Mr. Abbott took a step toward her, large hands balled into fists at his sides, chin jutting. “Here, you’ve got no right to imply that,” he said. He turned back to his wife. “I told you we should have turned down this booking. I told you.” Without another word, he flung out of the screen door, letting it bang shut behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Abbott said. “He’s under a lot of pressure. The move and everything. We’ve lived here so long. It’s hard on him, hard on both of us. At our time of life, to be laid off without so much as a ‘thank you,’ to have to pick up and … well.” She rose and put on a determinedly resolute face, retying her apron strings as if latching up her armor. “Would you like a cup of coffee to take to your room?” she asked, in what was clearly a dismissal. “Or perhaps some cocoa?”
Laurel declined the beverages, thanked her, and left. She walked down the hall toward the public rooms. She’d known the Abbotts off and on for those first ten years and hadn’t given them a thought in the past ten. What did she really know about them, other than that they ran the B and B efficiently and had been devastated when it looked like Evangeline was going to buy it out from under them? Now that American Castle Vacations had actually sold the castle, what did that mean to them? If tonight’s scene was any indication, leaving Cygne was harder for them than they were letting on. Still, that didn’t give them a reason to kill Evangeline. Laurel flashed on an image of Jack Nicholson as the crazed hotelier in The Shining, and she shook her head to clear it. Redrum. Stephen Abbott might be pissed off and worried about the move or something else, but he wasn’t an ax-wielding maniac.
As Laurel reached the foyer, the front door creaked and started to open. Heart beating a shade quicker, Laurel stopped well back from it as the door gapped wider.
Dawn came in. She was sliding her phone into her pocket and her eyes glistened. She let out a sharp “Oh” when she spotted Laurel.
They were all edgy, Laurel realized. “What’s happened?” Laurel asked, Dawn’s obvious distress dissolving her instinctive caution.
Dawn shook her head, a curl or two pulling loose from her topknot. She shut the door. “I can’t get hold of Kyra. She should be home, but she’s not. She got someone to stay at the house, and she’s just … disappeared. I’m afraid … ” She sniffed.
“I’m sure she fine,” Laurel said. “She might have had a … a meeting or yogi convention she forgot to tell you about.”
Dawn lifted her tear-streaked face. “She didn’t want me to come. What if she’s—” She stopped again, and Laurel wondered what she was truly worried about. “She was right. I shouldn’t have come this weekend. I thought—well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“What did you think, Dawn? Why did you come?”
Laurel’s genuine interest seemed to cut through Dawn’s distress. She stilled, hands hanging limply at her side. “I thought that this weekend could be about closure, or moving on, I guess,” she said. “The last weekend was so horrific, the worst thing that ever happened to me, and it seemed to cancel out all the good times we’d shared, you know?”
Laurel nodded.
“So, I thought that if we got together again, shared a few laughs, and caught up on each other’s lives, that it might—I don’t know—cover up what happened last time.” Her laugh was tinged with hysteria. “But it didn’t work that way. It didn’t work any better than spraying one of those scented products in the bathroom to cover up the odor. Shit smells like shit. Instead of re-connecting, we’re farther apart than ever, asking each other for alibis, wondering which of us slipped Evangeline a dose of rat poison. I hate it. I just hate it. And now Kyra might be hooking up with her old girlfriend!” Dawn broke down in noisy tears.
Laurel slipped an arm around her shaking shoulders and nudged her toward the bedrooms. “Why don’t you go to bed? Things will look more manageable in the morning, once you’re rested.” Good Lord, she sounded like her mother. Well, her mother was good at managing the fallout from emotional crises. “I’ll get you a cup of chamomile tea from Mrs. Abbott.”
Entering the hallway, they stumbled to a halt at the sight of the crime scene tape and closed door barring access to Evangeline’s room. After a brief moment, Laurel swallowed hard and urged Dawn forward. Neither of them commented. Dawn’s bedroom door was slightly ajar and Laurel pushed it wider.
