The Pumpkin Muffin Murder

by Livia J. Washburn

  “Neither can I,” she admitted. “But at this point we can’t rule out any possibilities.”

  “You’re right,” Sam said. “Like ol’ Sherlock Holmes, you just eliminate the impossible and see what you got left.”

  Phyllis didn’t like being compared to Sherlock Holmes. For one thing, she thought she’d look ridiculous in a deerstalker hat, and for another, she had no interest in using cocaine.

  She couldn’t help but wonder, though, what Holmes would have made of a dead man dressed up like a scarecrow stuffed with one of her muffins. If in fact it was one of her muffins. She had e-mailed her pumpkin muffin recipe to Detective Largo the day before but hadn’t heard anything back. Not that she really expected to hear back from Detective Largo.

  It took them about half an hour to pile all eleven scarecrows into the back of Sam’s pickup. When Phyllis looked at them, she couldn’t help but be reminded of what she had said a couple of days earlier when they saw the scarecrows in the back of Dana’s SUV at the elementary school. Like a pile of bodies, she had described them, and the remark had proven to be grimly prophetic, though only one of the scarecrows had turned out to be a body.

  So far, Phyllis reminded herself. If this were a movie or a TV show or a best-selling thriller with a hundred chapters, none of them more than four pages long, Logan would turn out to be just the first victim of a madman known as the Scarecrow Killer who taunted the authorities through the media while frustrating the efforts of a beautiful, dauntless female FBI agent and a rumpled but ruggedly handsome journalist to catch him. . . .

  This was none of those things, though, and Phyllis hoped and prayed that there wouldn’t be any more bodies dressed like scarecrows.

  A car door closed nearby, breaking into Phyllis’s thoughts, and a familiar voice said, “Hi, Mrs. Newsom.”

  She looked over to see Jenna Grantham coming toward them. “Good morning,” Phyllis said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just thought I’d stop by and see if you needed any help with those scarecrows,” Jenna said. She nodded toward the stack of overall-clad figures in the back of Sam’s pickup. “I see you’ve already got them, though.”

  “That’s right. But thank you.”

  “I’m supposed to meet Barbara, Kendra, and Taryn at the hospital, too. We’re going to try to see Dana again. Now that we know she’s there, I don’t think Barbara will take no for an answer.” Jenna smiled. “She’s really stubborn about getting what she wants.”

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Phyllis cautioned. “If Dana’s still in the hospital, she’s probably under a police guard.”

  “Really?” Jenna shook her head. “She’s really a . . . a suspect? That just seems so crazy to me.”

  “To me, too,” Phyllis said. “The police should have the results of the autopsy by now, though. Maybe it found something that will clear Dana’s name.”

  “Gee, I hope so.” Jenna opened her car door and lifted a hand. “Well, I’ll see you. Two more days of school this week, then the Thanksgiving break. I’m ready for it, too.”

  “Oh? You have big plans?”

  “No.” A wistful tone came into Jenna’s voice as she went on. “No, not really. I don’t have any family around here—I’m from Wisconsin—and I can’t afford to fly back up there just for a few days.”

  Sam said, “Well, you can spend Thanksgiving with your boyfriend, I guess.”

  Jenna shook her head. “No boyfriend. Not right now. There are places over in Fort Worth that are open for Thanksgiving dinner. I guess I’ll try one of them, or just have something in my apartment.”

  “That’s a shame,” Phyllis said. “You’ll be able to go back home for Christmas, won’t you?”

  Jenna brightened. “Sure. I can justify the airfare for a longer trip like that.” She waved again. “So long.”

  As Jenna drove away, Sam looked over at Phyllis and said, “You’re thinkin’ about somethin’, aren’t you? Somethin’ about the case?”

  “Not at all,” Phyllis said. “I was thinking about how that girl’s going to be spending Thanksgiving all alone.”

  “I’d figure any time a girl that good-lookin’ spends alone is by her own choice,” Sam pointed out.

