Houses and Homicide

by Alabaster, Stacey

  A suspicious look came over Blake. He spoke in a measured tone. “Of course I know that name.” He shook his head in disbelief. “But how do you know it?”

  I couldn’t figure out whether he was just trying to play me, or whether he really didn’t know about Cheryl’s two-timing scheme. Before I could answer, our pizza arrived.

  I pulled apart a piece of pizza, stretching the mozzarella to breaking point and then popped a bite in my mouth. It was delicious and with the sweetness of the peppers and the texture of the mushroom, I didn’t miss the meat at all.

  I still hadn’t answered Blake’s question. I had more of my own I wanted to ask, now that I was finally face to face with the guy.

  “So how well did you know Cheryl?” I asked, before taking another bite of the pizza.

  “Well enough that I was thinking about going into business with her,” Blake said. He looked a little embarrassed as he returned to his own plate, tearing at the corner of his napkin a little. “That probably surprises you,” he said, still not looking up at me. “That a tiny little organic, locally sourced store like mine would want to get into bed with a corporation.”

  I shook my head. “You have to do what you have to do to survive. I know that better than anyone.”

  Blake sighed and stretched his arms out in the sunlight. “I still hadn’t made my mind up. Not a hundred percent. But Cheryl kept pushing me and pushing me. Kept pressuring me to sell out to her. Wanted me to settle on a date, give a firm yes or no.”

  I felt a spike of jealousy. Cheryl had definitely not been pressuring me. If anything, it had been the other way around, with me trying to press her to finalize things.

  I had the sickening realization that we were Cheryl’s backup plan. She was just waiting for Blake to make a decision before she gave us the yes or the no.

  “You’ve suddenly gone awfully quiet,” Blake commented. “And you’ve stopped eating. Is there something wrong with the pizza?”

  I shook my head.

  “So, um, which way were you leaning towards?” I asked Blake, trying not to show that I was a little upset. “Were you going to say yes or no?”

  “I’d been about to say no to the offer. I couldn’t do it,” Blake said, finishing off the last bit of his soda. “But then Cheryl died.”

  I swirled my own soda around in my glass. Then I finally said it. “Cheryl was also talking to us. My bakery, I mean. She wanted to buy us out. Or at least, she said she did.”

  Blake looked shocked. “I…I don’t get it. There’s not room for two Pastry Trees in Belldale.”

  I shook my head. “No, there isn’t. I think that’s the point.”

  “What is?”

  I swallowed. “I guess she was just waiting for you to give your answer. She was stringing us along until then. I guess we were plan B.”

  Blake’s mouth was wide open. “I can’t believe Cheryl was doing that…” His anger seemed real. As in, it seemed fresh. As though this truly was the first he was hearing about any of this.

  “What were you doing at the Golden Medallion the other day?” I asked Blake. I really had turned the interrogation around.

  He shook his head and stared at me, then he leaned forward across the table, still looking me square in the eye. “Because that is where Cheryl was staying before she died. She had the business plan for our merger. I wanted to see if maybe I could get my hands on it.”

  I suddenly had very little to say. “Oh.”

  Blake rolled his eyes. “Of course, the manager was no help at all. Wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I-I actually have that business plan, if you still want it,” I mumbled a little sheepishly, while I quickly took another sip of my soda.

  Blake’s mouth dropped open. “How?”

  I placed my glass down. “Because unlike some people, I actually possess the skills to get into places, even when the other person doesn’t want me in there.”

  Blake just shook his head in disbelief. I couldn’t tell whether he was impressed or just annoyed.

  “So, do you want it?”

  Blake shook his head. “I’m not sure what the point would be now.” He stared off into the distance. “Even though The Pasty Tree wasn’t the ideal choice of partner, the idea of going into partnership with someone did interest me…I suppose that’s why I wanted to take a look at the files.”

  I finished off the last of my pizza slice and sat there in silence, taking in the glow of the late afternoon sun.

