Scone Cold Dead

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Liss found her sprawled gracefully on one of the twin beds, her forearm draped over her eyes to keep out the sun. “Are you all right, Emily?”

  She answered without changing position. “Don’t worry, Liss. I haven’t taken any more meds. I learned my lesson there.”

  Liss sat down on the foot of the bed, forcing Emily to shift her feet. “You really thought those pills of Victor’s were tranquilizers?”

  “That’s what he called them. Well, he called them his ‘magic pills’ and said they calmed him right down, so I assumed they were Valium or something like that. I didn’t know he was sick. He never said a word.”

  “But you knew about his allergy.”

  “Oh yes. Everyone did.” Shifting her arm, she peeked at Liss from beneath. “What is it you really want to know?”

  “How did you get Victor’s pills? You weren’t sharing a room.”

  “I had the pill bottle in my purse. It was bulky and he asked me to carry it for him until after the reception.”

  Liss supposed that made sense. “Did you take Victor’s pills before or after Detective Tandy talked to you?”

  “After. I wasn’t all that upset when I thought his death was just a terrible accident.”

  “In fact, you were probably relieved.”

  Offended, Emily sat up. “How can you say that?”

  “Did you plan to dump him once he gave you Zara’s part in the show?”

  The faintest wash of pink colored Emily’s cheeks. She scooted away from Liss until the headboard stopped her retreat. Her chin quivered. For a moment, Liss thought she might be about to cry. She pouted instead.

  “I wasn’t going to break up with Victor. Not right away. He would have taken the role away from me again if I’d done that.”

  “Do you think he’d have fired you if you broke up with him?”

  “Maybe. That’s why the split had to be his idea. I figured that once Zara left the company, Victor would hire someone new. Then, being Victor, he’d go after her and leave me alone.” With languid grace she rose from the bed and went to the dresser, sitting in front of it to check her hair. She picked up a brush and put it to use, ruthlessly attacking the snarls her short nap had caused.

  Not dumb. Conniving. And perhaps a bit naive. “Did Victor try to use his position with the company to coerce you into doing anything you didn’t want to do?”

  Emily’s titter was even more annoying than usual. “You mean kinky sex? Trust me, Victor wasn’t nearly as kinky as he thought he was.”

  Hiding her distaste, Liss did not press for details. She wouldn’t be able to stomach them. As Emily continued to primp in front of the mirror, Liss wondered what she’d do now that her sugar daddy was gone. Emily Townsend was not a nice person, but she wasn’t Victor’s killer. There was no profit for her in his death. In fact, she’d suffered a setback. Whoever replaced Victor, especially if the new manager was a woman, would not be likely to fire Zara and give Emily her part in the show.

  “Did you notice anything odd about Victor in the last few weeks before his death?” Liss asked. “Was he worried? More difficult? Was it something he did that made you decide to stay at the B-and-B instead of at the motel with him?”

  “No, no, no, and no. I just needed a break.”

  “Do you know why Victor was so down on Stewart?”

  Emily met Liss’s eyes in the mirror. “That I can answer. Stewart was too damn clever—and cutting—with all his puns and smart remarks. Victor encouraged him to drink to excess. He was looking for an excuse to fire him.” Emily spun round on the stool in front of the vanity, a smug smile on her face. “Want to know a secret? I don’t think Stewart actually drinks that much. He pretends to because a drunk can say anything he wants, no matter how nasty, and get away with it. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised it wasn’t Stewart who was murdered.”

  When Gordon Tandy knocked at her door late that evening, Liss eagerly undid the locks. She had been looking forward to talking to him about the bits and pieces of information she’d gathered and she was curious to know what he’d discovered in Victor’s apartment.

  But the Gordon Tandy who walked into her foyer was not smiling, nor was he alone. A uniformed state trooper followed close at his heels.

  “Where’s Kalishnakof?”

  “Why?” She couldn’t read a thing except determination in his set features and cold, dark eyes.

  “I’d like a word with him.”