Dawn balked on the threshold. “I locked my door,” she said, pulling the key from her pocket. “I know I did. Since Evangeline … ”
“Mindy probably left it open after turning down your bed,” Laurel said, nudging her into the room and flipping on the light. “Or Braden did. He was putting mints on the pillows last night. Why don’t you get into bed and I’ll get you a cold washcloth?” She crossed to the small bathroom and unfolded a washcloth from the stack atop the toilet. As she was dampening it, a brief, sharp scream came from the bedroom.
Laurel bumped her hip on the sink as she rushed to return to the bedroom. Dawn stood in the middle of the room, panting, finger extended toward the bed. “A—a—” she gasped. “Snake.” She finally got the word out.
Laurel’s eyes widened. She approached the bed cautiously. She wasn’t afraid of snakes in the abstract, and merely trekked around them when she came upon one on a hike, but caution seemed like a good idea until she knew what they were dealing with. Dawn had pulled the covers partially down, and it wasn’t until she was two feet away that she glimpsed the slithery coil of scales curled up against the pillow. She took an involuntary step back. “That’s a snake, all right,” she said, trying to steady her breathing. The snake didn’t move, not so much as a tongue flicker. She stepped closer to the bed.
“Be careful,” Dawn breathed from behind her. “We should get—”
Still clutching the damp washcloth, Laurel lofted it so it landed almost on top of the snake, tensed to jump back if it struck. The reptile didn’t move. She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding “It’s not alive. Plastic, maybe?” She leaned in to study the snake. “No. It’s a real snake, but it’s flat in the middle. Road kill, I’d guess.”
“How did it get in my bed?” Anger and astonishment seemed to be edging out Dawn’s fear.
“Someone’s idea of a joke?” Laurel wasn’t sure she believed that herself, not after what had happened to Evangeline. “Braden?”
“If so, he should be spanked until he can’t sit down for a week.” Dawn’s hands clenched on the fabric of her skirt.
Laurel went to the closet, got a hanger, and used it to snag the poor snake and drag it off the bed. It dangled from the hanger’s hook, about three feet long and black. “I don’t know what it is,” she said, “but it’s not poisonous.”
Dawn eyed it with repulsion. “No way am I sleeping in that bed,” she said. “I can camp out on the sofa in the sunroom.” She swept to the closet and pulled down the extra blanket and comforter stored on the shelf.
“You get settled in there,” Laurel said, “while I get rid of him”—she raised the hanger six inches—“and make you some tea.”
“Thanks,” Dawn said, suddenly sounding weepy again. “Really—thanks, Laurel. I don’t know what I’d have done if you weren’t here. What a shitty day this has been.” Her thin shoulders drooped.
They parted in the foyer with Dawn traipsing off to the sunroom, and Laurel returning to the kitchen, holding the hanger and snake at arm’s length. She was disconcerted to find it deserted, with one dim light glowing over the sink. What the heck was she going to do with the snake now? She’d been planning to turn it over to Mr. Abbott and ask him and his wife about where it could have come from. They might know if Braden had played similar pranks before. If not … she bit her lip. If not, the snake felt like a threat or a warning of some kind, but she couldn’t imagine from whom, or why it had been left in Dawn’s bed. The idea of an unknown someone sneaking into their rooms at will made her shiver.
The q
uiet was a shade unsettling. While she waited for the tea kettle to boil, Laurel found a two gallon zip lock food storage bag in the pantry and sealed the snake into it. She’d keep it under her bed overnight and give it to the Abbotts to dispose of in the morning. She drifted to the outside door, now closed and locked, and peered through the window. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
She had a view of the wall shielding the row of trash cans, and a corner of the parking lot. The flames from the gas burner reflected weirdly on the glass, and she couldn’t make out more than shadowy shapes. What sounded like a truck engine growled, but a clap of thunder drowned it out. She listened as the thunder faded but heard nothing more. Huh. Who would be arriving at Cygne at this hour? With her peripheral vision, she sensed movement in the dark, in the direction of the Abbotts’ cottage, but when she tried to focus on it, she saw nothing. A chill tickled her arms, and she tested the deadbolt—locked—before common sense reasserted itself. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a friend of Stephen Abbott’s, stopping by for a nightcap or to watch a ballgame. It wasn’t all that late—not quite nine. Hard to believe it was only twelve hours ago they’d found Evangeline’s body. The tea kettle shrilled and she hurried to take it off the burner. Warm mug in one hand and plastic bag in the other, she glanced through the window again on her way out, but all was still.
