by Aames, Avery
Sylvie huffed. “No one will take you seriously ever again, Ashley, not if I have anything to do with it, you two-bit—”
He raised his hand, as if about to strike Sylvie, but quickly diverted his hand to the back of his neck and rubbed hard. “No matter what you think, I didn’t kill Noelle Adams.”
“Grab hold of him, Charlotte,” Rebecca said. “Do what Delilah’s mom does. Divine the truth.”
“I can’t,” I whispered. The moment in the alley with Boyd was a fluke.
“Try.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Ashley said, his face bleak with resignation. He spread his arms, palms up. “Look, I couldn’t have killed Noelle. I have a tight alibi. I was live on my Internet radio program the night Noelle was killed. I took calls. There’s no way to fake that.”
“Why didn’t you say that before?” I asked.
“Because Chief Urso didn’t consider me a suspect. He never asked for an alibi. If he did, I guess I would have told the truth. It’s better to be a fraud than a killer, right?” He attempted a smile, but his lips quivered.
“I’ll say this, Mr. Yeats . . . I mean, Baldwin,” Rebecca said. “You do have a nice voice. Whenever you sing on the show, that seems to get the most call-ins.”
Sylvie groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding. He has a horrible voice.”
“Me?” he wailed. “You’re the one who can’t sing a lick. You’re always singing in the wrong key.” He demonstrated.
Sylvie stamped her foot and told Ashley to keep his opinion to himself.
As they mocked each other, I sank into a quiet funk and returned to the real matter at hand: Noelle. Who had killed her and why?
CHAPTER
27
Later that afternoon, while straightening shelves at Fromagerie Bessette, the words hell’s key kept blinking like a neon sign in my brain. Had Noelle given me other clues to determine the meaning? She had gone out of her way to make sure Matthew put her in touch with Shelton so she could get the job. The night she died, she was going on a quest. So much was at stake, she had said.
Suddenly the imaginary neon sign burst into a kaleidoscope of color. “That’s it,” I said out loud to no one. Matthew had left the shop to deliver an order, Rebecca had gone to the hothouse behind the shop to fetch some basil, and the last customer had exited the shop minutes ago. I stopped realigning jars of jam and focused on the incident on the street between Sylvie and Ashley a.k.a. Alcott. I’m all about shortcuts, he had said, and then he accused Sylvie of singing in the wrong key. The two phrases wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else but, for me, they conjured up a very distinct memory. I recalled the night after the winery tour and coming upon Noelle in the guest room. She had been humming. On key. It wasn’t the singing that mattered. It was what else she had been doing—writing in her journal. We shared a brief exchange. She said Shelton Nelson wasn’t into shortcuts, and then her mouth quirked up. Had she been cuing me in on the fact that Shelton was into shortcuts? If so, why hadn’t she come right out and said so?
Next, Noelle slid off the bed and removed a blue thumb drive from her computer. As she did, her journal fell open. Had she intended for me to glimpse one of the pages? There were wine labels and notes.
I closed my eyes and tried to envision her notes. She had written the word shortcuts in the margin. In the journal that I found tucked between the mattress and box spring, I had seen only the word short. Was the word cuts missing? Had Noelle torn out the specific page that she had accidentally on purpose let me see? Did the picture of the man in a noose signify something, or was Noelle just doodling, sort of hinting that when the truth was discovered the man would want to hang himself? What if Shelton was being truthful, and he wasn’t into shortcuts? Did he joke about that at the winery to imply that someone else, like Liberty or Harold, was?
“Chérie,” my grandmother called from the doorway. The twins scampered in behind her, their faces flushed from the cold. They let the door slam shut. “Girls,” Grandmère chided.
“Sorry,” they sang in unison.
“We have good news.” Grandmère scuttled to the cheese counter. “The Thanksgiving Extravaganza is ready. It is parfait.”
“Perfect,” the girls chimed.
“The duck flies like a dream.”
“And we all know our lines.”
“It is all about repetition, is it not? Répétér. Répétér. Répétér.” Grandmère clapped in rhythm.
“No shortcuts for you,” I said, the word emblazoned on my brain.
“Mais oui.”
