Rum Cake Murder: A Frosted Love Cozy Mystery - Book 8 (Frosted Love Cozy Mysteries) (5 page)

Missy’s daily routine now consisted of a disturbing rhythm which included, checking on Grayson and Chris every morning, and delivering any orders that had been placed through the Dellville store, followed by a visit to Ben’s room, haunted by the shadow of a girl perched in the corner chair, then back home to interrogate her boyfriend about the case and run out her anxieties with Toffee. She wasn’t sleeping well, and had no interest in food, even leaving the baking of cupcakes, muffins and cookies for the shop to Grayson, who had an incredible aptitude for it. Yet, despite her lack of appetite, she agreed to meet Chas for lunch at the local steakhouse.

“I just don’t understand it, Chas,” Missy complained, cutting tiny bits from her petite filet. “Ben is still not waking up. I’m sorry, I know you feel that we should trust Dr. Aston, but I just don’t. He didn’t act like any doctor that I’ve ever seen. Even if we’re in the midst of legal action, he could’ve at least spoken compassionately about Ben.”

“I’ve run into some top-notch doctors whose bedside manners are horrible. When Aston spoke with me, it was from one professional to another, he has no idea that Ben means anything to me, so he didn’t feel the need for diplomacy or tact, he just presented the facts,” Chas shrugged. “I’m sure Ben is getting the best care possible.”

“Well, I’m not so sure. Dr. Aston was positively nasty to me, and I can’t help but think that if he’s so bitter about what happened to his daughter, he might just take it out on Ben. Isn’t there some way that you can check up on him? Maybe see if he’s made poor decisions in the past? It’d make me feel so much better if I believed that he was actually a good doctor, even if he’s a cold human being.”

“Sure, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll do some checking,” he assured her, adding a dash of salt to his fluffy baked potato. “In the meantime, please just try to relax, okay?”

Missy nodded and speared a green bean with her fork, nibbling the end of it. A man walking in with a thin, beautiful blonde woman caught her eye, and she realized that it was none other than Sidney Christianson, Loretta’s husband and the lawyer who was suing her on Dr. Aston’s behalf. “Don’t be obvious about it, but when you have a moment, take a look at the table in the corner. The man sitting there is Sidney Christianson, but I don’t recognize the woman.”

Chas nodded, chewing a bite of steak. After he swallowed and washed down the bite with a sip of sweet tea, he casually glanced to his left and took in the occupants of the corner table. “Interesting,” he remarked, turning back to Missy.

“What? What’s interesting?” her curiosity was piqued.

“Well, I could be wrong, but if my memory of the society pages is correct, I believe that Christianson is with Mrs. Aston,” he said in a low voice.

“As in Dr. Aston’s wife?” Missy asked, eyebrows raised. When Chas nodded, she looked over again, subtly using her peripherals. “Looks to me like they have a bit cozier relationship than just that of lawyer and client,” she whispered, observing the way that the couple was interacting.

“That was my thought too,” Chas agreed. “Like I said, interesting.”

Not wanting to be seen by the lawyer who was threatening to destroy her life as she knew it, they had the leftovers boxed up and slipped out of the restaurant unseen by her foe.

When the handsome detective dropped Missy off after boxing up almost her entire lunch so that she could take it home with her, she felt a bit better, and was oddly confident that Beckett would find something suspicious when he looked into Dr. Aston’s history, and perhaps that of his wandering wife. She went back to check on Ben and once more found Cheryl sitting, waiting, in the corner.

“Do you stay here all day?” she asked the tortured young woman in the shadows.

Cheryl nodded, responding quietly. “They’re pretty strict about visiting hours, but I stay as long as I’m allowed.”

“What about meals?” Missy frowned, noticing that her clothes were baggy and her cheeks seemed sunken underneath the bruises and scrapes.

“I’m not hungry. Sometimes I eat when I go home, other times I just can’t make myself do it,” she hugged her knees to her chest.

“I could make you some cupcakes,” Missy offered, concerned. “Which kind are your favorites?” She might suspect the girl of murder, but she could not stand idly by while the pitiful creature starved to death.

“Please don’t go to the trouble, I wouldn’t be able to eat them anyway,” Cheryl admitted. “Food doesn’t taste good, and I stopped feeling hungry a few days ago.”

“That’s not healthy,” her boss warned, heart torn between mistrust and compassion.

