Murder Gone A-Rye (A Baker's Treat Mystery) (8 page)

“Why, yes, in fact, I will.” The young officer pulled his notebook back out of his pocket. He flipped it open, withdrew a small pencil, licked the tip, and poised it over the paper. “Go on then.”

“Will you tell the news?” Kip asked, his blue eyes alight with expectation. “I read once that they give awards to heroes.”

“And you are clearly Aubrey’s hero,” the officer said. “Of course, I’ll tell the news. But first you have to tell your story.”

Kip sat cross-legged on the black-and-white tiled kitchen floor. “I was playing in the tunnel under the slide when I heard a noise.”

“What kind of noise?” Tasha got into the spirit of things, matching her son’s posture on the floor.

“It was like this—
hmm, hmm
.” He made a high-pitched whining noise. The puppy stopped squirming and licked his face. Kip giggled, and my heart warmed.

I sat down on a kitchen chair and put my chin in my hands. Tim had his arms crossed and was leaning against the doorjamb.

“Then what happened?” Officer Bright asked. He wrote in his notebook as if our very lives depended on it.

“I followed the noise.”

“Where did it lead?” Tim asked.

“It went through the tunnel and out across the sand pit. I crept up on it like this.” He let go of the dog long enough to do an army crawl of elbows and knees a few feet into the kitchen. The puppy barked at him and pounced on his head. “No, Aubrey!” Kip pushed the puppy off.

“Then what?” I asked, wondering when Kip’d left the park and where he’d found Aubrey.

“I went into the grass and I kept sneaking up on the noise.”

“Why did you sneak?” Tasha asked.

“’Cause I wasn’t sure if it was a bad noise or a good noise and I didn’t want to rush toward it if it was a bad noise.”

“Good thinking.” Officer Bright nodded and wrote a note.

“Mommy taught me,” Kip said proudly. “I sneaked up until I saw this hole in the ground.”

“How big of a hole?” Tim narrowed his eyes.

“About this big.” Kip made a circle with his arms the size of a pie pan.

Tasha and I made a noise at the same time. I glanced at Officer Bright, who leaned toward Kip, his expression rock-hard. “Was it very deep?”

Kip pursed his lips and sat up straight. “I had to put my arms and head in to reach Aubrey.” He lifted his arms over his head in a diving manner.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We always heard of little kids falling into old wells and getting stuck. This sounded like a well in a park in the middle of town. Why hadn’t anyone noticed it before?

I tried not to think about what would have happened had a small child fallen in that well, or worse, if Kip’d gotten stuck. I glanced at Tasha. She had turned two shades of pale. I patted her back. “Breathe,” I said under my breath, hoping Kip wouldn’t notice. Officer Bright was a step ahead of us.

“If I asked you to show me this hole, could you do that?” he asked. It wasn’t the first time I noted how careful he was not to react and upset or overexcite Kip.

“Oh, sure.” The boy stood. The puppy at his feet jumped on him and licked his hand. “Can we go now?”

“How about we ask your mom first?” Officer Bright stood and looked expectantly from Kip to Tasha and back.

“Mom, can I show Officer Bright where the hole is?” He turned to Tasha, who clearly wanted to hug her child against her chest and never let him go. “It’ll be okay, ’cause he’s a police officer that I know. Can I?”

“How about I go with you?” Tasha stood. She gave Officer Bright an expectant look.

“Of course, your mommy should come,” he said.

“And me,” Tim said.

“And Uncle Tim,” Kip said. “But who’s going to watch Aubrey?”

Everyone turned to me expectantly. I held out my hands. “Okay, you all go. I’ll give Aubrey a bath and see if we have something for him to eat.”

“You need dog food,” Kip said.

“That’s true.” I held the dirty, wiggly creature at arm’s length. “But since I don’t have a dog, I don’t have any dog food in the house.”

“Oh.” Kip glanced around. “Officer Bright, do you have a dog?”

“No, son, I don’t. I work too much to leave a dog home alone.”

“Oh.”

Tasha took Kip’s hand. “We’ll go to the store after you show Officer Bright where the hole is, okay?”

“Okay.” He skipped along beside his mom as they headed out the back door. “Can I get a new sticker book?”

“Don’t you think we ought to come straight home from the store? Aubrey might be very hungry from his time in the hole and all.”

Kip’s expression fell a little. “Oh. Okay.”

Tasha looked over his head at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”

I smiled. “You’re fine. Go.” I raised the puppy up and waved its paw. “We’ll be here waiting.”

“So, buddy,” Tim said as he held the door open for everyone. “When did you leave the park? Did you head straight home? Because, dude, you were gone a long time.”

