Scoop to Kill (14 page)

And that sealed the deal. Emily Clowper might hail from a big city, and possess a fancy education. She might have a trendy haircut, wear funky glasses, and have the body of a twenty-year-old. But beneath all that gloss and sophistication, she had the same fundamental need to be appreciated that we all have. I couldn’t deny that basic female bond.

I reached across the table to cover her hand with my own. She startled, but she didn’t pull away. “Emily,” I said, “it will be okay.”

At first she studied my face from behind her hipster glasses, the naturalist observing an unusual insect. The anthropologist and the headhunter. And I retracted my hand.

But then she smiled again, not laughing at me or even commiserating with me. Thanking me.

“It
will
be okay,” she said with a small nod. “In fact, I think I know how to make everything okay now.”

But something in her eyes told me she didn’t believe it any more than I did.

E
mily had left by the time Bree returned to the shop with Alice. I’d sent her off with a promise to stop waiting and get a dog, and a promise to give Finn a couple of days to cool off and then call him again.

“I sent Kyle packing,” Bree said. “If that boy wants to graduate in June, he’s got to spend less time moping around this joint and more time cracking his school books.”

Kyle Mason had a long rap sheet as a general juvenile delinquent. He’d started working at the Remember the A-la-mode the summer before, just after I purchased Dave’s Dippery and relaunched it as an upscale ice cream parlor, so that he could pay court-ordered restitution for a mailbox-smashing spree. Even with the piddly wages I could afford to pay him, he’d managed to make good on his debt, and I felt confident he’d only continued scooping ice cream because of his excruciating unrequited crush on Alice. He’d never get past first base with my brainiac niece if he didn’t make nice with his teachers and graduate.

“This one,” Bree continued, jerking a thumb at Alice, “insisted on coming back to help.”

“You really can take off, Alice,” I said. “Aren’t finals next week?” She nodded glumly. “Or at least go home and get some sleep.”

“No, I want to make caramel,” she said, her lower lip drifting suspiciously close to a pout.

While I found a certain Zen pleasure in the homely act of making ice cream, and Bree just liked to sneak licks and nibbles, the process appealed to Alice on a more intellectual level. The alchemy of cold and motion transforming humble ingredients—sugar, milk, fruit—into something as decadent as our Peach Melba ice cream intrigued her.

But as much as Alice enjoyed the chemistry of ice cream, caramel was her favorite: the individual crystals of sugar breaking down into a whole new substance, through an inversion process scientists didn’t entirely understand, followed by the spectacle of the cold cream hitting the hot sugar syrup and frothing to fill the pan, and finally the Maillard reaction turning protein and sugar into golden deliciousness. She said it made her feel like one of Shakespeare’s witches.

“ ‘Double, double toil and trouble,’” I said.

A faint smile lit her face and she rubbed her hands together. “ ‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,’ ” she finished.

We didn’t technically need more salted caramel sauce, but it wouldn’t hurt to lay in some extra. “Go ahead,” I said.

The three of us worked in silence, Alice tending the caramel, Bree washing up, and me packing pints to stock the retail freezer, until Alice let forth a mighty yawn, the sort of yawn that used to herald imminent collapse when she was a toddler. It was well past midnight, a good two hours after her emotional confrontation with Emily, and the poor child had to be dead on her feet.

Bree pried the spoon from her daughter’s fingers, physically pointed her toward the back door, and gave her a little shove. “Go.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alice mumbled, and headed out, stripping her apron as she went.

As soon as the door clicked closed, Bree sighed. “What am I going to do with her, Tally?”

“Love her.”

“More than my own breath,” she said. “But just when I figure she’s grown, she doesn’t need her mama anymore, a boy hurts her heart or a friend betrays her, and she’s my baby again. Yet the second I get back in the swing of mothering her, she’s pushing me away.”

I laughed. “Bree Michaels, you just described dang near every mother-daughter relationship in the history of forever. I don’t think it’ll ever stop. Right up to the day my mama died, she and Grandma Peachy were doing that dance. And you and Aunt Jenny spend five minutes together and either she’s smothering you or you’re pitching a fit. Why should you and Alice be any different?”

“I guess you’re right.” Bree sighed again. “I’m just so dang worried about her.”

