2. Marius
2
MARIUS
“ L ucky duck! You only just got into town this morning, and already, Edna’s granddaughter murdered her husband.” Aunt Frances cackled. “This is shaping up to be a humdinger of a December.”
“Indeed.”
In a moment of guilt after Thanksgiving, I’d agreed to work remotely from my elderly great-aunt’s guest room in the senior living complex I paid a lot of money for her to live at. Because—as Aunt Frances had tearfully declared over the Thanksgiving sandwiches she was prepping for me at my parents’ house—this could be her last holiday season on earth. She had never been blessed with any children, and I was like a son to her. All she wanted for Christmas was to spend just a little more time with me before she passed.
As if.
The small older woman was spry and energetic, waving to her friend and loudly talking about the corpse on the floor like they were discussing what to bring to the holiday party.
After I’d graduated from law school, my parents had retired and started spending the majority of their time on cruise ships. I tried my best to forget about my small hometown of Harrogate. I was a big-shot corporate lawyer in New York City. I didn’t need the small kooky town.
I should never have come back. My parents had the right idea—get out of Dodge for Christmas.
Now an innocent man had been murdered right in front of me.
“I can’t believe Emmie would poison her husband,” Aunt Frances was saying loudly.
“My baby daddy!” Oakley was screaming from the floor of the café.
The police were trying to get things under control. Good luck in the small town of Harrogate. Someone yelled out on the street that there’d been a murder at the Santa Claws Café, and townspeople came running. Several were trying to buy cupcakes because they wanted to resell them. Others wanted to know about the cupcake advent calendar.
“Do we still get our daily cupcake?” a young woman asked Emmie anxiously as the heavyset police officer tried to untangle his handcuffs from his belt.
“I don’t know, Ava!” Emmie wailed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen!”
“Now, see here,” Ida scolded Officer Girthman. The elderly woman ran the local general store and seemed to be the font of all the small-town gossip,. “Emmie did the world a solid. You can’t arrest a woman for killing her cheating husband. She should be thrown a parade, not thrown into jail. I’m calling my congressman!”
Winston dropped his handcuffs.
Emmie helpfully picked them up off the floor for him, tears still streaming down her eyes.
“I spent a lot of money on that advent calendar. I need my cupcakes. I’m going to be suing the police station,” Ava complained.
“Good! Arrest her!” Alice, the crazy cat lady, was screeching. “You’re going to rot in jail for what you did to these poor cats! Cats belong outdoors.”
“Can we go, Aunt Frances?” I begged. “We can buy a coffee next door.”
It was hopeless; she ignored me, still speculating about the murder with her friends.
More people streamed into the cramped shop. I was jostled.
Moose meowed. The Bengal cat was in his harness and perched on my shoulder so he didn’t get stepped on.
A pudgy, short man froze, looked up, then beamed. “Marius! You didn’t tell me you were in town.”
Because I’d hoped to avoid everyone I’d gone to high school with.
Abbot grinned. “Long time no see.” He held up his notepad. “I work for the Harrogate Chronicle now! Finally got that full-time gig after old Mr. Harrison kicked the bucket. I’m so glad there was a murder. I bet papers sell out tomorrow. Shit, I gotta get the scoop. Web traffic is up. You want to give a statement?”
“No, thank you.”
Abbott pushed his way through the crowd to the corpse.
“Ooh! I need to get a better view.” Aunt Frances grabbed my wrist like I was five and dragged me through the surge of rubberneckers.
“I really don’t want to get involved.”
The police handcuffed the crying murderer.
Moose hissed when one of the café cats got too close.
“She didn’t do it!” Aunt Frances’s friend Edna was yelling to anyone who would listen. “My granddaughter didn’t kill her husband. This is a violation of her constitutional rights.”
“It’s not,” I muttered under my breath.
“How do you know?” Edna demanded.
“Because—” Aunt Frances began.
“No,” I hissed.
“Marius is a lawyer, remember? Is the dementia setting in, Edna? My God.”
“A lawyer?” Emmie croaked, looking up at me.
Maybe without all the snot and tears on her face, she might be attractive. But now…
“I don’t take charity cases.”
“Yes, you do.” Aunt Frances poked me. “I’ve seen you in court—you’re like a movie star! Like Richard Gere in Chicago .”
“Please,” the young woman whimpered. “I need to run my shop. I can’t go to prison. I just can’t. Who will take care of my cats?”
Twenty pairs of feline eyes blinked at me.
“They’re used to being inside.” She hiccupped. “If the café closes down, they’ll have to go back outside in the cold and the snow, and they’ll never find forever homes.”
If I were anyone else, maybe the big, tearful brown eyes would have swayed me, but we lawyers were a sociopathic bunch.
“Hard pass.”
“Of course he will. Marius,” Aunt Frances said firmly and gestured to me. “Do your lawyer thing.”
The elderly woman turned to the stressed officer and said loudly, “Emmie has a lawyer now. You have to let her go.”
“I do?” Officer Girthman asked, confused.
“No!” one of the firefighters yelled and rolled his eyes as he and several other trooped in. The health inspector followed and began taking custody of all the cupcakes.
