Dying on the Vine

by Marla Cooper

  I was pretty sure the answer to that was no, but then again, who knew what this new version of Danielle was thinking?

  “Look, Danielle,” I said, my tone conciliatory. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but it’s not too late to fix it.”

  “Of course it’s too late,” she spat. “First I find out Stefan’s still alive, and now here you are? I should have killed him while I had the chance. But believe me, I won’t make that mistake twice.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Even though I’d pretty much figured it out at that point, Danielle’s words were still a shock to me. Thanks to her impromptu confession, there was no more pretending Laurel and I didn’t know anything.

  I pointed at the crumpled-up piece of paper on the floor behind her. “So the letter…?” I’m no handwriting expert, but it now seemed pretty obvious she’d hastily penned it herself after we’d gotten off the phone.

  “It served its purpose,” she sneered.

  Laurel’s mouth opened wide as the realization struck. “You mean it’s not even real?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Danielle said. “You were going to the police and I needed to find out what you knew.”

  “Well, we didn’t know anything until you made us come here!” My tone was just this side of I mean, seriously, people! but Danielle didn’t seem to appreciate the irony.

  Laurel squirmed in her chair. “I hate to bring this up right now, but I really need to use the little girls’ room.”

  “It can wait,” Danielle growled.

  “But—”

  “Quiet! I need a minute to think.”

  I didn’t know what Danielle’s plan was—but from the sounds of it, neither did she. I looked down at the floor where my purse was. If only I could reach my phone, maybe I could call 911 without her noticing. As slowly as possible, I inched my foot toward the strap hoping I could hook it and drag it closer. No luck. It was just out of reach.

  Was there any chance I could reason with her? We’d been friends once. At least I thought we had—although the gun was a new facet of our relationship that I wasn’t super fond of. “Danielle, why don’t you tell us what happened? I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt him. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “You’re right about that. I never meant for Stefan to get hurt. Okay, maybe I meant for him to get hurt just a little bit.…”

  “So you followed him to the wine cave?”

  “I decided to drop by Higgins. You know, taste a little wine, drop off a business card, maybe even introduce myself. But when I arrived, I noticed Stefan’s car pulling out of the parking lot. He went up the hill instead of down, so I followed him.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. He’d been spreading all sorts of rumors about me, and he was threatening to ruin my reputation.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “You of all people should know how that feels.”

  I nodded. All too well.

  “He drove up to the wine cave and went inside. I noticed that he’d left the door open behind him, and I thought, ‘Well, there you go! If I’m ever going to confront him, this is my chance, when there’s no one around.’ After all, you know how he likes a public spectacle.”

  I flinched as I remembered the scene he’d caused at Margot’s house.

  “So I followed him in,” Danielle said. “I found him in that dining room, the one with all the lights on the ceiling, and I let him have it. We ended up getting in a huge fight, of course. He’s such a jerk.” Danielle paused. She chewed her lip for a moment as if she were weighing her words.

  “It’s okay, Danielle. I know how nasty he can be.”

  “He got right up in my face. It was getting out of control and he was acting so crazy that I was afraid of him. So I grabbed a bottle of wine off the table and hit him in the head with it. He fell to the ground, and I figured I’d better get out of there fast. That must have been when I dropped those,” she said, pointing at the keys.

  “So you just left him there?” I asked. “You could have killed him!”

  “I thought I had! I turned off all the lights and locked the doors, hoping that no one would find him for a few days.”

  I stared at her in shock. “But why?”

  “Oh, come on, now. Would it really have been such a big loss?” she asked. “He’d been badmouthing me, just like he badmouths everybody. And I guess I just snapped.”

  I wasn’t buying it. As big of a gossip as Danielle was, surely she could have waged an effective countercampaign against Stefan. “It had to be more than that. What did he do to you?”

  Danielle shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  What? She was going to pass up a chance to be the star of her own story? That didn’t sound like the Danielle I knew. Maybe I could use it to my advantage.

