Cinn full secrets, p.3
Cinn-full Secrets, page 3
How could something like that happen? It wasn’t like it was the first death that Erin had discovered in Bald Eagle Falls. Or even the second. She didn’t know how she always seemed drawn toward them. This time, it had been the smell. She should have known better than to look too closely, leaving it for someone else to investigate. Called Terry to look for her. Even if it had just been a dead animal, then who better than her boyfriend to find it and deal with it, protecting her from seeing what had happened or smelling the stench close up.
She gagged just thinking of it. She held her arm and then her shirt to her nose, checking to see whether she had carried the smell of the decomposition with her. She would have to wash everything. Shower for an hour to ensure it didn’t cling to her skin or get into her hair.
“Can I get you something?” Charley offered. “A glass of water? Would that help?”
Erin nodded. “Maybe.”
“Or some tea? I can heat a teakettle.”
Charley was not the best in the kitchen. She had grown a lot and could now follow most of the recipes in Erin’s big reference binder. Most of them. As long as she was careful and followed the step-by-step directions exactly. She was distractible and had been known to mess up an entire batch of dough more than once.
Erin nodded. Charley left her side to put the kettle on to boil. Erin sniffled.
“You might as well use the big boiler. If the police want anything…”
“Oh, yeah, I suppose,” Charley agreed. She turned off the kettle and looked at the big boiler they used for the ladies’ tea and other events. “This thing always scares me a little.”
“You just need to turn it on and make sure the tank is full.”
Charley looked at the boiler dubiously, but followed Erin’s instructions. The boiler started to tick, warming up.
“Ginger?” Charley asked, looking at a selection of teas in the ladies’ tea basket. “That’s supposed to be good for stomachs.”
“Yeah.” The pungent smell would help clean the smell out of Erin’s nose as well as the tea reducing the nausea. There wasn’t anything left in her stomach to throw up, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try.
The sound of approaching sirens reached into the kitchen, tinny and far away at first, but quickly homing in on the bakery and its latest, deadest customer. The wails rose to an unbearable level before finally stopping outside and cutting off abruptly.
Terry spoke to the sheriff for a couple of minutes. They both walked behind the fence, looking down at the ground, their heads close together as they discussed the discovery.
They were both experienced law enforcement officers and it certainly wasn’t the first time they had been faced with a decomposing body. Still, she couldn’t understand how they could stand that close to the remains without covering their mouths and noses. Or getting sick.
After a few minutes, Terry left the sheriff there and he and K9 returned to Auntie Clem’s, joining Erin and Charley in the kitchen just as Charley was putting a mug of ginger tea in front of Erin.
Terry stood a few feet away from her, unsure of how to approach the subject or treat Erin. She was, she supposed, a person of interest by virtue of being so close to the dead body. And the fact that Simon had been harassing her about Adrienne and then he had disappeared, only to turn up dead.
Surely, he knew by this time that there was no way Erin could have killed Simon or anyone else. And there was no way that she would have put herself in the position of having to see and smell the body in that condition. If Erin were to commit a murder, she would be more likely to kill and dispose of someone in a big walk-in freezer like the one in Buttermilk Biscuits, a restaurant in Whitewater Junction, than she would leave a body out in the Tennessee sun to putrefy outside her back door.
“Erin, are you okay?” Terry asked, still a couple of steps away from her. Did he maintain that distance because he was still acting in his role as a law enforcement officer, separate and emotionally distant from Erin? She had thought the sheriff would have taken him off the case.
“Mm-hmm,” Erin murmured. She took a tiny sip of the ginger tea and waited for it to start working before filling her stomach. One small sip at a time, until she could get the whole cup down. Then she should feel much better.
“Can you tell me what happened? How did you discover the body?”
Erin shook her head.
“You can take your time,” Terry said. “If you’re not ready yet.”
“She was just taking the garbage out,” Charley informed him. “We were cleaning up after the ladies’ tea.”
Terry nodded. He looked at Erin for more details, but she just shook her head. There wasn’t much else to say about it. She didn’t want to relive the experience. If she kept going over it, the discovery would just be indelibly impressed upon her memory, so she could never forget it.
“It isn’t exactly in plain sight,” Terry pointed out. “How did you end up looking behind the dumpster?”
“The smell.”
“It is pungent,” Terry admitted. “But you didn’t think it was just the garbage?”
Erin shuddered and shook her head. “Does it smell like garbage?” she challenged.
“Well, yes. To me… it doesn’t smell any different than any other rotting garbage.”
Erin shook her head. “Ugh. Rotten garbage doesn’t smell like that.”
Terry looked at her, his face a study of concentration. “I’m glad I don’t have your sense of smell,” he told her, not for the first time.
Erin nodded her agreement. As delightful as it was to have her sense of smell when there were cookies or a nice turkey dinner in the oven, her sense of smell was more often an inconvenience than a helpful tool. It might be fun to identify the ingredients in a tea or recognize what brand and variety it was, but garbage, dead bodies, and other terrible smells were not things she enjoyed.
