Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (19 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I
TROTTED
OUT
OF
the room and toward the front door as Pish answered the phone. Who on earth would be coming to my door late at night in the middle of nowhere? I got nervous for a moment, but McGill had followed me, perhaps with the same thought. We advanced, and I cautiously opened the heavy door, surprised to find that it was pouring rain. In the castle with the drapes drawn, it could be World War III outside and you wouldn’t notice.

Standing on my doorstep was a very wet, bedraggled Juniper Jones. I started back, and McGill stepped in front of me.

Wearily, she held up one hand, and said, “Give it up, already. Do I look freakin’ dangerous?”

I exchanged a look with McGill as Shilo drifted into the great hall after us. She saw Juniper and bolted forward. “You poor kid!” she cried, her voice echoing. “You’re soaked. C’mon in and get dry.” She gave us both a look that told me she wasn’t impressed by our defensive attitudes and pulled the young woman through the door.

Fine for her, I thought. She had not witnessed the Tasmanian-devil side of young Juniper. I could not forget the way she’d slashed out at Zoey, and I kind of wished I had a metal detector over the castle door, like in your average high school.

I followed McGill back into the parlor, where Shilo had Juniper ensconced in my chair and was helping her dry her matted hair with a kitchen dish towel. Pish, still on the phone, met my gaze, his eyebrows up around his sparse hairline. Neither of us had seen this side of Shilo. She was a great girl, but humans were generally not her thing. Nurturing was saved for her bunny, Magic. Perhaps she was practicing becoming a mother.

Becket, who had been sitting on the hearth purring contentedly, paws tucked under his big orangey body, now sat upright and glared at the intruder. Pish had turned away and was murmuring into his phone, so there would be no guidance on this particular social situation from him. What to do with a fugitive from justice, someone I considered a murder suspect?

She didn’t appear to be dangerous for the moment, though, so I would do what I do best: feed folks. I scooted to the kitchen and made the girl a plate of warmed, buttered muffins and a hot cocoa. She scarfed it all down as Shilo combed out her wet hair.

“You know the Ridley Ridge Police are looking for you after that little performance at the Party Stop the other day?” I finally said, hovering nearby and watching her.

“What else could I do?” Juniper said, tears rolling down her cheeks. She swallowed her last bit of muffin and took a long drink of cocoa. “That little rich bitch stole my Davey away and then killed him, like a dog she was tired of.”

“Zoey Channer
killed
Davey Hooper?” I blurted out, only part of my brain dealing with wondering what kind of people Juniper knew who would kill a dog of which they had tired. “How do you know? Did you see it?”

“No, but isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to most people.” I crouched down beside her and looked up into her troubled face. “Juniper, you have got to have some evidence if you expect us to believe that. Right now
you
are a contender for the position of suspect number one.”

“Me?” she cried, sitting up straight in the chair. “Why would I kill Davey? I
loved
him!”

“People have killed out of jealousy before; you just told us Zoey stole him from you.” Which was news to us, but I’d ask her about that in a moment. “You were angry about it. And you sure are handy with a knife.” I was wondering what I should do about her showing up out of the blue like this. Turning her in to Virgil would be the obvious choice, but somehow, sitting on my chair full of muffins and cocoa looking young and scared, she just didn’t seem like a killer. A grief-stricken young woman yes, but not a killer.

Pish hung up and approached us, eyeing Juniper warily. “Why don’t you tell us what happened the night of the party, then, if you want us to believe you didn’t kill him?”

She sighed, heavily put-upon by our determination to view her with suspicion. My shoulder still ached from trying to pull her away as she slashed at Zoey, so Juniper could just take her martyr attitude and stuff it.

“I have a better idea,” I said, pulling over a footstool and setting my butt down. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, when you hopped off a bus in Ridley Ridge and got a job at the Party Stop. Or before that, when you first met Davey Hooper.” If I got a feel for whether I thought she was telling the truth, it might help in my decision about what to do with her.

