The Pumpkin Muffin Murder (17 page)

“They’ve questioned her, though,” Jenna said. “How stupid is that? Dana wouldn’t hurt Logan.”

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Barbara agreed.

“Right now, the police don’t even know how Logan died,” Phyllis said. Chief Whitmire hadn’t told her not to discuss the case, so she didn’t see anything wrong with sharing what she knew with Dana’s friends. Of course, what she knew didn’t actually add up to very much, she reminded herself. Not even the proverbial hill of beans, in fact. She went on, “The autopsy was still going on when I talked to the chief.”

“Did he call you down there to fill you in on what was going on?” Kendra asked. “You work for the police as a consultant of some sort, don’t you, Phyllis?”

Carolyn scoffed. “She would if Chief Whitmire had any sense! The police wouldn’t ever solve any murders around here if it wasn’t for Phyllis’s help.”

“Do you really think Logan’s death was murder?” Barbara asked. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, as if the question bothered her.

As well it might, Phyllis suddenly realized. Barbara’s husband, Ben, was a business rival of Logan Powell’s, she recalled. She had heard Logan threatening to kill Ben Loomis the day before in the park, when Phyllis had accidentally eavesdropped on Logan’s phone conversation. Maybe Ben had decided to strike first.

Of course, right after that, Logan had mentioned the golf game he and Ben were scheduled to play. The so-called threat had been nothing but a joke. Logan had said so himself.

But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the banter masked a real feud going on between the two men over that NorCenTex Development deal. That was something she could look into, Phyllis thought.

If
she were investigating the case, and
if
there really was a case to investigate.

She knew she was grasping at straws. Logan’s alleged affair was a much better motive for murder than some nebulous real estate deal.

Those thoughts flashed through Phyllis’s mind. Barbara was looking at her, waiting for an answer to the question she had asked. Phyllis said, “I don’t know. No one does, at this point. We’ll have to wait until they find out the cause of death.”

“Well, they ought to let us in to see Dana at the hospital,” Jenna declared angrily. “We’re her friends, and they don’t have any right to keep us from visiting her.”

“Maybe they’ll let her go home tomorrow. I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave her something to make her sleep after Detective Largo finished questioning her.”

Taryn spoke up, asking, “Do we need to see about getting her a lawyer?”

Barbara nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Her rights need to be protected.” She looked around at the others. “I don’t know any defense attorneys, though.”

Phyllis did: Juliette Yorke. The woman was from back east somewhere, but she seemed like a highly competent lawyer. She had been involved in a couple of the cases that had ensnared Phyllis.

“I can recommend someone, if it comes to that,” Phyllis told the four teachers. “Right now, though, I think we all need to just wait and see what happens over the next couple of days. It might not look good for Dana if she rushed right out and retained a defense attorney.”

“No, I suppose not,” Barbara said. “If there’s anything we can do to help her, though, we’re certainly willing.” The other three women nodded.

“I’m sure she knows that,” Phyllis said. “Once she’s released from the hospital, one of you might even want to go and stay with her for a while.”

“I could do that,” Jenna said without hesitation.

“So could I,” Taryn said, and Kendra nodded, too. Barbara was the only one of the four who was married, Phyllis recalled. The three single women would have an easier time of it if they wanted to drop everything and help out a friend.

“Do you know if she has any relatives around here?” Phyllis asked.

“Not any close ones,” Barbara replied. “Some cousins, I think. But Dana’s folks are dead, and she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“And she and Logan didn’t have any children,” Jenna added.

Phyllis remembered Dana mentioning that. She said, “It sounds like she’s liable to need all of her friends, then.”

“We’ll be there for her,” Carolyn said.

There wasn’t much else to be said, at least not about Dana and Logan. The talk turned to the festival instead, and Phyllis told the visitors how she and Sam had driven by the park a short time earlier and found it more crowded than ever.

“Gawkers,” Barbara said, tight-lipped with disapproval. “They just want to see the place where a man died.”

Phyllis said, “I’m sure that’s why some of them are there, but the afternoon usually has the biggest crowds at something like a harvest festival. Some people probably don’t even know about Logan yet.”

“I’ll bet most of them do,” Carolyn said.

Phyllis had to agree with that. “But as Sam pointed out to me,” she said, “they still have to donate their canned goods to get in, no matter why they’re there.”

Barbara nodded. “There’s that to consider, I suppose. A big crowd means there’ll be plenty of food to deliver on Thanksgiving, I hope.”

“And a bigger cleanup in the morning,” Jenna added with a smile. “The trash collectors will be busy picking up everything that people leave behind.”

Phyllis knew that to be true, as well. Anytime there was a large crowd anywhere, there was trash to be picked up.

“What about those other scarecrows we made?” Kendra asked. “Dana was going to get them in the morning and store them for next year’s festival. Now, though . . .”

She didn’t have to finish her sentence. They all knew what she meant. Dana wouldn’t be able to pick up the scarecrows and probably wouldn’t want to, even if she could. She probably wouldn’t want to ever lay eyes on them again.

“I don’t mind pickin’ ’em up,” Sam volunteered. “You think there’s room in the toolshed for ’em, Phyllis?”

“I think we can make room if there’s not,” she said.

“And I’ll be responsible for them,” Carolyn offered. “If you’re sure that’s all right, Phyllis.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Phyllis said with a smile. “That way none of you ladies will have to bother with them, and they ought to be safe in the shed.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Barbara said. “Thank you.” She looked around at Carolyn and Sam. “All of you. I’m afraid Logan’s death has really thrown things for a loop, and it’s going to take some time to sort it all out. But if there’s anything we can do to make it easier for Dana and help her get through it, I’d like to.”

