Must Be Murder

by Jen Carter

  Stella nodded. “That’s probably the best way.” She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. Holly, her head still on the book, reached out and grabbed Stella’s hand.

  “Stop,” she said. “We know that you tell Jason everything and keeping this to yourself is going to be torture. But please, go have a glass of wine or something to stay calm. I can’t stand that noise.”

  It was barely ten o’clock in the morning, and I didn’t mind the sound of drumming fingers, but a glass of wine didn’t sound too bad under the circumstances.

  TEN

  Stella wore a black tank top, black Capri pants, and black flats.

  Holly wore a black tank top, black shorts, and black flip-flops.

  I felt like I should have been wearing black, but the last time I picked up clothes from my apartment, I didn’t expect I’d need a special outfit for sneaking into the barn late at night. I couldn’t borrow clothes from my sisters, either. Stella was too tall and twiggy, and Holly was too short and hour-glassy. So I wore blue shorts, a white tank top, and tan flip-flops.

  Oh well.

  A couple minutes before ten-thirty, the old eighties movie we elected to watch ended, and we got ready to go. Aldo was playing cards with his buddies in the back room of Deseo, so there was no one at his house to question where we were going.

  Only the sound of crunching leaves and snapping twigs filled the air as we trekked down the hill toward the winery. I could practically hear my heart thudding in my chest, but that was just me. Were we really about to tamper with a crime scene? The police had left the yellow tape intact when they left, presumably because they would be returning in the morning. But it was our family’s property. Was it really a problem if we looked around our own property?

  And besides, what were the chances that we would find anything? Pretty slim, I figured. The police probably had already found whatever it was that I slipped on. We were just double checking.

  Upon reaching the barn, Holly punched in the alarm code, and the big doors opened. “Okay,” she said, looking back at me. “Where do you think it went?”

  I took two steps in and surveyed the scene. Pointing at my feet, I said, “This is where I was when the first responders told me to leave and the police officer pulled me out.” I pointed across the barn. “And I kicked the green thing in that direction.”

  Stella and Holly pulled out their cell phones and turned on their flashlight apps.

  “Did you see how far it went?” Stella asked. “Could it have ricocheted off a wall or a wine vat?”

  Good question.

  “Maybe,” I said. “And if that happened, it could be anywhere.”

  “I’ll take that third,” Stella said, pointing to the far end of the facility. “Holly, take the middle third. And Jill, take the front section.”

  We nodded.

  Before I could start scouring my section, which included the barn’s entrance, my phone vibrated with a text coming through.

  How are you holding up?

  The phone number appearing with the message wasn’t saved in my contact list, but I recognized it as Shane’s. I hadn’t been able to recall the number that morning from my memory, but it was easy to recognize when I had it in front of me.

  My stomach did a guilty flip-flop. Little did he know we were sneaking around the crime scene at that very moment.

  I’m fine considering the situation, I responded. How are you? Angelia? Your brother?

  I knew that the bachelors and bachelorettes had left earlier that day, but I had no details about their departure.

  He answered back within a couple seconds. Angelia is a mess. Toby is stoic as usual. I don’t know how I am.

  Hmm. How to reply? I wanted to sound sympathetic, but I also wanted to end the conversation. He should have been comforting his fiancée rather than texting me. Plus, I had things to do.

  I’m so sorry for your loss. Take care of Angelia. I know she needs you. I hit send and then turned on my flashlight app.

  I scoured my section, looking in every nook and cranny, along every edge of equipment, across every inch of concrete floor. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I inched along the wall toward the big barn doors, still looking for anything shiny and green.

  “Aha!” I whispered loudly, seeing something sparkly, right in the last corner of my section. I leaned down and reached for it.

  “Stop!’ Stella hissed. “Don’t you dare touch it.” She strode over to me and pulled a pair of tweezers and a baggie from her pants pocket. “Do you really want your fingerprints on that? After Angelia accused you of causing this accident?”

