Hare Today, Dead Tomorrow

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Hey, you guys!” I cooed. “I missed you, too!” I crouched down to give them each equal attention, glad I had two hands. They jumped all over me, covering me with wet doggy kisses and nearly knocking me over.

  “Back so soon?” Nick asked, glancing up from the huge textbook that sat in his lap along with Tinkerbell. Cat lay on the couch beside him, her body pressed against his thigh. He glanced at his watch, then let out a surprised yelp. “Whoa! Is it that late already?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been sitting in that spot all day, studying!” I cried.

  His bleary eyes told me that he’d done exactly that.

  “I bet you didn’t even stop for lunch,” I accused, holding the cardboard box high in the air to keep my Dalmatian from leaving nose prints in the whipped cream. “Fortunately, I brought provisions.”

  Nick placed Tink on a cushion, stood up, and stretched. “What have you got there?”

  “Enough goodies for a garden party. I met a very friendly pastry chef.”

  I was about to put my calorie-laden booty on the table, but Nick was only too happy to relieve me of it. As soon as he opened the box, his face lit up like it was Christmas morning.

  “Whoa! Have I died and gone to heaven?”

  “No, but if you eat all these, you might do exactly that.”

  “St. Peter, here I come!” He plopped back down on the couch and put the box on the coffee table, studying its contents as intently as if they were torts, not tarts.

  While I retrieved a couple of forks from the kitchen, Nick reached for a slice of cheesecake swirled with what looked like blueberry and raspberry purees. “Check this out,” he said gleefully. “Red, white, and blue cheesecake. Who thinks up these things?” With one bite, he reduced it to half its size. “Wow, this is amazing stuff. So where did you meet this pastry chef?”

  I had a feeling he wasn’t going to like my answer nearly as much as the doggy bag I’d come home with. “I stopped by Granite today. Robert Reese’s restaurant.”

  His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

  “I knew I was taking a chance,” I added quickly. “But I figured I’d lay my cards on the table. I told Robert I was Suzanne’s friend and that I was absolutely convinced she had nothing to do with Cassandra’s murder.”

  “And?” Nick asked.

  I took a deep breath. “He’s absolutely convinced that she did. In fact, he practically threw me out.”

  “Before or after you raided his dessert cart?”

  “These were a gift from Jean-Luc Le Bec, his pastry chef.”

  “And what made him so friendly?”

  “Apparently Jean-Luc overheard my conversation with Robert. He wanted to set me straight on the realities of the happy couple’s relationship.”

  “You mean they weren’t such a happy couple, after all?”

  “Exactly. To use Jean-Luc’s words, Robert and Cassandra fought like cats and dogs.”

  “Interesting. Since you’re a vet, he probably wanted to explain it in terms he knew you’d understand.” By this point, the cheesecake confection was history. Grabbing a fork, Nick started to attack the coffee-colored crème brûlée dotted with chocolate-covered coffee beans, then reconsidered. Instead, he took an impressively large bite out of a small foil dish of bread pudding smothered with cinnamon and dripping with whipped cream.

  He’d barely licked the surplus gobs of cream off his lips before he asked, “Was it your impression that these little spats of theirs were intense enough that, oh, I don’t know, one of the puppies or kittens in question finally whipped out a knife and did the other one in?”

  “It certainly makes you think,” I replied. “But Robert’s not the only person I’ve added to my list of suspects. Jean-Luc also gave me an earful about the restaurateur next door, Robert’s number-one competitor. His name is Preston DeVane—and apparently he isn’t exactly in the running for Businessman of the Year. It seems Cassandra was angry enough with him that she was trying to talk Robert into suing him.”

  “In other words,” Nick interjected, “this DeVane guy has become a person of interest in your eyes.”

  “Or at least warrants closer investigation,” I said. “I’d like to check out DeVane’s restaurant, G, a little more closely. And I know the perfect way to do it. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of getting Suzanne’s mind off her troubles, and I think a night out at G may be just the thing. She deserves a break.”

