“Yeah.” Teddy slumped in the passenger seat of my Toyota, and I realized I’d asked the wrong question. He was a stiff-upper-lip sort of kid; no way would he admit to being upset. I shouldn’t have given him a yes-or-no option, but I couldn’t think of a question to ask that would open up a discussion and help him process what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This didn’t turn out to be the fun day at the fair that we had in mind.” Not only the Home and Garden Pavilion but the entire fair had been shut down for the day.
“Stuff happens,” he said, quoting a favorite line of the man who was his dad and my stepfather. Teddy’s voice was flat. The narrow road twisted through hills, and I didn’t take my eyes away from it to look at him, but I could almost hear him shrugging his shoulders.
“Yes, but some stuff is …” I couldn’t think of a good way to finish the sentence. He already knew that the situation we’d stumbled into was horrible. What more could I tell him? That no one should kill a fellow human being? That no kid should have to deal with being a witness in a murder case, even if he was just at its periphery?
Teddy turned his head and gazed out the side window. Fine. Let him process his thoughts and feelings. Then we could talk about what happened.
We drove through groves of trees at the height of their summer glory and past fields where horses, cows and, in one case, llamas grazed. Now and then Teddy lifted his camera and pressed the lens to the window glass. The trip took only twenty minutes but it seemed much longer. Finally we reached Florence’s house—a pretty blue cottage with white trim, nestled amongst fruit trees and rosebushes.
“Can I borrow your iPad?” Teddy asked when we’d gone inside.
I started to correct him—may I—but checked myself. “Sure,” I said, and gave him the device.
He disappeared into the den, where he was sleeping on the pullout sofa, while I phoned Roger to tell him about his son’s getting mixed up in a murder.
~*~
Early in the evening, the members of the Culinary Arts Club gathered on Cousin Florence’s deck, welcoming me as a sort of honorary member. The sun was making its slow descent and the peak of the day’s heat had passed. A breeze brought us the scent of the roses in the garden, and breaks in the trees gave us a glimpse of distant peaks in the Sierra Nevada.
Teddy was still sequestered with my iPad in Florence’s den. I had checked in on him a couple of times, and he seemed to be doing all right but he wasn’t in the mood for company. The rest of us were sitting around the round redwood table, each nursing a glass of iced tea or lemonade, except for Carlene, who had said, “I need coffee please. Strong and black.”
Florence had offered to slice up the Fourth of July pie that she had saved at home, but only Thelma was hungry and she didn’t like blueberries, one of the key ingredients. So the pie stayed inside on the kitchen counter, untouched.
Of course the topic of conversation was Gourmet Gus’s murder.
“Can you believe how much blood there was?” Thelma asked, shaking her head.
“Most of it wasn’t blood,” I said, setting down my pencil. I’d brought the pencil and my sketchbook out to the deck, and I was trying to capture the intricate contours of a rose, with all of its elaborate arrangement of leaves and petals. Drawing was one of the best ways I knew to relieve stress or to restore a sense of order when the world was threatening to fall apart.
“What do you mean? All that red! Splattered all over the place.”
“There was probably blood at the site of the stab wound.” I added the round curve of another petal to my sketch. “But most of the red stuff was jam.”
“Jam!” Mavis squeaked.
I nodded. “You could see the broken glass from the jar on the floor, and the two parts of the lid. And there was a smell like cherries.”
Thelma gave a low chuckle. I flipped to a fresh page so I could try to capture an impression of the smirk on her face.
“My jam, I bet.” Mavis’s voice quavered. “I can’t believe that Gus person called it poison. Why did they have to go and show it on TV?” Glaring at Thelma, she snapped, “What are you laughing about?”
Thelma put up her hands in protest. “I’m not laughing.”
“Yes, you are!”
“Not at you, honest.”
Florence reached out, a placating gesture. “Now, Mavis, it was just nervous laughter. Thelma was releasing her stress. Heaven knows, when you’re faced with such a terrible thing as murder—”
“That’s right.” Thelma agreed. “I wasn’t suggesting it was funny, just—what’s the word? Ironic, that’s it. Gourmet Gus calls your jam poison and look what happens.”
