The Missing Dough (9 page)

“Did you believe him?” I asked.

Kenny spoke up. “She wanted to, but not me. I didn’t care who took that money. I just wanted it back.”

“For me, you mean,” Samantha said.

“For us. I was going to make you split it with me right down the middle if I managed to recover any of it.”

“You have
got
to be kidding me,” Samantha said, clearly surprised by this news. “What makes you think I would have ever agreed to that?”

“If you wouldn’t have, I was going to keep it all,” he said smugly.

“Over my dead body,” she replied.

“Don’t tempt me,” he answered.

That was about all of the bickering I could take at the moment. “How about if we get this all back on track? From what you’ve just told us, you both had your own reasons to want to see Grant dead. Samantha, who decided to end the relationship between you and Grant?”

“I did,” she said as Kenny answered at the exact same time, “He did.”

“Which one of you is telling the truth?” Maddy asked.

“I was in the relationship, not
him,
” she said as she gestured toward Kenny. “As soon as I discovered that my investment was gone, I walked away.”

“So, do you believe that Grant was the one with the money?” I asked.

“It didn’t matter,” Samantha said with a frown. “He’s the one who talked me into investing in Orion in the first place, and when it all fell apart, he wouldn’t make any kind of restitution. I dumped him the instant he refused to give me any of my money back.”

“If that’s true, then it must have happened pretty recently,” Maddy said.

“I never claimed that it didn’t,” Samantha snapped at her. “I dumped him yesterday morning, and last night I was still trying to get my money back when we spoke with him at the concert.”

“I’m amazed he let the two of you corner him like that,” I said.

“Are you kidding? It was all Grant’s idea. It’s the only place he’d talk to us. There were a lot of people at that fair last night. I guess that made him feel that it was safe enough.”

“Boy, was he ever wrong,” Kenny said.

“We didn’t kill him, though,” Samantha said. “Someone else did.”

“I know that, and you know that,” Kenny answered, “but who’s going to convince the police that we’re innocent?”

“That’s why we’re here talking to Eleanor and Maddy, remember?” she said.

“Hang on a second,” Maddy said, holding her hands up for silence. “Are you telling us that you came by the Slice to ask us for help in proving that you’re both innocent?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” Kenny asked.

“Maybe because you two are at the top of our suspect list,” Maddy blurted out.

“You’re siding with the
police?
” Samantha asked.

“We’re not taking sides,” I said quickly. “We’re after the truth, no matter who it might implicate.”

“Even your precious fiancé?” Kenny asked Maddy.

“Bob didn’t kill Grant,” Maddy said flatly.

“How could you possibly know that? Are
you
his alibi?” Kenny asked.

“No,” Maddy admitted, “but he doesn’t need one, as far as I’m concerned. How about the two of you? If you want us to help you, we have to know where you were when Grant was murdered.”

Either my sister was being brilliant or she’d completely lost her mind. Was she serious about even considering helping this pair? I decided to keep my mouth shut while she worked. Either way, I’d back her up one thousand percent, but I didn’t know enough about what she was doing to make a play one way or the other.

“We’re waiting,” Maddy said. “Where were you?”

It was clear that Kenny didn’t like the neat way she’d turned the tables on them. “Samantha, we don’t have to answer that.”

“We’re asking them for help, don’t you remember? She’s right, Kenny. The only way we can expect them to lend us a hand is to tell them both what we were doing when Grant was murdered.”

“You can tell them if you want to, but count me out of this,” he said as he stood, threw his napkin on the table, and stormed out of the Slice. At least he tried to. He was locked in, though, so it took him five seconds to fumble with the latch before he could get out.

“I’m sorry about this. We’ll be back,” Samantha said as she hurried out the door after him.

I took another bite of pizza as we waited. “So, are we really helping them now?”

Maddy shook her head. “There’s not a chance of that happening, but if I can get solid alibis for them, we can at least mark them off our list.”

“If neither of them did it, that just leaves Bernie Maine. If.”

“If what?”

“If we’ve found all of our suspects yet,” I said.

“Who else did you have in mind?” Maddy asked as she took another bite of pizza.

“I don’t know, but then again, we just started digging. It’s hard to say who else might turn up on our suspect list. Grant had a way of riling folks up, didn’t he?”

“It’s a skill that he’d apparently gotten better at over the years.”

“What do you think?” I asked her. “Could he have swindled other investors, as well?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” she said. “Eleanor, I should have listened to you all those years ago. You saw right through him, and you tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it, Maddy. I got lucky finding Joe, and now you’ve got Bob in your life. We all win some, and we lose some.”

