Death Is Like a Box of Chocolates (A Chocolate Covered Mystery) (25 page)

Kayla was in charge of the store while Kona and I helped Erica with chairs and tables.

Erica was very subdued but wouldn’t respond to my “Are you okay?” questions with anything but, “I’m fine.”

“So what did you and Bobby talk about?” I asked when we were setting baskets on the silent auction table.

She looked surprised that I’d seen them. “Just working through a few . . . issues.”

“Did you apologize for being a butthead all those years ago?” I didn’t really think she was a butthead, but I knew it would get her to talk.

She smiled, seeing right through me. “I did, although I didn’t express it so succinctly.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“He didn’t kiss you?” I asked, astounded.

She laughed. “No. I think he wanted to, but he has, I don’t know, to think about things.” Her face grew serious. “Like if he can forgive me.”

“You should have kissed him,” I suggested, thinking that maybe I’d take a chance and use my own advice.

And just like the perfect timing that only happened in the movies, the delivery boy from Eugene’s Flower Shop walked in with a huge bouquet of flowers and called out, “Erica?”

Her eyes widened and her mouth made a little O as she signed for them.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Read the card.”

She smiled a little coyly and opened the tiny envelope. Her smile faded. “They’re a thank-you from Emberton.”

Those damn romantic comedies.

• • • • • • • • • 

R
eese waylaid me as I left the community center to change before the book signing. Maybe she had a GPS tracker on me or something.

“Michelle,” she said, falling into step beside me. “I know this is going to sound crazy . . .”

I had to take nearly two steps to her one. “If the shoe fits.”

“I need to tell you something.” She looked over her shoulder. “I don’t think you poisoned Denise.”

“Of course you don’t,” I said, regretting that I’d driven over with Erica and had to walk back to the shop to get my minivan. “No one does. You were just making it up to get back at me for taking your place on the basketball team a hundred years ago in high school.”

“And also for taking Guy Finestone away from me,” she said as if that made any sense at all.

“Who?”

“You don’t even remember. You played basketball with him near my house every Saturday,” she said, resentment in every word.

“Oh yeah, Guy,” I said. He was part of a group of boys who didn’t mind playing basketball with a girl who could hold her own on the court. “Didn’t he move away in high school? And how could I take him away from you when I never even went out with him?”

“He wanted to date you.”

“How could you know that when
I
didn’t even know that?” I remembered a time when he kept fouling me like crazy. Was this all in Reese’s head or was I really that clueless?

“I asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance in ninth grade, and he told me he was waiting for you to ask him.”

This girl was crazier than I thought. “Okay, is this real?”

She ignored my question. “I was fine until my divorce and everything.” She paused. “And then all this old stuff came up in my therapy. And I got mad again. But my therapist told me that I have to apologize to you and let it all go.”

“I accept your apology.”
You lunatic
.

“And I think we should work together on this investigation.”

I actually choked on nothing when she said that. Like that would ever happen. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because I have evidence that could help.” She waved her folder at me like she thought it would tantalize me. “I found the weak link.”

Now that was tempting. Except it was coming from Reese. “Why don’t you give it to Detective Lockett or the chief?”

“They won’t listen to me anymore. But if we go together, they’ll have to. And I can make a deal with you that you’ll give me an exclusive on the behind-the-scenes story.”

“How about this,” I said. By now we had made it to the front of my store. “I’ll think about it and let you know.”

She squinted at me, wondering if I was just blowing her off. She must finally be developing some kind of reporter instincts. “Okay, but don’t take long. This is time critical.”

Right. Critical for her blog deadline. I closed the door in her face, the twinkling bell sounding like sarcasm.

• • • • • • • • • 

T
he community center was packed. I didn’t know where all of these people came from, but one group of yuppie-looking folks were talking about the traffic in DC. I’d helped set up all the chairs, but I hadn’t expected them all to be filled.

There was a mixture of people in the crowd. Definitely a lot of locals who probably couldn’t believe the scrappy kid with the too-long hair was now a world-class journalist, but also sunburnt tourists, and another chunk of people dressed to impress with designer clothes, manicured nails and hair. We even had a few hipsters in their vintage clothes and nerd glasses.

Mayor Gwen let Erica run the show, seeming to be content with charming people into bidding more on the silent auction items. I hoped what Reese had said wasn’t true—the town council knew how important the Boys and Girls Club was to the community. Many of them had hung out there themselves.

Erica’s comic book club members were taking selfies with their phones and giggling in the back row. Jolene had negotiated extra credit for them with the English teacher if they helped.

Bean had been standing near the table packed with silent auction items, graciously talking to whoever had the courage to come up to him. His publisher had paid for the wine and cheese spread, and also for a lot of my chocolates that Kona and I were slowly putting out on the trays, trying to keep the teens from grabbing them all. Zane had figured out our routine and was taking way more than his share. Kona gave him a flirty smile. Maybe he wasn’t hanging around just for chocolate.

