by Kylie Logan
“So you didn’t kill Noreen?” Chandra asked.
For once, I thought Kate was perfectly justified in rolling her emerald green eyes.
“Of course she didn’t kill Noreen,” I reminded Chandra, then, for Kate’s benefit, added, “That’s why we’re here. To look for clues so we can figure out who did.”
“Clues, good.” Kate paced a nervous little pattern in front of us. She was wearing knee-high boots and her heels clicked like gunshots against the wood floor. “Suspects, better. Because I’ll tell you what . . .” She froze in place, and when she looked at the three of us standing there watching her, Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “Maybe he didn’t arrest me, but Hank thinks I did it. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I swear, he actually thinks I killed Noreen. He . . .” Kate’s breathing sped up, and she pressed a hand to her chest. “He knows I was mad at her. He made me admit it. About last year and the way Noreen and her friends trampled my grapes, and about how I felt when I found her here last night and saw them and how it all came back to me, all the anger, and how I would have wrung her neck if you weren’t here with me, Bea.”
“Those are nothing but facts.” I kept my voice as calm as possible, which was no easy thing, considering that Chandra had tears rolling down her cheeks, Luella was wringing her hands, and I was close to losing it. “None of that means a thing. Facts are just facts, and facts help Hank build a timeline. You know, so he can figure out where Noreen went when she left here. I just assumed she came back to the B and B.”
“You mean that’s where she was killed?”
I hadn’t even considered it, so Chandra’s question gave me an extra-special case of the creeps. I twitched it away with a shake. “I think someone would have noticed,” I said. “My cleaning people were in this morning and they didn’t say anything about blood. The way Noreen looked . . .” The memory washed over me and left me cold. “Wherever she was killed, there must have been a whole lot of blood.”
I was already edgy enough; this was not something I wanted to think about. It was better to stay focused, stay centered, stay objective. I tried. “You have nothing to worry about,” I told Kate. “Before Hank can make an arrest, he needs proof. You might have been mad at Noreen. Nobody can blame you. But before Hank can say you did it, he needs to prove you had means, motive, and opportunity.”
“Means.” Kate nodded, and her complexion turned green. “I heard her head was bashed in. Anybody could have done that, I guess. With anything. A rock. Or a bat. Or a brick. Or a—”
“We get it,” Luella told her.
Kate nodded again, and paced some more. Faster. Harder. Her heels banged against the floor. “Motive. Okay, yeah, I admit that part. I did have motive. Last year’s destruction, for one thing. And this year, with her coming here without my permission. I guess so-angry-my-head-was-going-to-pop-off is a legitimate motive. But don’t forget, there have to be a bunch of other people who have motives, too. There can’t be anyone anywhere who actually liked Noreen. She was pushy and rude and—”
“And compulsive and ornery and bossy,” I added. “I’ve already got a short list of the people who didn’t like her. We’ll check out each and every one of them.”
The nods were coming faster, and Kate’s left eye twitched. She swallowed hard. “Opportunity. Well, we know I couldn’t have done it, Bea. We left here, and I drove you home, and—”
“And when I got home, EGG was back,” I said. “At least, all their trucks were. I didn’t see any of them; I figured they’d all gone to bed. And I didn’t stick around for breakfast this morning. I guess Noreen missed it.”
“Well, I can vouch for Fiona,” Chandra said, and nodded. “She was in her room listening to a CD of Tibetan monks chanting. You know, while she did her meditation.”
Frustrated, I twirled a wayward strand of my unruly hair. “I wish I’d been paying more attention,” I mumbled. “I wonder if Noreen came home with everyone else.”
“Well, I went home and stayed home.” Kate crossed her arms over her navy sweater. “I was so mad, I couldn’t see straight. I had a little glass of sherry to calm my nerves and I went right to bed. I didn’t work today. I stayed home and enjoyed the day, just like I told all my employees to do.”
