The Sunflower Inn was located on a quiet side street, just a ten-minute walk from the downtown cafés, boutiques, and museums. Built in 1820, this beautifully restored Georgian mansion was owned and operated by seventy-year-old Udell Pickle. Everybody called him Dell.
He answered the door and said, “Natalie, long time no see!” Dell’s head was bald, his porous face sagged, and his eyes were as gray as the January sky. He was short and stooped, and always smartly dressed. Today he wore a crisp white shirt, a hound’s-tooth jacket, pressed brown trousers, and a pair of Hush Puppies. He preferred the kind of soft-soled shoes that snuck up on you. “Excuse the mess,” he said, ushering her inside. “Busy day after last week’s chaos. The streets aren’t the only place that need cleaning up post-Halloween.”
The bed-and-breakfast was spacious and welcoming, with built-ins full of bric-a-brac and comfortable chairs and sofas. The air freshener smelled like honeysuckle. The young, mostly female staff was busy running up and down the creaking stairs with armloads of fresh linens and cleaning supplies.
“Let’s go into the living room, shall we?” he suggested with a wave of his hand. “Most of the guests are gone. I call it the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am season.”
She smiled. The living room had speckled eggshell carpeting, large blocky furniture, and impressive views of the garden. The adjoining dining room’s long oak table was set for happy hour.
“Have a seat. You don’t smoke, do you, Detective?” He offered her one anyway.
“I quit.”
“You did, huh?” He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Dell slid the glass ashtray closer to him. “Morgan Chambers was a delight. She booked with us for four days. I was shocked when I found out what happened to her. We all were. I was literally shaking.”
“It’s terribly sad,” Natalie acknowledged.
“I won’t ask you what happened, because I know you can’t talk about it, Natalie, but rumors are flying. People are scared.”
“We’re doing everything we can to find out what happened.”
He patted her knee. “Just like your dad. Keeping the streets safe.”
Natalie smiled and took out her notebook. “When did she check in?”
“Belinda handles the check-ins. She’s in the front office.” He rubbed his chin and called out, “Belinda?”
“What?” she shouted back.
“Come in here a second.”
“Hi there, Natalie,” Belinda Pickle said from the doorway. Dell’s blowsy middle-aged daughter had gray hair and a forehead nibbled with worry.
Dell’s sigh sounded more like a hiss. “When did our friend Morgan check in?”
“Thursday,” she said. “Around three o’clock.”
“And she was supposed to check out this morning?” he asked.
“Yes, but then … you know.” She shook her head sadly.
“Let me tell you, it came as quite a shock.” Dell rested his cigarette in the ashtray and said, “She was such a nice person. A violinist at the Brock Conservatory. She was here for the festivities. She liked the doves outside her window, said they woke her up early, but that it was better than an alarm clock. She spent a lot of time looking at the brochures and asking for recommendations. She was curious about the Witch Museum.”
“Speaking of which, Dad, did you know Harry Crenshaw slipped and fell last night?”
Dell’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding me. Not another casualty.”
“You know Harry, right, Natalie? He manages the museum. Broke his hip. Once your hip goes, well…” Belinda shook her head sadly. “It’s all downhill from there.”
“What the hell is happening?” Dell asked rhetorically. “First Ned Bertrand has a stroke, then Jenny Marley passes away … you know Jenny, don’t you, Natalie? She ran that dry cleaning establishment over on Dunham Hill Road. And now poor Harry breaks a hip. I should go visit him, Belinda.”
“I’ll take you to the hospital this evening, Dad.”
“Maybe Death’s coming for me next?” he said with a wink.
“Dad … you’re never going to die. I won’t let you.”
“Ha. You hear that, Natalie?”
She smiled. They were never going to call her Detective Lockhart, so she didn’t bother correcting them. They’d both known her since she was a little girl, when her father used to take her along with him on his beat. The lower half of Joey’s face was sunburned from walking the beat from noon until ten at night. He knew these streets like the back of his hand. He knew every alleyway, every dead-end street, every business establishment and vacant building. Joey didn’t just walk the beat, he strode, chest puffed, eyes alert, covering an area from Gerry’s House of Style to Perlia Lane. His turf.
“When’s the last time you saw Morgan?” Natalie asked him.
Dell rolled his eyes. “Gosh, I don’t remember. We were fully booked, and it gets so busy this time of year … everybody has questions or special requests. There’s so much to do. Some of the guests leave their rooms in a terrible mess. Things get broken or go missing. There’s so much confusion, it’s just…” He craned his neck. “Belinda? When was the last time you saw her?”
His daughter paused to rub the back of her neck. “Umm … yesterday around four o’clock, I think.” The phone rang in the background. “That’s for me…”
“Before you go,” Natalie said, “what did she say when you saw her yesterday afternoon?”
