The Emma Wild Mysteries: Complete Holiday Collection Books 1-4 (Cozy Romantic Mysteries with Recipes)

by Lin, Harper

  “What about Larson?” I asked Demi. “What do you know about Larson?”

  “Larson?” she said. “Not much. He and Lena broke up awhile ago. I think Lena complained about who got to keep the cat when they broke up, but that was about it.”

  “Cat?” I asked.

  “Well, I think when they lived together, they kept a cat and Lena wanted to keep it.”

  “Did she?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you really think it’s Larson?” she asked. “I don’t know him too well, but I always felt sorry for him for putting up with Lena for so long.” She pressed her lips together. “Gosh, that’s really mean to say, isn’t it, now that she’s passed away?”

  “Wait, what about the phone call?” Aaron pressed. “Emma received a strange call at home today from the phone booth across the street from here.”

  “A phone call?” Demi asked.

  “Yes, a threatening one,” I said.

  “I swear, it wasn’t me. I was with the boys all afternoon. In fact Roddy had a field trip to the science fair and I was one of the parent chaperones. After that, I was here watching the game. I wouldn’t be able to leave the boys out of my sight, even to go across the street to make a phone call.”

  “Fine,” said Aaron. “Do you have witnesses? At around 3:30pm.”

  “Yes,” Demi said. “The teachers can tell you that I was here with them, taking the kids back, like I told you.”

  Her youngest son started crying in the stands below and the older boy was becoming agitated.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Demi. “Good luck with the investigation. I’m sorry, but it was humiliating to admit that my family needed help with money. Lena really helped me out and I’m sorry that she was murdered, you know, so if I have to come forward and testify in any way, I will.”

  We weren’t sure whether we hit a wall or we uncovered something new.

  But just then, Sterling called with some new information.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Since my cell phone was still turned off, he called Mirabelle’s phone.

  “So the cupcake is just a cupcake,” said Sterling. “It’s red velvet with cream cheese frosting.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “It’s your favorite flavor, isn’t it?” Sterling asked.

  “I suppose,” I said. “Who would know that?”

  “Maybe you stated it in an interview once.”

  “Okay, but are you sure there’s no poison?”

  “No. Our guy said that it would’ve been detectable right away, but this is the perfect cupcake. Freshly baked, too.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “It’s probably from a die-hard fan,” said Sterling. “With a crush. I’ll throw the cupcake away. Do you want the note?”

  I sighed. “Sure. Keep it. Maybe it’ll come in handy. Did you find out anything new?”

  Sterling was silent for a moment. I could tell he was contemplating whether to tell me or not.

  “Not yet. Except we did get part of the autopsy report back. She’d been sliced from the stomach up to the ribcage. There was a knife involved. We’re still waiting for Cherry’s results for her knife, so hopefully we’ll get an answer soon.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Look, I’ve got to go,” Sterling said.

  “Go then,” I said. “Thanks for the report.”

  He hung up. Although the cupcake clue went nowhere, the way Lena was killed with a knife stirred some suspicions in me…I had an idea who did it, but I didn’t have proof.

  “Hey Emma?” Mirabelle called from the living room. “I’ve got to go to the cafe. Craig is having trouble with the debit card machine.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just continue on with Aaron then.”

  “The cafe’s so close and it’s faster if I walk, so I’ll leave you guys the car.”

  “Thanks.”

  After she left, I filled Aaron in on what Sterling had told me.

  “We have to go visit Lena’s boyfriend,” I said. “I heard he was gone during the bake-off on a business trip. But he’s in town now.”

  Aaron nodded and grabbed his bag. We were off in the Mini Cooper to Lena’s house. They were living together, so we knew where the house was. Lena had mentioned his boyfriend a few time during the weekend. He had lived in a nearby town, and they’d met through an online dating site. He’d moved in with her, but he traveled regularly around Canada for business.

  We were just about to knock on the door when we heard voices from the inside.

  Two men were yelling at each other.

  “Please, put it down,” one man was saying. “I promise. I won’t tell anyone. You have my word.”

  “But is your word good enough?” growled another voice.

  Just then, Aaron slipped off the porch and made a huge noise. He was holding his ankle in silence while his face expressed nothing but pain.

