Cold Feet (Five Star Mystery Series)

by Karen Pullen

  Blue Stone had joined my list of “persons of interest.” The list seemed like that game at the State Fair, where moles pop up and down and you get points for each one you can whack with a mallet. On the chance that he was at work, I drove to the Castle B&B, using the back-road directions Camilla had given me. A gravel lane rolled down to an abandoned mill shedding its bricks into the slowly moving water of the Haw River. The lane ended in a crumbling single-lane bridge—built in 1922 according to a sign—that probably didn’t get enough traffic to be worth inspecting. No one was coming from the other direction, so I drove onto the bridge and inched across, aware that its splintering wooden guard rails didn’t offer much of a barrier.

  At the Castle B&B’s entrance, Wyatt was scouring the black graffiti—Murder—Stay Away—from his sign. It was an elegant carved-wood sign about three feet in diameter, painted a glossy blue and trimmed in gold leaf. He was working on the first R in “Murder,” rubbing gently. I rolled down my window.

  “Is it coming off?” I said.

  “Kind of. What do you want?”

  “Is Blue here?”

  He tipped his head toward the castle.

  A sense of foreboding passed through me as I clacked the brass door knocker. Murder stay away. No one answered. My apprehension was dispelled by the smell of baking chocolate and butter that led me down the hall to the kitchen area, where I found Liesle mixing up something fattening.

  “Oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies,” she said. “The first batch is over there—please take one.” The mixer began its whirr as she added a cup of chocolate chips to the batter.

  I contented myself with a tiny broken bit. Yummy. Then one more. “Where’s Blue?” I asked.

  “Outside. Sure you won’t have another one?”

  I declined and pushed my way out the back door. The tents were gone, the tables and chairs put away, leaving only an empty acre of green lawn. Blue was pushing a fertilizer spreader. I waved at him. “Got a minute?”

  He shrugged and walked slowly toward me. I motioned that he should remove his headphones and led us to a couple of Adirondack chairs under a tree. He was jumpy, rubbing his legs, rocking back and forth. I perched on the edge of my chair and leaned toward him. “You didn’t tell me your mom owned a B&B,” I said. “Pink Magnolia Manor, right down the road. And I bet Wyatt doesn’t know either.”

  “No one asked.”

  “It might be considered a good qualification, that you’ve got experience in one.”

  He shrugged and looked off to the side. I peered at his tee-shirt. A skeleton, dripping blood, held a Medusa-head. Do the clothes reveal the man? Was Blue scary like his tee-shirts?

  “Your mother doesn’t like Wyatt, does she?”

  “No, ma’am.” He gave me a furtive look.

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, ma’am.” He was looking at the ground now. Anywhere butatme.

  “I bet you know who spray-painted the B&B’s sign, don’t you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  This repetition was getting old. “How about the damage to the air conditioner? The water softener? The dead raccoon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just so it’s very, very clear, Blue? Some courts consider vandalism to be a felony. Felonies are serious crimes, people go to jail. State prison.”

  He stood up. “I have stuff to do. Wyatt doesn’t pay me to sit around.”

  “We’re not done. If you aren’t responsible, who is? Any ideas? Liesle?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. She’s a hardened criminal, that one.”

  “Let me see your hands.” He held them out. I touched his left palm. “You’re left-handed, are you? What’s that?” Under the grime, black paint.

  “Nothing.” He shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “Sit down just for a minute, please.”

  He complied. He was an obedient scared child, and likeable. But that didn’t mean he would confess to the vandalism.

  “I’m not interested in sending you to jail. I have bigger problems. As long as it stops now. Will it stop?”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  So he wasn’t ready to admit anything. Okay. But maybe he would stop. I handed him my business card. “I need your help, Blue. Anything you see, think of, hear around this place.”

  He studied my card. “What’s it like, being a cop? Donuts and car chases?” He smiled and the sun glinted off his braces.

  “Cookies and cake. Talking to cute guys.”

  He blushed. “How old do you have to be?”

