Lemon Tart (27 page)

“Yet you broke into Ms. Lemmon’s house last night, didn’t you?
And you’ve been withholding information again.” His eyes were stones in his
hard face as he stared at her. “You’re interfering with a police
investigation,” he said. “I should arrest you.”

Sadie knew her pleading showed in her eyes. “Please don’t,” she
breathed. “Please, I’m helping, I’m gathering information—”

“You’re causing a great deal of trouble, the very least of
which is trying to convince me that the man confessing to this murder didn’t do
it.” His voice lowered and he leaned forward slightly. She suddenly wondered if
it was appropriate for them to be alone in the observation room together. “I’ve
asked you,” he said in a tone stretched between warning and compassion, “to
please stop, to let us do our job. You have put me in a very awkward position.”

Sadie was not intimidated and pulled herself up to her full
height. “You have put me in a very awkward position as well, Detective. You are
accusing a man I know to be innocent of a serious crime. I have no choice but
to do what I can to prove his innocence.”

They stood there, him bent slightly over her as she stood tall,
refusing to concede her position. Finally, he straightened, the stiff lines of
his shoulders relaxing just a bit. “I will consider this a final warning. You
need to back out and let us take care of this.”

“Have you ever had English trifle, Detective?” she asked,
surprising him with her out-of-the-blue and completely off
topic question.

“English trifle?” he repeated with a blank look.

“It’s delicious. I make it every Christmas Eve. It’s cake and
custard and Danish dessert layered with fruit and whipping cream. I once
assigned six different women at church to make it for our Christmas social. I
got back half a dozen completely different variations. One woman added
pineapple, another used chocolate cake instead of ladyfingers. One woman
stirred it all together so it looked like soup. We were all doing the same
thing, making the same dish, but they were all done so completely different.”

“And the point of this little culinary lesson?”

“We all go about things in our own way,” she said. “I won’t
tell you how to make your trifle if you don’t tell me how to make mine. Jack’s
my brother. I will mind my Ps and Qs, but I will not stop looking for a way to
clear him.”

“Then you should go to jail.”

“Madsen,” she said, noticing the way Detective Cunningham
stiffened when she said his partner’s name, “would put me in jail. But you
won’t, because you know that beyond all your procedures and policy and
possiblys, that I am helping
you.” She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “And you know Jack’s innocent.
You can’t prove it, and neither can I, but you know he is. And you’re a
good enough cop—a good enough man—to find it
impossible to ignore that.”

They were silent for a few seconds and she watched his eyes,
the only part of him that slipped through his training enough to show just how
right she was. He couldn’t say it, he wouldn’t say it, and in truth, he
shouldn’t say it. But he knew. And he was going to let her go.

Cunningham finally snapped his gaze away and abruptly headed
for the door and pulled it open for her. “What a tangled web we weave,” he said
as she passed through the doorway. Their moment was over, but their
understanding was sealed. She would do what she had to do, within reason, and
he would allow her the freedom to do it.

Once outside of the small room she turned to him. “You will
keep investigating though, right?” she said. “I mean, you see the
inconsistencies. You have to take those seriously, don’t you?”

Cunningham let out a breath. “It’s not my decision,” he said,
his voice almost sounding apologetic. “We have a confession and that’s not
something my captain takes lightly.”

“But you still have to find Trevor,” she reminded him,
sidestepping the whole Jack-is-innocent argument since she knew
he was fully aware of it. “That will keep you on the case, right?”

“Trevor,” Cunningham said, sounding like a grandfather
lamenting his own grandson. “Jack won’t tell us anything about him. He won’t
say where he’s been or who he’s with now. All we have is his comment that we’ll
find him soon.”

“Is the Amber Alert still in place?” Sadie asked. She hadn’t
turned on the news today, so she didn’t know what was being reported. She
should have TiVoed it.

“It is,” Cunningham said, following her down the hallway,
carefully shepherding her out the door. At the glass doors she turned to face
him and moved to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear before remembering it was
a messy mass of curls. Oh, the humiliation! She felt strangely vulnerable,
knowing she didn’t look like herself. She hated that people—including
Detective Cunningham—might think she was a dowdy woman.

“Will you call me when you find something out?”

He raised one eyebrow, quite a nice eyebrow. “Would you?”

Sadie blushed at the reprimand. His face was stoic once again,
as if their silent exchange of connected allegiance was nothing more than a
memory. But then she wondered if he was simply keeping up pretenses, having to
live up to the big-bad-cop image he’d spent a lifetime
earning.

“Go home, Mrs. Hoffmiller. Stay home. Knit something if you
have to, but my request that you stay out of this is still in force.”

He turned and walked away from her as she put her hands on her
hips in response to his rudeness.

“I don’t knit,” she said to no one but the inebriated man
sitting on the bench to her left. “Those pointed needles are a safety hazard.”

Chapter 28

It had long been Sadie’s habit that whenever she found
herself passing a grocery store on her way home, she searched her mind for
anything she needed. There was nothing quite as frustrating than walking in the
door after a long day and realizing you were out of laundry detergent, cream of
tartar, or something equally important. Albertson’s grocery store was on her
way home from the police station and despite everything, old habits die hard,
and she automatically asked herself if she needed anything.

Lasagna noodles.

She’d used the last of them on Sunday and would hate to get a
hankering and be unable to fulfill it. Though never a very good dieter, she’d
found a rule of thumb that kept her from blimping out as her metabolism slowed
with age—eat what you want, but not all of it. So, if she
wanted cheesecake, she made cheesecake, had a slice, and took the rest to a
friend or someone in her church in need of a pick-me-up. If she
wanted pot roast, by George she’d have pot roast and freeze the leftovers for a
night when she craved a good stroganoff or beef soup. So far the system worked
for her—she enjoyed food but didn’t overindulge and could still
fit into styles that made the most of her curvaceous hips. However, she became
very cranky when a craving drove her to the pantry only to find she had
neglected to stock her shelves correctly. She pulled into the parking lot while
mentally scanning her cupboards to make sure there was nothing else she
needed.

