Madeleine Murder

by Sandi Scott

  Personally, she had no idea.

  * * *

  The next morning was Ashley’s day to sleep in. She had planned to stay in bed until the bakers’ and pastry chefs’ super-late hour of 8 a.m., then get up, make herself a cup of coffee, and start the day like a normal person.

  Unfortunately, there were two problems with her plan. First, it had been so long since she’d started the day like a normal person that she couldn’t really remember how to do it. She woke up at five a.m., terrified that she’d overslept, and sat straight up in bed.

  Dizzy heard her moving around and gave a questioning bark. That was the second problem.

  Ashley lay back in bed, pulling the blankets back up around her shoulders, and tried to go back to sleep. About a minute later, Dizzy, no fool, barked again, this time a little louder.

  Ashley sighed. She shut her eyes, but her mind had already started to run. She wanted to get in to Fresh Start Kitchens and handle a few small tasks, then run errands, then talk to Betty about the event on the… wait, what day had it been?

  She wanted to be the kind of person who could take a lazy day off, but she just wasn’t.

  Ashley swung her legs out of bed, slipped them into her slippers, and greeted the new day with one eye scrunched shut. It was still dark out.

  A few minutes later, she stepped out of her bathroom dressed in comfy sweats. She had passed on makeup, and her dark hair was pulled back in a sloppy brown bun. She let Dizzy out of her kennel, then stumbled over to the coffee maker and started it. Dizzy waited by the front door with her leash in her mouth. She would be patient for as long as it took to brew a pot of coffee, and then they had better be heading out the front door for a walk.

  Ashley grabbed her keys and phone and put her walking shoes on. She had promised to make Ryan cookies while he did research on the jerk who had cleaned out her debit card account. Was that today or tomorrow? Or Thursday? She should call him and find out.

  In a couple of hours, that was.

  The coffee pot gurgled at her. She was forgetting something else, she knew it. Today? Was she supposed to be doing something today?

  She booted up the computer, scowled at her still-locked personal account, then pulled up her calendar. She didn’t have anything else until this weekend, a wedding cake with three huge tiers, a bunch of white-chocolate candy seashells, and an extra sheet cake and seashells for two hundred.

  Okay. Her schedule was clear. In fact, she would rather have picked up a few extra jobs this week.

  What couldn’t she remember?

  The coffeepot’s gurgling intensified for a few seconds, then stopped. Almost automatically, Ashley stood up, filled a travel mug, and headed out the door with Dizzy’s leash in her hand.

  At least I can be a good dog mom this week, she thought as she closed and locked the door behind her, a habit that marked her as somewhat odd in the tiny community of Seagrass, but one that she’d picked up in Paris.

  “Left or right today?” she asked Dizzy as they walked down the driveway toward the sidewalk, then turned toward the main street.

  Dizzy stopped at the corner of the sidewalk and looked first left, then right. Left was the park; right was a winding trail through an open space.

  Dizzy chose right, gently guiding Ashley down the sidewalk past the end of the house. The sun still hadn’t decided to get up yet, and the streetlights were on, although the sky had lightened. Already she could tell from the air that it was going to be a scorcher of a day.

  The two of them walked along the street. Ashley glanced at the run-down, beige bungalow on the other side of the street, the house that Coyote was trying to buy. Ashley crossed the street with the idea of looking inside to see if the owners had made any repairs.

  The houses in the street each had mailboxes along the street—no need for the mailman to get out of his cute little truck to make his deliveries. The mailbox in front of the house she was looking at showed a silhouette of a coyote now. How perfect—she hoped it meant that things were going better for Coyote.

  She glanced through the windows. The curtains in the front window were light-blocking curtains, white along the backs. The ones in the kitchen, at the back of a small covered porch, were white with a striped yellow, red, and green border along the bottom—and a row of chickens.

