Tea Shop Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-6 Page 8

  “I can’t thank you enough for this, Reg,” she said, settling a cup of tea in front of him. “If Mavis interest in her house holds, then it should take care of the worst of my allergies.”

  “You should still make that doctor’s appointment,” Harmony said with a stern tone. “Entrapment only goes so far.”

  They were laughing when the sound of breaking glass stopped them cold. A shadow passed on the wall. Somebody was sneaking about outside!

  Putting a finger to her lips, Willow stepped close to the door out of the kitchen. A muttered curse gave away the position of her intruder—they were right by the door.

  She gripped the handle, paused for a second, then threw the door open with her full weight behind it. Halfway through its opening arch, a bent-over figure stopped it dead on its hinges, and his strangled cry told Willow she’d managed to get him good.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing sneaking around outside?” Willow shook her fist in the air in emphasis, but given the man—all dressed in black—was hunched over cradling his lower abdomen, it was a wasted effort.

  She took a step back, exchanging puzzled glances with Harmony and Reg as they pushed outside. “I don’t know what’s the matter. I just got him with the door.”

  “Come on, son,” Reg said, patting the intruder’s shoulder. “Walk it off.”

  Willow and Harmony turned in unison to stare at the offending door handle. Until now, Willow had never realized it was at groin level.

  “Hm. Well, you shouldn’t be sneaking around out back of people’s houses, young man.”

  “This is an active crime scene,” Harmony added for good measure.

  Reg just shook his head. “Give him a few minutes more, I reckon. He needs to catch his breath.”

  Harmony folded her arms across her chest and muttered, “He needs to… What about what we need?”

  Willow looked along her left at the path and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her memory quickly filled in the details of Roger’s body lying there, a garden fork sticking straight up out of his chest.

  She tipped her head forward, blinking rapidly to clear the image away. To her right, the sight of the long grasses and wildflowers soothed her.

  “It’s the Layton kid,” Reg called out, still stroking the teenager’s back. “What’s your name again, son? Mali? Malcolm?”

  “It’s Mael,” the boy choked out, hands still cupped gently in front of his groin. “My name’s Mael Layton, and my mother’s been falsely accused of a crime. I wanted to visit the crime scene to see if there’s evidence showing she didn’t do it.”

  Willow stepped forward and nodded. “I agree with you,” she said, ignoring the raised eyebrows of her friends, “I don’t believe your mother did it. Now, do you want to come inside and have a cup of tea? There’s nothing out here worth looking at.”

  Later, gathered around the table, everyone had taken the tea break to recover. Mael stared at the strange conglomeration of tubes and wooden boxes that formed Mavis’s new accommodation but didn’t ask.

  “I saw your mom in the sheriff’s office earlier today,” Willow said when the quiet had stretched out long enough to get on her nerves. Typically, she’d be happy to sit in companionable silence, but there was an urgency beating through her veins, saying they needed to get this thing sorted and the time to do that was now.

  “How’d she seem?” Mael asked. His face was pale, and Willow thought it couldn’t all come down to the unexpected knock she’d delivered to him. The boy mustn’t get out in the sun enough. Back in her day, at this time of year, she’d only just be starting to lose her summer tan.

  “She was nervous but seemed positive. We talked about you a little bit.”

  “What about me?” Mael’s eyes looked dark under the droop of his black fringe.

  “Just about how my friend was the one who caught you on camera and got you in trouble in the first place.” Willow nodded to Reg, who held the offending item up in plain view.

  “What d’you mean, caught me?”

  “Don’t start lying to us, son,” Reg said in a fatherly tone of voice. “All of us here know what you did.”

  Mael’s face turned from pale to flat-out white. “The only thing I did was chuck a few eggs at a mean guy’s car. He deserved that!”

  “And that’s what we meant,” Willow said, disturbed at Mael’s distress level. “What did you think we were going to say?”

