A Plain Vanilla Murder, page 12
Ruby had cooked dinner for Amy and Kate the night before and was bubbling over with happy news. Grace’s tonsils were much better. Kate had felt the baby move. Amy got promoted to head vet technician at the Hill Country Animal Clinic. If I could have gotten a word in edgewise, I might have mentioned Carl Fairlee’s suicide. Ruby knows Maggie, of course, although I’m not sure she had ever met Maggie’s ex-husband, now deceased. But she was so fizzy-full of good tidings that I decided not to darken her day.
After a few minutes, Ruby finished her report and went back to her shop to light a stick of incense and put on some music, and before long, both the fragrance and the melody were wafting into my shop. Today’s scent turned out to be a sunny citrus, which (according to Ruby) encourages customers to feel energetic and generous. The CD she was playing—something light and rhythmic called “Rainbow Fields in the Sun”—would no doubt reinforce the mood. Looked like we were in for a happy day.
Until Beverly Selms arrived, just before noon, with some startling news.
SHE SHOWED UP AT AN especially inopportune moment.
I was ringing up items for Mrs. Birkett, the senior Crockett Street resident, who had just purchased a half-dozen vanilla beans, four ounces of cinnamon sticks, and a mixed assortment of whole spices. At the same time, I was answering the phone, taking reservations for lunch at Thyme for Tea, and keeping an eye on Ruby’s shop while Ruby (harried, but still as cheerful as a ray of sunshine) was managing the seating in the tea room. Jasmine, our current server, was tending to the dozen already-seated customers. Cass was in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on today’s menu items: a choice of seafood or vegan quiche; a cup of tomato-basil soup; fresh greens tossed with a vanilla vinaigrette and topped with feta, cucumber, red onion, tomato, pecans, and fresh mint from the garden; and carrot cake with a vanilla cream-cheese frosting. To die for. Really.
“China, I wonder if you would have time to come and see me,” Mrs. Birkett said, in her high-pitched, scratchy voice. “I have a new renter in the little house next door, and something about her is worrying me. I’d like to talk to you about it.”
The old lady doesn’t always hear very well, and I know that her arthritis sometimes bothers her. But she still manages the big house and the smaller rental cottage she inherited from her grandmother, and her mind is as agile as ever. She’s not the kind of person who worries without a good reason.
“I’d love to,” I said, “but this is a pretty frantic time right now. Could we—”
“Wonderful.” Her old blue eyes rested on me with an odd intensity. “How about breakfast tomorrow? We’ll have ourselves a quiet, leisurely hour before we start our busy days.”
When I hesitated, she nodded at the vanilla beans she had just purchased. “I’m planning to make my famous strawberry vanilla breakfast omelet. Will that tempt you?”
The bell over the door—the closed door—rang peremptorily. Our ghost and Mrs. Birkett go back a long way, to the time when Mrs. Birkett was a little girl and Annie was in her last years.
With a chuckle, I pointed up to the bell. “You and Annie are ganging up on me.” It was only partially a joke. I have learned to take Annie quite seriously. “Would eight o’clock be too early?”
“Eight will do very well, thank you.” She gathered up her bag as the phone rang again. “See you tomorrow morning, dear.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I promised. I waved goodbye as I picked up the phone, gave the caller a quick recap of our luncheon menu, and jotted down two more names on the reservation form.
That’s when I looked up again and saw Beverly Selms standing at the counter in front of me, crisp and well-groomed and every inch the real estate broker in a navy jacket and slacks and a cream-colored shell with a silky red scarf. She was not smiling.
“Oh, hi, Beverly,” I said brightly. “I’ll be right with you. I just have to take these reservations to Ruby.”
I scooted off, handed Ruby the names, and got back behind the counter just in time to pick up the phone again and log another reservation, this one a single. The name—Karen Taylor—sounded familiar but I didn’t have time to ponder. I jiggled my eyebrows apologetically at Beverly, took the name to Ruby, and was back again, breathlessly.