  There was silence from the inside of the house as well. Then I heard whispering.

  A man with dark hair and a fearful expression poked his face out the door.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  I was helping Aaron up, who was able to stand.

  “Are you Matt?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Is everything okay? We heard yelling.”

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Is your friend okay?”

  “It’s my ankle,” said Aaron. “I don’t think it’s broken, thank God. It’s a little sprained, but I think I’ll be fine.”

  “Can I help you with something?” Matt asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “We’re here to see you, but is everything is okay? We heard screaming.”

  “I have company over,” he said. “Can you come back another time? I’m afraid I’m in the middle of something.”

  His face expressed nothing but fear. His voice had quivered. He slammed the door shut and we heard a locking sound.

  “That was weird,” Aaron said.

  We heard more noises, shuffling, grunting. Someone was coming out the back.

  I ran around to the side of the house and saw him. Larson! He was jumping over the fence and running away.

  I went inside the house from the back porch and found Matt lying on the floor with a huge gash on one of his arms.

  “Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “Are you okay?”

  “Call an ambulance,” he said. “I feel faint.”

  “Yes.”

  I made the call and got some tea towels from the kitchen for the blood that was pouring from his arm.

  “It was Larson wasn’t it? I saw him run away.”

  Matt nodded. “Yes, it’s him.”

  I called Sterling next.

  “Did he drive here?” I asked Matt.

  “No,” said Matt. “Well, I don’t know, but I think he came by foot. Snuck in the house through the back.”

  Sterling picked up.

  “Emma? What—”

  “Sterling, listen, the murderer is getting away! It’s Larson. He’s running from the back of Lena’s house. I think he’s on foot, but he might have a car. You better send all your guys to arrest him right away. He tried to kill Lena’s boyfriend just now!”

  “Wow, okay—”

  I hung up and got Matt a glass of water.

  “He’s crazy,” Matt said. “So you know he killed Lena too?”

  I nodded. “Well, I suspected him too and I was just on my way here to ask you about Lena’s cat. They fought over it and I thought it could’ve been a driving force behind this murder.”

  “Well Lena’s cat went missing when I came home from my business trip,” Matt said. “Then I saw Larson buying cat food at the pet shop and I got suspicious. They had fought about this cat that was really Lena’s cat. Larson gave it to her for her birthday or something. I thought maybe he had the cat and I’d called him to ask about it. He said he knew nothing about it. I went over there this afternoon to ask him about it. I d
idn’t see the cat, but he got aggressive. Too aggressive. He completely denied having the cat. I’d always thought he was a pretty decent guy. He even came over to ask me if I needed help with Lena’s funeral, so it was strange to see him so worked up about a cat!”

  “He couldn’t get out of it,” I said, “because we’d been at his house this morning and we saw the cat. He probably got paranoid.”

  “Yes, and he came over now with the knife, threatening to kill me. I think he’s a little crazy. He’s just not right in the head. There was a crazy look in his eyes.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “How did you figure out who the killer was?” Sterling asked me.

  I was down at the police station, filling out a report about Larson. When they caught Larson, there was blood on his shirt. He was running towards the woods, just trying to get as far from the town as possible. He knew that we had figured it out.

  He had been close to killing Matt before Aaron and I got there. When he realized that Matt couldn’t be killed on the spot without killing Aaron and me too because we were witnesses, he fled.

  “When you told me about Lena’s autopsy,” I said. “I had this big hunch that it was Larson.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this morning we had been at his house to give him his Chocoholic Cafe gift card for being the runner-up. He was making a cake, and he cut us each a slice. When he took out a knife from the drawer and walked from the drawer back to the counter where we were sitting, I noticed that he had gripped it with the sharp part of the knife facing upwards. It was the natural way he held a knife. And when you said that the murderer had cut Lena upwards to her stomach, I could imagine him thrusting the knife into someone and ripping upwards.”

  “Okay.” Sterling nodded stoically. “but why did you go to Lena’s house?”

  “To talk to her boyfriend,” I said. “Demi said Lena and Larson used to fight over the custody of this cat that they owned when they used to live together. I saw a tabby cat at Larson’s house, so I wanted to ask Matt whether it was Lena’s. I wanted to see if this cat was a motive in the murder.”