  I was silent for a few moments as I worked on the crème brûlée. But instead of thinking about DeVane and Jean-Luc, my thoughts drifted to another aspect of the case that raised a lot of questions: the three clues the murderer had left behind. A classic novel, a stuffed animal, a sneaker...

  It occurred to me that Nick could have insights into what the book might mean. After all, he hadn’t only majored in English in college; he’d earned a master’s degree by writing a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. The man knew American literature in a way I never would.

  “Nick,” I began, choosing my words cautiously, “what do you know about The Scarlet Letter?”

  “The Nathaniel Hawthorne novel?”

  “One and the same.”

  “It’s about hypocrisy, for one thing. And adultery, of course. It’s the story of a minister, Reverend Dimmesdale, who fathered an illegitimate child but remains silent while the mother of his child, Hester Prynne, is shunned by Puritan society. She has to wear a scarlet A for adulteress, while he merely suffers in silence.”

  Hypocrisy. Adultery. Maybe that was what the murderer was alluding to by leaving the book for the police to find.

  But no matter how hard I tried to picture a cold-blooded killer scanning the shelves, searching for a book with a particular theme, I couldn’t do it. It just didn’t make sense. Even if he or she was exceptionally calm and calculating, the idea of lingering at a crime scene long enough to assemble a group of objects after committing a brutal murder just didn’t sound plausible.

  I could feel the gears in my brain grinding away madly. And then something that felt very much like a jolt of electricity shot through my entire body.

  “Wait a minute!” I cried. “What if it wasn’t the murderer who left those three clues? What if it was Cassandra?”

  Nick frowned. “I’m not following. What three clues?”

  I decided it was time to spill the beans. Or at least to explain the beans I’d already spilled. “Forrester—the reporter—told me the police found three clues arranged together at the crime scene: a copy of The Scarlet Letter, a stuffed rabbit, and a running shoe. They assumed the murderer had left them behind.

  “But maybe it was Cassandra who grabbed the sneaker and the book and the bunny and made sure the cops would find them at the crime scene,” I went on, speaking just a little too fast. “And maybe the message she was trying to send us had something to do with adultery or hypocrisy, since they’re the two main themes of the book. Maybe she’d had an affair and her lover had something to do with her being murdered. Or maybe someone who knew about the affair, or who had been hurt by it in some way. Robert is the most likely candidate, of course, but what about the spouse or girlfriend of whoever she was carrying on with?”

  “The lover’s jealous lover,” Nick commented. “Now this is starting to get interesting.” He paused. “But wasn’t she about to marry Suzanne’s ex?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Robert Reese.”

  “Then how likely is it that she would have been having an affair?”

  I thought about Joan Thorndike’s characterization of her stepdaughter as someone who flitted from one thing to another whenever the going got the least bit tough. I also remembered Jean-Luc’s comments about her tempestuous relationship with Robert. “From what I’ve learned about Cassandra, I don’t think it’s out of the question. She might have seen it as simply enjoying one last fling before settling down.”

  “Assuming she even viewed marriage as ‘settling down,’ ” Nick noted. “Not everyone sees it that way.”

/>   “Good point. It could also have been a past affair,” I mused. “Something that happened a while ago. Maybe the guy’s wife or girlfriend just found out.”

  I was growing increasingly excited over the possibility that Cassandra had had an illicit liaison at some point, which would have explained why she’d left behind a copy of The Scarlet Letter to link her murder to the affair.

  And she certainly wouldn’t have been the first person to have a secret relationship turn around and bite her in the butt.

  “But why wouldn’t she have just written it down?” I mused. Almost instantly, I answered my own question. “The desk! The chaotic condition of the desk! Maybe the clutter wasn’t the result of a struggle between Cassandra and her attacker, the way the police assumed. Maybe after her attacker left her for dead, she pulled herself up, made it over to the desk, and tried to grab paper and a pen. But she was too weak or...or too disoriented, and the more she flailed around, the more impossible it became for her to put her hands on writing supplies. So she grabbed those three items instead.” I could picture the whole scene in my head.