“Of course you are. I am, too. But we have to trust that she’s a smart girl, smarter than the two of us put together, and probably more sensible to boot.”

Bree chuckled as she gave the caramel sauce one last stir, then whacked the spoon on the edge of the pot a couple of times. She opened her mouth to say something, but tinny music cut her off, some foreboding operatic thing that would have made me think of marauding hordes of barbarians if it weren’t coming from the hamper where we dumped our aprons at the end of the day.

Alice had apparently left her phone in her pocket again. She’d already lost one that way, when it got thrown in the washer with blazing hot water and a scoop of Borax.

Bree sighed and dug the phone out of the laundry. She frowned at the screen and declined the call. She’d just started to tuck the phone into her own pants pocket, when the barbarians returned.

With a huff, Bree flipped open the phone. “Hello? No, Dr. Clowper, this is her mama.” She caught my eye and made a gagging motion with her finger. “Alice is on her way home. It’s been a really long day, and I don’t think she wants to talk to you just now. . . . Yes, she needs to sleep, too. Maybe I can have her call you tomorrow. . . . No matter how important it is, it will wait until morning.”

I couldn’t hear Emily’s side of the conversation, but whatever she was saying did not impress Bree. Her lips thinned and her nostrils pinched in like they did when she was annoyed.

“Tim who?” she snapped. “Is he another one of your boy toys?” There was a beat of silence. “Do you have Tim’s keys, or does he have yours? Because I don’t think you should be driving. And why are you whispering?” Bree extended the pinky and thumb of her left hand and raised it to her lips in the universal sign for “drunk as a skunk.”

A sense of unease began plucking at the corner of my consciousness. I couldn’t put it into words right then, but something seemed off.

“Money? Whose money? Listen, I can barely hear you. Why don’t you go lie down now, get some sleep. We can straighten out the whole key situation in the morning.” There was a beat of silence, during which Emily must have been talking. “Who did what?” Another pause, and then Bree smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “No, I don’t have any candy,” she ground out.

My uneasiness erupted into full-fledged alarm. I snatched an old work schedule off the door of the walk-in, rooted around in my apron pocket for a pen, and scrawled the word “DIABETIC” in big loopy letters. I held it in front of Bree’s face and watched as her expression morphed from annoyance to confusion to wide-eyed panic.

“Dr. Clowper,” she snapped. “Emily. Are you at home? Do you have some orange juice in the fridge? Or some grapes?” She shook her head sharply. “I don’t care about Tim and his dang keys. Oh, now, don’t cry. We’re going to get you some help”—she waved in my direction, signaling that I should get right on that—“but I need you to focus.”

I dashed across the workroom and grabbed the phone handset off the wall. I had just hit the second “1” in 911 when the alley door crashed open and Alice flew back in.

“Relax, Mom. I just forgot my . . .” She trailed off as she took in the scene in the kitchen, Bree grim-faced and speaking earnestly into Alice’s cell and me dancing from foot to foot with the landline receiver to my ear.

“Nine-one-one. What’s the nature of your emergency?” I recognized Vonda Hudson’s three-pack-a-day growl.

“Vonda, this is Tally Jones. We need an ambulance for a woman named Emily Clowper. She’s a diabetic, and I think something’s real wrong with her.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alice sag a little, but in a heartbeat she was at my side.

“Tally? You at home or at the A-la-mode?”

“What?” It took me a second to figure out why Vonda was asking where I was. “No, Emily’s not here. Bree’s got her on the phone. She’s at her own house, I think. But I don’t know the address.”

Alice snatched the phone from my hand.

“Dr. Clowper lives on Sagebrush, between Ford and Hillcrest,” she said, her voice clear and precise. I felt a pang of shame that our little girl had a better handle on this crisis than I did.

“I don’t know the street number,” she continued, “but it’s on the, uh”—she closed her eyes, and lids fluttered faintly as she thought—“I think it’s the north side of the street. About halfway down the block, a yellow house with a wide porch and two live oaks in the front yard.”

“Emily? Emily!” Bree yelled into the cell phone. “Emily, honey, you need to stay awake and talk to me.”

