Death in an English Garden: Book Six in the Murder on Location series

by Sara Rosett

After the wire had been discovered, I’d waited on the terrace along with the Hibbert cousins until the police were sure the stairs were safe. A lot of confusion occurred right after the wire was found, though, and either one of the cousins could have slipped into the kitchen to put the envelope in my bag, or Torrie could have done it while I was outside because she never came out at all.

  Melissa pulled out a chair and sat. “You came here after you left Tate House, right?”

  “Ah—no. I took Slink for a run then stopped at the pub. Stevie Lund was there—you know who he is?”

  “Arabella’s angry ex, or that’s what they’re calling him in the paper that I saw at the market.”

  “That’s about right,” I said, thinking of how he’d shouted and shaken the gate. Could he really be in the clear when it came to Arabella’s death? “And I think I saw Gil Brayden in the pub, too, but it was only a glimpse. I looked around for him when I left, but either he’d slipped out, or it wasn’t him at all.”

  “Who’s Gil Brayden?”

  “That’s right. You don’t know about him.” I brought her up to date on the man in the garden and how the next day, Gil had tried to get onto the Parkview grounds.

  “So you’re pretty sure this Brayden bloke was at Tate House sneaking around the gardens?”

  “Both Arabella and Torrie thought it was him. He’s paparazzi. They’re not known for good manners.”

  “Or playing by the rules.” Melissa took a sip of her coffee, her frowning gaze fixed on the plastic bag that I’d placed on the table. “Threatening notes sent to a star would make a good story. Maybe Arabella was wrong and the notes weren’t from Lund. Maybe this Gil manufactured a story so he could cover it. He could have been sending Arabella the notes, but when he heard she’d died, he dropped one in your bag and gave the police a tip to divert suspicion from him.”

  “That’s possible, I suppose. But he’s a photographer, not a reporter. Or Lund could have put the note in my bag. Arabella thought he was the one sending the notes. Lund even bumped into me as I left the pub, so he could have put it in my bag then…but anyone could have done it, actually. I had my bag hooked on the back of the barstool. Anyone in the pub could have dropped something in my bag.”

  “But of all the people in the pub, only the photographer bloke and Stevie Lund have any link to Arabella.”

  “That we know of.” A gloomy feeling settled over me. “The pub was packed. Who knows what—or who—I missed. And then there’s everyone at Tate House—Torrie and the Hibbert cousins.” I swirled my mocha around. “Something was…I don’t know…off, at Tate House. I felt it every time I was there. Weird undercurrents that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”

  “I’ll bet there were undercurrents. Someone was murdered there.” She wrapped her free hand around her waist as if she felt chilled. “I’m sorry you’re messed up in this, but I’m so glad that Arabella didn’t want me around.”

  I put my coffee down. “What happened between you two? I never did get the full story.” Unlike Quimby, I didn’t think for a minute that Melissa could be involved in some scheme to harass Arabella, but I wanted to know the full story.

  Melissa became very interested in the grain of the wood on the tabletop. “It’s one of those things I’m not proud of.” Her voice was uncharacteristically quiet. “I stole her boyfriend. She’d landed the lead in the play—the role I’d hoped to get—and she was so smug about the whole thing, it made me furious…so, I flirted with her boyfriend until he broke up with her and went out with me. Not my best moment,” she said with a grimace.

  “As an adult, Arabella was hard to deal with. I’m sure she wasn’t any easier when she was a teenager.”

  “Still, I shouldn’t have done it.” She sighed. “But that’s what happened, and Arabella is not one to forgive and forget. Once you crossed her, you were on her black list forever.”

  “Until you mentioned it the other day, I didn’t know you acted.”

  “Oh, I tried. I was terrible,” she said, drawing out the last word. “I realize that now, but at the time I had my heart set on being a star. It was a summer workshop. We put on two plays: one in July and one in August. I see now that the whole point of it was to expose us to all aspects of theater. For the first play, half of us worked behind the scenes, lights, costume, that sort of thing. Then we switched for the second play. The people who were actors the first time around were behind the scenes and vice versa.”