She delivered the tea to the sunroom where Dawn had turned on a lamp, made a nest of blankets on the comfiest sofa, and was studying her cell phone screen. She dropped her phone when Laurel came in and it clattered on the tile.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I’m a little jumpy.” She accepted the tea, thanked Laurel, and said good night. Laurel headed toward her room, the sunroom’s light soon swallowed by the hall’s darkness. She glanced over her shoulder several times as she hurried to her bedroom, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched. Dawn would say it was Villette wandering Cygne, mourning her dead baby. Laurel would take a grief-stricken ghost over a murderer any day, if she believed in ghosts. A creak came from overhead and she quickly unlocked her door, slipped inside, and relocked it. Feeling paranoid, she shoved a tufted bench against it for good measure.
Seventeen
Laurel was downstairs at seven o’clock Monday morning to hand the snake over to the Abbotts in the kitchen. Mrs. Abbott gaped at her when she told them where she and Dawn had found it, and swore that Braden would never, ever do such a thing. Mr. Abbott accepted the bag silently and stomped outside with it. The clang of the Dumpster’s lid spoke to the snake’s resting place. Unsatisfied, but not knowing what else to do, Laurel entered the breakfast parlor to find Sheriff Boone draining coffee from the urn into an insulated cup. His solid presence immediately made her relax. She hadn’t realized how tense she was about being cooped up at Cygne with multiple murder suspects until the tension drained from her muscles at the sight of him. He screwed the lid on his cup and she saw it was decorated with images from Disney’s Frozen.
“You have kids?” Laurel couldn’t help the exclamation. She’d never thought about Boone’s personal life and was having trouble fitting a Disney princess-loving daughter into her mental image of him.
He sipped from the cup seemingly without embarrassment and without answering her question. “Been for a run yet this morning? I seem to remember you were a runner.”
“Not today.” Laurel got a plate and helped herself to a muffin and a carton of yogurt. She hoped Boone would leave, but he settled at the table with his coffee, legs stretched out in front of him, looking as relaxed as if he were in his own home. Pouring herself a cup of coffee and adding a dollop of milk, she chose a chair two away from him and sat.
“Dawn Infanti found a snake in her bed last night,” she said conversationally.
His thick eyebrows corrugated his forehead. “Come again?”
She told him the story and repeated Mrs. Abbott’s assertion that Braden wasn’t responsible.
He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “I’ll take your word for it that it didn’t get there on its own.”
“Not unless it dragged itself there from the road after getting run over,” she said drily.
“Why would someone do that?” he asked. His gaze didn’t leave her face, and she got the feeling he thought she knew more than she was saying.
“It makes no sense.” She suddenly remembered something. “Dawn said her door was locked.”
He looked unimpressed. “She says. Even if it was, these locks wouldn’t keep out anyone with a credit card or paper clip and the manual dexterity of a four-year-old.”
She conceded the point with a nod.
“So, Your Honor,” he said, cocking his head in a way that signaled a change of topic. “I’m curious. Why did you come back? You got away with attempted murder ten years ago—and when I say ‘you,’ I mean the collective all of you,” he clarified as she opened her mouth to object. “So why come back?”
Laurel leveled a look at him over the lip of her coffee cup. “Don’t you need a sidekick taking notes?”
“This isn’t an interrogation,” he said. “It’s friendly breakfast table conversation.” He smiled, mostly with his eyes, and even though she knew she couldn’t trust him as far as she could throw the table, she had to stop herself from returning the smile.
“Truthfully?”
“That would be a nice change.” His tone was dry but not hostile.