  One of the curtains twitched. Someone was inside the kitchen, awake, and watching Ashley stare at the house. She assumed it was Coyote, but as she got closer, a light came on in the kitchen and the figure in the window turned into a silhouette. As the dark shadow leaned back from the glass a little, it was easier to see her—a blonde woman probably in her forties. She looked somewhat familiar.

  She stared back at Ashley for a moment, then turned her head to the side and said something to a person that Ashley couldn’t see.

  “Oh, no,” Ashley said. She had just remembered what she had forgotten.

  Completely unrelated. But absolutely urgent.

  Betty had said the catering event in Galveston was the third of August, hadn’t she? She grabbed her phone, suddenly remembering the call that she’d ignored while talking to Moonbeam. Someone had left her a message, and she hadn’t even noticed. Oh, no.

  The first day of the festival had been July twenty-ninth. That meant today was… Oops. August second.

  The catering event was tomorrow.

  She looked back up at the window, and the figure was gone. Any thought of visiting Coyote vanished. She needed to get started baking as soon as possible.

  After checking the message, which was Betty cheerfully asking Ashley to call her back, Ashley decided to run the most essential errands first and go to Fresh Start later. She’d call Betty just after she arrived and make sure she hadn’t heard the wrong date—or the wrong month. Somehow she didn’t think so, though.

  She’d find a way to make sure she didn’t let Betty down—she’d make it work.

  Ashley waited until nine to call Ryan and check in, and he sounded just as bright and cheerful as ever. “I’m going to start on research for you today,” he said.

  “Should I drop everything and come over with cookie dough?” She more than half hoped that he would say yes.

  He hesitated. “Naahhhhh… it’s only nine in the morning. I probably shouldn’t start eating dessert until at least after lunch. Besides, you sound busy.”

  She explained about missing Betty’s message about the catering job in Galveston. He said, “Then you really shouldn’t be spending the day with me. We can do cookies later, okay? Unless Betty was talking about next month and not tomorrow.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n,” she said.

  11

  By ten Ashley had done most of her errands, including picking up some supplies for Patty at a commissary in Bay City.

  Half an hour later, she pulled into the parking lot of Fresh Start. Smoke Daddy Lee’s and Patty’s vehicles were there ahead of her; obviously they hadn’t been able to sleep in either. The day was already too hot for the ovens to give off any steam, but she could smell something delicious roasting as she got out of the car and started hefting bags and flats onto the loading dock.

  She shouted a greeting, and Patty came out to help her unload and carry flats inside to the walk-in refrigerator they shared.

  “What smells so delicious?”

  “Pommes frites,” Patty said.

  “You’re making pommes frites? That’s new. What’s it for?” They had both agreed earlier that taking a deep fryer out into the Texas heat for three days of wind-carried oil splatter at the festival would be less than optimal.

  Patty rolled her eyes. “It’s Lee. He insists that his homemade french fries are better than mine.”

  “But who’s competing, right?” Ashley teased as the two of them pulled the bay door shut.

  “Right,” Patty agreed. “Nobody’s competing. It’s just a friendly experiment.”

  The smell became even more delicious as the two of them stepped into the kitchen space. “Hey, Smoke Daddy,” Ashl
ey called to him over the sound of the desktop electric fryer that had been set up on the steel countertop. “I thought you’d be sleeping in this morning.”

  “I tried,” he said, watching a batch of seething golden potatoes inside the basket. “But then I woke up at the regular time, thinking that I’d forgotten something.”

  Ashley laughed. “Me, too! But I really did forget something…” She told him about the catering event in Galveston that Betty had invited her to. Privately, she was still concerned about letting Patty down.

  “I hope I’m not being a terrible friend and business partner,” she told Patty. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Ma chère, you’re doing the wedding cake this weekend without me,” Patty reminded her.

  “Yes, but we talked about that first,” Ashley said.

  Patty shook her head. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m going to be just fine this week—I should even have a good bit of money to put away for the shop.”