  That sounded ominous. “He doesn’t have to talk to you if he doesn’t want to,” she blurted. She’d learned that much about the law when she’d been suspected of murder.

  Gordon gave her a fulminating look. “That’s true, but it’s also his decision, not yours.”

  “He’s upstairs. I’ll get him.”

  “We’ll get him.” Gordon caught her arm before she could start up the staircase. “Which room?”

  Armed with directions, followed by his colleague, he climbed to the second floor, leaving Liss to stare after them from the bottom step.

  She heard their footsteps cross the upstairs hall, then a knock on the guest room door and Zara’s gasp when she opened it. It shut again with a solid thunk. Liss considered tiptoeing up and pressing her ear to the wood but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. She’d find out soon enough what was going on.

  Less than a minute passed—although it seemed an eternity—before Liss heard the door open and close again. Zara came flying down the stairs. “What’s going on, Liss? What do the cops want? Why wouldn’t they let me stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Zara’s frightened eyes darted up the stairs. “This isn’t good, Liss. I don’t know what that detective thinks he knows, but it isn’t good. I saw his face—”

  A shout from the bedroom cut her off. Then there was more yelling, and a dull thud sounded . . . from outside the house. Seconds later, the uniformed officer pushed past them, heading for the front door.

  Although Liss knew at once that a bad situation had just gotten worse, she was slow to put the pieces together. When they finally fell into place, she felt her face drain of color. Then she ran, too, with Zara close behind her. Racing to the back door off the kitchen, she dashed through, pausing only long enough to turn on the outside light but not taking time to put on her boots or her coat.

  The room Sandy and Zara shared had a small balcony attached. It was situated directly over Liss’s back porch. As Liss started down the two little steps that led to her driveway, Gordon dropped from above, almost landing on top of her.

  Zara screamed. Liss managed to hold in all but a muffled gasp, but her heart was pounding as fast as a bass drum keeping double time.

  Gordon lost his footing on the muddy strip of lawn between the house and the driveway but clambered up again and was off and running before Liss could do more than gape at him.

  Still struggling with disbelief, she turned to stare up at the balcony. The door into the guest room stood open. She’d been right about that thump she’d heard. For some inexplicable reason, Sandy had bolted from the room and leapt over the rail of the balcony, dropping ten feet or so to the ground. What on earth had Gordon said to him to make him that desperate to get away from the police?

  “Why would he run?” Zara wailed. “He didn’t kill Victor.”

  “Of course not,” Liss automatically agreed.

  But running away made him look guilty.

  Arms wrapped around herself against the chill in the evening air, she slogged toward the front of the house. The uniformed trooper already had Sandy in custody. His hands were cuffed behind him, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He was limping. Liss stopped dead and stared. It didn’t take much for an awkward landing to do permanent damage. She ought to know!

  “He’s hurt!” Zara tried to run to Sandy’s side, but Liss held her back. Far from calm herself, she still knew better than to get in the way of an arrest.

  Gordon opened the back door of the cruiser parked at the curb. By the time L
iss and Zara reached it, Sandy was inside. Liss caught only a glimpse of his face, but that was enough. His features were contorted with pain.

  “He’s injured,” she said to Gordon in an accusatory tone.

  “We’ll stop at the hospital on the way to the jail.”

  “Did you come here to arrest him?” Liss demanded. And to think she’d believed Gordon to be fair-minded!

  “I came to ask questions. Your friend was being so evasive that I suggested he might like to accompany me to another location for the rest of the interview. That’s when he decided he didn’t want to stick around.”

  “What are you charging him with?” Liss managed to sound calm, but her fingers had curled into tight fists.

  “Assaulting a police officer.”

  Zara made a little sound of distress and imitated a fountain. Liss just wanted to smack somebody, and it was a toss-up whether her target would be Gordon or Sandy. They were both behaving like idiots.

  “Gordon, you can’t just—”

  “Liss, butt out.” Leaving her sputtering indignantly, he climbed into the passenger side of the cruiser. The uniformed officer was already behind the wheel and lost no time getting under way.