“That’s all you need to tell Hank.” In the hope of calming her down, I made eye contact with Kate and refused to look away. “Just the truth. And when he talks to me—and I’m sure he’ll get around to it eventually—I’ll tell him I was with you as soon as you got back from the mainland. I was with you the whole time you were here at the winery, too, and Noreen and her bunch left here before we did. I’ll tell him you dropped me off at home after we left here last night. Then you went home and went to bed. You never had the chance to murder Noreen. Hank will see that. He’ll believe it. He’ll—”
“He’ll slap the cuffs on me and throw me in jail forever and ever!” Kate wailed.
Sure, she was being a little melodramatic, but hey, it’s not like I could blame her. It can’t be easy being a murder suspect. Especially when you’re innocent.
I looked Luella’s way and she got the message and moved to Kate’s side. “There’s an employee lunchroom here at the winery, isn’t there?” I asked Kate. I knew there was; I just wanted to ground Kate in reality. Thank goodness, it worked. She pulled herself out of the panic that gripped her and looked past the tasting bar. “Luella, how about if you take Kate in there and get her a cup of tea.”
“Or a glass of wine,” Luella suggested.
Now that I thought about it, that was the better plan.
“You go do that,” I told them. “Chandra and I will—”
“I’ll look around for clues. And Sleepy!” Chandra said, and she scurried away.
“Good. Fine,” I mumbled to myself once they were gone. “I don’t need someone to hold my hand while I look around the winery to keep me from getting the heebie-jeebies. I am, after all, a New Yorker.”
I told myself not to forget it, and chin high, shoulders back, and brain absolutely refusing to even consider the fact that there was even the teensiest possibility that I could bump into the ghost of the long-dead bootlegger, I proceeded to look around.
It didn’t take long to see that there was nothing out of place in the tasting room or the gift shop. I looked through the fermentation room, too, where a little less than twenty-four hours earlier, we’d discovered the investigators and where Kate and Noreen had had it out.
Nothing.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
It wasn’t like I thought I’d really find anything at Wilder’s. It wasn’t like I wanted to. After all, Noreen and her bunch left the winery before Kate and I had the night before.
That meant that Noreen had been killed somewhere else.
By someone other than Kate.
I left the fermentation room and went into the back hallway, following it past the offices where the accounting people took care of the books, and the packing people handled orders, and the shipping people did their magic to send Wilder’s wine to speciality shops in five different states.
I skirted their offices and headed into the warehouse, feeling along the wall for the light switch and breathing a sigh of relief (Okay, I admit it) when I found it and flicked on the overhead lights to banish the inky shadows.
I didn’t expect to see Chandra jump out of one of them at the far end of the room.
“You’re looking around in the dark?” I asked.
She pressed her back to the door just behind her. “I just thought if I did I might bump into—”
“Sleepy. Yeah, I know.” I hurried over to where Chandra stood, glancing around the warehouse as I did.
In the grand scheme of the beverage business, Wilder’s is definitely considered a small, boutique winery. But the warehouse—which was part of the original winery complex that hadn’t been touched by the fire a few years earlier—was a cavernous space. High ceiling, cement floors, aisle after aisle of metal shelving that rose nearl
y to the twenty-foot ceiling. Once upon a time, those shelves had been filled with product. These days, with Kate concentrating more on the quality of her wine than the quantity she could produce, most but the shelves nearest to me were empty.
I looked them over anyway, crisscrossing the warehouse from one aisle to the next, and one end to the other. I was all the way over on the far side of the room near where Chandra bounced from foot to foot outside a metal door with a Do Not Enter sign on it when I spotted it.
The old metal door was open a fraction of an inch.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I mumbled. “Kate told me once that there’s nothing beyond this door but some old storage rooms that aren’t used anymore.”
“That’s true.” Chandra grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the door we’d come in. “Which means there’s nothing here for us to see. Let’s get out of here.”
