The Gingerbread Bump-Off (9 page)

On the other hand, Claudia certainly seemed sincere, and Phyllis knew she had a history of volunteering at community events like the Peach Festival. Phyllis thought she remembered seeing the woman at the Harvest Festival at Holland Lake Park the previous month, too.

But even if Claudia was telling the truth about why she was here, there was still a problem. Phyllis hesitated a moment, toying with her coffee cup as she did so, then said, “I’m sure the police told everything to the press that they want to reveal about the case. It’s really not my place to be talking about any of the details. It might interfere in their investigation in some way.”

Claudia frowned. “Well, I really don’t see how. Carl and the others and I—we’re just friends of Georgia’s, and we want to find out what happened to her.”

“She was attacked on my front porch a short time before the tour was supposed to start. That’s really all I can say.”

“You didn’t see who did it?”

“I really shouldn’t be talking about the case at all,” Phyllis said. “I’m sorry—”

“Wait a minute,” Claudia said. She was starting to look angry now. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of a detective. The granny who solved all those murders.”

“Look, Claudia, I don’t want to upset you—”

“We’re Georgia’s friends. We just want to find out what happened to her. I thought you were supposed to be her friend, too.”

“I was. I mean, I am,” Phyllis corrected quickly.

“But you let her be attacked right on your front porch.”

Phyllis pushed her empty cup away. She was starting to feel a little irritated herself now. “I didn’t
let
anything happen. Don’t you think I wish I could have stopped it? There was nothing I could have done.”

“You could understand why the people who care about her want to know what happened,” Claudia said.

“Maybe you should care more about how she’s doing now,” Phyllis suggested. “Let the police handle everything else.”

Claudia glared across the table at her. “Well, you’re not anything like the newspapers make you out to be. I thought you’d have the case solved by now!”

“Sorry,” Phyllis said, although she wasn’t, really, not at all. She was disappointed, though. Claudia had seemed so nice before she turned unpleasant when she didn’t get what she wanted. “I think you should go now.”

Claudia sniffed. “Fine,” she said as she stood up. “I’ll go. But when you start trying to figure out who attacked Georgia, don’t expect any of us to help you.”

“I won’t be doing that,” Phyllis told her. “It’s up to the police to catch the man.”

Claudia pounced on that avidly. “So you’re sure it was a man who attacked her!” she said.

Phyllis shook her head. “I didn’t say that—”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” Claudia said, ignoring what Phyllis was trying to say. She gave Phyllis a curt nod. “Good morning. And thank you for the coffee and cookies.”

She didn’t sound sincere at all now.

Chapter 8

“ L
ady left outta here in sort of a hurry,” Sam commented when he came in from the garage a few minutes later. “She didn’t seem very happy, either.”

Phyllis was still sitting at the kitchen table. She said, “She was upset with me because I wouldn’t give her all the gory details of what happened to Georgia last night.”

Sam frowned. “Well, why would you? Unless she’s a cop, that’s not any of her business.”

“That’s what I tried to tell her,” Phyllis said. “It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, though.”

“You reckon she was really who she claimed to be, somebody who worked with Miz Hallerbee on the tour?”

“I think so,” Phyllis said. “I seem to remember her helping out with things like that in the past.”

Sam pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Some folks are always gonna get their nose out of joint about something. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else.”

“Yes, I know, but she seemed almost angry that I hadn’t figured out who attacked Georgia. She
expected
me to have solved the case already.”

Sam smiled across the table at her. “Well, you do have a certain reputation around here . . .”

“What if I don’t want to be known as somebody who catches killers?”

“It’s too late for that, I’d say,” Sam replied with a shrug. “But there are plenty worse things to be known for.”

Phyllis sighed. “Yes, I suppose.” She hesitated, then said, “I realize that after what I was just complaining about, I shouldn’t even be thinking about this, but . . . have you considered the fact that Roy wasn’t here yesterday evening when Georgia was attacked?”