Had she killed Davey Hooper, as we had speculated? Now I seriously doubted it, and if the police got her in custody, it could possibly end any search for the real killer. I hadn’t ruled out turning her in, but I wasn’t going to leap up and do it that moment. She lowered her gaze and stared into the fire.

“Juniper, how did you meet Davey Hooper?” Shilo asked, her tone soft.

Somehow the question sounded better coming from her. Pish took his chair back, and McGill perched beside Shilo. Juniper looked up at Shilo, tears in her eyes. “I met him at a party. I was living in Buffalo working for this dude, this guy who organizes parties and books entertainment. I was just supposed to clear tables and stuff, but he kept harassing me, making me do sh . . . crap jobs. There was this table of guys; I went over to ask if they wanted anything, and when my boss started hassling me, Davey—I didn’t know his name then—said why didn’t the guy go f-f . . . uh, forget himself.”

It was interesting to me that Juniper was censoring her language in our presence. Why was she bothering?

“So Davey Hooper stuck up for you,” Shilo said.

“Yeah,” she said with a broken, tearful smile. Her gaze became dreamy, her complexion in the firelight taking on a rosy hue. I was reminded of how young she was, only about twenty or so. “He asked me if I had a place to crash. I did, kind of, a friend’s couch, but he told me he could put me up.”

I was silent. Such offers usually came with strings of the booty-call type from what I had heard and observed.

“So we started going together,” Juniper continued, “and it was so cool. He was such a chill dude and looked after me, you know?”

“I heard he had been in jail before,” I said.

She gave me a withering look. “Who hasn’t been?”

Everyone else in the room, I was about to say caustically, but I restrained myself. While she gushed, I wondered what she was leading up to. I wasn’t
completely
certain of her innocence just yet and questioned why she had shown up at the castle door. Could she have attacked Hooper in a fit of jealousy over his new relationship with Zoey? Pushed beyond endurance, had seeing them together at the party, Zoey in her expensive clothes while Juniper served her hors d’oeuvres, driven her to murder?

I tried to do the mental gymnastics, to stretch my belief system to picture her killing the guy she adored, but on reflection, I didn’t think so. If she was going to kill anyone, it would have been Zoey. I still strongly favored Percy Channer as the culprit since finding out he had been at the party. I tuned back in to her story as she admitted to following Davey to Ridley Ridge. “Why on earth did he come to Ridley Ridge in the first place?” I asked.

Juniper looked uneasy. “He, uh . . . he was mad about his twin brother dying and his mom being put in jail.”

As we suspected. My skin crawled when I thought of someone plotting revenge or trying to come up with a way to make me sorry. I didn’t know if that was his intent, but just knowing he had been out there and angry about Dinty’s death . . . Had he sent Zoey to spy on me? Is that why she had been watching the castle?

“How did you know where he was going? How did you know to follow him to Ridley Ridge?”

“He had started hanging out with Zo-bitch in Buffalo, you know, but he was still with me, too. He kind of went crazy when he heard about his brother. His mom and he were on the phone ranting and raving about it, so I heard a lot about Autumn Vale, and then she sent him a message through someone else to get the people responsible and make them pay.”

“Dinty Hooper died in Merry’s woods, but no one here killed him, for heaven’s sake,” McGill said, his tone unusually acerbic, voicing what we were all thinking. “Merry didn’t even live here when he died, and neither did these other two. As far as we know, Hooper never made a move against the guy who actually killed his brother in self-defense. Why the heck did he come to the castle?”

Juniper shrugged. “Look, don’t ask me about any of this, ’cause that’s about when he cut me out of his life. I decided to go to Ridley Ridge after he dumped me for that flossy-haired floozy because I knew he was heading there himself. I just wanted him to tell me why, you know?”

Ah yes, the continual girl cry: Why? Why don’t you love me? Why did you choose another girl over me? What is wrong with me? She needed to read
He’s Just Not That Into You
or
Guys Who Make Girls Crazy and the Crazy Girls Who Love Them
, but she didn’t seem like the book-learning type. And Davey was dead anyway. If not an answer, it was at least an ultimate end to the “why” query. But there were still so many questions about her story. She curled up in her chair, looking so tired and sad that I began to feel for her. “So Davey was heading to Ridley Ridge,” I prompted. “And so were you. Why Ridley Ridge?”