The door closed behind them before I could hear Kip’s reply. Aubry and I stood at the back window and watched the police officer open the squad car door and let Kip into the backseat. Next he held the front passenger side door open and talked Tasha into taking the shotgun seat. I noticed the accidental hand touch and the look that passed between the two. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for my best friend. I continued to wave the puppy’s paw until the car cleared the driveway.

“Huh.” I lifted Aubrey into the air. “So much for the old-fashioned ‘Mom, can I keep him?’” It seemed, at least for Kip, that rescuing Aubrey made having a puppy a done deal.

It was after I had that thought that Aubrey decided to piddle on me. “Oh, no, no, no!” I rushed out the back door and set the puppy down on the small patch of grass between the house and the carriage house. Aubrey sniffed around the peonies, then waddled through the grass a moment doing figure eights until he or she—I hadn’t looked yet—squatted and peed. Then the puppy bounded toward me on playful legs.

I knew then I was sunk. Its big brown eyes gave me this knowing look while it stretched its front paws up and stretched against my leg. I reached down and picked up the puppy. A big smear of brown colored my arm. “I don’t know if Kip rescued you or you rescued Kip.” The puppy licked my cheek.

It was hard not to giggle like a schoolgirl. I tucked the wagging tail under my arm and went back inside to give the dog a bath and mop the kitchen floor. It seemed everyone wanted to live at my house.

The phone rang as I walked inside. I let the door slam, put the puppy into a cardboard box I used for recycling, and grabbed the phone with one hand and the mop with the other. “Hello?”

“Toni?”

“Hi, Rosa, what’s up?” Rosa was my oldest younger sister. She lived in Wichita with her professional rodeo cowboy husband, Brand. Rosa, Eleanor, and Joan were closer to each other than I was to any of my sisters. You see, I was the oldest sister, born between the two boys—Richard, who was the oldest, and Tim, who was only eighteen months younger than me. Mom and Dad took a few years off and then had Rosa, Joan, and Eleanor. Which meant that the boys were close and the sisters were close and I sort of hung out on my own.

“Did I hear correctly? Did the police arrest Grandma Ruth for breaking and entering?”

“Excuse me?” I ran the mop under the faucet, turned off the water, and squeezed the mop head to wring out the excess water.

“Is Grandma Ruth in jail for breaking and entering the courthouse?” Rosa’s voice sounded tight and full of blame.

“No,” I reassured her. “Grandma Ruth and Aunt Phyllis are here. They were helping calm down Tasha. She thought Kip had gotten lost and called the cops.”

“Don’t lie to me, Toni.” Rosa sounded breathless. “I saw Georgina Christenson at the club this afternoon. She kept going on and on about how sorry she was to hear that my poor Grandma Ruth was being held against her will . . . accused of breaking into the courthouse last night and of murdering Lois Striker. I wouldn’t put it past Grandma to break into the courthouse if she was looking for a story. But I told Georgina that surely my sister, who was right there in town, would tell me if such a thing happened.”

“She’s fine, Rosa, really. Chief Blaylock had her in for questioning yesterday, but I called Brad Ridgeway and he got her out.” I tilted my head and tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I mopped up the piddle spots.

“Then you’d better call him again,” Rosa said. “Because I checked with Sarah Hogginboom and Grandma is in lockup as we speak.”

“What? No.” I rinsed the mop head again and squeezed it dry. “That’s not possible. She’s here in the house. Besides, I talked to Chief Blaylock less than two hours ago. I promised him I’d ask Grandma to lay low and let the professionals investigate Lois’s death.”

“If I were you, I’d be calling Brad, because I believe Grandma used up her one phone call on you yesterday. And Toni . . .”

“Yes?”

“Don’t make me have to come home to straighten this out. It’s embarrassing enough without having to explain why my older sister can’t keep my grandma in line.”

She hung up and the line buzzed in my ear. I rolled my eyes and turned to see that the puppy had escaped from the box. He rolled on the clean but wet floor, smearing mud everywhere. “No!” I raised my voice a tad too loud and he piddled on my floor . . . again. “Darn it,” I muttered and went to grab him when he escaped from me and took off down the hallway.

It took me five minutes to corner the puppy in the formal living room. He growled at me but I picked him up and scolded him with my finger. He reacted by biting me.

There was a knock at the front door. I’d forgotten that I’d left the screen door open when I’d come in. “Toni?” Brad opened the door.

“Here.” I must have been a sight. The puppy was like a greased pig, slick from mud. I could see it streaked on my blue shirt and black pants. I tried to wipe it off my face, but that only seemed to make it worse. I’m certain my hair stuck out all over. “I’m in the living room.”

