The Iced Princess (12 page)

Her face had the most forlorn expression I'd ever seen and prompted me to give her a bear hug that rivaled my dad's. “I'll lock the shop doors. Go sit down at one of Pinky's tables; I won't be a minute.” She nodded and headed into Brew Ha-Ha. I closed up my side, turned off the lights, then went to lock Pinky's door. Pinky herself was standing on the other side of it with her hand on the knob. It gave me a start, and I jumped a few inches. Not that I was feeling guilty about harboring a fugitive or anything. Pinky pulled the door open and stepped inside.

“Man alive, Pinky.”

Pinky screwed up her face. “Are you that nervous about visiting Molly's mom?”

“No.” I leaned closer and whispered. “
Emmy's
here.”

“
Here
, here?” she whispered back.

I pointed behind me. “Back there, here.”

“Holy moly, Cami. Why?”

“The police are at her house, and she got scared and came here.”

“She can't hide out here.”

“I know that. Let's go talk to her.”

“Crapola, Cami. I don't like this one little bit.”

“You don't have to stay.”

“Of course I do.” A good story drew Pinky in like a magnet.

Emmy's eyebrows shot up when I rounded the corner in the back area with Pinky in tow. She had a napkin in her hands and was twisting it around and around. “I'm scared,” she said.

Pinky and I joined her at the table, and when Emmy looked from me to Pinky, I wondered if she thought we were closing in on her. That's what her expression seemed to be saying as she drew her hands to her chest in a protective gesture.

“I would be, too,” Pinky said, and Emmy made an inhaling noise that sounded like she was trying to catch her breath.

“What Pinky means is that it is perfectly natural to be scared given everything that's been going on,” I said, hoping to ease Emmy's anxiety a little. “Right, Pinky?” I nudged her foot under the table.

“Oh, right. What Cami said.”

“Where have you been the last two days?” I said.

“At a friend's house in Minneapolis. Do you have any idea why the police are in my house?”

I didn't think they'd want me to say much about it. “Um, maybe they wanted to talk to you some more about Molly,
and then you left without telling anybody where you were going. Maybe they were worried about you.”

“Or something,” Pinky said. I gave her ankle another nudge.

“Police cannot go into someone's house without the owner's permission, unless they have a search warrant,” Emmy said with a good deal of conviction.

I'm sure the expression on Pinky's face and my own told her obtaining a search warrant was what the police had done, all right.

Emmy shook her head. “What on earth would they be looking for?”

“Um, well, they asked me where you were—” I started.

“So Cami asked your neighbor Lester where you were—” Pinky interrupted.

Emmy raised her eyebrows. “Lester?”

I leaned in closer to Emmy. “Anyway, none of us knew where you'd gone, and since we didn't hear from you—until now, that is—I'd say they are probably trying to find out the name of the friend you left here to go help.”

Emmy's eyes narrowed, and she focused them on me. “You know more than you are letting on.”

My guilty heart pounded, and I threw the ball back in her court to change the subject. “You told me you didn't have a cell phone, and I found out you do, after all.”

Emmy looked down at her hands and nodded.

I pushed on. “Why didn't you want me to have that number? When you keep secrets, it makes it seem like you have something to hide.”

“Like what your name really is,” Pinky blurted out. I was too astounded to even give her a nudge that time.

Emmy's frown disappeared, and her eyes opened wide. “My real name? You must mean my full name, Emaline Grace Andersohn.” She looked down again and spoke so quietly I could barely hear her. “So you've heard the story of my past. And that's the reason the police are at my house. They are looking for something to try to tie me to Molly's death.”

I would not lie to her, so I kept silent. And thankfully, Pinky did, too. She'd blabbed enough, thank you very much. And if Emmy made a run for it, we'd all be in trouble. At least she was probably one of the few people on earth I could actually catch up to in a race. But how could I tackle her without breaking any bones or hurting her somehow? It was probably why Clint hadn't handcuffed Molly's mother. He didn't want to cause her any more pain than she was already in.

