by Clover Tate
What a house. Maybe I’d become used to Avery’s charming bohemian home—okay, it was slightly run-down, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything—but this place was immaculate. A sectional sofa rimmed the room, and a fluffy white rug lay under a glass table. A chair made of leather and chrome tubing sat across from the sofa. My first thought was that the owner didn’t have a dog. Or children.
“Is that all, Nick?” the officer in the kitchen asked the sheriff.
“No. Wait a bit.”
“Can I come down?” came a voice from upstairs. Caitlin Ruder.
“Yes,” the sheriff said.
“Finally.” Caitlin, pulling her bathrobe closed, descended the stairs. She halted when she saw me. “Why are you here?”
I glanced at the sheriff before replying. “By chance, I was taking a walk down the beach the night Jasmine died.”
Her expression changed subtly, as if she were doing split-second calculations, before it lapsed back into sullenness. “I don’t see why you weren’t in bed, like a normal person.”
“Is that your bedroom upstairs?”
“No,” she said.
The sheriff raised an eyebrow. “You said it was.”
“I said I was sleeping there. That doesn’t mean it’s my bedroom.”
I remembered Stella’s observation that Caitlin had been known for bending the truth on Bag That Babe.
Sheriff Koppen placed a hand on his hip. “Answer me clearly. The night Jasmine died, were you sleeping in the upstairs bedroom?”
“Sleeping?”
“It was three in the morning. You’ve already told me that as far as you knew, only you and Jasmine were in the house. What else would you be doing?”
Now it was starting to come together. There was an intruder, a man. He wasn’t a guest.
Caitlin seemed to lose interest. She dropped onto the sectional sofa, laying an arm along its edge. “Fine. I had the downstairs bedroom. Why shouldn’t I move upstairs once Jasmine left? It has the better view.”
I stared at her. She had taken her dead friend’s bedroom and didn’t see anything wrong with it. The sheriff had apparently had enough, too, because he went into the adjoining kitchen and motioned to the man standing near the sink.
“Sir?” the man said.
The sheriff turned to me. “Still think it was a larger man?”
“I’m not sure anymore. I think so, but I could be wrong,” I said. All this second-guessing was messing with my memory.
The man raised an eyebrow. “But I’m exactly Marcus’s size,” he said.
“Marcus Salek?” I said.
“Birk, you can go home now.” The sheriff glared at his retreating back.
“You’re talking about Marcus Salek,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he said to me.
“What do you mean, nothing? You were grilling me down on the beach. You thought the man could have been Marcus?”
“What man?” Caitlin said from the living room. I’d forgotten she was there.
The sheriff sighed. “Emmy said she saw a man in the kitchen the night Jasmine died.”
“There was no man here,” Caitlin said. “Are you implying I’m having an affair with that village weirdo?”
“He’s not a weirdo,” I couldn’t help saying, even though a part of me agreed. “He’s passionate. That’s all.”
The sheriff ignored us. He stared at the sink, then out the window above it, then turned back toward us.
“Why Salek?” I asked.
The sheriff drummed his fingers on the counter. “A neighbor reported seeing his car up the street.”
“He could have been checking his crab pots,” I said. “A lot of the locals do that at night.”
“Hmm,” the sheriff said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Jasmine’s rental car’s tires were slashed, too.”
I straightened. “The same night?”
“So what?” Caitlin said. “That kind of stuff happens all the time in L.A. Not a big deal.”
He didn’t reply.
“Well, what does Marcus say? I assume you asked him,” I said.
The sheriff shifted on his feet. “Can’t find him. He’s not home, and no one’s seen him in town.”
“Maybe he’s on vacation or something. I saw him at the Brew House yesterday—or I guess it would be the day before yesterday now,” I said, noting the early hour.
“That’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”
Caitlin fidgeted with her robe’s belt. “Anyway, there wasn’t anyone here.”
I grew uncomfortable. Either Caitlin was lying, or someone had broken in. Or, Caitlin was asleep and didn’t know Jasmine had a visitor. The sheriff clearly suspected the visitor was Marcus.
But for the ocean’s constant murmur, the house was quiet. All up and down the beach through Rock Point, residents were sleeping. It was even too early for the fishermen to be up. Mrs. Jurgenson, suffering from one of her regular bouts of insomnia, might be watching the shopping channel, or the Bensons might be tending their baby, but otherwise we were possibly the only people awake in town.
Caitlin yawned without covering her mouth and examined a fingernail.
“Jasmine’s death wasn’t an accident, was it?” I said.
The sheriff had also been lost in thought. He pulled his attention back to me. “I don’t know.”
Caitlin, again in full yawn, instantly snapped her mouth shut. Her eyes widened. “What do you mean? Just because there was some guy lurking around here? Like I said, this happens in L.A. all the time.” The sheriff’s silence seemed to be too much for her. “She took too much insulin, right? Maybe she saw creepy Marcus through the window and it freaked her out and she didn’t pay attention to her dose.”
