Death Comes to a Retreat (Book 4 Molly Masters Mysteries) Read online

  She hustled us toward the lobby, saying, “I’ll think about it.” Celia walked beside me, her arms tightly crossed. I asked, “Did your keychain have a zillion keys on it?”

  “Yes. They’re to the doors of the office building I own. Did you find them?”

  I nodded. The officer did a double take at me but said nothing.

  What followed was nearly as unpleasant an experience as I could imagine. After having my fingerprints taken—which was done electronically, a process not unlike photocopying one’s hand—I was deposited into a tiny room with two hardback chairs and a large mirror, which was definitely one-way glass. I sat in the chair and thought about Allison, trying unsuccessfully to block out the horrid image of her dead body. At length, the female officer entered the room, handed me my sketch pad and pencil and said, “I’ll be with you shortly,” then left again. I was well aware that she was playing a psychological game watching me through the glass to see if I’d try to stab myself with my pencil or attempt suicide by paper cut. But sketching truly did help me pass the time.

  Desperately seeking a sleuth of my own, I wound up calling on the ghost of a famous fictional one. I drew two little boys, one slightly taller and older-looking than the second, who’s wearing a Holmes-like cap and cape, but his toy meerschaum pipe is blowing bubbles. The older boy says to him, “Are you in preschool or elementary school?” He answers, “Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary.” The caption reads: Sherlock Holmes: The early years.

  The female officer finally returned, but she immediately mirandized me, which had the effect of causing my stomach to leap into my throat. She asked preliminary questions bent on establishing my identity, address, and so forth, then asked me to tell her “in my own words”—as if I’d use anyone else’s—what happened starting with when I first arrived at the Red Fox Resort.

  She stopped me when I related how I’d found the threat in the salad bowl and asked me to repeat the exact phrasing of the poem. Then she asked, “And what were your first thoughts when you received that note?”

  “That I should get the heck out of there.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone else what the note said?”

  “I thought it was a sick joke. I told Allison and Lauren Wilkins, right before we went to sleep. I was planning to tell everyone else, as soon as we were set to leave. Then the road was blocked and there was no way to leave, so I decided to tell only people I felt I could trust about the note.”

  “And how did Allison react when you told her?”

  I shrugged. “She pretended not to care. Told me that it was just a prank, which, like I said, is what I’d thought myself.”

  “What happened after you found this note?”

  I launched into a description of trying to get access to a phone and to contact the owners, waiting out the storm, and Allison sharing a bottle of wine with us.

  “And you say that was Allison’s wine bottle, right?”

  “Yes, and I only had about a third of a glass.”

  “Did you feel okay after drinking it?”

  “No, I suddenly felt exhausted. So were Lauren and Allison.”

  “Did you help Allison into bed?”

  “No, she wasn’t that out of it.”

  “What shoes were you wearing?”

  “Size seven Reeboks. But this morning, they were missing.”

  “No chance you left them outside?”

  “None.”

  “Have you had cause to handle a syringe lately?”

  “No, never.”

  She paused and studied my face for a long moment.

  “Any explanation of how your prints got on the syringe we found in your car?”

  Chapter 5

  I Feel Your Pane

  The revelation was so shocking, I felt faint. “My prints were on it?” I murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “That isn’t possible! I never…” I let my voice fade away. The same person who’d put my and Celia’s keys into my purse and took my shoes must have pressed the syringe into my hand as I slept.

  The door opened and a second uniformed officer—this one male and muscular—entered He introduced himself, then said, “Tell me what happened, Ms. Masters. From the beginning.”

  I went through the whole story, this time starting from my initial fateful decision to host a greeting card retreat. Afterward, he asked me a few more questions, which I answered to the best of my ability despite a ringing in my ears. My head felt as if it would explode.

  Then at last he was through and told me I could go home, as long as I stayed in Boulder. His parting words were “You might want to speak to your lawyer.”