“Not so fast!” I untangled myself from her grip. “We owe it to ourselves to check this out. We owe it to Kate.”
With that in mind, I pulled open the metal door, and we found ourselves looking into a smaller room where the walls were made of red brick arranged in a basket-weave pattern. I felt around the wall right inside the door and turned on the lights.
Chandra gasped.
I stood perfectly still, staring at the plasmometer—the piece of equipment I’d seen the ghost hunters leave with the night before—where it lay in pieces on the floor. One side of it was bashed in, the metal dark and twisted, and the glass that had once covered a lens of some sort was broken and scattered through the mess of blood and bone and hair nearby.
My stomach lurched, and my hands shook when I reached for my phone.
I hated to do it. I hated to get Kate more involved. But really, I didn’t have much of a choice.
I called Hank and told him to get over to Wilder’s right away.
8
“Well, I think we can say it wasn’t a planned murder.” When he examined the plasmometer, Hank’s expression was grim. “The murderer used something that was on hand to kill Ms. Turner. That means it was a crime of passion, something done at the spur of the moment with no planning involved. The killer didn’t bring the weapon with him.”
“Except he did,” I reminded Hank. “This isn’t something that was just hanging around the winery. It’s one of EGG’s ghost-finding devices. Remember, when the ghost getters left here last night, they took this gizmo with them.”
“You’re right! I was so worried about Kate hauling off and punching Ms. Turner, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to anything else.” Hank chewed on the end of the pencil he was using to jot notes in a little spiral-bound notebook. “So you’re saying—”
“They came back. After Kate and I left. And obviously . . .” I glanced at the battered plasmometer and at the blood caked on it. Hank had already called in a forensics team from the state crime bureau, but until they arrived, I knew better than to touch anything. Still, it didn’t take an expert to see the dark, rusty-colored stains on the stone floor around the plasmometer.
Or to know exactly what they were.
I pressed a hand to my stomach. “Noreen came back, and she was killed right here.”
“Looks that way.”
“Well, that’s good for you,” I told him, then, since he gave me a quizzical look, I explained, “Now that you have a crime scene, you can collect evidence. But Kate . . .” After I called Hank, I’d escorted poor, shaken Chandra into the lunchroom, and while I was there, I’d left strict orders with Luella: Don’t let Kate leave the room. The last thing she needed was to see this terrible scene. “She’s going to be very upset,” I said. “Once Kate finds out Noreen was murdered here, she’s going to feel even worse.”
“Unless she already knows.”
“You mean because I called you and the place is swarming with cops and—”
Silly me. Reality hit, and I spun away from the beat-up plasmometer and the spilled blood so that I could prop my fists on my hips and give Hank a look that would have intimidated a lesser man. Since Hank was a foot taller than me, at least one hundred pounds heavier, and had the added advantage of years of experience and a lifetime of law enforcement training, he didn’t exactly shake in his shoes.
But hey, just because I gave up on being intimidating didn’t mean I was any less angry. “You’re out of your mind if you think Kate did this. You know Kate, she’s not the violent type. She’d never have the heart to—”
“Not even if she was plenty mad?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “She was plenty mad. You know that. And she had a really good reason to be. But she didn’t kill Noreen because of it. You saw how she handled things last night. She didn’t even want you to arrest Noreen and her bunch, even though they deserved it.”
“Maybe because she figured she’d handle things her own way. Maybe she called Ms. Turner and told her she had a change of heart. Maybe she invited Ms. Turner back here, then when Ms. Turner showed up, maybe Kate was waiting for her. You know, to teach her a lesson.”
Preposterous!
I didn’t bother to say it. Mostly because Hank’s fierce glare told me he wasn’t in the mood for debate. I went with facts instead.
“Kate and I were here for maybe fifteen minutes after you left last night,” I told him. “We went up to the office, made sure nothing there had been touched, did a quick look around the rest of the place. Then we left here together. She dropped me off at home and then she went home herself. She went home, and she stayed there.”
