Chapter Three
While the pathologist worked on the body, Sheriff Wender escorted Willow back inside, putting on the kettle and seating her at the kitchen table. She didn’t know whether it was deliberate or a fortunate accident that he sat her down, so her back was to the body outside.
Even though she didn’t want to see the sight again, Willow found her head turning to glance over her shoulder and had to force it to face forward again.
“What time did you say Roger Randall was expected last night?” The sheriff had a notepad out, ready to scribble down everything she said.
The pathologist had already said Roger’s watch had stopped at eight-seventeen in the evening. Unless he found evidence to the contrary, they were working on the assumption that it had broken at the same time as he was killed.
Willow bit her lower lip. Now wouldn’t be the right time to let the wrong information slip. No matter how shocked she was—and so far, that was higher up the scale than ever before—her lip needed to stay buttoned until she was sure it wouldn’t reveal something better kept secret.
“I didn’t say.”
Willow looked down to see her hands wringing in her lap and folded her arms across her chest instead. Nobody needed to see that. Jacob would think she was nervous or had something to hide.
Like now, when he was frowning at her.
“I thought you said he came over at night sometimes?”
Willow nodded and shrugged, again having to fight not to look back over her shoulder. “That’s right. He came over during the day, too. It’s not something regular or anything.”
“And why would he do that?”
The sheriff stared straight at her while asking the question, and Willow met his gaze head on. She wasn’t about to give him the answer he wanted. The man would have to work a lot harder to earn that reply.
“Mr. Randall held a reverse mortgage on my property.” Willow shifted her glance, looking out the window for a second to the blue sky. It would be a brilliant day. “I think he liked to ensure I wasn’t destroying his investment or something.”
Jacob put the notebook down on the kitchen table and started to crack his knuckles. Willow could remember sitting behind him at school assembly and listening to him doing the same. Her mother would have had a fit if she’d taken up that habit. It causes arthritis and sounds uncouth, was her reasoning.
Willow didn’t know about that, but the noise certainly got on her nerves.
The sheriff gave her a funny look. “How often would he ‘check on your property’ in a week?”
Willow shrugged again, trying for a nonchalance she didn’t feel. This was worse than when Molly died. At least then, the police hadn’t been involved.
“Maybe once, maybe not at all. It depended.”
“Depended on what?”
Willow scowled, highlighting her discomfort before she could wrestle her facial muscles back under control. “I don’t know what it depended on, Sheriff Wender. I didn’t think to ask, and now it’s a bit late.”
The kitten mewed. Willow turned, grateful for the distraction and lifted the doily. “Do you want some milk?” she asked in a baby voice. To her surprise, the kitten appeared to nod. She dropped the edge of the doily, tucking it back under the corner of the box while fetching a saucer of milk. “Here you go.”
“That the kitten you called the station about?”
Willow rubbed her forehead. She’d frowned too many times already today. If she didn’t watch out, her wrinkles would double in size by tonight. Usually, her days were carefree. Her garden called out to her. There were weeds to be pulled, bushes to be deadheaded. The ground needed to be turned over and mulched, ready for the long winter ahead.
The garden had a dead body in it, a voice in Willow’s head reminded her. You won’t enjoy going out there ever again.
“I saw the kitten had something on its paws that looked like blood. Yes, it’s this cat. I don’t have any others.” Willow frowned again before she could stop herself. “Actually, I don’t have any. This little thing just broke into my conservatory. I guess someone’s missing it.”
“Cute.” The sheriff prodded at the doily for a few seconds, failing in an attempt to distract the kitten from its milk.
“Yes, it is.”
“But you say it isn’t yours?”
Willow nodded. She waved a hand over her watering eyes and red nose. “I’m allergic. Just having it inside for an hour did this to me. I could hardly keep one as a pet.”
“Right.” The sheriff picked up his notepad again. “So, Roger came by once a week to look at your house. Any other business he’d be around here for?”
Willow shook her head. “I don’t know. You could ask the neighbors if he had any business with them. As the main realtor in town, I imagine he dealt with most people at one point or other.”
The sheriff nodded and leaned over to pick something up off the bench. A red ribbon, Willow frowned at it for a second, then remembered it had been tied around the kitten’s neck. The pet store name was on it.
“That came with the kitten.”
“I guessed that.” The sheriff pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and dropped the bow inside it. Willow realized for the first time the man was wearing latex gloves.
“What?” she said, leaning forward. Willow had watched enough episodes of Miss Walsham Investigates over the years to know an evidence bag when she saw it. “You think the kitten did it?”
She sat back, smiling a little at the small joke. It felt good to have an expression on her face other than dull shock.
Not that it lasted long.
The sheriff shook his head and stood up, pulling cuffs out of his back pocket. The pathologist knocked on the back door, but Jacob ignored the signal.
“I’m arresting you for the murder of Roger Randall,” he said, snapping the cuffs over Willow’s wrists.
Her mouth dropped open in astonishment. “What do you mean? Why on Earth do you think I’m a suspect?”