  “Yeah, Jill, come on,” Holly said, grinning as she leaned against the vat of ruined Pinot Noir. “Why didn’t you think of that?”

  “It’s a button,” Stella said, bagging the find and handing it to me.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said. I stuffed the bag into my shorts pocket.

  “Not so fast,” Holly said. She was no longer leaning against the vat of Pinot Noir but instead shining her flashlight into it. “I think the investigators missed something.”

  We walked over and looked where she was shining the light.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said. The cap on the wine had grown thick, and it was hard to see anything in the dark muck.

  “There’s something in there,” Stella said, squinting.

  “Something other than grape skins and seeds?” I asked.

  Holly nudged me with her free hand. “Go grab the punching tool. You can use it to reach the center of the vat and pull the thing toward us.”

  I still wasn’t quite sure what I was going to pull toward us since I hadn’t seen it yet, but I turned toward the wall where we kept the punching tool.

  “It’s not there,” I said, staring at the bare wall. Neither was the plank I walked on to reach the middle of the vat.

  “Could it have been taken by the police for evidence?” Stella asked.

  “It was on the floor when I ran in here this morning,” I said, remembering. “So yeah, it would make sense if they took it.”

  “What else do you have in those pockets of yours?” Holly asked Stella. “You brought baggies and tweezers. Got any super extendo-grabber tools in there, too?”

  “No, no I don’t,” Stella said under her breath, absently, as though having an extendo-grabber tool had been an actual possibility.

  “Too bad,” Holly said. “Then I nominate Jill to hop in and just grab it herself.”

  I shined my phone flashlight directly into Holly’s eyes, my nighttime version of a dirty look.

  “Quick, take off your flip-flops, both of you,” Stella said. “We can use them to punch part of the cap down, just to loosen it up, and then we can use them as paddles to push whatever it is over to us.”

  We did as we were told.

  “We aren’t going to use your shoes, too?” Holly asked.

  “You two are wearing flip-flops, and the wine won’t ruin them. We’ll just rinse them off once we get back to Aldo’s, and they’ll be clean. The fabric on my shoes will be ruined if we put them in the wine.”

  “You’re making me crazy, Stel,” Holly said. “You and your fancy cloth shoes. Jeez.”

  We carefully used the flip-flops to punch down little bits of the cap, loosening it. I used both my shoes while Holly shared hers with Stella. Once it was loose enough, I used mine to push the cap away from me while Holly and Stella pulled it toward them on the other side. With a little effort, we created enough movement in one direction, and finally, Holly reached in and grabbed whatever it was that we were looking for.

  “Got it!” she said, wiping grape skin muck from the object.

  “What is it?” I asked. I walked back to my sisters.

  Stella shined her flashlight on it while Holly turned it around and around, flipping it over and over in her palm.

  “It looks like it has some feathers poking out of it—maybe feathers? And some rhinestones? Ribbon, maybe?”

  I held out my
hand to examine it. Holly placed it on my palm.

  The wheels turned in my head. And as much as I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, I could feel myself going in exactly that direction.

  “This looks like a hair clip that Katia Berke was wearing yesterday when she and Carolina yelled at me. She had fastened it in her hair with a chopstick, and I remember thinking that her hair had an identity crisis.”

  The last words the Berke sisters spoke to me about the bachelorette party rang in my head. If you don’t take care of it, we will.

  “Katia?” Stella said. “Really?”

  Before I could answer, I heard voices outside. I couldn’t make out the words, but someone was muttering, whispering, and shuffling around. Stella grabbed my arm and Holly’s shoulder, pulling us down behind the vat.

  “They’re going to find us!” Holly hissed. “We left the barn doors open!”

  “Shh!” Stella said. “Don’t move.”

  We did as we were told, crouching behind the vat. I held my breath.

  “They’re going away,” Stella whispered. “It’s just a group walking down the street.”