“Sorry for the interruptions,” I said. “Can I help you find something?”
Which was not the right question. Beverly didn’t look like she wanted to shop. She looked like she wanted to fire somebody, and the sooner the better.
“I’ve caught you at a bad time, I know,” she said, trying to downgrade her scowl to a frown. She wasn’t very successful. “But there’s something I really think you ought to hear.”
“Oh?” I said uneasily. Judging from the doomsday look on her face, I wondered whether I should duck and cover. The phone rang again, but this time, feeling a little cranky, I took the initiative.
“Please hold,” I said, and punched the button. “So sorry,” I said to Beverly. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“What’s wrong,” she said in a grim voice, “is that my husband is being questioned.”
I didn’t recoil or gasp in surprise, but that was primarily because I was confused. “Questioned?” I asked blankly. “By whom? About what?”
Her look said that she had expected me to be more astute. “Why, by the police, of course. About Carl Fairlee. A detective named Miller came to Dan’s office this morning and asked a lot of questions. Dan says he was very rude.”
“Uh-oh,” I said, under my breath. In my professional experience, the police are occasionally rude. But they are not usually rude to important, well-connected people like Dan Selms unless they have reason to suspect—
“Uh-oh is right, damn it!” Beverly’s eyes flashed. “The detective asked all kinds of irrelevant questions about Dan’s relationship with Carl, their plant-collecting business, their rivalry, and that ugliness over Carl’s greenhouse.” Her eyebrows registered contempt for such nosiness. “Why, he even wanted to know where Dan was the night Carl died.”
“The detective was checking your husband’s alibi?” Now I was surprised. If that’s what he was doing, it obviously meant that the cops now believed that Fairlee—
“Yes. Which is absolutely, unequivocally outrageous.” Beverly rolled her eyes. “I can vouch for him, of course. All they have to do is ask me.”
I am too well-mannered to point out that a wife’s corroboration of a husband’s whereabouts don’t count for terribly much in the grand scheme of things. And anyway, Beverly was too irate to hear that. So instead, I started to say what had not yet been put into words.
“If the detective is checking alibis, that must mean the police have reason to think that Dr. Fairlee did not—”
I didn’t get to finish.
“Exactly. He did not kill himself. After asking Dan all those snoopy questions and treating him as if he had pulled the trigger, the detective finally announced that Carl Fairlee was murdered. Murdered! Apparently somebody shot him and tried to make it look like suicide.”
“No kidding,” I breathed.
“No kidding.” Beverly pulled her dark eyebrows together. “So they have fastened on poor Dan as a person of . . .” She waved her hand impatiently. “A person of consideration, or something like that. I don’t remember the term exactly.”
“A person of interest,” I said. I stared at Beverly for a moment. From Maggie, I knew there had been bad blood between Dan Selms and Carl Fairlee, going back a couple of years. And McQuaid’s story about Dan’s part in the fiasco of the greenhouse was fresh in my mind. When it came right down to it, I wasn’t surprised that the police were considering Beverly’s husband as a person of interest. If I were advising him, I’d tell him to start looking for a lawyer. A criminal lawyer.
But all that glimmered out of my mind when I thought of Maggie.
“Murdered!” I let out my breath. “Oh, poor Maggie. This will be so dreadful for her.”
Beverly’s lips were compressed into a taut line. “I don’t know why you’d say that, China. She and Carl are divorced. And if you’re thinking of the children, murder might be easier for them than suicide. At least they would know that their father didn’t desert them.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said flatly. Whatever had happened, whoever had killed him, their father was dead. That loss would haunt them forever, even after the killer had been caught, brought to trial, and sentenced.
But Beverly had thought of something else. “What will really make it hard for them,” she said, straightening her shoulders, “is if it turns out that she is the one who killed him.”
“She?” I blinked. “She who?”
Her reply dripped pity for my thick-headedness. “Why, Maggie, of course. Who else?”