  “Ohhhhh.” I nodded knowingly. “Lucas Higgins must have signed a contract with him to be Higgins Estate’s full-time planner. I’d heard that was happening.”

  “What?!” Danielle said, shooting me an annoyed look. “No, that wasn’t it at all.”

  Laurel glanced over at me, and I could tell by the look in her eyes that she totally got what I was doing. “Oh, you know, Kelsey, I bet he sabotaged one of her weddings. Was that it, Danielle?”

  Danielle’s face was turning redder by the second and she shook her head adamantly.

  “It’s okay, Danielle,” I said. “He did the same thing to me. I can see why you’d be pissed.”

  “Higgins wasn’t going to hire him!” Danielle grabbed her glass of wine from the table near her chair and gulped down the contents. “That job was mine. Or at least it would have been.”

  “Then why’d you lock him in the cave?” I dropped my voice to a lower pitch. “Were you in love with him? I’m so sorry. Honey, it wasn’t your fault he didn’t love you back.”

  Danielle had held it in for as long as she could. “No, no, no! God no!”

  “Then what was it?”

  “He made me kill Babs Norton! There, are you happy?”

  Danielle clapped her hand over her mouth, looking as stunned by her sudden confession as I was. In a movie, this would be the scene where the detective says, Of course! It all makes sense now! Except this wasn’t a movie and it didn’t make any sense at all.

  “He made you kill Babs?” I asked. “How exactly did he do that?”

  “It was all his fault. I wouldn’t have even been in that office if it weren’t for him.” Danielle sank down into the chair, suddenly looking exhausted.

  “Danielle?” Laurel said gently. “What happened?”

  Danielle stared at the ceiling for a moment, then shook her head. “I’d lost several bids to Weddings by Babs. Then I heard around town that Stefan had been intentionally going after my clients.” She waved the gun in the air. “You know how people talk.”

  I nodded, feigning sympathy. “Of course.”

  “I wanted to find out if it was true, so I broke into their office.”

  “As one does.” What can I say? I wanted to keep her talking.

  “I wanted to find out if Babs had known about it, and I guess to be honest, I wanted to get even. So I went to her computer and I was snooping around and deleting some files. It was just a harmless prank. I wanted her and Stefan to know they couldn’t mess with me and get away with it.”

  It sure didn’t sound like a “harmless prank” to me. Danielle was clearly delusional. I wondered if she would say holding us at gunpoint had just been a harmless prank.

  “Anyway, I was sitting at Babs’ desk when she walked in on me. I thought everyone was gone for the evening, but I guess she came back for something.”

  “What did you do?” Laurel asked. She stifled a yawn, and I looked over at her wineglass. How much had she had to drink? C’mon, Laurel, I need you to stay alert!

  “I made up some excuse as to why I was in her office and then I ran for the door. She stepped in my way—I guess she was trying to stop me fro
m leaving.” Danielle’s eyes welled up.

  “So you pushed her out of the way and she fell?”

  “No, I grabbed a paperweight from her desk and hit her on the head with it.”

  I’d like to think I had a passable poker face, but my expression must have given away my horrified reaction, because Danielle made a face back at me. “What? I didn’t think it would kill her.”

  The room was silent for a moment as I pondered everything Danielle had just told us.

  Laurel was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “Danielle, I really, really have to go to the bathroom. It can’t wait.”

  “I said no.”

  “C’mon, Danielle, I can’t hold it anymore.”

  Danielle thought for a second. “Okay, but give me your phone first. And no funny business. Remember that I have a gun on your partner here.”

  Laurel stood and stretched as she let out a big yawn, causing me to reflexively yawn in response. “Sorry, I can’t seem to stay awake.” No sooner had the words left her mouth than she clutched at a nearby table.

  “Are you okay?” Laurel couldn’t possibly be drunk off the half glass of wine she’d had.