“Yes,” Aunt Frances insisted. “You need a warrant, or you can’t speak to her.”
I made a helpless gesture. “That’s not how any of this works.”
“Marius, I expected better of you.”
“Ow!” I yelped when Aunt Frances reached up to grab my ear.
“I paid a lot of money for you to go to law school. I need to see some results. There’s a good boy.” The elderly woman patted my cheek.
The police officer dragged Emmie to her feet. More officers were swarming in along with several bored firefighters put on crowd control.
“Can’t you blow something up, Emmie?” one of them begged.
“Poisoning your husband? Lame! There hasn’t been a fire all winter,” another firefighter joked then grinned when he saw me. “Hey, it’s Marius!”
“Luke.” I nodded, shaking his hand.
“Come from the big city to grace us with your presence? We should get a beer at the Christmas market after this.”
“He can’t,” Aunt Frances said. “He has a client to help.”
“Godspeed.” Luke saluted me then turned to grab a black cat off a shelf. “You aren’t supposed to be here, Salem.”
Resigned, I followed Aunt Frances as she power walked out of the café with the impromptu parade of police and senior citizens, down to the station along Main Street. For someone in her eighties, Aunt Frances was unreasonably spry.
Definitely has a lot more Christmases left in her. And I absolutely should have stayed in New York.
I hadn’t even gotten any coffee.
No one batted an eye at Moose perched on my shoulder, because people were carrying all sorts of random shit down Main Street. In one case, a whole family was carting what looked to be a drunken uncle, who saluted me with his beer can.
As we headed down the snowy street, where it looked like Santa Claus had gotten blackout drunk and vomited holiday cheer everywhere, I tried to get into my criminal-defense-attorney mindset.
Even though I had a cushy corporate position at Richmond Electric, where I oversaw multibillion-dollar buyouts and reviewed federal contracts, Aunt Frances refused to believe that was the job of a real lawyer. She said she had paid for me to go to law school, not be a secretary, because I didn’t look cute enough in a skirt for all that.
Aunt Frances and the seniors occasionally took a field trip to watch my pro bono criminal-defense cases in New York City. I’d take them to dinner on “that big lawyer salary,” during which they would give me helpful tips gleaned from Law and Order marathons.
“You don’t have any student loan debt,” Aunt Frances reminded me as I dodged tourists and locals. “You’re paying it forward. You remember Anya Pechowski?”
“No…”
“Yes, you do. You helped her son Alex get off on that mistaken-identity kerfuffle. She’s still so grateful. You’re a good person, and I know you can help Emmie.”
I did not believe I could help Emmie. “The best we’d do is a plea bargain. Maybe ten years in jail, five with good behavior?”
“Don’t you phone it in.” She wagged her finger at me. “That poor girl needs a good lawyer. Now, her grandmother sleeps around—that’s true—and her husband was stepping out on her. But the girl can cook, and she has a nice rack.”
“Can she really cook if her food killed someone?” I squinted.
The police station was packed when we arrived. The officers were running around like that chicken Aunt Frances’s old next-door neighbor used to have.
“Where’s the murder box?” the police yelled.
This is not New York City, I reminded myself. Shit, I might be able to get Emmie off just on the fact that no one here is following any sort of procedure.
Aunt Frances bypassed the waiting room, scolded one cop when he meekly asked her to please not go into a restricted area, then marched right into the police chief’s office.
I let her.
Emmie was huddled in a holding cell, one that looked like it was out of the 1920s, with bars and everything. Weepy, she sat across from a drunken man who was half falling off of the bench.
As much as I didn’t want to help her, couldn’t really, my brain was already cranking up, analyzing the facts of the case.
It’s always the spouse, I reminded myself. Always .
Emmie was sobbing hysterically now.
Her grandmother clung to me.
“Help her. You have to help my granddaughter. She’s soft and weak. She’s not like me. She can’t survive prison. I did it!” the old woman yelled. “I killed Brooks! My granddaughter had nothing to do with it. Arrest me!”
The police ignored her.
“Ma’am…”
“Don’t ma’am me, young man. I’m not that old.”
“And furthermore…” Aunt Frances was lecturing the police chief, who looked like he was one irate senior citizen away from a heart attack for Christmas.
The older man strode over to the holding cell, coffee mug in hand, teeth gritted. “I believe it’s absurd how much of my tax dollars were spent on the new motorcycles. I saw Winston here crash his into a snowdrift, and I use the word crash liberally. It’s more like he slowly drifted off course, and the bike fell.”
The chief sucked in a breath and bellowed, “All of you need to get the fuck out of here!”
The rest of the townspeople scattered.
I narrowed my eyes. “Where is the district attorney? Are you pressing charges?”
The chief looked around and sighed. “We can keep her here, by law, for twenty-four hours.”
“No, you’re not keeping my client here for twenty-four hours!” I barked. “This jail does not meet the minimum standards for a holding cell under the new law passed this legislative session. You need to bring it up to compliance if you’re keeping anyone here.”
The drunk across from Emmie heaved himself up. “S’tha means I c’leave?”
