We headed into the police station with a host of questions to seek answers for. Had Samuel hired a private investigator to follow his wife? And if he had, was it because he suspected her of being unfaithful? And what about that sign he put up at the end of last winter? Had it caused a rift between him and Ralph Martin?
More than anything else, did either of these possibilities come anywhere close to making someone want to kill Samuel Morrow? And if so, why did the murderer take my wedding band from the jewelry store?
Neither Alex nor I had mentioned the missing ring when we questioned Eliza, her beefcake driver, or the Founders’ Day committee ladies. For my part, I hadn’t said anything because I’d grown to loathe questions about the wedding and all the plans that surrounded it. I hadn’t asked Alex why he never brought it up to any of the people we’d spoken to, but I suspected it had more to do with keeping that part of the case under wraps for now than not wanting to discuss how his soon-to-be bride wouldn’t have a wedding band for him to slip on her finger on the big day.
And that said something since every time anyone in town even began to broach the subject of our wedding, he cringed. More than anything else, Alex Montero was a private man. That he happened to be marrying me made safeguarding that privacy a Herculean task, for sure.
“Poppy, I’m going to get working on getting Samuel’s bank, credit card, and phone records. Since he didn’t use a cell, we only have to get a hold of the store’s phone records and the house phone records, for now.”
“But what if that’s in his wife’s name?” I asked, suspecting nothing was in Eliza Morrow’s name.
Alex smirked. “I have a feeling everything was in our victim’s name. She hasn’t worked since they moved here over twenty years ago. I’d bet the utilities, credit cards, and the mortgage were all in his name.”
I nodded, but the setup all sounded so old fashioned. Maybe I’d been single for too long, but the thought of everything in my world being in my husband’s name sounded completely foreign.
As he worked the phone to get Samuel’s bank and phone records, I mulled over our interview with Eliza Morrow. I’d thought of her as severe, but as she spoke to us sitting in that beautifully decorated living room, at times she’d been downright icy. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt since I knew as well as anyone that mourning was an intensely individual matter. The problem was that nothing in her behavior said she was mourning.
And how likely was her claim that she hadn’t been inside her husband’s jewelry store in years? I tried to imagine my husband’s business being less than half a mile from my home and never once stopping in over the years, and it seemed improbable. Had she said that just to make sure we didn’t think she could be the murderer?
If so, it had backfired.
Then again, Eliza had rarely been seen walking anywhere in town, so perhaps as Bruno Carter drove her out of town each time, likely passing right by Morrow’s Jewelry, she never told him to stop so she could pay a visit to her husband. Perhaps she and Samuel preferred to keep his business life and their personal life separate.
That I could certainly understand.
And what about that driver, Bruno, who looked like a model and had a body that made me think he spent hours each day at the gym? Who was this guy and why was he driving a woman twenty years his senior around? While it seemed to be a full-time job for him, he couldn’t be making good money being a driver and resident car washer.
And speaking of being a resident, did he live at the Morrow’s too? If not, did he live nearby and walk to his work as a driver? That would be strange, at the very least.
I wished I knew how Samuel had felt about his wife’s driver. Unfortunately, we’d never been that close, so we’d never spoken about anything other than jewelry or small talk in passing about the weather and other pleasantries. Now that he was gone, I regretted not making more of an effort.
Was it possible that he suspected his wife of having an affair? I didn’t think she and the beefcake were sneaking around behind his back, but something seemed off about that guy. He seemed too protective of her and not like he cared at all about Samuel Morrow being murdered.
Alex got off the phone and turned to look at me. “You look a million miles away right now. What’s on your mind?”
“Eliza and her driver.”
“And what do you think?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow and smiling like he was amused by something.
“I’m not sure. All I know is my gut is telling me something’s off with them. I don’t know what, though.”
“Do you think Mrs. Morrow was having an affair?”
I thought about it for a moment before answering, “I don’t know. If so, they make one of the oddest looking couples I’ve ever seen. I’m having a hard time picturing them together.”
He chuckled at me. “I find it better, overall, not to picture most people together.”
“Well, I’m not sure about them cheating. All I know is I had a sure sense something was off between them.”