“She didn’t really have time to talk. She came into the inn carrying a couple of shopping bags and said she had to get ready to go out. I don’t know. It was so busy. That’s all I can recall.”
“What kind of shopping bags?”
“One was from Murray’s Halloween Costumes, I noticed.”
Natalie nodded. It matched the label on Morgan’s Wonder Woman costume. “Anything else?”
“No. Sorry.” Belinda tilted her head apologetically. “I gotta take this.”
Natalie watched her run off to catch the phone. “Which room was Morgan staying in?” she asked Dell, whose eyes shifted focus from the doorway where Belinda had just been to the marigolds on the coffee table.
“Suite Two B. Very nice, with an eastern view.”
“I’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind.”
Natalie followed the innkeeper up a creaky flight of wooden stairs to the second floor. Suite 2-B was charming, with a four-poster bed, a brick fireplace, and a view of the rose garden. There was a small flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, a Keurig coffeemaker, and a white-tiled bathroom. The Sunflower Inn wasn’t cheap.
“How much did she pay for the room?” Natalie asked.
“One fifty per night.”
Natalie added it up. Six hundred dollars was a lot of money for somebody who was struggling to pay the rent, but that’s what credit cards were for. Natalie had issues in that department as well.
“I’m not sure what to do with her belongings,” Dell said now.
“Don’t touch anything,” she told him. “I’ve asked Detective Labruzzo to process the room for prints and trace evidence. He’ll be here shortly with a search warrant. After that, an officer will pack everything up and make sure it gets back to her family. Did she have any guests while she was here?”
“Visitors?” Dell shook his head. “Not that I recall.”
“Do you keep surveillance tapes?”
He seemed shocked at the suggestion. “Never. We value our guests’ privacy.”
The small bathroom was cluttered with Morgan’s stuff—a hairbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, lipstick. Natalie found Morgan’s suitcase and overnight bag tucked inside the closet. Her clothes were hung up neatly on their hangers. On the bedside table were Morgan’s phone charger, her travel alarm clock, and another library book on witchcraft, which she’d checked out of the Burning Lake Library two weeks ago. It was due back tomorrow. Tucked inside the book was a promotional brochure for Halloween in Burning Lake, and there was a phone number scribbled on the front in blue ink.
Natalie dialed the number and listened to the automated response.
“The number you have reached is no longer in service…”
She opened the side table drawer and spotted a wrist brace. “Is this hers?”
Dell squinted. “We clean up after every guest, so I suppose it must be.”
After searching the entire room, Natalie hadn’t found a violin. “Did you see her take her violin out of the inn with her?”
“Like I said, Natalie,” he said with a sigh, “it was a zoo around here.”
“Okay. Has she ever stayed at the inn before?”
He shook his head. “She was a first-timer.”
“Is her car still here?”
“Out back.”
Outside, the fallen leaves rustled underfoot. The backyard was broad, with a couple of wooden benches and a mazelike path through the dying, sweet-smelling rose garden. The sun was about to set. The sky was pastel pink along the horizon, dark purple above.
Natalie found Morgan’s green Kia Rio in the parking lot and called Augie to have it towed away to the impound lot, where it could be processed for blood and prints. She thanked Dell and Belinda for their cooperation, then drove across town to the public library.
The library was closed. She would try again in the morning.
Natalie rested her forehead against the steering wheel of her car. Exhaustion took hold. It felt like something awful was about to happen, only she couldn’t control it. Her stomach twinged as she turned on the ignition again.
For some reason, “Happy Birthday” was playing on the car radio—part of an ad for health insurance coverage. How could she have forgotten Luke’s thirty-ninth birthday? She retrieved her phone and checked her messages—nothing that couldn’t wait. She saw things clearly for a moment through the fog of burnout. It was the kind of clarity that death can bring, brushing away the cobwebs and making room for reality. Morgan’s life had ended tragically and pointlessly. That was today’s lesson. Live your life fully, before it’s too late.
She dialed Luke’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Natalie? What’s up?”
“I’d like to take you out to dinner for your birthday. I thought maybe Lucia’s…”
“Thanks, but…” He hesitated. “But I’ve got other plans.”
“Oh.” She tried to mask her disappointment.
“Rainie Sandhill invited me out to dinner,” he said softly.
“She did?”
“Yep.”
Silence.
“Natalie?”
“That’s awfully nice of her,” she said, feeling feverish. “Anyway, I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday again.”
“Maybe some other time.”
“Sure. Bye.” She hung up and clutched the steering wheel, the tips of her ears burning. She drove home, feeling like the biggest loser on the planet.