“I seem to have picked more than my share of losers over the years, though,” she said. “As bad as Grant was when we were married, I never would have believed that he could take such a turn for the worse. Sharon must have been heartbroken.”

“I’m sure she knew that she did what she could,” I said as I glanced toward the door. “I’m not positive they’re coming back, are you?”

“Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind. They’re gone for good,” Maddy said as she took another bite of her pizza and then dropped it onto her plate. “Forgive me for throwing away your hard work, but I’ve kind of lost my appetite for this right now.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said as I gathered everything together and headed for the nearest trash can.

“You’re not chucking that because of me, are you?”

“No way. Maybe later I’ll make us a different kind of snack, but right now I think we should get out of here while we still have the chance.”

“Are we going to go out looking for Kenny and Samantha?” she asked me as I rinsed the plates in back.

“I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to have to wait until they’re ready to talk to us, but I’d love to see if we can find Bernie Maine.”

“In thirty minutes?” Maddy asked me.

“No, you’re right. We need at least an hour and a half to get to Cow Spots and back and still talk to him. Why don’t you put up a sign that we’re going to be late starting our dinner shift tonight?”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m calling Josh to give him a heads-up about what we’re planning to do,” I said. “There’s no reason to make him wait out front for us while we’re somewhere out of town, digging into murder.”

After we had wrapped up what we needed to do in the kitchen and had told Josh about our plans, Maddy and I left the Slice in search of the elusive Bernie Maine.

“I
’ve got a question for you,” Maddy said as we started driving my car toward the town of Cow Spots.

“Is it about the case?” I asked.

“No, it’s about this place where we’re heading. Why on earth would anyone ever call their hometown Cow Spots in the first place? It’s a crazy thing to name a place, and that’s even taking into consideration that North Carolina’s known for some of its weird town names.”

I laughed. “What did you do? Fall asleep in fifth grade North Carolina geography class? Don’t you remember? That’s when they taught us all kinds of things about the origins of different city and county names in the state.”

“Ms. Harpold didn’t cover any of that,” Maddy said. “The ink was still wet on her diploma when she took over my class, so it’s hard to say what all I missed out on. She’d had her heart set on teaching high school girls’ phys ed, and at the last second, they stuck her with us. You had Mrs. Ingersoll, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, remembering the oldest teacher I’d ever had. “She had to be a hundred and five by the time she finally retired, but the woman was as sharp as she could be up until the last day of class.”

“Then enlighten me, Eleanor.”

“Well, there’s nothing all that special about it, as far as I can remember it. According to Mrs. Ingersoll, the surveyor got lost in the middle of laying out the town limits and ended up making a mess of it. It looked sort of like a Holstein’s spots, without a straight line anywhere in it. I heard later that he wasn’t lost at all. He was just falling-down drunk. The place was named Cowton at the time, but the surveyor looked at the mess he’d made and registered it as Cow Spots to explain the lousy job he’d done, and somehow it stuck. From what I’ve heard, a few folks tried to change it officially back to Cowton when it first happened, but they never made much headway, so Cow Spots it has been ever since.”

“It’s not really a
great
story, is it?” Maddy asked.

“Hey, it is what it is. Do you think we’ll be able to track Bernie Maine down once we get to town?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t know much about the place. I wonder if Kevin Hurley has managed to speak with him yet.”

“I’m not even sure he knows that Bernie should be on his suspect list yet,” I admitted. “Sometimes I wish we both shared what we discovered with each other, instead of playing cat and mouse with the facts, you know?”

“Sis, you and I both know that it’s never going to happen,” Maddy said.

“Hey, we’ve compared notes a few times in the past,” I protested.

“Okay, not never. How about rarely? The police chief ordinarily doesn’t like us butting into his active investigations. You know what? If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t want us digging around, either. When I think about it, I’m amazed that he’s been as understanding with us as he has in the past.”

“Kevin knows deep down that we’re just trying to help,” I said.

Maddy laughed. “Maybe a little too much at times, right?”

“Hey, we are what we are. No excuses, no explanations.”

We pulled alongside the Cow Spots town limit sign and were greeted by a twelve-foot fiberglass Holstein cow. It had become the official mascot of the place, and you could even buy hats and T-shirts with the cow’s picture on them.

Initially, I decided not to stop in at the visitors’ center to make any purchases, but at the last second, I pulled off in front of the trailer that acted as a welcome to outsiders visiting the place for the first time.

“This is an odd time to stop and get a magnet in the shape of a cow for your refrigerator,” Maddy said. “Why are we pulling over here?”

