The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (9 page)

“And compulsive and ornery and bossy,” I added. “I’ve already got a short list of the people who didn’t like her. We’ll check out each and every one of them.”

The nods were coming faster, and Kate’s left eye twitched. She swallowed hard. “Opportunity. Well, we know I couldn’t have done it, Bea. We left here, and I drove you home, and—”

“And when I got home, EGG was back,” I said. “At least, all their trucks were. I didn’t see any of them; I figured they’d all gone to bed. And I didn’t stick around for breakfast this morning. I guess Noreen missed it.”

“Well, I can vouch for Fiona,” Chandra said, and nodded. “She was in her room listening to a CD of Tibetan monks chanting. You know, while she did her meditation.”

Frustrated, I twirled a wayward strand of my unruly hair. “I wish I’d been paying more attention,” I mumbled. “I wonder if Noreen came home with everyone else.”

“Well, I went home and stayed home.” Kate crossed her arms over her navy sweater. “I was so mad, I couldn’t see straight. I had a little glass of sherry to calm my nerves and I went right to bed. I didn’t work today. I stayed home and enjoyed the day, just like I told all my employees to do.”

“That’s all you need to tell Hank.” In the hope of calming her down, I made eye contact with Kate and refused to look away. “Just the truth. And when he talks to me—and I’m sure he’ll get around to it eventually—I’ll tell him I was with you as soon as you got back from the mainland. I was with you the whole time you were here at the winery, too, and Noreen and her bunch left here before we did. I’ll tell him you dropped me off at home after we left here last night. Then you went home and went to bed. You never had the chance to murder Noreen. Hank will see that. He’ll believe it. He’ll—”

“He’ll slap the cuffs on me and throw me in jail forever and ever!” Kate wailed.

Sure, she was being a little melodramatic, but hey, it’s not like I could blame her. It can’t be easy being a murder suspect. Especially when you’re innocent.

I looked Luella’s way and she got the message and moved to Kate’s side. “There’s an employee lunchroom here at the winery, isn’t there?” I asked Kate. I knew there was; I just wanted to ground Kate in reality. Thank goodness, it worked. She pulled herself out of the panic that gripped her and looked past the tasting bar. “Luella, how about if you take Kate in there and get her a cup of tea.”

“Or a glass of wine,” Luella suggested.

Now that I thought about it, that was the better plan.

“You go do that,” I told them. “Chandra and I will—”

“I’ll look around for clues. And Sleepy!” Chandra said, and she scurried away.

“Good. Fine,” I mumbled to myself once they were gone. “I don’t need someone to hold my hand while I look around the winery to keep me from getting the heebie-jeebies. I am, after all, a New Yorker.”

I told myself not to forget it, and chin high, shoulders back, and brain absolutely refusing to even consider the fact that there was even the teensiest possibility that I could bump into the ghost of the long-dead bootlegger, I proceeded to look around.

It didn’t take long to see that there was nothing out of place in the tasting room or the gift shop. I looked through the fermentation room, too, where a little less than twenty-four hours earlier, we’d discovered the investigators and where Kate and Noreen had had it out.

Nothing.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

It wasn’t like I thought I’d really find anything at Wilder’s. It wasn’t like I wanted to. After all, Noreen and her bunch left the winery before Kate and I had the night before.

That meant that Noreen had been killed somewhere else.

By someone other than Kate.

I left the fermentation room and went into the back hallway, following it past the offices where the accounting people took care of the books, and the packing people handled orders, and the shipping people did their magic to send Wilder’s wine to speciality shops in five different states.

I skirted their offices and headed into the warehouse, feeling along the wall for the light switch and breathing a sigh of relief (Okay, I admit it) when I found it and flicked on the overhead lights to banish the inky shadows.

I didn’t expect to see Chandra jump out of one of them at the far end of the room.

“You’re looking around in the dark?” I asked.

She pressed her back to the door just behind her. “I just thought if I did I might bump into—”

“Sleepy. Yeah, I know.” I hurried over to where Chandra stood, glancing around the warehouse as I did.