  Liss stared after the taillights until they disappeared. As if someone had flicked a switch, she became aware that her feet were rapidly turning into blocks of ice. She could hear Zara’s teeth chattering.

  “Inside,” she ordered, appalled to realize that both her front and back doors had been left wide open. It was a wonder Lumpkin hadn’t escaped in all the confusion. She located him in the kitchen, fully occupied with his food dish. “Only sensible one in the group,” she muttered. Raised as an indoor cat, he’d probably stuck one paw outside and decided to wait for summer to try exploring the world beyond the house.

  After a quick trip to her bedroom to exchange sodden shoes and socks for warm, fluffy slippers, she headed downstairs again. Her hands were still unsteady. She spilled cocoa, slopped water, and nearly dropped a mug, but she craved the soothing effects of hot chocolate and felt the need for something physical to occupy her. Completing the simple task settled her, although it took twice as long as it should have.

  The phone started ringing even before she put the water in the microwave. Sandy’s arrest had not gone unnoticed by the neighbors. Ray called from Dan’s house—Dan himself wasn’t at home. He’d been beeped by his brother and gone out, so he’d missed all the excitement. Then Fiona phoned from Aunt Margaret’s apartment. Angie was next, followed by Patsy from the coffee shop on the opposite side of the town square. Liss told them all the same thing—she’d talk to them tomorrow, when she knew more herself. Then she unplugged the landline and turned off her cell.

  Correctly guessing that Lee Annie would be with Zara, consoling her, Liss filled three mugs with cocoa, put them on a tray, and carried it upstairs. She found both women in the guest room, Zara huddled on the bed, Lee Annie standing by the balcony door and shaking her head in disbelief.

  When Liss appeared in the hall doorway, Zara sniffled, hiccuped, and fished for a tissue to wipe her streaming eyes. She accepted the hot chocolate. Liss gave her time for a few sips but she wasn’t feeling long on patience. “What happened before you came downstairs?”

  “Detective Tandy knocked. I let him and the other cop in. He said he wanted to talk to Sandy alone, but first he needed to ask me a question.” She started to tear up again, but got control of herself when Liss fixed her with a basilisk stare. “He had a letter I wrote.”

  “What letter?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How can you not—?”

  “He held out a sheet of yellow lined paper, okay? The page was folded so that only the last part showed—my signature. So when he asked me if I’d written that letter, I said I supposed I had. He didn’t let me see the whole thing, Liss. Just my name at the bottom. It was my writing, though, and I always write letters on yellow lined pads.”

  “You should have asked to see the whole thing.”

  “He didn’t give me the chance. He said thank you and told me that would be all. Then he all but shoved me out into the hall.”

  “What do you think was in that particular letter?” Liss perched at the foot of the bed, close enough to see Zara’s shuttered expression.

  “I don’t know,” she said evasively. “I write lots of letters.”

  “Did you ever write any to Victor?”

  “Once or twice, back when we were still a couple.” She sipped more cocoa, avoiding Liss’s eyes.

  From behind her, Liss heard Lee Annie shift position in the chair. She thought about asking the singer to leave, but nothing was going to stay secret much longer, not now that Gordon had arrested Sandy.

  “Did you write any letters to Victor recently?” she asked Zara.

  “No.”

  “How would that detective have gotten hold of one of her letters, to Victor or anyone else?” Lee Annie asked.

  “He was in Providence earlier today, searching Victor’s apartment. He probably found the letter there.”

  Liss hadn’t thought it possible for Zara’s face to lose any more color, but it did. She shoved the mug of cocoa at Liss, threw herself facedown on the bed, and buried her face in her arms.

  “What?”

  The other woman just sobbed harder.

  “Tell me, Zara! God, you’re worse than Emily!” She would have tried to shake an answer out of her if both hands hadn’t been full.

  “Patience, Liss. She’ll have to stop the waterworks sometime.” Lee Annie, looking thoughtful, drained her mug of hot chocolate and set the crockery aside. “Maybe you should try to find a lawyer for Sandy.”

