Berry Murderous

by Katherine Hayton

  “That’s right. The hammer would’ve been among them.”

  “When was this?” Harmony leaned forward, frowning.

  “On the same night,” Lee said slowly, his brow furrowed as he thought back. “We went down to the pub for a quick pint—”

  Willow shot him an indignant look. “You told me you were inside, having a coffee.”

  To his credit, Lee’s expression turned sheepish. “Yeah, well. If the job were during the day, we would’ve been doing that. At night, it’s a different story.”

  “So, you were both at The Old Chestnut when Jeff was killed?” Willow nodded. “You need to tell the sheriff that. He’ll be able to confirm it with the bartender.”

  But Lee shook his head. “Not at the time the pathologist said the boss was hit. You see, Jeff was at the bar, too, while we were in there.”

  “You were having a drink together?”

  Lee’s expression transformed into one of horror. “No. Goodness, no. I wouldn’t have a drink with that lousy piece of filth if you paid me!”

  After a second, Lee seemed to remember that the ‘piece of filth’ was now a murder victim and he grew even more upset. “He came over to us and told Charley he was going to fit him up for the check.”

  “What’s that?” Reg looked confused at the conversation.

  Willow knew enough about that part to offer an explanation. “I overheard that Charley wrote a check out from the company account—”

  “No, he didn’t.” Lee stood up and began to pace back and forth, smacking one hand into the other. “It was all Jeff’s idea. He was sick of getting all the letters from Shelby. He’d told us at the start it wasn’t his fault, the wood was misrepresented when it was sold to him, and if anyone got stuck with the bill for repairs, it should be the supplier.”

  “Was that true?” Willow asked.

  Lee shook his head. “No. None of it. Not according to the other builders who were involved, at any rate. When Jeff realized Shelby wasn’t going to go away, he wrote out a check for Charley to deposit into his account. The plan was for him to approach Shelby with a settlement offer.”

  Willow felt the threads of the conversation getting away from her. “Why didn’t he just deal with her directly?”

  “Jeff said that if he made the offer straight to her, it could be seen as an admission of liability. By doing it through Charley, he distanced himself from the whole thing.”

  “But she turned Charley down,” Willow guessed.

  Again, Lee shook his head. “He never even got that far. Jeff only gave the check to Charley to deposit on the Friday, so the soonest it could clear for him to make the offer was this week.”

  Harmony sat back, looking shocked. “And then Jeff said he’d frame Charley for stealing the money?”

  Lee nodded. “Exactly. He said no one would believe his silly story, and he’d end up in prison. Even if he didn’t go to jail, nobody in town would hire him to do a building job ever again.”

  The small group looked at each other, aghast, while Lee continued to pace the length of the room.

  Reg was the one who ventured the thought they were all thinking. “So, Charley did have a very pressing reason to kill his boss, then?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Soon after Reg said the words they were all dreading, he followed up, saying, “Hang on a second. It couldn’t have been Charley.”

  Willow looked at him, hope dueling with despair. “Why do you say that?”

  “I was sitting on the pier, remember?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. You lying about that’s the reason the sheriff thought you were a big target in the first place.”

  Reg flapped his hand at her. “I don’t like everybody knowing my business, and I knew I hadn’t killed Mr. Waterman. Sheriff Wender should’ve just taken my word for it. We’d have arrived at an answer a lot sooner.”

  “None of which tells us why you think Charley couldn’t have committed the murder,” Harmony said, getting the conversation back on track.

  “He couldn’t have done it because he never passed by me.” Reg folded his arms, looking very pleased with himself.

  Willow waited with bated breath, but there was nothing more. “Is that it?” The disappointment came clearly through her voice.

  “Jeff walked past me on this way home,” Reg explained further. “He can’t have gotten much farther, or his body would have had to float upstream to land where it did.”

  He looked at the group expectantly and when they offered blank stares in return, forged ahead. “That means the person who killed him, had to come past me if they were also in the pub.”