I stepped out and nearly ran into Brad as he stepped in from the foyer. “Whoa,” he said and grabbed me by the forearms to steady me. “What happened to you?”

“Meet Aubrey.” I lifted the puppy into the air. “Kip rescued him.”

“Oh. Hello.” He stepped back from both me and the dog.

“I promised to give him a bath. Want to help?”

“You, soapy water in the bathroom . . . nice image. I’d love to but I’m headed to the police station.”

I tilted my head. “Then why’d you stop here? Oh, no, don’t tell me. . . .”

“Yeah, sorry.” He frowned, drawing his thick blond eyebrows together. “I’m afraid Chief Blaylock caught Grandma Ruth and Phyllis at the courthouse.”

“But they were just here.”

“Not anymore.”

“M
ama said there’ll be days like this. There’ll be days like this, my mama said.” The song played on the radio as I paced the front porch. The sun set early in November, and the black of night hung thick over the street lamps. The wind whipped up a nice icy cold and carried the scent of snow. The big oak trees in front of the house had lost all their leaves last month, and their thick outstretched arms stood firm and sleeping.

Brad had called from the police station to let me know that he’d extracted Aunt Phyllis from the police for the price of a small fine. Grandma Ruth, on the other hand, was playing hardball. I could not wait to get my hands on her. What was she thinking going back to the courthouse in Aunt Phyllis’s van? Even worse, they’d crossed the taped-off section and opened the side door and walked in as if they owned the place.

“Technically, we do own the place,” Grandma had said over the phone. “It’s the county courthouse, and I pay my taxes.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to walk in whenever you want.” I rested my tired head against the wall of the bathroom. Grandma called while I was bathing the puppy. It turns out it was a very large, very fluffy white puppy. From the size of its paws, we might be in big trouble in a few months.

The puppy decided that it needed to shake from nose to tail, flinging soap and water all over the tiny pink rosebud wallpaper I’d put in the second-floor bathroom. It was pretty and I’d been reassured it was the same period as the house. My goal was to slowly decorate the house to my taste, starting with the floor with my bedroom and adjacent bath. It’d been three months before I’d settled on a small but tasteful amount of period wallpaper on this floor in pale creams with pastel flowers and stripes.

I grabbed a thick green towel and covered the puppy. It growled and grabbed the towel until I scooped it up and wrapped the squirming wet creature.

“What is that noise?” Grandma asked on the phone. The woman was hard of hearing until it was something you hoped she didn’t hear.

“Kip brought home a puppy.”

“Really? What kind?”

“White. Now, don’t try to change the subject on me. Rosa heard you were in jail before I found out,” I scolded. “You know how that makes me look.”

“Like a busy career woman?”

“Grandma, don’t you think I’ve had enough excitement in the last forty-eight hours, between you being arrested once and Kip going missing?” I fluffed up the puppy and let it go. It circled the floor and proceeded to lift its leg and piddle against my pedestal sink. “Aubrey, no!” My shouting only made the puppy run, piddling as it went.

“Aubrey?” Grandma asked.

“Kip named the puppy.” I grabbed up the pup and took it in one hand and my cell phone in the other as I headed down the wood steps to the foyer. “When will you be home?”

“When I convince the chief to look in the wall for Champ Rogers’s murder weapon.”

“Grandma! Do you know what a long shot it is that there is anything in the wall, let alone a long-lost murder weapon?”

“As long a shot as the idea that I killed Lois.” Grandma said that last part very loud. “I have to go.”

“Wait!” I froze at the bottom of the steps, but it was too late. Grandma had hung up. “Darn.” The puppy licked my hand. I blew out a slow breath and lifted the little guy up until we were face-to-face. I studied his broad forehead and square nose. “If your coloring matched the breed, I’d think you were a Saint Bernard.”

“Heaven help us.” Tasha walked in from the kitchen and crossed herself. “There’s no way I can rent an apartment if I’ve got a Saint Bernard.”

“Aubrey!” Kip raced around his mom and took the fluffy puppy from me. The dog’s tail wagged fiercely as Kip gathered it up in his arms and buried his face in the white fur. “Come on, Aubrey. We bought you puppy food. Uncle Tim says that you have to eat special food until you’re one year old so that you’ll have strong bones and teeth.” Kip disappeared back into the kitchen.

“You’re stuck with Aubrey now. Let’s hope no one comes forward to claim him.” I leaned against the staircase and studied my friend. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkled. Her blonde hair escaped from her headband, but in such a way that she looked like a Hollywood starlet stepping out of a convertible after an exciting ride with—what was the name of that movie star? Ryan something . . . Ryan Goose? Ryan Goss? Anyway, it starts with a
G
.

