Acts of Violets (30 page)

There was a long moment of silence, followed by a heavy sigh. “I knew I shouldn’t have answered my phone. All right, listen carefully. I want you to
think
about what’s in your purse.”

He was giving me a hint. I used my free hand to grope inside my leather bag. “I have a set of keys . . . a pack of tissues . . . lip gloss . . . my wallet.”

“Stop.”

“My wallet?” I pulled it out and unzipped it. Nothing inside but a ten and a few singles, a Gap card, and my Mastercard. Hmm. A credit card? Was Reilly telling me to use the old plastic-card-in-the-latch trick? “If I’m
thinking
that Ryson’s door locks are the cheap, flimsy kind, would I be right?”

“Now, how would I know that?”

That was a yes. “Okay, Sarge. I’ve got it. And just in case you want to help me
think
some more, I’ll be using my
head
about nine o’clock this evening.”

I snapped the phone shut, dropped it in my purse, and glanced around to see Captain Kellerman walk out the door. Talk about good timing. I gave him a polite nod and walked away, feeling his cold, snake-eyed glare on my back.

Who cared? My luck was finally on the upswing.

 

When I got back to the shop, Lottie gave me a phone message from my mother saying that she wouldn’t be able to make it to the shop after all, but might be able to stop by before school on Friday. Whew! That would give me more time to dry the frames.

Even better, Grace had already completed her research and was waiting in the workroom to share it with me. “Not one person has been admitted to the hospital for food poisoning of any kind in the past two weeks,” she reported. “I even added an extra week just to be on the safe side.”

“So if Eve used something poisonous on Ryson’s cake,” I said, “we could safely say it wasn’t used on her other cakes.”

“Unless he was the only one to have a reaction to it,” Lottie pointed out as she snipped stems for an arrangement.

“If the substance were that toxic, someone else would have fallen gravely ill,” Grace said. “It would be more likely that she used it on Dennis’s cake alone.”

“Then she must have done it by accident,” Lottie said. “It just isn’t natural for a mother to poison her own child.”

“Ah, but Dennis
wasn’t
her child,” Grace said, arching her eyebrow. “Eve’s husband had Dennis by his first wife. Interesting that she didn’t mention she was his step-mother, isn’t it?”

That was more than interesting. That was suspicious. “She could have thought of him as her own child,” Lottie said.

“I don’t believe that feeling was reciprocated,” Grace said. “A week ago Dennis filed a suit contesting his father’s will. It seems the entirety of the considerable estate went to Eve. Dennis received nothing.”

“Talk about someone having a motive,” Lottie said, voicing my own thoughts.

“Wow,” was all I could come up with.

“I, for one, can’t begin to fathom why she isn’t a suspect,” Grace said. “The information was readily available if the detectives had bothered to check.”

“It’s all about votes, Grace,” I said. “Melvin Darnell’s not a fool. He went after a sure bet—Marco, who had a history with Ryson
and
was at the murder scene. It doesn’t get much easier than that. Can you imagine the public’s reaction if the chief prosecutor had targeted a senior citizen who creates lovely cakes and looks like Mrs. Claus?”

Grace sniffed. “Mrs. Claus indeed. Lucrezia Borgia would be more like it.”

“Lucrezia who?” Lottie asked.

“Borgia,” Grace answered. “She was a devious, scheming woman.”

Lottie clipped another stem. “Was she from New Chapel?”

Grace rolled her eyes and went for tea.

M
arco called twice during the afternoon, once to my cell phone and once to the shop, but I didn’t take either call. As I had explained to Lottie and Grace, the whole case now hinged on my poisoned-cake theory, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Marco for fear that I’d be proven wrong and his hopes would be dashed yet again.

Besides, if I told Marco how I planned to go about proving my theory, he’d try to stop me, or at the very least, he’d lecture me on the risks involved. I knew I could get caught and be charged with a crime. But I wasn’t going to get caught. I was going to be Abby Knight, cat burglar—without the burgle part. So for today my motto had to be “What Marco didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.” In fact, as far as Lottie and Grace knew, I was going to meet Reilly at the house and he was going to get us inside legally.

The third time Marco called, he left a message on my voice mail. “Where the hell are you? Kellerman was just in the bar, nosing around like he suspects something is up.
Is
something up? Call me, damn it.”

It rattled me that Kellerman was snooping around, but I was determined not to cave. So I erased the message and went back to the fall arrangement I had just begun. Using a hollowed-out gourd as the container, I filled it with reindeer moss, crocosmia, red hypericum berries, goldenrod (solidago), and an apricot rose variety called Rosemary Harkness. Quite fetching, I decided, after turning it around to inspect it from all angles.

The fourth time Marco called, Lottie answered the phone.

“Tell him I’m making deliveries,” I whispered.

After she hung up she said, “You can’t stall that man forever. He’ll be heading down this way before long to see what’s cooking.”

“If he comes, I’ll just dash out the back door.”

I finished the arrangement, wrapped it, and set it in the cooler, then glanced at the clock on my desk. It was almost three o’clock—nearly time for my appointment with Eve, and a mere six hours before I made my cat burglar debut. I made sure Lottie and Grace were occupied up front, then got my credit card, slipped to the back, and tried to open the bathroom door with it.

“What are you doing?” Lottie asked, startling me. Grace was right behind her. How did they always know when I was trying to be sneaky?

“Um, just attempting to open a door with a credit card.”

They came to peer over my shoulders. “Why?”

“Because I thought it would be a handy skill to have, you know, in case I ever forget my key.”

“Good luck,” Lottie said. “I tried it once when one of the boys locked us out. Herman ended up having to break a window. Now we just keep a key hidden outside.”