In the grand scheme of the beverage business, Wilder’s is definitely considered a small, boutique winery. But the warehouse—which was part of the original winery complex that hadn’t been touched by the fire a few years earlier—was a cavernous space. High ceiling, cement floors, aisle after aisle of metal shelving that rose nearly to the twenty-foot ceiling. Once upon a time, those shelves had been filled with product. These days, with Kate concentrating more on the quality of her wine than the quantity she could produce, most but the shelves nearest to me were empty.

I looked them over anyway, crisscrossing the warehouse from one aisle to the next, and one end to the other. I was all the way over on the far side of the room near where Chandra bounced from foot to foot outside a metal door with a
Do Not Enter
sign on it when I spotted it.

The old metal door was open a fraction of an inch.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I mumbled. “Kate told me once that there’s nothing beyond this door but some old storage rooms that aren’t used anymore.”

“That’s true.” Chandra grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the door we’d come in. “Which means there’s nothing here for us to see. Let’s get out of here.”

“Not so fast!” I untangled myself from her grip. “We owe it to ourselves to check this out. We owe it to Kate.”

With that in mind, I pulled open the metal door, and we found ourselves looking into a smaller room where the walls were made of red brick arranged in a basket-weave pattern. I felt around the wall right inside the door and turned on the lights.

Chandra gasped.

I stood perfectly still, staring at the plasmometer—the piece of equipment I’d seen the ghost hunters leave with the night before—where it lay in pieces on the floor. One side of it was bashed in, the metal dark and twisted, and the glass that had once covered a lens of some sort was broken and scattered through the mess of blood and bone and hair nearby.

My stomach lurched, and my hands shook when I reached for my phone.

I hated to do it. I hated to get Kate more involved. But really, I didn’t have much of a choice.

I called Hank and told him to get over to Wilder’s right away.

  8  

“W
ell, I think we can say it wasn’t a planned murder.” When he examined the plasmometer, Hank’s expression was grim. “The murderer used something that was on hand to kill Ms. Turner. That means it was a crime of passion, something done at the spur of the moment with no planning involved. The killer didn’t bring the weapon with him.”

“Except he did,” I reminded Hank. “This isn’t something that was just hanging around the winery. It’s one of EGG’s ghost-finding devices. Remember, when the ghost getters left here last night, they took this gizmo with them.”

“You’re right! I was so worried about Kate hauling off and punching Ms. Turner, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to anything else.” Hank chewed on the end of the pencil he was using to jot notes in a little spiral-bound notebook. “So you’re saying—”

“They came back. After Kate and I left. And obviously . . .” I glanced at the battered plasmometer and at the blood caked on it. Hank had already called in a forensics team from the state crime bureau, but until they arrived, I knew better than to touch anything. Still, it didn’t take an expert to see the dark, rusty-colored stains on the stone floor around the plasmometer.

Or to know exactly what they were.

I pressed a hand to my stomach. “Noreen came back, and she was killed right here.”

“Looks that way.”

“Well, that’s good for you,” I told him, then, since he gave me a quizzical look, I explained, “Now that you have a crime scene, you can collect evidence. But Kate . . .” After I called Hank, I’d escorted poor, shaken Chandra into the lunchroom, and while I was there, I’d left strict orders with Luella: Don’t let Kate leave the room. The last thing she needed was to see this terrible scene. “She’s going to be very upset,” I said. “Once Kate finds out Noreen was murdered here, she’s going to feel even worse.”

“Unless she already knows.”

“You mean because I called you and the place is swarming with cops and—”

Silly me. Reality hit, and I spun away from the beat-up plasmometer and the spilled blood so that I could prop my fists on my hips and give Hank a look that would have intimidated a lesser man. Since Hank was a foot taller than me, at least one hundred pounds heavier, and had the added advantage of years of experience and a lifetime of law enforcement training, he didn’t exactly shake in his shoes.

But hey, just because I gave up on being intimidating didn’t mean I was any less angry. “You’re out of your mind if you think Kate did this. You know Kate, she’s not the violent type. She’d never have the heart to—”

“Not even if she was plenty mad?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “She
was
plenty mad. You know that. And she had a really good reason to be. But she didn’t kill Noreen because of it. You saw how she handled things last night. She didn’t even want you to arrest Noreen and her bunch, even though they deserved it.”

