in the middle of the table and spoke clearly. “This is Sheriff Gabriel Tate. I’m interviewing Emily Brown, widow of the late Owen Brown. It’s Saturday morning.” He looked up at her, and she tried not laugh at his serious cop voice. “Mrs. Brown, you agree that you have waived the presence of your attorney.”
She cleared her throat. “Yes, I’m innocent. I have nothing to hide.”
“Okay, then. We’ll get to it. Can you tell me where you were between the hours of nine pm and two am of Wednesday night/Thursday morning?”
“As I said when you asked me before, I was home in bed. Alone. There is no one that can verify that. To save your next question.”
“It’s routine to ask you these questions on the record, Mrs. Brown.”
Emily rolled her eyes again, but nodded.
Gabe continued. “You were married to Owen, but you were separated. Is that correct?”
“Yes, like I said before it was a very messy divorce. It’s common knowledge that I hated dickhead and he hated me back. We hated each other. He was dragging out the divorce and making my life miserable. But I didn’t kill him. Now, perhaps you could answer a question for me. Who else is on your suspect list?”
Their eyes met, neither blinking for a second. Gabriel was the first to look away. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of the investigation with you.”
Emily rolled her eyes, feeling much too much like a rebellious teenager and sighed again.
“What else do you want to know? I’ve got things to do. Clearly I’m going to have to solve this murder myself in order to clear my own name.”
“As I told your friend, Ingrid, you two need to stay out of this investigation. I’ll arrest you for obstruction, Em.”
She was silent, planning her next move and unwilling to give him the satisfaction of an argument. He continued his interrogation.
“Is there anyone you know that would kill your husband?”
“Unless you want me to throw up all over your pretty little recorder, don’t call him that. His name was Owen. And yes. Besides everyone he pissed off in his career, there was Ingrid. She hated him. And she totally would kill him. But of course, she has a very convenient alibi.”
His face turned red as he stared at her. His turn to clear his throat. He poured water into two paper cups that rested on the table between them, trying to regain his composure before he spoke into the recorder.
Emily smiled sweetly and winked at him. He choked on his water.
“Oh, my. Are you all right, Sheriff?”
“Fine. I’m fine.”
His cell phone started buzzing and simultaneously her phone beeped, signaling an incoming text. Emily’s eyes grew wider as she read Ingrid’s words on her phone.
Yo! Guess what whorish sister-in-law was sneaking around on the island with señor sleaze bag? That’s right, it was Melinda, let’s have lunch sometime, m’kay. Please let it be her who killed sleaze-o. There’s no one I’d rather see in an orange jumpsuit. Keep your hands off my man, Emily. Gabe, dream of me. Hugs, I’m off for either booze or chocolate depending on which demon wins the battle on my shoulder. P.S. Kimmie saw it all. She’s taking creepy gallery guy’s apartment once he goes. Her rent is free. My bad on the whole trying to blackmail the nail lady and getting taken to the cleaners. Good thing Sheriff Hotpants has such a reliable job. XOXO
“Um…” Emily started to speak but then paused, looking at the recorder.
“Why don’t we take a break, Mrs. Brown? You can stretch and use the facilities.”
He reached down and pushed stop.
Emily grilled him the moment the recording stopped. “Did you just get a text from Ingrid?”
He nodded. “Melinda is your sister-in-law. Were you close?”
Emily nodded. “Yes to sister-in-law. No too close. As far as I knew, Owen hated her. Even I’m shocked that Owen would sleep with her. Davis and Owen were always pretty close. Dickheads united type of thing. I wouldn’t have thought even he would stoop to sleeping with his brother’s wife.”
The sheriff took notes as Emily spoke and the shock wore off with a sudden spike of anger as she said, “That skinny redneck bitch!”
“Do you think Melinda could have killed Owen?”
Emily shook her head. “No. But she was probably screwing him.”
Gabe scratched some notes down on his notepad, and Emily’s mind raced as she considered the implications of this new piece of information. Melinda wouldn’t have killed Owen, she thought. It didn’t seem feasible at all.
Although, Emily never would hav
e suspected Melinda of cheating on Davis either. But hadn’t Melinda just admitted that she and Davis had an open marriage? And that Davis had given her an STD.
Suddenly, Emily’s palms began to sweat.