Sam frowned. “Neither were a whole bunch of other people,” he pointed out. “Namely, everybody else in Weatherford except you, me, Carolyn, and Eve. Since we were the only ones in the house, I reckon everybody else in town is technically a suspect.”

Phyllis felt a flash of irritation, even though she knew he was right. She said, “But Roy was close by. He had to be, to show up when he did.” Quickly, she explained the theory that had sprung unbidden into her mind about Roy parking down the street and running back to his SUV after breaking the gingerbread man over Georgia’s head.

Sam listened intently and nodded when she was finished. “Yeah, I suppose it could have happened that way,” he admitted. “But why would Roy do such a thing? He wouldn’t have any reason to hurt that poor woman.”

“No reason that we know of,” Phyllis said. “But we don’t really know all that much about him, remember?”

“I don’t believe it. Roy just doesn’t seem like the type, and anyway, I’m not sure he’s strong enough to have hefted that gingerbread man like that. It’d be a strain for me to lift it that high, and I’m in pretty good shape for my age, if I do say so myself.”

Phyllis knew that was true. Sam ran and worked out several times a week, and he did enough physical work around the place to help keep him in shape, too. Roy, on the other hand, if he hadn’t been lying about his job, had spent most of his time sitting in front of a computer for the past twenty years. That didn’t do much to build strength.

“You’re right,” she said. “But sometimes in the heat of the moment, people can do things you wouldn’t think they were capable of. Like Detective Latimer said, this was a crime of passion.”

“So what do we do? Try to find out more about Roy?”

Phyllis thought about it for a moment before shaking her head. “No, we’ll let the police handle it. Who knows, they might find out who did it and make an arrest at any time, and then we’ll know that Roy couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

“Because Lord knows the police never arrest the wrong fella,” Sam said in a dry drawl that made his point. Arrests had been made in several of the cases in which Phyllis had been involved, and each time the suspect had turned out to be innocent. Phyllis had been convinced of their innocence, too, which had played a large part in prompting her to launch her own investigations.

“Let’s just wait and see,” she said.

And hope for the best,
she added to herself.

 

 

 

The actual Jingle Bell Tour might be over, but there were still two weeks until Christmas, so Phyllis planned to leave all the lights and decorations up and turn them on at night. A lot of families, especially those with young children, liked to drive around at this time of year and look at all the lights. They would have plenty to look at when they drove down this street, Phyllis thought. Personally, she had always considered such elaborate displays to be a little gaudy, but it would be a shame to let so much time and effort—not to mention money—go to waste.

That afternoon she happened to notice an unmarked police car parked at the curb across the street. It was empty, so it came as no surprise to her when she saw Warren Latimer emerge from the Kimbrough house a short time later. From there he went next door, stepping inside when someone answered the bell. Phyllis knew Latimer was going through the neighborhood questioning everyone, just as she had expected him to do.

An hour later she was in the kitchen leafing through cookbooks and thinking about appetizers she could serve at Eve’s shower. There was also the wedding reception itself to consider. The prospect of baking a wedding cake loomed large in Phyllis’s mind. Eve hadn’t decided yet whether to have one made professionally or entrust the job to Phyllis and Carolyn. With the wedding only three weeks away, she was going to have to make up her mind soon.

Phyllis got to her feet when the doorbell rang. Carolyn had come back from her shopping but was upstairs in her room. Sam was out in the garage putting the finishing touches on that staining job. Phyllis was the closest one to the door.

When she opened it, she found Detective Latimer standing there, rolling up crime-scene tape around his left hand. Phyllis opened the storm door and said, “Hello, Detective. I take it this means I can have my front porch back?”

“Yeah, we’re through with it,” he said with a nod. “We have photos of everything, and the forensics team has gone over it and collected all the evidence there is to find. I just wanted to let you know.”

“Would you like to come in and have a cup of coffee?”

“I don’t know; I’ve got things to do . . .”