  By way of response, Laurel slumped to the floor.

  “Laurel!” I cried, jumping up to help her.

  Danielle spun around and trained the gun on me, a fierce intensity in her eyes. “You! Stay right where you are!” She went over to Laurel and nudged her with her foot, but Laurel was out cold.

  Come to think of it, Danielle didn’t seem particularly surprised. In fact, she looked rather pleased with herself.

  Laurel’s half-empty glass sat next to her chair. Had Danielle added something to our wine, like a sedative? My heart started racing. Or was it something even worse? Please dear God, don’t let it be lethal.

  “Danielle, you don’t want to do this,” I said, the panic rising in my voice.

  “You’ve left me no choice. You shouldn’t have even brought her here.”

  “Did you put something in her drink? We need to call an ambulance.”

  “Now why would I go and do that? Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”

  “C’mon, Danielle, Babs’ death—that was an accident. You don’t want to go down this path.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail, either. The police might have believed me that Babs was an accident, but two accidents? No way.”

  “And when they discover our bodies in your office, then what are you going to do?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart. It’s not going to kill you. You’ll just have a nice long nap. Now, be a good girl and drink your wine. You don’t want to seem like an ungrateful guest, do you?”

  I quickly weighed my options—and they weren’t looking good. If I was going to help Laurel, I’d have to stay awake. I crossed my arms in front of me and shook my head. “I’m not drinking it.”

  “It’s either that, or this,” she said, holding her gun up. “Doesn’t a nice glass of wine sound like the better of the two options?”

  Well, sure, of the two …

  “Besides,” she said, “guns are just so messy, don’t you think?”

  She had me there. I lifted the glass to my lips but kept them firmly closed to keep from ingesting any of the wine. Then I swallowed as convincingly as possible.

  “More,” Danielle demanded, pointing the gun at me. “You hardly drank any at all.”

  Laurel was still on the floor passed out cold, and my mind raced as I tried to decide what to do. I wasn’t willing to roll the dice that Danielle was just trying to escape and not to destroy the evidence—the “evidence” being me and Laurel.

  I quickly calculated which course of action would be the bigger risk.

  “No, I drank most of it.” I held the glass out for her inspection. “See?”

  Danielle scowled and took a step toward me. “No you didn’t! You just pretended.”

  Right when she leaned forward to inspect my still-full glass, I flung the wine in her face and dropped to the floor as a shot rang out from right above my head. I scrambled under the desk and popped out the other side, ready to make a run for it and hoping like crazy that Danielle wasn’t actually prepared to shoot someone in her own office.

  “Stand up,” Danielle demanded from across the desk. Her hands were shaking, and the way the whites of her eyes were showing made her look more than a little unhinged.

  “Danielle, think about this.” My heart pounded in my throat. “If you shoot me, there’s no way you’ll be able to cover it up. You won’t even be able to claim it was an accident.”

  “I won’t have to!” she said. “I’m going to call 911 right now and tell them I think I hear an intruder downstairs. I’ll beg them to hurry. After all, someone’s been killing off wedding planners—probably you—so if I shoot you in self-defense, who could blame me?”

  She kept both her eyes and her gun trained on me as she pulled her phone from her back pocket, then glanced down to punch in the three digits. “Yes, I’d like to report an intruder,” she began. “I’m at 831 West Bellevue and—” Before she could finish, there was a sudden movement from the floor as Laurel sprang up out of nowhere. She ran toward Danielle and body-slammed her as hard as she could, knocking them both to the floor.

  Scrambling around the desk, I jumped on top of Danielle, holding her down while she thrashed around on the floor. Laurel tried to wrest the gun from her hand, and it went off again, shattering a Tiffany floor lamp. Danielle fought like a cat at bath time, limbs flying in all directions.

