We rode in silence for a while, each of us lost in thought. I was replaying our conversation with Marcus Best in my head, looking for any potential clues. A few miles before our exit, Maggie pulled off the highway and found a spot in a parking lot that was already crammed full of other cars.
Food trucks ringed the lot, their generators humming loudly as people lined up at the windows to order. In front of the trucks were several picnic tables, each with their own umbrella. Like the sound of ten different radios all blaring from ten different kitchens, the smell of a dozen different cuisines all baking, frying, roasting, and grilling was at once jarring and exciting. It was like the food at the Bluebonnet Festival, only dialed up to ten.
“What is this magical place?” I asked.
“I knew you’d like it,” Maggie said. “Tuesday Truck Day. Why don’t you go grab something and we’ll meet back at one of the picnic tables?”
“Uh-huh, sure,” I agreed, barely paying attention to her as I scanned the colorful trucks, squinting to read their menus from afar. My glasses were good, but they weren’t that good. I’d have to examine each truck up close before making my decision. Or decisions. I wondered if they had samples.
“We don’t have all day, Juni. Just pick something, okay?”
“I’m not good at picking just one thing when the choices are this good,” I said.
Maggie made a harrumphing sound. “Like I don’t know that. You’ve got five minutes to order something or I’m leaving without you.”
“Whatever,” I said, hurrying toward closest truck. Five minutes? That wasn’t nearly enough time. I was ninety-nine percent sure Maggie wouldn’t leave me like she threatened. Besides, we weren’t that far from Cedar River. I could always order an Uber.
I chose a falafel wrap and chips at the second truck in the row. While I waited for my food, I wandered around taking mental notes. I would have to come back next Tuesday, and maybe every Tuesday after that until I’d tried everything there was to try.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved living in a small town. It’s safe. It’s quiet. Everyone knew everyone. On a mild day, I could ride my tricycle from one end of town to the other without breaking a sweat. But the food options were, at best, limited. There was United Steaks of America—an expensive steak house—Betty-B-Que, and the diner. That was it. If I wanted anything else, I had to make it myself or borrow a car and drive to Austin. I had to get on the highway just to go to Sonic. This was closer, and the selection was mind-altering.
By the time I’d picked up my food, Maggie had already sat down at one of the picnic tables. “What did you get?” I asked as I stepped over the picnic bench to sit across from her.
“Oh no you don’t,” Maggie said, circling her arms protectively around her burger and fries. “You have your own food.”
“I do,” I agreed, and started peeling the foil off my lunch. It was crispy falafel balls, chopped lettuce, diced tomato, and sliced cucumbers wrapped in a thick, fresh pita and slathered with tzatziki sauce. The chips were homemade, still warm from the fryer, and dusted with just the right amount of seasoned salt. It was a simple meal, and yet so delicious.
Maggie put her burger down, and made sure that her fries were out of my reach. Rude! As if I didn’t have my own homemade chips and needed to steal off her plate. She pulled a notebook and pen out of her bag and flipped to a clean page. “We need a list of suspects. Bob was too inoffensive to make enemies, but someone out there wanted to kill him. We should start with the obvious.” She wrote Marcus’ name in block letters and underlined it twice. “Who else?” she asked.
“If Tansy were here, she’d add Leanna Lydell-Waite, so we might as well. I suppose she has motive—if she wanted the mayor’s job. She was in Town Hall that morning, but wouldn’t tell us why. That’s opportunity.” Personally, I thought that my oldest sister had been barking up the wrong tree, but looking at her on paper, Leanna was a viable suspect.
“What about Pete Digby?” I asked. “He was there the morning of the murder. Did he let a murderer into Town Hall by accident or is he a willing accomplice?”
“That’s hard to swallow,” Maggie said. “If we’re gonna add Pete, we might as well add Tansy.”
“What? No!” I was so upset, I almost dropped my falafel wrap.
“Obviously she didn’t do it. But unless we write her name next to the others, it makes her look guilty.”
“I don’t care. We already know she’s innocent. Even Beau knows that. We don’t need to prove that. We just need to find out who did do it. Yes, Tansy had access to Mayor Bob’s coffee but she had no reason to kill him. And where would she even get poison?”
“Exactly,” Maggie agreed. “That’s why we should add her to the list.”
“No way.” I reached across the table and covered the pad of paper with my free hand, accidentally smearing tzatziki sauce on the page. “How would you feel if it was your name, and you found out that Tansy and I wrote you down as a suspect?”
“I’d feel awful,” Maggie admitted.
“Which is why we’re not doing it.”
“Okay. You win. Who else do we add?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Faye Bobbert? Jen Rachet?”
Maggie wrote down Faye’s name. “Faye, I get. The spouse is always a suspect. But why Jen Rachet? Is this because she doesn’t like you? Because, to be honest, she doesn’t like anyone.”
“She seems to know just a little bit too much about Mayor Bob’s death. And why was she at Faye’s house this morning acting like she owned the place? Very suspicious, if you ask me.”