“As far as I can figure, I believe that it’s as good a place as any to start tracking down Bernie Maine. If anybody knows where we can find him, it might just be in there,” I said as I put the car in park and shut off the engine. “Are you coming?” I asked her.

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss seeing it for the world. I’m right behind you.”

We walked into the small building and were instantly assaulted by all things cow related. As I suspected, there were T-shirts, sweatshirts, bandannas, hats of all kinds, and other merchandise emblazoned with black spots on white backgrounds. That was just the start of it, though. There were also magnets, key chains, shot glasses, and every other kind of knickknack imaginable, all with the same bovine theme.

“Excuse me, but do you happen to have anything with a cow on it?” Maddy asked the older woman sitting behind the counter, who was reading a magazine, one on dairy farming, of all things.

She grinned. “To tell you the truth, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with something that didn’t bear the markings of our mascot,” she said. “What can I do for you ladies?”

“We’re looking for a man named Bernie Maine,” I said.

Her smile suddenly disappeared as her gaze went back to the magazine. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”

“We’re not here to give him a bouquet of flowers,” Maddy said. “He might have had something to do with my ex-husband’s recent murder, and we want to talk to him before he tucks his tail between his legs and runs.”

“You were married to Grant Whitmore?” she asked, studying my sister with a critical glance as she put her magazine down.

“I’m not proud of the fact, but I was indeed. I finally have a good man in my life now, but he’s under suspicion for Grant’s murder, and if I can help him, I will.”

She smiled and nodded when she heard my sister’s answer. “Then you’d better hurry. I heard through the grapevine that he was packing up his office and getting ready to head out of town for good.”

“Where can we find him?” I asked.

“Leave your car here. His place is four doors down that way. It’s called BEM Enterprises.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No time for pleasantries. Go!”

We did as she suggested, and as we neared the building in question, we found a man loading the back of his BMW with boxes.

When he turned to go back for more, I wasn’t all that surprised to find that it was the same man we’d seen arguing with Grant in the shadows of the fair the night before.

Apparently, Bernie Maine had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to get rid of Maddy’s ex-husband. And now he was trying to escape.

Maddy was starting after him when I put a hand on her arm.

“What are you doing, Eleanor? We can’t just stand here and let him get away.”

“How are we going to stop him? I have to call Kevin and see if he has any connections in town. The only way Bernie’s not going to run is if we have the police stop him.”

“Dial fast, then,” she said.

I called Kevin Hurley, and after his gruff response, I said, “You can chew me out later for digging into something that’s none of my business, but do you know that Bernie Maine, Grant’s former business partner, is getting ready to leave town?”

“Where is he?” Kevin said. “What’s he doing in Timber Ridge?”

“He’s not. He’s packing up his office in Cow Spots, and it looks like it’s for good. Do you know anybody here that could slow him down until you can get here yourself to question him? If we have to, Maddy and I will stand in front of his car so he can’t pull out, if you think that would help.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Kevin said “I’m on it.” And then he hung up.

“What did he say?” Maddy asked after I put my phone back in my pocket.

“He told us not to do anything stupid,” I answered, relaying the message.

“Well, he’s going to have to be a lot more specific than that,” she said just as the business’s door opened again. Bernie Maine was coming out with a briefcase under his arm and an overnight bag in his free hand. He locked his office and was heading for his car when Maddy said, “I’m sorry, Eleanor, but we can’t wait another minute.”

Before I could stop her, she rushed toward Maine, somehow managing to get between him and his car.

The man was clearly startled by her behavior, and with good reason, in my opinion. My sister could be a real force to reckon with when she put her mind to it. “Who are you, and what do you want?” he asked. It was clear from his voice that she’d really shaken him up with her abrupt and sudden appearance. The man was jumpy. There was no doubt about that.

“I want to talk to you about Grant Whitmore,” she said as I joined her. If it was possible, he was even less pleased to see that now there were two of us blocking his way.

“I don’t have anything to say to you, or anyone else, about my former partner,” Maine said harshly.

“Yeah, well, I’m his former wife, so that trumps your position to keep quiet,” Maddy said. “Talk, buster.”

He looked taken aback by that bit of information, so I decided to turn up the heat even more. “We saw you arguing with him last night in Timber Ridge, at the fair,” I added, “so we know that you had contact with him, and recently.”

“That’s impossible. You’re clearly mistaken. I wasn’t anywhere near there.”

“There’s no use lying. We both saw you there,” I said.