  “So, nobody came past after Jeff?” Willow still couldn’t quite understand Reg’s certainty but was happy to go along with it for the moment. She’d play along with anything, if it meant Charley might be innocent.

  “Well, somebody did, but it wasn’t a man.”

  “Who was it?”

  Reg shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t actually turn to see at that point. I’d only looked after Jeff because the man was muttering to himself.”

  “How do you know it was a lady if you didn’t turn around?” Willow leaned back on the sofa, her hope starting to drain away.

  “Because she was wearing high heels.” Reg looked at Lee with his eyebrow cocked. “Unless that’s something Charley’s into.” He held up his hands. “I’m not judging, just need to know.”

  Lee burst into laughter. “No. Even if he liked to cross-dress, I don’t think Charley would have the balance necessary for heels. Especially not after a few pints at The Old Chestnut. Besides, the sheriff mightn’t take my word for it, but Charley and I both stormed out of there after what Jeff said. He was headed home, the last I saw him. That’s in the opposite direction to where Jeff would’ve been headed.”

  “Do you think the woman who passed by afterward was the one who killed him?” Willow asked Reg, forming a suspicion for someone who she didn’t want in the frame any more than Charley.

  Again, Reg shrugged. “I don’t know. There could’ve been someone laying in wait farther up the road, for all we know. All I can swear to is Charley didn’t pass by me and he would’ve had to if he wanted to kill Jeff, given where his body ended up.”

  Willow looked from Harmony to Lee, then to Reg. “If you’re certain about this, we have to take it down to the sheriff’s office. You’ll need to put it into a sworn statement before it can be used to help free Charley.”

  At the suggestion, Reg’s face paled, and he gripped the edge of the sofa as though it was a bucking bronco. “I really don’t want to go in there again. The last time, I thought for sure the sheriff would never let me leave.”

  “It’s different this time around,” Willow said. “You’re the one bringing them information instead of hiding it. It’ll be a simple mission to get in there, go into an interview room and get it all on the record.”

  But Reg shook so violently at that suggestion Willow couldn’t bear to force him to go in alone.

  “How about you, me, Harmony, and Lee all go in together?” she suggested instead. “We can insist to the sheriff we’re all giving a statement, and he can either cram all four of us into that tiny interview room or sit us around his desk in the open office, like normal people.”

  Reg looked at her, searching her eyes for a reassurance that he must have found there. He gave a short nod. “That, I can do.”

  “Well, let’s get a move on,” Willow said, getting to her feet with a small grunt, much to Lee’s amusement. “We don’t want to leave it so long the sheriff has gone home for the night.”

  The look of weariness on Sheriff Wender’s face almost made Willow feel sorry for him as they trooped into his office. Almost. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for his earlier jibes.

  “We have a statement to make in the case of Jeff Waterman’s murder,” Willow said, mimicking an early episode of Miss Walsham Investigates. Although nobody else would care, she was delighted with hitting precisely th
e right tone. Officious but not too pushy.

  The sheriff looked bemused as the group explained they would be sticking together for the duration. For a minute, Willow thought the man was about to protest, then his shoulders slumped, and he waved a hand around his desk. “Grab a chair and get close in,” Sheriff Wender said. “I don’t want to have to shout.”

  All four of them dragged their chairs together, looking expectantly at Reg to start them off. When he shot a pleading look at Willow, she offered him a prompt.

  “Reg has information about the people who were in the vicinity at the time of Mr. Waterman’s murder. As you know, he was seated on the pier when Jeff walked past him. Therefore, anyone walking from The Old Chestnut in pursuit of the man had to go straight by him.”

  Reg nodded, looking at Willow to further explain his case. She shook her head, it was his turn.

  He gave a giant sigh and clutched his hands together in his lap. “I heard Mr. Waterman go past not long after it got dark. Although I’d seen Lee here—” Reg jerked his head at the young man “—and Charley go past on their way from the Patterson’s decking job to the pub earlier, I never saw nor heard them come back past.”

