Tempest in a Teapot (A Teapot Collector Mystery) Page 8

  “Not yet,” she said, her husky voice holding a neutral tone. “I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to just wait until we figure things out. Mrs. Whittaker’s body will not be released to her family until we are satisfied we have all we need.” She turned to Thelma. “But the scene has been cleared, Mrs. Earnshaw, so you can go back to your place.”

  “Poor Vivienne!” Florence moaned. “She’d despise all this fuss.”

  • • •

  Everyone had gone home. Sophie stood in the tiny kitchen of her grandmother’s upstairs suite looking out the window toward Belle Époque, wondering how everyone was coping. She desperately wanted to rush in and ease people’s suffering. That part of her personality had made both life and work difficult at times. She had tried to fix problems at the restaurant alone instead of using the resources her partners could offer simply because she never asked for help if she could avoid it. Nana told everyone that when Sophie was little, standing on a stool at her grandmother’s elbow, her favorite phrase was I can do it myself! when stirring a stiff batter.

  “What are you thinking, my Sophie?” her grandmother said, from behind her.

  “Truthfully?” she asked, turning and eyeing her nana, who had already changed into a nightie and slathered lotion on her face, though it was only about six thirty. “I was wondering why I have a sudden urge to try to figure out what happened to Vivienne Whittaker so everyone can begin to heal.”

  “You always were the kind who needed to take care of everyone, smooth things over, make it all better. That’s because of the way your mom handles things, I’ve always figured. Rosalind is an avoider. And it’s because you were the mediator between your brothers, between your mom and dad, between me and your mom . . . between everyone!”

  “I guess that’s true,” she said. Her older brothers Andrew and Samuel were supercompetitive with each other, rocketing between estrangement and being each others’ best buddies. She had tried to be the buffer between them at family gatherings. Her father was a distant, difficult man and her mother a needy, clinging woman. Reconciling the two had been a constant battle in her teenage years.

  That was one of the many reasons Gracious Grove was home for her more than anywhere else; it was a serene, untroubled place where all she had to be was herself. It occurred to her in that moment that she had carried her family’s crazy behavior into her business life, trying to solve things between her financial partners, among staff, between the front of the house and the kitchen at In Fashion. How had that served her? Not so great.

  She plunked down in one of Nana’s retro chrome and aqua plastic kitchen chairs and sent her grandmother a searching look. “Nana, why do you and Mom not get along? And why doesn’t she like Gracious Grove? When I was a kid, she would plop Sam, Andy and me down here and then leave. I can’t remember her staying more than a night or two in Gracious Grove my whole life.”

  Her grandmother looked conflicted for a long minute, then appeared to make up her mind. “Come sit down on the sofa for a minute, honey. I have something to show you.”

  Sophie moved to the sofa in the tiny living room space that adjoined the kitchen and sank into the softness. Like all of Gracious Grove, that comfy powder-blue sofa was a soft place to land. When Nana came back from her bedroom, she was carrying a photo album, and she plopped down with a groan beside Sophie, setting the album on the polished-wood coffee table in front of them. She opened it to the first page. “Now, who do you suppose that baby is?” she said, pointing at a black-and-white photo of a chunky little toddler holding a Christmas gift up toward the camera.

  “I have no clue,” Sophie said, eyeing the other photos on the page. It looked familiar, the house and even some of the furniture. “Is that downstairs before you turned it into a tearoom, Nana?”

  “It sure is. That toddler is your own mother, my little baby Rosalind. There’s her older brother in the background.” Her voice choked. Losing her oldest son to the Vietnam War had been a horrible blow.

  “Why have I never seen these photos before?”

  Nana waved one hand dismissively. “I knew it would cause no end of trouble with your mother if I showed them to you, so I didn’t. Chickened out, I guess. But you have a right to them. They don’t belong to Rosalind, they belong to her children. It’s your heritage, just as Gracious Grove is, if you want it to be.”

