by Lucy Ness
“So why did you keep the key?”
Brittany flinched. She looked away. “What key? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I pulled her key ring out of my pocket and jingled it in front of her gnome nose. “Every key is here except the front door key.”
She stuck out her bottom lip. “That doesn’t mean I took it.”
“But if you did, it does mean you could come and go from the club anytime you wanted.”
As if I’d punched her, she reared back. “You mean like the night Muriel was killed?”
“Where were you?”
She sniffed. “I don’t see why that’s any business of yours.”
“Technically, it’s not,” I admitted. “Except the board wants me to ask around. Here I am, asking. Where were you the night Muriel was killed?”
She lifted her chin. “Right here.”
“All night?”
“Yes, all night. And all day, too. I haven’t found another job yet.” She backed away from me. “I still don’t see why this is any of your business.”
“Do you have the key?”
“No.” I might have actually believed her if she didn’t blink wildly when she made the statement. Her voice rang out against the Disney figurines that watched us. “I never want to step foot inside that place again.”
It’s one thing to think about playing detective.
It’s another thing to actually do it.
I didn’t have the chops to make Brittany fess up.
And I had exactly zero authority.
I had no choice but to head to the door. “I get it. I really do. I’m sorry you had such a terrible experience at the club. If you need a reference for a new job—”
She shot me a look. “I’ll do fine on my own, thank you. I don’t need your help.”
I opened the door. “Well, good luck. If you change your mind—”
“I won’t,” she assured me, and I think she was going to say something else, but she never had the chance.
The back door opened and closed, and the delicious aroma of grilled steak wafted into the room just as a voice called out, “Dinner’s ready, honey!”
When the man holding a plate with those steaks on them strode into the room, he took one look at me and stopped cold.
He was a tall guy with curly brown hair, wide shoulders, and piercing blue eyes, and honestly, I couldn’t say if he was a looker like Gracie thought, but I did know one thing. I knew exactly who he was.
CHAPTER 12
I nodded by way of greeting. “Bill Manby, I presume.”
Bill was dressed in khakis and a green golf shirt, and he set the steaks on the table so he could cross his arms over his broad chest. “Who wants to know?”
“It’s Avery,” Brittany told him. “The one who got—”
“Your job. Yeah. I remember them talking, after they decided to hire her.” Bill narrowed his eyes, blue lasers, and shot me a look. “What do you want?”
Before I could answer, Brittany stepped toward him. “She’s looking for the front door key to the club, the one that used to be mine. I told her I don’t have it, that I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
Bill snorted. “What, those rich old ladies can’t afford to make a copy of a key for you?”
“I’ve got a full set of my own keys,” I told him. “What I don’t have is an explanation as to why Brittany would want to keep a key after she no longer worked at the club.”
“She told you she doesn’t have it,” Bill snapped.
“She thinks I’m lying,” Brittany sputtered. “She thinks I killed Muriel.”
“Then you’re flat-out crazy.” Bill didn’t spare me another look. He flumped down on the closest chair, pulled it up to the table, and used his fork to stab one of the steaks so he could set it on his plate. “You got mushrooms to go with this, right?” he asked Brittany.
We all knew she did, and she scurried into the kitchen to get them and brought them to the table along with two baked potatoes. She sat down across from Bill.
It was rude to stand there and watch them eat. That didn’t stop me. I inched nearer and waited until Bill had a mouth full. “Muriel told me she sacked you because you were stealing from the club.”
He swallowed and coughed, and when he kept on coughing, Brittany popped up and hurried into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. Bill gulped it down and pounded his chest before he frowned in my direction.
“The woman was a liar. She made up that story because she wanted to get rid of me.”
“Why? Did she want Kendall to have your job, too?”
My sarcastic humor was lost on both of them, so I ignored their blank looks and decided on another tack. “Look, I’m just trying to get at the truth. If Muriel made up the story about you stealing—”
“She did.” Bill had a mushroom speared on the end of his fork, and he poked it in my direction. “That woman was as nutty as a fruitcake.”
“That’s why she fired you? Because she was nuts?”
Bill and Brittany exchanged brief looks before Bill popped the mushroom into his mouth. “That’s right,” he said even while he was chewing. “Nuts. And I can prove it. She said I stole stuff from the club, right?”
I nodded. “According to Muriel, you took two stained glass lamps, a porcelain ewer, and . . .” There was something else, I only had to remember what it was. “An oil portrait!” The words popped into my head and immediately out of my mouth. “A picture of Hortense Dash’s son, Percival. Sweet child, or so I’ve been told. Blond hair, cute smile.”
Bill scowled. “Well, if that was true, if she was so worried about me stealing, how come the cops have never showed up to ask me about it?”
A legitimate question.