At that, the sheriff laughed again. From his demeanor, it all appeared to be a game.
The gall of the man! Willow sat up in her chair, the urgency of the situation suddenly hitting her full force.
“What are you doing? I didn’t kill him. Surely, you know that.”
“What I know is, there’s a dead man in your back yard with your pitchfork sticking out of his chest. You deny having any relationship with him apart from owing him money on your house, and a kitten is sitting in a box with yours and Roger’s name written on its collar.”
The sheriff twisted the evidence bag around until the writing on the other side of the tag was evident.
“To Willow. I wanted you to have something as cute and cuddly as you are. Love, Roger.”
As Willow’s eyes filled with tears of sorrow, Sheriff Wender led her out of the house and down to his patrol car.
“This is all just a horrible mistake,” Willow insisted.
She was sitting in an interview room with Sheriff Wender sitting opposite her, a stern expression on his face. When he started to crack his knuckles again, the tension in her body overflowed.
“Stop doing that! You must know I had nothing to do with this dreadful death. Sure, I didn’t want you to know Roger was my boyfriend. That’s not a crime. I don’t need the entire town sticking its nose in my business.”
Willow hit the table with her fist for emphasis. A moment later, she thought showing so much aggression when she was trying to talk someone out of believing her capable of violence was probably a mistake.
Not the first one either.
“Look,” Willow said, holding her palms up on either side in a gesture of supplication. “I know a man has been killed on my property, and that’s obviously going to cast some suspicion my way. Sure, you want to follow up on that, I understand. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing your job.”
Willow glanced up under her lashes to see what effect her conciliatory tone was having on the sheriff. She hesitated be
fore speaking again. His face telling her loud and clear it wasn’t necessarily going the right way.
“I’ve never even had a fight with Roger.” Willow sat back in her chair, placing her hands on her knees so they wouldn’t do anything stupid. Like bunch into fists and pound on the table again. “You can ask around town, and everyone will confirm that.”
Jacob Wender nodded and shifted in his seat. “From what you’ve said, you and Roger kept your entire relationship secret. It’s hardly a surprise, then, if nobody saw you argue. I’m guessing nobody saw you two together at all.”
“I didn’t have any reason to kill Roger.”
“Fine. And once I can independently verify that, it’ll go some way toward letting you off the hook.” The sheriff leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “But until then, you’re our prime suspect. You had means and opportunity. Even if we can’t establish a motive, you must understand how it looks.”
“This is ridiculous.” Willow found herself banging her fist on the table again.
“I see the years haven’t mellowed your temper,” the sheriff said mildly.
Willow flushed. At school, a mild argument with a teacher had once led to her stomping out of an assembly, screaming at the top of her lungs, with everyone watching.
Small towns were terrific to live in, Willow thought, but boy, they didn’t let you forget anything.
“Instead of hauling me in here and asking me questions, you should be out on the streets finding the real killer.” Willow sat on her hands to stop them going anywhere they shouldn’t.
“And what if I say I think I have the right killer sitting in front of me?”
Some measure of logical thought finally penetrated through the confusion clouding Willow’s mind.
“Go and ring my doctor,” she said confidently, sitting back in her chair. “He’ll tell you I faint at the sight of blood.”
“Hardly a medical condition, I would have thought.”
Willow frowned again before she could catch herself. Those wrinkles would be deepening for sure. “It became a medical condition the first time I cut myself while gardening and ended up cracking my head on the way down. It’s in my file.”
“Not conclusive.” The sheriff shook his head. “That’s the kind of thing you could fake.”
The ridiculousness of that answer made Willow burst into laughter. “You’re saying I’ve been fainting for fifty-four years just to get it on record so I could kill someone without detection.” She shook her head, still smiling. “I’m such a criminal mastermind that I could lay the groundwork for an alibi for five decades and then be stupid enough to kill a man in my own back yard?”
“Maybe you didn’t look?” The sheriff placed a hand over his eyes. “Blind people can be murderers, too. You have to see the blood to faint from the sight of it, right?”
“Don’t be stupid. How would I know where to stab?”
Sheriff Wender sat back in his chair. “I don’t have to come up with the explanations, you do.”
Willow shook her head, squeezing her eyes tight in disbelief. “That is literally your job. To explain what happened. That’s the only reason this county pays your salary at all.”
“Hey, I’ve explained this murder to my satisfaction. You stabbed your boyfriend with a pitchfork in the garden. Case closed.”
“For goodness sake, Jacob.” Willow leaned forward and stabbed her forefinger into the table for emphasis. “You know full well I didn’t do this terrible thing. Now stop persecuting me and go out there—” she pointed to the door “—and get the real killer.”
She sat back, expecting some reaction, but upon receiving none, Willow leaned toward the sheriff again. “I had no reason at all to kill Roger. I didn’t owe him money on my house, it was a reverse mortgage, so he only stood to collect on it when I was dead. That’s a motive for my murder, not his. I couldn’t physically have done the crime. Forget about the blood for a moment, do you really think I have the strength to shove a pitchfork into a grown man’s chest?”
