Plan Bee (14 page)

“That’s right,” Mom agreed. “Besides, nobody around here would have done it that way, leaving him in a fireplace like that. A local would have hauled him out to the woods and buried him under a pine tree. I mean, if one of them had a reason, which they don’t, they would have handled it completely different.”

“Was he shot?” Grams wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I said. Then I thought about Grams’s question, and what might have really caused his death. I
hadn’t seen any blood around his body. And Patti and I didn’t find any blood the night before, nor had Ben been able to pick up the scent even with his keen sense of smell. If not shot, then what? Poisoned?

We dug into the pancakes, so talk at the table came to a halt, which suited me just fine, since I needed to regroup and decide how to present my warning to Mom without losing the sweet new mother sitting next to me.

Nothing simple and easy came to mind. Instead, I ate so many pancakes I couldn’t move. That’s the problem with pancakes—they’re delicious, but they sink to the bottom of your stomach like chunks of concrete.

“The Wild Clover opens soon,” Grams said. “Who’s taking care of business?”

“The twins. I’m really going to miss them when they go back to college. Then it’ll only be Carrie Ann, Holly, and me opening up. And you know how that goes.”

Mom snorted, like the woman I used to know. She doesn’t approve of my cousin. Carrie Ann has issues, nothing I consider really major or unfixable, but Mom thinks she’s nothing but trouble and I should fire her. Mom should be snorting about Holly instead, who shows up whenever it suits her.

“Want me to make more pancakes?” Grams asked.

“I’d explode,” I said.

“I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Mom jumped up and left the room. I hated to imagine what it was. Mom’s presents usually involved changing my life around to suit her image of what it should be. Like a new floor plan for the store, since she thought I could do a better job of organizing the shelves. Or a subscription to a dating service to remind me of her preemptive warning about Hunter. Maybe this time it would be old lady shoes because she dislikes my flip-flops. Or…

Mom came back with something wrapped in pink tissue paper. “A gift,” she said, handing the package over.

“For me?” I acted like I was excited.

“Open it.”

So I did. And held up a gorgeous tiger-print scarf with crystal beaded fringe. My mouth slammed open, almost hitting the table. “For me? Really?”

“It’s handmade,” Mom said. “The minute I saw it, I thought of you. The colors go with your complexion.”

“It
is
beautiful.” I fingered a topaz bead, then wrapped the scarf around my neck and loosely knotted the fringed edges. I was pretty sure Mom had bought it from Aggie Petrie, because it was the same style as the one I’d admired on Milly, only a different print. I quickly rationalized that I could keep it since Milly had said Aggie’s daughter-in-law made them, and I didn’t have a problem with Alicia like I did with her in-laws. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

Mom smiled again. She was breaking records today.

“Have you been sleeping okay?” I asked Mom.

“Like a rock. Why?”

“No reason.” Okay, here it came, time to spit it out. “Mom, tell me about Tom. Are you two really an item?”

Mom actually giggled. “We’re just friends at this point,” she said. “I’m going over to his apartment in a little while to see how he’s doing. He’s distraught about his brother, as you can imagine.”

“What do you know about Tom’s history?”

“Enough to know he’s a decent man, with integrity and honor.”

Grams got up and brought over the coffeepot. “He wears a wedding ring,” she said. “What’s the story behind that?”

See, Grams can say things any old way, just blurt them out, which is my style, too. But if I did that with Mom, right away she’d bristle and get all snappy.

“He was married once,” Mom said. “But his wife died from a dreadful disease. He wears his wedding ring because he’s loyal to her memory, to the woman she was before she got sick.”

“What a nice man,” Grams said.

So he hadn’t told Mom about the part where his wife ran off with his brother.

“Let me get my camera and take a picture of you looking so smart, Helen,” Grams said. “It’s about time you found a man to have fun with. And, Story, don’t take off that beautiful scarf yet. I want a picture of you wearing it.”

