“Do they travel alone or together?”
“Alone. Either of them could have slipped in a stop at Sam’s house. Everyone knows he arranges his route so he can stop at home for lunch.”
“What about Bertha?” Maddie asked. “Does she inherit anything from Clarisse? Although I’d hate to think that anyone who bakes such luscious pies could be a murderer.”
“Would you rather everyone believe that two women who make luscious cookies might be poisoners?”
“Point taken,” Maddie said. “We include everyone.”
Typing as she spoke, Olivia said, “Clarisse told me that Bertha was well provided for. I’m not sure it would be enough to kill over, especially since Bertha already had a secure situation.” Her fingers paused over the keyboard.
“May I suggest Tammy Deacons as our next suspect?” Maddie asked. “From what we overheard, she and Hugh did something they don’t want anyone to know about—something that involved Clarisse. We need to find out where Tammy was the night Clarisse died.”
Olivia added a row for Tammy Deacons.
“Tammy had lots of cookies at her house,” Maddie said, “left over from her engagement shindig. Although, if she was teaching that day, I suppose she wouldn’t have been home to hand Snoopy Sam a bag of cookies when he delivered her mail.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed. I’m sure we can find out if she was at school today . . .”
“I’ll bet you a dozen cookies Tammy doesn’t have an alibi for either time period.” Maddie’s cell phone sang a muddy phrase of Gregorian chant. “That’ll be Lucas,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. “He’s calling about when we’ll meet for dinner. He’s taking me to Pete’s for scallops night.”
While Maddie paced the kitchen and spoke to Lucas, Olivia shook her shoulders to loosen them. Hunching over a computer had begun to leave its mark on her once-flexible limbs. She had one more suspect to list, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Okay, it’s scallops at six,” Maddie said as she snapped her cell shut. “What time is your will-reading dinner at the Chamberlain mansion?”
“Sherry and will reading at six-thirty, dinner at seven.”
“Sherry? La-de-da. Sounds like the setting for a British murder mystery. Wish I could pose as a serving wench and watch the show.”
Maddie rinsed out her coffee cup and reached for her jacket. “Gotta roll if I want a shower before dinner.”
“Maddie,” Olivia said, “there’s one more person we ought to discuss.”
“Really? Who?” Maddie’s eager curiosity made Olivia’s stomach clench.
“Well, my mom and Allan were talking. . . . There’s no easy way to say this, so . . . Maddie, did you know that Lucas borrowed money from Clarisse, using the hardware store as collateral?”
Maddie’s sunny expression clouded over. “Of course I knew. Lucas told me early on. He’s very honest. Anyway, he’s been paying it off gradually, and the store is doing okay in spite of the economy.”
Olivia closed the lid of her laptop to put it to sleep—and to ease the tension. “I wondered, did Clarisse pressure Lucas at all? Did she offer to forgive the loan in exchange for Heights Hardware?”
Maddie threw the kitchen towel on the counter and folded her arms. Olivia could almost feel sparks shooting from her friend’s eyes.
Olivia took several deep breaths, then a couple more. Part of her wanted to leave Lucas out of it, for Maddie’s sake. On the other hand, she couldn’t stop imagining Clarisse’s last moments. “I can’t let this go, Maddie. I have to know what happened.”
“Okay. I get it.” Maddie kept her arms crossed and leaned against the kitchen counter.
“Couldn’t we talk about it, friend to friend?”
The silence lightened maybe an iota.
“Sleuth to sleuth?” Olivia asked.
Maddie didn’t uncross her arms, but her shoulders lowered a bit.
“Over cookies and milk?” Olivia opened the refrigerator door and removed a half gallon of milk. “I wonder if Del seriously suspects us.”
Maddie lifted two glasses and two plates from the cupboard. “Our alibis aren’t so great. We alibi each other for part of the night Clarisse died, and those cookies Sam ate were undeniably ours. By the way, I did stash away a few for emergencies.” She pulled down a tin from on top of the refrigerator. “If either of us refuses to eat these, it won’t look good.”
They settled at the table. Olivia waited through one red and yellow striped beach ball cookie and half a glass of milk before saying, as gently as she could, “I do need to know about Lucas, you know.”
“I know.” Maddie selected a second cookie, decorated with looping strings of white pearls. She set it on her plate and ran her index finger across the hardened dots of icing. “The truth is, Clarisse was pressuring Lucas to sell the hardware store to her. She said something about wanting to see what Hugh could do with it on his own. She only wanted the business to test Hugh. It was tearing Lucas apart. The way things are going, he’ll be paying off that loan for the rest of his life, assuming he lives to be one hundred. And yes, once Clarisse was gone, the pressure was off. Hugh doesn’t want the hardware; he said so. So Lucas has been a lot happier, and we avoid talking about money. We haven’t finished our first flush of romance yet.”
Maddie bit a half circle out of her cookie. She put the remainder back on her plate and pushed it away. “To be honest, I think that’s why Lucas and I finally got together. I’ve been crazy about him for years, as you well know. He is so easy to be with, and he accepts me with all my weirdness. He says I make him laugh.” She smiled at the tabletop. “But with his mom and dad and all that debt, plus the fear he’d have to give up the family business . . . So yes, he’s relieved the pressure to sell is gone, but he still has the loan to pay off, so it’s not like killing Clarisse would have gotten him very far. Unless you think he has plans to knock off Hugh and Edward, too.”
“I’ll admit that hadn’t occurred to me,” Olivia said. She didn’t add that Lucas would stay on the suspects list, for now.
Olivia glanced at her watch. “I have to be at the Chamberlain home in two hours. Can you stay a bit longer? There’s something I have to do, and I need company.” She explained to Maddie about the photos Deputy Cody took the night Clarisse died.
“No kidding,” Maddie said. “You bet I’ll stay. I showered this morning. Fire up that computer.”
Olivia awakened her sleeping laptop and called up her email. Maddie scooted her chair closer. “Here goes.” Olivia had seven unread emails, six of them from other businesses. She opened the seventh, Deputy Cody’s, which said only, “Here they are. Please don’t mention this to Sheriff Del.”
“Rest easy, Cody,” Olivia mumbled. She clicked on the first email attachment, and a photo appeared. No matter how much she’d tried to prepare herself, Olivia wasn’t ready to see Clarisse Chamberlain’s body lying facedown on her office carpet. She forced herself to study the details.
“Somehow it looks different than it does on those television cop shows,” Maddie said. “Sadder. What was it Cody said about her arms?”
“See how her arms are straight back along her body? Cody thinks that if she’d been conscious, she’d have tried to break her fall, so her arms might be under her. Maybe even above her head.”
Olivia opened the second photo, which Cody had taken from farther away. Now they could see a wine bottle on the carpet next to Clarisse’s shoulder. The bottle lay on its side, its pouring end pointing toward the office door, a corner of which showed in the photo. A small area of darkness appeared near the top of the bottle, as if a bit of wine had dribbled out. Olivia zoomed in, which made the area fuzzy, but it did look like a wine stain.
“Del said that Clarisse had drunk a whole bottle. At some point, she must have crushed her sleeping pills into it.” Olivia had a sudden, strong need to move. She bolted out of her chair and began to pace around the kitchen. “I thought at the time that Clarisse couldn’t have stayed conscious through an entire bottle of wine laced with sleeping pills. She wasn’t used to drinking more than a glass or so. Seeing these photos, I’m more sure than ever that her death wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t suicide.”