  Melissa smiled. “After playing the lead, Arabella was assigned to lights. She hated every moment of it. It wasn’t a bad gig. Torrie was with her, so she should have been happy about that, but she wasn’t. Pouted her way through the whole thing. But, like I said, she wasn’t one to let things go. I’m sure that’s why she vetted the list of cast and crew before she arrived here. Although, it looks like she had more to be worried about than cutting out the people who’d wronged her.”

  Melissa checked the time and finished her coffee. “Paul will be here any minute. Because we have the day off, we’re going to a swanky restaurant near Upper Benning for lunch. Would you like to come? Get away from all this for a bit?”

  “And be a third-wheel? No thanks. Besides, Quimby would probably assume I had skipped town. I think I’d better keep a low profile for now. Maybe try to work out where Brayden was yesterday and where Lund went after he left Tate House,” I said, mentally running through who would be a good source of information about the men.

  Lund was staying at the inn. Was Brayden staying there, too? Doug and Tara, the owners, were a nice couple. Since I’d helped them out in the past when a guest went missing, they might help me now.

  I could hear Alex’s voice in my head telling me those things were Quimby’s job and that I should leave it alone, but Quimby had gotten a tip that pointed him in my direction. I didn’t like sitting around waiting for things to happen to me. I’d much rather be out front, making things happen.

  Melissa looked doubtful. “Are you sure you don’t want to go?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay, well, then,” she gave me a stern look, “You’ll not hand that off to Quimby, will you? I don’t fancy having to cut short my day in the country to come spring you from jail.”

  “I doubt Quimby could arrest me with only a piece of paper as evidence, but I don’t like the idea of hanging on to it either.”

  “Then pop it in the post—minus that envelope with your fingerprints on it—and send it to him anonymously. Or keep it a day or two, and then turn it over to him later. Who knows? They might find the person who really sent the notes, and you’ll be in the clear by then. You could always tell him you found it buried in the depths of your bag—and it would be true, too. Just leave out the part about when you found it.”

  “I doubt Quimby would forget to ask me about that.”

  Melissa’s phone buzzed with a text. “That’s Paul. He’s outside.”

  “Have a nice afternoon,” I said firmly, following her to the door. Paul waved and shouted hello from the car’s open window. As Melissa trotted down the steps, I said, “Have you heard anything about a meeting today?”

  Melissa opened the gate at the end of the walk. “Emergency meeting late this afternoon. Looks like tomorrow will be a wash as well. Check your email for all the details.”

  “Thanks. I will.” I returned to the cottage. I thought Melissa’s idea of posting the note was better than keeping it, so I slipped on my winter gloves, then took an envelope from the back of the box I’d bought for mailing my occasional letters to California. I knew I wouldn’t have touched the envelopes at the back of the box. I slid the single sheet of paper into the envelope and retrieved Quimby’s business card from the mantle. He’d given it to me before I left Tate House yesterday, and I’d propped it up there so I wouldn’t lose it. I carefully printed the address in letters so neat it would have made my first grade teacher proud.

  I removed the protective strip that covered the self-sealing flap and pressed it into place.
I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the envelope, so I left it in the plastic bag and stuffed it into the back of a junk drawer in the kitchen under a stack of receipts and coupons that I’d saved but never used.

  Feeling better now that I had a course of action, I took off the gloves, then sat down at the kitchen table to read my email before I left to post the letter. I didn’t want to give Elise any reason to be more upset with me than she already was, and I wouldn’t put it past her to give me some other assignment—one of the kind she always described as “little,” but could take hours or days to complete.

  I lifted the lid of the laptop, picked up the mouse, and turned it over to switch it on, but the bright beam at the bottom of the mouse was already on. I set it down with a frown. I was sure I’d switched it off the last time I’d used it—I always did. The screensaver faded as I swirled the mouse and the background image came up, one of my favorite shots, a photo of Alex and me grinning at the camera, which we’d held at arm’s length. The green undulating hills of Derbyshire spread out behind us under a cloud-dotted sky. Normally, I smiled when the image came up, but not today. Hadn’t I left the browser open?

