The Poison in the Pie

by Rosie Sams

  Within seconds, the detectives had climbed out of their cars and entered the house, taking over for Al and complimenting him on securing the evidence and suspect so quickly.

  “Smudge here helped me,” Al said. “Sniffed that there was something strange in the cupboard and nosed around until she found it. So, if you find a dog hair on the bottle, she’s likely where it came from.”

  “Good dog,” said the head detective, bending over to pat Smudge on the head.

  Smudge eyed him warily, but then wagged her little tail.

  Sooner than Melody would have thought possible, she and Al had been questioned and released, to go out on their date. But Melody was no longer in the mood to even pretend to have fun.

  “I don’t know if you did the right thing, Al,” she said. “I don’t think Jillian is guilty.”

  “If not her, then who?” Al asked. “And why? This is the strongest lead that’s been offered to us so far. If we’re doing our jobs as servants of the people and the law, then we have to arrest someone in the face of evidence as strong as this.”

  “I just don’t know,” Melody said.

  “Think about it,” Al said, sounding sincere. “And tell me anything you come up with.”

  He drove her and Smudge home, but Melody found herself too restless to settle in, so she and Smudge went for a walk. Jillian had been angry at Perry. That was understandable. She had been betrayed. Eleanor had been angry at Gloria. She had felt like Melody and Perry had undermined the legitimacy of the contest. And Gloria had been upset. She had been betrayed by Perry as well.

  Melody went through several different scenarios, trying to find one that fit. Could Gloria have murdered Perry and framed Jillian for it? Could Jillian have murdered Perry and framed Gloria for it? What if the reason everything seemed off was that no one’s plans had gone according to plan? What if Eleanor had tried to sabotage Gloria’s pie in the contest, only to be stopped by Jillian, who knew that Gloria planned to murder her husband?

  It all made Melody’s head spin.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, Melody got up, took a shower, and had an idea. She checked on the bakery and spent a few hours minding the cash register and filling orders.

  Then, at ten o’clock, she took Smudge for a walk to the newspaper office where Quincy Atkinson worked. When he saw her, he gave her a polite but non-committal smile, then brought her into his small office to talk. It was almost as though he had been expecting her.

  “How’s Port Warren’s favorite baker doing this morning?” he asked.

  “Curious,” Melody said.

  “You’re curious, or you’re doing curiously?” Quincy asked.

  “I’m curious about the photographs you took at the contest yesterday,” she said.

  “Yesterday… yesterday,” Quincy said. “Oh, the day of the murder. I suppose you want to look at the photos, don’t you? I might just be able to be convinced. The photos are digital. I had to give the police the files already, but I made copies for myself and the newspaper as well.”

  “You might be convinced?” Melody asked, narrowing her eyes. “What do you mean, convinced?”

  Quincy threw his hands up. “Nothing dirty, woman! I just want a thank-you cake. And some of your brownie-stuffed chocolate-dipped strawberries. I’m single. I don’t get treats like that very often. And you’ll have to look at the photos here. If anyone finds out I let you look at the photos, that’s one thing—but giving you copies is another.”

  “Deal,” Melody said.

  While Quincy was pulling the files up, she quizzed him on his tastes: something with chocolate, and he liked things that were salty and sweet. She told him to stop by the following Thursday, and he’d find something he liked.

  “Here are the photos,” he said, turning his monitor toward her. Melody took over his computer chair and started going through the pictures.

  “Are you sure that I can’t have copies?” she asked after she’d gone through them several times.

  “What are you looking at?” Quincy asked. “And why do you keep going through all the photos, when only about half of them are after the murder?”

  “If you really want me to tell you, it’ll cost you your cake,” Melody said.

  Quincy threw up his hands again. “If you don’t want to say, you don’t want to say. We all have to follow a hunch sometimes.”

  As soon as Melody left, she made a call to Mike Sampson, the contest organizer. “How many pies did each contestant have to bring?” she asked him.

  “Five to sell and one official contest pie.”

  “Did each of the contestants bring six, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mike, this is important: did each of the contestants bring six?”

  He paused, and Melody heard the rustle of paper. “I had them sign them in… Yes, I’ve got it down here. Each of the contestants signed in with six pies, with one of them marked with a piece of masking tape along the side to indicate which one was supposed to be used as the contest pie. I checked them all myself when they first came in.”

  “And did you check them again before the contest?”

  “No… You think someone switched pies?”

  “Something fishy happened,” she said. “Because, on the table in Quincy’s photos before the contest started, there was one extra pie.”

  Chapter Ten

  What did the extra pie mean?

  And who had brought it?

  Melody turned around the corner from the newspaper office and entered the Seafood Shanty. It seemed like an appropriate place to sit and think about the case. The Shanty was a humble dive of a restaurant, clean and reliable but not the least bit fancy. It had started life as a double-wide trailer, which had been converted into a drive-thru for burgers and ice cream. It was sold, then turned by its new owners into the home of big plates of fried shrimp, fish tacos, baked and battered fish filets with hushpuppies, crab strips, and more. A large, partially closed-in porch wrapped around the parts of the building facing the water. Unless it was the dead of winter, most people ate outside at one of the many picnic tables—the big porch windows were open but screened against the bugs in good weather, and closed up in bad weather.