“Gus didn’t like your jam either!” Mavis put her head in her hands. “I can’t imagine how my cherry jam could have tasted so bad.”
Carlene asked, “Could someone have put something in it, doctored it somehow?”
“Why would they do that?”
Thelma sat back in her chair. “To keep you from winning the blue ribbon. You do win it every year.”
“At least you got your usual red ribbon for second place.”
“Always a bridesmaid,” Thelma muttered.
“I didn’t even recognize the name of the lady who took the blue,” Florence said. “Do any of you know her?”
They all murmured, “No.”
Carlene added, “I think she’s new, just moved to Mira Vista a few months ago.”
“No blue ribbon for me this year either.” Florence shook her head. “So sad that they had to cancel the pie and cake judging.”
Mavis jerked up straight in her seat, a look of panic on her face. “I just had the most horrible thought. What if Gourmet Gus really did die because of my jam? If someone really put poison in it…I bet those detectives have me on their list as their number-one suspect.”
I tried to reassure her. “He may have disliked your jam—and I’m sure he was wrong in that opinion. But I’m sure the autopsy will show that the stab wound is what killed him.”
“That’s worse,” Florence moaned. “It’s my knife. I brought in my knife block so there would be good knives for the cooks to use when they did their demonstrations. You should have seen the detectives’ faces when I told them that. I’m worried that they’re going to show up here any minute and arrest me.”
Thelma gasped. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Of course not! How you can even ask that question.”
“Well, it’s not that I’m accusing you. But if it’s your knife—”
“Calm down, you two,” Carlene said. “No one here committed murder, and none of us believes any of the rest of us are guilty.”
Thelma concentrated on her lemonade.
“But who did kill him?” Mavis asked. “It happened at the fair, and we all have a connection to that. Maybe one of us is next on the killer’s list!”
“Jess, what do you think?” Florence asked. “You’ve had experience in dealing with crime.” To the others she added, “Did you know my cousin here is a private eye? Go ahead, Jess, give us your professional opinion.”
“My opinion is that this is a tragic situation,” I said. “But I don’t know any more than the rest of you. Let’s walk through what happened. We all probably noticed different things. If we put all of our ideas together we might come up with something.” I flipped over the drawing in my sketchbook to reveal a fresh page so I could take notes. “First, when do you think the murder happened?”
“Must have been last night,” Florence said. “I was the first to arrive today, other than the security guard. I came early to get things set up for the first demo. I went to the storeroom to get out some supplies, and there he was. Gus, just…lying there.” Her voice broke. To cover her emotion she reached for her glass of iced tea.
“You were already gone this morning when Teddy and I got up. Were you the one who unlocked the building?” I asked.
“No, the security guard did that. He’s in charge of the keys. But
I was there right behind him.”
“What time was that?”
“About eight-thirty.”
I jotted that in the sketchbook.
“But if Gus was killed last night, surely someone have noticed the body when it was time to lock up,” Carlene said.
“When was that?” I asked.
“All of the buildings are supposed to close fifteen minutes before the fireworks show is scheduled to begin,” Carlene explained. “So about nine-fifteen. The fireworks end around ten, and everyone starts to leave the grounds. The gates close at ten-thirty and by then just a cleanup crew and some other staff are still present.”
“Okay.” I made more notes. “Let’s go over what happened yesterday.”
We went through the sequence of events, and I sketched out a timeline. Since it was opening day, and the culmination of several months of planning, they had all been at the fair for most of the day and into the evening. The TV crew—Ashley the reporter, Drake the camera guy, and Gus the star—had arrived in the late afternoon. They had filmed a demonstration of the making of fruit tarts, a presentation about heirloom tomatoes, and finally the judging of jams and jellies. Shortly before closing time the crew packed up and left.
“Were all of you there when the Home and Garden Pavilion was closed for the night?”
“Not me,” Thelma said. “I’d already left.”
