CHAPTER 16
I drove Michael’s Tesla back to Baby Cakes. April pulled up to the alley. She got out and walked over to the car.
“Wow!” She smiled. “Things between you and Michael must have progressed nicely if he let you drive his fancy new car.”
I got out of the car.
She gasped. “You’re bleeding. Are you hurt? Where’s Michael? What happened?”
I held up a hand to fend off the barrage of questions.
She paused for a second and then stretched out her arms and pulled me into a hug.
I don’t know when the tears started, but once the waterworks were going, I couldn’t stop them. I cried until I was weak and my knees buckled.
She opened the car door. “Sit down.”
I sat. For the second time in one night, I felt someone pushing my head down through my knees. The irony of the situation made me laugh.
“You’re in shock. Do you want me to slap you?”
That helped to sober me up. I shivered. “I’m just cold.”
“You’re in shock. You need to go to the hospital.”
I shook my head. “No, that’s where they took Michael. I can’t face him, not after what I did.”
She glanced at me and then moved over to the passenger seat and got in. “Madison, I like you, and it would break my heart to have to arrest you. Plus, it’ll mean I won’t get to move into the basement of Miss Octavia’s . . . your house. But I do need to warn you that I swore an oath to uphold justice. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Now, do you want to call your attorney?”
“No. I don’t need an attorney. I need a shrink, but not an attorney.”
“Good. Maybe you should tell me what happened. Why is Garrett Kelley hanging from a beam in your bakery? Why’re you driving Michael Portman’s Tesla? Why’re you wearing Michael’s coat? And why are you covered in blood?”
I sat in Michael’s car with the heat blasting and told April everything. I have no idea how long I talked. When I was out of words and energy, I leaned my head back on the seat rest, exhausted.
April stared ahead. “You have no idea what Garrett wanted to tell you?”
I shook my head.
She stared at me. “You can’t drive. You’re in shock, and you’re exhausted.”
I didn’t have the strength to object. I sat staring out the window, wishing I could go back in time and relive this night from the moment I got the text message from Garrett Kelley asking me to meet him. “If I’d only said no when Garrett Kelley sent that message, then none of this would have happened. Maybe he’d be alive today. Definitely, Michael wouldn’t be in the hospital with a bullet in his arm.”
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” April said, quoting a famous passage. “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
“Sherlock Holmes, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ He isn’t real. I can’t believe I thought I could solve a murder based on books with fictional detectives.”
“Just because he wasn’t a real person doesn’t mean he was wrong.”
I turned to stare at April. “You must be in shock, too. That doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re tired, and your brain isn’t functioning on full capacity. If it were, you would have noted that Garrett Kelley was probably dead long before you and Michael arrived.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those beams are at least twenty feet if they’re a foot. Garrett Kelley was about five six. His feet were so far off the ground, you bumped into them. How’d he get up there by himself? Unless you and Michael tossed the ladder away that he must have used to get up there, then someone else must have killed him and then hoisted him up.”
I sat up. “Are you sure?”
“We won’t know for sure what killed him until the medical examiner gets done.” She gestured toward the building. “Plus, there’s the biggest question of all.”
I looked at her and waited.
“If Garrett Kelley was hanging from the rafters, who shot Michael?”