  “You’ve suddenly gone awfully quiet again,” Blake commented.

  I sighed. “I don’t know. It just kind of hurts a little to know that our bakery was second choice,” I commented, playing with the crust of the pizza I’d left behind. “That we weren’t good enough, I guess.”

  Blake made a sympathetic face.

  “Your bakery is cute. I thought it looked great when I was in there,” Blake said, but it felt like an empty compliment now.

  “You don’t have to say that,” I said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now anyway. Cheryl is gone and you were going to say no, anyway.”

  And if Blake was going to say no to Cheryl’s offer, why would he even have cared if he’d found out that Cheryl was two-timing him?

  “So, you really didn’t know that Cheryl was talking to us?”

  He shook his head firmly. “Definitely not. I mean, it wouldn’t really have changed anything, not in a practical sense. But I still would have been peeved if I’d known. I mean, I’m pretty annoyed right now, hearing all of this.”

  I nodded. I understood.

  Blake frowned. “Is that why you were following me? Did you suspect me of doing something to Cheryl?”

  I hesitated for a second before nodding. “I thought you might have had something to do with her death.”

  Blake stood up and threw his napkin on the table. “Sounds to me that if there was anyone who had cause to murder Cheryl Spellman, it was you, Rachael Robinson.”

  Chapter 10

  Thank goodness Anderson was not on the reception desk that evening when I returned to the Golden Medallion.

  But my gratitude didn’t last too long.

  The young woman behind the counter, with a short dark bob and a name tag that read “Nina” but not her job title, was even less friendly than Anderson, if that was even possible.

  “Are you a guest here?” she asked sharply.

  Are they supposed to just call out to you and ask you that? It seemed kind of rude.

  “What if I was?” I asked, stopping. “Is that really a way to treat your paying guests? Making them feel uncomfortable.”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve had to be extra vigilant about strangers coming in through the lobby this week after, after…” Her face went a little red and she trailed off. Right, after a stranger came in to the hotel earlier in the week and killed Cheryl Spellman. I supposed I couldn’t blame her too much for her question.

  “I’m visiting a friend who is staying here,” I explained.

  “Oh.” She looked around like she wasn’t quite sure what to do. “Can I… Can I see some proof of that?”

  I sighed. They really were paranoid around here, weren’t they? “What do you think I’m going to do? Hop on the elevator, get off at level five, and go on a wild killing spree?”

  I could tell from the look on her face that this was definitely no laughing matter. “Fine.” I gave her Pippa’s name and room number and told her that Pippa could confirm my identity.

  “Sorry about that,” Nina said, once she had ended the brief phone call. “It’s just better to be safe than sorry, under the circumstances.”

  I noticed there were security cameras in the elevator as I travelled up to the third floor, and that they were also in the hallways. Why hadn’t they picked up Cheryl’s killer? Surely if the cops had looked at the footage, they would have noticed any unregistered guests walking through the hotel.

  Pippa answered the door in her nightgown.
“Hey,” she said. “Make yourself at home.” She was wearing a robe and she looked exhausted.

  She told me that Marcello and Lolly were out again, visiting a hobby farm on the edge of town. Apparently, Lolly really couldn’t get enough of the farm animals.

  “How did it go on your weird date with Blake?” Pippa asked.

  “It was not a date, it was an interrogation,” I said. “And actually, in the end, it turned out that I was the one that did more of the interrogating.”

  Pippa looked surprised. “Really? I thought he was about ready to turn you over to the cops when he hauled you out of there. What did you manage to find out?”

  “Well, get this. It turns out that Blake didn’t know about us.” I flopped down on the hotel bed. It really was soft. I sank right into it and suddenly had the urge to go to sleep.

  Pippa looked a little skeptical. “He might be lying.”

  I rolled over onto my elbows and shook my head. “He was going to say no to the offer, Pippa. We were going to be The Pastry Tree’s leftovers.”

