Moira’s eyes were fixed on her daughter. She had expected Candice to be frightened, but to her surprise, her daughter looked a lot calmer than she felt. She was looking past Moira at David, and the deli owner thought she saw her daughter give a slight nod of her head. If David was getting ready to do something, then that meant that the best thing that she could do would be to distract Linette.
“Listen, please just listen. How about we do another contest? Just the two of us. I’m sure you’ll beat me this time,” she suggested frantically. Linette’s arrogance was astounding. An innocent girl, just out of high school, had been killed and her sister was dying, and she was the only one suffering? Moira didn’t think that she had ever felt such disgust towards another human being before in her life.
“I don’t need to beat you in a pie making contest. I’m beating you right now. There’s nothing you can do.”
“You don’t need to hurt anyone. You have the medal, and you can tell your sister that the judges messed up — tell her that we cheated and got disqualified. It will be just like the two of you won.”
“You don’t get it at all,” Linette said. “You just pranced into town on your little family vacation and you took away from me the one last thing that I had with my sister. She is all that’s left of my family, and soon I won’t even have her. This is her last summer, and it was supposed to be perfect!”
“Please, just let my daughter go,” Moira said. “I’ll do anything you want.”
“Really?” Linette said, her voice amused. “Then sit down and eat your pie.”
Moira gazed at the familiar lines of her daughter’s face for a long moment, then slowly lowered herself to her seat. I don’t even know what kind of poison she used, she thought. Maybe there’s an antidote. If we can get to a hospital quickly enough, maybe I’ll be okay. Or maybe the woman hadn’t poisoned the pies at all. She was obviously crazy — with any luck, she would have poured sugar in thinking it was rat poison.
The deli owner had the fork raised to her mouth when there was the loud sound of shattering glass. The fork clattered to her plate as she jumped up. There was a large wet spot on the wall next to Linette’s head, and the woman’s shoulder and hair were covered in broken glass. Moira realized that David must have thrown the water pitcher at her while her attention was focused on Moira. His aim was off, but he had still managed to distract her enough that she removed the fork form Candice’s neck. She must have loosened the grip on her hair too, because Candice managed to jerk her head free, losing only a few strands in the process.
Linette realized that her only leverage was getting away from her. She reached for Candice again, but the young woman wasn’t going to be caught that easily twice. She bit hard into the arm that was trying to snake around her neck. When Linette jerked back, Candice shot to her feet and scrambled out of her reach.
“Come back here!” Linette screeched. She lunged at Candice, but Moira stepped in between them and shoved the woman backward, hard. She stumbled and landed in the pile of broken glass from the pitcher. While she lay there groaning, David strode around the table. He plucked the fork from her grasp, then yanked her to her feet and held her arms behind her.
“Get something to tie her up with,” he said. .” And hurry!”
EPILOGUE
* * *
Moira winced at the feel of the dog’s hot breath against her cheek. She gently shoved his head back. He had been standing with his front feet on the center console and his head resting on the shoulder of her seat.
“Can I have just a little personal space, Mav?” she said.
“Maverick, come on back here,” Candice said to the dog. “Quit bugging them. We’ll be home soon. I know it’s a long drive.”
Moira watched her daughter in the rear-view mirror. She could see the red marks on the young woman’s neck where Linette had pressed the fork to her skin. She knew that she had come close to losing her daughter. The woman had already shown that she was willing to kill over a small slight like losing a cooking contest. After the lack of empathy that she had showed over Jillian’s death, Moira didn’t think she would have hesitated to kill Candice.
To her surprise, she had discovered that she did feel a small shred of pity towards the woman. It didn’t excuse her actions, but she had been grieving. If it had ended at the break in, if Jillian hadn’t been killed, Moira would have almost sympathized with her. However, no matter what Linette was going through, nothing could excuse what she had done to that young woman, and what she had tried to do to Moira’s own family.
Every time that she thought about the woman, she tried to remember if she had ever said or done anything that might have hinted as to her mental state. She had seemed perfectly normal, if a bit too eager to have them over for a meal, but Moira had put that down the small-town atmosphere. Logically, she knew that there was no way that she could have anticipated anything that had happened, but she didn’t think that her guilt over Jillian’s death would ever go away. She had promised to keep an eye on her, and the unthinkable had happened.
She did feel a bit bad for the trouble that they had caused for Austin as well. To make up for it, she had asked Grant for his number, and had paid the young man handsomely for his help in loading up the car and tidying the house after they were out. She hoped he managed to get that new car soon, and that he figured out a way to patch things up with his girlfriend. Being accused of murder couldn’t have been easy for him, especially not if he had still had some feelings for Jillian. She knew that the police had released their original suspect, Theodore, and she wondered what the town was making of the whole event. The mayor’s nephew having been held as a murder suspect would certainly be the talk of the town for a while to come.
“Well,” David said as he turned onto Candice’s road, “I wish I could say that was a nice vacation, but in all honesty, it will be a relief to be home.”
“I agree wholeheartedly,” Moira said. They had ended up staying in Bearpaw for a few days longer while the police figured things out, and while no other disasters had occurred, none of those days had felt very much like a vacation.
“Even with everything that happened, it was nice to have the chance to get away for a bit,” Candice said. “I can’t believe my wedding is in a month. It hasn’t really started to feel real until now. I can hardly believe how quickly it seems to be coming up.”
“Are you excited?” Moira asked. She wondered if her daughter was having second thoughts.
“Of course I am,” her daughter said, grinning. “It’s just going to take a lot of work to finish preparing for it. With the destination wedding and then the honeymoon right after, we’re going to be gone for almost three weeks. That’s probably my biggest concern — I don’t know if I can close the candy shop for that long without losing customers. If Logan was around, I would trust him to run it, but without him, I really don’t have a choice.”
“I’m sure it will be all right. You have a pretty loyal customer base.”
“I hope so. I also hope that I’ll be able to relax and stop worrying about it while we’re on our honeymoon.”
“Oh, sweetie, I know you’ll have a wonderful time. I’m going to miss you so much, though.”
“You know, just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean anything will really change with our family,” Candice said. “I’m still going to visit all of the time.”
“You’re my daughter and you’re getting married. I know it might seem silly to you, but this is all very emotional for me. I hope you know that I’m proud of you.”
“So am I,” David added. “Even in just the few years that I’ve known you, you’ve grown and changed so much. Moira is lucky to have you for a daughter.”
“And,” her mother added, “I think Eli will be very lucky to have you for a wife. I just know that the two of you will have a happy life together.”
“I hope so,” Candice said. “That’s the plan — to grow old together.”
Moira turned to look at
David and smiled. Even after everything that had happened over the past week, she still thought the three of them were lucky. They had each other, after all.
Pies, Lies and Murder (The Darling Deli Series Book 22) Page 7