Cast Iron Motive (The Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries Book 4) (7 page)

“She told us that you were so upset about the parade bypassing your hardware store that you threatened to burn it all down. Is that true, or are you calling her a liar?” I asked.

“Slow down. We had words, and I can’t recall exactly what I said to her, but Della said much worse to me, and you can believe that whether you want to or not.” He took a slow sip of coffee, and then he put his mug back on the table before he spoke again. “Your aunt thinks that whoever killed Cheryl was gunning for her, doesn’t she?”

“Why do you say that?” I asked him, not wanting to give anything more away than I already had.

“It just makes sense. She’s been acting odd all week. At first I thought it was because of the festival, but that’s not the case, is it? So, she thinks she’s got a target on her back, does she? No wonder she hasn’t been herself lately.”

“Her suspicions aren’t entirely without merit,” I told him.

“Has somebody actually taken a run at her?” Gary asked, lowering his voice as he did so. “That’s not good.”

“You’re telling us,” Pat said. “She’s our family. How do you think we feel about it?”

“If there’s anything I can do to help, and I mean anything, all you have to do is ask. I feel bad now for the hard words between us, and I aim to make things right,” he said as he dug out his wallet. I was about to refuse his offer to buy us breakfast when he slipped a business card from his wallet and slid it across the table to me. “My home number’s on that thing, so call me day or night if you need me.”

“Why are you being so helpful to us?” Pat asked him. It was a worthy question that I was wondering about myself.

“You said it yourself. Knowing Della, half the town is going to believe that I had something to do with Cheryl’s murder. Your aunt isn’t afraid of sharing her thoughts with the rest of this sleepy little place, and before you know it, folks will be driving somewhere else for their hardware needs. Call my offer a healthy dose of self-interest, if that makes you feel any better.”

“I can accept that,” Pat said.

Gary made a motion to leave, but before he could go, I reached across the table and touched his arm lightly. “Are you sincere about your offer to help us?”

“Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been.”

“Then stay right here and tell us about some of your fellow townsfolk.”

He shrugged. “Who do you want to know about?”

“Let’s start with Police Chief Cameron,” Pat said.

“Who else have you got?” Gary asked, clearly uncomfortable talking about the chief of police.

“I thought you were going to help us?” I asked him.

“Cam isn’t all that fond of your aunt. They went out for a while a long time ago, and from what I heard, he asked her out again a few days ago. She laughed at him, and that’s likely to leave scorch marks on a man’s heart, if you know what I mean.”

So, at least that much of Aunt Della’s story was true. “What about your mayor?”

“Davis? Did she say that he was sweet on her, too?” Gary asked me.

“She hinted as much,” I said.

“Well, if he is, she’d better watch her back. Serena Jefferson laid her claim on that man a long time ago, and she wouldn’t take well to trespassers.”

So, Aunt Della wasn’t nearly as delusional as Pat and I had first suspected.

“I don’t get it. What’s her charm?” my brother asked him candidly.

“It’s simple, really. When your aunt talks to a man, she gives him her full attention. It’s as though there’s not another soul in the world, and nothing is more important than what you’ve got to say. It can be intoxicating at times.”

“Have you ever had a thing for her yourself?” I asked him.

“Me? No. No ma’am. That’s never going to happen.”

Pat grinned. “You don’t seem to be very sure of your answer.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Della is a fine woman, and a great listener, but I’ve had my heart broken too many times. I’m afraid if I fall in love again and it ends badly, it will be more than I can take. That’s how my daddy died, and I don’t want to follow in his footsteps.”

“He died of a broken heart?” I asked, knowing that it didn’t have anything to do with our case, but I wanted to know nonetheless. “Did your mother leave him?”

“In a way. The cancer got her. I thought it was going to kill him when she passed away, but to my surprise, he found himself another wife. Only she had more problems than anyone could have suspected. Six weeks into the marriage, she left with everything in their joint bank account. There was a note that said she was sorry that it didn’t work out, and for the next six months, I watched my father slowly die right in front of me. He just gave up, you know?” There were tears in the corner of Gary’s eyes, and without realizing what I was doing, I reached out and patted his hand gently.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s all ancient history now,” the hardware store owner said. He shook his head once, wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, and then he stood, throwing a twenty on the table. “Breakfast is on me, folks. Happy hunting.”

Before we could protest, he was gone.

“What do you make of that?” Pat asked me.

“It’s just about the saddest story I’ve heard,” I told him.

“I’m not talking about his dad’s broken heart. Gary managed to confirm everything that Della told us, with one glaring exception.”

“What’s that?” I asked, still thinking about the tragic story of his father.