  Melody had half-expected the Shanty to be closed, but it wasn’t. Perry might be dead, she supposed, but that didn’t mean the customers didn’t need to eat, or that the servers and staff didn’t need to make money that week.

  She ordered grilled shrimp tacos with a side of coleslaw (two hushpuppies included) for herself, and a plain, unseasoned chicken breast for Smudge. She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t really there to have lunch. She felt like she had found out more than she wanted to know, and she wanted to sort out her suspicions.

  The outside of the restaurant was packed, so she decided to eat at one of the few indoor tables, with red-and-white checked tablecloths and flowers in tiny vases at each table. It was hot and stuffy inside, and only she and the staff were within doors.

  The contrast between the inside and the outside made her think about Perry’s plans for the restaurant. It really wasn’t a puff pastry sort of place. She clucked her tongue, then pulled out her phone and sent Kerry a message to cancel Perry’s order for puff pastry. She hoped Kerry hadn’t already started on it.

  Someone stopped beside her table, and Melody pulled up her arms to let her server put her plate in front of her as she finished her message. “Sorry! One sec,” she said.

  But the person sat across from her. She looked up. It was Horace.

  “What do you think? Seafood Newberg with puff pastry?” Horace asked.

  She blinked at him. Suddenly, the restaurant seemed far too loud. As if the staff in the kitchen had to clang every last pot and pan together and had turned the radio all the way up to max volume. With the way her head was spinning from all the possibilities, she could barely guess at what he meant. “For what? For the Shanty?”

  Under the table, Smudge’s ears picked up, brushing the side of her l
eg.

  “For his last meal,” Horace said. His voice was hoarse, and his eyes red. “I have to plan his funeral dinner. Jillian can’t handle it from inside a jail cell, obviously. It’s the least I could do. But I’m going around and around in circles. No one but the two of us knew his hopes and dreams for this place. Everyone else will be expecting fried shrimp and hushpuppies. But that wasn’t really what Perry would have wanted.”

  “Fancy food does seem a little out of character,” she admitted. “But didn’t he talk to Jillian about what he wanted?”

  “Their marriage was only for appearances and had been for a long time,” Horace said. “Let’s just say that neither one of them would have come out smelling of roses, if the whole truth had come out.”

  Melody hesitated. Maybe she had been wrong about Jillian. “Do you think she did it?”

  Horace shrugged. “From what I’ve heard since last night? It has all the hallmarks of a woman’s murder—poison, you know. A man would have used a more violent method. At least, that’s what statistics say.”

  “I’d never heard that,” Melody said. She shook her head. “We’ll just have to let the police sort it out. What’s going to happen now?”

  “Lunch,” Horace said firmly. “Then, supper. A restauranteur doesn’t get the luxury of dwelling on much of anything else.”

  “I mean with the restaurant,” Melody asked. “It’s not going to close, is it?”

  “No, no,” Horace said. “There might be some legal wrangling, but when it comes to the restaurant itself, we made each other our own heirs, in case something happened to one or the other of us. Although, Jillian’s lawyer and I have been working on an arrangement to help pay her legal bills out of Perry’s share of things.”

  “You must have been doing very well,” Melody said.

  Horace laughed modestly. “After a rocky start, yes. But it was never doing as well as Perry wanted it to. You’ve seen his house. He spent too much on it. I still live in a 1960s bungalow, humble but completely paid off.”

  “I know how it is,” Melody said. “No matter how well the bakery is doing, I can’t seem to stop scrimping and saving on everything else. The second I think about renovating a bathroom, I start to panic.”

  “I’m sorry that things won’t work out between us and the bakery,” Horace said. “That puff pastry would have been a big score for you.”

  Melody shook her head. “I wasn’t counting on it, honestly. The more I think about it, the more I realized that if Perry wanted to run that kind of restaurant, he’d have to start up a different restaurant. The Seafood Shanty really isn’t the place for it.”

  “Exactly,” Horace said with satisfaction. “I told him that many times myself. I’m glad you see things my way.”

  A server brought Melody’s food. She gave Smudge her chicken breast, then began to pick at her shrimp tacos. She really wasn’t very hungry, after all the stress of getting ready for the festival, then the murder. “I should have gotten this to go,” she said.

  “Let me box it up for you.” Horace reached for her plate.

  Reflexively, Melody put her hand on top of Horace’s. “No, I’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t want to eat it?” he asked. “Or you don’t want me to box it up?”

  She knew she was just being ridiculous. But the thought of letting Horace take her food out of sight…made her stomach flip. She wasn’t sure why. She stammered, “I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Quincy’s photos flashed before her eyes.

  She had seen several different things in the photographs. She had, for one thing, seen that there were seven empty pie pans in Gloria’s row of pies. When Quincy had first started taking pictures, there were six: five on the table and one under the glass cover. Then, a few photos later, there had been seven.

  And one of those seven pie plates had had tape on the side, to mark that it was the “official” pastry that was supposed to be under the glass pie plate.