  “Makes sense,” Nick said earnestly. “And if you want my opinion, it’s that her fiancé killed her. When I was in the P.I. business, I can’t tell you how many cases I worked on that involved a husband or wife trying to find out if their spouse was having an affair. Sometimes the person who hired me was so furious over the prospect of being cheated on that I was reluctant to give them a definitive answer.”

  Grimacing, he added, “One more reason I decided to get out of the business. But from what I saw in the days I was poking around in other people’s personal lives, my theory is that Robert found out about that ‘one last fling’—or maybe the past affair, which pushed his buttons, for some reason—and went nuts.”

  His theory certainly made sense. The problem was, so did a lot of the other theories that had been slowly forming in my head.

  “Enough!” Nick suddenly cried, pushing the pastry box out of the way. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about murder or butterfat. “I put in a long, hard day of studying, and I need a break.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked flirtatiously. “What have you got in mind?”

  “Come a little closer and I’ll show you.”

  I kicked off my shoes and curled up next to him. “Is that before or after you wipe that whipped cream off your cheek?”

  “Funny you mentioned whipped cream,” he said, reaching for me, “because I’ve got a few ideas about how we can put some of it to good use.”

  “Sweet,” I murmured. My remark had nothing to do with Jean-Luc’s desserts.

  “I hope this wasn’t a mistake,” I commented nervously the following evening, scanning the crowd that had converged upon G. Most of them fit right in with the depressing décor, since dressing in black seemed like a requirement—a little piece of the Manhattan lifestyle that had apparently drifted east. By comparison, my outfit of a lavender silk blouse and dark purple pants was positively garish. “For all I know, they’re not even going to show up.”

  When I’d first come up with the idea of Suzanne, Marcus, Nick, and me going out to dinner, getting Suzanne out of the house for at least a few hours had seemed like a real brainstorm. I couldn’t forget the image of her all alone in her dark living room, sitting in a rocker without rocking.

  But now, as I took in all the chaos of the restaurant— the waiters and busboys whirling by, the deafening chatter and laughter and clinking of glasses, the aroma of the other patrons’ perfume mixed in with food smells—I wasn’t so sure. It all seemed so overwhelming.

  “Relax, Jess,” Nick insisted. “I think this was a great idea. They’re probably just running a little behind schedule. You said yourself that Marcus warned you that he probably wouldn’t get here on time. Here comes our waiter. Let’s order a bottle of wine.”

  As I was telling myself that the worst that could happen was that Nick and I would simply have dinner alone, I noticed Suzanne weaving her way through the crowd toward our table.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly.

  Nick glanced up, his polite expression instantly morphing into a look of astonishment. “Wow!”

  I had to agree. Here I’d been worried that if Suzanne showed up at all, she might be wearing a bathrobe and a pair of bunny slippers. Instead, she looked as if she’d gone all out for our little night on the town. Her flamered hair had been brought back to life, or at least washed and styled by a professional. From the looks of things, the pros had also worked on her hands, creating ten perfect scarlet tips so shiny they still looked wet. Her makeup was a bit on the heavy side, by my standards— the luminous lip gloss, the thick coating of mascara—yet even I had to admit that the effect was dazzling. Then there was her dress, a clingy emerald-green number that fit her voluptuous curves the way a casing fits a sausage. The strappy black patent leather high heels were just the right touch.

  Yet one element of her outfit struck me as out of place: a small gold heart-shaped locket that I’d never seen before. It looked like something a little girl would wear. A present from Marcus, I suspected.

  “You look great!” I told her sincerely.

  She forced a little smile as she sank onto the banquette next to me. “Thanks. I figured I’d go all out. That maybe looking good would help me feel better.”

  I didn’t have the courage to ask if it was working.

  “How are you doing?” I asked solicitously.