  “You get her legs!” I yelled. I grabbed Danielle’s right arm and slammed it repeatedly against the hardwood floor until she was forced to release the gun. Danielle and I both lunged for the discarded weapon, but I got there first since I didn’t have Laurel grabbing on to my feet. Relief flooded my body as I grabbed the gun and turned it on Danielle.

  “Laurel! You’re alive!”

  She got up from the floor and dusted herself off. “Yep! I’m not even sleepy.”

  “You were playing possum?” I asked, impressed by my friend’s acting ability.

  “I knew that wine didn’t taste right, and then she kept watching to see if we were drinking it. So I poured half of it into that ficus tree over there when she wasn’t looking.”

  The sounds of police sirens blared in the distance, and Danielle jumped to her feet with a panicked look in her eyes. “The police are here. If you let me go, you can escape out the back before they get here.”

  I crinkled my forehead at her. “What are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere. You just confessed to killing Babs Norton.”

  “Or another way to look at it is you broke in here and now you’re holding a gun on me,” she said. “I guess we’ll see which one of us they believe. Especially since you’re already a suspect.”

  I couldn’t wait for the cops to arrive, if for no other reason than to shut her up. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Laurel ran over to the window to look for the squad cars, whose sirens were growing louder and louder.

  An expression of calm crossed Danielle’s face as she walked over and removed her coat from the coatrack. “Actually, come to think of it, ladies, I think this is my cue to leave.”

  “Stop right there!” I yelled.

  “Oh, come on, you’re not going to shoot me. If you do, they’ll arrest you immediately for my murder—and you’ll never recover from that.”

  There was no denying that it would look pretty bad if they came in and found me hovered over Danielle’s dead body.

  “Ah, go ahead and shoot her,” Laurel said.

  Danielle and I both turned to Laurel in shock. “I don’t know, Laurel, I think she might be right.”

  “Nah, I called 911 back when I hit the floor and they’ve been listening ever since.” She smiled proudly as she held up the phone display for us to see.

  Danielle dropped the coat and sagged against the door frame. “Oh my God, what have I done?” She
sank to the floor and put her head on her knees.

  Tires screeched to a halt outside, and flashing red and blue lights danced on the curtains. The front doorbell chimed loudly and Laurel buzzed them up from a keypad by the door.

  I turned to Laurel and smiled as heavy footsteps clambered up the stairs. “I take back what I said.”

  “What’s that?” Laurel asked.

  “You make an excellent lookout.”

  CHAPTER 34

  By the time we went downstairs, a crowd of neighbors and passersby had gathered on the sidewalk. For their efforts, they got the special honor of seeing Danielle Turpin being escorted to a squad car in handcuffs, a royal perp walk for the short-lived Queen of Wine Country Weddings.

  Members of the crowd whispered and pointed, and some of the younger ones took videos with their phones. Danielle scowled at them, but seeing as how she would have been texting everyone in the tri-county region if she were a bystander, she didn’t really have any room to judge.

  When the police took our statements, I was tempted to ask them if they could call my BFFs at the SFPD and let them know they could scratch me off their suspect list, but I figured they’d find out soon enough. It felt good knowing that I wouldn’t have to endure any more questions from Detective Blaszczyk and his sidekick, Ryan—unless the question was, Would you like to go to dinner? to which my answer would be, Sure, but not with you.

  On the drive home, we called Brody and gave him the highlights, instructing him to have ice cream waiting for us back at his apartment if he wanted the full story.

  He greeted us at the door with a hug, then quickly ushered us into the kitchen, where he’d set out a buffet of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Four cartons were lined up along his granite countertops, lids off and spoons at the ready.

  “I know what flavor you eat when you’re happy, and which one you eat when you’re on a diet—which seems self-defeating, but we can talk about that another time—but I wasn’t sure what flavor you prefer when you’ve been held at gunpoint.”

  “All of the above,” I said, scanning the selection. I grabbed a carton of Chunky Monkey, just because I had to start somewhere. “And thank you.”