  I had been in the middle of scanning job postings for location scouting jobs yesterday before I left for work. The documentary was winding up and, even though I didn’t want to think about my time in Nether Woodsmoor coming to an end, I had to start looking around. Many of the location scouting jobs I’d landed had come through word of mouth, but it didn’t hurt to keep an eye on the job boards. There had been a promising one in New York. It was for a medical drama and needed locations for a hospital. New York was on the other side of the Atlantic, but it was closer to England than California.

  I clicked through a couple of open documents, but the browser window wasn’t hiding behind any of them, and it wasn’t minimized either. With an apprehensive feeling, I opened the browser, thinking about identity theft and how foolish it was that I hadn’t taken time to set a password for the computer. I had a passcode on my phone, but not on the laptop. I didn’t carry it with me all the time and it didn’t seem like I needed one on it.

  I gave myself a mental shake. If someone had been on my computer, then that would mean someone had been in the cottage and everything had been fine when I got home last night, nothing disturbed or out of place…except the computer mouse was on.

  The browser window opened, and I clicked to the history section as I glanced at the door to the back garden. I’d learned last year that the locks on the doors fell into the antique category and were quite easy to pick, if someone knew what they were doing. Beatrice owned the cottage along with several others, and I’d meant to ask her for newer locks, but it hadn’t seemed urgent.

  The page loaded, and I sucked in a breath as I read down the list of page titles of the recently visited sites: How electricity works. Basic house wiring. Voltage of power lines. Man electrocuted in home. Worker dies after electric shock.

  My fingers trembled as I cleared the search history. I clicked the commands to shut down the computer and restart. But was that enough? I didn’t know enough about computers to know if I’d completely erased the data. As the computer powered up again, I looked around the cottage, my heart hammering.

  Someone had been inside and planted those search terms in the browser’s history to make me look guilty of Arabella’s death. And someone had told the police I was involved in sending threats to Arabella. What else had they done?

  Chapter 18

  AN HOUR LATER, I CLOSED the door to the storage nook under the stairs then sat down wearily on the bottom step. I’d been through the whole cottage, checking everywhere I could think of—drawers, cabinets, under the sofa cushions and the mattress—but nothing else looked different or out of place. I felt a little steadier and not quite so frightened now that I’d searched the cottage. I hadn’t found any more envelopes or pages with cut-out words pasted to them, but I still had the note I’d found in my bag, and I wanted to get rid of that.

  Slink shook herself awake and trotted over to me, then rested her nose on my knees. “Good thing you stayed with me last night,” I said.

  For a moment after I’d found the strange search history on my computer, I’d been afraid that someone had gotten inside the cottage last night, but it couldn’t have happened, not with Slink around. She wouldn’t sleep through someone breaking in and messing with my computer. And now that I’d calmed down and thought about it, I realized that the search history had been dated. The searches on electricity and electrocution had been at the top of the list under yesterday’s date. Since Slink had been in the cottage with me last night it must have happened before I returned home. At least I knew it hadn’t happened while I was sleeping unaware upstairs.

  I gave Slink’s ears a final rub and stood. “Time to post a letter.” Slink looked hopeful, but I shook my head. “Not this time, girl. I think it’s much better if you stay here.”

  In my search of the cottage, I’d found what had been a full sheet of first class stamps shoved into the back of a drawer in the kitchen with a few remaining on the page. The previous tenant must have left them. I donned my winter gloves again and attached more postage than the envelope needed. I wanted to make sure it got to Quimby.

  I checked the locks on the door, used a tissue to tuck the envelope into my pocket, then transferred my phone and other essentials to a slender crossbody bag. On non-shooting days, I didn’t need to carry all my extra items and downsized from my tote bag to the smaller bag.

