by Sofie Kelly
I leaned against the back of my chair and began to stroke Owen’s fur. He laid his head against my chest and looked up at me.
“Rebecca said that if Dorrie hadn’t dropped out she might not have made it onto the show.”
Owen wrinkled his nose.
“I know, that does sound wrong.”
“Mrrr,” he agreed.
“It occurs to me that it’s also possible that if Dorrie Park hadn’t left the contest, Ray wouldn’t have made it onto the show.” Was I too judgmental where Ray was concerned? Too suspicious?
Owen’s whiskers twitched. He looked from me to the computer.
Maybe not.
It wasn’t hard to find Dorrie Park’s social media accounts. They were full of photos from her recent Paris trip. I checked the date of the first photo that had been posted. She’d arrived in Paris less than a week after she’d dropped out of the qualifier.
“Whatever that family emergency was, everything was all right pretty quickly,” I said to Owen.
I took a quick look at some of Dorrie’s other photos. She was a student at the University of Minnesota Duluth, living in a basement apartment with three other young women. She didn’t have a car and she could get pretty creative with ramen. In other words, she seemed like a typical broke student.
“So how did she afford a trip to Paris?” I said.
Owen cocked his head to one side, considering my question, at least from my perspective.
“What if someone gave her the money?”
“Mrrr,” Owen said. That made sense. At least to him.
“What if Ray gave her the money?”
I didn’t trust him. He was an opportunist. I was convinced he had used his past connection with Kassie to help him make it onto the show. So why wouldn’t he get rid of the competition? And while it seemed that Ray had an alibi for Kassie’s murder, I couldn’t help thinking it was possible he’d manipulated that somehow, too.
I decided to send Dorrie Park a message via social media. It was a long shot but I couldn’t think of any other way to find out if my suspicions about Ray were correct.
I explained I was a researcher with the show and I had a few questions for her. I added my phone number and crossed my fingers I’d hear back from her.
Owen had gotten bored at some point in the process and jumped off my lap. He was lying on the floor now, fishing under the refrigerator with one paw.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He just continued his efforts to reach something under the fridge.
“Did you lose that frog Marcus got you under there?”
“Mrrr,” he said. I didn’t know if that was a yes or a no. Mostly it just sounded like aggravation.
The small space under the refrigerator seemed like a tight fit for Ferdinand the Funky Frog, but nonetheless I got one of my extra-long cooking chopsticks, crouched down next to Owen and poked around underneath. I didn’t find a catnip frog or even a dusty stinky cracker but I did realize there was a piece of paper under there. After some finessing and a lot of cat commentary I managed to slide the paper out onto the kitchen floor.
“Is this what you were after?” I said to Owen. There was a clump of dust on his paw and I reached over to brush it off.
The page looked to be the image of a check that had been deposited electronically. I picked it up for a closer look. The check was made out to a holding company: Mulberry Hill Holdings. There was something familiar about that name but I couldn’t place it. I did recognize who wrote the check. It came from Sullivan Enterprises. Sullivan Enterprises was Sean Sullivan, gym owner and Kassie’s father. I looked at the amount. Five hundred thousand dollars. Sean Sullivan had written a check to someone for half a million dollars. The page must have slid under the refrigerator when Owen knocked down some of the papers that had come from Kassie’s desk. How had she gotten this? Was Kassie Mulberry Hill Holdings or . . . ?
I got to my feet, picked up my phone and scrolled through the list of contacts. Lita answered on the third ring.
“Hi, Lita,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you at this time of night.”
“Kathleen, it’s eight thirty,” she said, an edge of laughter in her voice. “What time do you think I go to bed?”
“Umm, after eight thirty?”
She did laugh then. “Sometimes after nine. What do you need?”
“Have you ever heard of a company called Mulberry Hill Holdings?” I crossed my fingers.
“Of course. That’s one of Elias Braeden’s companies.”
I gave a small fist pump.
“I think he named it after that piece of land Idris Blackthorne owned out by Wisteria Hill,” she said. “Ruby would own it now, I think.”
Mulberry Hill. Rebecca had mentioned it when we were talking about Everett’s family homestead. That’s why the name had seemed familiar to me.
“Thanks, Lita,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. I heard the rumble of Burtis’s voice in the background. “Burtis says to tell you he has the house high score at the moment.”
“Tell him I said that all good things must come to an end and his end is nigh.”
Lita was still laughing when she hung up.
I pulled out a chair and sat down. Owen leapt onto my lap and put two paws on my chest.
“Elias,” I said. “He’s Mulberry Hill Holdings.”
One ear turned sideways and his expression soured a little bit. I stroked his soft fur. There was another dust bunny on his tail and I picked it off. “I can’t find anything that points to someone else being Kassie’s killer, and there are random things like his fingerprints and the fact that Elias was in the building that suggest he did it. And I don’t know what to make of this check.”
