A Parfait Murder (5 page)

Bree disappeared the minute we got to the fairgrounds, so my newest hire, Beth Oldman, and I got the fudge and caramel sauces heating in their water baths and fired up the waffle cone presses.

“Will you be okay here alone for a few minutes?”

Beth surveyed the tiny space within the booth. Hair the rich burnished brown of espresso beans curled around her square jaw, and she tucked it back behind her ear. “Sure thing. Can’t hardly fit two people back here, anyway.”

“Thanks, Beth. I don’t know where Bree got off to, and I really need to head over to the Creative Arts Exhibit and talk to Garrett about the judging schedule. He wants the committee to meet about the canned goods and the quilts next Wednesday evening, and that conflicts with the big karaoke contest. Bree will have my hide if I’m not there for her big moment.”

I don’t know why I was nattering on. Beth had already turned her back on me and was obsessively stacking and restacking the metal milk shake canisters.

She was an odd duck, for sure. I didn’t know where Beth and her son, Sam, had come from, at least not recently. Occasionally Sam talked about ships and the ocean, and I thought I detected a trace of Boston in Beth’s voice, but I got the sense they’d been moving a lot. Beth herself never offered any personal information, and I sure didn’t want to intrude. All that really mattered was that, as distracted and neurotic as she seemed, Beth was a crackerjack employee.

As I cut across the midway on my way to the other side of the fairgrounds, I ran into Detective Cal McCormack.

Literally. Ran smack into him. Which was a little like barreling headfirst into a mountain.

Cal and I had a long history together. Throughout grade school and high school, he’d been my honorary big brother. We’d drifted apart as adults, but a few months before, we’d gotten pretty close again. I hurt Cal a lot when I started dating Finn, but he wasn’t the type of man to hold a grudge. He made no bones about the fact that he disapproved of Finn Harper and thought I was a fool to let him back into my life, but he wasn’t mean about it. In fact, he was pretty tightlipped around me. Civil, though.

“What brings you out to the fair today?” I said.

“Meeting,” he responded. Cal wasn’t much of a talker. But the way he looked over my shoulder when he said it and the flush creeping up his neck told me there was more to the story.

“Cal McCormack. Spill it. What kind of meeting could possibly bring you out here at this hour? And put that blush on your face, to boot?”

He swept the cowboy hat from his head and ran his long, square fingers through his neat salt-and-pepper hair. Cal always dressed as if he were heading to an old-fashioned barn dance: well-laundered jeans, a crisp cotton shirt tucked in with military precision, nicely polished boots. A cowboy, all cleaned up. That morning, he wore his shirt buttoned to his clean-shaven chin and a bolo tie around his neck. The only thing marring the Sunday-best image was his shoulder holster and gun.

“Don’t laugh, but I got roped into being a judge for the Lantana Round-Up Rodeo Queen Pageant.” He gave me a hard look. “I told you not to laugh.”

“Cal McCormack, you can’t tell me you’re judging a beauty pageant and expect me to keep a straight face. I mean, I can see you judging the marksmanship competitions, or the roping, or even picking the best blackberry jam, but a beauty pageant?”

He tipped his head, and I heard his vertebrae crack. “It’s not a beauty pageant. They’re judged on character and horsemanship and . . .” He cleared his throat.

“And beauty. You can say it. Just because those girls wear big ol’ belt buckles over their evening gowns doesn’t make it any less of a beauty pageant. They still have the teased-up hair. Just with a hat perched on top of it.”

He narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth as though he were about to argue with me.

“Come on, Cal. Do we need to break out the dictionary?”

Cal was forever complaining that I needed a dictionary because my definition of little things like “truth” and “meddling” didn’t quite square up with his.

He cracked a smile then. A little one, but a smile nonetheless. “Well, whatever you call it, the coordinator, this attorney named Kristen Ver Steeg—”

“Yeah, I know Kristen,” I muttered.

“She was mighty persuasive, and, uh, before I knew what I was doing I said yes.”

I could imagine exactly how that conversation went: Kristen looking up at Cal through her long lashes, a soft curl of platinum hair curling around her delicate jaw, as she begged his favor. Cal getting all “ma’amy” and uptight and maybe even blushing a bit.

