“Alicia. Alicia Duarte.” Jayce’s voice cracked. “She’s dead.”
“What?” Whipping around the counter, I came to stand beside my sister. I stared.
The newspaper editor Alicia Duarte lay on the floor between a wooden table and two, brown-cushioned chairs. Blood pooled beneath her blond head on the bamboo floor. Her eyes stared, blank, at the ceiling. For a wild moment I believed she wasn’t real. It was a trick. The body was wax. I was dreaming.
My stomach rolled, sluggish. Someone had done this to her. I scanned the café, my breath coming short and fast, but we were alone.
Shocked, I looked to my sister. Jayce’s green eyes were wide, her forehead damp in spite of the arctic air conditioning. But there was something else in her gaze.
Guilt.
That snapped me out of my fear. What was Alicia Duarte doing in my sister’s café? “Why is she dead?” It was a stupid question, but my brain and my mouth seemed disconnected.
“How should I know why she’s dead?”
“She’s in Ground! Why is she in your coffee shop?”
“I don’t know!” Jayce clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, God. Alicia.” She fumbled her way to a chair and sat, gripping the watering can.
Movements stilted, I walked to the wall phone behind the counter and dialed the police.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
“This is Karin Bonheim. I’m at Ground Café on Main Street. We’ve found a dead woman.” The front entrance didn’t appear broken into. Its red-framed windows were intact. And the rear kitchen door had been locked. How the hell had Alicia gotten inside the closed café?
The dispatcher squawked into the receiver, and I hung up the phone. My stomach rolled. Jayce’s look of guilt… I’d seen it too many times to mistake it, though I hadn’t seen it often in the last few years. Jayce had outgrown that particular emotion.
I bit my lower lip. It was no secret Jayce was better friends with Alicia’s husband, Brayden, than with Alicia. Could Jayce have given Brayden a key? Had he come here, and then his wife somehow… And there’d been an argument…
I swallowed. Whatever had happened, my sister couldn’t have been involved.
But why was Alicia’s body here?
CHAPTER TWO
Sirens wailed outside the café.
I touched my sister’s arm. “How did she get inside Ground?”
Jayce’s mouth opened, closed. She stared at Alicia’s corpse, sprawled behind the wooden table. The morning sky lightened, brightening the square windows, the polished tables, the funky chairs. “She couldn’t have.”
Maybe if I’d paid more attention to my own magic, I would have seen this coming. But I’d never had Jayce and Lenore’s talent. And I’d been so wrapped up in the day-to-day grind of work and my aunt, my magical work had fallen by the wayside.
But this moment called for logic, not spells. “Who else had a key?” If Brayden had one, then people would believe the rumors were true, that something had been going on between Brayden and my sister. But if Brayden had a key, that meant he’d probably killed his wife. And as awful as that was, I preferred it to Jayce being accused of the crime.
“The landlord, I guess,” she said.
“Is that it? None of your other employees?”
She gnawed on her plump, bottom lip. “Darla. In case of emergency.”
I nodded. Darla was the assistant manager. Maybe Darla had lost the key, because I couldn’t imagine her attacking Alicia. In truth, I couldn’t imagine anyone committing murder. Don’t get me wrong — I know it happens. Still, I’m always shocked when I read about a murder in the big city papers. But that sort of thing never happened in Doyle.
Until today.
“I should call Brayden.” Jayce stood, looking around.
Oh, hell no. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
“Why not?”
I focused on a framed watercolor on the far wall. “It’s better the police make the call.”
“But he’ll want to hear it from a friend.”
“It won’t look good if you call him.”
“But it’s Brayden.” Her voice rose. “He can’t hear about his wife from a stranger. It isn’t right.”
“Forget Brayden,” I snapped, fear arcing through me, and instantly regretted my outburst. There was nothing between my sister and Brayden Duarte. Jayce had lots of friends — mainly drinking buddies — and that was all. But Brayden was the kind of guy women tended to think of first — to their cost. “Seriously. The police will be here soon. Ask if you can call him when they get there.”