“It’s because she never filed a police report,” Bill added. “Because it never happened, and Muriel knew she could get in trouble if she filed a false report. She was just looking for an excuse to get rid of me. That woman, she was a nasty piece of work.”
“Where were you the night she was killed?” I asked him.
“Nowhere near the club,” he assured me. His gaze flickered to Brittany. “I was here. All night. With Brit.”
“So she’s your alibi? And you’re hers?”
He scooped up some baked potato. “Looks that way.” He chewed and swallowed before he said, “Which should pretty much prove we’re telling you the truth. If we were guilty and really needed an alibi, we’d come up with something better than that, don’t you think? Instead of wasting your time talking to us, why don’t you ask some of those fancy-schmancy ladies what they were up to when Muriel was bumped off?”
“Why? Do you think one of them killed her?”
“I know a bunch of them had reasons,” Bill grumbled.
“Like?”
Bill worked on his steak a bit more, and while he was doing that, Brittany spooned sour cream onto her baked potato. “If Agnes won the election, everything would have been fine,” she grumbled. “Our troubles would have been over. Agnes was a dream to work with.”
“But she didn’t win.” I didn’t need to point it out, but I thought they should know I’d heard the story straight from the horse’s mouth. “She told me she dropped out of the election because she was being nice to Muriel.”
Bill snorted a laugh.
Brittany nearly gagged on her baked potato.
She recovered first. “Agnes being nice to Muriel? Never!”
I couldn’t help but wonder, “Then why would she drop out of the election and let Muriel walk into the president’s job?”
Thinking, Brittany tapped her fork against her plate. “I wondered the same thing,” she admitted. “Told Bill as much. Didn’t I, Bill? Told Bill it smelled plenty fishy to me. Muriel and Agnes, they were mortal enemies.”
“You mean because Agnes was once engaged to Tab, and Muriel ended up marrying him.”
“You know about that, huh?” Brittany excused herself and went into the kitchen. She came back with a bottle of wine and poured some into both hers and Bill’s glasses. “Agnes is a nice woman. I’m glad she’s finally president.”
“Then who do you think killed Muriel?” I asked her.
Brittany stood beside the table and held the wine bottle to her chest like a shield. “We’ve been talking about it. Me and Bill.”
“Which doesn’t mean a thing,” Bill insisted. “Of course we’d talk about it. Anybody who worked with somebody who’s been murdered would talk about it.”
“And we think . . .” Brittany skimmed a look in Bill’s direction and when he didn’t object, she cleared her throat. “You know, she cut Tab off.”
It took a second for me to process this piece of information. “Muriel? You mean she—”
“Cut the purse strings. Just like that.” Bill put down his fork long enough to snap his fingers.
“She was the one with all the money,” Brittany added. “Old family money, and there’s plenty of it. And Tab, from what I’ve heard, he loves to spend it. Cars, vacations, clothes. Once he married Muriel, he never had to worry and he never had to work a day in his life, either. Then one day, I heard Muriel on the phone with him. Not that I was eavesdropping or anything,” she added quickly. “I was just passing the president’s office and it was impossible not to hear. That’s how angry she was. That’s how loud she was talking. She said, ‘That’s the last of it, Tab. No more allowance. No more meal ticket. I’ve had it with you.’” Brittany shrugged. “I never had the nerve to ask her about it, and now . . . well, I guess now it doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” Bill added. “Because now that Muriel’s dead, Tab probably gets all her money, anyway.”
* * *
* * *
Did Tab inherit Muriel’s fortune?
It was an interesting question, and one I’d have to dig into when I had time.
The way it was, when I got back to the club, it was late, it was dark, and after watching Bill and Brittany eat their dinner, I listened to my stomach rumble and realized I was starving.
Just as I rolled by the front of the club, I saw a movement in the shadows near the front door, just out of the circle of the glow of the security light, and when I pulled my car closer, I saw the shadow detach itself from the darker shadows around it.
I made sure my car doors were locked and reached for the phone just as the person stepped into the light. That’s when I breathed a sigh of relief and put down my car window.
“Oz, what are you doing here?”
He sauntered over looking all official in the kind of beige trench coat so many cops wear in so many movies. “Looking for you, of course.”
“I was . . .” How could I explain that I’d been out interviewing suspects? Rather than try, I shrugged and pointed across the parking lot to the space where I usually left my car. “I’ll be right back,” I told him.
Leave it to a cop not to allow a woman to walk across a dark parking lot all by herself.
By the time I got out of the car, he was right there waiting for me.
“When I realized you weren’t here, I was all set to leave and I figured I’d just call you in the morning. I still can. If it’s too late.”
It was late. I was whooped.
“How do you feel about pasta?” I asked him.
“Depends if I’m cooking it or just eating it.”
“Quentin made the sauce. I think I have the culinary skills to deal with the noodles.”