  She responded by shaking her head. “We’re not talking about any of that tonight. For once, I’d just like to take a break from—” She stopped mid-sentence and glanced around the restaurant. “No sign of Marcus?”

  “Not yet.” Quickly, I added, “He probably hit traffic.”

  “Right.” Suzanne grabbed her napkin and, with a snap, flattened it and spread it on her lap. “So, Nick, how’s law school?”

  “It’s great—especially if you’re the kind of person who enjoys having surgery done without an anesthetic.”

  I laughed, glad that the tension was dissipating. Maybe this really is what the doctor ordered, I thought.

  Good old Nick. He launched into one hilarious anecdote after another, describing his quirky law professors, the details of some of the more bizarre cases he’d studied, and the eccentric people in his study group. I laughed along with him and Suzanne, but kept sneaking peeks at my watch.

  Where is Marcus? I thought, noting that he was over half an hour late. At the very least, doesn’t the man own a cell phone? The three of us had already gone through a bottle of wine. The waiter, meanwhile, kept hovering near our table, no doubt agonizing over how he’d ever manage to squeeze in a second seating.

  My annoyance was forming a knot in the pit of my stomach. Still, it was better than the other emotion I was trying hard to suppress: the fear that Marcus was about to disappoint Suzanne, big time.

  When I finally heard his familiar voice booming, “...I’m meeting some friends, including an incredibly foxy lady—oh, there they are!” I didn’t know if I felt like throwing my arms around him in relief or reading him the riot act.

  I did neither. “Hey!” I called, plastering on a big smile. “We were about to send out a search party!”

  “Tell me about it,” he replied, pulling out his chair. Like Suzanne, Marcus had pulled out all the stops this evening. Then again, he always looked pretty well-groomed, a by-product of his vanity. The fact that he was exceptionally tall helped, although I always found him to be pretty gawky—if not out-and-out geeky. He was wearing what I knew he thought was his “cool” outfit: jeans and a white T-shirt, along with a sports jacket. His blond hair was cut short, little more than stubble.

  “Parking in this town’s an absolute bitch,” Marcus grumbled as he sat down. “You’d think that now that all the tourists have gone home...” He leaned forward and gave Suzanne a perfunctory peck on the cheek. “Hey, babe. How’s it going?”

  My eyebrows jumped. Was I just imagining that there was a dista
nce as wide as the Grand Canyon between them? I glanced over at Nick, anxious to see if he was reading what I was reading. At the moment, however, the only thing he seemed to be reading was the menu.

  “Hey, this appetizer sampler, the Seafood Sonata, looks good,” he said. “Lobster, shrimp, scallops...four different dipping sauces...I say let’s go for it.”

  Thank goodness for food, I thought. The ultimate distraction. And the four of us actually managed to get through another bottle of wine—with most of the credit for our accomplishment going to Marcus—as well as our salads and appetizers before any mention of Suzanne’s situation snuck into the conversation.

  I was telling a story about a dog I’d recently performed surgery on after he’d eaten bread dough—the yeast ferments in the animal’s stomach, causing alcohol toxicosis—when Nick turned to Suzanne and asked, “How’s the vet business?”

  Instead of answering, Suzanne glanced at Marcus. From the look on both their faces as their eyes locked, I knew we’d just crossed into dangerous territory.

  “I’ve closed my practice,” Suzanne said somberly.

  “No!” I cried.

  “It’s only temporary,” she replied, sounding strangely matter-of-fact. “Just for now, I’m referring all my clients to Marcus. There’s no way I feel up to working. Ever since the police showed up at my house last week, acting as if I were the murderer, I’ve just been too upset. So I decided to take a little time off.”

  I glanced over at Nick. He looked as horrified as I felt. If something as dramatic as closing down one’s place of business didn’t spell guilt, especially in the eyes of the police, I didn’t know what did.

  “Does your lawyer think that’s a good idea?” I asked cautiously. “It might be better to act as if nothing in your life has changed.”

  “I agree with Jessie,” Nick added. “Proceeding with your life the way you normally do might be the best thing.”