  Sterling shook his head. “I’ve never seen a guy get so worked up about a cat. He has mental issues. In the interrogation room, he confessed, ranting about how Lena broke his heart, destroyed his life and kept the only other thing that he loved, his cat. He was upset that she would shove her new boyfriend in his face. He wanted to get back at her by winning the contest, but when Lena won again, he got upset. He claimed that she taunted him about taking her new boyfriend on vacation with her.”

  “What about his current girlfriend?” I asked.

  “There is no girlfriend,” he said. “He claimed to have a long-distance girlfriend, but it turned out that he was just saying that to make Lena jealous. He also thought he had a strong chance in winning the contest, but I supposed Lena knew that he didn’t. Valentine’s Day was their anniversary. I suppose this could also be a crime of passion. Larson couldn’t stand the thought of Lena being with her new boyfriend and keeping their cat, while he was alone. He said that she was really rubbing the vacation thing in his face, telling him how happy she was that she had it all—the boyfriend, the prize, the vacation and how she was going to get a book deal.”

  So she was probably going to stiff Demi on her money too.

  “Larson’s going to plead insanity,” Sterling said.

  “Why did he send me the cupcake?” I asked.

  “He said he didn’t know anything about it. I told you, it’s probably from some fan.”

  Before I could ask him more questions, Sandra came in, holding two cups of coffees. She passed one to Sterling with an adoring look on her face.

  “Hello Sandra,” I said cheerily.

  “Emma,” she put on a fake smile. “Congrats on finding the murderer.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said a little too smugly. “I’m just glad an innocent person like Cherry could go free now. She could’ve had her life ruined for a wrongful conviction, you know.”

  “Well, the DNA on her knife didn’t come back with anything, so we didn’t have anything on her anyway.” Sandra said quickly.

  “But I’m sure you were just doing your jobs,” I said. Even if you were doing it terribly, I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue.

  “I’m sure we would’ve found out that it was Larson in the end,” Sandra said.

  “Sure,” I said. “After he killed Matt, right?”

  Sterling looked embarrassed. He cleared his throat. It was my cue to leave.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have a baby shower to plan.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  On a Sunday afternoon, Mirabelle, Suzy, Mom, and ten more of our closest female friends were competing as to who could suck the beer from baby bottles the fastest. Mirabelle, being pregnant, stuck with apple juice. Mom won.

  Mom could drink anyone under the table. I gave her the prize of a $50 gift certificate to the town’s wine store, and she cheered.

  Then we played pin the sperm on the uterus, a game I made with felt and velcro. It was a hit. We had to pin each sperm blindfolded and the one pinned closest to the egg on the uterus won.

  After that, we spent a good hour decorating onesies for the baby.

  It was such a blast that before I knew it, the shower was over. I had successfully pumped up the competitive spirit in everyone by giving out great prizes to fight over, like gift certificates and chocolate baskets.

  The men had been banished from the Wild house. Dad got kicked out to Mirabelle’s house to join her husband, and they had their own shower—drinking beer and watching hockey on TV.

  Mirabelle was thrilled with the shower. She told me that I should probably become some sort of party planner.

  It had been a pretty eventful week.

  Aaron’s ankle got healed. He felt stupid for slipping off the porch step, but ultimately it was for the best because otherwise Larson would’ve killed Matt.

  Before he left, he let me read the article that would run in Rolling Stone. I loved it. It made me sound human and flawed, unlike other interviews that either glorified me, or bashed me. He wrote about my small town interests, my vulnerabilities, and how aware I was of my own flaws, but accepted them nonetheless. Aaron said it was his most in-depth celebrity interview, and he was proud of it, even if he didn’t get to include the juicy stuff about solving a murder case together.

  Cherry was released of course and Mirabelle split the final winnings between her and Demi. They had the option of taking the vacation…together, but they took the money because they both needed it. The police checked, and yes, they did find one of Cherry’s pins in the blender. Cherry was shocked that Lena would stoop so low to win, but maybe it toughened her up a little. Since Cherry ultimately wanted to work in TV, I told her that this experience had probably toughen her up for the industry.