  The question made me pause. Some days I felt older than dirt. Other days, more like a damp chick half out of the egg. He wanted a literal answer though. “It varies by department,” I said. “You don’t need a college degree but it helps.”

  “My mom wants me to go to college.”

  “How are your grades?”

  “Okay. Not great.”

  Recalling the peeling paint and termite-eaten porch at Pink Magnolia Manor, I doubted that Camilla Phillips had a college fund for her son. “I was in the same boat exactly,” I said. “Very average grades. No money. But you can do it if you want to.”

  “When did you decide to be a cop?”

  I paused. How much to tell him? My mother disappeared when I was five. Around eight years old, I began having nightmares about being murdered. Fern had tried to help, explaining to me that whoever robbed that Texaco and took my mother was most likely dead, or in prison for similar misdeeds. Not reassured, I had begun clipping newspaper accounts of murders, avidly reading the follow-up stories all the way through arrest and trial. Most people have a box or two of childhood memorabilia. In my closet are cartons marked Unsolved Murders, Murder Arrests, Murder Trials. I would move the envelopes of clippings from one box to another as the police and courts did their work. A helpful librarian obtained reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for me. Each year I updated a three-ring binder with homicide and conviction rates, numbers of murders by age, state, and type of weapon.

  One persistent statistic consumed me—though homicides have the highest conviction rate of all crimes, over one-third of all murders are never solved. I hated that my mother’s death was a cold case. Every day Fern and I lived with the fact that Grace’s killer walked free.

  “Pretty early on,” I told him. “But I almost took a different path. Foolish stuff. Like you’re doing.” I stood to leave.

  He looked up at me. “Thanks.”

  Good. Message received.

  Liesle had already cleaned up after the cookie-making, and the kitchen floor was still damp from a mopping. I heard machine noises at the end of the first-floor hall, coming from the Stirling room. When the din stopped, I knocked on the door.

  Liesle opened the door. Her tank top revealed the full rabbit tattoo, slightly dampened with sweat. “Oh, it’s you. I thought it would be.”

  “Why, are you psychic?”

  “I am, actually. Stay out there, I’m shampooing the carpet.”

  I was intrigued. I think psychics are a waste of police resources but this was different. Liesle was here last weekend.

  What she considered intuition could be subliminal information.

  “Psychic in the sense that . . .”

  She pulled a hankie out of her pocket and blotted her chest and neck. “Whew, it’s hot. Okay, sometimes I know about something before I’m told. Or I feel someone who’s died is trying to communicate with me. It’s not very developed. It was stronger when I was a kid.” She yanked a container of filthy water out of the shampooer. “Mind if I keep going? I’ll never finish if I don’t.”

  “Sure, go ahead. Don’t suppose you’ve heard from the dead bride?” I followed her down the hall to a closet with a janitor’s sink. She dumped the water, then wheeled the shampooer into the room next door. I helped her move two bedside tables and a chair into the hall.

  She pushed her hair behind her ears and studied me. “Something was off about her. You might not underst
and. With nearly everyone, I sense their unique humanity—it’s a mix of fear and love, basically. Even with animals, I can feel what they are about, it’s not too different. With her? Something else. She didn’t seem real.”

  This was not helpful. I could hardly take such an insight to

  Anselmo Morales. “You didn’t sense human emotion?”

  “To me, she was like this shampooer. Mechanical.”

  I remembered the video—Justine had seemed quite human. But I wasn’t going to argue with Liesle over her own perceptions. “Anything else? When you go into the Falkirk bedroom, do you have any feelings about what happened?”

  “Usually, the dead person herself would help me. But her being the way she was, I don’t get any messages. It’s funny, ever since she died in there, I’ve sensed peanut butter in Falkirk. It’s left over from the death, I think.”

  “There’s peanut butter somewhere in the room?”

  “No, no. Of course not. I don’t actually smell peanut butter with my nose. I don’t go in the room and think someone’s been eating PB&J. I think peanut butter. I smell it with my mind. Very strong.You look confused.”