“I trust your gut, Poppy, so I’m not ruling anything out yet.”
“Thanks,” I said, beaming a smile.
Nodding, he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to get a look at those phone and bank records. If Samuel was having a private investigator watch his wife, we’ll be able to see that somewhere in them.”
“Until then, what are we going to do?” I asked, antsy to get really moving on this case.
He thought about my question for a moment and sat forward in his chair. “I’ll tell you what. Since you look like you’re about to jump out of that seat, how about you take a walk up to Martin’s Pharmacy and strike up a conversation with Ralph Martin? See if Mrs. Scanlon is onto anything with that idea of hers that Samuel’s sign was a thorn in Ralph’s side.”
I jumped up from my chair, thrilled to not only get out of his office but also that Alex trusted me enough to let me go interview someone for the case. It wouldn’t be anything official and wouldn’t hold up in court, but I wasn’t going to be trying to extract a confession from Ralph Martin. Alex wanted my sense of how he felt about Samuel and his sign, and that made me feel more valuable than I ever had on any case we’d worked together.
“Okay! I’ll take a walk up there and see what I can find out. Maybe we can grab a bite to eat when I get back,” I said as I headed toward the door.
“Oh, yeah. That sounds fine. I didn’t expect you to run out like this, but I’m happy that you’re enthusiastic about going to talk to him. Just be careful.”
I spun on my heels and smiled at Alex. “Not that I’m trying to get away from you or anything, but this is the first time you’ve ever had me do anything like this on a case. So I’m pretty excited about it. And it’s broad daylight, so I think I’ll be fine walking up the street.”
As usual, Alex showed his cautious side and held his hands up to slow me down. “Don’t get crazy with this, Poppy. Remember, you aren’t officially a cop. You’re just a deputy. I’m not even sure if he says anything to you that it would be admissible in court. I just trust your gut enough that I want to know what you think Ralph is feeling about Samuel’s death.”
“It means a lot to me that you think my gut is trustworthy, Alex. I won’t let you down.”
I made a move to leave but heard him say, “I love you, Poppy.”
Looking back at him, I blew him a kiss. “I love you. See you in a little while.”
Happy to go out and do field work on my own, I headed out of the station and up Main Street toward Martin’s Pharmacy. As I walked up the street, I noticed the flower baskets hanging from the lampposts that the Founders’ Day committee had planned to put up in advance of the events next month. I had to admit that those ladies sure did good things for the town, even if the price we all paid was having them lord over everyone with their gossip.
The pink, yellow, and white flowers in the baskets made me even happier, so by the time I reached Ralph Martin’s pharmacy, I had to remember to dial back my joy since I was about to speak to him about the death of his business neighbor. It wouldn’t do to be discussing poor Samuel’s demise with a silly smile on my face.
Martin’s Pharmacy felt like someone had frozen it in time and protected it from much of modern day America. Unlike major chain pharmacies, Martin’s didn’t carry much more than drugs and medical supplies. A few grocery items, but no makeup or seasonal goods like rakes, shovels, or sand pails made their way onto the shelves of the store.
No, like drug stores of old, Martin’s offered any kind of over the counter medicine for headaches to back pain, along with ACE bandages in a variety of sizes and a selection of canes that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Sunset Ridge. And behind the counter of the pharmacy, Ralph filled any prescription you handed him.
He carried greeting cards for a while when I was a little girl until Gladys McMullen opened her stationery shop called The Write Way at the other end of Main Street. Shortly after at a town council meeting, they came to an agreement that she wouldn’t carry anything that could be considered medicinal and he wouldn’t sell cards so as not to intrude on her business. Since then, any time anyone asked about greeting cards, Ralph happily pointed them down the street to The Write Way and told them to say hi to Gladys. In return, she dropped the Martin Pharmacy name in any conversation she could in her shop.
I walked toward Ralph’s store and looked up at Samuel’s sign hanging over the sidewalk. Just as Mrs. Scanlon had said, I couldn’t see the much smaller Martin Pharmacy sign behind it. I stopped in front of the business and looked in through the windows. Just like it always looked, the walls were painted a pristine white, and the fluorescent lights lined the ceiling, illuminating the store.