  I was too scared and shocked to ask how I would get home, but the female officer told me to “hang on a moment,” and soon returned with my purse, from which she said they’d taken the key to my rental car, which they were impounding, and Celia’s keys, which they’d returned to her. She was closely followed by Tommy Newton. I was so relieved to see his friendly, freckled face, it was all I could do not to cry.

  Tommy led me across the small parking lot crowded with the white sheriff vehicles to his blue two-door. He told me that Lauren had taken the children back to my house, and I mindlessly gave him directions on how to get there.

  How could all of this have happened? This was supposed to be a brief, joyous return to my beloved home in Boulder, with a simple little greeting card workshop in the mountains thrown in for fun and profit. Now, all of a sudden, a longtime friend was dead and one of five women who barely knew me had framed me for her murder.

  Tommy sat with his hands on the steering wheel, but made no move to start the engine. His face looked grim. Finally, he faced me. “Listen, Moll. You know we kid each other a lot, but I’m gonna tell it to you straight. Things don’t look so good for you, and I haven’t got any pull here whatsoever.”

  I nodded. “Can you at least request a copy of the police reports?”

  “I can always make the request. Doesn’t mean I’ll get anywhere, though. What all are you interested in knowing about?”

  “The autopsy results. And the test results on the residue, or whatever you call it, from the bottle of wine we drank last night.”

  “Autopsy won’t be complete till tomorrow at the earliest. Even then, I won’t have access to it. It’s gonna be critical to their investigation that they keep that report confidential.”

  “But you’re a police sergeant.”

  “Don’t matter. There’s gonna be a key fact or two about this case that the investigating officers keep to themselves, so they can guarantee only one other person on the planet knows it, too.”

  “The killer?”

  He nodded. “Providing, of course, it was murder and not suicide or an accidental OD. My guess is they’ll keep a lid on the precise spot on her body where she was injected. Or maybe the actual substance she was injected with.”

  My stomach lurched at my imaginary vision of Allison getting a poisonous injection jabbed into the back of her neck. “Come on, Tommy. You know as well as I do she was murdered. I never touched that syringe. My shoes were next to my bed when I went to’ sleep last night, not half-buried in the woods. And the threat was in the pocket of my jeans in my bedroom. For this to have been anything but murder, I’d have to be either a raving maniac or a compulsive liar.”

  He fastened his seat belt, started the engine, and pulled out of the space. “Never knew you to lie. Not so sure about the ravin’ part.”

  I let his wisecrack slide, automatically checking to see if the road was clear for his right turn out of the lot. It was, and we headed east and away from the mountains.

  “What about the contents of the wine bottle? Surely I have a right to know about that, don’t I? After all, I drank the stuff. So did Lauren. What if we need to have our stomachs pumped?”

  The muscles in Tommy’s jaw tightened. “They did a preliminary analysis on the traces of wine still in the bottle. It had what they call ‘roofie’ in it. Knocks you out pret
ty fast and causes short-term amnesia. Gotten to be a rampant problem on college campuses these days. A guy can slip it into a girl’s drink, she passes out stone cold and doesn’t wake up till morning, no matter what the guy does to her while she’s asleep.”

  “Oh, God. That’s hideous!” By the time Karen was off to college in the not-too-distant future, would we have to warn her not to ever leave her drinking glass unattended? I shuddered, then another thought occurred to me: Katherine taught at C.U. She could have ready access to a prevalent campus drug.

  Tommy growled, “Doesn’t make me too happy to think about Lauren bein’ so vulnerable last night.”

  My immediate reaction was: Forget about your girlfriend! I’m the one who’s being framed for murder! But I mustered a reasonably calm voice and said, “This wasn’t a case of date rape. The only male around us was the cook, and he couldn’t have been involved in any of this. It was definitely one of the women in our group who slipped me that death threat, and the cook was never near our cabins.” I hesitated. “Was he?”

  “He has a one-room apartment in the attic above the lodge. Claims he was there all night. No one heard or saw him in the immediate vicinity. Odds are, he’s telling the truth.”