Ruby was a strong person, but if Elias really had killed Kassie, I didn’t see how she would ever get over the betrayal.
And just that quickly I was angry. Angry at Elias for only telling part of the truth or maybe even none of it. Angry that Ruby had put her trust in someone I didn’t think deserved it, even if he hadn’t killed anyone. Angry at the prevarications and omissions from just about everyone involved with the show.
I set Owen on the floor and grabbed my keys and my wallet. “I’ll be back,” I told him. I didn’t think about whether or not it was a good idea to go confront Elias. I just went.
It wasn’t hard to find the man. His fancy SUV was in the parking lot at the community center. I signed in with Thorsten and on a hunch climbed the stairs to the second floor. I didn’t see Elias giving up his private workspace. The hallway was dark with just a bit of light spilling out from one open doorway.
I was right. Elias was in the office, talking on his cell phone. “I’m going to have to call you back,” he said to the person on the other end of the call when he noticed me standing in the doorway.
I set the image of the check in front of him. He looked at it and the only reaction I saw was a tiny twitch at one corner of his mouth. “Where did you get this?”
I had the urge to say from under my refrigerator, but I resisted the impulse. “Kassie had it.”
He leaned back in the chair. “She kept hinting she had something.”
“Sean Sullivan gave you half a million dollars.”
“He invested half a million dollars in my company.”
“It’s the same thing.”
Elias shook his head. “No, it’s not. Half a million dollars to me is a gift. Half a million dollars to my company gets him a tiny piece of it. In theory.”
I remembered what Eugenie had said to Russell and me: “I do have more than enough money to relieve Elias of any financial obligation he might have to Sean Sullivan, Kassie’s father.” Would she have spent half a million dollars?
He gestured to the chair in front of the desk. “Have a seat, Kathle
en.”
I sat down, picking up the piece of paper as I did. “Kassie thought this was important. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “You would have to ask her and since she’s dead, you can’t.”
I thought about doing something dramatic like slapping my hand on the desktop. Instead I stared silently at him for a moment. Then I said, “You’re lying.” I leaned across the desk. “If it weren’t for Ruby, I would take this to the police and wash my hands of you. I would leave you to twist in the wind. But I can’t do that. You’re the closest thing to a father Ruby has. And that more than anything tells me what a kick in the head life has given her that you . . . you of all people . . . get that honor.” I struggled to keep my voice under control and shook the paper at him. “This is just one more thing that makes you look bad. One more thing in a long list. You better be innocent, Elias.” My voice cracked. “You damn well better be innocent, because if you’re not, you’re going to break Ruby’s heart.”
All the lines on his face had seemed to have gotten deeper. That was the only sign that my words had affected him at all. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t kill Kassie, Kathleen. I swear on—”
I cut him off. “Don’t go there, Elias,” I warned, hoping my voice conveyed how angry I was in that moment.
“The money was for me. Sully made it look like an investment in my company because neither one of us wanted to explain why he’d given me, personally, half a million dollars. He still has several boxers and I’m involved in several TV projects. Optics. You understand that.”
“I do.”
His face hardened. “What he didn’t tell me was that he’s being investigated for insider trading, which puts all of his business practices under a microscope.”
“Not good for you.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So Sean Sullivan paid you five hundred thousand dollars to hire his daughter because she had aspirations of being a TV star, which wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up. And then he made that money look like an investment in your company, which also wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up.”
“Yes.”
I folded the piece of paper and put it back in my pocket. “Kassie found out.”
“She did. I was having some temporary cash flow problems. I shouldn’t have taken the money. That was stupid.”
“She must have been angry finding out her father had so little faith in her that he paid you to hire her.”
Elias gave a humorless snort of laughter. “You didn’t know Kassie. She was going to use that payment to blackmail her father. If he’d pay me half a million dollars so she could do the Baking Showdown, he could pay more than that to get her on some other show.”
I wondered what had happened to Kassie to turn her into such a self-absorbed person.
“Do what you want with the information, Kathleen,” he said. “I didn’t kill Kassie Tremayne. And this is the last time I’m going to say that.”
I nodded. Then I got up and walked out.
My hand was shaking as I signed out at the back door. I said good night to Thorsten and walked over to the truck. Some small part of me wanted to believe that Elias wasn’t a murderer. But if he hadn’t killed Kassie then who had?
* * *
Wednesday morning just after we opened, Harry Taylor and his brother, Larry, arrived at the library.
“Do you have something already?” I asked.
“Ever see any of the James Bond movies?” Harry asked.
“I’ve seen all of them.”
He inclined his head in the direction of his brother. “He’s Q.”
“It wasn’t complicated,” Larry said with a smile. He handed me a small cardboard box.
