Peach Cobbler Poison

by Diana DuMont

  I nodded. “Right. Well, that’s just my first impression. There are a lot of records here. It’s not just the accounting records. It looks like there are emails between someone from the City Council and someone else on the outside, but I have no idea who because the email addresses are all blacked out.”

  “Do you think Todd found all of this? Or were these Caitlin’s notes on the scandal?”

  “I think these were Caitlin’s notes. There are a lot of handwritten notes all over these papers, and it looks like girly handwriting. No matter who wrote the notes, though, they’re worth going through. There’s a lot here to unpack. I think we should get together tonight. Maybe have some dinner, and start going through it all in some sort of methodical manner? That is, if you have time tonight.”

  I felt my cheeks heat up with embarrassment. Who was I to ask Molly for more time? I knew she was busy. She’d already taken the whole day to come to San Francisco with me. Maybe she didn’t have time to spend the evening going over boring accounting records.

  But Molly was looking at me like I was crazy. “Are you kidding me? I can’t think of anything more important right now than going through these records and figuring out a way to prove that you aren’t a murderer.”

  I looked over at her and smiled gratefully. She looked at me for a brief moment and smiled back before turning her eyes back to the road.

  “What did I do to deserve a friend like you?” I asked.

  Molly threw back her head and laughed. “Well, for one thing, you make such a good banana cream pie that it’s not even fair. I knew I had to become good friends with you so I could get first dibs on all your pies. But also, I love a good adventure. And even though I know this adventure has been quite stressful for you, it has been an adventure. How many times in my life will I have the chance to help chase down a murderer?”

  “You know, some people might be just fine going their whole lives without having to track down a murderer.”

  “Well, that’s a pretty boring life if you ask me!”

  I grinned. “In a couple decades, you’re going to take my grandma’s place as the craziest old lady in Sunshine Springs.”

  Molly’s smile widened. “That’s a place I would take with pride. Your grandma is one of Sunshine Springs’ best citizens. I know sometimes it seems like she’s hard on you, but she loves you more than anything. She talks about you all the time. She did even before you moved here. I know she has her own way of showing that she cares, but she does care. You know that, right?”

  I sighed. “I know. And I love her more than anything, too. It’s just so frustrating sometimes that she can’t seem to take anything seriously. Not even a murder accusation.”

  “Don’t worry. If it gets to the point that it needs to be taken seriously, she will. But in the meantime, I think she knows that you’re a big girl, and you’re more than capable of handling this on your own.”

  “Well, not entirely on my own. I’ve got your help, and I’m grateful for that. In fact, to show you I’m grateful, why don’t we go to the pie shop to sort through all of this? I have a few pies left over from yesterday that I didn’t sell, and we can munch on them while we work. They’ll be a day old, so they’re not as fresh as what I normally sell in the store. But they’ll still be really good.”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice. I’m sure even one of your day-old pies tastes better than any of the other pies I could find anywhere in Sunshine Springs. I’ll need to swing by the library for an hour or so to take care of a few things. Maybe you could go and start sorting the papers, and I’ll catch up to you at the café as soon as I can?”

  I nodded. “That sounds good.” I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully for a few moments. “Do you think that perhaps we should ask Scott to come help us?”

  Molly glanced over at me and raised an eyebrow. “Scott the delivery guy?”

  “Yeah. He’s been keeping an ear out for me while he does deliveries to see if he might hear anything useful to my case. And he did save me yesterday night when Josie came into the store and attacked me.”

  Molly looked over at me and her eyes widened until they must have been about twice their normal size. “Wait a minute. Josie attacked you? You never told me that!”

  I winced. “Yeah. She attacked me. It wasn’t a big deal, really. She just caught me off guard, and Scott stepped in to pull her off of me. I guess I didn’t say anything because I was so preoccupied with the divorce proceedings this morning that I didn’t really want to talk about the murder case. And then on the drive home I’ve been so interested in all these papers. Actually, I have a few other things to tell you. Like the fact that Violet thinks that Josie is the one who poisoned Caitlin, and there’s possibly some evidence that that’s true.”

  Molly glanced over at me and raised an eyebrow. “You do have a lot to tell me.”

  “Yeah, I do. I haven’t even mentioned yet how I saw Theo, Sheriff Mitch and the Mayor having a secret little meeting yesterday evening.”

  “What?” Molly exclaimed. “You’ve been holding out on me!”

  “Not on purpose,” I insisted. “Tell you what: why don’t you go finish up everything you need to do at the library. I’ll go to the pie shop and start organizing these papers. I’m not opening at all today, since I didn’t have time to bake pies this morning. I’ll call Scott and ask him to meet us there as well, and when you both get there I’ll tell you both everything I know. Then we’ll all be on the same page regarding Theo, Josie, and Todd.”

  “Alright. But it’s going to be torture waiting even an hour to hear all of this.” Molly sighed. “I do have to get a few things done, but I have a feeling I’m going to be working quicker than I ever have before.”