“Maybe because she figured she’d handle things her own way. Maybe she called Ms. Turner and told her she had a change of heart. Maybe she invited Ms. Turner back here, then when Ms. Turner showed up, maybe Kate was waiting for her. You know, to teach her a lesson.”

Preposterous!

I didn’t bother to say it. Mostly because Hank’s fierce glare told me he wasn’t in the mood for debate. I went with facts instead.

“Kate and I were here for maybe fifteen minutes after you left last night,” I told him. “We went up to the office, made sure nothing there had been touched, did a quick look around the rest of the place. Then we left here together. She dropped me off at home and then she went home herself. She went home, and she stayed there.”

Hank rolled back on his heels. “And you know this because you were with her the entire night? Or because you sat up all night long and looked out your front window so you could keep an eye on her house?”

When I glared at him, I narrowed my eyes just for good measure. “I know it because Kate told me that’s what happened.”

“Uh-huh.” It was amazing how much mistrust and disbelief could be packed into two little syllables. “When you’ve been around people as long as I have—”

“This isn’t people, Hank. It’s Kate.” In an effort to keep the crime scene as uncontaminated as possible, we stepped out of the small, brick-walled room and back into the warehouse, and my voice ricocheted from the high ceilings and the empty metal shelving that surrounded us. “You know Kate wouldn’t do this.”

“I only know what the facts tell me.” He eyed me the way I imagined he checked out the groups of rowdy college students who were known to visit the island on weekends. “So tell me some facts, Bea. What did Kate tell you about Ms. Turner?”

“She told me Noreen was on the island last year. That Noreen and her bunch destroyed a crop of grapes Kate had just planted.”

“She say anything about what she was going to do about it?”

I lifted my chin. “That’s just how people talk when they’re mad,” I said. “It’s just what people say when they need to let off steam. It doesn’t mean—”

“What did Kate say exactly?”

My stomach went cold. “She said she’d like to see Noreen at the bottom of the lake. Or in one of the fermenting tanks. But that doesn’t mean anything, Hank. You know that. You know people—”

“You said it yourself: This isn’t people. This is Kate. And she’s not the type who says things she doesn’t mean.”

“Well, she’s not the only one who talked like that,” I added quickly, before any of these crazy ideas could settle in his head. “Jacklyn Bichot—she used to be one of the ghost getters, and she said she wants to boil Noreen in oil. But she wasn’t on the island the night of the murder.”

Hank made a note of it. “I’ll need to talk to her anyway and—”

Before Hank had a chance to finish, every light in the winery went out and we were plunged into darkness.

It wasn’t so much scary as it was startling, and I caught my breath, then let it out with a little whoop of surprise when the intercom box on the wall next to me buzzed.

“Don’t panic. It’s not a problem!” Static punctuated Kate’s words. “The lights are computer-controlled. At this time of night, they only stay on for an hour at a time when they’re turned on manually. I’ll go to my office and—”

“No!” Hank talked before he thought, then grumbled a curse, flicked on his flashlight, and aimed it at the intercom so he could press the proper button to talk. “No, Kate. Don’t leave the lunchroom. Bea will go up to your office and take care of the lights.” Even before he’d eased his pressure on the button, he’d already grabbed my arm and started dragging me along through the dark.

“Just touch the space bar on my keyboard,” Kate told me, her voice growing smaller as we made our way out of the warehouse. “The screen will come on. Click
override
and the lights will come back on and stay on.”

In a matter of moments, Hank and I were outside the warehouse and back in the hallway that led past the administrative offices of the winery.

“You know where Kate’s office is?” Hank asked.

I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “I’ll find it.”

“Here.” He pressed the flashlight into my hand. “The last thing I need is for you to bump into something. Then we’d have even more drama on our hands.”

He turned and stalked off through the darkness in the direction of the lunchroom. I went the other way, following the thin beam of the flashlight to Kate’s office. Down the hallway, up the stairs. I’d be there in just a minute.