  “I dunno. That you saw me heading off toward Roger’s office to kill him? Something like that. Someone’s been lying about me to the police. Otherwise, my mom would never confess to something she didn’t do.”

  Mael’s deduction suddenly made Trisha’s confession seem entirely sensible. Willow nodded and closed her eyes. “Of course!”

  “Of course, what?” Harmony turned to her with a frown.

  “I couldn’t work out why that sweet woman who loved Miss Walsham Investigates as much as I do would confess to such a terrible crime.”

  “I doubt it has to do with a television show,” Harmony said.

  “But it does.” Willow opened her eyes and clutched her friend’s hand. “That’s exactly what she’s doing. I told her to think about the show when she was in the interview room—that’s what helped me get through. And she did it!” Willow’s excitement evaporated as she thought the results through. “She just picked the wrong show.”

  “What do you mean?” Mael was staring at her in confusion, a look echoed on Reg and Harmony’s faces.

  “It’s in the third season, second episode. A woman confesses to a crime to protect the real killer, who turns out to be her son!”

  For a minute, Reg and Harmony turned to Mael in horror, Reg pushing back his chair to get out of reach.

  Willow laughed and shook her head. “No! I don’t think Mael did it any more than I think Trisha did. But she’s covering for him because she thinks he might have done it.”

  “Why would she think that?” Mael picked at a spot on his cheek, looking distraught.

  “Because I told her you’d been out that night, vandalizing Roger’s car. The poor woman must have thought the police had more evidence on you than they did.” Willow slammed her palm down on the table. “I bet that new detective let her think it, too. He’s a nasty piece of work.”

  “What do we do now, then?” Mael looked around the table. “The police won’t believe us without any proof.”

  “I have proof,” Willow declared. “Let’s get down to the station right now and get your mother out.”

  * * *

  “You understand that someone knowing the details of a TV episode doesn’t constitute proof of innocence,” Sheriff Wender said.

  Willow shook her head. “I don’t understand anything about that. The show was on TV, and it was on while Roger Randall was being murdered. You’re the one who told me his watch stopped at the time of death. Has that changed?”

  Harmony tugged at Willow’s arm, but she shook her friend off, not turning.

  “That might have been an alibi thirty years ago,” the sheriff said in a tired voice. From the bags underneath his eyes, he hadn’t slept a lot the night before. “Ever since they invented video recorders, though, it’s hardly the same.”

  “Does she even have a video recorder?” Willow demanded. “Until you can prove otherwise, then I think you need to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “We have a time-lapse thing on our smart TV,” Mael admitted, hope draining out of his voice. “It doesn’t prove anything, though. Mom can barely operate the dishwasher, and it’s only got three buttons—she’s never touched anything on the telly remote apart from the channel and volume.”

  “Can you prove that?” The sheriff turned his exhausted gaze on Mael, who reluctantly shook his head. “No. So, until we have something better to go on, then your mom’s confession stands.” He turned to go, then half-leaned back, dropping his voice to a low whisper. “I’m sorry about your mother. She seems like a nice woman.”

  “
She is a nice woman,” Willow insisted, but she was just speaking to her friends. The sheriff had closed the door behind him. She pursed her lips, frowning in worry. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

  “What if she really did it?” Reg said.

  Willow and Mael turned glares at him in unison, and he held his hands up, palms facing them. “Okay. Sorry. Just a thought.”

  “If she confessed because she thought you did it,” Willow said to Mael, “then maybe we just need to show your mom you didn’t, and then she’ll withdraw her confession.”

  Mael considered Willow’s new idea, his face brightening a little before disappearing back into gloom. “How would I do that?”

  “Well,” Harmony said, leading them out of the sheriff’s office and into the crisp, midday air, “what were you doing after eight that night? Perhaps we should start there.”

  “I was here,” Mael said in disgust, waving his hand across the town square.

  “Walk us through it, then.” Harmony stepped up beside him and gave him a quick touch on the shoulder. “Start with when you threw eggs at Mr. Randall’s car and finish with when you got home.”