When Jacob started to nod, Willow held up a hand to cut him off.
“No, you don’t. Not if you thought about it for a minute. I don’t have a motive, I don’t have the ability, and even if I did, I’m not so stupid as to do the entire thing in my back yard. My daddy also taught me how to look after my tools. If I were going to stab someone through the chest, I would’ve pulled that pitchfork out, rinsed the blood off the prongs, dried it with a soft cloth and hung it back in its rightful place!”
As Willow went through the explanation, she became more and more wrought up. Then she remembered about the time that had shown on Roger’s watch—seventeen minutes past eight in the evening. Exactly when Willow was watching her favorite show.
“Not to mention,” she said, stabbing the table with her forefinger as though it had done her a grievous wrong, “this all happened when I was watching television. I can recite the entire episode I was watching if you need further proof.”
Sheriff Wender looked unimpressed. “There’re such things as DVRs, you know.”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what that abbreviation means, but I’m quite sure I don’t have it. Why don’t you go out and start to question someone who actually did have it in for Roger Randall? If you were doing your job instead of mucking me about, you’d have Jimmy Niko in here with his sandwich board and make him give you his alibi.”
Willow sat back, glaring at Sheriff Wender, who’d miraculously turned into little Jacob Wender, the grade below her in school, right in front of her eyes.
“You let me out of this room and this station house right now, or I’m laying a formal complaint.”
As the sheriff did just that, Willow thanked her lucky stars she’d been paying attention to Miss Walsham Investigates, season two, episode eight. Miss Walsham is arrested.
Life imitating art.
Chapter Four
Although the sheriff released her on her own recognizance, it wasn’t quite that easy to leave the station. For a start, there was the matter of a little kitten who’d been brought along as evidence at the pathologist’s request.
“I need to know what hairs belong to this little beastie so I can check to see if there’re any others clinging to our victim. I’d also like to type the blood on its feet to prove it belongs to the deceased.”
Willow wasn’t at all sure she’d ever get used to hearing Roger described that way, but her immediate concern now was getting the wee creature out of custody. Having suffered herself in the airless rooms of the sheriff’s office, she had no desire for the kitten to endure the same fate for a second longer than was warranted.
Luckily, the medical examiner’s office was a lot more hospitable than the sheriff’s office had been, and the staff there readily turned over the kitten. While it stared up at her with large blue eyes, Willow tried to ignore how cute it was.
“I’m taking you straight back to the pet shop,” she whispered into its ear, getting close despite the havoc that played with her eyes and nose. “And that will be the last I ever see of you.”
However, the pet shop had other ideas.
“I’m afraid we can’t accept returns of animals,” the girl behind the counter at Fowler’s Pet Store said when Willow handed the kitten over.
“But it just came from here yesterday,” Willow protested. “Roger Randall brought the cat, but—” she lowered her voice and looked around to ensure no one else in the shop was listening “—he’s died. So, you see, the kitten has no home to go to.”
The girl sniffed and pulled across a massive ledger. “It says here we had to ship this one in special.” She pointed to the page and turned the book to face Willow, as though she could interpret the scrawled writing, let alone judge what the codes meant. “We never stock Maine Coon cats in here because the town folk don’t go for them. Too big or something.”
“I don’t see—”
“If we have to get the pets in special, then we can’t accept returns.” The girl s
hrugged. “It’s store policy. Otherwise, we spend a lot of money getting special breeds and end up losing money when we can’t sell them to our usual customers.”
When Willow continued to stand, staring at her with a mulish expression on her face, the girl behind the counter crossed her arms and pooched out her lower lip.
“I can’t do nothing about it. It’s the rules.”
“Then I’d like to speak to your manager.”
The effect of Willow’s stern tone of voice was somewhat dissipated by the flurry of sneezes that followed it. But Willow was a far older and a little bit wiser version of the steadfast young woman in front of her—she was more than capable of returning a glare with a fiercer one.
Finally, the girl shrugged and turned to her side. “Mom!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “There’s a customer wants to see you.”
Willow closed her eyes as a woman bustled out from the back, anticipating defeat. Family businesses were wonderful, joyful, a boon to the community. They were also independent, fiercely defended their bottom line, and never strayed away from the primary purpose of putting food on the table.
“It’s our policy, I’m afraid,” the senior version of the counter girl explained with exactly the same expression. “If we had a kitten in stock, that’s one thing, but ordered in special…?”
She trailed off, and Willow nodded. “What am I meant to do, then? I can’t keep the kitten, I’m allergic.”
“You could try to get some antihistamines from the drug store in town. That’ll stop you sneezing.”
Willow rolled her eyes. “Hardly a solution. I’m not taking drugs for the rest of my life to keep a cat I never wanted.”
As though it knew she was talking about it, the kitten stared up at her with its large eyes. Willow smiled. The tips of its ears poking up made it look a bit like a lynx or another large cat—she’d once told Roger how much she loved that look.
But that thought just brought along a boatload of sadness, and Willow cut it off at the knees.
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