A Fatal Twist of Lemon Read online

  “It isn’t your fault he’s a jerk.” She tugged her coat closed and started doing up the buttons.

  I had never seen Iz so emotional. Usually she’s so quiet you don’t even know she’s there.

  “Just go home and try to forget about it,” I said. “Vi said you had a test tomorrow, so get some rest.”

  She looked up and brushed her dark hair back from her face. “I will. Sorry I dumped on you. Like you need it, on top of all this! I’m sorry, boss.”

  I stood up and gave her a little hug. “Don’t worry about it, Iz. We’ll see you Friday.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, you might want to go out the back door. There was a news crew out front.”

  She shot a glowering look toward the front of the tearoom. “Thanks for the warning. My car’s out back anyway.”

  We listened to her footsteps die away down the hall. Gina looked at me.

  “He thinks you’re a suspect.”

  I opened my hands. “We’re all suspects.”

  She didn’t answer. Perhaps she’d realized it really wasn’t a game. I passed the chocolate mousse to her and she ate a spoonful, looking thoughtful.

  “You’ve eliminated Manny and Nat,” she said. “Is there anyone else we can rule out?”

  I sighed, thinking back to when the party had broken up. “When I left the dining parlor, Katie Hutchins was still there talking with Sylvia, and Vince Margolan was talking with Donna. You had already left, right?”

  Gina nodded. “I came down to the gift shop. I saw Mr. Ingraham go out the front door.”

  “So he’s accounted for.” I frowned. “Trouble is, someone could have come in again by the back.”

  “Wouldn’t Julio have seen them go past the kitchen?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Or one of the girls might have noticed anyone in the hall.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Maybe we should leave this to the police.”

  Gina put down the mousse and reached over to clasp my hand. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to get you down. I thought it might help to be working at the problem.”

  I gave her a feeble smile. “Thanks. But I guess the police know what they’re doing. I hope they do.”

  “They could miss something.”

  “Speaking of missing something, if Detective Aragón finds out you’re here you’ll get grilled. You might want to slip away.”

  She shrugged. “Gonna happen sooner or later. Did he ask you who you saw in the room as you left?”

  “N-no. But he’ll probably ask everyone about their own movements, and then try to verify it.”

  I felt restless all at once. The suggestion that the police might make mistakes in this investigation made me uncomfortable. I picked up the mousse bowl and scraped the last spoonful out of it, then stood.

  “I’d better check on the coffee situation. Want to come with me?”

  “Sure.”

  We went to the kitchen, where we found Mick standing with the clean, empty coffee pot in hand, looking doubtfully at the coffee maker. His long ponytail hung down his back, blond like his sister Dee’s. I took the pot from him and gave him the mousse bowl.

  “Could you wash this, please? I’ll make more coffee.”

  He looked relieved. “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Mick.”

  The simple task of making coffee was oddly soothing. Gina leaned against the counter, watching. As the pot burbled away I tidied up, sponging up spills, refilling the cream pitcher and putting a fresh spoon in the sugar bowl. I put some more clean spoons out along with a little plate to put used ones on, in an attempt to preserve the sugar from further violation. Probably futile, but I had to try.

  Slow, heavy steps and a rolling sound came from in the hall. I stepped out and watched as two men pushed a gurney bearing a black plastic body bag out of the dining parlor. They went out the front door toward the waiting ambulance, which had shut off its lights.

  “That’ll look great on the evening news,” Gina murmured behind me.

  I shot her a glance, but before I could answer I saw Dee coming down the stairs. I went to the foot of the staircase to meet her.

  “He wants to talk to Mick,” she said, her voice full of repressed excitement.

  I watched her. “You all right?”

  “Fine. It’s so interesting!”

  “Interesting?” I said blankly.

  “I’m taking a criminal science class. Actually, I’m thinking about making it my major.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t wait to tell the professor about this!” Dee glanced toward the front door. “It’s dark,” she said, sounding surprised.

  “Well, it’s almost nine. Do you want a ride home?”

  “I can take you,” Gina offered.

  “Thanks!”

  Mick came out of the butler’s pantry. Dee grabbed him in a quick hug, then went down the hall to fetch her coat.

  “Detective Aragón is ready for you,” I said to Mick.

  He nodded, gazing after his sister as he took off his apron. He was two years older and had his own place, but they were still close.

  “Shall I come back?” Gina asked.

  “No, it looks like it’s winding down,” I said, stepping aside as two more cops emerged from the dining parlor.

  “Sure you don’t want to spend the night at my place?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, though.”

  She caught me in a swift, tight hug. “Okay. Call if you need anything, even just to talk.”

  “I will. Thank you for coming. Having company helped.”

  She smooched my cheek, then let me go and collected her coat. I walked her to the door, where Dee was waiting, and watched them hustle down the sidewalk past the news crews.