  She thought about this for a second before answering. “Well, hopefully we still are.”

  “You want us to be leftovers?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. Better than being chucked in the garbage.” She walked over to a drawer and pulled out what I assumed was her cell phone. “We need to get the deal locked in with Jarrod.”

  I sighed. I knew we did. At least, we needed to know one way or another. We couldn’t keep on operating like we were, not knowing what was going to happen, floating in a kind of limbo.

  I thought Pippa was ignoring me to check her phone so I closed my eyes for a second and considered taking a nap.

  But it turned out that Pippa was brandishing her phone around. It was Anderson’s.

  “He still hasn’t figured out I took it,” Pippa said, throwing it up in the air and catching it again. “Or, if he has, he hasn’t said anything. What is he going to do? Ask to search my room?”

  It wouldn’t have surprised me, to be honest. The Golden Medallion hadn’t exactly been treating its guests well. It had been treating them more like criminals. “You’d better be careful, Pippa. There are security cameras everywhere here.”

  She shook her head in dismissal. “I took it while Anderson was in my room. They aren’t filming guests in their rooms, are they?”

  Once again, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  “Maybe you should give it back…” I said cautiously.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Well, no. I don’t want you to get in trouble. I’m still pretty sure that stealing is a crime, even if you’ve done it to solve a murder.”

  Besides, we hadn’t even gotten any info from the phone after all that. No point facing a criminal charge over it for nothing.

  “Let’s try the number again,” Pippa said, sitting forward on her knees. She looked excited.

  I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. “If it didn’t work the first ten times we called it, why would it work now?”

  I could tell she wanted to give it another shot, one last Hail Mary, because she didn’t want me to press the point about her giving the phone back

  I threw my hands up. “Fine. What do we have to lose. But no one is going to answer, Pippa.”

  Pippa placed one hand over the receiver and cried out in excitement. “Oh my goodness, Rachael! It’s ringing.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’ll put it on speaker!” She threw the phone down on the bed like it was on fire.

  Suddenly, I felt a streak of excitement. Maybe I was just catching Pippa’s.

  I rolled over the edge of the bed and sat up. Okay. Now I was interested.

  Surely they weren’t actually going to answer the call though, right?

  “Hello?”

  My heart stopped beating for a second.

  The voice was crackling, so it was hard to tell exactly who it was. Even whether it was male or female. But I was pretty sure it was a man.

  “Hello?” the man said again, sounding angrier and angrier as he spoke. “I thought I told you never to call me again on this number. You’re going to get both of us in trouble. Hello?”

  Oh my god.

  Pippa gasped and placed her hands over her mouth. Was it too late? Had he heard her?

  I reached over with shaky hands and ended the phone call.

  I stared at her and whispered. “Was that…”

  Pippa nodded. “That was Jarrod.”

  “We need to find Jarrod.”

  Pippa already had her robe off and was running towards the door.

  I rolled off the bed and followed her. She was right.

  Jarrod had played far less coy with us than Cheryl had, I would give him that. Whereas we’d always been the ones chasing Cheryl down, asking her to commit, the roles had been reversed with Jarrod. Or at least, they had for me. I’d actually been dodging his calls for days.

  So when I finally called him for a meeting late that evening, he was more than happy to drive over to meet us.

  “Look at this,” I said, comparing the number I was dialing with the number from Anderson’s cell. “Same number. It was definitely him.”

  We waited nervously for Jarrod to pull up to the bakery. We were closed, but this seemed like the safest place to meet, all things considered.

  Jarrod slammed the door of his black BWM and stalked towards us.

  “I’ve been hoping to speak to you two girls.”

  I hated the way he called us ‘girls’ like that. Maybe it could be kind of endearing in some circumstances, but we were two businesswomen that he was about to go into business with.

  “Would you call a man you were doing business with, a boy?” I asked him, straightening up.

  He looked confused. “Huh?”