  I picked up my laptop, considering if I should bring it with me. I didn’t want to leave it in the cottage in case Melissa was wrong, and Quimby did get his warrant. Just the thought of Quimby returning made my heartbeat skitter. I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down. I’d make sure that if the inspector returned, he wouldn’t find my computer…at Honeysuckle Cottage.

  I tucked it under my arm, gave Slink a pat on the head, and made a quick trip to Alex’s cottage. I let myself in and went to the storage area under the stairs that was positioned in the same place as the one in my cottage. The similarity ended at the location. While my storage area held an empty suitcase and a few boxes that had been left from prior tenants, Alex’s storage closet was completely packed.

  A kayak paddle swished toward me when I opened the door. I caught it and pushed it back into place beside the snowboard. Stacks of boxes and books lined the shelves on the back wall along with a sadly deflated soccer ball, a radio with a broken antenna, and a manual typewriter with a limp ribbon. I shoved aside some boxes on the floor, opened one of the dusty board games, and set my laptop under the colorful playing board. After replacing the lid of the box, I brushed off my hands, thinking that it should be safe from Quimby at least temporarily. I felt slightly better. Now I just had to get rid of the note.

  As I came back down Cottage Lane, I heard the noisy clatter of Annette retrieving her wheelie bin from the street. My steps slowed as I remembered something she’d said yesterday. Hadn’t she thought I was home early?

  “Annette,” I called, but she’d seen me and was waiting for me. She was always up for a chat. She looked much more polished than she had yesterday in her gardening clothes. She wore a yellow cotton top, tan slacks, and flats. A name tag was clipped to her shirt.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Looks like we’ll escape the rain for another day.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” The weather was the last thing on my mind. “I can tell you’re on your way to work, so I won’t keep you.” I didn’t want to be pulled into a long conversation with her. I wanted to get rid of the letter in my pocket. Even though it was slim, I was very aware of it as it crackled with each step.

  “Oh, it’s fine. I’m on the afternoon shift today. I have a few minutes.”

  “Oh…er, good. Well, I have to be off soon.” It was always good to have a deadline when chatting with Annette. “Yesterday, you said something about me being home early…?”

  She tipped her head to the side, “Did I
? Oh, yes. I was in the back garden, weeding. With all this rain it’s been difficult to keep up with the garden, you know?” She parked the bin and settled in, leaning her hip against the gate.

  “Yes, I imagine so.” Thank goodness Beatrice employed a gardener to stop by the cottage and maintain the flowerbeds. My thumb was more black than green, and I was sure the plants would be in sad shape if they were left up to me.

  “I heard your back door close, and I thought what a difficult job you have, such long hours.”

  “I think working with toddlers would be more difficult.”

  “They can be a…challenge at times, but then they put their fat little arms around your neck, and it makes it all worthwhile, you know?”

  “I’m sure it does,” I said vaguely since my experience in that area was limited. “So that would have been about what time? That you heard the door, I mean.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Around eight or so, I think. It was still light out, but getting darker. I had so much to do that I worked until the light was completely gone. I would have come over and said hello, but I was almost done with the flowerbed by the wall, and I wanted to finish it off.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. I just wanted to make sure my…friend was able to get in.”

  I knew it had been closer to nine when I arrived at the cottage. It had taken several hours before the police let me leave Tate House. Then I’d taken Slink for her run and stopped by the pub. I swallowed, a feeling of unease sweeping over me. What if I’d walked in on the intruder?

  Her attentiveness faded. “Yes, no problem. I didn’t see who it was. I was hunkered down next to the wall that separates our gardens. It blocked my view, but I knew it was probably your boyfriend.” I didn’t correct her, not wanting to launch into a long explanation, but something else had caught her attention behind me. She leaned a little to the side and called out, “Hello! How are you? I see you were able to get your bike fixed.”

  I turned and saw the woman who had been seated next to me at the bar last night. She was on a cruiser-type bike, one of the older designs that let you ride sitting up. Nether Woodsmoor was a cycling destination because of the beautiful countryside. While I saw some of the traditional bikes on the streets and paths, more often than not, I saw riders on sleek modern bikes, whipping by, hunched over their handlebars.