Erin took another sip of her tea. She could hear the muted voices of the other law enforcement officers talking or yelling back and forth as they secured the scene and looked for any forensic clues that would tell them what had happened there.
Erin, Charley, and Terry said nothing for a while, each pondering their own thoughts.
“When was the last time you saw Simon?” Terry asked. “Before this, I mean. The last time you saw him alive.”
Erin swallowed. “The same time as you did. When I called you to get him out of the bakery.”
“You had to call him to get Simon out of the bakery?” Charley repeated, not having heard this detail previously.
Erin nodded and looked at Terry. “He was harassing me. Wouldn’t get out. Blocking the other customers or asking them uncomfortable questions. I asked him to leave and he wouldn’t, so I called Terry.” She nodded to him. “He got Simon on his way, and that was the last I heard from him. I was expecting him to come back… he kept coming back to demand to know about Adrienne. Where she was or if I could get her a message.”
“But he never came back after that?” Terry asked.
“No.”
“That was… Friday afternoon.”
Erin nodded. She thought about the state of decomposition of the body. It wasn’t a fresh kill. Someone had made sure that Simon would never come back to the bakery to harass Erin again.
“I guess that’s about right,” Terry admitted. “He must have died soon after that. It’s been more than a few hours. More than a day, I would say, but we’ll have to see what the medical examiner has to say about it.”
“Who would do that?” Erin demanded. Who would kill Simon? Who would leave him right outside Erin’s back door, rotting behind the dumpster like that? There were so many questions whirling through her head as she tried to make sense of it.
“How was he killed?” Charley asked sensibly. She was the only one of the three of them who had not seen the body, so she would need to be filled in on the details of the murder.
Because Simon had been murdered.
CHAPTER 6
Terry looked at Charley and didn’t answer the question, obviously trying to keep the details of the investigation under wraps.
He was the one who was required to keep the details confidential, not Erin.
“Stabbed,” Erin told her. “That’s what it looked like.”
They both looked at Terry for confirmation. He just shrugged. No comment.
“Stabbed,” Charley repeated. “Up close and personal, then. A face-to-face confrontation.” She looked at Erin. “Was it face-to-face?”
“Stabbed in the front,” Erin agreed. “Chest or stomach… maybe more than once, I didn’t get close enough to investigate.”
“Anger,” Charley deduced. “Rage? How many stab marks?”
“Don’t know,” Erin reiterated. Charley looked at Terry, but he didn’t help out.
“He was so well-liked,” Charley said sarcastically. “It’s going to be hard to find anyone who wished him dead.”
Terry snorted. K9 looked up at him with a doggie expression of concern.
“Who did you see around here Friday?” Terry asked Erin. “After I left. Who was around the bakery in the next couple of hours? Customers, employees, anyone you saw walking down the alley?”
“I didn’t see anyone walking down the alley. I don’t stand out there watching for people to go by. The only time I open the back door is for deliveries or to take stuff out to the garbage.”
“Did you have any deliveries Friday afternoon?”
“No.”
“Anyone come by for the day-old bread?”
That was another thing that people came to the back door for, and Terry knew that. Anyone who needed help with their groceries, who couldn’t afford the bread that the family needed, could come by Auntie Clem’s to get day-old bread and baking from the freezer. Whatever they needed, no questions asked.
“No. Not Friday.”
“Did Adrienne ever come to the back?”
Erin shook her head. “Not on Friday.”
“Did she ever?”
Erin balked at revealing anything sensitive to Terry. “I don’t see what that has to do with it. That’s confidential.”
“If Simon knew that sometimes she came by for day-old bread, he might have camped out there to watch for her.”
“And then stabbed himself?” Charley asked sarcastically.
“And then… had a confrontation with Adrienne or someone else.”
“Adrienne didn’t come by,” Erin repeated.
“No one else came by?” Terry verified.
“No.”
“And you didn’t… hear anything strange out there Friday or Saturday?”
“It’s a heavy door. And we often have machines or water or fans running back here. So we don’t really hear anything from outside.”
“Did you hear anything?” Terry repeated. Erin could hear the frustration in his voice. She didn’t mean to answer ambiguously; she just felt that his questions needed more context. She meant to answer.
“No. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Any of your employees? Anyone mention hearing or seeing anything unusual?”
Erin looked at Charley and shook her head.
“I don’t know of anything,” Charley confirmed. She wasn’t in the bakery very often but, hopefully, her confirmation reassured Terry that Erin was telling the truth and not just trying to brush him off.
Sheriff Wilmot entered the kitchen. He stomped off his shoes at the door in case they were dusty and wiped his sweaty forehead. It was evening, but it was still pretty warm out.
“Miss Erin,” he greeted. “Mind if we have a chat?”
Erin nodded. “Of course.”
She was glad that he had come in himself to interview her rather than assigning the job to Rodney Stayner, whom Erin had never really gotten along with.
He nodded toward Erin’s tiny, closet-sized office and asked, “Shall we take your office?”