  “You’d think so because you’re a man. Being attractive doesn’t guarantee that men are going to be flocking around all the time. From what I’ve heard, really attractive single women are alone more than you’d believe.”

  “So what are you gonna do? Invite her to the house for Thanksgivin’ dinner?”

  “Oh, I doubt that she’d want to come spend her holiday with a bunch of old folks like us,” Phyllis said. “But I might call Dolly and see if she knows of any other teachers who are going to have the same problem.”

  A grin split Sam’s face. “Have a real houseful, eh?”

  “Would that bother you?”

  “Shoot, no. Back when I was married and the whole family would visit durin’ the holidays, sometimes there’d be forty or fifty people in the house for Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s Eve. Everybody’s all scattered now, though, or too busy with their own lives to get together, so I sort of miss those days.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” Phyllis said. “It would mean making more food, but I’m sure Carolyn wouldn’t mind pitching in to help.”

  “I reckon you can count on that,” Sam said dryly. They both knew how much Carolyn liked to get in the kitchen and roll up her sleeves to get to work, especially if everybody else was willing to let her think that she was the boss.

  They got in the pickup and headed back to the house. Sam drove up the alley behind the property, which would give them easier access to the toolshed. Earlier, he had pushed the riding lawn mower a little to make room for the scarecrows against the rear wall. Phyllis took them out of the pickup and handed them into the shed to Sam, who stacked them in place.

  “There,” he said as he brushed his hands together when they were finished. “They’ll be ready for next year’s Harvest Festival. Wonder if anybody will dress up a twelfth one, or if they’ll make do with eleven. Odd numbers like that drive some folks nuts.”

  “It doesn’t really matter to me,” Phyllis said. “I can make one, if anybody wants me to.”

  Sam took the pickup around front while Phyllis walked into the house through the back door. She found Carolyn waiting for her with a tense look on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Phyllis asked, knowing that her old friend was upset about something.

  “Detective Largo is here,” Carolyn said in a low voice.

  For a second Phyllis thought she must not have heard correctly. “Detective Largo?” she repeated.

  “That’s right. She just got here a few minutes ago. I told her that you’d be back anytime now, and she asked if she could wait and talk to you. Of course I said yes. She’s the police, after all. I offered to call you on your cell phone, but she said to wait a little while first.” Carolyn’s voice took on a scornful tone. “She said she didn’t want to interrupt what you were doing.”

  “Well . . . all right. I suppose I’ll talk to her. Where is she?”

  “In the living room.”

  Something else occurred to Phyllis. “Where’s Bobby?”

  “Upstairs.” Carolyn frowned. “I think.”

  As Phyllis went along the hall toward the living room, though, she heard Bobby’s voice. “My daddy is a deputy sheriff,” he was saying.

  “I know,” Isabel Largo replied in her throaty voice. “I’ve worked with him before, coordinating things between the sheriff’s office and the police department.”

  “You’re a detective?”

  “That’s right.” Largo sounded a little amused. Bobby’s precocious intelligence had that effect on some adults. He was so bright that they enjoyed talking to him.

  “My gran’mama catches bad guys, like my daddy.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  “A little boy wh
o’s not quite three years old. How old are you?”

  “I’m four! What’s your little boy’s name?”

  “Victor,” Detective Largo said. “The two of you will probably be in school together someday.”

  “I’ll be a grade ahead of him.”

  “Maybe you’ll know each other anyway.”

  “Yeah, I hope so.”

  Phyllis had paused to listen to the conversation, but she didn’t want to wait too long. She was curious about what brought Detective Largo here. She stepped around the corner into the living room and said, “Good morning, Detective. Mrs. Wilbarger told me you were here.”

  “Gran’mama!” Bobby greeted her with his usual enthusiasm. “Did you get the scarecrows?”

  “We did,” she told him, smiling. “Maybe Sam will take you out to the shed later to look at them.”

  “Are they scary?” he asked with a sudden frown.