“Della claimed that she and Gary had a real argument, but he seemed to downplay it, didn’t he? I wonder if anyone overheard them arguing?”

“We can always ask around,” I said as Regina came up, scowling at us both.

“You two Della’s kin?” she asked harshly.

“We are,” Pat said.

I kept waiting for Regina to say something, but after a moment, she just shook her head and walked away.

“What was that all about?” I asked my brother.

“I don’t know, but I’ve got a feeling that she’s not a fan.”

“Maybe she wants the mayor for herself, too,” I said with a smile.

“Maybe,” he answered.

After our breakfast was over, Pat grabbed the twenty, as well as our bill, and we walked to the register together. “You’re not going to actually let Gary pay for our meal, are you?”

“Why not?” Pat asked as he handed Regina the twenty Gary had left behind.

I waited until we were outside on the curb before I asked, “Care to explain what just happened?”

“Don’t worry, I was just teasing. I used his twenty, but I’m planning on paying him back the next time we see him,” he replied.

“When are we going to do that?”

“As soon as we speak with our other suspects. Maybe if we get lucky, we’ll find someone who overheard that exchange between Della and him. In the meantime, we’ve got other folks we need to speak with first.”

“Where should we start?” I asked him.

“Town hall sounds good to me, since two of our suspects work there. Should we question them separately or stick together?”

“Together,” I said without hesitation. “Always together.”

Chapter 9: Pat

“I
s the mayor in?” I asked the pretty young brunette behind the desk in city hall as I gave her my brightest smile.

“He is,” she said, though it was clear that my charm had no effect on her. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but we were hoping that he could fit us in. We just met him last night.”

“You’re Della’s people, aren’t you?” she asked with a smile. If there was any animosity between them, I couldn’t see it. Perhaps this was one of the times where our aunt’s sense of dramatics came into play.

“We are,” I said as I extended a hand. “I’m Pat Marsh, and this is my twin sister, Annie.”

She took my hand and then Annie’s. “I’ve always been fascinated by twins. They run in my family.”

“Are you one yourself?” Annie asked her.

“I wish. It must be so cool.”

“It can be,” I said with a grin.

“More so for him than me, most times,” she added.

“I bet. Let me see if Davis has a second for you.”

She stood and walked from behind her desk into the mayor’s office. Once she was gone, Annie said, “She’s cute enough to get someone her own age. Davis has to be somewhere around thirty years older than she is.”

“Maybe she finds older men attractive,” I said.

“Then you wouldn’t qualify,” she answered with a smile. “You’re not old enough.”

“I’ve got someone in my life, remember?”

“I know that. I just want to make sure that you do. Jenna is the best thing that’s happened to you in a long time.” I knew she was referring to Molly Fennel, my former love, and she was right. Molly and I had too much of a history to ever put the past completely behind us, but I was with Jenna now, and I was happy about it.

“No worries on that count. I’m not about to mess that up,” I said.

“Good.”

Serena came back and stood in the open doorway. “He’s got some time for you right now, but you need to make it quick.” She turned and looked at her boss and scolded him. “Don’t take over ten minutes, or I’ll have to throw them out,” she said good-naturedly. “You have a meeting with the planning commission, and you skipped out on the last one.”

“I got distracted,” he said with a grin.

“That’s where I come in, to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

As we stepped inside, I said, “We won’t keep him long.”

“I’m just having a little fun with him,” Serena said. She closed the door behind us, and Davis stood until we were seated across from him. For the mayor, his desk was rather nondescript, and I wondered if it had first seen life in a high school classroom. The top was scarred from decades of hard use, but somehow it seemed to fit Davis just fine.

“She seems nice,” Annie said.

“For a nag, she’s okay,” he answered with a grin. “Not that I don’t need someone keeping me on schedule. Before I hired her, I missed half of the meetings I was supposed to be attending, and I like the way she teases me into action.”

“Is there anything else going on between the two of you?” Annie asked lightly.

“What? Do you mean romantically? She’s just a child! I’m thirty years older than she is, Annie.”

“Still, it’s been known to happen,” my sister pushed a little harder.

“Not to me. I like women I can share a common history with.”

“Does that mean you only go out with people that you’ve dated before?” I asked him.

“No, I mean general history. My cutoff line is the first moon landing.”

“I don’t follow,” Annie said.

“If they were born before Neil Armstrong took that first step, then I’ll date them. After that, and there’s not as much to talk about as I would like.”