At that point, I gave up. What else could I do? Burst her bubble? Without the full support of my sister and grandmother to interrogate my mother and demand she stop seeing Tom, I decided to crawl back into my shell. At least for now. If Tom Stocke
had
brutally killed his brother in a fit of revenge, then maybe Ford asked for it. Or it could have been an accident. Who knows at this point.

In any case, that certainly didn’t mean that Tom would harm Mom.

From now on, though, I was going to keep an eye out for trouble from him. Luckily, since Tom worked at his antique store during the day, all I had to worry about was nighttime.

“Are you two going out tonight?” I asked Mom, acting all nonchalant while I wrapped the scarf back up in the pink tissue paper.

She didn’t answer, but by the Mona Lisa smile she had plastered on her face, it was a sure bet.

I parked my truck behind The Wild Clover and waddled around to the front of the building, still stuffed from Grams’s wonderful blueberry pancakes. She had offered to dog-sit for Dinky, so I was free from that responsibility for the entire day.

As a small business owner, I’m here to say that sometimes I really feel the weight of the burden I carry, especially when I’m forced to work with family members. Mom’s adjusted attitude and her scarf gift, which I actually like for once, gave me a temporary high. But the thrill was fading.

I felt grumpy because Holly’s Jag wasn’t behind the store, and she’d promised to be on time in the future. While hiring Carrie Ann had been my idea from the very beginning and I was prepared to accept full responsibility for any problems my cousin created for me, Holly had been forced on me by Mom and that stupid contract I’d signed when I borrowed money to pay off my ex-husband. So now I had to put up and shut up and I didn’t like it one bit.

I felt even grumpier when I discovered that Aggie and Eugene Petrie had already set up for business, and they’d expanded from one table to two, doubling the amount of junk from the past weekend.

“Wait just one minute,” I said. “You can’t do that. Twice as big was not part of the deal.”

“Eugene,” Aggie said, smirking at me, “would you get another table out of the van?”

“Another table! Eugene, stop right there. This wasn’t the deal!” Eugene slowed and was about to do just as I said, until Aggie got through to him with a more commanding voice than mine. “Eugene, that table. Now!”

This was
not
going to endear me to the other business owners in Moraine. I’d caved to Aggie’s trespassing charge threat, but I’d been so mad at the time, I didn’t take into consideration how it would affect anyone else. We’d tried so hard to keep the festival revenue in the hands of our residents, and here I was, looking like I was welcoming the competition. Maybe I should just take my medicine, let nasty old Aggie Petrie press charges, and make Johnny Jay’s day.

Now I knew exactly how it felt to be between a rock and a hard place. And it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Carrie Ann came out of the store to watch. “Uh-oh,” she said right away. I followed her gaze and saw Tom Stocke heading our way and looking upset. I immediately felt defensive about how having Aggie here must look to him.

“Can I have a word with you, Story?” Tom said.

“This isn’t my fault, Tom,” I said before I could corral the Fischer blame game words. They’d just slipped out automatically. “I take that back. This is my fault, but I can explain.”

Tom looked at Aggie’s tables as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Oh, that,” he said. “I have bigger problems today.”

“I’m so, so sorry about your brother,” I said next, rather
awkwardly, because I was sorry he even had Ford for a brother in the first place.

“I’m sorry, too,” Carrie Ann said from the doorway.

Aggie was in the process of ignoring our existence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her putting sales pressure on one of my regular customers. And really hoped she didn’t drive away business. I hadn’t thought of that before.

“I want to talk to you about yesterday,” Tom said to me. “What you saw, what you think might have happened. Since you found him and all.” He had pulled me aside, out of earshot, and kept his voice low. “We need to go over the facts.”

The last thing I was about to do was share any information with Tom Stocke. He was the number one suspect in my book. So I used that stupid directive ordered by Johnny Jay. “I can’t talk to you. The chief would have my head on a platter. Remember what he said about staying away from each other?”

