Town in a Strawberry Swirl (Candy Holliday Mystery) (15 page)

Candy’s phone rang first thing. It was Finn. “You’d better get over here.”

“Why, what’s happening?” Candy was still upstairs, dressing. Her father was already outside on the porch with his first cup of coffee and the morning paper.

“There’s a lot of chatter going on over at the station this morning. The police have found something.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Where are you?”

“The usual place. We’re keeping a couple of spots reserved for you and Doc.”

She finished combing out her hair and dressing and hurried downstairs. For a few moments she lingered in the kitchen. She disliked rushing out like this, first thing in the morning, without a few minutes to get herself organized and take care of a few chores. But there was one chore she couldn’t ignore. She grabbed her tote bag, did a quick sweep of the kitchen to see if she’d forgotten anything, and headed outside.

Doc had his phone out and was looking down at it. “I just got a text,” he said.

“From Finn, I’ll bet.” And she told her father what she’d just heard.

Doc folded up the paper as he listened, and swallowed the rest of his coffee, then rose. “I’ll lock up the house and meet you over there,” he said as he started toward the door. But he stopped after a couple of steps and looked back at her. “Hey, did someone stop by the house last night?”

Candy gave him a brief wave of acknowledgement as she headed down the steps and around the porch toward the chicken coop. “I’ll tell you about it at the diner.”

The chickens were clucking and pecking at the ground, content as usual. She went about her daily routine, collected the eggs, and ten minutes later she was in the Jeep, headed toward town.

She was the last one to arrive in the corner booth. Doc and the boys were working on a plate of doughnuts and fruit-filled croissants. As she slid into the booth, this time next to Artie, a cup of coffee instantly appeared in front of her, delivered by Juanita.

A warm blueberry muffin and a small chilled bowl with freshly made honey butter arrived a short time later. Despite Candy’s protests, Juanita continued to provide her with free food, because of an earlier episode between the two. For a long time Candy had protested the special treatment, but after a while, rather than fight it, she’d learned to accept it. Instead, she’d simply started leaving larger tips, which worked out to be a comfortable compromise.

Finn waited until they’d all settled, with their food served and coffee cups filled, then leaned forward toward the center of the table, resting his elbows lightly on the edge. “The news is about to break,” he said in a low voice, “so I’m not telling you anything you wouldn’t know in a few minutes anyway. But they’ve found Lydia St. Graves.”

Candy didn’t say anything but Doc sounded surprised. “They have? Where?”

“Up on Route 1. She was in an accident overnight. Her car ran off the road and hit a tree sometime around midnight. Apparently no one saw her, since she wound up pretty far off the road, so she wasn’t spotted until daybreak. They got her to a hospital but she didn’t make it.”

Candy was about to take a bite out of her muffin, but it dropped to the plate as a shocked expression came to her face. “Lydia’s dead?”

Finn nodded grimly. “That’s what they’re saying.”

“How is that possible?”

Finn shrugged. “These things happen.”

“What about the airbags?” Doc asked. “Didn’t they go off, especially in that fancy car of hers? That thing must have six or eight of them at least. And doesn’t that model have some sort of automatic alert system, which sends out a signal in the event of an accident?”

“Good points,” Finn said, “and yes, her BMW had accident assist and GPS, but both had been disabled. She’d also apparently discarded her phone. She must have known she could be traced that way. As for the airbags, her vehicle had four, since it’s a convertible. Front and side airbags. They deployed exactly as they were supposed to, which is what makes the death so mysterious.”

“Mysterious?” Candy echoed. She didn’t like the sound of that. “In what way?”

“Well, she was out there all night in her car,” Finn said, “but her injuries weren’t necessarily that severe, from what I’ve heard. As Doc said, the airbags went off, so she was fairly well cushioned. She might’ve had a few bruised ribs, maybe even a broken bone or two. She would have been dehydrated when they found her, of course, but she didn’t appear to be fatally wounded.”

“But you said she died,” Candy pointed out.

“That’s just it. She
did
die. But she
shouldn’t
have.”

Candy scrunched up her face. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m just reporting what I’ve heard. No one knows what happened yet. They’re still trying to figure it out. But there are a few theories floating around.”

“Such as?”

“Well, as I said, when they found her, she wasn’t in bad shape physically. They got her into an ambulance and checked her out on the way to the hospital. At first they thought she might have had a heart attack, though they were able to rule that out. And they also thought she might have overdosed on her medication. Now, however, they have a new theory. They think she might have been poisoned.”

After she left the diner, Candy swung by the Black Forest Bakery briefly to say hello to Maggie and Herr Georg, but stopped in the doorway when she saw the crowd in front of the counter. Maggie waved to her but was obviously too busy to talk. “I’ll come back a little later,” Candy mouthed to her friend.

Back outside, she headed down the street and up the stairs to her office, where she pulled her phone out of her tote bag, tossed the bag onto a side chair, and closed the door behind her. She could hear a few voices around the office, and she preferred to make her next phone call in private.

She scrolled down through the contacts until she found the number she wanted. But when she made the call, she was sent straight to voice mail. She left a quick message—“It’s Candy Holliday. We need to talk. Call me as soon as you can”—and ended the call.

She dug back through her contacts and found another number that might work. This time someone answered. “Cape Willington Police Department. How may I direct your call?”

“Chief Durr, please.”

“The chief is unavailable at the moment. Is this a personal matter, or can I direct your call to someone else who might be able to help?”

“It’s a personal matter,” Candy said, and left her name and number, along with a request for the chief to call her back as quickly as possible.