The others all nodded. Their concern for their friend was touching, Phyllis thought.

She just hoped that before all this was over, what Dana would really need to get through it wouldn’t be the services of a good defense attorney like Juliette Yorke.

T
he air the next morning was still cool and crisp, with enough of a north wind to carry away most of the pollution that drifted in from Dallas and Fort Worth and even from as far away as Houston. The deep blue color of the sky was broken here and there by small, puffy clouds as white as snow. It was beautiful fall weather in Texas.

Phyllis and Sam skipped church in the morning to go collect the scarecrows from the park. When they got there, a crew of inmates in orange and white coveralls from the county jail was already at work cleaning up the trash left over from the festival, under the watchful eyes of a couple of deputies. Mike had worked on cleanup details like that from time to time, Phyllis knew, but he didn’t like it. He preferred being out on patrol where there were more opportunities to actually help people.

There were a handful of cars parked in the lot. Phyllis saw some children down around the playground equipment by the lake, and she spotted an elderly couple who appeared to be walking for exercise on the opposite shore.

She and Sam qualified as an elderly couple, she mused. There hadn’t been any more talk about that whole boyfriend-girlfriend matter, but as far as she was concerned, it was settled and didn’t need any more discussion. They would continue to take things slowly. That was just the opposite of someone like Eve, who had been known to comment more than once that she had only a certain amount of time left on this earth and she meant to make the most of it. Phyllis could see the logic in that approach, but it just didn’t fit her personality. And she was too old to change now.

“We don’t have to do anything with the hay bales, do we?” Sam asked as they got out of the pickup.

“No, I assume they’re the responsibility of whoever provided them,” Phyllis said. “I know there’s not room for them and the scarecrows in our toolshed.”

They came to the spot where the hay bale had been moved down to the dogtrot. Phyllis pointed it out to Sam, who paused and squinted as he looked back and forth from where he stood to the cabin.

“Seems like a long way for a little thing like Miz Powell to haul a bale of hay,” he said after a moment.

“I pointed out that same thing to Chief Whitmire. He didn’t seem to put much stock in it, though. He just said that desperate people are sometimes stronger than you think they would be.”

“Well, I suppose he’s right about that. If he wasn’t, you wouldn’t hear about mothers liftin’ cars off their kids.”

“True,” Phyllis said. “I still can’t see Dana doing it.”

“Neither can I, to be honest. I guess this bale was as close to the cabin as any of ’em, come to think of it, if you wanted to dress a dead man up as a scarecrow and set him up down there.”

“How do we know he was dead?” Phyllis asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe Logan was still alive when he put on those old clothes. Maybe it was his idea.”

“I can’t see why he’d want to do that.”

“Neither can I,” she admitted. “But at this point we can’t rule out any possibilities.”

“You’re right,” Sam said. “Like ol’ Sherlock Holmes, you just eliminate the
im
possible and see what you got left.”

Phyllis didn’t like being compared to Sherlock Holmes. For one thing, she thought she’d look ridiculous in a deerstalker hat, and for another, she had no interest in using cocaine.

She couldn’t help but wonder, though, what Holmes would have made of a dead man dressed up like a scarecrow stuffed with one of her muffins. If in fact it was one of her muffins. She had e-mailed her pumpkin muffin recipe to Detective Largo the day before but hadn’t heard anything back. Not that she really expected to hear back from Detective Largo.

It took them about half an hour to pile all eleven scarecrows into the back of Sam’s pickup. When Phyllis looked at them, she couldn’t help but be reminded of what she had said a couple of days earlier when they saw the scarecrows in the back of Dana’s SUV at the elementary school. Like a pile of bodies, she had described them, and the remark had proven to be grimly prophetic, though only one of the scarecrows had turned out to be a body.

So far, Phyllis reminded herself. If this were a movie or a TV show or a best-selling thriller with a hundred chapters, none of them more than four pages long, Logan would turn out to be just the first victim of a madman known as the Scarecrow Killer who taunted the authorities through the media while frustrating the efforts of a beautiful, dauntless female FBI agent and a rumpled but ruggedly handsome journalist to catch him. . . .

This was none of those things, though, and Phyllis hoped and prayed that there wouldn’t be any more bodies dressed like scarecrows.

A car door closed nearby, breaking into Phyllis’s thoughts, and a familiar voice said, “Hi, Mrs. Newsom.”

She looked over to see Jenna Grantham coming toward them. “Good morning,” Phyllis said. “What are you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d stop by and see if you needed any help with those scarecrows,” Jenna said. She nodded toward the stack of overall-clad figures in the back of Sam’s pickup. “I see you’ve already got them, though.”

“That’s right. But thank you.”

“I’m supposed to meet Barbara, Kendra, and Taryn at the hospital, too. We’re going to try to see Dana again. Now that we know she’s there, I don’t think Barbara will take no for an answer.” Jenna smiled. “She’s really stubborn about getting what she wants.”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Phyllis cautioned. “If Dana’s still in the hospital, she’s probably under a police guard.”

“Really?” Jenna shook her head. “She’s really a . . . a suspect? That just seems so crazy to me.”

“To me, too,” Phyllis said. “The police should have the results of the autopsy by now, though. Maybe it found something that will clear Dana’s name.”

“Gee, I hope so.” Jenna opened her car door and lifted a hand. “Well, I’ll see you. Two more days of school this week, then the Thanksgiving break. I’m ready for it, too.”

“Oh? You have big plans?”

“No.” A wistful tone came into Jenna’s voice as she went on. “No, not really. I don’t have any family around here—I’m from Wisconsin—and I can’t afford to fly back up there just for a few days.”