“Zane,” I said. “Did you find out anything about that photo?”

He sent one last look at Kona before focusing on me. “Erica kinda ordered me to drop it this weekend.” Then he gave me a crafty smile.

“But you found it?” I was so excited, I couldn’t stand it. “You found the barn?”

He pulled out his phone and brought it up on the screen. “Erica told me what you said about the direction it faced, and I used Google maps to find the latitude and longitude and match it to the original photo.”

It was hard to see it clearly on his phone, but I recognized the big barn with a huge advertisement for Gable’s Heating and Plumbing. “Whose barn is that?” I asked.

“It’s the old Durham farm,” Zane said. “Denise Photoshopped the ad out and here’s what it looks like now.” He showed me the modified photo. “Once Denise changed the photo, it lost its geotags.”

“Any idea why the principal wouldn’t want that photo to be public?” There wasn’t much out that direction except the housing development that had gone bankrupt and a two-lane road to the next town. Most people drove more miles and took the highway instead. What could have caused the principal to risk everything to get that picture?

Then I got completely distracted when Bean excused himself from his latest fan and headed toward me. “Thanks,” he said, grabbing my hand.

My fingers curled into his. “You’re welcome but—” and then he kissed my cheek and walked to his place in the front of the room to begin his talk.

It wasn’t just a kiss on the cheek like you’d give your great aunt. It was a warm face touch, with cheeks turning and meeting before the kiss. More intimate than many kisses I’d had on the lips. I was stunned.

Bean told great stories from his trips researching the impact of global warming on the different communities of Africa. Even though his often heartbreaking anecdotes were about individuals, he also demonstrated how vulnerable Africa was as a continent, and then made connections to areas of the United States, bringing the reality home.

He also kept meeting my eyes, as if he was talking directly to me. What was going on?

Bean finished his talk and the crowd started lining up for the signing. Erica prepped the books.

Kona moved closer to the silent auction table as the bidding started in earnest. Two women in matching pink suits kept outbidding each other for the five day spa trip. One of them had a blunt haircut that seemed to point right at her huge chin. Her hairdresser must hate her.

My cell phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket.

“Uh-oh.” It was an emergency text notifying me that my dehumidifier was malfunctioning. Shoot! So much for state of the art.

“What?” Kona asked.

I
so
did not need this. “You know that smart alarm feature on the dehumidifier? It’s texting me that the unit is off.”

Panic flittered in my chest at the thought of losing the chocolate we’d worked so hard to make over the last few days. Even with all the sales we’d made today, I could not afford another disaster. “I’ll just go see if it’s something I can fix on my own,” I told Kona.

“Want me to go?” she asked, but her eyes drifted to Zane again.

I smiled. “No, I got it. I’ll be right back.”

The town was quiet as I cut through the alley leading to the back parking lot. Coco greeted me with an urgent “Meow!”

“Right,” I said to her. “Like you need any more food. The whole neighborhood is feeding you, you hussy.”

I unlocked the door and Coco surprised the heck out of me by running right in. What? Had someone trained it to actually go into a building?

“Coco!” I called when it disappeared down the hall. The door slammed behind me with an echoing bang, and I realized the alarm was turned off. After all we’d been through, I couldn’t believe we’d forgotten to turn it on when we’d left.

I could take care of that after I checked my equipment and put Coco back outside. Switching the lights on, I opened the door to my kitchen.

Mayor Gwen was standing by my dehumidifier holding a gun. With a lifeless Reese at her feet.

“G
wen?” I said calmly, as if talking to a crazy person. Which I suppose I was. “What’s going on?” My voice shook as the gun pointing at me grew huge in my mind, like a cartoon. Too bad it was real and wouldn’t push out a little flag that said “bang” instead of a bullet. Had she
shot
Reese? I took a deep breath and looked away from the gun. There was no blood near her.

Gwen tilted her head. “So you don’t know.”

“Know what?” My heart started racing while I tried to figure out how this could be happening. I couldn’t even tell if Reese was alive.

“I saw you talking to Reese and I was sure she’d told you,” she said. The gun in her hand started to point away from me while she considered her miscalculation.

I slid one tiny half step back toward the door. “She didn’t tell me anything, so why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll figure this out?”

The gun zeroed in on me again. “You would have found out eventually,” she said. “You just don’t quit. I didn’t realize you had that in you. Erica maybe. But not you. My mistake.”

“Uh, thanks?” I said. “Is she dead?” I tried unsuccessfully to keep the quaver out of my voice and took another step backward as she glanced down at Reese and gave her a little kick.

