Peanut Butter Pies & Dangerous Lies

by Willow Monroe

  I didn’t answer.

  “Understand?” he asked.

  “I understand,” I said, fingers crossed behind my back.

  We moved over to the register, he swiped his card and I printed the receipt.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing the slip of paper to him to sign with one hand, reaching for my pen with the other.

  It was missing again.

  “I don’t know who keeps running away with my pens,” I told him.

  “That’ll be my next investigation,” he joked. “The case of the missing pens.”

  I finally found it on the floor but by that time he’d pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket, signed the receipt and handed it back to me.

  “Maybe you need to chain one to the counter here like they do over at the bank,” he said.

  “Used to,” I said. “I don’t think anyone has to sign anything at the bank any more.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he told me, gave both me and Barbara Ellen a little salute and left.

  “That boy,” Barbara Ellen said, shaking her head.

  I supposed to Barbara Ellen we were all still children. We’d worked at the diner under her management when we were teenagers, after school and during the summer. She taught us well. I wasn’t looking forward to the day she retired. Yes, she’d worked hard all her life and deserved some leisure time but Barbara Ellen was our rock when it came down to the hard stuff.

  I yawned, covering my mouth with one hand at the last minute.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” she suggested. “I’ve got some help coming in later.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Scoot. Oh, and I saw that your fingers were crossed behind your back.”

  I gave her a sheepish grin, pulled off my apron, hung it on a peg by the kitchen door and went up to my apartment.

  Once I was upstairs, I lay down across my bed, watching the blazing summer afternoon sun start its slow crawl toward the west. Summer would soon be over and I think the whole area was looking forward to those crisp fall mornings. Maybe even a little snow. That got me to thinking about summer when we were kids. Those days seemed to go on forever.

  I smiled remembering how my grandmother always made sure there was something to do at our house. She said she liked having me there and if that meant all of my friends, that made her happy, too. As I grew older, I realized she probably just wanted to keep an eye on me - on all of us.

  Just as I drifted off to sleep my phone chimed. I almost ignored it, wanted to ignore it. The ringing stopped and I sank deeper into sleep.

  It started up again, sounding insistent almost urgent.

  “Uhhhh!” I groaned, forcing myself to sit up. Then I reached for the phone.

  The name and number on the screen didn’t belong to Poppy or Tucker but I recognized it.

  “Hello,” I answered and then cleared my throat. “Hello.”

  “Is this Starla Cupp?” Madelyn Caldwell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I just heard the news about Jimmy Bones,” she said in that same raspy smoker’s voice I remembered.

  “Yes,” I repeated.

  “Is it true?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, not wanting to elaborate.

  “I have some information,” she told me.

  Now she had my attention. “Shouldn’t you go to the police?”

  “No. I’ll tell you and you can do what you want. I don’t want to get involved.”

  “Why? You’re the national fan club president,” I reminded her.

  “I’m the president for other celebrities’ national fan clubs as well. I don’t want any bad press over this,” she explained impatiently.

  Either the position somehow paid well or got her some kind of prestige. “Okay.”

  “Two or three days before Jimmy came to Sugar Hill, I received a phone call from his wife,” she began.

  “Are you sure it was his wife?”

  “As sure as I can be. I’d not talked to her before. The only thing I’m sure of was that it was definitely a woman and she said she was Caroline Bones.”

  “Okay. What did she want?”

  “Well, I was ready for a fight. You know, some of the wives of celebrities are jealous of my position,” she explained, sounding incredibly proud of that fact.

  I doubted that but I wasn’t about to argue with her. “I see.”

  “But she had something else in mind. She asked me for a favor,” Madelyn continued.

  “A favor?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Jimmy Bones was jealous but not of me. She was jealous of maybe other women getting into the tour bus. You know, after the show or maybe before when no one was looking.”

  “How could anyone get on the bus—?”

  “Jimmy was quite the ladies man. He’s been known to, um, entertain, several women at the same time,” she said.

  I frowned. That wasn’t the Jimmy Bones I’d met that day on the bus but maybe when he was younger—Who knew. “So his wife, Caroline, needed a favor from you.”

  “Yes. She paid me to get a PayDay candy bar, clean the wrapper thoroughly and sneak it onto the bus.”

  Now, that was the strangest thing I’d ever heard. “And then what?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

  “I did what she asked and made sure it was completely clean. I would never do anything to harm Jimmy,” she added quickly.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Then, I visited with Jimmy for a bit on the bus and, as I left, I dropped the clean wrapper on the floor, just out of sight but close enough to his dressing room that it would be spotted pretty easily.”

  “How did she know you were going to get on the tour bus?” I asked.

  “I’m the president of his national fan club,” Madelyn said, as if that explained everything.

  “Oh.”

  “So, I guess someone or even Jimmy, was supposed to find this candy bar wrapper, think he’d been exposed to peanuts and-what?”

