6. Marius
6
MARIUS
“ Y ou don’t have to come.” Emmie was stubborn as we walked through the dark street toward city hall.
“I wasted all day at your café,” I reminded her. “It would be just my luck that you’d do something incriminating when left to your own devices, then I’d have to hear about it from Aunt Frances, who would expect me to pull miracles.”
“You are impressive,” Emmie said begrudgingly. “You just have a caustic personality.”
“Because I’m dealing with a child who wants to end up back in jail. Now, as your lawyer…” I stepped in front of Emmie. She slid on the icy concrete. I grabbed her before she could knock into me. “I would advise you not to attend this meeting.”
“I’m the social chair of the feral-cat committee,” she said, jaw set. “I don’t miss meetings.”
Why I’d thought it would be any different when we stood in the doorway of the small meeting room in city hall, I didn’t know.
Moose hissed from my shoulder as all of the cats in the room sprang onto the furniture, fought over bowls of food, and tried to escape into the hallway.
I rubbed my jaw.
I recognized Cora, who was a neighboring shop owner, and Alice and Gertrude from the protests.
“Hi, Rosie!” Emmie greeted a fourth woman.
“Order. Order! ” Gertrude banged a cat-shaped gavel, causing several cats to scurry.
“Oooh! A new member! Don’t worry,” Rosie purred to me. “We don’t bite. Except for David. He definitely snapped at a police officer the other day. Don’t worry. As the new person earlier this year, I’ll show you the ropes. You just stick with me, handsome.”
I turned back to the meeting. The weirdo cat-committee people were now in a shouting match about proper fees for adopting a cat.
“I can barely give away a cat,” Emmie was arguing. “We can’t charge for them. They’re stray animals!”
“That’s why you murdered your husband!” Gertrude thundered. “To drum up business for your café. You are using these poor innocent cats for your own financial gain.”
“Don’t,” Rosie whispered when I was about to interject. “They hate her.” She ran her hand up and down my arm. “Gertrude and Alice were talking about it earlier.”
Across the room, Emmie glared at me.
I smirked at her.
But my mind was racing.
Could it be that Emmie had been the real target all along, not Brooks? If so, she could be in danger.
“When you said ‘widow’”—there was a twitch of a smile on Grayson’s mouth—“I was thinking, you know, a widow. Not…”
Not Emmie with her too-tight sweaters, the apron that hugged her curves, and literal rosy cheeks.
“She looks like she should be on a Christmas card, greeting you with a homemade dinner and a baby on her hip.” My friend and boss had just come into town with his girlfriend. Lexi was shopping. He was there under duress.
His two Dalmatians wagged their tails furiously as I petted their big sleek heads.
I buttoned up my coat and let the door shut behind me.
“Isn’t that the cat girl who nerfed her cheating husband?” A group of excited teenagers stopped in front of the café, and I opened the door for them.
“Everyone’s talking about it.” I sighed.
“You’re her lawyer.” Grayson raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, ‘everyone’?”
I grimaced.
“Rookie mistake, letting the publicity go wild,” I admitted. “Though it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.”
“The tabloids got ahold of it. She has means, motive, and opportunity. It’s all over the internet, or so Lexi tells me,” Grayson unhelpfully reminded me.
“You didn’t want to spend time shopping with her?”
“Lexi says she didn’t want to ruin my surprise Christmas present,” he said dryly.
“I hope it’s something noisy and colorful.” I smirked as we headed into the lively Christmas market.
Everyone was capitalizing on the cupcake murder. Murder-related merchandise was everywhere. The food stalls even had murder-themed offerings.
I didn’t live in Harrogate, but I was sure it wasn’t normally this busy on a weekday. The cupcake murders had attracted a crowd. People were standing around, speculating about whether Emmie had done it.
“What do you think?” Grayson asked.
“It doesn’t matter; she claims she’s innocent, and as her lawyer, that’s what I have to go with.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with a pretty damsel in distress needing to be rescued?” His mouth twitched.
“I think I liked you better when you were anti love and relationships,” I snipped.
Grayson just smirked.
“Besides, I only date other lawyers, not a literal widow with twenty cats. I need someone who understands me.”
Moose, riding on the back of one of the Dalmatians, meowed at me.
“Don’t want to be a stepfather?” Only someone who had known Grayson as long as I had would detect the undercurrent of humor. “Also didn’t the last lawyer you dated dump you because her dad was mad you didn’t go to Yale?”
“Maybe.”
We walked in silence for a moment.
“Emmie Dawson doesn’t seem like the murdering type,” Grayson said.
“They never do.”
We headed past a stall selling Christmas ornaments made out of beer cans.
“You don’t think she did it?” Grayson asked after a moment.
“If it goes to trial, I could make a good case that it was someone else.”
“Who?”
“Not sure yet. Small towns aren’t like the city. People hold grudges. The motive could be as simple as someone said something mean to someone in high school, and they finally got revenge.”
“Then you’re suspect number one.”
“Fuck off.” I elbowed my friend.
There was a skit underway at the stage in the center of the market. The children were acting out the gruesome cupcake murder. One little boy took a large bite out of a cupcake then convulsed dramatically. Then the grim reaper solemnly came out and took him away. The kids linked hands and bowed to applause.
