Scone Cold Dead (21 page)

“And applying for Victor's job gives you an excuse to look into it. Does it occur to you that it also might make you a threat to the killer?”

She sighed heavily. “I
have
to do this, Dan. These people are my friends. My family. I spent eight years with some of them. Imagine having the same roommate all the way through college and double it. You don't just abandon someone you've been that close to, even if you may have had a few differences with them along the way.”

“Okay. Okay, yeah, I see that.” He reached out to run one hand down the length of her arm. “Just be careful. Please? And if you need help—”

She came up on her toes and kissed him on the lips, cutting off the flow of words. “I'll call you if I need backup,” she promised. “I will. Trust me.”

 

 

“You sure this is what you want?” Sherri asked.

“Positive. Thanks for the lift.”

The end of Sherri's shift had coincided with Sandy's release from jail. When he'd asked for a ride to Fallstown Motor Lodge, she could hardly say no. She had been surprised, though, that there was a vacancy. She'd been under the impression that all the rooms were filled . . . with members of
Strathspey
.

“Look, Sandy—”

“No. Thanks, but no. I'm not comfortable going back to Liss's house. Not until I sort out how I feel about Zara.”

“I don't get it. Liss says that letter was written more than a year ago.” This was not the first time Sherri had mentioned that salient fact.

“No, you
don't
get it.” Sandy's face was a mask of misery. “It isn't
when
she wrote the letter that matters. It's that I didn't automatically trust her to have an explanation. I'm the one who failed her, not the other way around. I'm still failing her.”

“Sheesh, Sandy! Get over it. If there was ever a time to stick together, this is it. There's still a murderer loose, or had you forgotten?”

“I can't think about this now. I've . . . just . . . thanks for the ride over here, Sherri, but I'd like to be alone now.” He all but shoved her out of the room and he did slam the door. She heard the locks engage.

Shaking her head, Sherri gave up and left him to his own devices. At least she could phone Liss and tell her where he was. If Mr. Carrier had already let her know that the charges had been dropped, she'd be wondering why Sandy hadn't returned to her place yet. She'd be worrying about him.

With her hand on the door handle of her truck, Sherri glanced thoughtfully at the motel. Was there another reason Sandy didn't want to return to Moosetookalook? Gordon Tandy sure thought the dancer knew more than he was saying. And maybe, just maybe, with lots of time alone to think, Sandy had figured something out while he was sitting in that jail cell.

Sherri toyed with the idea of going back and confronting him, but she was ready for a little time away from the case herself. He was probably just brooding about Zara anyway. Love! It sure could mess up the thought processes.

Glancing at her watch, Sherri fixed her mind on Adam. It was three thirty on a Friday afternoon. If she hurried, she'd have a whole hour to play with her son before supper.

Chapter Sixteen

B
y seven Friday evening, Liss gave up on hearing from Sandy. He wasn't going to contact her. He didn't want to talk to her.

Tough. She had a few things to say to him and this was the ideal time. Lee Annie was in the library with the door closed, reading. Zara had gone up to her room right after supper, pleading a headache.

Liss punched in Sandy's cell number but he had turned off his phone. Muttering to herself, she called the office at Fallstown Motor Lodge. She had received reports from both Mr. Carrier and Sherri. She knew where Sandy was staying. She was also well acquainted with the owner of the motel, and she'd recently sent enough business his way that he barely balked when she asked him to keep ringing Sandy's room until he answered. She didn't want voice mail. She wasn't about to leave a message with the desk clerk. She wanted to talk to her “best pal” and she wanted to talk to him now.

It took twelve rings, but he finally picked up the phone.

“Don't hang up!” she ordered.

After a long silence on the other end of the line, she heard a deep sigh. “What do you want, Liss?”

“You. Here.”

“I'm not coming back to Moosetookalook.”

“Tonight or ever?”

“Don't snarl, kid.” He sounded tired. “I need to be on my own for a bit.”

“What about your things? What about Zara?”

“I already bought a new toothbrush.”

Whoa! That didn't sound good.
“Uh, Sandy, what—”

“Look, Liss, I gotta go. I appreciate you getting me a lawyer and all, but I just can't—I don't—Ah, hell. I'll call you later.” And he disconnected.

She called him right back. “Don't you dare cut me off again, you jerk. Talk to me. This is no time to hole up and stare at your navel.”

What might have been a snigger sounded in her ear. Liss carried the phone over to the Canadian rocker in the bay window and settled in, setting it in motion with one foot.

“I mean it, Sandy. The last thing you need is to be alone. You think too much when you're alone.”

“I'm just not ready to see Zara again yet.”