What might shortcuts cause? I wondered. Inferior wine, Matthew had suggested. Anything else?
Grandmère said, “Amy and Clair, you may play with Rags for fifteen minutes, then it is time for homework.” When Grandmère learned that Noelle was coming to town and staying with me, she offered to take over my responsibility of shuttling the children from school to rehearsals. I think she relished the extra time with the twins. As the girls flew to the office, Grandmère settled onto a ladder-back stool by the tasting bar and slipped a morsel of Rogue Creamery TouVelle into her mouth. “I love the smoky goodness.” She purred with contentment and took another slice. Nibbling the corners, she said, “Charlotte, what is puzzling you? Your forehead. It is creased.”
“Nothing,” I said, not wishing to worry her. All I had to go on were words that I’d overheard and suppositions and tidbits of evidence gleaned when Matthew and I had stolen into the winery—footprints, expensive wines stored behind a locked gate, and a cursory view of the insides of a few drawers in Shelton’s office. My thoughts scudded back to the expensive wines. How might Noelle’s note about shortcuts fit that scenario?
The rear door of the shop opened, and Rebecca waltzed in with two fists full of basil and other herbs that she had collected from the town’s communal hothouse located in the alley behind the shop. “Bonjour. Aren’t these gorgeous?” She stopped short of the kitchen and gave me a hard look. “What’s up? Charlotte, your face is all scrunched up.”
“You see?” Grandmère spread her hands.
I grabbed a towel and started cleaning the cutting surface.
“You’re thinking about that skirmish on the street, aren’t you?” Rebecca said.
Grandmère’s gaze swung between us.
I told her about Sylvie and Prudence’s free-for-all.
“Poor Prudence,” Grandmère muttered.
Rebecca recounted the clash between Sylvie and Ashley Yeats, a.k.a. Alcott Baldwin, right through to the final words that I was replaying in my head.
Grandmère said, “Our upcoming play, Days of Wine and Roses, will not have as much drama.”
I said, “Battling alcoholism”—the theme of the play—“can be pretty dramatic.”
“Oui.”
I flashed on Boyd Hellman, who would battle alcohol the rest of his life, but I put him from my mind. He had an alibi for the night Noelle died. Though it was quirky, it was solid. Alexis confirmed it.
“But life. That is the real drama,” my grandmother said.
Rebecca flaunted the herbs. “If you ask me, that Ashley-Alcott guy is lucky he has an alibi, because he has the best motive to kill Noelle so far. Keeping his secret hidden.”
“Except Noelle didn’t know his secret,” I said. “I think she was avoiding him to keep her parents’ illegal activities buried.”
Grandmère held up a finger. “Seneca said, ‘If you wish another to keep your secret, first keep it to yourself.’”
“Wait, wait, I know the book that came from,” Rebecca said. “Hippolytus.”
“Oui. Bravo. You are becoming a true student.” Grandmère glanced at her watch. “Oh my, we must go.” After giving Rebecca and me kisses, she collected the girls.
The remainder of the afternoon sped past. With the arrival of a passel of tour bus customers as well as a pair of women frantic to put together a cheese plate for their evening game of mahjong, I didn’t give my musings another thought.
Ho
wever, as Rags and I headed home, leaving Matthew to attend to his wine tasting alone, the notion of secrets swelled again in my mind. Who had the best secret to keep? Was Ashley’s alternate identity a secret worth killing for? Hardly. I focused on the father/daughter argument that I had overheard at the winery. Had I fabricated a soap opera from Liberty and Shelton’s words when really they were talking business? If so, then why had Liberty seemed so upset that I had listened in? I strung the words together in no particular order: label, lover, nose, charted for disaster. As Matthew and I had discussed, a few were words that could apply to the wine business—the label on a bottle; a lover or connoisseur of wine; the nose or bouquet of the wine. If the winery was strapped financially, it could be charted for disaster. How did the word phony fit in?
“Here you go, Ragsie.” I entered the kitchen and released him from his leash. He galloped to his bed and retrieved a jingle bell. While he batted it, I threw together dinner. Cooking for one could make a girl feel lonely, but I was dead set against dining on leftovers. I wanted fresh. My brain needed energy as well as flavor. A chopped Italian salad with homemade dressing, sweetened ever so slightly with sugar, would do the trick. I sliced mozzarella into cubes, diced Genoa salami, and opened a can of garbanzo beans.