  She was reading my aura correctly. I couldn’t do anything with this. If it were chocolate, I’d think about Lottie and Evan. Booze equaled Mike’s step-aunt Delia. Cigars, his stepfather Scoop. But peanut butter? I sighed and let go of this thread.

  “Show me where the keys are kept.”

  She led me into the tiny alcove off the dining room, Wyatt’s office. On the back of the door hung a small cabinet. She turned a knob to open it and showed me—for each guest room, a labeled hook; on each hook, sets of keys. One clump of keys was unlabeled. “My keys,” she said. “For housekeeping. A key for each bedroom, and the supplies closet.”

  “And the barn?”

  She pointed to a small key on its own hook. BARN was written on the tag. “There’s usually two. Blue must have the other one.”

  “Think carefully about this,” I said. “On the weekend of the wedding, do you remember anything unusual about this barn key? Was one missing, or did someone borrow it?”

  “Unlikely. I’ve never known a guest to borrow it. But Wyatt and Blue go in and out of the barn all the time.”

  “Is it left unlocked?”

  “I don’t think so. Wyatt’s always worried about theft.”

  I left her to get on with her work. Peanut butter—not a real smell, just a smell in her mind. Lordy.

  Wyatt had reached the “s” in “stay away.” “Murder” was erased, except for a few stubborn black specks. “If one more thing goes wrong around here, I’m going to torch this place. You didn’t hear that, of course.”

  I recalled my talk with Blue.“It might end now.The sabotage, I mean.”

  He glared at me with blood-shot eyes. “Gee, golly, that’s just super.”

  Fluffed out with white fur, the cat was enormous, almost as big as a raccoon. It padded slowly across the living room of Mike Olmert’s townhouse and sniffed at my shoes. Mike had asked me to stop by. He wanted to show me something possibly useful to the investigation.

  “Let me introduce you,” Mike said, “to Justine’s baby, Brigitte.” Brigitte’s eyes were pale green and her expression was irritated. I leaned down and rubbed her head and Brigitte emitted a plaintive-sounding “mmrroww.” She was toothless except for one pointy canine.

  “She’s off her feed,” Mike said. “I know what you’re thinking—with her size that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

  “What happened to her teeth?”

  “It’s something genetic—they all fell out. So, this is our house. Justine’s and mine. Want to look around?”

  I followed him from room to room, to see what I could learn about Justine. She collected elephants—stuffed, clay, glass, metal. Her clothes—deep jewel colors and natural fabrics—filled the closets of two bedrooms. A small deck off the kitchen was crowded with plants in colorful pots. “I didn’t want to come back here without her,” Mike said. “I didn’t think I could face all these reminders. But there was Brigitte to take care of, and these guys.” He gestured toward the fish tank built into the wall over a fireplace. Two yellow fish lolled underneath the rocks, their bright color popping them out against the black background of the tank. Each almost six inches long, they seemed large for aquarium fish.

  “Canary cichlids,” Mike said. “They were Justine’s too.”

  “She had a knack for growing her pets, didn’t she.”

  He chuckled. “They grew for her all right. I guess they’re mine now. Sit down, won’t you?”

  When I sat on the couch, Brigitte climbed into my lap, stretched out like a polar bear, and began to purr. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Better, thanks.” Mike looked calmer than the last time I’d seen him, at the gym, when Anselmo and I had confronted him with questions. As if reading my mind, he apologized for his previous attitude. “I couldn’t accept—hell, I couldn’t under-stand—what you were saying, that Justine was transsexual. But the ME—Dr. O’Brien—he convinced me. And I’ve had a couple of days to think about it.”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “What she had was like a broken leg. You fix it, you don’t limp around in pain and waste your life. She knew who she was.”

  My opinion of Mike Olmert ratcheted up as he spoke. It was amazing, really, that a man with Tricia for a mother could be so open-minded. I reminded myself—children sometimes turn around and take a very unexpected path. Me, for example. I’m sure Fern never set out to raise a drug agent.

  “Yet she didn’t tell you,” I said.