But there really wasn’t room in there for two people. There was no guest chair and Wilmot would have to stand or sit on the edge of the desk. And it would be very close and warm.
“Why don’t we grab a table at the front instead?” Erin suggested.
The sheriff nodded his agreement, and he and Erin sat down at one of the small wrought iron tables in the front of the bakery that they used for the ladies’ tea and that customers occasionally used if they needed a quiet place to have their tea or cookies before going back to the office. Everything was clean and tidy. Erin and Charley had just wiped everything down, swept, and wet-mopped.
Sheriff Wilmot sighed as he sat down opposite Erin. “So… Another day, another body,” he joked gently.
“I think it’s time for someone else to take a turn,” Erin said ruefully.
“Yes. You seem to have had to deal with more than your own share, haven’t you? How are you feeling? You’re a mite pale.”
“Well… I was sick. But I guess I’m okay now. As long as I don’t think about it too much.”
“We’ll try to avoid that the best we can, under the circumstances. I’m sure you’ve already walked through it with Officer Piper, but if you could outline things once more for me…”
“I was just taking the garbage out. I could… smell the decomp. I looked around, thought it might be an animal. And then… I saw him.”
“Quite a shock. Despite your experience in these matters.”
“It’s always a shock. And it’s not something that I go looking for.”
“Certainly not,” he agreed. “Was there anyone else around when you found the body?”
“Just Charley. And she was inside the bakery, not out there.”
“Anyone walking by? Did you hear anyone out there earlier? Yesterday?”
“No.”
“I’ll need a list of your employees and when they were on shift.”
Erin thought about that. She wasn’t sure how knowing the bakery shifts would make any difference. If someone were working a shift, did that make them a suspect? Or did that mean that they had an alibi? It could go either way.
“Okay,” she agreed. But she didn’t really think it would help him.
“Have you seen Adrienne the last few days?”
Erin shook her head. “No. She hasn’t been around town very much.” She gave a little grimace. “Almost as if she was avoiding someone.”
Wilmot chuckled. “Almost as if she were,” he agreed. “Do you have a phone number for her that works?”
“Um… I might.”
He frowned, brows drawing closer together. “Miss Erin. Do you have a number for her or not?”
Erin sighed. “Yes. But it is supposed to be private. I’m not supposed to share it with anyone.”
“You’re going to need to give it to me. We need to get in contact with her to notify her of Simon’s death and discuss the circumstances with her. We can’t get around that.”
Erin nodded. “Okay. But can you not put it on anything that others will see? If it leaks out to other people in the town… then it’s not exactly private anymore.”
“It is going to need to go into our official records.” He held up his finger to stop Erin from objecting. “Again, no way around that one. We have to keep accurate records. It won’t be available to anyone outside of the police department.”
Unfortunately, Erin knew the police department had at least one very large leak.
She pulled out her phone and found the number for Wilmot. “Just please… keep it as private as you can.”
“Isn’t the danger already past? Wouldn’t you say that the one person she needed to keep that number from is past being able to use it?”
Clearly, Simon was dead. But was he the only person who would show up interested in Adrienne’s windfall? She was reclusive and liked to keep herself and her family apart from mainstream society. She wouldn’t want just anyone calling her.
“It’s not a public number,” Erin reiterated. “Keep it as quiet as you can.”
Wilmot nodded his agreement. “When was the last time you saw Simon?”
“Friday. When I called Terry to get rid of him.”
The sheriff raised his brows. “To get rid of him?”
“From Auntie Clem’s. He was making a nuisance of himself and wouldn’t leave when I asked him to. So I called Terry, and he saw him on his way. That was the last I saw of him. I expected him to come back, but he didn’t.”
“Very good. That’s helpful. And you didn’t see or hear anything else in the back?” He gestured again.
“No.” Erin tried to think of whether she had heard the trash pickup or whether she had seen or heard anything else over the past two days. “No, I can’t think of anything at all.”
“How late were you here Friday night?”
“Uh… maybe seven. I’m not sure.”
“And you didn’t hear anything out there? Shouting? Anything like that?”
“No. I was in my office, and you really can’t hear anything in there.”
“Who else was here? Miss Vicky?”
“No. I was… just by myself. The bakery was closed. I had some accounting and planning to do while it was quiet.”
“You were here by yourself.”
“Yes.” Erin swallowed and tried to meet his eyes. “Is that really a problem? You don’t think I did it, do you? I wouldn’t take on someone like Simon physically. That would be stupid.”
“People do stupid things. And desperate things. And they even up the score with weapons or other advantages. No, I don’t think you had anything to do with Simon’s death. But I still have to follow up and make sure I have everything documented. I still need to follow proper investigative procedures.”
“I know.”
“What time did Victoria go home?”
“Six o’clock, maybe. Roughly that. And she said she was going to cook dinner for Willie, so she had an alibi. She wasn’t hanging around waiting for Simon Simpson to show his face.”
Wilmot nodded. “Fair enough. I will talk to her and confirm that. As well as the rest of your employees. What about other people you saw in the bakery that day? Who was around?”