  Someone had taken Gloria’s real pie, replaced it with a poisoned pie, and put the real pie out on the table, to get eaten up with all the rest.

  Who?

  Not Eleanor, who would have replaced the pie with her own, rotten one. Not Jillian, whose ideas of revenge were seeing Perry suffer financially, not physically. And not Gloria, who could have merely poisoned her own pie. Not added another one.

  Someone had put the poisoned pie there.

  Horace?

  “Why are you here?” Horace asked. “It’s clear that it wasn’t for lunch. Even your dog isn’t eating.”

  Melody looked down at the chicken breast, which, it was true, Smudge had turned her nose up at. Carefully, she said, “Why did you say that Perry had been poisoned?”

  “I didn’t say he was.”

  “You said, ‘poison was a woman’s crime.’ The implication being that Perry was poisoned. Have the police announced something?”

  “A man falls down dead after eating a few bites of pie, and after the doctor standing right next to him performs the Heimlich maneuver on him twice. You make the connection,” Horace said sarcastically. “Now, why did you come here today, if not to eat?”

  Melody took a breath. “I’m here because I stopped to talk to Quincy Atkinson at the newspaper office, and your place is right around the corner. I didn’t have any reason to come here other than that I was running on autopilot.”

  “Why stop at the newspaper office? Are you in the habit of passing out cookies to journalists in order to buy good reviews?”

  “No,” Melody said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Is it true,” Horace asked mercilessly, his eyes glinting, “that you were the one who cooked all of Gloria’s pies for her?”

  “That’s what Eleanor thinks,” Melody said. She blinked. Maybe someone had told Eleanor what to think.

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  Melody stood up. “I’ve already paid for the food. I think I’ll just leave it.”

  “Did you, or did you not, use your reputation and skills as a baker to influence the outcome of that contest?” Horace asked.

  Horace was manipulating her, trying to put her on the defensive. He had somehow worked out that she felt less than super-secure about helping coach Gloria on her pies, or even encouraging her after she had had Eleanor yell accusations at her.

  But how would he know that?

  “That’s not what we’re discussing. I am leaving.” She picked up Smudge’s leash from the arm of her chair and walked toward the door.

  Horace grabbed her arm. “Just what are you trying to do here? Do you think you can win? Do you think you can just walk out of here without answering my questions?”

  “Yes,” Melody said. “That’s what I think.” She tried to pull her arm away.

  Horace wasn’t having any of it. He gripped tighter, making her wince.

  “I think you’re here to try to take something from me that isn’t yours and never will be. I think you’re here to try to take the restaurant from me.”

  “Me?” Melody asked incredulously. “Take your restaurant? Why would I want your restaurant?”

  “What else could you possibly want from me? You show up, blackmail me—suddenly, you don’t just have one business under your control, but two.”

  “I wasn’t going to blackmail you,” she said.

  Horace took both her arms. In a voice that was only just loud enough to reach Melody’s ears, he growled, “Why did you go to the newspaper office? What did you see?”

  Smudge growled, and Horace took a kick at her. He missed. Melody used the distraction to wrench herself away from him, picking up Smudge in her arms.

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “No,” Horace said. “You’re here to damage me. To take away everything I’ve worked for. Why should I?”

  “I haven’t done anything to you!” Melody exclaimed.

  Horace’s eyes were without emotion and had been, Melody realized, this whole time. Now his voice went
flat, almost a monotone. “You will, though.” Horace looked around, then picked up a ticket spike, a sharp spike attached to a heavy metal base, from a ledge near the door to the kitchen. “Unless I stop you.”

  “What are you doing?” Melody asked.

  “I can’t afford any loose ends.” Horace’s face was beet red, and he was laboring for breath.

  Melody clutched Smudge to her chest, then kissed her on top of the head. “You have high blood pressure, don’t you?” she asked.

  Horace hissed a curse at her. “Don’t lie to me. You know what happened to Perry. You put the pieces together, then came over here to destroy me. But I won’t let you. If you hadn’t threatened to take the restaurant, we could have worked something out. Biscuits. You could have made us biscuits. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it?”

  Melody could hardly believe the words coming out of his mouth. She hadn’t threatened to take his restaurant! Then she realized what was really at stake: Horace was telling himself what he needed to hear in order to justify violence.

  Against her.

  The same way he must have talked himself into murdering Perry.

  She had to delay Horace and hope that someone came out of the kitchen soon.

  “Was Perry trying to destroy you, too?” she asked.

  “Yes!” Horace snarled. He held the ticket holder out at her. “I don’t like violence. But you’re forcing me. This is your fault.”

  “Perry was going to change the restaurant,” Melody began, trying to get Horace back onto a better subject than wanting to murder her.

  Horace interrupted her. “He didn’t just want to change the restaurant. He wanted to take all the profits out of it and start another restaurant! It was reckless! He didn’t do any market research. He had no idea what he was doing. It was all about his vanity. The Shanty wasn’t good enough for him!”

  Horace suddenly lunged forward and took a swipe at her with the ticket spike.

  Startled, Melody yanked herself backward out of the way, stumbling into the table behind her. She yelped in fear.