“I forgot all about that,” Tom said. He didn’t look so good—hair plastered in spots where he’d slept on it wrong, red and unfocused eyes—but if I’d just lost a sibling, I’d probably look even worse.

“Johnny Jay was pretty clear,” I said.

“Sorry. Forget I mentioned anything.”

“Who’s minding your store?”

“I didn’t open. I just can’t. Not after what happened. Finding Ford like that, well, it brought back lots of bad memories. Horrible ones.”

I couldn’t imagine how awful his wife’s treachery must have been for him. Infidelity is an ugly, soul-wrenching thing to have to go through. I knew exactly how he felt. My ex-husband should have had
philanderer
branded on his forehead for eternity. And imagine if my sister had run off with the sex addict? That would hurt even worse. And finding out the other man was his own brother… Maybe Tom could plead self-defense. Or temporary insanity. Against
my will, I felt my heartstrings tugging for him. Money didn’t buy happiness and Tom’s millions weren’t going to comfort him now.

Tom probably didn’t even plan to kill his brother. Total blinding rage must have taken over.

“You should turn yourself in,” I suggested. “No jury is going to convict you.”

“You think I killed my brother?” Tom had a haunted look in his eyes. “I didn’t even know he was in Moraine. You have to believe me.”

“I’m trying, Tom, but nobody else around here knew your brother at all. None of us had a reason to want him dead.”

“Somebody did. Nobody is going to believe me when I say I didn’t murder my own brother. And that crazy woman, Patti Dwyre, has been stalking me. She’s threatening to write up a big piece in the newspaper.”

Before we got any further, I heard a siren coming our way, growing louder fast. Johnny Jay’s police chief car zipped past the store and slowed. Then it turned down the street where I lived.

“Always in a great big hurry,” Aggie said from her junk-laden tables. “I’ve seen him using his touch-button toys just going to lunch. What a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. Self-important caveman. What a show-off.”

Finally, a subject Aggie and I could agree on.

Tom muttered something under his breath and took off in the opposite direction as though Johnny was out to get him. So much for Tom running against Grant Spandle for town chair. What a pipe dream that had been.

Another police car roared past, making lots of noise, too. It also turned down my street.

This couldn’t be good.

“Better make sure nobody blew up your house,” Aggie suggested.

I studied the obnoxious blackmailer and couldn’t help
thinking I’d just been threatened by her again. Unfortunately, I gave her the satisfaction of watching me run down the street, just in case my house really was involved in some way.

For some reason Noel, the tween explosive expert, popped into my head.

As it turned out, Patti had been the one who called for help and it really did have something to do with firepower. She and Johnny were standing in her backyard. They were both looking up at Patti’s favorite room, the one from where she scoped out gossip and
Distorter
news with her telescope. There was a small hole in the center of the window.

“What are you doing here, Fischer?” Johnny Jay said. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Actually, I want Story to see this, too, Chief Jay,” Patti said. “She’s my closest neighbor. We have to stick together.”

Tim, Johnny Jay’s oldest police officer on the force, raised the window from the inside and stuck his head out.

“Telescope is smashed to smithereens,” Tim said. “My guess is a high-powered rifle.”

“Damn,” Johnny Jay said. “Everybody ought to know they can’t fire a rifle in my town.”

“That’s not the point,” Patti said, scowling at Johnny, then to me, “the chief thinks it was a stray bullet.”

Johnny Jay nodded. “But once I catch him, he’s going to get nailed for firing a rifle. Nobody does this and gets away with it when I’m in charge.”

Johnny should be getting all blustery about what had happened to Patti’s window and telescope. Instead he was more concerned about the choice of weapon selected by the shooter. We all are aware that rifles, because of their long-range power, aren’t legal in our area. Everybody knows that. But there’s always somebody horsing around with a rifle when they shouldn’t be. This, though, was different.