  The sheriff looked at Reg with raised eyebrows. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Is that it?”

  “Nobody walked from The Old Chestnut after Jeff left there,” Willow said with a hint of impatience, forgetting that she’d struggled to follow Reg’s line of thinking just a half-hour ago.

  Reg cleared his throat. “No male, anyway.”

  Willow nodded. “No men passed that way, so Charley can’t have been the murderer.” She jerked her head toward Lee. “Mr. Harrington can tell you all about the check Mr. Lacy is supposed to have forged, and I believe he also reported to you some tools were stolen off the building site they were working on.”

  The sheriff snorted in disbelief. “First off—” he began ticking items off on his fingers “—we only have your word for it, Reg, that no one passed by there. Since you’ve already lied to me about where you were that evening, forgive me if I don’t blindly take you at your word. Second, you were working with Mr. Lacy at the time, weren’t you, Lee?”

  The young man nodded, pursing his mouth.

  “Hardly an unbiased point of view. Thirdly, the tools were only reported stolen the next morning, after Mr. Waterman had been murdered. That’s not an alibi at all.”

  “What about the woman?”

  All eyes turned to Harmony as she spoke for the first time.

  Sheriff Wender gave another massive sigh. “Fine, I’ll bite. What about what woman?”

  “Well—” Harmony shifted on her chair, looking uneasy “—from what Reg says, there was a woman who came along the road not long after Jeff passed by. Isn’t that right?”

  Reg nodded in agreement.

  “Now, he didn’t see her—” Harmony held up her hand to forestall the coming objection from the sheriff “—but I’m sure we can all agree there’s only one woman with a large complaint about Jeff Waterman in Aniseed Valley. Shelby Causer.”

  Willow felt a pang of misgiving as Harmony spoke the woman’s name. It didn’t seem fair to be blaming her, behind her back, especially when Shelby would soon be working in the tea shop. If I ever finish getting it built. “We don’t know that—”

  Harmony held her hand up again, this time cutting Willow off mid-sentence. “No, we can’t tell for sure who it was, but that makes the most sense to me. What about it, Sheriff? Is there a reason we’ve overlooked that crosses Shelby Causer out from your list of suspects?”

  “Yes,” the sheriff said at once, and Willow gave a short sigh of relief. “She has an alibi for the night in question. She stayed the whole afternoon and evening with her sister over in Wilber Pines, and we have a sworn statement to support it. If you want to find another suspect, you’ll have to try harder than that.”

  As Willow stared at the sheriff, she felt her stomach lurch, then drop down to the floor. She twisted her hands in her lap, not wanting to say anything but too honest to keep the information to herself.

  She clearly remembered the day she went into The Old Chestnut, following up on what Charley might know. The bartender had made a joke about it being a long time since a pretty woman had been inside and Charley had responded with a quip about Shelby.

  It might all turn out to be a mistake, anyway.

  Willow grasped onto that hope like a lifeline as she cleared her throat. “Actually, I’m fairly certain Shelby Causer was in town that night, despite what her sister says. Both Charley and the bartender at The Old Chestnut said she was in the pub.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Willow winced as the paper hit the doorstep. The bend down to pick it up wasn’t nearly as painful as reading the headline.

  SHELBY CAUSER FOUND GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER

  Although Willow hadn’t accompanied the sheriff when he went to Shelby’s house to question her, she’d heard afterward that the woman had immediately confessed when confronted with the evidence from the bartender that suggested she was in town on the night in question.

  The confession had been accompanied by a lot of sorrow in the community. Although Willow could imagine the stressors that the woman was under, the act of taking a hammer and striking Jeff Waterman down was so far beyond her comprehension that she shied away from even thinking about it.

  An even greater shame was that if Shelby had just held on, then the community would have gone some way toward righting her dreadful situation. Instead, now, the money raised was all being directed to fix up the school–also a worthy cause.