  “Well, they’re scarecrows. They’re supposed to scare off birds.”

  “Yeah, but one of ’em turned out to be a dead guy.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Phyllis said firmly. “The ones in the shed are just scarecrows. They can’t hurt you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why don’t you run on out to the kitchen and see what Carolyn is doing?”

  He was an agreeable child most of the time, thank goodness. He nodded and said again, “Okay.”

  When Bobby was gone, Detective Largo said, “What a smart little boy. And adorable.”

  “He’s definitely both of those things,” Phyllis said as she sat down on the sofa opposite the armchair where Largo sat. “What brings you here on a Sunday morning, Detective?”

  “Chief Whitmire asked me to stop by and talk to you.”

  “More questions?”

  Largo shook her head. “No, he wanted me to tell you the results of the autopsy on Logan Powell, as long as you promise to be discreet and not tell anyone else.”

  Phyllis leaned back, taken by surprise. “He did? Why in the world would he do that?”

  With a faint smile, Detective Largo said, “You may not believe it, Mrs. Newsom, but the chief really does appreciate the things you’ve done to help the department in the past. And he has a great deal of respect for your son. I think he’d like to hire Mike away from Ross Haney.”

  Phyllis knew that was true. Mike had been the object of a tug-of-war between Whitmire and Sheriff Haney for a while now.

  “I appreciate the chief feeling that way,” Phyllis said. “And he’s right—I’d be very interested to know what the medical examiner found out.”

  “Again, this is confidential,” Largo said.

  Phyllis nodded.

  “Logan Powell died of a heart attack.”

  Phyllis drew in a deep breath. “A heart attack,” she repeated. That left the question of why Logan had been dressed like a scarecrow and propped up in the dogtrot, but at least it settled one thing. “Then it wasn’t murder after all.”

  “Oh, yes,” Detective Largo said. “It was murder, all right.”

  Chapter 20

  Phyllis stared at Detective Largo for a moment, unable to comprehend what the woman had just told her. Finally, she said, “I don’t understand. How could Logan’s death be murder when you said he died of a heart attack?”

  “Mr. Powell had a number of different medical conditions, Mrs. Newsom. Were you aware of that?”

  Phyllis shook her head. “Not at all. Every time I saw him, he looked so . . . so healthy.” She paused, then added, “Well, except for the last time, of course.”

  “Evidently he drank heavily when he was younger and damaged his liver. That caused him to be hypoglycemic. Do you know what that means?”

  Phyllis thought that Largo’s question was a little condescending, but she was too interested in what the detective was telling her to be offended. “Of course I do,” she said. “It means he suffered from low blood sugar.”

  Largo nodded. “That’s right. It was aggravated by the fact that he was slightly diabetic and was on medication for that. He had to maintain exactly the right dosage, taken at exactly the same time every day, and stay on a very strict diet, or else his blood sugar would either spike to dangerous levels or plunge so low that he risked going into a coma and dying.”

  “I didn’t know any of that,” Phyllis said. “Of course, I only met the man a few times.”

  “According to what Mrs. Powell told us, her husband tended to disregard his doctor’s orders. He was always busy with his work, and he would sometimes forget to eat a meal when he should, which could cause problems for him.”

  Something clicked together in Phyllis’s head. “That’s why he was always eating those peppermints he carried. He used them to keep his blood sugar from dropping when he wasn’t eating properly.”

  Detective Largo nodded and said, “That’s right. He was self-medicating, in a way, and in the end it backfired on him. He came to rely on those peppermints to keep his blood sugar up.”

  “How did that backfire on him?” Phyllis asked.

  “Because someone switched the peppermints he normally carried for sugar-free ones. They were in the same wrappers as the ones with sugar in them, and I guess they tasted similar enough that Powell didn’t notice the difference until it was too late.”

  “You said he died of a heart attack,” Phyllis reminded the detective.