“Fine, I’ll add her,” Maggie said. “I don’t know where Jen was at the time of death—the festival, I suppose—but Faye was on a cruise in Alaska. The Bobberts always seemed like such a happy couple, but I guess you never really know what’s going on inside of someone else’s marriage. Even if she did have a motive, she’s got the perfect alibi.”
“A little too perfect,” I muttered ominously.
“You’ve been listening to too many true crime podcasts,” Maggie said. She tapped the top of the page with her pen. “Marcus has motive. He and Mayor Bob were rivals when it came to collecting the bank robbery memorabilia.”
“If that’s reason to kill someone, we might as well look at Uncle Calvin, too.” Maggie started to write. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “He’s had enough police suspicion to last a lifetime. Marcus and the mayor competed against each other on the auctions, but Marcus contributed to his campaign fund and Bob sold him the plot of land. Those aren’t the actions of mortal enemies.”
“Unless Marcus’s campaign contribution was a kickback to get the land cheap,” Maggie suggested. “But he paid fair market value, so I guess it’s not that great of a motive.”
“It doesn’t make sense. People have gotten killed over business deals gone bad, but this one went through. It was quiet, but aboveboard, so there’s no reason for Marcus to kill Bob to hush him up,” I said between mouthfuls of warm, salty chips.
“Unless Mayor Bob was threatening Marcus.”
“With what? To sell him more land?” I shook my head. “Friendly rivals don’t poison each other in self-defense.”
“Poison is historically a woman’s weapon, though,” Maggie said. “Which is another strike against Leanna.”
“And Faye, and Jen,” I pointed out.
“When I asked Marcus if he was a hunter, he changed the subject, instead of talking about his guns and trophies like most hunters would have. Maybe he doesn’t own a gun, which is why he used poison to kill Mayor Bob.”
“Come on, Maggie, you’re reaching. Marcus doesn’t work for the town. He lives in Austin, not Cedar River. He’d have no access to Town Hall while it was closed and locked.” Then I corrected myself. “Except the doors were unlocked. I walked right in. But I bumped into Pete Digby, the security guard, almost immediately. He let me go back to the mayor’s office, but only because he knew me.”
“If Marcus has been buying property in Cedar River, he had to go downtown to file his paperwork. Maybe Pete felt like he knew him, too.”
“Yes, but Pete said he hadn’t seen anyone else come or go,” I said.
“Unless he was lying about that,” Maggie said.
“Unless he was lying,” I agreed. “That morning at the festival, I saw Mom walking around with a man I only later realized was Marcus. If he was with Mom, he didn’t have a chance to murder anyone.”
“We can ask her,” Maggie said, “but what if she lies to protect him?” She reached for one of my chips, and I snatched the paper basket away from her.
“You have your own fries!” I protested.
“Yeah, but those chips are a perfect golden brown. Please?”
I sighed. Of course I would share with my sister. I always had and always would. I pushed the basket of chips between us. “I forgot to get ketchup. Can I have some of yours?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, moving her ketchup-laden fries into easy reach. Then she turned the notebook sideways so we could both read it.
Not counting Tansy or Calvin, which I absolutely wasn’t, we had five possible suspects: Marcus, Faye, Leanna, Pete, and Jen. None of them had a strong motive. Only Leanna and Pete had a reason to be in Town Hall, but security was a joke. And as for the means? I had no idea. “Mayor Bob was poisoned, but do we know what kind of poison killed him? Was it fast acting or slow? Hard to come by or natural?”
“Natural?” Maggie asked.
“Like a mushroom or something.”
“A poisonous mushroom would make you sick before it would kill you. Even bluebonnets are poisonous, in enough quantity.”
“They are?” I asked.
“Sure. Every year at the start of bluebonnet season, the state puts out a warning not to let your pets or babies put bluebonnets in their mouths. But you’d have to eat a whole bunch of them to do any damage, and supposedly they taste horrible. Plus, no self-respecting Texan I know would pick a single bluebonnet, much less enough to kill a grown man,” she explained.
I looked down at the table and realized that we’d eaten everything. I started gathering the wrappers. “I probably should have taken it easier. Beau’s taking me out for dinner.”
Maggie wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Well, that’s just perfect.” Out of everyone in my family, she was the only one who’d come around to the idea of me dating Beau. I guess it’s because she’s a romantic at heart, and the idea of a second chance on love was too much for her to pass up. Then, she surprised me by adding, “You can grill him at dinner. Ask if they’ve got any suspects. Find out what you can about the autopsy. Ask him what kind of poison killed Mayor Bob.”
“I am not talking about an autopsy over appetizers,” I declared.
“Dessert, then.”
“I’m not ruining a perfectly good dessert. Besides, Beau won’t tell me anything—not on purpose at least—but I think I know someone who will.” I pulled out my phone and dialed. When a voice answered, I put it on speakerphone. “Kitty? It’s me, Juni. My sister Maggie’s here too.”