If, like Hank said, I didn’t bump into something.

And if that something wasn’t something I couldn’t really bump into because it was something that wasn’t a real something.

A shiver crawled up my back. Is it any wonder? I’d just tripped over the scene of the murder. I’d just discovered a pool of blood and the weapon used to club Noreen to death. I had a perfectly good excuse for being creeped out.

And it had nothing to do with ghosts.

“No Sleepy,” I reminded myself in no uncertain terms. “No ghosts. No—” I opened Kate’s office door, turned on the lights, looked around the office, and stopped dead in my tracks.

No telling what you might learn about a friend when you’re in that friend’s office and she never expected you to be there. Not before her, anyway.

The thought burning through my brain, I overrode the computer command to turn on the lights in the winery, looked around again just to be sure I wasn’t mistaken (I wasn’t), and hurried back downstairs.

I needed to talk to Kate.

Fast.

Before Hank caught on to what I’d just figured out.

*   *   *

I wasn’t sure who looked more miserable, Kate, on Luella’s right, whose breaths were coming hard and fast. Or Chandra, on Luella’s left, who wept uncontrollably as she took tiny sips of wine from one of the tasting glasses used out at the bar.

I offered Luella my commiseration with a small smile as I zipped past, my attention fixed on the fancy-schmancy latte and espresso machine across the room, the one Kate had installed in the employee lunchroom just a few months before. It was the same sort of machine found in high-end coffeehouses, and from what I’d heard, Kate’s employees were thrilled with it. Why wouldn’t they be? Kate had unveiled the machine at an employee breakfast and told them it was there for them to enjoy because they worked hard and deserved to be pampered.

That’s just the kind of person Kate is.

Good-hearted, though she is disinclined to show it.

Considerate, even though she never makes a big deal out of it.

Kate is aware of how morale affects production and how production affects the bottom line. She’s demanding, too, about everything from how the labels are placed on the wine bottles to how each customer is greeted at the front door. This was her family business. It was Kate’s name on the label of every bottle of wine that left the building. She had a right to expect hard work and to demand a quality product.

Her attention to detail is just one of the things I admire about Kate. She has a lot of determination. And a great sense of style, for another thing. And though she has been known to push me to my limits when it comes to things like always checking her text messages and always worrying about how she looks and always figuring (though she never comes right out and says it) that she’s a Wilder so she’s just a little bit better than everyone else on the island, Kate is, deep down, a moral and ethical person, and a hard worker, too. More than once, I’d heard stories about how she’d get right down there in the trenches with her employees when they needed help with everything from packing boxes to unloading trucks.

In other words, Kate Wilder was not exactly the stuff killers are made of.

I forced myself to repeat the thought at the same time I grabbed a coffee mug (Kate’s orders—no paper or Styrofoam cups allowed in her lunchroom) and fumbled with the controls on the front of the machine. Truth be told, it wasn’t rocket science. That didn’t keep me from grumbling a curse.

“Kate!” I spun away from the coffee machine and looked at my friend. “Can you show me how to do this? I need an espresso and I need one bad.”

From across the room, Kate stared at me.

“Kate!” I called again.

My appeal sank in, and though she shook herself out of her daze, when she got up and walked over, she still reminded me of a zombie. Glassy-eyed. Stiff. Out of it.

But then, I guess shock does weird things to people.

I waited until we stood side by side at the coffee machine before I said another word.

“We need to talk.”

“Sure. Yes.” Kate’s voice was clogged with tears, and when she pushed the proper buttons on the machine, her hands shook. “But you don’t have to tell me. I know what’s going on. There’s only one reason every member of the Put-in-Bay police force would be here. Noreen . . . she . . .” Kate swallowed hard. “It happened here, didn’t it?”

The coffee machine whooshed and glugged. I waited until it was done with its gyrations and my cup was filled. I grabbed it and a couple packs of sweetener and headed over to a table on the other side of the room, one far away from Luella and Chandra and the fresh-faced police officer who stood near the door and eyed us as if he’d just seen our faces on a flyer in the post office.