“He was going to stay with Les, who was a buddy of his brother’s. That was about the same time he took up permanently with that bleached freak and dumped my ass.” She choked back a sob and sat up, doubling over.

I shared a look with Pish. Why had Rusty, who had actually killed Dinty, gotten a free pass? And why had Davey been lingering about in Ridley Ridge without taking his revenge? We knew they had all been there for the better part of a month. I asked her those questions.

With a helpless shrug, she said, “Look, like I said, Davey cut me out of his life. He started up with Sleazoid Barbie, and after that I was, like, no one to him. It hurt so bad. Les and Dinty were buddies from jail—”

Aha! That was true . . . Dinty Hooper was a jailbird, too. Birds of a feather . . . “So you headed to Ridley Ridge to be near Davey, even though you two were no longer an item.”

Juniper sniffled back a sob and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted to be close to Davey so that when he figured out I was better for him than her, I’d be close by. When I got off the bus, I told Les that Davey and I were engaged, but Davey and Zo-whore showed up and told him the truth a coupla days later. I asked Les to let me stay anyway, and he said okay.” She frowned and started chewing on a ragged fingernail. “I don’t know why.”

None of this made a bit of sense to me yet. I kept expecting something she said to add up, but in her storytelling style, one plus one equaled fritters. It seemed like they had all just collected in Ridley Ridge and done . . . nothing. “Did Davey Hooper ever talk about me?” I asked.

She gave her fingernail a break, looking up at me as she shook her head. “Never heard of you until I started working for Binny. Not by name, anyway. I think I heard about some bitch who sent his mom to jail.”

Still didn’t make sense. Why did Hooper come to the party at the castle if not to accost or attack me for having some tangential part in his family drama? “Why did you come to Autumn Vale to get a job?”

“After Les tossed me out, I had to go somewhere, and I saw Binny’s ad for help. It kept me close to Davey. I kept hoping . . .” She sighed hugely and flopped back in the wing chair. “It seems so freakin’ dumb now, but I kept hoping Davey would ditch that Channer witch and come back to me. Or that she would ditch him and he would need me, you know?”

It was hard to believe Davey Hooper, lowlife scum, jail rat, and son of a grifter, could have had two girls in love with him. Though, for a girlfriend, Zoey did not seem particularly broken up about his death. I surmised that for her it was thrill seeking, some way to fill a hollow life. I had seen her type all too often in the fashion world, the celebutants who turned to men, booze, or drugs—or all three—for excitement. I was anxious to get to Juniper’s version of the night of the party. “So the night of the party you found out he was still with Zoey Channer, right? And you were jealous. You accosted him, or he talked to you, right?”

Pish made a face at me and jerked his head. He had something to tell me.

“Hold that thought,” I said, and followed him out to the hallway.

“I just wanted you to be cognizant of everything before we speak more with young Miss Jones,” he murmured. “Earlier I made a few calls of inquiry about the people involved; that phone call just before she arrived was an answer. I’m starting to lean toward our theory that Channer might be the guilty one. I know of the man’s financial dealings, of course—some of them are questionable, and many downright illegal—but what I didn’t know is the latest Percy Channer news. . . . He is a suspect in a case involving the disappearance and probable death of a business rival.”

“Wow,” I said. “It doesn’t surprise me, somehow, having met the charmer.”

“We’re pretty sure now that that Juniper let Percy Channer into the party, and she would have been watching Hooper more intently than anyone else. Maybe she can tell us something about Channer’s movements that night. And I have more. I got another call at the same time; my federal friend tells me that he heard from an unnamed source that someone was trying to blackmail Channer with shameful photos or video of his daughter. Zoey Channer is a wild little thing and, as we know, has a liking for bad boys. It’s possible Davey Hooper was the blackmailer.”