  Sophie avidly scanned the page and leafed through the rest, watching her mother grow up (along with her two brothers, Jack and Harold Junior) before her eyes into . . . wow. Her mom had been a heavyset, unhappy-looking, spotted teen. “This explains a lot.”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  She stared down at a photo of her mother, a teen in the disco era, with wild, blowsy curls and too much tummy squeezed into a polyester disco dress. “It explains Mom’s attitude toward food, and even why she didn’t want me to become a chef.” She considered her next words, not wanting to offend. “Was Mom ashamed of being heavy?”

  Nana nodded, a thoughtful gleam in her pale eyes. “Yes, she was. And I see what you mean about your mother’s attitude toward your chosen career. I never thought about it before. She was a chunky girl when she was a kid, but so pretty! I told her she was being foolish when she worried about her weight. Told her it was just baby fat and that she’d grow out of it.”

  “Did she?”

  Nana shrugged. “She went on this wild diet, cabbage soup and grapefruit. Wouldn’t eat anything else, no matter that I tried making all her favorites, chicken and dumplings, Spaghetti Bolognese, macaroni and cheese. How I worried!”

  It was weird how generations flailed around, coming up against issues time and time again, masked in different costumes but always the same. Her mother didn’t cook at all, so Sophie had grown up with a chef in their home who had been ordered to prepare the most minimal of meals—a chicken breast with a spinach salad, or a filet of salmon and salade frisée—and had hated every minute of it. When Sophie had stayed with her grandmother, she reveled in the home cooking Nana offered and that her mother abominated. Now Sophie understood and felt bad for all the times she had railed at her about her obsession with eating only the simplest, smallest meals. Weight loss had been a great triumph, probably, for a Gracious Grove teen, and she had been determined not to see her own daughter struggle with the same issues.

  But Sophie was not elegant, perfect Rosalind Freemont Taylor and would not feel bad for wanting something different. Her mother had found what she wanted: wealth, status and security. It was Sophie’s turn to figure out her own life. She closed the photo album with a slap and said, “Nana, do you think Mrs. Whittaker was really murdered?”

  Her grandmother started and Sophie realized she was dozing, the events of the day too much for her. “I’m sorry, honey, what did you say?”

  Sophie repeated her question.

  “The police must have some reason for thinking so. Did you notice anything?”

  “Nothing important,” Sophie said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Sophie described the scene, the attendees all sitting around the one large round table in the center of the room and the leftovers from their tea crowding the space, some platters set aside on nearby tables. She viewed it all in her mind’s eye, the half-empty trays of misshapen finger sandwiches, the scones studded with nuts and the vanilla-iced red-velvet cupcakes in a semicircle on a plate. “It looked like a flower with some of the petals missing and the center gone,” Sophie mused. “Like some weird game of ‘he loves me, he loves me not.’ That poor woman, Vivienne Whittaker . . . she was on the floor, yellow frosting smeared on her face.” Sophie shuddered. “Her face was all swollen and . . . and red. She was writhing, but no one was helping her.” Tears welled up in Sophie’s eyes and she pressed her shaking hands to her mouth. “Including me. It was terrible!”

  Nana patted her back. “You couldn’t have done anything, sweetheart. What about the rest o
f them? What were they doing?”

  Try as she might, Sophie could not bring to mind some of the faces. Francis, certainly, had looked shocked, down on his knees trying to soothe his mother. Cissy appeared frightened and elderly Mrs. Earnshaw horrified. But was there someone whose expression did not go with the scene? Was it Gilda Bachman’s ghoulish curiosity? Florence Whittaker’s blank expression? Gretchen’s distaste? Belinda Blenkenship’s quivering lip?

  She talked all this out, only to realize when she was done that her grandma was slumped over, snoring slightly. Pearl gracefully jumped up and cuddled against her mistress. Sophie got up, covered her grandmother and the beautiful Birman with the granny-square afghan that was flung over the back of the sofa, kissed her grandmother’s soft cheek just beyond the face cream and ascended to her own space to ponder the day’s events.