“What if she got the STD from Owen instead of Davis? Maybe she would have killed him for that.”
“Wait. What?”
“Melinda called me this morning to say she couldn’t come today with Davis because she was going to get tested for an STD that she assumed she’d picked up from Davis. But what if she got it from Owen?”
Gabe chewed on the end of his pen for a few seconds before speaking. “You know, Ingrid just told me that Doug Martin suspected that his daughter was sleeping with Owen.”
“Yeah! Why couldn’t that man sleep around in a bigger city? This is just too incestuous for me. Plus that girl is only a teenager! Great. My husband was a pedophile. It’s things like sleeping with children that destroy a marriage. Every new piece of info I get makes me that much gladder not only that he left me, but that the dickhead is dead.”
More silence. Finally Emily spoke again.
“Well, it’s pretty clear to me. I think you need to find Davis and see if he has an STD. And maybe while the coroner does the autopsy he could see if Owen had one, too.” She smiled. “I’m so glad I stopped sleeping with the whore over a year ago.”
Gabe pushed his chair back, the metal screeching on the ceramic tile floor. “I’ll check with the doc and try to reach Davis and Melinda.” He looked at her sternly. “I’m not sure how you just manipulated all of this information out of me. If you were doing a spell…”
“I wasn’t. I’m all handicapped magically.”
Gabe stared at her for a long minute before he said, “You two just leave the investigating to me.”
9
Sunday Morning
Emily sat in her favorite leather chair by the window of the bookstore while she waited for Gabe. He’d called and said he needed to look around the shop for some clues. Was he going to come with a magnifying glass and a pipe? If he did, that would make her day so much better. She drummed her nails on the soft leather, trying to keep awake. She decided that having a murder investigation around the death of her soon-to-be ex-husband was messing with her nap schedule.
Her phone buzzed with an incoming text from Melinda. “Can we talk? I need to talk to you.”
Emily typed a quick response. “Were you sleeping with Owen?”
After a few seconds, the phone buzzed again. “I think we need to talk about this in person. I want you to understand what happened.”
Emily replied, “I don’t need to see you in person unless you want me to kill you. In which case, name the time and place.”
Then Emily powered her phone off. “Needy whore,” she muttered under her breath.
She closed her eyes and pushed Melinda out of her mind before drifting into sleep.
The bell rang when the door to the shop opened, and Emily opened her eyes and then stood up, wiping the drool from her chin. Dammit. That had been a really good dream. Who was that guy? She needed to find him and act out her dream. Just as soon as this dumb investigation was over. She knew she couldn’t concentrate on dating until this was done.
Also, she was pretty mad that her nap had been interrupted, so she scowled at Gabe as he crossed the shop.
“Your death is damned inconvenient, Owen,” she muttered to herself. He should have had a heart attack and fallen off the ferry on the way home. So much better.
Gabe raised his eyebrow in response to her comment but didn’t ask any questions.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff? Did you track down Davis or hear back about Owen’s disease-ridden body? I assume he had syphilis and genital warts.”
“Not yet. We’ve got the department looking out for Davis and Melinda since I haven’t been able to reach either of them by phone, but if they’re not on the island, I can’t force them to come in yet. And the coroner said he’ll let me know about the autopsy results as soon as he’s got them. He’s rushing it for me. Right now, I’m just following up on a lead. I need to have a look around the shop. And ask you some questions.”
“I thought I saw Davis’s car pass by the shop earlier, but maybe it wasn’t him. Anyway. You want in the basement again to go over the crime scene?”
Emily was surprised when he shook his head. “No. Not this time. What can you tell me about the type of herbs you sell?”
“Uh, almost nothing. We sell herbs from here. I can show where we keep them and get you a list of the different ones, but honestly I have no idea what these herbs do. Mostly we just find them in the bins, weigh them into bags, throw in some extra to make sure we didn’t screw it up and send them off. This is the only part of Aunt Danna’s business we’ve kept running. I’m not sure how she ever made money off this dump.” Emily glanced around the bookshop, noticing again all the dust and the dank smell of old books.
“You’re renovating, right?”
“Yep. Ingrid doesn’t want to be seen in here until it’s cute. But Aunt Hazel said if we didn’t keep the witch stuff up, she’d hex us as she and Danna worked so hard for the clientele.”
“Even though you aren’t good at magic?”