Twin lines appeared between Jayce’s dark brows, but she nodded.
“And don’t say anything without a lawyer,” I said.
“Can’t you be my lawyer?”
“Criminal law is a whole different animal from estate and business. I’m not qualified. Just don’t say anything.”
“I can’t not say anything,” Jayce said. “It’s Alicia! She’s dead in my coffee shop! How am I going to explain this?”
“Can you?” I wanted her explain it, to have a reason why Alicia would be here.
Jayce looked away. “I don’t understand what happened — why she’s here or how…”
“Then stick to the facts. Keep it brief. But if they start to push, wait for a lawyer.” I racked my aching brain. I wasn’t friends with any criminal attorneys, but I knew other attorneys who might make recommendations.
Two uniformed officers strode to the front door and rattled the knob.
“I’ll get it.” I let them inside. “Thanks for coming. Alicia is…” But the body on the floor wasn’t Alicia anymore. “Over there.” I motioned toward the corpse.
More uniforms arrived. The fire department (useless under the circumstances). Paramedics (ditto). I looked for Brayden, Alicia’s husband, and was glad when I didn’t see him among the paramedics. The cops separated us, settling me on a stool by the dark, wooden counter and peppering me with questions.
My tongue thickened, clumsy. I hesitated over my words, darting glances at Jayce in the opposite corner of the room.
“We’ll need to get your prints,” the deputy said, “to separate them from any others we may find.”
“Uh, huh,” I said.
The sheriff, grim in her khaki uniform, strode inside the coffee shop.
My shoulders tensed. Authority had arrived, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
Lifting her hat from her curly, blond hair, the sheriff looked down at the corpse. The muscles beneath her face shifted. She blinked rapidly, her hooded, brown eyes widening.
Spotting me, the sheriff crossed the café. “Karin. What happened here?”
“I don’t know. My sister and I returned from the hospital, and we found her.”
Furrows appeared between the sheriff’s blond brows, the lines around her eyes deepening. “The hospital? Your aunt again?”
“She had a fever last night. They’re running some tests.”
“How did Ms. Duarte get inside your sister’s café?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has anyone taken your statement?”
“Yes. That officer, over there.” I pointed at a gangly deputy now talking to a paramedic by the door.
“That’s ridiculous!” Jayce shouted on the opposite side of the café.
The sheriff’s gaze flicked to my sister. “What else can you tell me?”
I tore my attention from Jayce, who gestured animatedly toward Alicia’s body. “Nothing. I’m… we were shocked to find her here. There’s no reason for Alicia to be in the café, not at this hour.”
The sheriff gave me a long look. “Your aunt’s a strong woman. Please give her my best.” Nodding, brisk, she strode to the two detectives questioning Jayce.
More police arrived, and a detective in a cheap-looking business suit became my new interrogator.
My mind rattled. My natural inclination was to cooperate with the police. They were the go
od guys, right? And the truth should set us both free. But a sharp voice inside me told me it would not.
A man shouted outside the café, and police officers gathered in the open doorway.
“I am simply a concerned citizen,” one of our councilmen, Steve Woodley, proclaimed from outside. Water stained the shoulders of his blue, suit jacket. They say politics are for people too unattractive to be movie stars, but Steve Woodley could have been a star. Fit and muscular, he looked like an aging Patrick Stewart with a silver goatee. Woodley had been a town councilman forever. I suspected the only way he’d leave city hall was feet first.
The sheriff bustled to the door and spoke to Woodley in a low voice.
Woodley wiped a handkerchief across his bald scalp, glittering with moisture. Smoothing the front of his blue business suit (no tie), he nodded. He and the sheriff ambled onto the sidewalk. I strained to hear them and failed. The door swung shut.
A uniformed cop grasped Jayce’s upper arm.
She wrenched away, her chin high.
He motioned her out the front entrance.
I slid from the stool, taking a step toward my sister.
The detective stepped sideways, blocking my way.
The room suddenly felt hot. “Where are they taking my sister?”
“To the station,” the detective said.