“Maggie?” Naughty me—I hadn’t even guessed. “But why in the world would you think—”
“Why?” she repeated. “Really, I am surprised at you. Weren’t you a criminal lawyer? Isn’t the spouse—in this case, the ex-spouse—always the first to be suspected? And Maggie certainly isn’t known for her gentle personality. She and Carl battled like a couple of demented prizefighters over the divorce settlement, and especially over those orchids. Why, she went to the campus and raised hell with him at a faculty meeting, calling him every name in the book, right in front of everybody. She was hysterical. Dan said that if she’d had a gun with her, she would probably have shot poor Carl on the spot.”
“It wasn’t about orchids,” I said. I remembered when Maggie had confronted him on campus. It had happened when she was distraught about having to sell the house out from under the children. She felt they ought to be able to continue there until both kids were out of high school. And while it wasn’t very smart, she confronted him at the faculty meeting because he wouldn’t return her phone calls or her emails.
But Beverly was going on. “In fact, Logan Gardner—Carl’s research assistant—told Dan that it was Maggie who broke into the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago and stole that rare orchid of Carl’s. Logan saw her skulking around the building that night. Dan has told the police, so they’ll probably be onto her right away.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Rare orchid?”
“Oh, maybe you didn’t hear about that. It’s called a ‘demon orchid,’ because the central part of the blossom looks like the face of a devil and the pink-striped petals look like claws. It was collected from the jungles of Colombia. It’s endangered, and quite, quite rare. Logan says it was Maggie who stole it.”
“If it’s endangered, how did Carl get it?” I asked, thinking of CITES and the prohibition against orchid export and import. Had somebody smuggled it into the country and sold it to Carl? Or had Carl himself done the smuggling?
Beverly chuckled wryly. “Dan asked Carl that question, too, but he didn’t get an answer. Still, it’s worth saying that Carl refused to allow the campus police to look into the theft—probably because he didn’t want anybody asking how he came by that orchid.” She pulled her brows together. “I’m sure that Dan related all of this to the detective. I hope the cops search Maggie’s greenhouses. I’ll bet they’ll find it.”
I took a breath. “Maggie can be a little unpleasant sometimes.” An understatement, and I knew it. I hurried on. “But she would never break into somebody’s greenhouse and steal a rare orchid. She’s just not that kind of person.”
But the minute the words were out of my mouth, my lawyerly self was reconsidering. Maggie was the kind of person who might steal an orchid if she thought the orchid had been smuggled and she intended to set the matter right. She was also perfectly capable of blowing her cool, losing her temper, and hurling hysterical threats. Yes, she might steal an orchid. But that didn’t mean she would murder somebody, not even her ex-husband.
I was about to say this to Beverly when her cell phone chimed. She took it out of her jacket pocket. “My timer,” she explained, turning it off. “A reminder that I have an appointment to show a house.” She looked pointedly at the hold button blinking on my phone. “And I’m sure you have things to do, too. I apologize for taking up so much of your time. But I thought you ought to know that Carl didn’t kill himself.”
“Thank you.” I managed a smile. Beverly was wrong about Maggie, but I was glad she had let me know what was going on. We said goodbye, and I pounced on the hold button. “Hello,” I said breathlessly. “Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” a low, rich voice said. “Hi, China. It’s me—Kate Rodriguez.”
“Oh, Kate!” I said, stricken. “Sorry to keep you on hold. I got sidetracked by something here at the shop.” Something like a friend being accused of theft—and murder. Should I call Maggie and offer a shoulder to cry on? She probably needed more than that.
Kate cleared her throat. “I apologize for calling at a busy time, but I was wondering if we could get together—soon.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to. I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on your baby.”
“Yeah.” Kate sighed. “Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about, China. Amy and I had dinner with Ruby last night, and she told us what you said about having an agreement with Ron. The baby’s father.”
“Oh, that.” I was paying attention now.