The bell on top of the front door jingled as walked in to see if I could speak to the owner himself. Rows of white metal shelves to the left and right of a main aisle stood meticulously stocked and ready for any physical malady customers might have. A handful of customers milled about checking labels and tossing their chosen purchases into the metal baskets they held in their hands. At the far end of the store up on a level about three feet higher than the rest of the store a half wall painted white to match everything else separated Ralph and the pharmacy section from the floor below.
I craned my neck to see him standing behind the wall, the top of his head the only part of him showing. He hummed the tune playing low on the store’s speakers, a Muzak version of Donna Summer’s She Works Hard For The Money, as his thin hair bounced to the tune. I chuckled at the image of him dancing his heart out to an eighties tune behind that wall.
“Mr. Martin? Do you have a minute to talk?” I called out loud enough so he could hear me.
He immediately poked his head around the end of the half wall and smiled warmly at me. “Poppy McGuire, the soon-to-be bride! What can I do for you today?”
At that moment, I realized I hadn’t thought of any cover story for my visit, so I quickly scrambled to come up with something believable. “I was wondering if you had anything to brighten my teeth a little. I’ve always thought they were just fine, but next to my wedding dress, I feel like I look like some backwoodsman who’s spent the last ten years chewing tobacco.”
Ralph walked around the wall and came down to stand behind the register sitting on the glass case in front of me. “That’s crazy. You have a gorgeous smile, Poppy, but if you really want to brighten up your teeth a little, look in aisle three. I hear customers like the strips the best.”
He pointed in the direction where the toothpaste was displayed, and I pretended to pay attention to where I could find what he suggested. After looking over at aisle three, I turned back to face him and nodded.
“Thanks, Mr. Martin. How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”
“Well, I’ve been good. Thank you for asking, Poppy,” he said with a broad smile before catching himself and forcing a serious expression onto his face. “That is until yesterday. I’m still in shock.”
I nodded again to let him know I shared in his disbelief at what had happened to Samuel. “It is so terrible. It’s almost too much to think about. Samuel was such a wonderful man.”
“He was. This town will miss him.”
I watched as Ralph spoke about his next door neighbor in the business district and spotted no hints of pleasure that Samuel had been killed and no trace of anything resembling resentment toward him. He appeared to be genuinely unhappy that the jeweler had been killed.
However, I pressed on, knowing that even the most ordinary of people could successfully pretend to be something they weren’t.
“Were the two of you close, Mr. Martin?” I asked, keenly focused on his face for any changes in his expression when he heard my question.
But he simply nodded and smiled. “I think we were. Samuel Morrow was a true businessman in every sense of the word, and that included how he interacted with the rest of us here on Main Street.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not many people know this, but whenever Samuel planned on having a special sale in his store, he always approached every other store owner on the street to ask if they wanted to participate in some way. He sold the most profitable merchandise in town, yet he never failed to include everyone else in his success. That kind of professionalism isn’t as common as it should be.”
I’d never heard that about Samuel, but it didn’t surprise me. His goodness came through loud and clear every time you entered his store or saw him on the street.
“So you weren’t upset when he put that big sign up in front of his store that blocks yours?”
Ralph chuckled and waved away even the suggestion of his being angry at Samuel. “No. You should have seen his face when the sign company came to put it up. His eyes practically bugged right out of his head as he stood there and watched them hang that sign. I didn’t even get a chance to come out and see it before he came running into the store to tell me how it was all a big mistake and he’d fix it. The replacement sign was scheduled to come at the beginning of June.”
He began to choke up on his words and sighed. “I can’t believe someone could do that to him, Poppy. I know you’ve been working with the police. Do they have any idea who did it?”
Not wanting to share any details I knew weren’t for public consumption yet, I simply shook my head and frowned. “It’s early yet, but I know they’re working very hard to solve this case. Samuel was loved by everyone in town.”
“That he was. As I told the officer who came by that day, I have a hard time imagining anyone from Sunset Ridge could have done that to him,” Ralph said sadly.
“We spoke to his wife this morning. I can’t imagine how hard it is to lose your husband after twenty-five years.”