  I took a deep breath. “Good. And then, when you get to the pie shop, you can help me work through all of these papers as quickly as possible. I don’t know why, but I have this uneasy feeling that I’m running out of time.”

  Molly nodded grimly and clutched the steering wheel tighter as she crossed into Sunshine Springs’ city limits. I noticed her knuckles turning white. “I think you’re right,” she said. “But don’t worry. We’ll figure this out. We’ll clear your name and find the real killer before it’s too late.”

  I hoped she was right. After the confrontation I’d had with Josie last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the real killer was on the loose, and might easily kill again if they weren’t stopped soon.

  I shivered, even though it was the middle of July.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Several hours later, Molly, Scott and I all sat inside the dimly lit Drunken Pie Café. I kept the front door locked and the lights low in hopes that no one would think I was open. I didn’t have to worry too much about that, though. It was fairly late in the evening by this point, so the activity on Main Street was mostly dying down. Sunshine Springs wasn’t much of a nightlife town, and the few bars and restaurants that catered to those who liked to stay out a bit later were all on the opposite side of the small downtown area. Besides that, it had started to rain. This was quite unusual for wine country in the middle of the summer, and many of the Sunshine Springs residents were hiding out at home tonight.

  That was just fine by me. I didn’t want to be bothered, and the rain fit my mood. I had a lot to figure out, and so far I hadn’t had much luck. Before Scott and Molly arrived, I’d separated the papers into as organized of piles as I could manage. One pile held what looked like accounting statements from the winery, and another pile had accounting statements from the city. There were also hundreds of emails printed out. I was assuming the emails were mostly to and from the same person, but it was impossible to tell because the email addresses were all blacked out. I skimmed a few of the messages, and they seemed to be between a City Council member and someone outside the Council. This supported the idea that there was a scandal going on at the Sunshine Springs Winery, but nothing directly mentioned the winery. Not only that, but many of the emails that I did take time to re
ad before Scott and Molly arrived appeared to be relatively benign.

  But I figured there must be something good in there somewhere. Otherwise, why would Todd have been carrying them around? It just might take a while to get to the good stuff unless we were lucky. I put all of the emails in one pile, and figured we’d have to start going through them and hope for the best.

  In another pile, I put all of the photographs. These must have been photos that Todd had taken during his brief stay in Sunshine Springs. I wasn’t sure why he’d printed them all out. Nothing looked particularly out of the ordinary. There were photographs of Josie and Caitlin about town, and Todd had taken a few photos of them in the lobby of the hotel where they’d been staying. A few more photos showed them having breakfast at the Morning Brew Café, and then most of the other photos were of the winery.

  It seemed Todd had documented every square inch of the place. Some of the photos that he’d taken of the grapevines were actually quite good. I chuckled, thinking that Theo should buy these from Todd to use in the winery’s marketing. Too bad they were both accused of murder, and unlikely to be interested in any sort of business deal with each other.

  Molly and I decided that it would be prudent to look carefully at each photo, even though they didn’t seem to be anything special. Better safe than sorry. She and I would tackle the photos, carefully scrutinizing each one, while Scott started going through the account records. He’d offered to do that, saying that he’d helped his father out with accounts at his father’s small auto body shop when he’d been younger.

  I supposed I could have figured out the account records easily enough, but I wasn’t going to complain about passing that job off to Scott. At least he could get the initial work of the first pass done and pull out anything that looked suspicious.

  His job didn’t turn out to be that hard: it didn’t take him long at all to find something that looked suspicious. Like I had on the car ride over, he quickly identified spots in the city’s accounting where money seemed to be missing, or where money had been designated for general funds which then had generic withdrawals that made no sense. I let him ponder on that while Molly and I continued to look at the photos.

  “I don’t think there’s anything here,” Molly said. “Todd took beautiful photos of the winery, that’s for sure. But they don’t show anything out of the ordinary. Just a bunch of tourists in the background, doing tastings just like Josie and Caitlin. Well, a bunch of tourists along with Violet. I guess she wasn’t kidding when she told you she liked to hang out there.”

  I looked at a photo that Molly handed to me. Violet was indeed in the background, and I saw her staring down at Josie’s purse. I shivered as I remembered Violet talking about Josie putting ground-up pills in Caitlin’s wine. Had this photograph been taken before or after that moment had allegedly occurred? There was no way to know, except perhaps by asking Violet—and I wasn’t ready to go talk to Violet about any of this yet. She’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t approve of the fact that I was playing detective, so I’d save my questions for her until they were absolutely necessary.

  I turned my attention to Josie’s and Caitlin’s smiles in the photo. Caitlin flashed her perfect white teeth at the camera, and her tanned skin seemed to glow in the light of the tasting room’s chandeliers. I shook my head as I looked at the picture—one of the last pictures ever taken of Caitlin.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” I asked. “She had no idea that just a few hours later she’d be dead.”

  Molly shook her head sadly. “Just goes to show that you can’t take a single moment for granted.”