“Why not? She loves you, you big doofus.” In the silence that followed, Liss started to put two and two together. “Okay, let's try this on for size: Gordon Tandy showed you that letter Zara wrote to Victor. The one with no date on it. And you thought the same thing he did, that Zara wrote it recently. That she was going to dump you for Victor. Idiot!”

“I know it was stupid, but Tandy was so sure . . .”

His voice, full of misery, trailed off into another long silence. Liss was about to speak when he starting talking again.

“I did think she might have decided to dump me in order to keep her job. I didn't think it for long, but I thought it. The idea never really made sense, but that just makes it worse . . . that I believed it was possible, even for a second. I lost faith in her. I'm supposed to love her, to trust her without question. I failed her, Liss.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a saint, Sandy. So you had a moment's doubt. So what?” Too agitated to sit still, she left the chair and stood at the window, looking out at Dan's house. Everybody had lapses, didn't they?

“How can I face her?”

“How can you not? You love her. She loves you. Get on the damn bus tomorrow when it heads up here for rehearsal. First chance you get, confess your great ‘sin' and ask her forgiveness. She's not going to dump you, Sandy. I repeat: she
loves
you. Everything will work out just fine, but you have to talk to each other.”

This time she hung up on him.

Men! What on earth had Sandy been thinking to go to the motel instead of coming straight back here when he got out of jail, especially with a bum ankle? Was he keeping it elevated? Putting ice on it? Sherri had said he was supposed to use a cane for the next few days.

A car passed by, momentarily blinding her with its headlights. Liss blinked. Come to think of it, how had Sandy managed to get a room at the motel? They should all have been taken. She'd booked every room in the place herself.

Frowning, Liss contemplated motels, hotels, B-and-Bs, and cabins. What with one thing and another, she was becoming very familiar with what was available for lodging in the area. After a few more minutes of careful consideration, she reached for the phone once more and made two calls. Then she grabbed her coat and an umbrella—it had started raining an hour earlier—and headed for Dan's house.

“Good news,” she told him when he opened the carriage house door to her knock.

“You know who killed Victor?”

“Not yet, but I have solved
your
mystery.”

 

 

Dan felt like a character in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Followed by Liss and Pete, the latter in full uniform and armed, he crept along a shadowy corridor at The Spruces. The only light came from the narrow beam of the flashlight he carried. Outside a storm raged. Wind howled. Rain pounded against the windowpanes. Eerie drafts had the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up.

The previous evening, he and Sam had driven to the hotel in separate trucks to investigate reports of lights moving on the second floor. Neither that search nor the one he'd made earlier today had yielded any evidence that the hotel had been broken into. If teenagers had been using one of the rooms, they'd been extraordinarily neat.

This time they approached with stealth. They'd parked some distance away and walked to the front entrance. They were searching for intruders in semidarkness, switching on lights only after they'd already entered a room and closed the door behind them. He wondered what the neighbors would think of that.

Lightning flashed, making Dan jump. He heard a muffled squeak from Liss. Great. That would be all they'd need, to have the power knocked out by the storm. The hotel had its own generator, but Dan wasn't about to fire it up just to hunt for . . . what—ghosts or squatters? He liked the second choice better.

Liss touched his arm. When he turned to look at her she pointed to her nose and made sniffing motions. The smell was faint, but recognizable. Someone had been cooking in one of the rooms. Frying something with garlic in it.

Still fanciful in the darkness, his thoughts leapt from Scooby Doo to the Scoobies. Liss as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer? Highly unlikely, he thought with a grin, though she did have that female empowerment thing down pat.

They rounded a bend in the hallway and spotted what they'd been looking for. A thin strip of light showed faintly beneath one of the doors ahead. A suite. One of the more expensive ones. The intruders had good taste.

As they'd agreed back at Dan's house, they let Pete go in first. After all, Liss couldn't be a hundred percent sure she knew the identity of the squatters. When the time came, though, Dan took the precaution of catching her by the waist to make sure she stayed back. She squirmed out of his grasp and burst into the room only seconds behind Pete. By the time Dan went through the door, the deputy had two men lined up against the wall and was patting them down.

Liss was doing what looked suspiciously like a victory dance.

When Pete told his captives to turn around, Dan saw that her guess had been correct. The hotel's unofficial guests were Charlie Danielstone and Jock O'Brien.

Danielstone looked worried . . . until he recognized Liss. “Busted,” he said, grinning at her.

Pete managed not to laugh as he started reciting charges: “Trespassing. Breaking and entering. Theft of services. You—”

“Hey!” Jock O'Brien objected. “We didn't have to break in. We were already here.”

“Let me guess,” Liss said. “You wanted to save the price of a couple of nights in the motel?”

“Well, yeah.” Jock gave her a look that said that much must be obvious. “Why pay for something we could get for free? You were pretty generous about offering some people a place to stay, Liss. We figured you'd have extended the courtesy to us, too . . . if you'd thought of it.”