The morning snow had stopped, leaving a steely gray sky and a
few inches of snow behind—another reason to get her groceries
now, in case the snow came back later. It was only as she scanned the parking
lot to find a space that she remembered this had been the store where Anne
worked. It wasn’t the grocery store Sadie frequented; it was a chain and she
preferred to support Sammy’s on Mount Ridge since it was locally owned. She
slid her car into a space between a Cadillac and a Pinto and paused with her
hands still on the steering wheel.

What could she possibly gain from talking to the people Anne
worked with? There was no real answer—she could learn a lot or
she could learn nothing. All she could do for sure was her best. She did feel
the tiniest bit of apprehension, but the memory of Jack being handcuffed made
it hard for her to swallow as she got out of the car. A blast of cold wind took
her breath away and she shivered, glad she hadn’t left her jacket at the police
station.

She hunched her shoulders and peered at the sky, wondering if
it would snow any more today, or if the weather was just taunting her.

It took less than five minutes to find the lasagna noodles and
remember that she also needed some nutmeg and a few lemons—Anne
had used her last one for the mystery tart. Then she got in the express lane
and began putting her items on the conveyor belt. She knew the clerk, though
they didn’t have a good history. Melba Browton’s son was quite likely the worst
student Sadie had ever taught. It had only taken one parent meeting to realize
he’d inherited his mother’s personality charms. His name was even Damien, which
she believed meant “devil” in Italian, or maybe Portuguese. Regardless, it was
fitting. Sadie scanned the other check stands but knew it was too late to
choose a different lane. Picking up her items and moving would be overtly
rude.

“How are you guys holding up, Melba?” Sadie asked sweetly as
the clerk scanned her first item.

Melba looked up, staring at Sadie from behind her glasses. She
was a thick woman, with middle-aged skin to go with her
middle-aged figure. Her red hair was tightly curled and looked as if
it were glued to her head. It had been a decade since Sadie had taught Melba’s
son, but Melba still wore the exact same hairdo. “Holding up?” Melba
repeated.

“Well, with what happened to Anne Lemmon,” Sadie said. Wasn’t
it obvious? They’d lost a comrade, a fellow employee. Surely it stung a
bit.

Melba shrugged. “I said I wasn’t gunna take any of her open
shifts,” the woman said. “She weren’t nobody that ever tried to help me out.”

Sadie stiffened. Was there no respect for the dead at all?
“Oh,” she finally said, opening her purse and pulling out her wallet. “So you two
weren’t friends?”

“Hardly,” Melba said. “She was nice enough to the customers,
but she let us know from the start that this weren’t no career for the likes of
her.” She snorted and hit the total button. “Last I heard she was quitting
anyway.”

“She wasn’t, uh, close to any of the other clerks then?”

Melba looked up at her this time and eyed her with suspicion.
“Why d’you care?”

“I’m just curious.” Sadie handed over a twenty-dollar
bill. “It’s been a long time since Garrison had a murder is all.” The last one
was a teenage kid almost eight years ago who killed his girlfriend and then
himself. People still talked about it—usually when their
daughters were dating a boy they didn’t like.

“Yep,” Melba said. She opened the till, counted out Sadie’s
change and handed it back to her. “Y’all have a nice day,” she said without a
smile before moving onto the next customer—an order well over the
ten-item limit. Melba glared at the customer who was breaking the
rule.

“You too,” Sadie said. She retrieved her grocery bag and looked
around the store, trying to think of anything else she could do, anyone else
she could talk to. To her surprise another clerk in the next lane was watching
her. As soon as Sadie met her eye, however, the girl looked away. But there was
something in her expression that caught Sadie’s attention. The girl was close
enough to have heard the exchange with Melba.

“Doggone it,” Sadie said out loud. “I forgot I was going to
cook up a roast tonight.” She turned to Melba. “Can I leave my bag here while I
go back for it?”

“I don’t care,” the woman said. Sadie got her roast and was in
the other girl’s line before Melba had finished with her
over-the-limit customer.

Though they were a chain store, Albertson’s had always been
good about employing otherwise difficult to employ people in the community.
Mason Dillies, a local man with Down syndrome, had recently been featured in
the paper for having worked as a bagger at Albertson’s for fifteen years. Their
philanthropic disposition was enviable. However Sammy’s did the same thing, she
preferred their produce, and the owners went to her church. The clerk for this
new check stand didn’t have Down syndrome, but she had a breezy disposition
that seemed to make time move slower in her lane.

The girl was young, early twenties Sadie guessed, with
shoulder-length brown hair. She had a fair amount of acne scarring, a
general look of naïve unkemptness, and jack-o’-lantern earrings that
dangled from her ears even though Halloween was three weeks away. When she said
“Good morning,” her words were slow and not fully sounded out.

Sadie smiled brightly, wanting to put the girl at ease. “Did
you know Anne?” she asked directly.

“Yes,” the girl said as she picked up the roast and slowly
pulled it over the eye of the scanner. It didn’t take. “She gives me rides home
so I din’t have to take the bus.”

Sadie smiled and realized how hungry she was to hear something
positive about Anne. Until this moment she hadn’t known how badly she needed
the reassurance that Anne wasn’t just mean and manipulating. Sadie had seen
worth in her; surely she hadn’t been completely wrong in her judgment. “She was
very nice, wasn’t she.”