It was an interesting approach, and I couldn’t blame him for it. It would be hard enough for me to go out with someone ten years younger than I was, let alone thirty. I had a friend from school who kept marrying eighteen-year-old girls. He’d started in high school, getting Miranda Huggins pregnant our junior year and eloping to Las Vegas. When that didn’t work out, he’d married Sarah Lawson eight years later, who also happened to be eighteen at the time. After Sarah left him, he started dating yet another eighteen-year-old, and I wondered if he’d ever be able to break the cycle.

“How about Serena? Did I see a twinkle in her eye when she looked at you?” Annie asked.

I had to hand it to my sister; she’d steered the conversation so elegantly that I wanted to applaud.

“Hardly. I’m more of a crazy uncle to her, as far as I can tell. The last I heard, she was dating someone long distance in Raleigh, but I try not to dig too deeply into her personal life.” He paused a moment, and then the mayor/newspaperman leaned back in his chair. “I’m sure you didn’t come by to discuss my love life. What can I do for you?”

“Have you had any luck discovering what they found at the crime scene last night?” I asked him. We had a valuable resource at our disposal, and I wasn’t about to ignore it.

“Yes. It’s most likely the murder weapon,” he answered gravely.

“What was it?” I asked him.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it was a heavy-duty flashlight. Apparently Cheryl was struck from behind with something around the size of it, or shaped a lot like it. It didn’t kill her, but it must have knocked her out the second it hit. The official cause of death is drowning, and the report lists foul play. She was deliberately murdered.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “They may have wanted to just knock her unconscious. You saw the slope of the path near where they found her body. She could have easily rolled into the water before her assailant could stop her progress.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s still homicide if it happened as a direct result of the assault,” the mayor said. I had a feeling he’d looked that up upon learning about the blow to the head.

I remembered that Della had told us that she’d loaned just such a flashlight to Cheryl the night she was murdered. Was that true, or was our aunt covering her tracks for a crime she committed herself? It sounded outlandish at first, but what did we really know about the woman? Had she had her own reasons to want to see her best friend dead? If so, the supposed attempts on her life might help muddy the trail. Then again, it hadn’t been my imagination last night; someone had tried to get into her house long after anyone should have been making the attempt. This was getting more confusing than it had first appeared. “Any idea who the flashlight belongs to?” I asked him.

Davis frowned upon hearing the question. “From what I’ve learned, there were no distinguishing characteristics on it, aside from the section that was a little dinged up from where it most likely hit Cheryl. Why, do you know something I don’t?”

“I’m just asking questions, hoping to uncover something that’s relevant,” I said. It was the complete and utter truth, and yet it still managed quite nicely as a lie. I needed to have another talk with Della, but until I did, the mayor was just going to have to be satisfied with my obfuscation.

It made me proud when Annie didn’t react at all to my statement, though I could tell from the look in her eye that she’d made the connection as well.

“Is there anything else you can tell us?” I asked him.

“Honestly, I’ve probably said more than I should have. How do you two manage to do that?”

“Do what?” Annie asked.

“Make it so easy to tell you things I shouldn’t,” he replied. After glancing at his watch, the mayor said, “I hate to keep bailing out on you, but Serena’s right; I really can’t miss another meeting.”

As he started to stand, I said, “Just one more question.”

“Fire away, but make it quick.”

“Are you in love with our aunt?” I asked him.

It took him a few seconds to come up with an answer to a pretty straightforward question. “That’s an odd question. What gave you that idea?”

“According to her, you’ve asked her out on more than one occasion, and now you’re living in the house right beside her. It’s a fair question.”

“Della is an interesting woman; I’ll give you that,” the mayor replied. “I’ve expressed interest in dating her in the past, which she has politely declined. The fact that I bought that house has a great deal more to do with its location on the water than it does its proximity to your aunt. Now, if there’s nothing else, I’ve really got to go.”

We all walked out into the hallway together, and I was surprised to find Serena standing just beside the door. Had she been eavesdropping on our conversation the entire time?

She said quickly, “Good. I was just coming to get you. Here are the papers you need for your meeting.”

Serena handed him a sheaf of paperwork, which he gratefully took. “What would I do without you?” he asked her with a grin.

“Fail miserably at whatever you attempted, most likely,” she answered with a warm smile of her own.

After her boss disappeared, I heard Annie say, “He’s really something, isn’t he?”

“Davis is a good man, and he has the potential to be a great mayor. He just needs a little nudge every now and then.”

“And that’s where you come in, right?” Annie asked.

“I like to think I have a hand in it,” she replied.

“It would be hard not to have feelings for a man with that much charisma, especially when you work so closely with him.”

“Me and Davis? Hardly. He’s old enough to be my father.” She appeared suitably outraged by the notion, but I couldn’t tell if she was sincere in her protests or not.