“Let me have a go at it.” Grace took the card from my hand, slid it expertly between the brass latch and the wood trim, and pushed open the door. I didn’t even want to know how she had learned that. She handed me the card. “Why don’t you try it now, dear?”

After two unsuccessful tries and a little more help from Grace, I got the door to open.

“Bear in mind that it doesn’t work with all locks. Let’s try it on our back door.” She led the way through the kitchen to the heavy fire escape door and showed me how the card wouldn’t fit. “In this instance there’s simply no way to get the card between the metal and the door frame. You’ll have to try it on your door at home tonight. But why would you need to know this anyway? We have keys to Bloomers, and your roommate has a key to your apartment.”

“But Nikki isn’t always available. You know how it is being on duty at the hospital. I’d hate to sit around waiting for her to show up.”

“Well, then, why not give your cousin Jillian a spare key. She lives just down the hall from you, doesn’t she?”

“Grace, I just got my key
away
from her.”

I could see her formulating more arguments, and since I was getting tired of making up excuses, I finally said, “I want to know how to do it for the fun of it, Grace. In fact, maybe I should learn how to pick a lock, too. I don’t suppose you know how to do that, do you?”

“I absolutely draw the line at lock picking, dear.”

It had been worth a shot.

At three o’clock I stepped inside the Icing on the Cake just as Sharona finished ringing up a customer. “Hey, sugar. What brings you down here? You after another of Evie’s little cakes?”

“Actually, I came to see Mrs. Taylor.”

“I don’t know, baby. She’s pretty swamped today.”

“It’th all right, Sharona. I invited her.” Eve Taylor stood in the doorway at the far end of the counter, smiling her warm Mrs. Claus smile, which I no longer found quite so charming. “Come, Abby, dear. Let’s talk in the back. Sharona, is there any coffee left?”

“Sure is, Evie. Half a pot, only twenty minutes old.”

“Good. Bring two cupth, pleathe.”

I followed Eve through her spotless kitchen to her marble work counter, where she was putting finishing touches on a nine-layer wedding cake covered with pink frosting. The layers had been carefully sculpted to look like a spiral staircase winding to the top, with each step sprinkled with miniature rose petals and clover leaves, as though a tiny flower girl had tossed them from a basket on her way up. On the topmost layer, plastic figures of the bride and groom stood under an arbor of miniature rosebuds, their faces frozen into smiles of eternal bliss.

She placed a leaf on the frosting, then turned to beam at me as I settled onto a stool to watch. “What do you think of my latest creation?”

“Remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it”

“Here you go, ladies,” Sharona called, setting a small tray on the counter. On it were two cups of coffee, two demitasse spoons, a pitcher of cream, and a ceramic dish containing packages of sugar and sugar substitute.

“Thank you, Sharona,” Eve called as her assistant left the kitchen. “Abby, you enjoy the coffee while I finish this wedding cake. My heaventh, we’ve been busy today. Wouldn’t you know Maxthine would have to leave early for a doctor’th appointment?”

Hmm. That left us conveniently alone in the kitchen, the perfect setup if someone wanted to slip poison into someone else’s cup. I glanced at her pink-cheeked face as she poured cream into her coffee and stuffed in a packet of sugar. Was I sitting with a devious, scheming woman or a sweet little baker? To be on the safe side, I decided not to drink or eat anything unless she did first.

Eve glanced up at me with a hopeful smile. “You thaid on the phone you had new information?”

I doused my coffee with cream and added sugar, just as she’d done, debating on how best to get her to confess her crime. “Yes, I do have new information. First of all, Trina has a solid alibi for Sunday evening.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed.

“Also, I located the woman who I thought was Dennis’s former girlfriend, but as it turns out, she had only been helping him with his clown act, and her alibi checked out, too.”

“And Dennis’s neighbors? The Mazellas?”

“Other than that they didn’t get along with him, there’s nothing to tie them to his death.”

She looked smug as she sipped her coffee. “That leaves Mister Salvare, as I’d originally suspected.” Smug was good. It was a sign of confidence, and when a person felt confident, she was more apt to give up information.

“By the way,” I said casually, “did Dennis have any food allergies that you knew of?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I noticed something odd in a report from the prosecutor’s office. But before I go any further, are you okay discussing this? I know it must be painful—he was your
son
, after all.”

“Painful doethn’t begin to dethcribe my agony, but I need to clothe the door on thith. Tho, pleathe, go ahead.”

Aha! Her deception continued. I knew I was on the right track now.

Eve held up a hand. “Wait. Before you go any further, I must clear up a mithunderthtanding. Dennis wasn’t my son. He was my stepson.”

I didn’t have to try to look astonished. I
was
astonished. What did this sudden confession mean? That she knew I was suspicious?

She gave me a chagrined glance. “I’m thorry I didn’t tell you earlier, Abby. I called him my thon becauthe I tried to think of him ath my own. And believe me, that wasn’t easy. Dennis was always causing trouble, in and out of juvenile detention from the age of thirteen. He couldn’t theem to help himself.”

“Then how could you believe he was innocent of robbing the convenience store?”

“Dennith made hith thare of mithtaketh, but he wathn’t a felon.” Eve spotted a misshapen petal on one of the steps and plucked it off, dropping it in the waste can beside the counter with a look of disgust. “I detetht imperfections in my work, don’t you?”

If she detested imperfections, how had she ever tolerated Dennis? Yet she seemed to have cared about him, bringing him cakes every week and clucking over his accomplishments as if he were a little boy. However, I still couldn’t picture the bald, tattooed, pockmarked, snarling bully I’d seen in the newspaper photo as the
boy
she kept referring to.

“What wath in that report that made you athk about hith allergieth?” she asked.