“Dude,” Emily said, “We’re terrible. Possibly the worst. If the containers that held the herbs weren’t labeled, we’d be screwed. We get a few orders a week from her regular customers. Ingrid knows more about it than I do. She’s lazy but she does like money.”
“Why do you think Hazel insisted you keep it running? Why does she care?”
“The coven used to be all buddy-buddy here. They’d have terrible coffee and gossip and do off-the-cuff spells. I think she’s hoping that’ll happen again.” Emily shrugged.
Gabe wrote some notes down and then said, “Why don’t you show me where you keep your supply?”
“Yeah, okay. Sure.”
She led the way to the basement rooms where her aunt stored all the plants and herbs. “I hope my aunt doesn’t have anything illegal down here that you shouldn’t be seeing. Like marijuana. That would be just my luck. I could go to prison on a double charge—first degree murder and selling drugs. I hate that guy. Why did he have to die here? Just to screw with me one more time?”
Gabe sighed, exasperated. “I don’t think Owen died from a marijuana overdose.”
“Oh, so you think something in this shop killed him then? Did the coroner tell you for sure what killed him?”
Gabe was now perusing the shelves of herbs. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
Emily rolled her eyes. “Please. Maybe I’m not at liberty to let you search my store without a warrant then, Sheriff.”
He didn’t respond to her threat but continued looking through the inventory, settling on one particular container. He held it up.
“Can I take this?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. Take what you want.”
“Your cooperation will look good. I’ll also need your computers that have any records of transactions and inventory.”
“It will look good for me? Are you trying to freak me out? Are you messing with me? I’ll tell Ingrid on you. Also, jerkhole, you know I didn’t do it. Take whatever you want. I didn’t kill Owen. Though, with every passing moment, I’m wishing I had.”
Gabe cleared his throat. “You might want to refrain from making statements like that in front of me. If I ever had to testify, comments like that wouldn’t help you very much.”
“Whatever, Gabe. You won’t be testifying against me because I didn’t kill Owen.”
“I don’t get a choice over who I testify about, Em. You don’t know what any of these are?”
“I don’t cook and I don’t do magic. Ingrid knows a few. Herbs are boring. This is boring. I’m gonna go take a nap.”
She walked to the counter and pulled out a laptop from underneath it.
“Here’s the laptop that came with business. Any records we have will be on this.”
She turned toward
the door to leave and then turned around for one last word. “Oh, if you need anything else from me that requires me to get up from my nap, then get a warrant. My sleep is very important. And lock up when you are done, yeah? There’s a murderer running around. Who knows who’ll be next.”
She tossed her keys at him, and he caught them out of the air
“I’m sure you’ll see Ingrid soon. She’s clearly obsessed with you. You can return my keys to her. Oh, and ask her about creepy gallery guy getting up in our faces. Tell her she should file a restraining order so her sheriff can protect her.”
“What?” he asked, but she didn’t wait to answer.
She pushed through the backdoor and headed through the wrought-iron gate that separated the back of the shops from the elevator that led to the apartments.
Owen was such a huge pain. Maybe even more now that he was dead.
She needed her beauty sleep, so she pushed Owen out of her mind. There was no way she was gonna let a dead guy interfere with her nap. Not even a dead guy that she used to love. She wasn’t going to waste any more time stressing about him. There was a pit in her stomach that refused to go away, despite her bravado.
•
Sunday Evening
“Do you realize,” Ingrid said to Emily, “that nothing in my house is actually good to eat? All I have that you can eat is coffee, wine, and chocolate. I suppose you could eat that sugar scrub I bought yesterday. Every single thing else is expired or useless. What kind of crazy dove buys orange champagne vinegar? Why did I?”
“You said it sounded interesting,” Emily replied as she stretched out on Ingrid’s chaise lounge. She pointed her toes toward the ceiling, rotated her feet and sighed. She pulled Ingrid’s case of nail polish onto her lap and began digging through it.
“Are you talking about the sugar scrub in your shower?” Emily rose, setting down the case of polish she’d just picked up and crossed through the wide-open living room that had barely been refinished by the crew that Ingrid hired to completely renovate the apartment. Emily pulled open the drawer that held the takeout menus. “I don’t eat bath products. Also, you have herbs.”
Inconvenient Murder: An Inept Witches Mystery Page 8