“Mmm-hmm,” I mused. “Was she ‘persuasive’ like Madeline Albright? Or persuasive like Pamela Anderson?”

“Don’t be smart.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not even all that partial to blondes. Still, here I am.”

“I thought the pageant started on Friday.”

“It does,” Cal said. “But Kristen called all the judges yesterday and said we needed to meet right away. Some kind of emergency.”

“Sounds dramatic,” I said with a smirk.

He rolled his broad shoulders. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is I ought to be working. You know, catching criminals.”

“Well, I should let you get to your meeting,” I said. “It looks like Kristen is on her way.”

Cal turned around so he, too, could see Kristen Ver Steeg, once again in a sleek, fashionable, impractically cream-colored suit, hustling up the midway from the main entrance of the fairgrounds.

Cal raised a hand in greeting, but Kristen didn’t see us. She was making a beeline for, of all things, the haunted rodeo ride.

Cal and I shared a puzzled glance, then watched as she took the rickety steps of the ride in her ridiculous sling-back heels, handed something to a slack-jawed Wiley, and then stepped into the first car on the ride’s train without any apparent regard for her beautiful suit.

I was still processing Kristen’s bizarre behavior when, amazingly, I saw Bree dashing up the same set of stairs. Her valentine hair and bodacious curves were unmistakable as she piled into the car behind Kristen’s. Wiley shook his head as he walked back to the control box and worked his magic. Within a heartbeat, the sound track for the ride powered up and, amid the cackling and hooting, the cars carrying Bree and Kristen disappeared into the ride.

“Snow White and Rose Red,” Cal murmured.

I turned my attention back to him. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just a fairy tale. Snow White and Rose Red. They kill a bear and marry a dwarf. Or something. I don’t remember. The two of them together made me think of it, is all.”

“So that was weird, right?”

He shrugged. “I don’t really expect normal anymore.”

I laughed. “That’s probably wise. Well, I guess this means your meeting’s going to be a little late.”

He grimaced, but didn’t answer.

And just that quickly, we ran out of conversation. I felt a twinge of sorrow that the friendship we had built at the beginning of the summer could have withered away so quickly. I met Cal’s eyes and saw my regret mirrored there. Somehow knowing that he, too, felt the strain between us, and knowing that he knew that I knew . . . it intensified the awkwardness tenfold.

“Well, uh,” I stammered, trying to come up with a graceful way to say good-bye.

Something stopped me, mouth open, midword. My conscious brain didn’t register the change right away, but then I realized that the hokey sound track from the haunted rodeo had stopped. In the sudden and unexpected silence, a woman screamed. Not the tinny shriek from the ride’s recorded narrative, but a real, fleshand-blood holler. And then a sound—a brisk
crack
—sent a jolt of electric fear through my entire body, as if someone had sent pure current into the most primal curl of my brain.

A gunshot.

I’d barely formed the thought before Cal pushed me aside and sprinted toward the haunted rodeo. I was right behind him. Bree needed me.

Cal leaped onto the ride’s platform in a single bound, boots ringing the sheet metal like a bell as his body weight crashed down. He dodged around Wiley, who stood frozen, staring slack-jawed at the fake wood door of the ride’s exit. Cal paused at the door, setting his back against the wall beside it.

Another shot rang out, the sound unmistakable this close.

He drew his weapon. “Call 911,” he barked at Wiley. Then, cautiously, he pried open the door and peered inside, eyes squinted against the darkness within.

I took the stairs two at a time. When I reached the top, Cal glanced in my direction. “You. Stay the hell back.”

The stripped-down tension in his voice gave me pause, but as soon as he disappeared into the haunted rodeo, I crept to the door behind him.

At first, with my eyes not yet adjusted, the interior of the attraction appeared pitch-black. But, by feel, I could tell there was a narrow ledge on either side of the depression for the tracks, presumably for maintenance and emergencies like this one. I felt my way along that ledge, sliding one foot out carefully before inching the rest of my body along.

After several painstaking minutes, my eyes adjusted. There was enough light from the saloon tableau, the last one on the ride, to make out the contours of the ledge and to see Cal just a few feet ahead of me and on the other side of the tunnel. He was paused at the opening to the saloon, craning his head as he scanned the interior.