  As if intuiting Willow was in need of a bit of light relief, both Reg and Harmony turned up within a few minutes of each other. Between sorting them out with refreshments and playing with Mavis, there was barely time to dwell on the terrible outcome.

  “They’re tearing Shelby’s house down today, did you know?” Reg asked as he finished up his cup of tea. “A few of the fellows who’ve been doing the inspections gratis are going along to watch. We could join them if you like.”

  Willow opened her mouth to say, no, it was a terrible idea, and somehow ending up saying, “Yes. I think I’d like that.”

  Harmony looked about as shocked as Willow herself, but they soon bundled themselves up against the cold weather and headed out the door.

  “It’s hard to believe that nowadays something this terrible could happen.” Reg shook his head. “If only that scoundrel had owned up and rectified the damage, everyone would be better off today.”

  He sounded so miserable Willow gave him a concerned once-over. “We can leave if you like. I don’t really care that much about the place coming down. It was just the spur of the moment.”

  But Reg was adamant. “I feel horrible knowing that if me and the guys had only reached out sooner, we might’ve been able to engineer a different end.”

  Willow hooked her arm through Reg’s on the left-hand side, while Harmony did the same on the other. “All the ifs and maybes can’t change what happened. You were headed in the right direction, and the blame for the tragedy can only be laid at two people’s door.”

  At that, Harmony tutted. “It doesn’t feel right to blame the murder victim.”

  “I’m not blaming him for getting murdered,” Willow hastened to explain. “I’m accusing him of being a terrible builder who couldn’t care less about whether his client’s needs were met.”

  “Not like your builders, eh Lee?” Charley said coming up behind them.

  Lee stood off to the side, shuffling his feet and looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else but there.

  “Well, of course, my builders are nothing like that,” Willow agreed. “I only hire the brightest and the best.”

  That caused Lee to color a brilliant shade of red in addition to looking like he wanted to leave.

  “Oops. There it goes,” Reg said as the first bite of the roof surrendered to the digger’s mighty jaws. “Goodness. I always think of my house as bein
g so strong, but this makes it look like tinfoil and cardboard, doesn’t it?”

  “It’d be a different story if there were brickwork but, yeah.” Charley nodded. “Those machines certainly let you know who’s boss.”

  In an hour, most of the excitement was over with. Lee made his excuses first and left, while the remaining group members accepted Willow’s invitation to return to her place for a cup of tea.

  “I want to try out the new tea rooms,” she said as they wandered back to her house, pairing up on the sidewalk. “You can pretend to be my first customers.”

  Reg’s eyes gleamed. “Does that mean we get to send everything back until it’s exactly to our liking?”

  “If you’re prepared to pay for it,” Willow quickly shot back. “Otherwise, you don’t need to take the play acting quite that far.”

  Instead of walking through the front door, Willow forced them to trot up the new path to the side and around the back. “I’m serious,” she warned them sternly. “I need a thorough try out of what’s involved if I’m ever to sort out the requirements for my staffing.”

  Leaving them to it, she ducked inside and hurried along to open up the conservatory doors.

  Although at one stage it had seemed impossible the building work would ever be finished, Willow was now overjoyed at what had been achieved. After a few long conversations with Charley explaining the ins and outs of what she needed—a process that felt a thousand times more comfortable than when she went through it with Jeff—he and Lee took over and turned her vision into bricks and mortar.

  The conservatory was so different from the ramshackle building it had sprung from, that if Willow were plonked down inside with no point of reference, she never would have been able to guess that’s where she was. Windows offered a clear view of the gardens on every side, while still managing to enclose the space and make it feel cozy.

  In summer, one entire wall of windows could be slid back to open up the space to the afternoon breezes—an option that would offer as much refreshment as Willow’s excellent assortment of herbal teas. In winter, the double glazing retained whatever heat the afternoon sun brought with it. A row of air conditioning units was tucked along behind the serving counter, at floor level, to aid with keeping the room temperate.