“No,” the chief snapped. “Your sister said to leave you here to sober up.” He turned on me. “I don’t need some big shot city lawyer coming into my town, telling me how to run my precinct. This is the way we’ve done things for a hundred years. I ain’t changing now.” The chief paused, pushed up his glasses, and peered at me. Then he made a noise of disgust. “Oh, you’re Randall’s boy. Shoulda known.”
It didn’t matter that I was in my thirties—I’d always live in my father’s shadow here, it seemed.
“So is the DA pressing charges or not?” I asked.
“The DA’s having a working lunch.”
“Translation, the DA is out drinking on the city’s dime. Fantastic. I will be taking my client, then, since no charges are being filed.”
“I’m here! I’m here!” An older man in suspenders, a bow tie, and round spectacles hurried into the room, reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey.
“You called me here for Brucey? Brucey, what did we tell you? You can drink in public, but you can’t be a nuisance,” the DA scolded the drunk.
“No, it’s the murderer.” The chief pointed with his coffee mug.
“A murder?” The DA flailed. “Here in Harrogate? Someone call the National Guard—there’s a murderer loose!”
“She’s not loose. We have her.”
“Sir,” I began.
“Oh, you’re Randall’s boy!” The DA beamed at me. “How’s he doing in retirement?”
“He and my mom are in the French Riviera, enjoying themselves.”
“Wonderful!”
“Wouldn’t catch me dead in France,” the police chief said mulishly.
“My client—”
“Brucey?”
“Emmie Dawson,” her grandmother sobbed. “You locked up my granddaughter.”
“Surely there’s been some mistake!” the DA exclaimed. “Pretty girl like that.”
The police chief rolled his eyes
“I’m glad you and I see eye to eye.” I shook the DA’s hand.
The police chief threw down his papers.
“You do not have enough evidence to keep Ms. Dawson,” I argued. “We don’t know if those are even her cupcakes. Someone could have made cupcakes that looked like hers and poisoned them.”
Emmie hiccupped. “But they look just like my cupcakes. It’s a custom design.”
“Ms. Dawson, please shut up, and please let me handle this. Unless you do want to go to prison.”
“She can and should be in prison!” Theo blustered.
Yes, Theo, the man who’d bought my father’s legal practice because I was a terrible son and refused to come home to Harrogate to run it.
I hated him.
I pulled myself up to my full height, still pettily happy I was taller than him.
I am not a teenager or some snot-nosed twentysomething recent grad. I should not care. It’s unreasonable to care. Theo is nothing.
“Why are you releasing her?” Theo still had that same whiny nasal voice.
“Because my client is innocent,” I snapped.
“She killed my best friend; she killed Brooks. Justice for Brooks! The man had a baby on the way.”
“Theo, my boy!” The DA and Theo embraced.
“We still doing drinks tonight?” Theo asked.
“Don’t I know it? My treat,” the DA said.
None of this would fly in NYC.
I felt the annoyance rise and tried to lower my hackles. This was why I’d left Harrogate—this petty small-town bullshit.
“Emmie murdered Brooks. Everyone saw it. There are a hundred witnesses,” Theo argued.
The DA squirmed.
“She didn’t. There were no witnesses. Just because Ms. Dawson was in the vicinity doesn’t mean she had anything to do with his death. We don’t even know if it was the cupcakes,” I argued. “He could have had a burst appendix. He could have had an allergic reaction. It could have been anything. You might as well arrest everyone who was in the café this morning.”
“He does have a point…” Emmie made big teary eyes at the DA.
“That girl can’t sit in a jail cell. Chief, let her out.” The DA motioned.
The chief’s keys jangled.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you, Ms. Emmie?” the DA asked.
“No, she is not a flight risk,” I assured him before Emmie could say something stupid.
I grabbed her arm and half dragged her back out into the cloudy winter afternoon.
She shivered on the sidewalk.
“You got me out of jail.” She seemed to be in shock.
Begrudgingly, because I knew my mother would materialize from France just to yell at me, I wordlessly took off my coat and draped it around her.
“Thank you.” The young woman clutched at the coat. “I can’t believe you were able to get me out of jail.” She stared up at me in a daze.
“Just for today,” I warned.
“Just today?”
“They could still arrest you, for keeps this time.”
The tears started again. Moose wound around her feet.
Emmie’s grandmother was there to envelop her in a warm hug as the seniors cheered.
“You did it!” My aunt kissed my cheek. “You saved the day!”
“Aunt Frances, that is not how this works. There will be a trial. In fact, I would bet anything that Theo will convince the DA to do so at their next little drink session.”
Aunt Frances nudged me as Emmie sobbed on her grandmother’s shoulder. “So you’re taking her case?”
I reminded myself no good deed went unpunished. I shouldn’t get any more involved. Small-town girl’s hubby was cheating on her. She axed him. The end.
But what if she didn’t?
And if not, then who did?
“She’s cute,” Aunt Frances whispered. “Women fall in love with their saviors, you know!”
“Yes, I am taking her case, but I’m not getting romantically involved with a person who allegedly poisoned her husband.”
“You’re a man with a cat on a leash,” my aunt said flatly. “Your options are limited.”