“I’m healthier than he is,” she replied, her eyes glued on Ben. “This shouldn’t have happened to him. It should have been me. I’d give anything to trade places with him,” she murmured, seemingly forgetting that Missy present, rocking slightly back and forth. Missy moved to the bed, and after kissing Ben’s forehead, slipped quietly from the room. Cheryl either didn’t notice or simply didn’t acknowledge her leaving.

Curious about the relationship between Sidney Christianson and the coldly beautiful Mrs. Aston, Missy decided to do a little of her own detective work. Her findings would most likely have absolutely nothing to do with her own lawsuit, or the possible charges facing Ben and/or Cheryl, but it would at least give her something to do besides sitting around waiting for the results of the police investigation. After spending a little over an hour on her computer, Missy was able to track down the address of Dr. and Mrs. Aston, and decided to go for a drive that just happened to take her past that address.

The Aston home was a sprawling brick traditional three story house, tucked privately behind a gated brick wall with lots of trees and bushes for privacy. There was no way to see into the yard other than sitting right in front of the wrought iron, spear-topped gates, but luck was with Missy. As she turned onto the street that ran in front of the mini-mansion, a candy-apple-red convertible German car, driven by a blonde woman with giant sunglasses and a silk scarf around her neck, pulled out of the drive. The top of the convertible was up for the winter, but even through the lightly tinted glass, Missy caught a good enough glimpse of the driver to be nearly certain that it was indeed Mrs. Aston.

Following a safe distance behind, she trailed the doctor’s wife to the country club, where she handed off the keys to a valet, and dressed for tennis, she headed for the indoor courts.

Frustrated that her little adventure had revealed absolutely nothing, Missy started to pull away from her vantage point under some trees near the entrance, when she saw a car with a vanity plate that read, “ATTY SC,” pull into the front drive. She wasn’t terribly surprised to see Sidney Christianson climb out of the car and hand his keys to the valet, dressed for tennis.

Hurrying home, she told Chas about her findings while taking Toffee for a walk. He listened carefully, then told her he’d found out some things about Dr. Aston that were worth looking into,  promising to fill her in at dinner.

Missy was on pins and needles, waiting for Chas to appear. She had prepared a homemade veggie lasagna that came out absolutely perfectly – the noodles tender, the cheese slightly browned on top, and the slices firm enough to stand on their own without sliding. She opened an opinionated Cabernet that would be the ultimate complement to the dish, and put crisp, green salads out as an appetizer. The bread sticks that baked in the oven after the lasagna was done were lighter than air and slightly glazed with garlic butter. Her mouth watered at the food, and her heart skipped a beat when she heard Chas’s deep voice greeting Toffee in the living room.

She kissed him quickly, suffered impatiently through small talk while they got settled at the dining room table, then started pumping him mercilessly for information.

“So, what did you find out about Dr. Aston,” she asked, tearing the end off of a bread stick and dipping it lightly in her salad dressing.

“I’m fine, thank you, and how was your day,” the detective teased, dark eyes sparkling.

“Chas! You promised that you’d tell me about what you found out at dinner,” Missy reminded him. “This…” she said gesturing to the delicious meal in front of them, “…is dinner. Now tell me what you found out!”

Still grinning, Beckett ate a forkful of lasagna, chewed, swallowed, and took a sip of wine before responding, enjoying her impatience. “Okay, okay,” he raised his hands in surrender, then turned serious. “When I tried to look into Aston’s history, I came up with nearly nothing. It was as though he didn’t exist prior to about five years ago, so I looked outside the area for what I could find, and some very interesting things came up.”

“Like what?” she prompted, sipping her wine.

“Like, his track record for patients dying is very strange. He typically loses two to three a year, and they almost always die the same way, no matter what symptoms they had to begin with,” he explained.

“What do you mean?” Missy was mystified.

“Whether they came in for an injury, or an illness, they all followed the same pattern prior to their death. They’d slip into a coma that would last for a couple of weeks, then die of an embolism.”

“Wow, that’s a strange coincidence,” Missy frowned.

“It seems that a medical board in Illinois thought so too. They did a formal investigation of Aston, but never found enough evidence to charge him with anything, so they advised him that he could either resign his position or be fired, and that’s how he ended up in Louisiana. Once he got here, the pattern decreased, but one of the deaths makes me really suspicious,” Chas said, lips pursed in thought.