“Should I go too?”
He gave me a brief smile, his blue eyes sympathetic. “No. Not yet.”
I hurried to the glassed door. “But where…?”
Outside, the cop put his hand on Jayce’s head and guided her into the back seat of the black and white. She wasn’t in cuffs. That should mean it wasn’t an arrest. And how could they arrest her? They’d only just found the body. They wouldn’t have heard the gossip about Jayce and Brayden Duarte. But there were only three keys, and the café had been locked, and the pool of suspects was narrow. Alicia Duarte hadn’t walked into the café, fallen and hit her head, and then locked up after herself.
She’d been murdered.
CHAPTER THREE
An SUV drove past, its tires whooshing on the slick street. Water dripped from the awning above Ground’s front door. I drummed my fingers on a brick planter, the blood banging in my brain.
Lenore wasn’t answering her phone.
No surprise there, Lenore was a late riser. But I needed my baby sister. Now.
Carless, I walked toward Lenore’s apartment and rubbed the traces of fingerprint ink from my fingers. The rain had stopped, leaving the town’s streets glossy and black. I walked down the shaded sidewalk, past wine-tasting rooms and nineteenth-century restaurants and shops of brick and wood. The exercise eased the fear twisting my gut, and my muscles loosened, my strides lengthening.
I turned on Arcadia, a sloping street that curved past a park with an old-fashioned gazebo. Doyle Creek splashed, hidden, behind a hillock of grass. Later in the day, children would play in the water, cooling off from the high-foothill summer.
Two more blocks and I was in a residential area. I climbed the exterior steps of a leaning, two-story wood building, its white paint pristine, and I knocked. Waited. Knocked harder.
Lenore opened the door, her honey-colored hair tumbling down the shoulders of her kimono wrap. The wrap exposed most of her gazelle-like legs. She held a leather notebook at her side, and a pen was tucked behind one ear. “What’s happened?”
My heart skipped. “How did you—?”
“You’re banging on my door at eight a.m.” She stepped aside, allowing me inside the cramped apartment. “What’s wrong? Is it Aunt Ellen?”
“She’s in the hospital, but she’s okay. Another infection. But I think Jayce has been arrested.”
Her mouth opened, closed. “Arrested?”
I took another step inside the nearly all-white apartment. The only accent colors came from a few strips of brown and her books. Brown stripes in the white throw rugs. Brown doors. Brown, geometric wall hangings. And books everywhere, overflowing shelves, atop tables, stacked in corners. Otherwise, she was living in a snowstorm of white walls and rugs and sofas.
“It’s Alicia Duarte,” I said. “We found her inside the café, dead.”
Lenore’s fair skin paled. “Dead? But how… Are you sure?”
“We found the body. Jayce came to pick me up at the hospital. She was in a rush to open Ground, so she brought me to her apartment so I could get some sleep there. That’s when we found her, lying beside a table in the café. The blood…” I stared at a pile of paperbacks atop an end table. There’d been so much blood. It must have been a head wound. They bled like crazy. Had she been struck with something? “We called the police. They took Jayce away but not in cuffs. Maybe it’s not as bad as I imagine,” I finished weakly.
Lenore looked out the window, crisscrossed by white-painted metal panes. Tree branches with wide leaves, a shocking splash of emerald, brushed against the glass. “No. You’re right. It’s bad.”
I didn’t ask why she thought so. It was one of Lenore’s talents — she knew things. She knew when someone’s girlfriend was leaving. She knew when death and children were on their way. She knew precisely which authors to book at the store she managed. She just knew.
“And Aunt Ellen?” Lenore asked.
“She had a fever. The hospital’s doing tests, keeping her under observation. She’s got an appointment with Doctor Toeller at eleven to discuss the results.”
“How was she?”
“Disoriented. She kept talking about… you know.”
“I’ll get dressed.” She vanished into her tiny bedroom.
Digging my cell phone from my purse, I dialed lawyers I knew. All but one call went to voice mail — it was still too early in the morning. The attorney I did get through to said he’d have to get back to me with a name.