“But he’s not related to you,” I said. “Surely you’ve thought about it.”

“No, I can honestly say that it’s never crossed my mind. Besides, I have a boyfriend.”

“A long-distance one, correct?” Annie asked.

“How did you know that?”

“Davis told us,” my sister replied.

“Well, it’s true enough.” Her phone rang on her desk, but before she answered it, she turned to us and asked, “Is there anything else?”

“Just one thing,” I said. “Did you know Cheryl Simmons very well?”

“We were aware of each other’s presence enough to say hello if we met on the street or in the grocery store, but that’s about the extent of it. Why?”

“Just curious,” I said. “See you later.”

“I have no doubt of it,” she replied. “After all, Gateway Lake is a small town.”

“That it is,” I said as Annie and I left her office space.

“What was that all about?” my sister asked me once we were well away from the mayor’s office.

“What do you mean?”

“We left before we could ask her for an alibi, and we never did get a chance to ask Davis for his, either.”

“The time frame when the murder could have occurred is so spread out that alibis aren’t going to do us a bit of good with this case,” I told her. “Anyone in town could have done it, or in the state, for that matter. I thought about asking her some more pointed questions, but I didn’t know how to phrase them without warning her that they were both suspects in the woman’s homicide.”

“Isn’t that the exact premise we’re working from, though?” Annie asked me. “
Somebody
killed that woman.”

“Unless she dropped the flashlight, tripped on a root in the dark, and drowned, all by accident.”

“If that’s what happened,” my sister said, “then we’re not doing ourselves any good snooping around town. We have to work with the idea that someone was so obsessed with Aunt Della that they killed Cheryl Simmons by mistake.”

“Did Serena seem obsessed to you? How about Davis?” I asked my sister.

“No, not particularly. Then again, their behaviors could have both been covering up their true feelings toward our aunt.”

I shook my head. “I have a hard time believing that after speaking with both of them. Isn’t it possible that Della’s imagination has gotten the better of her this time? Davis didn’t seem to be in love with her, and Serena didn’t seem all that jealous, either.”

“Are you saying that Aunt Della read both people wrong?” Annie asked me.

“I’m just saying that they both seemed perfectly rational in their reactions to her,” I answered.

“Davis never answered our question, though. Did you notice that?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked her.

“We asked him if he was in love with Aunt Della, and he never answered.”

“Are you sure about that?” I thought back to the conversation and realized that Annie was right. Davis had managed to avoid answering our question altogether by diverting the conversation from it. “You’re right. I missed that. Is it significant? After all, he could have just lied to us.”

“I think he’s too good a politician not to leave himself a way out if we find out the truth later.”

“How about his feelings for Serena?”

“I think he really does think of her as a quirky niece, but how Serena feels is a different matter altogether.”

I was surprised by my sister’s observation, since the secretary had struck me as being open and sincere. “She smiled when she heard Della’s name, and she couldn’t have been nicer to the two of us if she’d tried.”

“I don’t know. It didn’t feel right to me, for some reason,” Annie said. “I don’t completely trust her.”

“Even though we don’t have any reason not to?” I asked her.

“Aunt Della considers her a threat,” Annie answered. “That’s enough for me.”

“Even after our conversation?”

“Even then.”

There was no use discussing it further until we had more information. “Where should we go now?” I asked her.

“We could always go speak with Gary again,” she suggested.

“Until we have more information, I’d like to delay that for a little while. I have another idea, but I have a feeling that you’re not going to like it.”

“Try me,” Annie asked.

“Let’s talk to our aunt again,” I said.

“To call her a liar about what she told us before?” Annie asked me, being more than a little bit defensive.

“No, but we need to know if she has any solid proof that Davis is willing to kill her if he can’t have her all to himself and that Serena wants to see her dead so she doesn’t lose the man of her dreams. Some of Della’s stories I can buy, but some of them just don’t add up, especially after we’ve spoken with the parties involved.”

“Okay, we can certainly ask her for some clarification,” Annie conceded, “but we can’t browbeat her, Pat. She may not be your favorite person in the world, but she’s family, and she deserves better than that.”

“Annie, when I have ever browbeat anyone?” I asked her calmly.

“I just know how you feel.”

“I’m trying to warm up to her, but that doesn’t mean she gets a free pass. We need to push her just as hard as we would anyone else we didn’t happen to be related to. It might get a little tense, but we still need to do it. If you can’t go along with that, then I’ll give you a free pass. You can make your excuses and go do something else, but she and I are having that talk, whether you like it or not. I’m sorry to go against your wishes, but it’s how it has to be.”