  We were quiet for a few moments, contemplating the brevity of Caitlin’s life. Then, from a few tables away, Scott broke the silence with a long, exasperated sigh. Molly and I both looked up at him.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s just that I can’t find anything in the winery’s accounting records here to indicate a scandal. Everything looks squeaky clean on the winery’s end.”

  “Is it possible it’s in some other records that we don’t have here?” I asked.

  “It’s possible. But that doesn’t help us much right now. All we’ve established is that someone on city Council was definitely doing something shady. Or at least someone with access to the city’s money. But we haven’t tied it to the winery at all.”

  I frowned, and thought of the Mayor’s meeting with Theo and Mitch last night. “There must be a tie somewhere. We’ll just have to keep looking.”

  Molly set down the pictures she’d been looking at. “Are we sure it’s the winery? Maybe we really are barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the city’s money is going to someone else in town, and Theo doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I considered this. “But if Theo doesn’t have anything to do with it, why did Caitlin end up poisoned? You’d think that whoever’s involved in this deal would have been happy that she was going after the wrong person.”

  “Well, the other business owner who’s getting the kickbacks from the city might have been happy about it. But it seems Caitlin was still onto the fact that someone on the City Council was illegally pilfering money. Maybe that person got nervous and thought Caitlin would destroy whatever little scheme they had going on. Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place all along, and it was actually someone from the City Council that poisoned Caitlin.”

  I stood up and started pacing, feeling frustrated. I felt like every time I thought we were getting close to the answer, we reached another dead end. Rather than narrowing down our list of suspects and closing in on the true killer, our field of suspects seemed to be only expanding. Was I going to need to add every single person from the Sunshine Springs City Council to the list? Or worse, was I going to need to add every single person that might have access to the city’s coffers to the list?

  Sprinkles seemed concerned about my pacing. He stood, and came over to nudge my hand with his warm muzzle. He’d been extra protective of me today. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he somehow understood why I’d been in San Francisco this morning, and knew that I needed the extra love now that my divorce was finalized, or whether it was because of the commotion of chasing down Todd. Or perhaps he’d somehow even sensed that I’d been a nervous wreck last night when I picked him up from Grams’ after the confrontation with Josie—the confrontation that had been followed by a confrontation with Mitch at the police station.

  I rubbed my forehead. What a stressful week it had been. I went to open another bottle of wine, and poured myself a generous glass. Then I helped myself to another slice of pie. Why not? I was willing to try anything right now that might help me relax.

  “Yeah,” Molly said slowly as she put the photographs back into a neat pile. “We’ve looked through all the photographs too, and there’s nothing in here that looks suspicious. Perhaps we should move on to reading the emails.”

  “You’re right,” Scott said. “I wish all the addresses weren’t blacked out, but maybe there’ll be something in the actual bodies of the emails somewhere that will help us out.”

  “It’s so weird that all of the addresses are blacked out,” I said. “Do you think Caitlin did that, or do you think they came to her like that?”

  “I’m sure they came to her like that,” Scott said. “I don’t know what reason she possibly could have had to black out the addresses. It’s not like she was trying to protect someone.”

  I nodded, and took a stack of emails. Scott and Molly each grabbed a stack as well, and for the next half hour, we all read in silence. Occasionally, I would come across an email that had a handwritten notation on it from Caitlin, but none of the notes were particularly helpful. Mostly, Caitlin had just written things like “this looks suspicious,” or “check into this more later.”

  The emails themselves proved to be equally unhelpful. They all seemed to be between the same two people, but those two people were careful to never
call each other by name or give any identifying information in the bodies of their emails. Most of the emails discussed things like upcoming community events in Sunshine Springs, or the general state of the wine business in the area. Now and then, references were made to amounts of money being transferred from the city’s coffers to whomever was writing these emails. But the emails only mentioned the amounts of the transfers. That didn’t give us any new information beyond what Scott had already found in the accounting records.

  I was starting to get tired. It had been a long day, and the frustration of searching uselessly through all of this information was only making the day feel longer. Maybe Todd wasn’t going to be all that angry that he’d lost these records, I thought ruefully. It didn’t seem that there was much of use here.

  But just as I was about to suggest that we call it a night, Scott suddenly let out a long, low whistle.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “I’ve got an email here talking about Caitlin and her investigation. Looks like one of our mystery correspondents realized that Caitlin was coming to Sunshine Springs to investigate things. They got a little nervous, and offered to pay off the other email correspondent if he or she would take care of Caitlin and make sure the investigation stopped.”

  Molly and I both looked up at Scott incredulously.

  “Take care of Caitlin?” Molly finally asked. “You mean, murder her?”

  “Well,” Scott said. “They didn’t exactly say to kill her or to murder her. They just said to take care of her. But I think the implication is pretty clear.”

  With my heart pounding, I stood and went to look over Scott’s shoulder at the email. I felt sick to my stomach as I looked down at the letter and saw that Scott was right. Someone had definitely been hinting at the need to kill Caitlin off. Of course, we still had no idea who that someone was. But for the first time since Caitlin died, I was beginning to feel like we were at least on the right path here.