He grinned. “Well, since I was pretty sure my dinner tonight would have been from the drive-through at McDonald’s, that sounds perfect to me!”
Inside, I turned on the lights in the hallway and the dining room, and once we were back in the kitchen, I put a pot of water on to boil and found the container of sauce Quentin had earmarked for me, put the sauce in a pan, and set it on the stove to heat.
“You’re working.” Not much of a deduction, since when he slipped out of his raincoat, I saw that Oz was wearing a dark suit and a crisp white shirt. His tie had little dots on it, red against a navy background.
He stretched. “One thing they never emphasize enough at the police academy is the lousy hours.”
“If they did, would you have quit and done something else?”
As if he had to think about it, he cocked his head, but he answered quickly enough. “Nah. It’s in my blood. My dad was a cop. So were both his brothers. I always knew this was what I wanted to do.”
“Except for the lousy hours.”
He grinned. “Sometimes the company makes up for the hours.”
He was talking about me. He was smiling at me.
And I suddenly felt like a high school freshman at her first dance.
Good thing I noticed the steam rising from the pasta pot. Tossing the pasta in the boiling water gave me something to do, something to think about besides Oz’s warm smile.
“You stopped by to see me.” Done with the pasta, I spun to face him, and yes, I sounded as totally dorky as I suddenly felt. “What did you want?”
Maybe Oz felt dorky, too. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. Took them out again. “You were going to look through your rooms. To see if anything—”
“Yes, of course.” I’d tucked that list of missing items in my purse and I took it out and handed it over to him and Oz read it, then looked up with a question in his dark eyes.
“This stuff is all awfully personal,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“So who here would care that much about you?” He made a face. “Sorry. That didn’t come out like I meant it. What I mean is, you’re new in town, right? But the list of things that were taken from your room . . .” He consulted it. “Address book, journal, datebook. A burglar wouldn’t have bothered. He would have gone after a TV or jewelry or cash. But these things . . .” He tapped a finger against my list. “They sure don’t sound like anything a stranger would care about. Are you sure you haven’t run into anyone here who you knew back in Lily Dale?”
His words hit, along with a realization, and I froze. “You checked me out.”
“Well . . .” He gave me a sort of one-shoulder shrug. “It’s what I do.”
“You think I’m a suspect.”
Another shrug pretty much said it all. “At the beginning of an investigation, everyone is a suspect. And you were right here at the scene. You found the body. You called 911.”
“Yes, but I—”
He held up a hand to stop my protest. “I know. You were at the Chamber of Commerce meeting. I verified that. And I know you went to the grocery store after, just like you said you did.”
“I gave you the receipt to prove it.”
“And I went to the grocery store and watched the security tapes just to make sure you were telling the truth.”
I sucked in a gasp. “You really did think I might have done it!”
“Occupational hazard.”
“And that’s why you did a background check on me, too. That’s how you know I’m from Lily Dale.”
He pulled his notebook out of the pocket of his suit jacket, but something told me he really didn’t need to look at what was written in it. He looked through the pages, anyway.
“Twenty-nine years old. Born in Buffalo. Raised in Lily Dale. But not by your parents.”
“They died in an auto accident when I was six.”
“You were raised by Rosemary . . .” This, he did need to check in his book. “Rosemary Walsh.”
“My mother’s sister.”
“And a medium.”
I gave him the same flippant answer I’d always given the kids at school when they found out where I lived and who I live
d with and started making fun. “Truth be told, Aunt Rosemary is more like a large!”
He smiled politely. That is, right before he asked, “Do you suppose she could contact Ms. Sadler for us?”
His question caught me off guard.
Right before it made me laugh.
“You’re not serious?”
He pursed his lips. “If there’s one thing you learn on the police force, it’s that there are a lot of weird things out there. Talking to the dead would just be another one of them.”
“You mean . . .” I barely dared to ask. “Do you think it can be done?”
He slid me a look. “Do you?”
I balanced the idea of telling him about Clemmie against not wanting to look crazy. After all, dorky doesn’t hold a candle to whacked out.
I was saved from deciding when the timer went off. The pasta was done.
I drained the noodles, filled our plates, ladled on sauce.
I remembered what he said about how he was still on the clock. “I don’t suppose you can have a glass of wine?”
He sighed. “Another rain check. But go ahead, if you want to.”
I didn’t. It seemed mean-spirited to drink wine in front of him when he couldn’t.
Oz leaned over his plate and breathed in deep. “That smells great. Your chef must be a genius. Where’d he do his training?”
I’d just twirled up a forkful of pasta and I stopped before I could put it in my mouth. “Something tells me you already know that. You must have run a background check on him, too.”
“Touché!” Oz chewed, swallowed, and smiled his approval. “He’s got a record, you know.”