  “It was supposed to scare him. To make him realize that letting people onto his bus, especially strangers, was dangerous,” she told me.

  “Strange women?” I guessed.

  “Bingo.”

  Then I remembered something the lady at the RV park had told me. “Someone told me they saw you remove a wig and some big glasses and throw them in the trash,” I said. “Why would you disguise yourself?”

  She hesitated so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I waited.

  Finally, she said, “I always wear a disguise when I’m out in public or in front of the other fan club presidents. It just cuts down on the publicity.”

  Was she lying about the disguise? About everything? Did she somehow do something to one of Jimmy’s injectors or leave one on his bus that was tampered with so that he would use it and—.

  “I swear I didn’t do anything to harm Jimmy. It was just a little scare tactic dreamed up by his wife, almost a joke,” she told me.

  “Alright,” I said, my thoughts going a mile a minute.

  “Are you going to the police with this?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, picturing Tucker’s face. I was already keeping some information from him, this would only add to the list.

  “If you do, please, just keep my name out of it. Out of the press at least,” she pleaded.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told her, wondering if Madelyn Caldwell was even her real name. “But I’m pretty sure our Chief of Police is going to want to talk to you.”

  She grew quiet again and then said. “If it helps for you to know, everyone knew about this trick.”

  “Everyone?”

  “His manager, his security, his cook. She told me that all of them knew about it.”

  So everyone knew that Caroline was trying to scare Jimmy into not bringing strangers (women?) onto his bus. “If she was that worried, why didn’t she travel with him?” I asked.

  “I was told she couldn’t be ther
e because she had an audition for a big movie part,” she explained.

  That made sense. Hadn’t Withrow said something about her being an aspiring actress? I made a mental note to see if Tucker had checked into her background.

  “Thank you for telling me this,” I finally said, reaching for my shoes.

  This was getting serious and it was time to tell Tucker what I knew no matter the consequences. I ended the call and headed downstairs. A quick peek in the diner told me it was still pretty quiet. Hopefully, with the news out about Jimmy’s murder, business would pick up soon.

  The warm scent of baking bread made me want to linger in the empty kitchen, wait for it to come out and eat it straight out of the oven. Barbara Ellen was talking to Joylou’s son, Josh, while he cleared a table. It looked like some reporters that I didn’t recognize had just been seated and were still looking at the menu.

  Vic, impeccably dressed as always, entered the diner.

  I stood still just out of sight and watched.

  “Hey guys,” she said, sauntering over to their table, her high heels making little clicking sounds on the black and white tiles.

  “Hey, Vic,” one of them said, looking up from his menu.

  The other, a middle-aged balding man, scooted over to make room for her.

  Who was I kidding? I was just postponing the inevitable. I was going to have to go talk to Tucker. Tell him what I knew. Outside, the heat rose off the pavement in waves and the humidity was through the roof. I could almost feel my hair starting to frizz. After being in the air conditioning of the diner, it felt like I’d just put on a wet, wool sweater. I started in the direction of the police department and then decided to just call Tucker just to make sure he was there.

  “Hey,” he answered on the first ring.

  “Is that any way for an officer of the law to answer his phone?” I teased.

  “It is when he knows it’s the pretty lady who runs the best diner in town,” he shot right back.

  Even in the heat, my face grew hotter and I was glad no one could see me.

  “Did you need something?” he asked, growing serious.

  I started to sit down in one of the wrought iron chairs at the little table out back but thought better of it after touching the scorching arm. Instead, I walked along the railroad tracks, toward the train station.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said. “I have some information.”

  “About the Jimmy’s murder?”

  “Yes. I think. I don’t know for sure.”

  Far away, a train whistle echoed off the mountains that cradled our beautiful valley.

  “Are you outside?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Starla, it’s too hot to be out walking around,” he told me.

  I didn’t want to talk about the weather or anything else. It was time to come clean and tell him everything I knew.

  “Can we meet somewhere or...?” I asked, ignoring his warning.

  “Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be at your apartment,” he said. “Starla, this is serious isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Heading there now.”

  The concrete walkway behind all of the shops in the old depot was covered and the closer I got to the empty train station and the deserted buildings there, it grew somewhat cooler. I passed the old deserted Pullman Restaurant and peeked in a grimy window. I’d heard that it was going to be refurbished for weddings and meetings. It was a grand space but they had a lot of work to do.

  As I passed under the bridge that acted as a connector to a footpath from downtown up into Sears Hill, I saw a few passengers pulling up and unloading their luggage. I checked my watch. In about thirty minutes the afternoon Amtrak train would come barreling through headed for Chicago.

  Poppy and I promised ourselves that one day we would take a little trip on the train, if only to Covington, which was about an hour way. So far we hadn’t made that happen. Turning around, I headed back to the diner. Nina who owned the quilt shop, was out emptying her trash can in the dumpster shared by several of the shops.

  “Too hot to be out here walking around,” she said, when she saw me.

  “That’s why I’m headed back to the diner,” I said with a smile.