  The two of them had talked about setting up a more permanent location. It was still a toss-up between a shop with a food truck or a full-blown restaurant. Either way, it was something good to fantasize about on difficult days.

  Today it just made Ashley feel worse.

  “It sounds great,” she said, “but I can’t do anything. The thief wiped out my extra funds for now. I guess if Ryan and I end up finding some way to get it back, I’ll be able to, but not until then.”

  “Do you need any cash?” Patty said.

  “No… I’ll be fine. Unless something else happens.”

  Smoke Daddy Lee pulled the basket of french fries out of the oil. “Voila!” The french fries hissed as he hooked the basket against the bar to let them drip. “And now…we wait.”

  The three of them stood around the basket. Ashley was the kind of person who tended to be pickier about her desserts than her fries, but she wasn’t sure that Smoke Daddy Lee was going to be able to make any kind of claim here. She’d tasted Patty’s pommes frites before—they were to die for.

  But it was probably better to let Smoke Daddy Lee figure that out the hard way.

  Just then, someone rang the doorbell.

  Ashley, not having her professional pride at stake, went out into the entry and opened the door. Their visitor was Detective Luna, in full uniform.

  “Uh, hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to ask you some more questions regarding the Seagrass festival and the murder of the man known as Sparrow Soulbrother.”

  Ashley blinked.

  “We are establishing the whereabouts of all people who have reported unauthorized debit transactions that weekend,” he said.

  “Am I a suspect?” she asked.

  His nostrils twitched. “That remains to be determined.”

  Ashley gaped at him. She literally couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Detective Luna pulled his small spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket. “Now, Miss Adams, I know you already talked with Sheriff Mueller, but I’m going to need you to repeat some of these answers for me. Where were you on the evening of July twenty-ninth?”

  “I was…” Ashley shook her head to clear it. Mentally shifting gears wasn’t easy this morning. Detective Luna couldn’t seriously be considering her as a murder suspect—he was just doing his job. Being thorough. She couldn’t take this personally. “I was at the Seagrass Sweets and Southern Bird tent most of the evening with my partner, Patty LaFontaine.”

  “Did you leave the tent at any time?”

  “I left the tent initially at two or two thirty p.m. to pick up lunch and check out the festival, but I was back by about three or so. I talked to the victim then, at his table, and bought a hemp dog collar from him using my debit card. After that, I stayed at the tent except for a short bathroom break until about ten o’clock in the evening…”

  “Back up a second there, please,” interrupted the detective. “Was there anyone else at the tent when you were there with Mr. Soulbrother?”

  Ashley closed her eyes. She had already told this story, and the police were no closer to catching the suspect than she was. Her mind was running with all she had to do before the job with Betty, but she knew that there was no rushing Detective Luna.

  “There was one man who came by to tell Sparrow he had a flat tire on his van. He was young, white, and had short dreadlocks. Sparrow seemed to know him—they were acting like they were familiar with one another.”

  “Is there anything else you remember about this man?”

  “He was carrying a guitar. I figured he was on his way to or from the karaoke tent.”

  “Continue.”

  “That’s it, really. After I left Sparrow’s tent, I went back to mine.”

  “Have you seen this man, the mystery guitar man, since then, Ms. Adams?”

  “In fact, yes,” Ashley said. Was her hunch about that guy right? She made a quick decision. “I saw him walking in the park the next morning while I was talking with Moonbeam, Sparrow Soulbrother’s partner, that is. But he left before long—he didn’t talk to anyone.”

  Ashley had decided to neglect to tell Detective Luna about the interaction she had seen between the guitar man and Betty. Partly because she needed the job Betty had offered her, and a surefire way to lose it was to accuse her of a crime. Plus, she wasn’t even sure what she’d seen.

  “Hmmmm. Interesting.” Detective Luna nodded, wrote a few more things down on his tablet, and looked up. The door to the kitchen had opened, and Patty and Smoke Daddy Lee were standing in it. Tantalizing smells wafted out the doorway around them.