Molly's mother.
That's why Pinky had come back to the shop; we were planning to visit her in jail. Instead, we were sitting with another older woman who'd also been there and done that. And she might be in trouble again.

“I want you both to know that I didn't do what I was accused of back then. I was heartbroken when my husband died.” Her lips turned down and quivered.

“Emmy, you're saying you did not poison your husband?” I said.

“No, I did not.” She looked me directly in the eyes.

Either she was telling the truth or she was a very convincing liar. “Why did the police think you did?”

“I worked for a hardware store, and we sold poisons. According to my boss, a bottle of cyanide was missing from the inventory. I had access to it, of course. And I was with
Howard when he died. They thought I'd given it to him and gotten rid of the evidence before I called for help.”

It did sound a little suspicious, and it made some sense that the authorities thought she was guilty of the crime. Something deep inside me believed Emmy was sincere and truthful, but still, there was something about her story that caused me to doubt her.

Pinky's cell phone rang from wherever she had it tucked away on her person, about the same instant mine did. Pinky flapped her hands and jumped up like she was on the dance floor. She headed to her back room, and I went the other direction to answer my phone. It was difficult for me to block out Pinky's loud telephone voice when I was concentrating on something else. She always talked about a hundred decibels above normal on the phone, no matter how much I'd nagged her to keep it down. We'd made a pact long ago that if I was on the phone or talking to someone and she got a call, she'd take her amplified voice to an opposite corner.

I glanced at the display and winced when I saw it was Clint. I had no choice but to answer it. The woman he was looking for was sitting in the coffee shop, and I was probably in enough trouble for not calling him the minute Emmy called me to tell me she was outside. I went into Curio Finds so Emmy wouldn't overhear the conversation. “Hello?”

“Camryn, it's Clint.” Even without caller ID, I'd be able to pick out his distinctive baritone voice anywhere.

“Clint, Emmy's here,” I said as the first line of defense.

“Where?”

He'd called my cell phone, so he wouldn't know where I was. “Brew Ha-Ha.”

“Why in tarnation didn't you call me?”

“She just got here a few minutes ago, and Pinky and I were trying to calm her down.”

“Calm her down from what?”

“She was on her way home when she spotted your police cars and saw the lights on in her house. She didn't know what else to do.”

“I'm on my way, and whatever you need to do, do not allow her to leave.”

I went back to Pinky's sitting area, relieved that Emmy had not escaped when we weren't keeping close watch. Pinky joined us from the back room. “The police are on their way?” Emmy said.

I would have sworn I had talked more quietly than that. “How did you know?”

Emmy pointed at Pinky. “She was talking to Officer Mark.”

Pinky's shoulders and hands lifted a tad. “Sorry, Emmy, but they said they needed to talk to you.”

“Like last time,” she said, looking as sad dog as it got.

A loud knocking on Brew Ha-Ha's door reminded us it was locked. Pinky ran to open it, and I stayed with Emmy. She slowly stood, and I moved to her side as a way of offering my support while Clint and Mark talked to her. But there was to be no talking. Clint arrived first, looked at me, and said, “Camryn, step aside.” He meant business, and I did as he said, then he moved in close to Emmy and pulled a set of handcuffs from his belt. “Emaline Andersohn, I'm placing you under arrest for the murder of Molly Dalton. Hold out your hands.”

Emmy lifted one hand but put the other on the table and leaned on it for support.

“Clint—” I started, but he cut me off.

“Mark, I need your help.”

Mark understood what Clint meant and moved behind Emmy in case she fell. I was worried about that myself.

Emmy's voice was shaky. “Why in the world would you arrest me for that?”

Clint closed a cuff on her free hand. “Because we found the bottle of cyanide in your garage.”

If someone had touched me with a feather, I would have fallen over. Apparently Pinky felt the same way, because she collapsed onto a chair.

Emmy had the opposite reaction. She raised her hand from the table and stood up straighter. “That's impossible. Where was it?”