“It's not her courtesy, it's mine.” They were so earnest, so cocky in their assumed innocence, that Dan was also having trouble keeping a straight face. He had to give them credit for ingenuity. He just didn't want to do it out loud.

“Oh, come on, man. You've got this whole big hotel just sitting empty. We didn't hurt anything.”

“I notice you chose to camp out in one of the luxury suites. Shall we say two fifty a night? That's a discount rate, you understand, because you're friends with Liss.”

Danielstone went pale. O'Brien's jaw dropped.

“You're not open yet!” Charlie Danielstone objected when he got over the shock. “No services. We had to cook our own supper.” He gestured at the hot plate on the floor near an electrical outlet.

“No furniture,” O'Brien chimed in. “Nice carpet, but hard.”

“You're breaking my heart,” Dan told them.

“If you want to get off the hook,” Liss said, “we want a full confession. How come Dan and his brother didn't find you guys here last night when they searched?”

“Have you looked at this place? There's like a gazillion rooms. And lots of good hiding places.”

O'Brien backed up his buddy. “We had to improvise last night. We got lucky. They couldn't search every nook and cranny. They didn't find our stuff and we kept moving, always a little ahead of them. But today we had time to work out a plan. If we'd seen headlights or heard you coming, we'd have been able to scatter ourselves and all our possessions in five minutes flat. You'd never have known we were here.”

“How
did
you know we were here?” Charlie asked.

“Neighbors saw lights.”

“No, I mean how did you know it was us?” He pointed an accusing finger at Liss. “You weren't surprised to find us here.”

“Sandy was able to move into a room at the motel—long story—and that made me wonder who'd left. It wasn't too hard to find out. The manager's a friend of mine. Then I called Paul and asked him where he'd been dropping you two off the last two days.” Paul Roberts, sole member of Ray's stage crew, doubled as the company's bus driver. “He said he hadn't. That you'd told him you'd made your own arrangements. Add the reports of someone here late at night and it was elementary, my dear Charlie.”

As one, they stood up straight and clapped their hands together, a sort of mock salute to her achievement. Liss grinned and, bouncing on the balls of her feet, bowed to them in acknowledgment.

Apparently, modesty was beyond Liss's capabilities. She was tickled to have solved this one small mystery. She
had
been clever about it. Dan had to admit that much.

“Do you want to press charges?” Pete asked.

“No, but I want these two out of here.”

“First thing in the morning,” Jock O'Brien promised, “but you'll have to find us somewhere else to stay.”

“Not a problem,” Liss told him. “As of rehearsal tomorrow, I'm pretty sure your old room at Fallstown Motor Lodge will be available.”

 

 

Liss awoke on Saturday morning to find Lumpkin's tail in her face. She pushed him away and tried to get back to sleep. Bouncing cheerfully out of bed was beyond her. Sure, she'd solved one small mystery, but she didn't have a clue who had killed Victor, nor did she have any idea how to proceed next.

With a groan, she rolled over and buried her head under the pillow. It didn't help. She couldn't escape the unpalatable truth: there was no way the investigation of Victor's death would turn out well, not when someone she knew was bound to be his murderer.

Liss sighed deeply as her thoughts took a side path. She'd given her word to both Dan and Sherri that she would be careful. She'd fully intended to avoid being alone with any of the “suspects” when she questioned them, but she hadn't done a very good job of sticking to her promise. It was too hard to remember, let alone accept, that her efforts to solve the crime might put her in jeopardy from one of her old friends.

Then again, they might not
be
her friends much longer, not if she continued to alienate them by asking intrusive questions.

Liss tossed the pillow across the room and sat up. Tempting as it was to contemplate abandoning her investigation and letting Gordon Tandy find the killer, she knew she couldn't do that, nor could she spend the entire day in bed.

She hesitated one last time when she remembered that it was the Ides of March, an unlucky day by anyone's reckoning. It wasn't as if the Emporium would be awash with customers. She
could
sleep in . . . except that she couldn't
sleep
. She threw her legs over the side and stood. If she was just going to lie in bed and worry, she might as well get up.

She found Zara already in the kitchen and more wired than Liss was.

“Can I borrow your station wagon?”

Liss sent a quelling look over her shoulder as she reached for the coffeepot.

“You have to work, right? That means you don't need it.” Zara could barely sit still.

Liss wondered if it was too late to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over her head. “Give me a minute,” she begged, all but inhaling the first life-giving gulp of the coffee and scalding her tongue in the process.

Zara toyed with the salt and pepper shakers. She realigned place mats that were already perfectly straight. When she tried to wipe away the wet ring Liss's mug had just left, Liss gave up the struggle to ignore her.