Reese groaned and I felt relief sweep through me. Maybe Gwen wasn’t really going to kill us.

“Not yet,” she said. “But you’re going to take care of that.” She shifted to the left, keeping the metal utility table between us.

“But why do you want to kill her?” I couldn’t say the obvious “
Or me?
” out loud.

Her lips tightened. “You two just don’t give up. She got to one of my campaign guys—they told me to watch out for the hangers-on with nothing special about them. I knew I had one on the campaign I couldn’t trust, and sure enough, he told her about my donors.”

“The solar company?” Maybe I could keep her talking long enough for Kona to realize something was wrong.

Her gun hand jerked and I tried something else. “So you pulled out the plug on my equipment? How did you know it would notify me?” I tried to use my peripheral vision to search out anything to use as a weapon, but Kona had thoroughly cleaned, leaving only the heavy pot of caramel on the back burner with a ladle in it and my bottle of gold cocoa butter on the stove.

“You showed it to me when it was installed.” She grimaced. “I have to fake interest in a lot of crap in this town, but that was hard. But like a lot of what I do, it paid off, didn’t it?”

“But how do you know the security code to get into the building tonight?”

“That I had help with,” she said.

“The principal?” He’d been so friendly with Johnny. Had Johnny let him know our backdoor code?

Why was the mayor doing this? It was so extreme. And then the pieces fell into place. The Durham barn was on the way to the mayor’s housing development on the outskirts of town, the one that was practically empty. Then Kona’s list of customer favorites flashed into my mind and I saw the connection. The principal’s favorites were the same as the mayor’s. Oh. My. God. They were having an affair. Denise’s photo had caught the principal’s car driving by the barn near the mayor’s house, not by his own house.

So the principal was driving away from her house at dawn. An affair was enough to kill Denise over? To kill Reese and me as well?

“So you killed Denise because you’re having an affair?” I sounded appalled. “You’re a widow. Why does that matter to you? Wait—did you try to kill me with that truck?” I imagined her driving that black truck, aiming right for me, and rage mixed with my fear.

“I did not kill Denise,” she said. “Peter did that all on his own. The idiot. We wouldn’t be in this mess if he had just thought it through.”

“So was it you or Peter who tried to kill me?” I had to know.

She laughed. “I’ll plead the fifth on that one.”

“Why did you kill Larry?” When she just stared at me, I added, “Surely you can tell me that one thing before you kill me.”

“That scumbag was blackmailing me. Me! After all I’ve done for this town. Could still do . . .” She took a deep breath. “It’s still going to work out. Now pick up the ladle.” She pointed with her gun.

I inched around the table. “So how do you think you’re going to get away with this?”

“Obviously, Reese went over the deep end with your little rivalry.” She talked as if it made sense. “She surprised you while you were cooking and you were forced to kill Reese by hitting her over the head with the ladle in that pot.”

“Really? A ladle?” The irony wasn’t lost on me.

She went on undeterred. “Too bad she shot you as she was falling.”

“Do you really think anyone will fall for that nonsense after what’s recently happened?”

“They’ll believe what I tell them,” she snapped, and then forced herself to calm down. “There weren’t any witnesses to the other murders. But I came with you to check out your kitchen equipment so you wouldn’t be alone, and I’ll tell everyone the whole tragic story.”

“Do you really think Erica or Bean or Leo will give up? They won’t believe any of this.”

Her face grew even colder and I felt fear for anyone who got in her way. “You better hope they do. For their sakes.”

Great. A homicidal maniac was going to be in the United States House of Representatives. It probably wasn’t the first time.

“Most of the people in this town are a bunch of sheep that fall in line. But not you. And this idiot.”

I moved to the stove. “Okay. Now what? She’s all the way over there.”

Her eyes narrowed, not trusting me.

I pretended to attempt to lift the ladle with my left hand. “The caramel got too cold. It’s stuck.”

It took all of my courage to turn my back on her, picking up the bottle of gold cocoa butter in my right hand.

Then I heard a loud hissing sound that scared me to death until I realized it was Coco. She was attacking Gwen’s ankles! I turned and fired the bottle at the center of Gwen’s forehead, as if I was throwing out a runner at first base. It stunned her enough that I had time to pick up a ladle full of burning hot caramel and whip it across the table at her.

She screamed. The gun went off and she dropped it to put both hands to her face. I ran around the table and, using both hands, hit her with the ladle like I was swinging for the fences.

She fell to the floor with a thud.

I dropped my weapon, fumbled with my phone and dialed 911. “Maxine! Send the chief! Send Bobby!”

Gwen moved and I picked up Coco and ran for the back door, realizing that I sounded incoherent. “This is Michelle at Chocolates and Chapters. I need help now! The mayor just tried to kill me!”