“We'll talk about that later.” Clint put a cuff on her other hand. “Let's go.”

I moved behind Pinky's chair, and we watched helplessly as Clint and Mark led Emmy away. When they rounded the corner on their way out, Pinky stood up and the two of us walked to where we could see them go out the door.

“Do you believe what just happened?” Pinky said.

“No. And it's the second time today I've witnessed a little old lady getting arrested. I'm beginning to feel like a bad-luck charm.”

“Cami, I actually thought Emmy was telling the truth when she said she hadn't killed her husband.”

“I know, me too. She seemed as sincere as could be.”

Pinky turned to face me. “So what do we do now?”

I thought awhile. “Remember what we were planning to do?”

“What?”

“Visit Molly's mother in the county jail.”

Pinky bopped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “That's what I came back for. And to let you know I talked to Erin about it, too. She had to go to a meeting but wants to hear how it goes.”

“Of course. Oh, and I called the jail and found out visiting hours are from six to eight tonight. So we better get a move on.”

—

P
inky and I walked to Buffalo County Courthouse, which also housed the jail, since it was only three blocks away. Prior to our friend Archie Newberry's arrest the month before, neither of us had ever visited anyone in our county jail, thankfully. The only county business I'd ever had was when I needed a copy of my birth certificate and to get my driver's license and vehicle plates.

Pinky glanced up at the camera above where the female lobby officer was sitting in a glass-enclosed area. “I don't know why I didn't notice all these cameras when Archie was here, but that's the third one I've seen so far tonight,” she whispered.

“Just don't panic and do something goofy, and you won't have to worry about it,” I said quietly out of the side of my mouth.

“This is way too nerve-racking, but I'll try to think about why we're here instead of the fact we're being watched.”

There was a line of open booths where a number of people were seated on stools and talking via phones to inmates on the other side of glass partitions. The inmates had doors on
their side. We approached the officer to tell her why we were there.

“Good evening, can I help you?” She was no-nonsense but polite.

“Yes, we'd like to see Irene Ryland. Please.”

The officer looked at her computer screen, pushed a few buttons, then nodded slightly. “Do you have your driver's licenses with you?”

My wallet was in my coat pocket, and I found what she needed and handed it over.

“I locked my purse in my car. I'm sorry. I forgot I needed it,” Pinky said.

The officer looked at Pinky. “I recognize you from the coffee shop. What's your full name and date of birth?”

She wrote down the information Pinky gave her, handed back my driver's license, and pushed a button on her radio. “Lobby to Central Control, send Ryland from zero-four-two to visiting.” Then she said to us, “Take visiting booth E.”

We walked down the line to the fifth booth. “You sit on the stool, since you're the one she'll be expecting,” Pinky said.

I discreetly moved my eyes to the right and then the left without moving my head to see if I recognized any of the inmates in the visiting booths next to me. One looked familiar, but I didn't know why.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Ryland and a jailer walked up to the door on the other side of the booth. There was a loud click, and the jailer pulled the door open for Mrs. Ryland then shut it when she was safely inside. The orange jumpsuit looked like it was at least three sizes too big. She had her
sitting pillow with her. The corners of her lips moved into a little smile as she set the pillow down and lowered her body onto the stool. She lifted the phone to her ear. Everything she did took some effort, and I hoped she wasn't hurting too badly, physically speaking. I knew that time and maybe therapy would help with the emotional pain.

“Thank you for coming to see me.” She pointed behind me. “And I see you brought Alice with you. Molly thought so highly of both of you.”

I held the phone away from my ear enough so Pinky could hear, too. “Thank you for saying that. We can't tell you how bad we feel about what happened to her. We'd like to offer you whatever support we can.” A lot of good people did bad things for what they thought was a good reason at the time.

“That is very kind of the both of you.”

“Did you get into court today?” I said.

“No, the officers told me they were too busy up there. It'll be tomorrow, then. But, no matter, I think I'll be in here for a long time, maybe for the rest of my life.”