As I stood at the sink chopping cherry tomatoes that I had collected from the hothouse before leaving the shop, I peered through the kitchen window at the garage and thought again about Noelle’s final words: hell’s key or Shel’s key. Which was it? The day we toured Shelton Nelson’s cellar, Noelle had cleared her throat before asking him whether he kept a log of his precious wines. A log, or register, could be a kind of key, essential to keeping things organized, like a color code for a painter. Had she cleared her throat to clue in Matthew or me to her plan to expose Shelton? Expose him for what?
The word phony popped into my mind again. What if Noelle discovered the winery was intentionally creating a counterfeit wine? Phony, label, nose.
I recalled Matthew telling me about a wine scam where a vintner duplicated a very expensive wine. The vintner sold it at auction, and a few wine snobs, not willing to reveal that they couldn’t tell the difference between the wines, lost a lot of money. The story made the wine journals.
Boyd said that, thanks to her parents’ lifestyle, Noelle didn’t take kindly to scam artists. If my theory was correct, when Noelle realized someone at SNW was swindling the public, she made it her mission to blow the whistle.
I flashed on the brief moment I had spent in Shelton’s office rummaging through his top desk drawer, which held a collection of items: blank labels, ink, specialized pens, corks, and what had resembled a branding tool. Were those the tools that could help perpetrate a fraud?
Noelle had devised the job for herself. She had begged Matthew to introduce her to Shelton. She had given up a cushy job to work for SNW. Had she discovered the winery’s scam while working as a sommelier? If I was correct, was Shelton, Liberty, or Harold the culprit? After Matthew and I had raided the winery, Liberty had come to The Cheese Shop to find out what we had discovered. She hadn’t told her father about our foray. Was she afraid of what he might do to her if he found out that she and/or her possible lover Harold were bastardizing his wine?
Noelle went to investigate something the night she died. Did she find evidence that would convict someone? Maybe she made notes and took photographs, crafting her own kind of key. Maybe she taunted the killer and told him or her that she had the evidence. Or did the killer figure it out on his or her own? Matthew and I found traces of Noelle’s muddy footprints. The killer could have, as well. Would Noelle have risked leaving her evidence at the winery? I didn’t think so. She returned to my house. She must have hidden it here.
Zinging with pent-up energy, I placed the knife on the counter, wiped my hands on a towel and tossed it beside the knife, then sprinted to the garage, which was cleaner now that Matthew had helped move the furniture back to the office. I stood in what could once again be used as a garage and tried to picture that night. Noelle lying beside the reassembled desk. A screwdriver nearby. No flashlight. Boxes strewn.
I thought again of the desk and flashed on a comment made at the pub the other night. Tyanne said Boyd Hellman had a hollow leg. When I left the garage on the night Noelle died, the legs of the secretary desk were lying on the floor. They were hollow. Had Noelle stuffed whatever evidence she had collected into those hollow legs and attached the legs before the killer found her? Other than me, no one would have known the legs had been off the desk.
CHAPTER
28
I fetched my cordless power screwdriver and raced back to the house. I bolted through the kitchen door and was heading for the office when I felt a presence. I whirled to my right. Harold Warfield charged me. Light glinted off the sharp knife in his hand—the knife I had used to slice tomatoes.
“Don’t kill me,” I shouted. Not clever. Not even scary. I raised the power tool, which was heavy but no match for the blade. It would work better as a shield. Where had he come from? Had he broken in through a window? I had locked the front door after Rags and I entered. “I don’t know where it is.”
“Where what is?”
“The key.”
“What key?”
“The key Noelle stole . . . copied . . . whatever.” My mouth felt as dry as sawdust; my heart drummed my rib cage. I edged to my left, but I couldn’t evade Harold. The kitchen table was in my way. Ducking and scrambling on my knees would do no good. “I don’t know where she hid it.” I was lying. I felt certain that I did know.
“Hid what?”
“The key.” Hell’s key. Harold’s key. “Isn’t that why you’re here? To retrieve the key?”