As I closed the distance between us, Cal suddenly shifted, pressing his back against the side of the tunnel, struggling in vain to make his broad shoulders less of a target.

“Put the gun down,” Cal said, his tone hard as granite.

I could hear weeping from deeper in the room. Weeping and gasping.

“I said, put the gun down.”

“No, no, no.”

I sagged against the wall in relief. Bree’s voice. At least she was alive.

But she continued to murmur no like an incantation. Like a child huddled beneath the covers willing away the bogeyman with the sheer force of her fear.

“Bree, you need to do what I say now.”

“No, not till he’s gone.”

“Till who’s gone?”

“Him,” she hissed.

“Him, who?” I’d never thought of Cal as a patient man, mostly because I managed to rile him so easily. But in the face of Bree’s crazy talk, he remained firm but calm.

“Him,” she said again. “By the door. With the gun.”

Cal dropped into a crouch and edged close enough to the tunnel entrance to peer around the corner.

I could hear him sigh.

“Bree, that man’s not real. He’s just part of the ride.”

“No,” Bree insisted. “He shot at us. For real. He shot at me and . . .” Bree’s voice trailed off, and then she screamed again.

All rational thought vanished. Bree’s terror triggered pure instinct and I scooted past Cal, leaped the tracks, and plunged headfirst into the saloon.

I saw Bree right away, crouched next to the poker-playing zombie cowboys, her flame-colored topknot impossible to miss. As I got closer, I saw she held a long-barreled gun clutched in her hands.

“Bree?” I said. “Honey?”

“Dammit, Tally,” Cal snapped, only a pace behind me. “Get down.”

I ignored him and knelt by Bree’s side.

“Tally!” Cal barked. “She’s got a gun.”

“She’s scared spitless, Cal. She’s not going to shoot me.”

To punctuate my claim, Bree threw the gun away, sending it skittering across the floor. I heard Cal mutter to himself—“Can’t you do just one little goddamn thing I tell you to? Just one?”—but I kept my eyes fixed firmly on Bree.

Between her bloodless complexion, the dark wounds of her smeared mascara, and the fiery halo cast by the ride’s spotlights sparking her crimson hair, Bree looked as if she’d crawled right out of a horror movie. She reached for me with grasping hands, and, without hesitation, I pulled her close. She leaned her body into mine, trembling like a newborn colt. I crooned nonsense words in her ear, held her tight against me, and rocked her.

From near the tracks, I heard Cal cuss. I looked over to where he stood. Kristen Ver Steeg lay sprawled, half in and half out of the train’s front car, a dark stain spreading across her impractical cream suit.

I met Cal’s eyes. He shook his head. Then his gaze slid to the right, to Bree, who continued to cry quietly.

Kristen was dead. And the only living soul who’d seen her die was Bree.

P
olice and emergency personnel descended on the haunted rodeo within minutes. By the time the uniformed authorities rushed in and began processing the scene, Bree stood on her own two feet and had a little of her pepper back.

One of the cops, a kid with sunburned scalp shining beneath his buzz cut and acne putting a permanent blush on his baby-round cheeks, approached Bree with a long cotton swab in one hand and a little fear in his eyes.

“Whatcha planning to do with that, sugar?” Bree asked, a smile simmering on her lips. “You haven’t even bought me dinner.”

The young officer looked helplessly at Cal.

“Bree. Behave.”

She rolled her eyes. “Jeez. Cut me some slack. Someone just tried to kill me, for cryin’ out loud. I’m not serious.”

Cal crossed his arms across his chest. “Most folks would be serious as a heart attack if they were standing in your shoes.”

“Well, I’m not most people.” Bree extended one leg and admired her three-inch-high strappy gold sandals. “Most people wouldn’t look quite so fine standing in these shoes.”

“Bree,” I hissed. “Hush.”

I knew my cousin better than I knew myself. She was still scared as all heck, but she’d always fallen back on humor when she felt cornered.

I knew it was a defense mechanism. Cal might not. And Cal was the one with the handcuffs.

Bree sighed and held out her hands so the young man could swab them.