Bone Appétit (27 page)

“Where’s Amanda?” Tinkie entered and scanned the room. “I don’t see her.”

“Hedy isn’t here, either.” Not a good thing.

Guest chefs stood behind a counter loaded with food set up in a buffet. The wonderful smells made my mouth water. Each contestant would taste a particular dish and write down the recipe deduced by taste.

“Contestants! Contestants!” Evangeline called out. “Come and draw a number for your first assigned chef. You’ll rotate clockwise and have fifteen minutes to ascertain the ingredients and cooking methods of each dish. Write them down and move on along the line. Our chefs have prepared a special treat for you.”

When the small audience applauded, Evangeline signaled for silence. “Due to the unfortunate deaths of two of our wonderful contestants and the serious illness of a third,
we’ve decided to conclude the competition tomorrow evening. There will be a final event, the dessert finale, at seven o’clock. After that, the judges will retire to deliberate and the votes will be tallied. Miss Viking Range will be crowned tomorrow at nine p.m.”

I shifted at the outskirts of the crowd. Hedy was nowhere in sight, and I was worried.

Mrs. Phelps cleared her throat. “We can’t undo what’s occurred, but Chief Jansen and the Greenwood officials assure us the person responsible will be captured and punished. For the families of Brook Oniada, Janet Menton, and Babs Lafitte, we offer our deepest regrets.”

Sadness and dismay touched every face—except for that of Hedy, who was notably absent. I tugged at Tinkie’s arm to tell her I’d return to the hotel to search for Hedy when our client emerged from a door in the back to an audible “ah.”

Even I inhaled. She cut a striking figure in black, her pale skin luminous, her lips red and glossy. She’d applied heavy eyeliner and teased her dark hair into a bouffant that would have done the sixties proud. Her look was almost, but not quite, goth. John Waters would cast her immediately.

“Holy shit,” Tinkie said, a smidgen of admiration in her voice at Hedy’s chutzpah. “Why didn’t she just bring her broomstick and a cauldron?”

Her remark was a little too close to the conversation I’d had earlier with Jitty. “She demands attention. You have to give her that. But I’d like to stand her in a corner. This won’t help her cause.”

Hedy took her place in front of judge three, a portly Frenchman with a handlebar mustache that made Chief Jansen’s look anemic. His dish looked to be something with lean beef and mushrooms, but I wasn’t close enough to be certain.

“What did Mrs. Phelps say about a plan to protect the contestants tonight?” I asked Tinkie in a whisper.

“Every ingredient was purchased and brought in by Mrs. Phelps this morning. She and her staff remained in the kitchen with the chefs at all times, and she tasted every dish. She said if anything was wrong with the food, she’d get sick first.”

“That’s dedication to a pageant,” I said.

“Some would call it foolish. Mrs. Phelps could die.”

“Which may be preferable to having another contestant killed, if you’re the sponsor of this event.”

Tinkie elbowed me in the ribs. “Hush. She’s done everything possible to make this safe for everyone. She doesn’t believe the title is the motive. I talked to her about it, and she simply won’t entertain the thought. Pageant girls are not killers, is what she told me.”

“Chief Jansen is still suspicious of Hedy.” He stood in the back of the room watching Hedy’s every move. Police officers were stationed around the area, all on alert.

A silver bell chimed. Each contestant handed her written recipe to the chef and changed position.

Tinkie and I were members of an exclusive group allowed to witness the competition. Mrs. Phelps had decided to close the event to the general public. The fewer people attending, the easier it would be to keep control of things.

As the bell rang several more times, I stifled a yawn. I’d had little sleep the night before—and I certainly wasn’t complaining, because I’d enjoyed every second of Graf’s attention—and a very busy day. I also had a drive ahead of me. As much as I wanted to skip the remainder of the event, I couldn’t.

While most of the pageant competitions had been festive, this was subdued. Tinkie snapped her photos. The contestants were quiet and studious as they tasted and wrote.

To my relief, Mrs. Phelps rang the silver bell loudly to announce the conclusion of the evening.

“The judges and chefs will now analyze the written recipes. Thank you all.” The tension showed on her face, but she mustered a huge smile and waved everyone out the door.

I fell in step beside Hedy, and Tinkie caught up with us as we walked across the street to the hotel. “How’d you do?” I asked.