  “Then don’t call us girls.”

  Pippa was glaring at me. I could tell she didn’t want me to rock the boat, or to risk sending him running, even if he was kind of a sexist. Or even if he was a killer.

  “Maybe we should talk inside,” Jarrod stated. I could tell he wasn’t the kind of person who liked making a scene.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Rachael,” Pippa said, grabbing my arm. “Please, tread carefully.”

  “Had any interesting phone calls this afternoon?” I asked Jarrod as we sat down at a table.

  Pippa dropped her purse and gave me the evil eye. Be careful, she was conveying through the power of her glare. Or else.

  “What?” Jarrod asked, spreading the contents of his briefcase over the table.

  I shrugged. “Any blasts from the past ring you up?”

  He slammed the briefcase shut.

  He glared first at me, then at Pippa, who looked like she wanted to curl up into a ball and hide, pulling her sweater up over her face.

  “It was you two, wasn’t it? I thought I heard a girlish gasp down the other end of the line.”

  “Girlish gasp?” Pippa, well, gasped. “How dare you?”

  I leaned forward. “How do you know Anderson…” I stopped. I realized I had no idea what Anderson’s surname was. “Anderson from the Gold Medallion?”

  He quickly shoved all the papers back into his briefcase and shut the clasp so quickly that there were still bits of paper sticking out of it.

  “I don’t have to answer any of these questions.”

  He began to pace towards the door. He paused before he left.

  “Oh, and by the way, in case this isn’t entirely obvious, the deal is off. Ladies.”

  “Good!” Pippa called after him. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”

  But I wasn’t about to let him get away that easily. I headed for the door after him, while Pippa sulked for a minute.

  The sun had set by the time I got outside.

  “I heard Anderson on the other end of the line,” I said, walking in front of him so that he’d have to literally push me out of the way if he wanted to pass. And we were in danger of making a ve
ry large scene in the middle of the street. “He called you, barely ten minutes after Cheryl had been killed, and said that it was done. That Cheryl was gone.”

  He looked ruffled.

  Clearly, he never meant for anyone to overhear that phone call.

  Running his fingers through his white-blonde hair, he stumbled backwards. “I told you, I don’t have to answer any of these questions,” he said. “You’ve got an awful lot of nerve, thinking you can do the police force’s work for them.”

  He had a point. Maybe I did have a lot of nerve.

  But I wasn’t about to let him get away without giving me an explanation.

  He pulled at the collar of his shirt. “I had been staying at the Golden Medallion a week before. Just to check out the town, look at the competition, etc. That’s when I met Anderson. I knew that Cheryl would be staying there the following week, also using the company tab. And I also knew she was going to screw everything up,” he said bitterly. “I should have been given Cheryl’s job a year ago. But of course, she is so buddy-buddy with the CEO…so I got passed over for promotion, again.”

  My heart started to beat faster. Was this a confession?

  “I only wanted Anderson to make things difficult for her. Scare her off with fake debt collection bills, overcharge her bar tab, that sort of thing. I said I’d make it worth his while if he could get her to leave Belldale.”

  I was shocked. “But he went a step too far,” I whispered. “He thought you meant you wanted Cheryl dead. And he would never want to displease a loyal customer. So he went the extra mile and killed Cheryl…”

  “No!” Jarrod cried out. “Are you crazy? He didn’t kill Cheryl. I mean, he’s kind of a maniac, and that phone call was pretty inappropriate. But he didn’t kill her. At least, not under my command. And not that I know of.”

  I was so enthralled by his tale that I hadn’t even noticed Pippa had joined us outside. She heard everything.

  “That was still a pretty terrible thing to do to Cheryl,” she said in a low voice.

  Jarrod shook his head and looked down on us.

  “Whatever. You two girls know nothing about the business world, what you have to do to survive. Now, if you don’t mind, I am going to get out of his pit stain of a small town,” Jarrod said, slamming his car door shut.