“Suspicious…why?”

“Because it was Cheryl’s mother.”

Missy’s mouth dropped open. “What? Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious, but that’s not even the most interesting part. Aston was one of the loudest voices calling for Stanley Conner, Cheryl’s stepfather, to be prosecuted for the crime.”

“Hmm…deflecting attention from himself maybe?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m thinking. There was also a time a few years ago where his own wife mysteriously slipped into a coma, but came out of it a couple of weeks later,” he added.

“And when you consider that we saw her with another man at lunch today, it makes it entirely possible that she may have been about to become his next victim,” Missy’s eyes widened.

Chas nodded. “This is all speculation at this point, but I’m definitely going to be doing more digging to see what I can find out about Dr. Aston. It’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t investigate doctors when there’s a murder, because they’ve essentially spent their entire lives trying to maintain and extend life rather than ending it, but at the end of the day, they’re just people too – people who could succumb to evil impulses.”

Missy shuddered. “Chas, Ben is in a coma, and is in the care of Dr. Aston…what if he’s next?”

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions. While the evidence that I’ve found seems to point to Dr. Aston, we have to remember that every time someone was suspicious about him, there was never enough evidence to even charge him. It could be merely a series of bizarre coincidences,” he shrugged.

“But I really don’t want to gamble on that with Ben’s life,” she exclaimed. “Can’t we petition the hospital to get Ben a different doctor because his current one is in the process of suing him?” she pleaded.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Beckett nodded. “And in the meantime, I hate to say it, but if Aston didn’t kill Stanley Conner, it looks like Cheryl did.”

“But if Cheryl killed her stepfather, then who tried to kill Ben by cutting his brake line?”

“Good question, and one that I intend to find the answer to. As for you, young lady, no more following around doctor’s wives looking for dirt, understand? If Aston is capable of doing what we think he may have done, you could be unnecessarily putting yourself in danger,” he warned.

“Okay,” Missy nodded, it’s just so confusing and scary, I hate feeling helpless.

“I know,” Chas said softly. “Hopefully, it’ll all be over soon.

Feeling more than a bit strange walking into the hospital after her strange conversation with Chas, Missy visited Ben’s room again the next morning, disturbed, but no longer surprised to see Cheryl in her usual spot in the corner. The shadows kept her mostly hidden from view, but when Missy politely said hello, she could’ve sworn that the pale, unkempt girl was clutching something in her hands, as if to hide it. Not bothering to even attempt conversation, Missy went directly to the bed and placed a hand lovingly on Ben’s cheek, trying to hold back her tears.

“Oh Ben, honey, please wake up,” she pleaded quietly, hoping that somehow he could hear her. She searched his face for any sign of movement, any twitch that might give her hope, and found no peace in the smooth, still skin. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, Missy heard a soft sound behind her and turned to see Cheryl’s shoulders shaking with the force of her tears as she bowed her head and cried. As though feeling Missy’s gaze, she slowly raised her head.

“I talk to him every day…just hoping that he’ll blink or something, but every day, there’s no change,” she mourned. “I wonder if I’ll ever hear his sweet voice say my name again, or if I’ll ever feel his kiss. It hurts so bad.” The bereft young woman clutched at her sides, her head dropping again. At a loss, Missy squeezed her shoulder on the way out, not knowing what to think.

She went to Crème de la Cupcake after the disconcerting visit, glad to see that Grayson and Chris were still doing well.

“Hey Ms. G.,” Grayson greeted her. “How’s Ben doing?”

“The same, unfortunately,” Missy made a face.

“I ran into Cheryl at the grocery store a couple of nights ago. That girl is messed up,” he shook his head sadly.

“Messed up? What do you mean?”

“Well, you know what she’s been like. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep, she spends all of her time at the hospital, and when I tried to talk to her, she kept muttering about how it’s her duty to watch Ben and protect him from the bad man. It really creeped me out, but I feel bad for her, you know?”

“Of course you do, Grayson, it’s just a sad thing all the way around. Did she say who the bad man was?” Missy asked, her heart beating fast.

“No, she was really out of it, so I didn’t ask her any questions. Do you think Ben’s going to be okay?” he asked, brushing his thick, black hair out of his soulful eyes.

“I hope so Grayson, I really hope so.”