  “She must have had her reasons.”

  “Did you know her brother?”

  He shook his head. “Man, you are queen of the reveal, aren’t you? She had a brother?”

  “Ten years older, lives in Wilmington.”

  “No. I didn’t know him.You met this brother?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I’d like to meet him sometime.”

  “I hope to see him tomorrow, and I’ll tell him. You had something to show me?”

  “Hold on.” He went into the kitchen and came back with a plastic bag. “The Castle innkeeper sent me a package of Justine’s things. Clothes, makeup. Like I’m supposed to know what to do with them. I’ll give everything to charity I guess. Anyway, there was this. It’s one of those personalized bracelets, and it’s not hers.”

  The bag contained an Italian charm bracelet, shiny silver modular links on a stretchy band. The bracelet had perhaps eighteen links, and half of them were charms. An apple, inscribed “#1 Teacher.” The Miami Dolphins logo. A snake encircling a staff—the caduceus symbol for medical alert. A birthday cake, with a date, April 2. A tiny faded photo of two dark-haired girls and another of a dachshund. No one I’d talked to fit this profile. Ingrid and Kate were approximately the right age, but like Gia Mabe, Mike’s stalker, neither was a teacher. I slid the bracelet into my pocket, to be examined later.

  “And I want to give you something.” Mike handed me a book. “It’s Justine’s vegan cookbook. She wrote it, and self-published. It’s a good book if you’re interested in that kind of thing. We got the first shipment just a week ago.”

  Enchanted Food was spiral-bound, with almost two hundred pages. The cover showed a round little phyllo bundle stacked high with green beans, all drizzled with an herby creamy sauce. I leafed through it. Page after page of gorgeous food pictures—stews, cakes, dips. I paused at Tempeh Strudel with Braised Endive, followed by Porcini and Grilled Ramps Napoleon. Four ingredients I’d never tried. The photos were amazing.

  I turned it over to see Justine’s picture on the back. It wasn’t the air-brushed glamour shot I expected. Instead it showed her in the kitchen wielding a chopping knife in one hand and a platter of pita chips and salsa in the other. Her head was tilted and she had a flirty smile, an inviting look. Come on-a my house, I’m gonna give you tofu cacciatore!

  With a sudden intake of breath,
Mike choked back a sob.

  “This is really hard,” he said. “She was so proud of her book.”

  “Are they her recipes? Her photos?”

  “Yes. She made all the food and took the pictures. Everything in the book is Justine’s.”

  “Is it for sale?” I asked. I’m not a cook—Hogan had been the chef in our household. I can make about four things. But perhaps Justine’s cookbook would provide a stimulus for me to branch out. I needed a hobby anyway.

  “Take it. A gift. In fact, take a carton of them.” He opened a closet to reveal stacks of boxes. “I’ll put it in your car.”

  I fished in my purse for some money but he brushed it aside. “Please, give one to everyone who’s working on her case. Maybe she’ll be more real and alive to them. Not . . . not . . . you know . . . just weird.”

  I tried to thank him but he waved me away. As easily as hoisting a glass of water, he picked up a carton. “Find out who ended her life. Then I’ll be thanking you,” he said.

  I sat in my car and made notes, doodles actually, trying to sort out what I’d learned. A bracelet, a toothless cat, a cookbook, an elephant collection, a secret brother. Irrelevant distractions or vitally important? Mike Olmert, innocent or guilty? I touched the carton of cookbooks, hoping for a flash of intuition, a smidge of Liesle’s psychic powers, because deductive reasoning and logic were failing me. Identify Justine Bradley’s murderer? I might as well pitch darts at names on a board, trying not to impale an innocent bystander.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Thursday Late Afternoon

  Tricia and Scoop Scott lived in Silver Hills, a development with a gate that keeps residents from meeting anyone unlike themselves. The only people who want to come in—the gardeners, maids, nannies, construction workers, vendors—are the ones who have to come in. Innumerable pizza delivery people know the code. Anyone can tear through the gate and snap off the boom arm. Three days to replace it.