Maddie's Recipe Of Mysteries (A Rockcrest Cove Cozy Mystery Book 1) (10 page)

“I’m so sorry to have to put you through this, Evan, but we had to be sure,” Madeline assured him. “I hope we can continue to be friends after this.”

Evan didn’t answer right away. He had drifted off into deep thought. Finally he spoke.

“It was always pretty hard for us growing up, Rachel and me. But if it wasn’t for Mama Betty, chances are we’d have had very different lives.”

Madeline wondered why he was telling them this.

“Did you ever wonder how it was that I got into culinary school?” He smiled to himself.

“I won a cooking scholarship. Both Rachel and I entered, but there could only be one winner. She got second place and I won first.”

He smiled a little bit. “We were so proud that our family had swept the competition. When I went to school, I always came home and taught her everything I had learned.”

Evan continued to reminisce for a while as Madeline and Bailey watched. They were convinced now that they had pegged the wrong person as the killer. Evan didn’t have a murderous bone in his body. Bailey looked around and wanted to kill Kyle for sneaking off the way he did, and she chided herself for not thinking of it first.

She slowly inched her way to the doorway and was standing there trying to figure out how to get out of the sad story when the door flung open and an arm flung violently around her neck. She only needed to see the glint of the knife and feel the sharp edge of its point against her throat to know that their plan had actually worked and they had flushed out the killer.

Madeline and Evan leaped from their seats, startled by the noise, and turned to see Rachel, her eyes fierce like a wild animal’s, standing there with a knife to Bailey’s throat. Madeline screamed, but she dared not move in Bailey’s direction. Evan looked at his sister in horror.

“Rachel!” he shouted. “What’re you doing?”

“You stupid idiot,” she shouted at Evan.

“Why don’t you just stop talking all the time? You’ve gone and destroyed everything,” she complained.

Bailey tried to pull away while Rachel was focused on Evan, but Rachel was surprisingly strong.

“Yes. I killed Emma and I did it so that I could get rid of all you silly sentimentalists,” she shouted.

“Rachel,” Evan pleaded. “You don’t want to do this,” he said soothingly.

“Shut up! You blithering idiot!” she spat.

“Of course I want to do this, if only to get rid of you and your weak little attitude.” She started backing toward the door, pulling Bailey with her.

“All you ever did was talk about how nice Mrs. Madeline was, how great Mama Betty was to you, and how much you admired and respected them. You never had a thought of your own in your entire life.”

Evan looked shocked and hurt by her accusations.

“And so what happens? The one with absolutely no originality, no ideas, no sense of creativity gets a scholarship and gets to go to culinary school while I, who had been with Mama Betty far longer than you, got to sit at home and babysit. It was so unfair.”

Evan tried once again. “Rachel, why didn’t you talk to me about this before?”

“Because you had too many stars in your eyes for Madeline and Mama Betty. You wouldn’t have seen what I saw: two selfish women who had nothing to give anyone who didn’t kowtow to their every wish,” she answered.

“But you know what the worst part of it was?” she asked. “What hurt the most?” she waited for a response.

“When you decided to open up your own bakery, you turned to vindictive Emma and her unscrupulous tactics instead of your own sister. The one who had helped you your entire life.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to be in the business,” Evan said defensively.

“You should’ve asked,” she shouted at him. “Imagine what the two of us together could have accomplished,” she said dreamily, tears now streaming down her face.

“And when you finally hired me to work behind your counter, I was hurt, really hurt.” Her eyes now spilled tears that made little lines down her face.

“You chose Emma, the little slut, the little thief, the liar, for a partner instead of me?” She backed a few more steps toward the door.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes, I killed Emma, and I planted that little book in here too. I figured if I killed Emma and the book was here, they would blame Evan for the murder. With you in jail, little brother, I could take over the business and get what I always deserved.”

As she pulled Bailey through the door, she relaxed her grip just enough. Thinking that she had gotten clear of the danger, she had thought to take Bailey someplace remote and get rid of her, but as she rounded the corner with her hostage, a strong arm came out of nowhere and twisted her knife-wielding arm behind her back, forcing her to release her grip on Bailey. She screamed from the pain, and through tear-filled eyes, she saw Kyle’s large frame towering over her.

Bailey, realizing she was free, ran across the room to where Madeline was reaching out to catch her, as she always did.

Kyle took Rachel and forcibly pushed her down in a chair while Madeline called the police. From the other side of the room, she could feel Evan watching her closely, his eyes red and his face stained from his own tears.

He got up and slowly approached Rachel, pulling up a chair and turning it to face her.

“Why, Rachel?” he asked. “Why would you do such a horrific thing?”

“Shut up!” she snapped. “Shut up and be a man for a change.”

“Rachel,” he said.

“All you had to do was ask me. You know I would’ve given you anything you wanted. And now an innocent woman is dead.”

“Innocent?” Rachel laughed.

“You were so much in love with Emma that you didn’t see her for what she really was.” She gave a derisive laugh.

“Emma was far from innocent. And I knew all along that you suspected Evan,” she said to Madeline.

“Well I didn’t really suspect him right away,” Madeline countered.

“Of course you did,” Rachel corrected.

“You suspected him two years ago, when you fired Emma for stealing your secrets. You never thought it was me, because none of you ever gave me a second thought. So, when Emma approached me about helping Evan get out of catering and enter his own business, no one thought about me. I knew that Emma had her own ideas, but it was your ideas that were selling. She told me that she had a master key to your shop and she could get in any time, day or night. I knew she could help play into my plan.”

“I had her call me several times a week and tell me exactly what you were doing, and then we implemented the same thing in our business, just with a little more finesse. Things were going real good for a while, but then Emma got greedy. She wanted more money, and Evan was just the sniveling idiot to give it to her. If they had continued to run the business, chances are we would’ve eventually had to close. We couldn’t keep supporting Emma’s habits. She was running through money like water through a sieve. As much as we were making, we were losing.”

She called me one night and asked me to meet her here after your business closed. She wanted to show me something, but she didn’t say what it was. I watched you leave that night, Mrs. Madeline. I watched you lock up your store and walk home with that stupid looking cat. Then Emma came and let me in the back door. She said she wanted to talk, but she really wanted to kill me. She felt I had too much influence over Evan, and he wanted to stop giving her money. I thought she was speaking crazy talk, so I walked out.

“That’s when she pulled out her gun and tried to kill me. But I grew up on the streets, I know how to fight and I managed to get the gun away from her.” Rachel laughed in derision.

“I realized that nothing would be the same again, so I turned the tables on her. I shot her. I shot her right there in the back alley.”

“I knew that the police would blame Madeline for the murder, Madeline would blame Evan, and no one would suspect me. Not little old me, who had never done anything of significance in her whole life.”

Rachel laughed a wicked little laugh. “Not little Rachel,” she said to herself and then she fell completely quiet.

For the second time in as many weeks, Madeline’s storefront was filled with police officers. Rachel sat in a chair with her hands cuffed behind her back. Nolan stood by as he watched deputies pull Rachel from the chair and lead her out the door.

“Well, I have to admit, Mrs. McDougal, I had you pegged all wrong.”

He picked up a muffin off the counter and looked at her straight.

“I suppose we should all have a little celebration or something. You know, in honor of catching a real killer. Maybe you could provide the cupcakes.”

Madeline looked at Nolan as if he had just landed from another planet.

Nolan took the look as an opportunity to try to bury the hatchet.

“Oh, if I remember correctly, you wanted me to call you Maddie, right? Instead of Mrs. McDougal?”

Maddie thought for a moment. “No, Chief. I believe you were right the first time. Call me Mrs. McDougal.”

~~~

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