“You might have thought you did, but you are wrong. I’m going now, so I’d advise you both to stay out of my way.” Bernie Maine looked as though he would push us both to get to his car, so I tugged on Maddy’s arm and pulled her out of the way.

“We can’t just let him go,” she protested.

“We don’t have any choice.” Despite what I’d told Chief Hurley, I wasn’t about to do anything as drastic as trying to stop him by force. Where were our reinforcements? Was Bernie Maine going to just drive away? I had a hunch that he’d be impossible to find once he left town.

The BMW started and was beginning to pull away when a police car suddenly appeared, neatly cutting off the luxury car’s escape.

Maine got out at the same time that the officer did, and from the redness of his face, he was about to start screaming.

The cop cut him off, though. “Mr. Maine, the chief asked me to hold you here until he gets a chance to come by, and I’d consider it a personal favor if you did it voluntarily.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, if you really want to play it that way, then I’ll just have to find a way to persuade you,” the deputy said, a hint of steel in his voice now. It was clear there was no love lost between the two men, and I wondered how far the cop was willing to push it.

We didn’t have to find out.

Ten seconds later another police car came around the corner, and this one had markings that indicated this was the chief of police of Cow Spots himself.

It appeared that the law had come to the rescue, after all.

I just hoped that all this effort was worth the tongue-lashing I knew that I was going to get from our chief of police.

“I didn’t do anything!” I heard Bernie Maine say in protest the moment the chief of police got out of his cruiser. He was a handsome and fit man, with dark hair cropped short and his eyes covered by sunglasses.

“Now, hold on, Mr. Maine. Nobody’s accusing you of anything, at least not just yet. I’d like to ask you a few questions, and as a matter of fact, so would a colleague of mine from Timber Ridge. Now, it’s probably only fair to tell you that I can’t make you hang around, but I guarantee you one thing. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll be an unhappy man, and believe me, you don’t want that. Now, are you going to pull your car back all the way into that driveway and wait with us, or do we have to do this in a more official manner? The choice is yours, but if you decide to make things difficult, I’ll make sure that Officer Petty handles you personally.”

We all glanced at the deputy, whose grin was unmistakable. “That’s the choice I’m hoping you make.” It was clear that Maine got the not-so-subtle warning.

Maine threw his hands up into the air. “Have it your way. I’ll be in my car, but I won’t wait long, and in the meantime, I’m calling my attorney.”

“Call anybody you’d like to,” the chief said. “Just don’t try to leave.”

As Maine did as he was told, the chief turned to Petty and said, “Watch him.”

“Yes, sir,” the deputy said as he started walking toward the BMW.

“Nicely,” the chief called out loudly.

“Yes, sir,” his officer acknowledged, though this time there was quite a bit less enthusiasm in his voice as he said it.

The chief of police shrugged as he explained, “Officer Petty’s mother lost money as a minor investor in one of Maine’s companies. I don’t think the man wants to take any chances with my deputy, not if he knows what’s good for him.” The chief smiled at us both, removing his sunglasses as he did. His dark brown eyes had the same flecks of gold in them that my late husband had, and that made me feel warmly toward the lawman, no matter how crazy that might sound. “Ladies, I’m Chief Hudson, but you may call me Stephen.”

“Hi, Chief,” I said, despite his offer to be a little less formal. “Thanks for coming to the rescue. I suppose you want to know what this is all about.”

“Actually, Chief Hurley already filled me in,” he said as he glanced at his watch. “He should be here in ten minutes.” The grin dampened slightly as he added, “I’m afraid he’s not very pleased with the two of you.”

“I’m not at all surprised,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling we probably deserve it.”

“Well, as long as you aren’t misbehaving in my jurisdiction, I don’t have a problem with either one of you.” Then he looked over at the BMW and added, “I guess that’s exactly what you’re doing, though, isn’t it?”

I was about to explain when he held up a hand, demanding immediate silence, which I gave him. The chief continued, “I understand that this might just be justified, though. I’m sorry for your loss.”

I was afraid my sister would take that opportunity to make a smart reply, but thankfully, all she said was, “Thank you.”

Chief Hudson pointed to the BMW. “Your chief didn’t exactly have to twist my arm, anyway. I’ve had my eye on this joker for the last year, but I can never seem to nail him on anything. If he leaves town and never comes back, I could live with that, but if he’s killed someone, then we need to get him, and get him good.” As he said the last bit, there was a deeper hint of iron in his voice, and I knew that I didn’t want to cross him, ever. He might live and enforce the laws in a town that had a funny name, but there was nothing clownish about this man.