“Right. That.” She hesitated. “The thing is . . . well, we don’t have an agreement. And Ron is getting a little pushy about the baby. I’m at the point where—” She was trying to sound casual, but I could hear the concern under her words. “I think I need some advice. Could we, like, just talk?”
“Of course,” I said sympathetically. “When?”
“As soon as possible. And please, don’t mention this to Ruby—or Amy. I don’t want to . . . well, worry them.” Her voice darkened. “At least, not until I know whether there’s something to worry about.”
“Well, then, how about coming out to my house after supper tonight? It’ll be quiet there, and we can talk as long as we like. Seven, seven-fifteen, maybe?” For supper, I was planning to experiment with a balsamic vanilla sauce that would dress up a simple baked chicken dish. The meal ought to be quick and easy to assemble. I’d be out of the kitchen by the time Kate showed up.
“Terrific.” Kate huffed out a relieved sigh. “I can’t thank you enough, China.”
“Thank me when we’ve finished talking,” I cautioned, and she laughed, nervously. “See you this evening.”
I hung up the phone and went back to work—or rather, I tried to. But my mind wasn’t on it. I was chewing on several possibilities and wondering what, if anything, I could or should do about them.
Specifically, I was considering whether I should call Maggie and offer not just my sympathy but my help, although at the moment I couldn’t think what sort of help I should offer. Although I certainly didn’t want to get into the middle of a murder investigation, I couldn’t help feeling that I should be doing something to support her. But what? Should I go out to the garden center and talk to her?
I was thinking about all this when the door opened and a woman came in. “Hi,” she said, pausing in front of the counter. She had assertive hazel eyes, a firm jaw, and a square face bare of makeup and neatly framed by short, straight brown hair. She wore jeans, a bright green cotton roll-sleeve blouse, and tennis shoes. “I called in a lunch reservation a little while ago. I’m Karen Taylor.”
“Oh, right.” So that was why her name had sounded familiar. “You attended our vanilla workshop yesterday. You’re the nurse, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “That’s right. I work at the Adams County Hospital, in the ER. After I left here yesterday, I went on the computer and looked at some of the medicinal research you mentioned.” She gave me a rueful grin. “I also found a ton of hype, of course. People are touting vanilla as God’s great gift to humankind. A cure for gout and arthritis, better than Prozac for depression, even a treatment for sickle-cell anemia.” She tilted her head. “But I also read that our stomach enzymes destroy the main chemical, vanillin, which means that it only works in test tubes. If it’s to have any effect at all, it will have to be modified before it can be useful to humans.”
I was impressed. People don’t always ask the right questions about the medicinal information they find online, some of which is way over the top and unreliable. Karen Taylor was clearly an exception.
“I’m glad you’re interested enough to sort out what’s credible and what can’t be trusted,” I said. “But until there’s more research . . .”
“Oh, yes, we always need more research, don’t we?” We both chuckled. “Actually,” she added, “it was my daughter who was interested in vanilla. Her curiosity prompted mine.” She gave me an odd little smile, half-forlorn. “I have come for lunch, but I was also hoping to get a better look at your vanilla plant. I’m thinking of buying one of my own. As a reminder.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that last remark, but I returned the smile. “I’m sorry, Ms. Taylor,” I said. “I took it out to Sonora after the workshop.”
“Oh, please. Call me Karen.” She cocked her head. “Sonora is the garden center you were talking about, isn’t it? Owned by Maggie Walker?”
“Yes, that’s the place.” I smiled. “My vanilla plant thinks it’s heaven.”
“I’m not sure how long I’ll be in Pecan Springs. I’m at the hospital on a temporary assignment. But the place where I’m staying—just a few blocks down the street, actually—has a greenhouse window in the kitchen. I’d love to have a small vanilla plant.”
“Then you’ll want to see what Maggie has,” I replied. “In fact, I was just thinking of going out to Sonora. Would you like to go with me?”
“That would be wonderful!” she said eagerly. “What time?”