For a moment, he just nodded without saying a word, but I had a feeling there something was behind his silence. I waited a few moments more for him to continue the conversation and watched as he opened his mouth to speak and then closed his lips tightly, as if to stop the words from accidentally flying out.
Wanting to encourage him to say what was on his mind, I said, “She seems very strong, at least from what I saw when we spoke to her today. I can only hope that I’d be that strong if something happened to Alex.”
That loosened Ralph’s tongue, and after he twisted his face into an expression of distaste, he quietly said, “There’s strength, and then there’s strength. Some is better than others.”
I wanted to hear more about his ideas about strength, specifically Eliza Morrow’s brand of strength, but a customer interrupted us with a question about a prescription she held in her hand for a cream to help her eczema. The painfully thin woman stared at Ralph with wide eyes like he was the savior she’d been waiting all her life for to solve her problem, so I figured I wouldn’t be able to get any more from him and excused myself so she could have his complete attention. She elbowed me out of the way once she got the signal that our conversation had come to an end, and I turned and left the store still wondering what Ralph had meant by that comment about strength.
“Hey, Poppy! How are you?” a man’s voice called out as I started on my way back to report what I’d found out to Alex.
I turned around to see Nate Cardow standing outside his shoe store smiling at me. A sweet man of around fifty, he’d known my father for years and always treated me like the daughter he never had. He liked to wear sweater vests that only served to accentuate the roundness of his middle-aged belly years of drinking beer at McGuire’s has created.
“Hi Nate! How are you today?”
He began to walk toward me, still smiling like seeing me made his day. “I’m better now. It’s so nice to see you. Were you getting a prescription filled at Ralph’s?”
“No. I was just taking a walk on this beautiful May day. I’m just heading back to the station.”
“You’re still working with the police on cases? I know your father worries himself sick about that. Maybe you should take a break from it for a while.”
Clearly, my father had been doing some talking behind the bar. I knew he worried, but did he have to tell all his buddies about it? They were worse than the town gossips sometimes.
I patted Nate on the shoulder and chuckled. “I love it, though, so my father is going to have to keep worrying and trust that Alex won’t let anything happen to his soon-to-be bride. Nice seeing you again! Have a great one!”
I left him standing there in front of his store and made my way back down Main Street toward the police station feeling like I’d accomplished something in my time with Ralph. Mrs. Scanlon had seemed to misconstrue how he’d felt about that oversized sign of Samuel’s. That didn’t really surprise me, though. She was always trying to stir up trouble wherever she could, and creating problems between a dead man and a fellow businessman certainly wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done with her gossip.
By the time I reached Alex’s office, I had rehearsed my report on what had transpired at Martin’s Pharmacy at least three times. I knew it wasn’t a big deal or anything like that, but for the first time speaking to a person on a case alone, I wanted to get it right.
Alex sat typing on his laptop when I walked in, and he looked up with anticipation in his eyes when he saw I’d returned. “Back so soon? Did you find out anything?”
“You doubt me?” I joked as I sat down in front of his desk.
Shaking his head, he smiled. “Never. I’ve seen your talent in getting people to talk, Poppy. It’s practically supernatural. You could go into a room with ten perfect strangers and come out an hour later with all their deepest, darkest secrets.”
“Oh, stop,” I said, outwardly dismissing his compliments while inside I loved hearing them.
When he didn’t say anything more, I joked, “Well, I guess you took me seriously. But feel free any time to stroke my ego like that again. So I found out that Ralph wasn’t bothered in the least about that sign of Samuel’s.”
Alex looked disappointed by my announcement. Frowning, he said, “Oh. Okay. I guess Mrs. Scanlon was wrong.”
“She sure was. Ralph told me that he never even had a chance to say anything to Samuel before he apologized for the sign’s size. I guess it was a mistake, and a new one is being made to replace it. It’s supposed to be switched out early next month. Or at least it was supposed to. So the whole sign thing was a dead end.”
“I had a feeling it might be. Oh well. Thanks for checking that out.”
He began to tap away on his laptop again, but I cleared my throat and he looked across the desk at me, clearly confused. “Something else you want to talk about?”
I’d practiced this whole report the whole way down Main Street, and now he’d pretty much ruined all I’d planned. Disappointed, I said, “Yes. I didn’t spend my entire time talking about that silly giant sign, you know.”