I clenched the phone and paced the room. Jayce was impulsive. God only knew what she was saying to the cops right now. Had they read her her rights?
Lenore emerged from her bedroom. My sister adjusted the collar of her tunic-style dress, sleeveless and white with pale blue stripes. She cinched a belt at her waist. “Anything?”
My cell phone rang. I took the call, scrawling a name and number in lightning-bolt script on a notepad Lenore slid beneath my fingers. I hung up and drew a ragged breath. “I’ve got a recommendation for a lawyer.” The law firm wasn’t in Doyle, but it was close.
Lenore cracked her knuckles. “Maybe we should talk to Jayce before getting her a lawyer.”
“Jayce’s being questioned now. She doesn’t have a lawyer. She has no one to call. Jayce needs someone at the station to stop her from saying anything she shouldn’t.”
Lenore pressed her lips together and blinked an assent.
I made the call. A man picked up on the third ring. “Giles and Ferris Law, Mike Ferris speaking.” A lawyer who answered his own phone, like me. My heart warmed.
“Hi, this is Karin Bonheim. My colleague, Henry Williams, recommended you. But I believe we met at the retirement dinner for Judge Buchwald last year?”
“Oh, yes. I remember you. Contract law, isn’t it?”
“That and estates.”
“What can I do for you?”
“My sister, Jayce, needs a criminal attorney. She was taken in for questioning—”
“Questioning? Not arrested?”
“I don’t… I’m not sure. They put her in a squad car, but she wasn’t in cuffs.”
“Go on, Miss Bonheim. What was your sister brought in for?”
“Murder. We found a body in her café this morning.”
A pause. “Which café?”
“Ground. We’re in Doyle.”
“All right. I can be at the police station in thirty minutes. Why don’t you meet me there? Oh, and bring your checkbook for the retainer.”
“Thanks.” My shoulders slumped. I’d found someone. I’d fix this. After all, how much trouble could my sister get into in thirty minutes?
CHAPTER FOUR
; The sheriff’s station was a three-story building of rounded corners and aqua-tinted glass. It was too modern and too big for antique Doyle, but the station served the entire county.
Drizzle dampened the windshield of Lenore’s Volvo. She parked the car beneath the shelter of a tall pine and the wipers squeaked to a halt. “I’ve never been inside before.” She yanked up the parking brake.
“Why would you?” I asked. Why would any of us? The idea that our sister was inside, possibly under arrest, seemed fantastic, outré. My grip tightened on my purse.
“It feels like I’m dreaming,” Lenore said. “That none of this is real. That I’ll wake up, and…” She shook her head and grabbed her pale, leather bag off the seat.
We walked through the macadam lot to the station’s front doors. They glided open, silent, and we hurried into a long atrium.
A uniformed officer sat behind a window to the right. Empty chairs clustered in random groupings around potted ficus trees.
“The lawyer said he’d meet us here?” Lenore touched her clavicle.
I nodded. But we’d never defined exactly where “here” was. Outside? In the waiting area? “It’s not that big a waiting area,” I said. “He’ll find us.”
We pulled out chairs and sat.
A florid, middle-aged man in a rumpled suit exited from a far-off hallway and hurried toward us.
Adjusting my purse over my shoulder, I rose, recognizing the lawyer from that long-ago dinner.
Nostrils flaring, he stopped before me.
“Mr. Ferris, this is my sis—”
“I’ve already met your sister, Miss Bonheim,” he said. “And she’s found her own attorney. It appears I’m not needed.”
“Her own?” Why hadn’t I listened to Lenore? I glanced at her, but she’d shrank into her seat. “I’m sorry. There was a miscommunication. Of course we’ll pay—”
Nodding curtly, he stalked from the building. The glass doors swished shut behind him.
Lenore looked at me, questioning. “What now?”
Another man swaggered toward us. I felt rather than saw him, his aura a pulse of hot energy that filled the high-ceiling room. When I finally saw him, I noticed his suit first — expensive and charcoal-gray — and my heart sank.
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