“I nailed it,” she said. “Easy as pie.”

“I want you to go to your room and order something from room service so you can verify your whereabouts. Then lock the door and stay there,” I told her.

Before she could answer, someone cleared a throat behind me. Chief Jansen had joined us. “No need for all of that, Miss Delaney. I’m stationing a police officer outside Miss Blackledge’s door. She’ll have an official escort at all times.”

“I think that’s a wonderful idea, Chief. Hedy is innocent, and this will prove it.”

“We could sit with her,” Tinkie offered.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, we could,” Tinkie insisted. “In fact, we need to be with her every moment. We know she’s innocent—”

“Not tonight,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Why not?” She stopped at the hotel’s entrance and forced me to face her.

“Because,” I said in a huff, “I need to talk to Doc in Zinnia, and Oscar is coming here to spend some time with his wife.”

Tinkie’s eyes widened, and a classic sorority girl squeal erupted as she jumped up and down. “Oscar is coming here? Tonight? You’re taking care of Sweetie and my precious Chablis?” She retrieved her spare car keys from her
purse and pressed them into my hand. “You’re such a good friend!”

My surprise was ruined, but it didn’t matter to Tinkie. Oscar was in her immediate future. And now I understood exactly what Jitty was trying to get me to comprehend.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. “I’m on my way home. Tinkie is all yours,” I said to Oscar.

When I hung up, I gave Tinkie a big hug. “See you tomorrow.” I jangled the keys to the Caddy. On the way home, I had a phone call to make, too. One I hoped would convey the true depth of my feelings for my fiancé.

The night, a soft black tunnel, glittered with stars as I drove north. Beside me, a bag of prime burgers from the Alluvian kitchen tantalized my olfactory sensors. I’d picked up a treat sure to tempt my hound’s depressed appetite. It was midnight in the Delta land, but my mind churned with much to do in so little time. The place to start was with my man.

Though it was two hours earlier in the land of celluloid dreams, Graf was obviously asleep when I called. His groggy voice gave me a mental image of him, shirtless, his wonderful hair tousled and a stubble of beard on his handsome face.

“I love you,” I said. “Don’t talk. Just listen. I’ve been wrong.” I imagined my fingers on his lips—those sexy lips that could make me weak with pleasure. “Not about what I’ve done, but the way I’ve gone about it. Graf, there is nothing more important to me than you.”

He tried to interrupt. “No, let me finish. What happened to me in that cotton field isn’t my pain alone. This is where I made a terrible mistake. I let the loss and sorrow isolate me from you, from the one person who was suffering as much as I was. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I walled you out when we both needed each other so much.”

“I love you, Sarah Booth,” he said, and his voice was wide awake. “I love you exactly the way you are.”

“The pageant concludes tomorrow. Once your movie is done, can we make that trip to Ireland?”

“Only if you want to make me the happiest man alive.”

“Oh, I think I could enjoy doing that.”

“Can I ask where this revelation came from?”

Crediting Jitty was out of the question—at least for now. Maybe one day I could tell him about the Ghost of Delaney Women Past. “A good friend turned on a lightbulb for me.”

“Thank her, for you and for me, because this conversation also points out some things I need to consider. I thought I knew what you needed, because it’s what I need. My focus was on my needs, not yours. While I might not fully understand your needs, I should honor them.”

What planet had this man dropped from? “Go back to sleep,” I said. “We’ll talk soon, when it isn’t late and we both have time to really dig in.”

“Where are you, Sarah Booth?”

I’d driven halfway home. On either side of the road spread the vast fields of cotton. “Right where I need to be,” I said, almost laughing. “I’m in the middle of a cotton field.”

“Now I have an image I can take into my dreams.”

“Good night.” I blew him a kiss and closed the phone with a smile. In another five minutes I’d be home, where Chablis and Sweetie Pie waited for me. Oscar had dropped
them off and headed toward Greenwood even as I drove north toward home.

When I turned down the drive, I saw the lights of Dahlia House blazing a welcome. Oscar had turned on every bulb in the house, but despite the waste of energy, I was glad. The sight of my ancestral home, lit with a warm glow, was exactly what I needed.