Phyllis smiled. “There are plenty of cookies, too.”

Latimer laughed. “You talked me into it.” Awkwardly, he stuffed the balled-up crime-scene tape in his pocket.

When he smiled, he looked less like a bulldog and more like a cherub, Phyllis noticed.

Latimer sat down on the sofa in the living room while Phyllis brought a cup of coffee and a plate of assorted cookies from the kitchen. She placed the cup and plate on the table in front of the sofa and took a couple of the cookies for herself. As she sat down in one of the armchairs, she said, “I saw you canvassing the neighborhood a while ago.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?” Latimer asked. He picked up the coffee and took a sip. “This is really good.”

“Thank you.”

“But you can’t ply me with coffee and cookies and find out how the investigation is going,” he said.

Phyllis thought about whether to be angry at his comment and decided to smile instead. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

He picked up one of the lime snowflake cookies. “I’ve heard about you. Isabel Largo says you like to get involved.”

“Sometimes I haven’t had any choice.”

“People always have choices,” Latimer said. “Somebody chose to bust that dressed-up gingerbread man over Ms. Hallerbee’s head.”

“You’re a plainspoken man, aren’t you?”

The detective’s heavy shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “I’ve just never seen any point in beating around the bush. If you want to ask me something, Mrs. Newsom, just ask it. Maybe I’ll answer, and maybe I won’t.”

“What I really want to know is how Georgia is doing. Has she regained consciousness?”

Latimer looked at her for a couple of seconds, then obviously decided to answer. “No, she’s still in a coma. I wish she wasn’t. If she came to, she might be able to tell us who attacked her.”

“Do you think she actually saw him? I thought he came up from behind her.”

Latimer swallowed the bite of cookie he’d been chewing. “He did, but think about where she would have been standing when she rang your doorbell. The gingerbread men decorations were on both sides of her, not more than a couple of feet away. Nobody could have come close enough to reach down beside her and pick up the one dressed like Mrs. Claus without her being aware of it.”

“And when that happened, the natural thing would be for her to turn and look,” Phyllis said. She was picturing the scene in her mind, not because she actually wanted to but because she couldn’t help herself. “The porch light wasn’t on, and neither were the Christmas lights. But the curtains were open on the narrow windows beside the door, so some light from inside would fall onto the porch from them. Georgia might have had time to see whoever picked up the gingerbread man.”

Latimer nodded. “That’s my thinking. And that’s why there’s an officer in the ICU with her around the clock. If she wakes up, I want somebody there to question her as soon as possible.”

“And to keep the attacker from trying again to kill her.”

“That, too,” Latimer agreed. “He has to know that as long as she’s alive, she represents a threat to him.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Phyllis asked. “I was under the impression that Chief Whitmire really doesn’t want me mixed up in this case.”

“The chief hasn’t given me any orders about you, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I believe in being reasonable about things. I haven’t told you anything you didn’t already know, except that Ms. Hallerbee is still unconscious. I mean, good grief, you were right on the other side of the door when it happened, and you saw the scene when it was fresh. I’ve heard enough about you to know that you’d already figured out everything we talked about.”

Phyllis had seen the immediate aftermath of the attack, all right. It was imprinted on her brain with more clarity than she would have liked. Georgia had been lying at an angle across the porch, her body twisted some but generally on her right side, and that was the side of her head that had the most blood on it, too.

“She turned toward him and probably opened her mouth to say something or to cry out, but he hit her before she could make a sound,” Phyllis mused, watching the scene play out in her head like something from a movie. “The impact was enough to make her turn back the other way and fall. The blow was a glancing one, though. If it came straight down on top of her head, she would have crumpled without turning. Which means that the attacker wasn’t tall enough, or strong enough, to get the gingerbread man all the way over Georgia’s head.”

Latimer nodded. “That’s the way I see it, too. We’re looking for somebody as tall as Ms. Hallerbee or probably a little taller, but not somebody who would tower over her.”