  As she got ready for bed herself, exhausted and aching from the events of the day, she picked up her cell phone and checked her messages. She had a text, all in caps, from Cissy, and it said, CALL ME . . . I’M SO SCARED!”

  Chapter 7

  “Cissy? I got a text from you; what’s wrong?” she demanded, as her friend gasped out a weak “Hello?”

  “I’m so scared!” Cissy said, her voice trembling.

  “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  There was silence for a minute. “Vivienne was murdered!” Her tone was like, duh . . . how do you not know this?

  “I know that,” Sophie replied. “But there’s no cause for you to be scared, is there?”

  “What if the killer was really after me?”

  “Why would you think that?” Sophie remembered how her friend had always been a drama queen wannabe, constantly hoping and wishing that the inevitable teen angst swirling around Gracious Grove circles was about her, when it never was. Cissy was the kind of girl that nobody felt strongly enough about to murder, Sophie thought. Or was she wrong?

  “I just know someone is out to get me,” she muttered, her voice muffled. “They don’t want me to marry Francis.”

  “Cissy, who is they? Has anyone told you that to your face?”

  “Phil told me he’d rather see me leave town than marry Francis Whittaker.”

  Sophie was taken aback at the mention of Cissy’s brother. “Are you saying that Phil killed Vivienne to keep you from marrying Francis?” Seemed kind of a roundabout method of keeping her from marrying a guy, to kill the fiancé’s mother, but who knew?

  “Of course not! Phil wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  Sophie recalled Phil sneaking out of the Belle Époque moments before the engagement party was to begin, even as the guests came in the front. She was about to ask Cissy about that, but her friend said something to someone in the background. She wasn’t alone.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “But Cissy, wait! You said you were scared!”

  “I have to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Sure.” Sophie tried to quell the annoyance that welled up in her. Cissy had freaked her out over nothing, just more of her drama queen stuff.

  “We’ll go over plans for the bridal shower, right?”

  The shift from life-threatening situation to normal everyday was weird. “Okay. But I should be getting together with Gretchen about that. You’re not supposed to be planning your own shower.”

  “I know, but . . . all right. I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up.

  Sophie sighed, flung her clothes off and pulled on a long T-shirt and went to bed.

  • • •

  Over at Belle Époque, Thelma Mae Earnshaw, in the kitchen with her feet in a basin of hot water and Epsom salts, pondered the horror that had happened just beyond the big double doors, in the tearoom. How it could have come about was beyond her. Those police were acting like it was something in the food and had searched her place top to bottom before letting her back into her own kitchen. They had taken away a lot of stuff, too.

  It just couldn’t be her food. Every scrap of that food had been hand prepared by Thelma or Gilda. Well, pretty much all of it, anyway. Or . . . to be completely honest, at Belle Époque there just wasn’t time to do everything fresh so they did buy frozen rolls, scones, tarts and cream puffs and thawed them out. She defied anyone to tell the difference! At least the finger sandwiches were fresh, made right in her own kitchen, except for the fillings, which she’d bought at the deli. The ham salad at the Tastee Mart was the best, and the egg salad wasn’t too shabby, either.

  She sat back in her chair as the water cooled. It was just plain easier to buy frozen, pull it out of the freezer, thaw it and bake it, or buy ready-made from the grocery store or bakery. So those police folks wouldn’t pin this awful thing on her just because it happened at Belle Époque, no sir! It was impossible that anyone could have tainted any of the foods that were put out for the guests.

  Or almost impossible. Folks had brought stuff, too, and they all said the same thing; someone told them to bring a dish, like it was some potluck or something instead of a professional tearoom! She harrumphed and frowned down at her feet, wiggling her arthritic toes. She should take her feet out of the water or they’d get cold and crampy, she thought, but then forgot about it as she tried to recollect what all had happened.

  It had been terribly busy, an awful rush right before the tea party. She closed her eyes, trying to remember; let’s see . . . Gilda was being her usual slowpokey self, whining that she only had two hands and couldn’t be expected to do everything, Thelma thought. People had brought a few containers, cookies, cupcakes, some strange thingies that looked like little whole-wheat blankets with grass sticking out of them; wraps, they were called, she had been told. Looked uneatable, to Thelma, but they went faster than the finger sandwiches she had taken so much trouble over. No accounting for taste.