“I went home at dinnertime,” Carlene said. “Had to feed my cats and my kids. And Florence wouldn’t have been there, Jess—she was expecting you and Teddy, so she would have gone home to be there when you arrived.”
“Actually, I did stay late,” Florence admitted. “I left my house key for Jess under the welcome mat.” Which was true. She hadn’t arrived home until nearly eleven. “But I didn’t see anything strange happening. No one was around but the guard. That’s strange come to think of it, that the same guard was there last night and then again this morning.”
“I bet Mavis was there.” Thelma picked up her glass and took a sip.
“Me! No, I wasn’t.”
“I just thought you might have been, since the jam judging was the last thing scheduled for the day.”
“You were there for that, too. Whenever you left, it wasn’t until after the jam judging. You wanted to see if you were going to beat me. Well, you did, with your red ribbon. You were there when I got humiliated. You wouldn’t have missed that for anything, would you?”
“What? You make it sound like I wanted you to fall flat on your face. Like I set you up to look like a fool on TV.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it past you. I bet you did put something in my jam. Admit it!”
“Now calm down, you two. Let’s not fight,” Carlene said.
Florence, to my right, leaned over and whispered to me, “You see what I have to put up with as chair of this group.”
“What was it? What did you use to ruin my jam?”
Thelma stood and leaned her bulk over the table, getting in Mavis’s face as best she could from that position.
“Nothing!” she yelled. “I put nothing in your jam. You ruined it yourself. Admit it, for once you made a bad batch. And about time too, you smug, supercilious, showoffy pipsqueak!”
“What! How dare you…you…jealous old horse!” Mavis picked up her lemonade glass and flung the ice cubes in Thelma’s face.
I heard a gasp behind me and turned to see Teddy, who had slipped out of the house unnoticed and was standing behind my chair. I twisted in the seat to slide my arm around him. “Hey there, are you okay?”
He nodded but didn’t take his eyes off the squabblers. “Can I show you something, Jess?” he whispered.
“Sure.”
“In there.” He nodded toward the house. I got up and followed him inside, leaving it to Florence and Carlene to restore the peace.
Chapter 5
I settled beside Teddy on the sofa in the den and he placed the iPad onto my lap.
“I uploaded the photos I took today and emailed them to Dad.” He scrolled through them for me.
“You have an excellent eye,” I told him, and it was true. He’d caught the look and feel of the fair in fine style. I laughed at the one of me mugging for the camera with crossed eyes and a goofy grin. But I became solemn at the shots of crime scene. I peered at those closely in case he’d captured something that I overlooked when I’d gazed around the storage room but saw nothing new. He had taken several photos of Drake and his TV camera. There was even a blurry photo of Drake’s ugly tennis shoes, dirt-smeared, grass-stained, and spattered with paint.
Teddy, laughing, moved on quickly from that one. “I took that by mistake. I was just holding the camera down and clicked on the button by accident. Isn’t he a cool guy though? I think maybe I’ll be a camera guy for TV someday.”
He was most excited about his pictures of Ashley Hewitt. She had granted him a wide smile and a toss of her blond hair.
“Those are great candid portraits of her,” I told him.
He looked pleased and slightly embarrassed. “Yeah, well, she’s pretty and that makes it easy. Look at this, Jess. Ashley has her own blog.”
He brought up the website. The page was dominated by a large photo of Ashley that showed off the blondness of her hair and the blandness of her face. He sighed a little, reminding me again that he was growing up quickly.
“She talks a lot about Gourmet Gus in here. Look, a couple of weeks ago she said she’s going to L.A. to be with him on his new show. But then yesterday she said she’s not going after all. I bet she’s really bummed by what happened to him.”
“I’m sure she is.” I read the past month’s entries. It was clear from what she wrote that Ashley was in love. What I couldn’t tell was whether she was in love with Gus or with the idea of having a shot at a gig on national TV.