“You’ve been talking to my wife.”
“Velma didn’t tell me about the key.”
“What key?”
“The key.” I felt like I was performing a bizarre routine of “Who’s on First?”.
He said, “I’m not here for a key.”
“You’re not?”
“You’re digging around my life.” His voice rasped with anger. “You interrogated my wife.”
“No, I didn’t.” Okay, yes, I had. Yet again I was lying. But the guy was pointing a knife at my chest, and he was twisting and turning it like he wanted to cut out my heart. I clutched the power drill tighter.
“How dare you,” he hissed.
He slinked toward me, his hand shaking, and I thought maybe I had the advantage, after all. If I threw the power tool at him, I could knock away the knife. But I would need to run away and the kitchen door had slammed closed. And Harold was bigger than I was and probably faster. I wouldn’t get far.
“Velma put a GPS in my car.”
I swallowed hard. “That’s great. She wants to make sure you won’t get lost.”
He snarled. “Very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” If I dropped the power tool and tried to get control of the knife, he would slice my hands to ribbons.
“Velma followed me to Wooster.”
“What’s in Wooster?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?” I asked, returning to our “Who’s on First?” routine. When would the scary merry-go-round ride end? My head was spinning.
“She found out I was having an affair.”
Uh-oh. Not good. He had wanted to keep the affair secret, and I had incited his wife to action. What kind of key fit that scenario? A key to the woman’s apartment. Would Noelle have hidden something that small in the leg of the desk? Except Harold said he wasn’t here for a key.
Shut up, brain. Concentrate. Lunatic, straight ahead.
I said, “I’m sure you can patch things up. End it with Liberty.”
“Liberty?”
“Aren’t you involved with Shelton Nelson’s daughter?”
“Are you crazy? She’s a nutcase.”
Talk about a pot calling a kettle black. “Well, whoever the woman is, end it, and go to marriage counseling
with Velma.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” I could be such a Pollyanna at times.
“I’m having an affair with a man.”
With a man. Even worse. Well, not worse, just different, but that scenario had to really upset Velma. How could she compete with a man? She had a chance at winning her husband back from a woman, but from a man? I remembered Velma saying during a visit to The Cheese Shop that Harold spent a lot of time with his college buddies. At the time, I hadn’t thought anything about it. How dense could I be?
“Does the man own a dog?” I said, thinking back to when Meredith had seen Harold acting strangely at the pet store.
“Who cares?”
“Nobody. Not me. Maybe the man . . . Maybe the dog.” I couldn’t believe the babble blathering out of my mouth. Having a case of the jitters while trying to defend oneself against a man with a knife was not smart.
“That’s where I was on the night of Noelle’s murder,” Harold said.
“You weren’t at the library.”
He frowned. “You already established that.”
“That’s great,” I said. “You have an alibi.” He wasn’t the killer. He hadn’t come to my house to do me in. He was angry, outed, and desperate to vent.
I eyed the towel that I had discarded on the counter. Maybe I could swap it for the power tool. If I could wrap the towel around my hand, I could go for the knife, and—
No, Rebecca would tell me she had seen it work in a movie, but I would wager the knife would pierce right through the fabric. Only last week, I had sharpened the entire collection of knives.
Reason with the guy would be Jordan’s suggestion. But it would be hard to convince Harold I was levelheaded with an anvil-sized power tool in my hands. Perhaps a melding of both Rebecca and Jordan’s ideas would work.
In the gentlest voice I could muster, I said, “Harold, let’s talk civilly. I’m going to put down the power tool.” I twisted to my right and placed it on the counter and picked up the towel, pretending to wipe off my hands, while wrapping it around my fingertips and palm. “I’m sorry about your marriage woes. I am. Velma must be distraught, and I never meant to hurt her. But you should be happy that you have an alibi. Only minutes ago, I was wondering if you were Noelle Adams’s killer. When you showed up and lunged at me, well . . .” I chuckled. A nervous cockatoo couldn’t have sounded wackier. “Please put down the knife. I won’t tell anyone what you told me. As for you and Velma, well, that’s up to you guys to sort out. Counseling might be a good idea. Do you want me to drive you home so you can talk to her? You look pretty upset.”