  Then some of the guests (a couple who Thelma didn’t even know and didn’t like much, anyway), who had been waiting out in the tearoom for luncheon, wandered back to the kitchen, probably to see what was wrong and what the holdup was. Francis, Vivienne, some woman with stiff hair that Thelma had had to put in her place, a blonde girl, Florence Whittaker, that hoity-toity Gretchen girl and even Cissy had all wandered around, “helping,” which translated to sampling, suggesting, plopping things on plates, looking in the fridge, checking out the oven and generally making nuisances of themselves.

  And she had to shoo Phil out of the kitchen just as folks were arriving in the front door. But no, there was not an ounce of evil in that boy’s bones. All the trouble he had been in had been other people’s faults, folks who had led him astray, like that Francis Whittaker. That confounded boy had done everything Phil had done and still come out smelling like a rose while her poor grandson ended up in trouble. Francis’s mother was behind that, her and her money.

  This tragedy was like a divine judgment on Vivienne Whittaker for putting on airs all these years when she had been born plain-old Vivienne Crenshaw, daughter of a hootchy-kootch dancer who got lucky by marrying up. And even that wasn’t a real love match or nothing. No, that woman had tempted poor, unsuspecting Francis Whittaker Senior, heir to the Whittaker grocery fortune, into bed where she got herself pregnant so he’d marry her. Most folks had forgotten about that, but not Thelma!

  It wasn’t as if Thelma had wished this on her, but it did seem that the good Lord was removing thorns from her side. Maybe Cissy would see what kind of family she was preparing to marry into and back out before it was too late. Thelma decided she had better watch what she wished for. It was dangerous to have so much power. She would most definitely not wish for Rose Beaudry Freemont to break her hip in a fall. She wouldn’t wish that on her worst enemy. She clutched at her hip, the constant ache a reminder of a difficult period of recovery.

  But wishes didn’t make something happen, after all; human hands performed the Devil’s work. Someone had wanted Vivienne out of the way, but
who? Fear shot through Thelma; could it have been Francis himself who killed his momma? And if that was so, how could Thelma convince sweet, naive Cissy that he was an evil mother-killing monster?

  She’d have to start the very next day. If she could just get those police officers . . . not that there was a pair of brains to choose between them. Take Wally Bowman, please! Thelma snuffled at her clever variation on her favorite old Henny Youngman joke. But she had known that boy since he still required an hourly change of diaper. There was no way he was qualified to investigate a murder. And that woman, Detective Morris . . . well, everyone knew policing was a man’s job; no woman was fit to be a police officer.

  Okay, now, what on earth had she been thinking?

  Francis Whittaker. Right; if Thelma could just get one of them to arrest Francis, then Cissy would be safely free of him. She could give the police a good stern warning that he could be the killer, but too often folks didn’t listen to her like they ought. She didn’t know why. She told folks all the time what was good for them, warned them about the dangers lurking behind every smiling face, but no one paid attention.

  It was all a part of getting old, she guessed, because everyone ignored old ladies no matter how much they demanded help or attention or sympathy. Getting old was a pain . . . a pain in the back, a pain in the hip, a pain in the feet. She lifted her feet out of the now-cold soaking water and dried them off as best she could, given that she couldn’t bend over very far without getting vertigo. The plop-plop-plop of dripping water echoed in the empty kitchen; the old house sure felt lonely with no guests, no Gilda and no Cissy.

  She pushed her feet into warm slippers. Ah! That was better. Now, what had she just been planning? Right . . . how to get one of the police people to arrest Francis, so at least he would be out of the way. Maybe she could get them to think Francis was capable of it, first. Wally was the one she knew, but he had never paid her any mind even when he was a scrawny little brat playing Hacky Sack in her driveway. He sure wouldn’t pay attention now.