Caitlin ambled to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of expensive French sparkling water and set it on the counter. With one hand still holding the fridge open, she lifted a second small glass bottle from inside the door and without warning tossed it toward the sheriff’s chest. He caught it and set it on the table without even looking at it. “There’s your culprit,” she said. “Isn’t that what the medical examiner said?”
I picked it up. It was about the size of a pill bottle and cold in my hand. Its blue label told me it was insulin. My mind whirled back to the night Jasmine died. Had I overestimated the size of the man in the kitchen? Or maybe it hadn’t been a man at all. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. Was I missing something?
“So she did die of an insulin overdose?”
“Appears so,” the sheriff said.
“Maybe Caitlin’s right. Why are you sure it wasn’t an accident?” I asked.
I’d never seen the sheriff so out of sorts. Usually he was disconcertingly calm. Something had wormed its way under his skin. He took a step closer. “Jasmine got in touch with me the day before she died,” he said. He looked toward the sea, still black, although dawn was close now. “Said she’d been threatened. Said she’d been warned to leave town.”
I gasped. No wonder he had his doubts. “Someone threatened her,” I repeated. “Did they leave a note?”
“That’s what she said, although she didn’t show it to me.”
“Did you—?”
“Yes,” he cut in, “we searched the house and can’t find it.”
So, Jasmine might have accidentally overdosed. But it also might have been something more serious. Sheriff Koppen clearly didn’t like the odds.
“Jasmine wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist,” Caitlin said all of a sudden. “She’d only known she had to do insulin for about a year.”
“What do you mean?”
Caitlin looked at me as if I were firing on too few pistons. “She probably messed up. That’s all. Maybe she forgot that she already shot up.”
The sheriff rubbed his eyes. I real
ized that I’d seen him as a sort of superhero whose energy never flagged. He had a family. It was getting on to four in the morning. Naturally, he’d be tired.
“Thanks, Emmy, Caitlin,” he said. “Why don’t you get to bed? I’ll be in touch.”
I hesitated to leave. The sheriff clearly wasn’t satisfied, but what could I do?
Caitlin had only to go upstairs, but I had a long trek home. He walked me to the back deck. “You want a ride?”
“So it was an obvious overdose,” I said, ignoring him. “If Jasmine was murdered, the killer had to know she was diabetic.”
Sheriff Koppen nodded. “True.”
“He either knew where she kept her insulin, or he brought his own.”
“And next you’re going to ask if we’ve checked her garbage and sharps container for a different brand of syringe or insulin.”
I nodded. So much for my brilliant deductions.
“We did check, and everything was consistent. The insulin and syringes were the same.”
“What about doses? Could you tell if there were more bottles used than there should have been?”
The sheriff glanced toward the upstairs bedroom. The window was closed, but he lowered his voice anyway. “It doesn’t work that way. Diabetics don’t always take the same dose. It depends on what they’ve eaten, what their insulin levels are.”
“Oh.” I turned toward the ocean. Before long, the sun would bleed pink on the eastern sky. The fishermen who still worked the ocean would rise and unlatch their boats in the damp dark, hoping for a thick enough catch to see themselves through winter. I knew how that felt.
“So, would you like a lift home?”
I considered it, but shook my head. “I’ll walk. It will do me good.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
“I suppose it’s all right.” The sheriff’s voice trailed off.
I knew what he was thinking. I would be safe. Even if Jasmine’s death wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t random, either. She had been targeted.
I clicked on my flashlight and started down the steps to the beach. The sheriff thought Jasmine had been murdered, but he couldn’t prove it. Tonight he’d been looking for something to solidify his theory. He suspected Marcus might have killed her, but he couldn’t find him. The thought made my head spin.
Down the stairs I went. With each step I felt that much more removed from reality. On each side of the steps, rocks and grass took over the bluff. I passed my flashlight right and then left. The light flashed on something in the rocks. Something glass. I returned the flashlight to that spot and held it. Something was there. Something shiny.
I looked up to the house. Its lights flickered off, one by one. “Stop!” I yelled.
“What?” the sheriff’s voice came from the deck.
I stepped off the stairs toward the glimmering object my flashlight had caught. “I found something.” But maybe I hadn’t. Maybe it was just a piece of trash the beach house’s prior residents had left. In my gut, I knew it wasn’t.
In a moment, the sheriff was at my side. “What?”
“That.” I pointed toward what my flashlight had caught.
Sheriff Koppen rolled a latex glove over his hand and reached for the object. I was strangely gratified—he’d taken me seriously. He picked up a small bottle. “Insulin,” he said.
If it hadn’t been dark out, and my flashlight hadn’t caught the glass, I never would have seen the bottle. Whoever wanted to get rid of it must have thrown it from the house, thinking it would disappear forever.
He showed me the bottle, and I knew. This one had a gray label. The label on the one in the house was blue.
“Jasmine Normand didn’t use this brand.”
This was proof. Jasmine Normand had been murdered.
chapter nine
Once again, I was too wired to sleep. This time it wasn’t worry over Jack, it was the knowledge that a murderer was loose in Rock Point. I had to get my kite finished for the festival, so after a few unproductive hours in bed, I went to the shop. Stella was an early riser, so as I stitched slips of fabric to the kite, I kept an eye on the clock until it was a decent hour to call. Then I begged Stella to join me.