“Oh, hey, Juni. Hi, Maggie.”
“I was just curious. Did the medical examiner figure out what kind of poison killed Mayor Bob yet?”
“Hold on.” I could hear voices in the background growing fainter as footsteps echoed in a small space.
While we waited, Maggie put her hand over the microphone. “Kitty? As in J.T.’s cousin, Kitty? What does she have to do with any of this?”
“She works at the hospital,” I reminded her.
Kitty came back on the line. “Okay, get this. The killer went old school. Cyanide. I mean, how cool is that?”
I swallowed hard. Kitty was an EMT. She was used to dealing with sick, injured, and even deceased people. I wasn’t. “Cool?”
“I don’t mean cool cool. Obviously. Just I’ve been on the job for a couple of years now, and most of my patients OD on fentanyl, not cyanide.”
“I guess if you put it that way,” Maggie said doubtfully.
On the other end of the phone, I could hear Kitty talking to someone else before she returned and said, “Sorry, gotta run.”
“Okay, thanks!” I said, but she’d already disconnected. I looked at my sister. “She’s right about it being old school. How do you even get cyanide?”
“I have no idea,” she said as she pulled out her phone. “Is this going to get me on a watch list or something?”
“Probably,” I told her.
She read quietly for a minute, slowly scrolling past the information on her screen. “Apparently cyanide is in a bunch of stuff. It’s got a bunch of legit uses, including taxidermy and film developing. Next time we see Marcus, we should ask if he’s got a darkroom at his house.”
“I don’t know about Marcus, but Tansy took a photography class recently with one of her Groupons. Do you know who else was in the class? Leanna.”
Maggie made a note of that. “Out of all of our suspects so far, only Leanna had means.” She scrolled a little more. “Aha! Cyanide is used in all sorts of pesticides and weed killers. Who do we know that just bought a huge plot of land that is certainly overrun with bugs and weeds? He could buy barrels of this stuff at Home Depot and no one would bat an eye.”
“Yeah, but how does he get into Town Hall? And how does he convince Mayor Bob to drink pesticide?”
“It’s just a theory,” Maggie said, and made a note under Marcus’s name. “What about the others?”
I shrugged. “Everyone has access to weed killer, I guess, but I’ll bet you a month’s pay Faye has never pulled a single weed in that gorgeous lawn of hers. She has an army of gardeners.”
“Not fair,” Maggie complained. “You don’t have a paycheck coming in right now.” None of us did, not until Sip & Spin started turning a profit. It was a sacrifice we’d all agreed to make. Although, at the time, we hadn’t anticipated all the bad luck we would run into.
Cedar River hadn’t had a single murder in almost fifty years. And now, there had been two in the short time since I’d moved home. If I didn’t know any better, I’d write my own name on the list of suspects.
We cleaned up after ourselves. As soon as we stood up, a family swooped down and claimed our seats. Now that I knew this place existed, and that it was this popular, I would come earlier next Tuesday. We drove back, and Maggie dropped me off at the shop so I could relieve Tansy.
Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be much to relieve her from. Annie Lennox was singing to an audience of one as my sister busied herself with reorganizing our stock. Daffy was sunning himself in the front window. While that was an enviable activity, it was a bad sign. The skittish cat wouldn’t be casually dozing in a beam of sunlight if we had any customers.
“Has it been this quiet all day?” I asked, looking around at the empty shop.
“We had a lady come in earlier, but it turns out that her kid just needed a restroom. But what about y’all? Did you and Maggie learn anything interesting?”
“I don’t know about interesting, but it feels like we made some progress. Hey, before I forget, you took a photography class with Leanna last week, right?”
“Not with Leanna, but Leanna was there,” she confirmed.
“And it was all film, right? Not digital?”
“Yup. The class was more focused on how to develop film and print photos than how to take good photos, but it was still annoying that Leanna ruined my film just so she could be better at something than I am.” She shook her head. “But, because I had such a bad experience, the instructor gave me a free pass to come back and I got a refer-a-friend-for-half-off coupon. Why don’t you go with me some night and we’ll take the class together?”
“Sounds like fun.” I’d never been terribly interested in photography, unless I counted posting hastily composed photos on my Instagram grid without any thought to theme or consistency. But spending an evening with my sister, not at the shop? That would be great. “Wait a sec. If you got a coupon to refer someone, did you get referred by someone?”
“Yeah. It was, um…” Tansy tilted her head back and tapped her chin with one finger. “Jen. Jen Rachet.”
My eyes got big.
“Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“We added her to the suspect list, practically as a joke, but now she has means.”
“How so?” Tansy asked. “Mayor Bob wasn’t killed with a camera.”
“No, but he was killed with cyanide, one of the chemicals used in film development.”
Tansy paled. “How does that help me? I had access to those same chemicals. You’re supposed to be proving I didn’t kill Mayor Bob, not that I did.”