“I wanted to figure out what happened last time.” She tore the lid off her yogurt and licked it. “Like you, I never thought it was an accident. Oh, I wanted to, but Evangeline was no more than tipsy that night, not nearly drunk enough to fall by accident. You know—the BAC tests showed that.”
“So you came back to see justice done?” Skepticism flickered in his eyes. “How noble.”
She wasn’t going to let him irritate her. “Not noble. Just … ” She searched for a word. “Necessary. To me.”
“You thought—what? That you’d all sit around, catching up, and one of your pals would confess? ‘Oh, by the way, the last time? I shoved Evangeline off the balcony?’ You’re not that dim, Laurel.”
His use of her first name took her aback. His southern accent lengthened it and gave it more resonance than she was used to. Her eyes locked with his. “No,” she said after a moment, dropping her gaze to the yogurt cup. “No, I guess I’m not. I don’t know why I came.” She certainly wasn’t going to tell him about her personal turmoil about the judgeship and her ticking biological clock, tell him that she’d needed some distance from her Colorado life. She thought about what Dawn had said last night, and knew she’d wanted to do something similar—not erase the last weekend so much, but purge it of its ugliness by talking about it, like lancing a boil. Pleasant image. She wrinkled her nose. But once lanced, the infection could heal. She realized with a pang that she wanted these women in her life and that wasn’t going to happen until they knew the truth. She shared none of that with Sheriff Boone, who was eyeing her silently while she thought.
“You know what I think?” he asked.
“Do tell.”
Her gentle derision didn’t seem to faze him. “I think that whoever pushed Evangeline off that balcony was jealous. Soul crushingly envious. Evangeline had something—I don’t know what—that the murderer didn’t or couldn’t have. And even though Evangeline didn’t die, she was paralyzed, imprisoned in a wheelchair. And that was enough. Until … ” He held up a finger and shook it gently. “Until you all showed up here and Evangeline was happy—engaged to be married, and on the brink of walking. The green-eyed monster rose up again.”
He didn’t sound self-satisfied with his theory; in fact, he sounded matter-of-fact, perhaps even a little sad. He’d learned a lot during his interviews yesterday, too. His insight astounded her. His theory about jealousy … could he be right? She tucked his ideas away to think about later. “You’re different this time,” she said slowly. “Not
so cocky.”
“And you’re not so arrogant.”
Her jaw dropped a fraction. Before she could think of a comeback, he said, “Life has a way of doing that, doesn’t it, taking us down a peg? Especially the kind of lives you and I lead, where we spend more time than the average person looking at the ugly things people do to one another.” He fished a butterscotch from his pocket but didn’t unwrap it. “Tell me about the vic. Who was she? What made you all friends?” He sipped from his insulated mug but kept his gaze on her face.
Facing Elsa’s long blond braid and limpid blue eyes, Laurel voiced a sudden thought. “I’ll bet you don’t even have kids. I think you use that silly Thermos mug to distract people, or take them off guard.”
For answer, he flicked his smartphone screen and held it out to show her a photo of a sprite in a purple bathing suit. “Ciara. She’s ten. Her mom has custody.”
Flushing and feeling stupid for her semi-accusation, Laurel thought about his question. “I can’t explain Evangeline—you had to know her,” she said when he shifted in the chair. “She could be prickly and controlling, but she had so much energy, so much zest for life—she was fun to be around. You never knew what was going to happen. And she could be very kind, generous to a fault, even. She lived on Ramen noodles and peanut butter fall semester our sophomore year after giving her spending money to a friend who needed to fix his car so he could get to and from work and classes. And she ran a fund-raising campaign—put dozens of hours into it—for an international student, a girl from India, so she could be independent of her parents and not have to take part in an arranged marriage.” She found herself wanting to tell him more but bit back the impulse.
She fell silent, thinking of all the laughter and good times, about the effervescent sparkle that hung around Evangeline, and for the first time since learning she was dead for real, she felt tears welling up. She dabbed at them with a napkin but they kept coming. “I’m sorry,” she said, groping for another napkin. “I didn’t mean to—”
That Last Weekend Page 15