  Guilt swamped Liss as she realized she should have thought of that herself, and long before now, too. She should also have called the hospital in Fallstown, to find out how badly Sandy had hurt his ankle. “Keep an eye on her?” she asked Lee Annie.

  “As if she were my own sister.”

  It didn’t take long to make her calls. She only knew one attorney, Edmund Carrier III. As a rule, he didn’t handle criminal cases, but he could look quite formidable when he put his mind to it. After she’d exacted his promise to look into Sandy’s arrest, she phoned the emergency room, but they wouldn’t tell her anything. She’d forgotten about Maine’s strict confidentiality law.

  Liss returned to the guest room to find that Zara had recovered her composure. “I think I know what letter it was,” she blurted the moment Liss came through the door. “I wrote it more than a year ago, before Victor and I broke up for good. We’d had a spat and he’d said we were finished. I should have let it go, but that was before Sandy and I got close and there were a lot of things I liked about Victor, so I wrote to him to tell him I wanted to get back together with him.”

  “Foolish girl,” Lee Annie murmured.

  But Liss understood. She’d known Victor for eight years. He’d rarely been without a lady friend among the dancers and never once had Liss heard he’d harassed or ill-treated any of them until Sarah. She blamed his mysterious illness. Pain and uncertainty could well have accounted for his aberrant behavior.

  Zara swiped at the tears once again running freely down her cheeks. “I should never have written that letter. It was stupid of me to want to get back together with Victor. It’s not like he was that great a lover or anything, and I knew we didn’t have a future together. He wasn’t the picket fences and babies type.”

  Neither was Sandy, but Liss let that pass. She was trying to work out why an old letter had made Gordon suspect Sandy of killing Victor. “Zara, was that letter dated?”

  She looked blank. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because if it wasn’t, Gordon Tandy must think you wrote it recently, and that Sandy murdered Victor to keep you from going back to him.”

  Horrified, Zara leapt off the bed. “I’ll tell him he’s wrong. I’ll go right now and—”

  “Why should he believe you? Besides, Gordon didn’t arrest him for that
.” Gently, she pushed Zara back down on the bed, keeping her in place with a hand on one thin, trembling shoulder.

  Liss wasn’t certain exactly what had happened in this room earlier, but she was sure Gordon Tandy hadn’t made up the charges. Sandy must have done something stupid even before he jumped over the balcony railing, something it would take someone better versed in the law than she was to straighten out.

  Exhaustion hit her like a sledgehammer. Too many questions. Too few answers. Why hadn’t Gordon just shown Zara the letter and asked her when she wrote it? Why had he wanted to take Sandy somewhere else to question him? And why had Sandy, in a fit of panic, tried to run? What was he hiding?

  “We’ll all see things more clearly after a good night’s sleep,” she said. “I called a lawyer. He’ll take care of everything.”

  Lee Annie, yawning, seemed willing to fall in with her suggestion. Telling them she’d see them in the morning, she headed for bed. Liss was about to follow suit when Zara spoke.

  “I thought he’d come to arrest me,” she whispered.

  Liss turned to stare at her. “Why? What made you think you were a suspect?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Maybe it does.” Checking first to make sure Lee Annie had retreated into her own room, she closed the door. “You want to help Sandy, right?”

  “Of course I do. How can you ask? I love him.”

  And once she’d loved Victor. Unless, Liss thought with unaccustomed cynicism, she’d just been using him, as Emily had. “Why did you think the police would decide you’d killed Victor?”

  “Because of the rumors that Strathspey is in financial trouble.”

  “Yes?” This was worse than pulling teeth, Liss thought.

  “I trained as a bookkeeper.”

  “So what? You weren’t the one keeping the company books.”

  “They aren’t that hard to get at.”

  “Still, I don’t see—”

  “My mother is in prison for embezzling money from the company she worked for! She’s an accountant. Oh, Liss, don’t you see? I was sure that if the police found out about her, they’d be bound to think the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”