  Mael moved them to the edge of the square, Reg nodding in recognition as they reached the place he’d caught on camera.

  “Roger’s car was over there,” Mael said pointing, then frowned. “Well, it still is there.”

  The egg white wash had set into a crackle glaze on the black sedan still parked out on the street in front of Roger’s office.

  “What time did you have on the camera around then?” Willow asked Reg, who peered at the screen for so long that Harmony ripped it out of his hands with a tut.

  “That was just after seven-thirty.”

  “I sat on the bench opposite the building for a while after.”

  As they crossed over the road, Willow asked, “Weren’t you afraid the police would be called? I think I would have run away.”

  “I never expected to get away with it,” Mael said, pointing to the CCTV cameras mounted on each corner of the square. “I don’t have the know-how to dismantle those, so I just assumed a day or two would pass at most before the police came knocking on my door.” He shrugged. “The point was to let Mr. Randall know how angry I was, not to get away with it.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you something delicate?” Willow was thinking back to the rude clerk in the drugstore and her loose lips.

  Mael shrugged. “Go ahead. If it helps get my mom out, I don’t mind.”

  “Did you believe Roger Randall was your father?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The look of horror that passed over Mael’s face told Willow the answer more effectively than his stuttered denials.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, backing up a step with her hands up. “I’ve just heard from a few different places that your mom and he might have been having a dalliance.”

  “The guy was a complete jerk!” Mael slammed his fist into his palm. “Do you know he reduced mom’s pay six months ago? He put her down to minimum wage after twenty years of working there because he said his expenses were growing out of hand.”

  “Was his business in trouble?” Harmony asked Willow, who shook her head.

  “I have no idea. I’ve never talked about business with the man, except for when he purchased my reverse mortgage, and that was mostly done through solicitors.”

  “Of course, he wasn’t in trouble,” Mael spat out in a fury. “His business posted a larger profit this year than last year. That didn’t stop him.”

  “Why did your mother accept that?” Harmony asked. “If that were me, I would have walked out and found something else!”

  “I told her to, but money was already tight. My dad—my actual dad,” Mael added with a furious scowl in Willow’s direction “—hasn’t kept up with his support payments, and mom doesn’t want to take him to court. She’s too soft. When she told Mr. Randall that she wouldn’t accept the pay cut, he told her the alternative was that he fire her and hire some young intern fresh out of university to work for free!”

  “Ouch.”

  Willow ducked her head down, feeling the impact of Roger’s ruthlessness as a physical blow. She knew about Jimmy and his grudge—everyone in town did—but for some reason she’d put aside that knowledge when she was with Roger. He was charming to her, courteous, gentle, lovely in fact. Even though she knew in the back of her mind there was another side to him, this revelation of how harsh that side was came as a shock.

  The group reached the bench, only to find a man already sitting there, a disconsolate look on his face. His elbows were on his thighs, hands dangling uselessly between his legs. He stared at the building opposite as though it had sucked out all his hopes and dreams.

  Even though she’d seen him most days in the past few years, it took Willow a couple of seconds to recognize Jimmy. Without his sandwich boards, he was difficult to place.

  “What are you doing here, Jimmy?” Willow asked him kindly. “Shouldn’t you be home, starting a new project?”

  As the group took a seat beside him, Jimmy shuffled farther along the bench. His large feet trampled a dandelion, struggling against the odds to grow in a crack in the pavement.

  “I don’t know what to do, anymore,” Jimmy mumbled. “I spent so much time tramping up and down outside Randall’s business that I never gave a thought to how I’d occupy myself if it all came right.”

  Willow winced at the phrase. How could someone think murder was ‘everything coming out right?’

  “Don’t you have any hobbies?”