  “Who’s out so late on a Sunday night?” I asked. “Nothing is open right now.”

  The three of us slowly got up and crept to the barn door, snatching the flip-flops that had been flung aside as we hid. As Holly and I put our wet and soon-to-be very sticky shoes on, I held the hair accessory out to Stella. “Can you bag this?”

  She put it in a fresh baggie and handed it back to me.

  “Let’s go see if we can find—” Holly cut herself off and gasped, pointing to a figure in black turning the corner behind a building across the street. “Did you see that? Someone is sneaking around Checkmate!”

  “Was it Artie?” Stella asked. “Maybe he had to leave the card game at Deseo and get something from work.”

  “No,” I said. “Artie’s a beanpole—and that person wasn’t. C’mon.” I smacked my sisters’ arms with the backs of my hands. “Let’s go see who it is.”

  “Why?” said Stella.

  “What if it’s the person who pushed Marlo into the wine?” I said. “I mean, if she was pushed in the first place,” I added hastily.

  “Exactly,” said Holly. “That’s exactly why we shouldn’t follow whoever it is. We should call the police.”

  “We can’t do that,” I said. “What if it’s just a random person taking a late walk? We can’t call the police for every little thing we see. Plus, then we’d have to explain why we’re out so late creeping around the barn ourselves.”

  Holly and Stella looked at each other.

  “You aren’t making any sense,” Holly said. “Those aren’t good enough reasons to go follow someone ourselves.”

  “Close the barn door,” I said. I started walking toward the street. “Let’s go. Jules has been teaching us self-defense classes for years. It will be fine.”

  Stella scampered after me, just as I knew she would. She couldn’t watch me go off on my own. “Yeah,” she muttered, “But that doesn’t mean we should go looking for trouble.”

  She was probably right. After all, she was right ninety-five percent of the time.

  But that still left five percent of the time for me to be right. And every now and then, I was willing to take my chances.

  ELEVEN

  Jules had been teaching us self-defense for a couple years. She had grown up doing kung fu and felt strongly about women being able to protect themselves—so every Friday she held a self-defense class in OV’s East Park. Everyone was welcome. Not surprisingly, it was mostly the gals who worked in OV who attended, but sometimes tourists joined us, too.

  Being that Jules was one of my best friends, I normally hightailed it out of work on Fridays during the school year to be in OV for the five o’clock self-defense sessions. My sisters didn’t attend Jules’ classes nearly as often as I did, despite working and living around here. Maybe they were less comfortable with self-defense and that’s why they didn’t want to follow me to Checkmate.

  Or maybe they really took to heart Jules’ number one lesson: don’t go looking for trouble.

  Somehow, that lesson seemed to be a little cloudy in my mind as we crossed the street.

  By the time Stella and I reached the sidewalk in front of Checkmate, Holly had finished closing the barn doors and caught up.

  “Jill, this is a bad idea,” she said. “Last chance—let’s turn around and go back home. Jason’s waiting for Stella anyway.”

  “Have a seat then,” I said, pointing to the ornate bench on the sidewalk. “You don’t have to come.”

  “We can’t let you go by yourself,” Stella said.

  I turned to my sisters. “Okay, you two worry-warts. Stop talking. Either follow me or don’t. But either way, stop talking.”

  I crept alongside the building, squeezing through the bushes that separated Artie’s property from Vinea Cellars’ tasting room next door. My sisters were right behind me. As we neared the end of the wall, I could hear rustling and murmuring. Peering around the corner, I saw Checkmate’s back door was open. A thin slice of grass behind the building was bathed in dim light.

  “Someone’s in there!” Holly whispered. “Did someone break into Artie’s shop?

  I continued creeping toward the door. The voices and murmuring got louder and clearer, and just a few feet away it occurred to me that this probably was a bad idea. Maybe we really did need to call the police. But then something clicked in my mind.

  That voice. That accent.

  No way. Really?

  I charged the last few steps and threw myself through the backdoor, Holly and Stella gasping behind me.