  The house was getting quiet at last, though I could still hear people moving around in the dining parlor. I wandered through the front rooms: the parlors that I’d divided into the gift shop and eight cozy alcoves for groups having tea. Naming the alcoves after flowers now seemed frivolous, though at the time I’d thought of it I had felt clever. The flower theme reflected the wisterias that draped the front of the house, and they in turn had inspired the tearoom’s name.

  I’m especially glad you chose to celebrate the wisterias. We had the hardest time keeping the law firm from chopping them down. Had to take them to court once.

  Sylvia’s words, that afternoon at the tea. Just a few hours ago.

  A wave of grief washed through me. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t been close.

  Fighting tears, I collected the tea things from Iris and took them to the butler’s pantry. As I returned to the hall, Mick came down the stairs with Detective Aragón on his heels.

  “You want me to stay so I can wash up?”

  I glanced at Detective Aragón, who shook his head. “No,” I said. “We’ll worry about it tomorrow.”

  I followed Mick to the back door and locked it behind him. When I turned around, the detective was right behind me.

  “Could you come upstairs, please?”

  “All right.”

  He led the way, the thud of his motorcycle boots deadened by the carpet runner on the steps. I wondered if he’d thought of more questions, but instead of going back to my office he stopped and indicated the door opposite.

  “This door is locked,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s my private suite,” I told him. “It’s been locked all day.”

  “You live here? In Cinderella land?”

  He sounded incredulous. I bristled, but kept my voice calm. “At the moment, yes.”

  He ran a hand over his short, dark hair. “Well, I need to look in there. Open it.”

  My private space. My last refuge.

  “I’d prefer not to,” I said. “It was locked, it has nothing to do with—with what happened here today.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Look, it’s been a long day. Why don’t you just make it easy on all of us and open the door?”

  I
’d had it. It probably would have been easier if I’d done as he’d asked, but I was tired of being helpful and receiving no thanks for it.

  “I don’t see why I should,” I said, keeping my voice polite. “It has nothing to do with your investigation.”

  “I need to look in that room.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes just got meaner.

  I was sad and weary and fed up with his bullying. I straightened my shoulders and summoned my best diplomatic voice.

  “If you have a valid reason to search my private rooms, Detective, then you’d better get a warrant. You won’t set foot in there without one.”

  For a moment he looked so angry that I thought he was capable of anything. I was actually frightened, but I didn’t want to let him know it so I held still and waited.

  “Fine,” he said at last, and turned away.

  He clomped down the stairs two at a time. It wasn’t until I heard the front door slam that I breathed a sigh of relief.

  3

  After that, I couldn’t very well go into my bedroom, not while the investigators were still in the house. I fetched a book from my office, made myself a pot of peppermint tea, and went back once more to Iris to sit by the fire. The book couldn’t hold my interest, though. Too much had happened, and I found myself thinking over the day’s events.

  Where had I been when Sylvia died? In the hall? At the front door?

  I hadn’t heard any sound of a scuffle, nor, apparently, had anyone else. My staff had been nearby, in and out of the butler’s pantry and the kitchen. The murder must have been very quick.

  The horror of it made me close my eyes, and I felt a familiar spiral of despair pulling me downward. I sat up and inhaled sharply, looking at the chair across from me where Gina had sat.

  I could not, dared not let this defeat me. I had to fight it. It would be all too easy to give in to depression after something like this, but I knew that if I did, I would lose the tearoom that I’d worked so hard to create, and in which I had invested everything I had, financially and emotionally.

  So I’d fight for it. All I could think of was to try to figure out who had killed Sylvia. The police would do their job, but they had no personal stake in identifying her killer. I did.

  I half expected Detective Aragón to show up brandishing a search warrant, but he must have had more promising fish to fry. He didn’t return, and soon I heard the remaining police coming down the hall. I got up to meet them.

  The blond evidence tech was in the lead. He smiled at me.

  “We’re though.”

  “May I go into the room to clean up?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Got everything there was to get. Thanks for the coffee and all.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I saw them out and locked the front door. The street was mostly back to normal, only occasional traffic that late on a week night. The news crews had gone away. I watched the cops climb into a couple of SUVs and drive off, thankful for the silence left behind.

  A breeze stirred the hanging clusters of wisteria blossoms on the front porch. Pretty, but in my present state of mind they also seemed melancholy.

  I wasn’t looking forward to clearing the dining parlor, but it had to be done. I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing the mess was still there, and besides, I needed to go into the room and face my feelings about the murder.

  I went to the butler’s pantry to fetch a tray. On impulse, I turned on the sound system that piped music into all the public rooms, and put on a lively Vivaldi mandolin concerto. Music filled the house, and I immediately felt less gloomy.

  The yellow tape was gone from the door to the dining parlor. The furniture had been pulled all about, and coffee mugs sat on every flat surface including the floor, but beyond that the room didn’t look too bad. I half expected to see a chalk outline of Sylvia’s body on the floor, but apparently that’s a cinematic trope. The only sign of where she had lain was the space that had been cleared around where she had fallen.

  I stood looking down at that space, remembering. Poor Sylvia. No one deserved to die like that.