  “Turn left here,” I mumbled as we neared Twenty-eighth Street. My thoughts had focused on the wine bottle and the image of it nestled in the weeds near the path. “Tommy, whose fingerprints were on the bottle?”

  “Just Allison’s. And yours.”

  “Mine? But that—Oh. I picked up the bottle this morning when I found it.” I punched my thighs in frustration. “Damn it! I wish I hadn’t done that!”

  Tommy raised a corner of his lips but said nothing.

  “The bottle had already been opened when Allison came over to our place last night, but it looked full. She said nobody wanted any in the other cabin. Any one of them could have drugged the wine while Allison was outside, working on the fuses. Do we have any way of knowing when that bottle was first opened?”

  “We?” Tommy repeated. “Believe me, Molly, I’ll do everything I can to exonerate you, but that means you keep your distance from this case. You go talking to the other women in the cabin, you’re gonna get yourself dug so deep, we’ll need a miner’s permit to get you out. You and I are not doing a…Starsky-and-Hutch duet here. You got that?”

  “That old show was the best analogy you could come up with? Which role did you have in mind for me…Starsky or Hutch?”

  “You’re the bimbo they have to rescue,” Tommy muttered.

  If he hadn’t been driving, the urge to hit him would have been irresistible. “And you’re my hero? Ha! Talk about bad casting.”

  “Right now, I’m the only thing you got goin’ for you, so don’t push it!”

  His words zapped whatever hope I had of trying to keep myself from lapsing into despair. “I never thought I’d say this,” I murmured, “but I just want to go back home to Carlton.”

  “You’re not s’posed to leave Colorado till they clear you of all charges.”

  That had better happen soon, I thought. I was matron of honor in Lauren and Tommy’s upcoming wedding, and I needed to review applicants for a scholarship program I ran every year. We drove the rest of the way in silence, save a couple of directions, and soon turned into my north Boulder neighborhood of large homes on oversized, well-maintained lots. The foliage was so much sparser than I’d grown used to in New York, allowing an uninterrupted view of the Flatirons—a series of rock faces in the shape of irons, which graced the base of the mountains due west of Boulder.

  The house was deserted. I felt disconcerted as I walked inside, as if I were returning from a stay in the hospital. When we’d moved originally, we’d always expected to return shortly, so the house was fully—and yet impersonally—furnished: mostly bare walls, no bric-a-brac. For a brief, horrible moment, I had a sensation of returning as a ghost to view my pitiful possessions, as. if these few rooms were the sum total of Molly Masters’s life.

  The screen door creaked behind me. “Where is everybody?” Tommy asked.

  “They must have walked down to the park. It’s just—”

  “Mom’s home!” came Karen’s distant cry from outside.

  Fear gripped me so tightly I could barely breathe. I could not let myself get arrested! My children needed me!

  One after another, Rachel, Karen, and Nathan barreled inside, the screen door banging behind them each time like a gavel. The last inside, Karen ignored Tommy and set our old basketball on the floor beside him. “Mom!” she said, panting, her hair in damp clumps. “I dribbled the whole way home!”

  “You’re supposed to keep your lips closed when you drink,” I said.

  She giggled and rolled her eyes. “I meant with the basketball.”

  “Oh, right. Silly me.”

  “I won a game of HORSE,” Rachel announced, casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure Tommy’d heard.

  “She cheated!” Nathan growled. “She skipped the letter r. And I’m not a hose!”

  He and Rachel bickered for a moment, then she stormed off to the backyard. The fact that Karen stayed put and steered clear of the debate indicated to me that Nathan was probably right, but Karen didn’t want to betray her best friend in favor of her little brother.

  Lauren entered, still limping slightly, once again out of breath, with her round cheeks pink with exertion. She gave Tommy a quick kiss, then turned to me. “How’d it go?”

  “Not great.” I glanced at Karen and Nathan and didn’t continue.

  With an exaggerated sigh, Karen said, “Come on, Nathan. Let’s go play on the swing set. Mom doesn’t want to talk in front of us.”