Alice hung up the landline. She sidled up close to me and took my hand, laced her fingers through mine and squeezed tight. Together, we watched Bree trying to talk Emily back from the brink.

“Emily, are you there? Tell me more about the keys and the money.” Finally, Bree looked up, her expression stricken. “She’s not talking anymore,” she murmured. “I think I can hear her breathing, but she’s not talking.” After another moment, Bree cursed softly. “She hung up.”

“What do we do, Mom?”

Those little words, in Alice’s tiny voice, brought Bree to her senses. She stood up straight, renewed purpose in her eyes. “Tally, get the keys. We’re going to go find Emily.”

W
ith Alice navigating, we managed to beat the ambulance to Emily’s house.

Alice tumbled out of the van and raced across the lawn, took the porch steps in a single leap, and had her hand on the doorknob before Bree could yell, “Stop!”

Something in that maternal command cut through Alice’s panic and she froze long enough for me and Bree to catch up to her.

“You two wait here,” I said. “Flag down the ambulance. Call Finn.”

Alice appeared torn, but her fear got the better of her and she sagged against her mother’s side. Bree nodded, and I tried the door.

Open.

Emily’s front door opened into her living room. Her house seemed to be about the same vintage as ours, but without our family’s clutter, it appeared strangely sterile and cold. A low green velvet sofa, sagging in the middle, and a single bentwood rocker were the only furnishings.

I knew Emily had been teaching at Dickerson for five years, but it looked like she’d just moved in.

“Emily?” My voice echoed off the whitewashed plank walls and oak floors.

One side of the living room opened onto a dining room and then a kitchen. The lights were on in both rooms, and I didn’t see Emily, so I made a beeline down the hallway that led off the living room, opening doors as I went. First, an empty bedroom, littered with open boxes of books but no furniture. Then an immaculate bathroom that smelled strongly of bleach.

At the end of the hallway, right next to an archway leading into the kitchen, a final door was pulled to but not latched.

“Emily?” I called as I pushed the door open.

“Oh, God.”

A lamp sitting on the bare wood floor, its shade draped with a red scarf, cast hellish light and shadow over the scene. Emily sat sprawl-legged atop her brass bed, her body canted forward like a broken doll. Something, it looked like the belt to a bathrobe, stretched between her neck and the brass headboard.

I rushed to her side, and tried to shift her body to reduce the tension in the makeshift noose, but I couldn’t get any leverage from the slippery oak floors. Wedging my knee in the fluffy duvet didn’t help.

My fingers grasped at the slipknot around her neck, and then at the more substantial knot on the headboard, but the weight of Emily’s body pulled the fabric tight.

Frantic, I dashed out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, desperate to find a knife or scissors.

No clutter in the kitchen, either. A butcher-block island in the middle of the room had a cell phone and a gold foil take-out box on top. The take-out box was open, a fork resting half in and half out of the box, and I saw a perfect square of tiramisu nestled inside. Other than the forgotten snack and the phone, though, the counters were bare.

I yanked open the first drawer I found, but it was stuffed with receipts, half-used birthday candles, and plastic packets of soy sauce. The next drawer held cutlery, but nothing sharper than a butter knife.

Finally, I found a paring knife wedged behind rolls of plastic wrap and boxes of sandwich bags.

I raced back into the bedroom and started sawing on the bathrobe tie, but the paring knife didn’t have much of an edge.

My breath came in heaving sobs and I found myself cursing everything under the sun—the knife, the bathrobe tie, Emily herself, my wimpy arms, everything. I tried not to notice how still Emily was, without even the faint stirring of breath in her body. At last I heard the clatter and commotion of emergency personnel from the front room.

“We’re back here,” I screamed.

I didn’t drop the knife until a paramedic pried my hand loose and pulled me bodily from the bed. Tears blurring my vision, I watched the medics cut Emily loose with a single movement, lift her off the bed, and begin CPR.

I backed out of the bedroom, then turned and ran out of the house. Outside, the once-quiet street swarmed with rescue vehicles—an ambulance, two fire trucks, and a half-dozen cop cars. Cal physically restrained Finn Harper, who seemed determined to get to Emily’s side. It seemed all of Dalliance had descended on Emily’s tiny yellow house in response to the call for help, and yet I knew that effort would not be enough.