Okay, so I wasn’t up on my Hollywood stars. I had a business to run, and that meant that my movie viewing was limited to the three and four
A.M.
old movies that played on cable channels. I liked to have movies playing in the background while I baked. Ever since the murder outside my bakery door in the wee hours of the morning, I’d decided I’d rather have a movie plot than simply music. A movie plot kept my mind engaged and my thoughts from wandering off in scary directions.

I straightened from the staircase. “Are you okay?”

Tasha sat down hard on one of the chairs that rested against the wall in the square foyer. “I’m not sure.” She looked nearly as afraid as she had been when I’d first gotten home.

“Kip seems all right,” I pointed out. “Was the hole scary deep?”

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the wall. “It was about four to five feet deep. I have no idea how Kip got that dog out of there.” She opened her eyes and her expression grew sober. “He could have fallen in and it might have been hours or even days before we found him.”

“He’s fine.”

“I know. I kept saying that as I watched him show Calvin the hole.”

“Calvin?” I raised my right eyebrow and waited for her to blush in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

“Don’t you think he did a good job with Kip?”

I noticed she didn’t tell me who Calvin was and left it up to me to assume it was Officer Bright. “He seems like a nice guy.”

“I swear, Toni, I thought I was going to fall apart until he got here. There was something calm and confident about him.” She paused, her gaze softening.

“I noticed.” I shoved my hands in my pants pockets.

She shook off the mood that had struck her. “He said he was going to see that Kip got a hero award for not only rescuing the puppy but saving the neighbor kids from certain harm.”

I tilted my head, a little confused. “So, what was it? An old well?” It seemed odd that no one would have noticed an old well in a park that had been there since before I was born.

“Calvin thought perhaps it was a sink hole. It’s been so dry this fall, and then we had that rain last week.”

“I remember. The downtown would have flooded if not for the new lake and dam project.”

“We’re lucky it all worked out,” Tim said as he walked in. “Bright called in an emergency crew to cover the hole before anyone else fell inside.”

“Thanks for your help, Tim,” Tasha said with a sigh, the tension leaving her shoulders.

“No problem,” Tim said and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Any other emergencies before I go up and try to get a little more shut-eye?”

I noted that the sunlight was fading in the living room windows. It was the time of year where it grew dark at five
P.M.
From the look of the light it was nearing twilight. “While you were gone, Grandma Ruth and Aunt Phyllis were picked up by the police.”

“Not again!” Tim muttered something dark under his breath.

Tasha sat up straight. “When, where, how? Aren’t they here?”

“That’s what I said.” I shrugged. “It seems Grandma heard Kip come in and decided it was time she and Phyllis go down and continue their search of the courthouse building.”

“What would make them do that? Didn’t you tell them to lay low?”

I rolled my eyes and tucked my frizzy hair behind my ears. “When have we ever known Grandma Ruth to listen?”

“You should have asked her how she thinks she’s going to investigate Lois’s murder from inside the jail,” Tim said.

“You are brilliant!” I rushed over and hugged my brother—then pulled out my phone and dialed Brad’s number.

“Ridgeway.”

“Hi, Brad, it’s Toni.”

“It’s okay, Toni, I’m calling in some favors to get your grandma out of jail.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.” There, I said it. I went out on the front porch and sat in the porch swing.

“What? Why?”

“As long as she’s in jail she can’t investigate any further.” I pushed off on the swing and watched the sun go down.

“Hmm. Do you think she’ll be all right in lockup?”

“Knowing Grandma, she’ll be fine. It’s the guards I worry about.” I laughed short and tight, then sobered. “Wait, seriously, you’d better check in with Chief Blaylock first. I don’t want to leave her there only to have her get into worse trouble than if she were home where I can keep an eye on her.”

“Toni, she sneaked out of your house and willfully broke into the courthouse. How much more trouble can she get in?”

“Seriously, Brad, do you know my grandma? She’s a Mensa member. If there’s a way to get around a problem, she’ll find it.”

“Point taken.”

I pushed off the swing and hung on to the silence our phone conversation had fallen into. Clearly we were both thinking through the fine points of being between a rock and a hard place where Grandma was concerned.

If I didn’t get her out she’d have to sleep on the cot in a jail cell. And worse, I’d have to hear from Joan, Rosa, and Eleanor about how irresponsible I was for not keeping a better eye on the old lady.

It was a risk I would take if it kept Grandma safe. We must have reached our decision at the same time.

“I’ll talk to the chief,” Brad said.

“Thanks,” I said, my heart pumping as I crossed my fingers and toes that Grandma wouldn’t find more trouble in a jail cell than she did running around in Aunt Phyllis’s VW van.