Add to that the wagging tails of one dustmop and one hound, and it was as close to bliss as I was going to come for a while. Sweetie Pie’s mournful bay rang through the night as I stopped the Caddy in front of the house and got out.

There is no joy like that with which a dog greets her human. Whatever bad decisions I’d made in the past weeks, coming home was a good one.

Sweetie and Chablis snoozed beside my bed. Outside the window, moonlight touched the cotton fields. The trees that shaded the family cemetery at Dahlia House swayed in a light breeze. In the stillness of the night, time seemed to have slowed, but it was an illusion. Events were moving forward at a fast and furious pace. While I should be sleeping, my mind wouldn’t rest.

Graf’s words whirled in my head, and there was a truth there that refracted on the murder of two girls and attempted murder of a third. He’d said he recognized my needs were different from his. Somehow, I knew this was the key to finding the beauty pageant killer. It all had to do with motive. Every criminal investigation looks at three principal elements: means, motive, and opportunity.

The means was poison, which could be purchased via the Internet. It was almost impossible to narrow a field of suspects by this criteria.

Motive was equally nonspecific. Getting rid of pageant competitors was a motive Tinkie and I had settled on. But we also considered Marcus Wellington’s potential desire to frame Hedy and remove her from registering a claim on Vivian by plunking her behind bars. But Graf’s simple statement—that he’d wanted to give me what he needed, not what I needed—was the thing that kept me awake. Somewhere in those words was the nugget of truth I sought. In assigning motives to these murders, Tinkie and I—and even Chief Jansen—had assumed the killer would want what we might want.

That was not necessarily true.

Amanda Payne had been the top contestant at the “Taste and Copy” competition. Which by my theory would make her the next victim—unless she, or Voncil—was the killer. Yet no one had been poisoned or harmed.

Had our extra security measures been successful? Had we foiled the killer with our precautions? Or had there been no murder because Amanda, as the potential winner, had no need to kill the woman who stood ahead of her in line for the title? If Amanda, or Voncil, was the killer, why would she go to such trouble to frame Hedy?

Perhaps the poisonings weren’t related to the competition at all but to something from the past. So far, our research had found nothing in common amongst the girls. They’d never met until the competition.

I wanted to throw the keyboard across the room. I didn’t have enough evidence to settle on a single motive, and I couldn’t trust my gut. The attack on me at the Carlisle plantation had deeply shaken my faith in my instincts. Self-doubt gnawed at me.

I stood up and stretched. Sweetie Pie and Chablis had eaten the deluxe hamburgers and now slept in the bliss of a doggie coma. Dr. Leonard, Sweetie’s vet, would be on my
case if she knew I’d treated my hound to such a fatty meal, but Sweetie had scarfed it down. Whether it was the food or my return, it didn’t matter. Her hunger strike was over—she was full and content, as was Chablis.

I considered the third arm of an investigator’s approach to crime. Opportunity. Because of the extra security at the “Taste and Copy,” the killer might have been thwarted. “Might have been,” like any other qualifying phrase, was the opposite of fact. Supposition didn’t make for a strong case.

Because the public had been excluded from the “Taste and Copy” event, Marcus Wellington had not been on the premises. Was the lack of a murder due to lack of opportunity? Again, it was impossible to say.

The things linking the poisonings were location, occupation of the three victims, means of death or injury, and timing. The poisonings all occurred in less than a week. Any logical person would assume they were somehow connected to the pageant. Yet a “logical” person would not harm three young women in such gruesome ways.

The use of different poisons was another clue to the killer’s mindset. The total lack of forensic evidence told me this person knew something about sophisticated detection. He, or she, was showing off. Unless, of course, there were multiple killers. My head hurt with the possibilities.

I leaned my arms down on my desk and lowered my head. My temples throbbed, and I needed to get up and run. Just run. Without destination or reason. Frustration made me feel this way.

When I woke up, my back and neck were stiff. Sweetie was licking my face while Chablis teethed on my right ankle. I looked around, confused for a moment about where I was. I didn’t normally sleep on my desk in the Delaney Detective Agency, a room that had once been a grand parlor and now contained desks, filing cabinets, and the putty
gray furniture of an inexpensive office. One day, when Tinkie and I were fabulously wealthy, we’d spring for mahogany credenzas and wall-to-wall framed accounts of our successful cases.