Hank rolled back on his heels. “And you know this because you were with her the entire night? Or because you sat up all night long and looked out your front window so you could keep an eye on her house?”
When I glared at him, I narrowed my eyes just for good measure. “I know it because Kate told me that’s what happened.”
“Uh-huh.” It was amazing how much mistrust and disbelief could be packed into two little syllables. “When you’ve been around people as long as I have—”
“This isn’t people, Hank. It’s Kate.” In an effort to keep the crime scene as uncontaminated as possible, we stepped out of the small, brick-walled room and back into the warehouse, and my voice ricocheted from the high ceilings and the empty metal shelving that surrounded us. “You know Kate wouldn’t do this.”
“I only know what the facts tell me.” He eyed me the way I imagined he checked out the groups of rowdy college students who were known to visit the island on weekends. “So tell me some facts, Bea. What did Kate tell you about Ms. Turner?”
“She told me Noreen was on the island last year. That Noreen and her bunch destroyed a crop of grapes Kate had just planted.”
“She say anything about what she was going to do about it?”
I lifted my chin. “That’s just how people talk when they’re mad,” I said. “It’s just what people say when they need to let off steam. It doesn’t mean—”
“What did Kate say exactly?”
My stomach went cold. “She said she’d like to see Noreen at the bottom of the lake. Or in one of the fermenting tanks. But that doesn’t mean anything, Hank. You know that. You know people—”
“You said it yourself: This isn’t people. This is Kate. And she’s not the type who says things she doesn’t mean.”
“Well, she’s not the only one who talked like that,” I added quickly, before any of these crazy ideas could settle in his head. “Jacklyn Bichot—she used to be one of the ghost getters, and she said she wants to boil Noreen in oil. But she wasn’t on the island the night of the murder.”
Hank made a note of it. “I’ll need to talk to her anyway and—”
Before Hank had a chance to finish, every light in the winery went out and we were plunged into darkness.
It wasn’t so much scary as it was startling, and I caught my breath, then let it out with a little whoop of surprise when the intercom box on the wall next to me buzzed.
“Don’t panic. It’s not a proble
m!” Static punctuated Kate’s words. “The lights are computer-controlled. At this time of night, they only stay on for an hour at a time when they’re turned on manually. I’ll go to my office and—”
“No!” Hank talked before he thought, then grumbled a curse, flicked on his flashlight, and aimed it at the intercom so he could press the proper button to talk. “No, Kate. Don’t leave the lunchroom. Bea will go up to your office and take care of the lights.” Even before he’d eased his pressure on the button, he’d already grabbed my arm and started dragging me along through the dark.
“Just touch the space bar on my keyboard,” Kate told me, her voice growing smaller as we made our way out of the warehouse. “The screen will come on. Click override and the lights will come back on and stay on.”
In a matter of moments, Hank and I were outside the warehouse and back in the hallway that led past the administrative offices of the winery.
“You know where Kate’s office is?” Hank asked.
I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “I’ll find it.”
“Here.” He pressed the flashlight into my hand. “The last thing I need is for you to bump into something. Then we’d have even more drama on our hands.”
He turned and stalked off through the darkness in the direction of the lunchroom. I went the other way, following the thin beam of the flashlight to Kate’s office. Down the hallway, up the stairs. I’d be there in just a minute.
If, like Hank said, I didn’t bump into something.
And if that something wasn’t something I couldn’t really bump into because it was something that wasn’t a real something.
A shiver crawled up my back. Is it any wonder? I’d just tripped over the scene of the murder. I’d just discovered a pool of blood and the weapon used to club Noreen to death. I had a perfectly good excuse for being creeped out.
And it had nothing to do with ghosts.
“No Sleepy,” I reminded myself in no uncertain terms. “No ghosts. No—” I opened Kate’s office door, turned on the lights, looked around the office, and stopped dead in my tracks.