  Swallowing, I turned to work. Everything on the north sideboard had been shoved to one end, no doubt to make room for some piece of forensic equipment. I put the tray down on the empty space and began collecting coffee mugs and china. By some miracle, not a single piece had been broken by the mob of police investigators, though everything was smeared with black fingerprint powder.

  As I picked up each place setting at the table, Gina’s game of whodunnit returned to me. I gathered the place cards and shuffled through them, looking at the names I’d calligraphed so carefully. I couldn’t eliminate any of Gina’s five suspects, though I felt pretty confident Mr. Ingraham wasn’t the killer. Maybe I’d talk to Katie, ask her who was still in the dining parlor when she’d left it.

  Of course I’d talk to Katie. She’d want to know all about the investigation. She was probably worrying how it would affect her business.

  I fitted a teapot into the last empty space on the tray and paused. The saddest part of this mess was that the tearoom had been my salvation. Before I had decided to take the plunge and try to make it happen, I had been mired in despair.

  The tearoom’s genesis, though I didn’t know it at the time, was a trip my family took to England—the last vacation we all took together. I was eighteen, about to head for college, and in love with English literature and history. My brother Joe was twenty-four and more interested in crawling pubs than visiting historic sites. While he was off exerting his independence, my parents took me to museums, famous buildings, and afternoon tea at the Ritz.

  I fell in love. The dainty sandwiches and cakes, the scones, and especially the profound revelation of clotted cream—a food unlike any in America, so simple yet so sinfully rich—were such a delightful treat that I begged my parents to take me again the next day, and the day after that. We ended up having tea all over London, Brighton, and Bath. Even Joe got into the spirit of it, and found little places with no more than six elbow-rubbing tables that served cream tea and hot lunches. It was the trip of a lifetime.

  The following year my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She never traveled again, spending the last two years of her life in a losing battle against that dreadful disease.

  Dad was crushed when she died, and he never really got his spirits back. He passed on four years later, just as I was out of graduate school.

  I spent a year in a tailspin after settling my father’s estate. I gave all the cash I inherited to Joe in exchange for his share of the house on Stagecoach Road, in the hilly, northern part of Santa Fe. That house was much too big for me, though. A huge hacienda-style, single-story adobe laid out in a square around a center courtyard, what in a true hacienda would be called a plazuela.

  That had been my favorite part of the house. I’d always thought of it as my secret garden, where I played and threw parties for my imaginary friends. After Dad died, I sat there for hours on end, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

  Joe had moved to New York a few years earlier. Gina was away finishing a master’s degree at Wellesley College. I wrote despairing letters to them both and racked up huge long-distance phone bills, but even though they poured out love and sympathy, I couldn’t shake out of my gloom. It was Aunt Nat who finally gave me a much-needed kick in the pants.

  “Ellen, you need to figure out where you’re going,” she said to me over tea in my courtyard, wearing shades and a broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with yellow silk chrysanthemums. “You need to let go of the past, no matter how fond the memories are. You have a life, so get going and find it!”

  “Where?” I asked her. Almost a year after Dad’s death I was still numb. I felt as if I’d never have an idea again.

  “Well, first question: do you want to stay in Santa Fe?”

  “Yes.”

  Santa Fe was my home. Though I had gone away to school and traveled a fair amount, I never found
any place I’d rather live.

  “Next question: what career can you have in Santa Fe?”

  I couldn’t come up with anything. My degrees in literature and music probably weren’t going to get me a job in Santa Fe. I could try for a teaching certification, but the best I could hope for was teaching high school English, and I couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm for that.

  “Can’t we just have tea?” I said, knowing I was ducking the question.

  “Certainly. That’s an excellent idea. You remember the afternoon tea we had at the Biltmore that time in LA?”

  I frowned. “Sure.”

  “You can do better than that,” she said loftily. “You’ve done a beautiful job with this little tea for us two.”

  I blinked, looking over the cafe table I had set with my favorite china: teacups and matching plates, tiny silver teaspoons, a pair of tiny violet chintz milk and sugar servers, and a three-tiered tea tray loaded with all my favorite little comfort-food nibbles.

  “It’s just cucumber sandwiches and deviled eggs—”

  “And these cookies, which are divine,” Nat said, waving a thumbprint cookie filled with red currant preserves.

  “I like to bake.”

  “Well, why hide it under a bushel? Share your talent with the world, darling!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Nat took off her shades and leaned toward me, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling as she grinned. “You just want to have tea. So open a tearoom.”

  I stared at her. “Me?”

  “Why not? You’ve always loved tea parties!”

  “But, I—”

  “You love planning menus, and you love English culture and tradition. Ellen, tea is an up and coming trend. If you find the right location, I think it would be a big hit.”

  “Wait, whoa—”

  “You love the Victorian era, too. I think you should make all the decorations Victorian. In fact, there are some Victorian buildings in town—you should see if any of them are available.”

  “Nat!”

  “What?”

  She looked up at me, teacup in hand, all innocence. I knew what she was doing, and that I should be grateful, but I was too annoyed.