  “Hello, Detective Luna,” Smoke Daddy Lee said. “What brings you to our place of business?”

  “I had some questions for Ms. Adams,” Detective Luna said. “I also have some questions for the two of you.”

  Patty and Smoke Daddy Lee exchanged a look.

  “Ask away,” they said in unison.

  Detective Luna asked them both almost the same questions that he’d asked Ashley. Patty’s answers, since she and Ashley had been together most of the time, didn’t surprise Ashley at all. Smoke Daddy Lee’s answers were also pretty standard—he’d been at his truck most of the time, too. Friday night he’d gone back to Fresh Start Kitchens to pick up more meat from the refrigerators, but had left before Patty and Ashley had come in for their epic, all-night prep session. He’d spent the night back at the Smokeground’s camping area, where his giant trailer-sized smoker was parked, and got to work doing his prep for the following day’s festival crowd.

  “Was there anyone at the campground with you?” Detective Luna asked.

  “Sure, we had almost a full campground for the night.”

  “Was there anyone there who could personally confirm that you were there all night?”

  “The campground manager, maybe. His name is Jim Trevino—he takes care of the campers for me, makes sure there are no altercations and that nobody’s dog is running around, that kind of thing.”

  “And did he see you?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. I was too busy to do anything more than wave at the door of his RV before I got started working for the night.”

  Detective Luna wrote something down in his notebook. “One more question. Do any of you smoke marijuana?”

  He looked up, locking eyes with Smoke Daddy Lee.

  “No,” Smoke Daddy Lee said flatly.

  Patty said, “In college I did. But not since I moved to Paris in… well. Let’s spare my tender feelings about my age and say it was a long time ago.”

  “No,” Ashley said. “I do chocolate and wine, that’s about it.”

  Detective Luna still hadn’t looked away from Smoke Daddy Lee. “Are you sure you don’t smoke pot?”

  Smoke Daddy Lee frowned. “I just told you that I didn’t. Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Just answer the question,” Detective Luna said.

  “I am sure that I don’t smoke pot. There, is that answered enough for you?”

&
nbsp; Patty put her hand on Smoke Daddy Lee’s arm. His mouth closed with a snap.

  Detective Luna said, “We have reason to believe that there may have been a supply of marijuana tied to the murder. It seems Sparrow Soulbrother was bringing in a large amount that he recruited dealers to sell at the festivals. We always say where there is drugs and money, trouble isn’t far behind.”

  Ashley felt her eyes widen. A glance toward Patty and Smoke Daddy Lee showed her that they, too, were feeling surprise. Their small, safe little town—tainted by murderous drug deals? If that was the case, Ashley could almost sympathize with some of the techniques the Localists used to chase away bad elements.

  But implying that Smoke Daddy Lee might be involved? That was just wrong.

  “Thank you,” Detective Luna said. “I will let you know if we have any further questions. Ms. Adams, I hope the thief who stole your money is found soon.” He nodded at her.

  “Thank you.”

  “And did you have any other information you’d like to share?”

  “About what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You always seem to be coming up to me and telling me something or other you’ve heard about the case. Seems like you have an ear for gossip.”

  Considering all the work that Ashley had done on cases that Detective Luna had received credit for in the past, she had more than “an ear for gossip.” But right now she wouldn’t have shared information with Detective Luna if a murderer was standing right behind him with a gun raised.

  She sighed and shook her head. No sense in getting irrational, even if Detective Luna was trying to provoke her. “I’ll let you know if I do, Detective Luna.”

  “Thank you.” He nodded to them again and stepped out of the front door, closing it carefully behind him.

  Patty burst out with, “The nerve!”

  “That’s all we need,” Smoke Daddy Lee growled. “Rumors going around that I’ve turned into a pothead.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean…” Ashley drifted off. “No, you’re right. He totally was trying to insinuate that you were a drug user. I wonder where he got that idea?”