  “Nonno! What are you doing here?” I said.

  Aldo whipped around, startled. So did the three others, all of whom were crowding around a desk in the cramped office space. The Council of Elders. Aldo and his old buddies.

  “What is going on?” I barked. “We thought someone was breaking into Artie’s shop! And it was you guys!”

  The four elderly gentlemen, all dressed in black from head to toe, looked at each other sheepishly. Just as I was finding more words to lecture them for scaring the willies out of us, the sheepish look on Eduardo’s round face changed to skepticism.

  “What are you doing out here, young one?” he asked me. “Why are you creeping around Otto Viti so late?”

  Holly and Jill appeared at my sides, though neither of them volunteered an answer Eduardo’s question.

  Aldo patted Eduardo’s arm. “Let’s just explain ourselves. It will be easier that way. We will explain, and then Jill can explain, too.”

  Eduardo nodded. Then he motioned to Artie as though to say, speak.

  Artie cleared his throat. This was the first time I had ever seen him without a bow tie, though wearing the black turtleneck and suspenders wasn’t too far off his signature look. “As we told you earlier today, we don’t think Marlo’s death was an accident. And we think we might know who could have been involved,” he said.

  The sodden hair clip and the Berke sisters’ earlier threats against the bachelorette party flashed through my mind. Could Aldo and his buddies have found evidence to implicate the sisters as well?

  “Who? And why are you here?” I asked before Artie could elaborate.

  Morrie pulled out the chair at the desk and wiggled into it as his buddies stepped back to give him some space. He began typing on the laptop sitting right in the middle of the desk.

  Eduardo crossed his arms, and it occurred to me that he was shaped like the fella we saw sneaking around Checkmate moments before. He harrumphed. “Marlo’s ex-husband, of course. He’s that art teacher from the high school down the road—the guy who makes the fancy chess tables from old school desks sold here at Checkmate.”

  I could feel my mouth dropping into an O as I glanced at both my sisters.

  Of course. We had heard Marlo arguing with him on the phone. Alex, was it? I tried to remember what Marlo had said. Something about list
ening to demands. Had he been threatening her? Blackmailing her for something?

  “So what are you doing here at the shop?” Stella asked. “And why couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow morning?”

  “Eh, we are trying to get into, what do you say? Email?” Aldo answered, looking at his friends for confirmation. “Alex’s emails on Artie’s computer.”

  I think my sisters and I all gasped. I know I did, and the sound seemed to be in stereo.

  “You’re hacking into his emails?” I asked.

  Morrie turned around in his chair and faced us. “I don’t think it’s technically hacking. Alex gets all his orders through Checkmate’s online system. We’re simply checking the messages that have been sent through the system. They belong to Checkmate, and so, hacking—um—it’s probably not considered hacking. It’s not his personal email or anything.”

  “You think he might have sent incriminating messages using Checkmate’s ordering system?” Holly asked.

  “We leave no stone unturned,” Eduardo said, throwing his arms out the way an umpire declares a player safe across home plate. He nearly whacked Artie in the gut.

  “And Morrie,” I said slowly, “You know how to get into the system?”

  Morrie glanced at Artie, who was trying to loosen the turtleneck around his throat. While Temecula summer nights were quite warm, I guessed the heat wasn’t the only thing making him uncomfortable. Artie didn’t strike me as the snooping type. Neither did Aldo or Morrie, actually. I could only imagine that this was the brainchild of Eduardo, who was half drama king and half bully.

  “Well,” Morrie began, “This system is similar to the reservation system I use at the hotel. I don’t know Alex’s password, but there’s got to be a back way into his account.” Again he glanced at Artie who shrugged in response.

  “It’s just the first step of our plan,” Eduardo added.

  I looked at Aldo, who was staring at the floor and shifting his weight back and forth. Then I looked at my sisters. Holly’s left eyebrow was high and Stella was shaking her head.