I opened the flaps and peered inside. “This is the camera?” I said. The contents looked like a tiny robot spaceman in a white spacesuit with a black-visored helmet.
Larry nodded. “Wi-Fi, night vision, motion detector, 360-degree panoramic view, SD card and it will send an alert to my smartphone if anyone is around the gazebo.” He looked at me a little uncertainly. “I hope it’s okay that the alerts go to my phone. I couldn’t have them go to Harry’s. All he has is a flip phone.”
Harry gave him a look that said this wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation about his phone.
“You could send the alerts to my phone,” I said.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think that it’s a good idea for you to come down here in the middle of the night to confront whoever has been pulling these stunts. I’m sorry if that seems sexist.”
I recognized the size and strength difference between the two of them and me. “No, it’s not. But I’d feel a lot better if you’d call the police when you get an alert.”
“We can do that,” Harry said.
I noticed he’d said “can” not “will.” I also knew arguing wouldn’t get me anywhere.
Harry and Larry installed the camera just under the back roof edge across from the gazebo. Unless you were looking for it you couldn’t see it from the ground or with a cursory glance at the building.
I was just walking back around the building when I caught sight of Caroline Peters coming up the sidewalk. She saw me and raised a hand in acknowledgment. I waited for her at the bottom of the steps.
“Hi,” she said as she reached me. “Ray called me after you two talked last night. I just came from the police department.”
I stuffed my hands in my sweater pockets. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said.
“I’m sorry I deceived you. I’m sorry I deceived everyone.” She played with the knotted bracelet around her left wrist. “No one knew about Ray and me. I wanted to keep it that way. When I left his apartment I was going to walk back to the café and just join everyone else. Then I met Kate.” There was a second’s pause. “She said, ‘So you got tired of working on your bread and decided to come out for a walk, too,’ and when I opened my mouth ‘Yes’ was what came out. I didn’t mean to lie. It just happened.”
“I believe you,” I said. That was the thing about lying. It was surprisingly easy.
“Thank you,” she said, and a little of the tension left her body.
I hesitated about whether to say anything else. The fact that I truly liked her won out. That and I didn’t trust Ray as far as I could throw him, as Rebecca would say. “Caroline, your life and your marriage are absolutely none of my business,” I said. “But Ray Nightingale is not someone worth blowing up your life over.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. I had no way to know if Ray had just been a reckless fling or if she had feelings for him. I hoped it was the former.
“I should go.” She looked in the direction of the sidewalk.
I nodded. “Thank you for coming. You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “I tell my kids to tell the truth all the time. I tell them when they’ve made a mistake to admit it. I need to start practicing what I preach.” She gave me a small smile and headed toward the sidewalk.
I started up the steps. I realized that Kate didn’t have an alibi anymore unless she had some kind of secret romance going on as well. It didn’t exactly seem likely, given her soft-spoken, quiet demeanor. Neither did the idea of her being a murderer. So now what?
chapter 17
The phone rang Thursday morning before I had even had my first cup of coffee. I glanced at the screen. It was Harry. I knew what that meant.
“Good morning,” I said.
“I’m not sure you’ll think so when you know where I am,” he said.
“You’re at the library.”
“Larry got an alert about half an hour ago.”
I leaned against the counter. “You didn’t catch our gazebo guy, did you?”
“No.” I imagined Harry pulling off his ball cap and smoothing down what little hai
r he still had. “Whoever it was disconnected the camera and took the SD card. We’ve got nothing.” I heard him exhale. “Well, almost nothing.”
“What did he do this time?”
“There’s an inflatable pool in the gazebo—pretty good size, too. It’s full of Jell-O. And two squirrels, but I think they just might be a couple of innocent bystanders.”
“What kind of Jell-O?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It’s dark red.”
I heard someone else say something.
“Larry says it’s black raspberry.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked.
I pushed away from the counter. “I’m sure. Do you want coffee?”
“As long as it’s not too much trouble,” he said. “Aw hell, even if it is too much trouble.”
“It’s not,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”
Owen and Hercules were fed. The litter boxes were clean. All I had to do was brush my teeth and my hair. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, put on some lip gloss and tossed a banana, a corn scone from the freezer, my travel mug and the rest of my makeup into my bag. It looked kind of lumpy.
I stopped at Eric’s and got three large coffees. I found Harry and Larry standing by Harry’s truck in the parking lot. I handed them each a cup. They both thanked me.
“Let’s go see the gazebo,” I said, wrapping my hands around my travel mug. Harry glanced at it but didn’t say anything.
The pool almost covered the floor of the gazebo.
“I figure fifteen feet in diameter,” Harry said. It was filled almost to the top with black raspberry Jell-O. Which had set. The squirrels were gone. I had a feeling that if we didn’t get it emptied soon we could become the downtown squirrel hangout.