“It was murder. Jasmine’s death, that is. Not an accident at all,” I told Stella as soon as she arrived, my kite set aside.
“Someone killed Jasmine Normand,” Stella said, maybe to make it more real.
I knew how she felt. I’d been telling myself the same thing all morning. I filled her in on the night’s reenactment.
Considering that she’d been practically yanked from bed by my call, Stella had the easy, natural beauty she always did: long gray hair pulled into a chignon, a linen shift chosen for the afternoon’s heat with a worn cashmere cardigan to ward off the morning’s chill, and a necklace with an abstract silver pendant dangling mid-chest.
“The sheriff seemed to think that Marcus had something to do with it. Remember how I told you I’d seen a man in the house?” I wrinkled my brow.
“Yes?”
“The sheriff had someone stand inside and pretend to be him. He specifically chose someone about Marcus’s size.”
“Do you mind if I make some tea?” Stella rose to help herself. She’d worked at Strings Attached off and on over the summer, and was as at home in the workshop as I was.
“Please do.”
“I wonder where the sherriff got the idea that Marcus would hurt anyone. I admit he can be abrasive, but he’s not violent.”
“He sounds violent, though. You should have heard him at the Brew House.” I sighed and pulled over the kite’s limp body. It wasn’t going to sew itself. “Do you have any idea why he’s so hell-bent against tourists coming to Rock Point?”
“I don’t know much about him, really. I know he grew up here. His family were fishermen. He married and moved away for several years. When he returned, he was alone and had enough money not to need to work.”
“His anger is too intense, though. More than if he’d simply objected to traffic and a fudge shop on Main Street,” I said.
“Yes.” Stella fidgeted with her pendant. “But you told the sheriff it couldn’t have been Marcus.”
Down went the kite again. “I did. I think he might suspect me.”
Stella sat across from me. “What are you talking about? You mean because you and Jasmine had it out at the Brew House?”
“And because I was on the beach that night.”
“But you told him you were on the beach. If you were a murderer, you wouldn’t be blabbing about hanging around the murder scene in the middle of the night.” The kettle whistled, and Stella rose to turn off the stove.
“Unless I was a crafty murderer. Think about it. Say I had killed Jasmine. If I were really smart, I’d tell the sheriff that I was there that night because I couldn’t sleep. That way, if someone saw me, I’m in the clear. Plus, I could tell him I saw someone else at the beach house, like a man standing in the kitchen window, and throw the suspicion away from me.”
“I see what you mean,” Stella said.
Reluctantly, I pulled the kite back over and picked up a needle. “Of course, presumably I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to tell him that the double for Marcus he posted inside wasn’t the man I saw.” I let that sink in a moment. “And then there’s the reporter from the National Bloodhound.”
“The what?”
“A reporter from the National Bloodhound cornered me at the Brew House the day before yesterday. He asked Sheriff Koppen about me, too.”
“No one knew Jasmine’s death was murder until this morning, though,” Stella pointed out. “So the reporter couldn’t suspect you.”
“He made insinuations.”
“He was just trying to stir up trouble. Anyway, he’s probably left town by now with the rest of the
m.”
That may have been true. I hadn’t seen him, and the sheriff hadn’t mentioned him last night. “I hope you’re right.”
Stella lifted the tea ball from the pot and poured herself a mug of tea. “Listen. Are you positive you saw a man at the beach house?”
“Yes.” I bit my lip. “Or maybe not. Now I’m not sure. I would have sworn that I did, until last night.”
“It was dark,” Stella offered.
I nodded.
“You were tired.”
“Exhausted,” I agreed. “Worried, too.”
Worried about Sunny. She was probably up by now, hopefully taking Bear on a walk at the cliffs. She needed to get her act together.
“Then again, if you did see someone, that person might be the murderer.”
“True.” This was not a new path of inquiry for me.
“Are you sure it was a man?” Stella asked. “Could it have been a woman, maybe?”
“Possibly. The sheriff and I already covered this ground.”
“And the light was on in the upstairs bedroom?”
“Yes. Caitlin’s moved up there now, but it had been Jasmine’s bedroom. At least, that’s what she said.”
Stella stared at me. “You aren’t helping. You don’t seem sure about anything.”
Once again, I pushed the kite aside. At this rate, it would never get done. “When it was just an accident, things seemed clearer. Now that it’s murder, well, more is at stake.” I dropped my arms from the table and leaned back. “People really think I’d kill someone to win a kite contest?”
Winning the contest was a big deal to me, it was true. The future of Strings Attached depended on my winter sales. But I couldn’t very well operate a kite shop from the state pen.
Stella rose, and the schoolteacher in her came out full force. “What we need is a plan. We need to know more about Jasmine’s life. Her friendship with Caitlin, her marriage, her relationship with her sister.”
I watched in admiration. I wished I had a blackboard for her to write on.
Stella poked a finger into the air. “We also need to know what Marcus has been up to. Sheriff Koppen is no dummy. If he had reason to suspect Marcus, then something was going on.”