Teddy reclaimed the iPad. “But Ashley’s blog isn’t what I really wanted to show you. What’s really cool is that the camera guy, Drake, has posted a whole bunch of stuff on YouTube. This one’s from yesterday.”
He tapped the screen and video began to play, a snippet, just a couple of minutes long. On the screen Gourmet Gus stood behind the worktable on the Culinary Arts stage in the county fair’s Home and Garden Pavilion. Watching him, I could see why a national network would want to recruit him. He came across as handsome and charming but it was more than that. What he was doing was simple—holding up fresh fruits and glass jars and describing the characteristics of top quality preserves and jellies. Yet he had a commanding presence, and a vitality that made him compelling to watch. Seeing him alive, I was reminded what a terrible loss his death—any violent death—was.
The camera angle shifted back to show a wider view and Mavis Tucker appeared on the screen. Tiny and nervous, she looked as if she were standing in Gus’s shadow even though a bright light illuminated her face.
Gus smiled at her and said, “Now, let’s taste the latest offering from Mrs. Tucker, who has won the blue ribbon in the jams and jellies competition more often than any other cook in Mira Vista County. Mrs. Tucker, will you describe what I’m about to taste?”
Mavis nodded. “Yes, Gus, this is my latest creation. It’s a cherry jam with just a tiny bit of spice to make it special.”
Gus dipped in a spoon and brought a small bit of the jam to his lips. The spoon slipped into his mouth, and suddenly fell with a clatter to the tabletop. His face puckered up, his eyes bugged out, and his hands went to his throat.
“Oh my…my…this jam tastes like…poison!”
The camera closed in on Mavis’s horrified look of shock. Then the video ended.
“Poor Mavis. No wonder she was upset.”
“I think that’s what they showed as an ad on the newscast last night, to get people to watch the next Gourmet Gus show. But Drake uploaded some other videos to YouTube too. These haven’t been played with so much.”
“You mean they’re not edited?”
“Yeah. They look like he just filmed them and put them r
ight up. There’s a whole set that he calls the Ashley Chronicles. Watch.” He tapped play again.
The first video showed the blond reporter outside the local school district headquarters, delivering a report of a contentious board of education meeting. That one had probably aired on the evening news, but the next ones definitely had not. One showed Ashley in a bikini, stretched out on a lounge chair on a patio, perhaps her own. She seemed oblivious to the camera, as if she didn’t know she was being filmed. Another video showed her sitting at a desk in an office, probably at the TV station, reading some papers. She takes a sip from a mug, flips a page, idly brushes her long hair away from her face. Then she looks up and sees the camera pointed at her and waves it away, but softens the rejection by giving Drake a dazzling smile.
The final one, like the first, was time-stamped the previous evening. The lighting was poor, as if the film was showing something taking place in a dark corner. Looking closer, I recognized the storeroom behind the Culinary Arts stage. The camera zoomed in on what appeared to be a large lumpy figure. Then I realized: it was two people, looking almost like one because they were locked in a passionate embrace.
Reporter Ashley and Gourmet Gus.
Teddy sighed. “I bet Drake was jealous when he took that last one.”
“Jealous?”
“Yeah. She’s hot!”
“You’re too young to care about who’s hot.” But it started me thinking. Drake had been keeping a close eye on Ashley this morning. Maybe his concern was more than concern for a grieving colleague.
“There’s one more I want to show you,” Teddy said. “Another one Drake took last night. It might be important.”
“The next episode in the Ashley Chronicles?”
“No, it’s about someone else. You’ll recognize her.”
This one began with a title slide. It said Subterfuge.
The video opened with the members of the Culinary Arts Club as they bustled about to set up the stage area for the jams and jellies judging. Carlene wiped down the worktable, Florence arranged jars on top of it in a neat row, and Mavis was pointing here and there, directing their activities. The women were chatting, but the sound was muffled. Then they stepped back and surveyed what they’d accomplished. Florence dusted her hands together in a that’s-finished gesture, and the three of them wandered out of the camera’s range.
Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Crime: Includes Happy Homicides 3: Summertime Crimes Page 65