“What kind of wholesome small-town event is this?” Grayson hissed in my ear.
The grandmaster of the Christmas market blared into a megaphone, “Stay tuned for part two of the Cupcake Murders next week, folks. And now on to the raffle.”
Grayson handed me a scrap of paper and shifted the dog leashes to his other hand. “I bought you a raffle ticket.”
“Only tourists buy raffle tickets.”
“Don’t those people live here?” Grayson nodded. Oakley and Beatrice were close to the front of the crowd, giving flowers to the kids who had just finished the play, many of them little blond doppelgangers of their older, more obnoxious Svensson siblings.
“Don’t let them see us,” I hissed as the brothers collected the kids.
“Too late.”
Garret, a blond man, locked in on us. He sneered, “Why aren’t you at work? Don’t you have a contract you’re supposed to be finishing for us?”
One of his little brothers flung himself down to the ground and bit Garrett’s shoe. “I didn’t get a cupcake!”
“I just have to thank you and your brothers for putting this together, Garrett,” Oakley said, sobbing, wearing a big black hat.
Beatrice handed her a handkerchief.
“It is so comforting in my time of need to see people care about Brooks’s murder.”
“My condolences for your loss,” Grayson murmured.
“I have his child.” Oakley rubbed her belly. “At least I have a piece of him left.”
Garret picked up the screaming kid and yelled until the other kids stopped getting distracted by the lights and the townspeople and followed him.
“What kind of grieving girlfriend wants a gruesome play about the death of the father of her child?” Grayson asked me.
“Someone who is secretly glad he’s dead, probably.” I narrowed my eyes as I watched Oakley and Beatrice slowly make their way out of the Christmas market, causing as much commotion and drawing as much attention to their exit as they could.
“And for the raffle winner, number three hundred forty-five!”
“You won,” Grayson said.
“Shut up,” I hissed at him.
“Do we have a winner?” the grandmaster screamed, pointing at me. “Step right up and claim your prize!”
“You get it for me.”
“I can’t,” Grayson said, clamping down the smile. “The dogs… You know how they are.”
I trudged up the steps to shake hands and have my photo taken with my prize.
“You won!” Lexi screamed when I rejoined Grayson and the animals.
Grayson’s girlfriend had shown up with a wheelbarrow—yes, a literal wheelbarrow—full of Christmas market crap like wreaths, ornaments, and disfigured-looking holiday decorations.
“I thought Grayson wasn’t supposed to see his gift.”
“I actually am having something custom-made,” the short redhead sang. “It’s going to be amazeballs! He’s going to die when he sees it. Oops, wrong choice of words.”
“I’ll make sure Grayson practices his ‘I love it’ face,” I joked with her.
“Oooh!” She looked down at the red-green-and-white-striped box in my hand. “No fair! You won murder cupcakes.”
“I’m not eating them.” I headed to a trash can.
Before the elf-shaped can could open its mouth, I was mobbed by the crowd.
“Fifty dollars! I’ll give you fifty for those.”
“A hundred or nothing!” Lexi yelled.
“How about a reindeer sausage,” one guy offered. “Homemade?”
“Ooh, yes! Dinner tonight.” Lexi accepted the cooler and added it to the pile on the wheelbarrow.
I watched, feeling like a third wheel as my best friend and the love of his life bickered good-naturedly over the amount of stuff she’d bought.
Grayson picked up the wheelbarrow handles.
“Going back to the hot widow?” Lexi waggled her eyebrows.
“Against my will.”
“It’s Christmas. Santa loves a good deed! Someone’s at the top of the nice list!”
Emmie didn’t notice me when I hovered in the back door to the kitchen, wanting to avoid the crush of gawkers in the shop.
Tongue poking between her lips, brow tense in concentration, she was using a syringe to squirt something into a set of cupcakes.
Though Oakley was acting suspicious and Charles and Gertrude and Alice all had motive to frame Emmie, I wasn’t going to count her out.
She had access to not just her grandmother’s medicine but that of all the elderly in the retirement community as well. Any one of those medications could have been deadly to Brooks.
I stepped back into the shadow of the alley and headed to the police station.
Of course, Winston gave me a blank look when I ask for the toxicology report.
He made a big show of shuffling the papers around. “I can’t seem to find it.”
In other words, they’d never had it done.
“Then I want a sample to do my own tests.”
“I mean, Ida said it smelled like cyanide,” Winston whined as he led me back to the evidence locker.
“Ida is old and crazy. What does she know?”
“Supposedly, that’s how she killed her husband in the fifties. That’s what my great-granny says anyways.” He handed me one of the cupcakes in a bag.
I didn’t take it. “What are you doing? You can’t just hand it to me. There has to be a chain of custody.”
I watched him as he filed a transfer request, and a courier showed up to take the sample to a lab I used in New York City.
“You’re real good at this cop stuff,” Winston said in admiration.
It was dark by the time I finally returned to the café.
My eyes adjusted to the dimness of the alley.
Why weren’t there any lights back here?
Moose yowled as a cat knocked over a metal trash can.
Wait. Not a cat…
A dark figure raced by me out of the alley. I caught a whiff of almonds.
The hell?
So, Emmie’s suspect was real after all.
The baker gave me a startled look when I opened the back door to the kitchen.
“I think I just saw your murderer.”