“I’ll make sure he gets the message,” Candy was informed, and she ended the call.

That was all she could accomplish on the phone at the moment, she decided. Now she’d just have to wait for the chief to call her back. So she set the phone aside and reached across her desk for the list of questions she’d made the previous afternoon. She had a number of new questions to add. She found a clean page and wrote down her thoughts quickly, while they were still fresh in her mind:

• Why would someone poison Lydia? What was the motive?
  
• Why did the alleged murderer
  set up Lydia by leaving the shovel from Blueberry Acres next to the body in the hoophouse?
  The motive appeared to be an effort to frame Lydia for Miles’s murder, Candy thought, which was exactly what the real estate agent had claimed last night. But was that what really happened?
  
• Is there a connection with the beauty shop?
  Lydia said she’d parked right in front of the shop when she went inside. Could someone already inside have spotted the unattended car with the convertible top down and waited until an opportune time to steal the shovel? It was certainly a possibility, Candy thought. But why would someone steal the shovel from Lydia’s car and then hold on to it for a couple of months before taking it out to the berry farm? That would indicate a long-term intention—premeditated murder.
  
• Did the same person kill both Miles and Lydia?
  Candy suspected the answer was yes. The berry farmer and the real estate agent were certainly connected, and she now knew the rumors about a secret deal were true, though not in the way everyone suspected. Had someone else been involved—a third party perhaps? But if so, why murder both Miles and Lydia? And why poison? Which brought up another question:
  
• How was Lydia poisoned?
  

According to Finn, Lydia had been out there along that road all night. She’d only died in the morning, while either on the way to or upon arrival at the hospital. Finn hadn’t been specific about the time of death. But if Lydia came into contact with the poison sometime between nine and midnight—either by drinking it, eating it, inhaling it, or being injected with it—then it was reasonable to assume the poison had started taking effect within an hour or two, but had taken six to eight hours to end Lydia’s life.

From nine to midnight. A three-hour window.

Candy wrote again:

• Where was Lydia between nine
  P.M
  . and midnight?
  

She straightened. Now that she thought about it, she recalled Lydia saying something about making one more stop before she left town. She planned on visiting someone, she’d said. But Lydia had never mentioned a name.

What had she said exactly? It came back to Candy after a few moments:

I’m headed out of town tonight. . . . I’m going to make one more stop and then lay low until this whole thing blows over.

One more stop . . . . 

She must have met with someone after she left Blueberry Acres, eaten or drunk the poison, and then driven up to Route 1. But she hadn’t made it much farther than that.

Poisoned
, Finn had said.

Why?

One possible answer came to Candy almost immediately.
To prevent her from talking
, Candy thought.
That means she must have found out something about Miles’s murder
.

And before she could talk, she’d been murdered herself.

Candy knew what that meant: Lydia had been telling the truth. It meant she hadn’t killed Miles. Instead, it sounded like someone else had killed Miles, and used the shovel to incriminate Lydia—just as she’d said.

The shovel
, Candy thought.
It’s at the center of this whole thing. I thought we were done with it, but it’s back in play
.

Candy put it all together in her mind with the information she now had. The shovel had gone from Doc to Sally Ann Longfellow to Ray Hutchins to Judicious F. P. Bosworth. Judicious had given it to Lydia, who promised to return it to Blueberry Acres. She had thrown it into the backseat of her BMW convertible. But first she’d stopped at the beauty salon, and when she’d come out, the shovel was gone.

If that was all true, then it meant many of Candy’s theories were right. Someone had taken the shovel from the back of Lydia’s car, held on to it for a couple of months, used it to kill Miles, and then . . . what? Lydia said she’d been lured to the berry farm. She’d mentioned an e-mail Miles had sent to her, instructing her to meet him at the hoophouse around ten
A.M
. And he’d asked her to delete the e-mail after she’d read it. Lydia had thought that was strange—and it
was
strange.

Why delete an e-mail message?

To cover up a paper trail
, Candy thought.

But why would Miles want to cover up his own paper trail? It was a question she didn’t have an answer for at the moment.

But something else stuck in the back of her mind—something Lydia had said last night.

She said she’d received the e-mail message from Miles at around eight in the morning. But if Candy recalled correctly, Maggie had told her that Miles had dropped off some fresh strawberries at the bakery sometime around seven thirty or eight—the same time he’d allegedly sent an e-mail to Lydia.

How had he e-mailed her? It’s possible he had contacted her on the run using a smart phone. But Candy had never pegged Miles as the smart phone type. He seemed more low-tech, like Doc. So how had he e-mailed Lydia when he was out making strawberry deliveries?

She made a note to check on it.

And then there was the final question, perhaps the most important one: If Lydia hadn’t killed Miles, then who had? Candy wrote down on the sheet of paper:

• Suspects?
  

She thought about that for a few minutes.
Why would someone want to kill Miles?
she wondered.
Who had the motivation?

Again, a possible answer came to her:
To prevent Miles from selling the farm.

That led her inevitably to think of a very vocal group that had recently started a high-profile campaign with just that purpose. The ladies of the Cape Willington Heritage Protection League were vehement in their opposition to the sale of the berry farm. Could their passions have progressed to something deadlier?

Before she had a chance to ponder that harrowing line of thought, her phone rang. It was Chief Durr. She answered it and told him she had some important news concerning Lydia.

“Where are you?” he asked when she’d finished.

“In my office.”

“Stay right where you are. I’m coming over. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”