  “You guys doing okay?”

  “We are.”

  “Good.”

  I didn’t see anyone from the photographers studio next door to the quilt shop and no movement around the book store which was next to that. The heat was keeping everyone indoors.

  At the back door to the diner, I slipped inside and hurried upstairs to my apartment. I brushed my hair and pulled it back into a low pony tail, rinsed my face and, almost as an afterthought, put on some lip gloss.

  “Better,” I said to my reflection. Then I shook my head and chuckled. Tucker wasn’t coming to see how pretty I looked.

  I’d just filled two glasses with ice when I heard him on the stairs.

  “Come on in,” I said. “It’s unlocked.”

  He came into my kitchen, filling up the space just like he always did and smiled when he saw the tall, cold glass of tea.

  “Ah,” he said, sliding into a seat at the gray and white Formica table that had belonged to my grandmother.

  “I thought you could use something cold to drink,” I said. The sight of him in that dark blue uniform nearly took my breath away.

  “You thought correctly,” he told me, taking a drink that drained nearly half of the tea.

  I added more to his glass, sat down across from him and then took a drink of my own.

  “So, how’s the investigation going?” I asked. Sometimes he talked to me, sometimes not. It never hurt to ask.

  He shrugged. “Really just getting started. We’ve swept the bus again just in case we missed anything. We’ve interviewed Herb Fleming.”

  “I think he’s anxious to get out of town,” I said.

  “There’s a reason for that. He’s just a little nervous being around law enforcement. Jimmy’s murder hit a little bit too close to home.”

  “I don’t think he’ll leave Caroline behind,” I said. “And she won’t leave until Jimmy’s body is released.”

  Again the shrug. “We talked to Ben Herlong who admitted to having a terrible argument with Jimmy the morning he was killed.”

  I played dumb.

  “Said it was over money. Jimmy had promised to pay them a certain amount and then Withrow changed Jimmy’s mind.”

  “Yikes.”

  “He was upset mostly because of his crew but said he’d never do anything to harm Jimmy,” he continued. “I believe him.”

  “You said someone took a bite out of one of the pies I’d left,” I reminded him.

  “There was no evidence of that in his stomach and we ran tox reports on the pie, too. It came back clean.”

  “So what are your thoughts?” I asked.

  “Starla, this had to be someone close to him. Real close. Someone who had the means and the know how to tamper with one of those injectors. The only wound found on his body was on his thigh at the injection site.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Jimmy slapping his thigh. “Why would he inject himself if he didn’t need it?” I asked, mostly just thinking aloud.

  “That’s a good question,” he said.

  We were quiet for a moment. I added more ice and refilled his glass with tea. He took a sip and then seemed to remember why he was there in my kitchen in the first place.

  “You said you had something to tell me,” he reminded me.

  “I did. I do,” I stammered.

  He nodded and gave me a knowing look.

  “Promise you won’t be mad.”

  “I can’t make that promise but if you’ve got some information, I need to hear it.”

  I took a deep breath. “I received a call just a while ago from Madelyn Crawford,” I began.

  “Who?”

  “She’s the national president of Jimmy’s fan club,” I explained.

  He no
dded.

  “She told me Jimmy’s wife called and asked her to sneak a clean PayDay candy bar wrapper onto Jimmy’s bus.”

  “Why?”

  I repeated what she had told me not leaving out anything including the fact that she just assumed it was Caroline who called her.

  “That’s an odd request,” he said, lost in thought for a minute.

  “It is. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I was also told by one of his groupies that she saw Crawford taking off a wig and glasses and throwing them away,” I continued.

  “People sure do like talking to you,” he said, looking skeptical.

  I shrugged and then grinned. “What can I say? I’m just more approachable than you.”

  “I’ll need to talk to Crawford at least,” he told me, pulling out his notepad.

  “I’ll give you her number but I don’t know if she’ll talk to you. She wanted me to relay the information to you.”

  “Who was the other lady you spoke with?”

  “What lady?”

  “The one who told you about the disguise,” he reminded me.

  “I don’t know. Just someone out at the RV park.”

  He nodded and then chuckled. “Now why would you think I would be mad after you told me this?”

  “There’s more,” I said, avoiding his steady gaze.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tucker took a long, suffering breath. “Okay, let’s hear it,” he said, wrapping both big hands around his empty glass.

  I made a move to refill it and he pulled it out of my reach.

  “Starla, if you know something regarding this investigation, you’d better tell me.”

  All jokes were off. When Tucker started talking like that, he was dead serious. I took a deep breath and set the pitcher down on the table with a thump. “The day of the show, Jimmy sent word that he wanted me to bring some of the little sunflower pies to his bus. It was while I was watching the K-9 demonstration.”

  Tucker nodded, still watching me closely.

  “He’d heard about the sunflower butter pies but, mostly, I think it he just wanted to see me because of my grandmother. Anyway, we talked a bit in his dressing room.”