  Jimmy just waved his hand at the road opposite. “That was my hobby. Once Roger swindled me out of my home, that protest was all I had left. I lost my business ‘cause I couldn’t afford the outlay, my wife left me, and I live in a one-bedroom apartment I’m pretty sure the council should have condemned years ago. I didn’t have anything but my protest.”

  “Go to the library,” Harmony said. That was her form response to anybody at a loose end, but Willow conceded, in this case, it might be the answer.

  Jimmy just shrugged. “Maybe I’ll try that. I’ll move on and let you folks sit, anyhow.”

  Although they immediately reassured him he didn’t need to, Jimmy walked off, tucking his large hands into his pockets.

  As she watched him walk away, pieces of evidence began to click together in Willow’s mind. She turned to Reg. “Could you take a few photos of Jimmy for me?” A note of urgency in her voice caused him to spring into immediate action. “Make sure you get a few good shots of his feet.”

  * * *

  The walk back into the sheriff’s office was made with even more determination than the previous visit. Willow strode up to the counter and banged her fist down, making Mary-Jo jump.

  “I want to see Sheriff Wender, and I want to see him right now.”

  Whether it was her tone of voice, her confidence, or merely a convenient gap in the sheriff’s schedule, Mary-Jo buzzed through to Jacob, and he appeared within seconds.

  “I hope this isn’t a wind-up,” he said, shooting a quick glance over his shoulder at Detective Jones. He lowered his voice and ushered the group toward his desk. “I would really appreciate something good right now. Some of the people working this case don’t seem to listen to reason.”

  “We have photographic evidence that clears Trisha Layton of any wrongdoing.” Willow turned to Reg, making a hurry-up gesture as he struggled with his pockets. When he finally pulled the camera free and placed it on the desk in front of Sheriff Wender, she felt like saying, “Ta-da!”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “That’s a picture of Jimmy Niko that Reg took just now,” Willow said, pointing at the smudge of an image on the camera.

  After a second of the sheriff frowning in puzzlement at the shot, Harmony leaned forward, gave an exasperated sigh, and flicked through to the correct picture.

  The sheriff’s face didn’t look any more illuminated.

  “Look at his sh
oes,” Willow insisted, pointing where she thought they might be. The sheriff gently moved her hand away from the frame.

  “I don’t get it. Jimmy has very plain, brown shoes. So what?”

  “Now look at the image that Reg took of him on the night Roger was murdered.”

  Willow nodded to Harmony, who did the honors. “See the difference?”

  “He swapped shoes.” Sheriff Wender looked at Willow, his fingers drumming out an impatient beat on the table.

  “Look at the size of them,” Willow insisted. “Jimmy must wear a size twelve or more. Those aren’t just different shoes. They’re different feet!”

  * * *

  It took a scroll through the CCTV feed from three different days before the sheriff was convinced. The five of them crowded into the booth with the tiny screen, even though Harmony pointed out at least two of them couldn’t see it.

  Willow didn’t need to see the images clearly to know what they’d show, however. The man tramping up and down in front of Roger’s building while the man was being murdered wasn’t Jimmy.

  “He kept his head down the whole time,” Harmony noted. “Look at this.” She pointed to the tiny screen. “No one walking by would ever have seen his face. That could be anyone in a wig.”

  “It’s not anyone,” the sheriff said with a note of satisfaction. “That’s Billy no-name from down at the city mission. He’d do anything for drinking money.”

  When the group emerged outside the sheriff’s office, it was with the addition of Trisha Layton, who still couldn’t believe her luck.

  “I thought they were going to keep me banged up forever.”

  Willow gave the woman’s arm a squeeze. Their shared bond of a television show made her feel like Trisha was now a long-lost friend. A college roommate or similar.

  Surprisingly, Mael had a more difficult time with his mother’s release.

  “I can’t believe you thought I killed your boss,” he said over and over, shaking his head.

  “Considering that you vandalized his car,” Reg eventually interceded to say, “I think you should give your poor mother a break. Besides, at least now you know if you do want to commit murder, you won’t go down for it.”