  Tommy and Lauren sat on the loveseat in our living room, and I filled Lauren in on what had transpired. I told her that the wine we’d drunk had been doctored, which gave the killer the opportunity to press the syringe into my hand so my fingerprints would be on it.

  Lauren looked at Tommy. “Why would someone take a risk like that? If Molly or I had awakened, what could they say they were doing? Sleepwalking with a syringe in their hand? And the three of us were alone. The killer couldn’t even know that we’d been drinking the wine, too.”

  Tommy said slowly, “Maybe if you woke up, there would have been more than one victim.”

  On that sobering thought, I glanced at my watch. “I have to go call Jim and let him know about this.”

  I decided to test my new gizmo, and I set it on the granite countertop in the kitchen. It was a portable phone, printer, scanner, and fax machine—basically a two-pound cellphone with a 50-foot roll of paper inside. The phone was set up to use my business number back in Carlton. One of the downsides of running a financially precarious freelance business: There’s no such thing as leaving your office. Tommy didn’t get the hint that I’d like some privacy, but Lauren stood up and said, “Come on, Tommy. I’ll show you our guest room downstairs.”

  I dialed the emergency contact number my husband had given me. After several minutes, he was located, and he greeted me with “Sweetie? What’s wrong?”

  To my frustration, the sound of his voice instantly put me on the verge of tears. I managed to clear my throat and say, “The class didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. One of the students was murdered. My friend Allison Kenyon.”

  “Good God! Allison? You mean that woman you used to golf with? She was murdered? Oh Lord, Molly. Not again. How?”

  “Poisonous injection. Late last night.”

  “Gee-zeus! Do the police have any suspects?”

  Imagining his reaction, I winced and closed my eyes. “Well, one. Me.”

  “Is this… What the… Molly, why…” He paused. “I’ll be on the next flight from Dallas.” He hung up.

  Too drained to do anything else, I sat on the floor and leaned back against the cabinets. My dear, sweet husband would be here in a few hours. Would that help matters or only make them worse? It was bad enough to have to cope with the absurd notion that some virtual stra
nger had framed me for a murder. When Jim arrived, I’d share his frustration and futility, as well.

  Tommy’s heavy footfalls were unmistakable as he trudged up the stairs and out through the front door. A moment later, Lauren entered the kitchen and gave me a sad smile when she spotted my ignoble seat on the linoleum. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Tommy and I are going to make a run to the grocery store.”

  “Thanks.” I rose, intending to get my wallet. “I’ll stay here with the kids. But let me—” Reading my mind, Lauren held up a palm. “Tommy and I will pay for everything.”

  I brushed my dark bangs out of my eyes. “That’s not necessary.” I stared at my hand, which was trembling as if with a life of its own.

  “You can handle this, you know. Whoever did this made a big mistake when they chose to frame you.”

  I meant to thank her for the vote of confidence, which felt unearned, but she left too quickly. My mind seemed to be operating a half second behind the rest of the world. I checked on the children, playing on the wooden swing set in the backyard, then sat in the living room and went to my usual salve: my drawing pad.

  Though a perverse character trait, it cheers me to make fun of my duress, so I played around with puns about being in pain. I wound up creating a cartoon in which a man, dressed in a workman’s uniform, says to an angry-looking woman, “I realize I charge a little more than other companies, but you see, I not only repair your window, I feel your pane.”

  The doorbell rang. To my complete surprise, it was Julie the aerobic dog breeder, and she had an enormous Golden Labrador with her that looked at once in need of Zumba and overexerted. The dog was strikingly plump, yet was panting so hard I thought the poor thing might collapse.

  “Hi, Molly. I tried to call you to say I was coming, but your phone was busy. This is Teak,” Julie said. “Do you mind if I bring her in?”

  “No, but why is she panting like that? Does she need some water?” I opened the door wide and they both stepped inside.

  “She’s going to have puppies in a couple of days, and I’m afraid to leave her home alone in this state.”