  Largo nodded again. “Brought on by the stress caused by his plummeting blood sugar. Powell must have been incoherent and only semiconscious there at the end, and if his heart hadn’t given out on him, he would have slipped into a coma and died from that if he didn’t receive immediate medical attention. Either way, it would have been murder.”

  “Because someone switched the peppermints.”

  “That’s right. The fact that whoever it was changed the wrappers and made the sugar-free candies look just like the ones with sugar in them means it was deliberate.”

  Phyllis sat back on the sofa, trying to process everything that Detective Largo had just told her. She had suspected all along that Logan’s death might be murder, but she never would have dreamed that anyone could come up with such an arcane method. In order to do so, whoever had killed him would have had to know him very well indeed. . . .

  “You said that Dana Powell told you about her husband’s medical problems?” Phyllis asked suddenly.

  Largo smiled faintly. “That’s right. She didn’t know at the time that we had already determined what killed her husband. I’m sure she thought she had gotten away with it.”

  “I knew it!” Phyllis said. “You think she killed him.”

  “Of course she did. She had argued with him about his affairs. That gave her a strong motive, and she had plenty of opportunity. She could have been switching his peppermints without him knowing for days or even weeks or months, a few at a time to bring his blood sugar down slowly, and then all of them to make it drop suddenly and dangerously.”

  “Then why would she even tell you about it?” Phyllis wanted to know. “She could have kept her mouth shut about his medical problems.”

  “She knew they would show up in the autopsy and in his medical history. I’m sure she thought it would look better for her if she told us, rather than letting us find out on our own. She was confident enough—or arrogant enough—that she thought we’d never discover the business about the peppermints being switched. Powell didn’t have any of them on his body, after all, either sugar-free or the regular kind.”

  “That’s right; his regular clothes and everything else he had on him were gone, weren’t they?” Phyllis asked, still struggling with the idea that Dana Powell had killed her husband. “Have they been found yet?”

  “No, I’m sure the killer took them away and disposed of them somehow, and it’s our theory that the peppermints were the reason why. By dressing him in that scarecrow costume and leaving him there at the festival, she thought the circumstances of him being found like that would be so bizarre, we wouldn
’t even think about what he might have had in his pockets.”

  Phyllis supposed that a killer could have thought that way. It was a bit of a stretch, but someone’s reasoning powers would have to be a little flawed to start with if they were going to seriously consider murder.

  “So how did you find out about them?” she asked.

  “When we searched Powell’s car, which was still parked in the lot, we found some of them. A chemical analysis told us that they contained an artificial sweetener, not sugar. The autopsy had already confirmed that Powell died of a heart attack, as well as the dangerously low amount of sugar in his blood. I discussed everything with the medical examiner early this morning, and he agreed that the heart attack could have been brought on by a severe attack of hypoglycemia. That makes it murder.”

  “You got the results of the chemical analysis that fast?” Phyllis asked with a surprised frown.

  Detective Largo smiled. “I called in some favors over in Tarrant County and got their forensics lab to run the tests right away. Chief Whitmire regards this case as high priority.”

  Phyllis wasn’t surprised by that, considering both the victim and the circumstances. Logan’s status in the community and the bizarre nature of the case made it prime fodder for the media. It had been featured on the newcasts of the Fort Worth and Dallas television stations the night before, and there was a big story on the front page of the Fort Worth newspaper that morning.

  “Were they able to get any fingerprints off that stake?”

  Detective Largo shook her head. “Not off that rough wood.”

  “What about the other forensics tests?”

  “We recovered a number of hairs, but that doesn’t really mean anything. Several different women worked on those scarecrows and handled the costumes. It’s possible some of the hairs we found belong to you, Mrs. Newsom.”

  A shiver went through Phyllis at that thought.

  The detective went on. “None of the evidence clears Mrs. Powell, and since she’s the only one who had both the knowledge and the opportunity to kill her husband in this particular manner . . .” Her shrug was eloquent.

  “Have you arrested Dana yet?”