Alex swiveled in his office chair so he faced me directly and gave me his undivided attention. “I’m sorry. I’m a little distracted. What else did you find out?”
“Well, I let Ralph know that we had spoken to Eliza Morrow earlier today, and he said something very interesting when I told him that I thought she was strong in how she was handling the death of her husband.”
Leaning forward, he asked, “Something interesting? Like what?”
I smiled and repeated Ralph’s words exactly as he’d said them to me. “He said, ‘There’s strength, and then there’s strength. Some is better than others.’”
Alex’s eyebrows slowly raised up into his forehead. “He said that about Eliza Morrow?”
“Yep.”
“Did he say anything else?” Alex asked, clearly interested in what I had to report.
I shook my head, wishing I had more to tell him. If only that pencil thin woman hadn’t interrupted us, I might have kept him talking a bit longer.
“No. One of his customers needed him to help her with her eczema prescription, so I didn’t have a chance to get any more out of him. But I thought that comment all on its own was pretty interesting.”
“It certainly isn’t a ringing endorsement of Eliza Morrow as a sympathetic figure,” Alex said, sitting back in his chair.
“I have the feeling very few people would say a lot nice about her. Being standoffish in a small town usually puts people off, and Eliza Morrow is the definition of standoffish.”
“I wonder what he meant,” Alex said, echoing the very thought in my mind at that moment.
“No idea, but I thought you’d find it interesting. Did you find out anything from the financial and phone records yet?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. We got the judge to sign off on us getting them, but it’s Sunday so it might take a little longer.”
Surprised to hear he’d made so much progress in the short time I’d been gone, I said, “You got Judge Harlow to do work on a Sunday? I’m impressed.”
Alex threw his head back and laughed. “You’d be amazed how helpful he is on Sundays. I think it’s the only day he doesn’t drink, so other than the hangover early in the morning, he’s pretty useful. Thank God, right, or we wouldn’t get anything on those records until tomorrow.”
“Speaking of tomorrow, we have the cake tasting,” I reminded him. “You didn’t forget, did you?”
He cringed, narrowing his eyes to slits. “No, but I’m still confused as to why we have to taste anything. It’s wedding cake. I’ve been to dozens of weddings, and every single piece of wedding cake has tasted the same. Tasteless cake with too sweet icing. It’s like there’s a universal recipe every baker knows.”
Alex had given me a hassle about this cake tasting idea ever since I first brought it up. He simply didn’t understand that a wedding cake didn’t have to be that awful dessert that tasted like sawdust and pure sugar topping.
“We have to taste samples so we know what we want our cake to taste like so it doesn’t taste like that typical wedding cake. I made sure to tell the lady at Charming that your favorite cake flavor is chocolate and mine is spice, so I expect those two will be part of the tasting. And I’ve told her that neither one of us like that stiff icing that makes you feel like your teeth are rotting out of your head, so there won’t be any of that.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“And I want fresh flowers on the cake, so she knows that.”
He squinted again, but this time he looked confused. “Fresh flowers? Are people going to be eating real flowers? I’m not sure I’m up for that, although my grandmother made dandelion wine years ago that my friend and I got into when we were teenagers and got pretty smashed off of.”
I had to laugh. Even when he was being difficult, he could still be quite cute. “Well, I’m not planning on having the flowers get anyone smashed, but don’t worry. I’m sure my father will make sure the alcohol is flowing just fine. This is a half Irish wedding, after all.”
“With the other half Italian, which adds to the celebrating. We’ll be lucky if Sunset Ridge is the same ever again after this wedding.”
I winked at him and chuckled. “I suspect it won’t be, in fact. One of this town’s old maids is marrying one of the most eligible bachelors in Sunset Ridge. The place is going to be forever changed after our wedding.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “I leave the most eligible bachelor in town thing to Derek. He’s had a lot of practice in the role. And you’ve never been an old maid.”
Before I could say I was worried about Derek after his breakup months ago from Solange, Alex’s computer made a sound to let him know he had a new email. Clicking on it, he smiled at me.
“Time to check out the bank records and see what Samuel knew or didn’t know.”