A Game of Cones Read online

  “Didn’t you have him pegged as the last murderer?”

  “I think he’s capable.”

  “Oh brother.” I closed my eyes and let my neck roll around.

  “Let’s go and talk to him,” she said, excitement and determination locked in her voice. “Find out where he was last night.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you didn’t like him. You said you were never stepping foot in his restaurant again.”

  “I’m not going in the restaurant. I’m just going down the street to talk to him.” She grabbed my wrist, wrapping her fingers around it tightly, and started dragging me along. “C’mon. The detective would want us to.” Before I could protest, she raised her other hand and waved. “Hey! Hey, Ari!” she shouted. “Wait up!”

  chapter

  SEVEN

  That sub smells good,” Ari said after we made our way to him. “You got it hot, huh?” He pointed to Maisie’s sub and I could see his muscles ripple under his white button-down shirt. I couldn’t understand how Maisie could think someone so handsome could do something so heinous.

  But that was Maisie. She was a lot like a banana split, not knowing exactly what to be so she tried to be a little bit of a lot of things. But when she did set her mind to something, it was next to impossible to get her to change it. She turned into a DQ Blizzard—even if you turned her upside down and gave her a good shake, you couldn’t get her to move. And proving Ari Terrain was a cold-blooded killer just seemed to be one of those things that she was stuck on.

  Ari smiled that big wide, easy smile of his, and his scent—a cool breeze—wafted up my nose.

  He squinted to keep the sun out of his brown eyes, and his long dense lashes made it nearly impossible to see the sparkle in them.

  “How are things over at Molta’s?” Maisie asked. Small talk. I guess that was her interrogation tactic of the day.

  “Everything is good. Why?” He shot a look at me, mischief in his eyes. “They’re not treating you right over at Crewse Creamery?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just like being with family all day.”

  “Well, if you change your mind about working there”—he winked at me—“you’re always welcome back at Molta’s.”

  Maisie let out a cough and I knew exactly what she was thinking: She’d never work for a murderer.

  Although, she had yet to prove he’d ever committed one.

  “And we’re just heading back to work,” I said and gave Maisie’s arm a tug.

  “What was on the menu last night?” Maisie asked, pulling her arm away from mine. “Anything scrumptious?”

  “Maisie, you know that’s all we serve. Eye-appealing, skillfully prepared, scrumptious food.” He chuckled as he stroked his closely trimmed goatee with his thumb and forefinger, and stuck his other hand in the pocket of his brown trousers.

  That didn’t tickle Maisie at all.

  “What exactly was it?” she asked, her face stern. She was determined to find out his whereabouts. “You remember? Or weren’t you there?”

  “Of course I was there,” he said. He looked upward and stroked his beard again. “I think it was lamb.”

  “You think?” Maisie said.

  “We should probably go,” I said, fully prepared to pick her up and carry her away if it would stop her.

  “Why didn’t you come to the shop owners’ meeting last night?” she asked him, changing her approach and ignoring me and my plea.

  “Oh, I heard about it—” he began.

  “You heard about it?”

  “Yes. Happy to donate money for what you are trying to do.”

  “Is that why you weren’t there?”

  “Because I want to donate money for your cause?” He blinked his eyes, seemingly trying to process what she was saying. He glanced over at me. I hunched my shoulders. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Because you knew they were going to build a mall, didn’t you?”

  “A mall?” He seemed to be getting more confused by the minute. “There’s going to be a mall?” He tilted his head. “In Chagrin Falls?” He looked around as if trying to imagine it. “No.” He shook his head. “Couldn’t be.” He looked at Maisie. “There’s not going to be a mall.” There was conviction in his voice.

  “There isn’t going to be one?” Maisie asked, leaning in and turning her head like she wanted to be sure to hear every word he said. “Why? Because you made sure of that?”

  “What?” His nose scrunched up.

  “She’s hungry,” I said and yanked her arm so hard she nearly leapt off the ground. I twirled a finger close to my temple. “Her sugar is low and she is just talking out of her head.” I dragged her off down the street. “Bye!” I waved as I got behind Maisie and pushed her up the street and around the corner onto North Main Street.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “That man is sneaky.”

  “He is not.” While I didn’t know Ari Terrain all that well, what I knew about him I liked. Even after I found out he might have done some not so legal stuff with the last murder victim we had, like robbing pharmaceutical warehouses. I had decided everyone needed a second chance. And he was doing well with his.

  “He is too. He’s trying to protect Molta’s.”

  “Protect Molta’s from what?”

  “Remember when Riya said that everything is going upscale?”

  “No. I don’t remember.” I did remember her saying it, I just didn’t want Crewse Creamery labeled like that. We were just a family ice cream parlor. “But Molta’s is upscale,” I said.

  “And every other shop around here is a mom-and-pop establishment.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So he wouldn’t want an upscale mall going up around here because then he wouldn’t stand out anymore. People wouldn’t come to his establishment as much.”

  “So?”

  “Sooo . . .” She drew the word out that time. “He doesn’t want any competition.”

  “So he killed Zeke Reynolds to stop him from building a mall?”

  “Yes!”

  “Zeke Reynolds wasn’t building the mall,” I said. “Remember? ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’? He only worked for the people who were—are—building the mall.”

  “Rhys Enterprises.”

  “Right,” I said, hoping I had convinced her that she had it all wrong about Ari.

  “He probably planned on killing them next.” She let her eyes drift off. “The whole lot of them.”

  “Who?” I asked cautiously.

  “Ari,” she answered resolutely.

  I slapped my forehead. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “What?” she said. She gave me a sideways glance then smiled. “Okay. So maybe it wasn’t him who killed Zeke Reynolds.”

  I couldn’t do anything but shake my head.

  “Walk with me to check on the building,” she said, doing a one-eighty about-face.

  “Check on the building?” I had to think for a moment about what she meant, she changed subjects so abruptly. “Oh,” I said. “Your building.”

  “Yeah. I’m worried about it.”

  “What about your food?” I pointed down to the bag. “It’ll get cold.”

  “I won’t be able to get it down, hot or cold, if I don’t check on the building.”

  “Don’t worry.” I frowned to show I felt for her. “Maybe Rhys Enterprises won’t want to put their new mall in such a crime-ridden town and withdraw the offer.”

  “How can they come in and buy my building anyway?”

  “You don’t know that they have,” I said. “So don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “That snake of a mayor would know.”

  “Oh goodness. Why is the mayor a snake?”

  “Didn
’t you see how he slithered in and dropped off that building-stealing messenger boy and then slithered right back out?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I did see that.”

  “Even though he’s sneaky—”

  I cut her off. “I thought it was Ari who was sneaky and the mayor was a snake.”

  “The mayor’s even sneakier than Ari.” She gave a firm nod. “A sneaky snake. And even though he is, he was probably rooting for the mall to come here.”

  “I’m sure there’s a point to that assessment.”

  “There is. It means the mayor is probably not the killer.”

  “Oh brother.” I blew out a breath. “I’ll walk with you to check on your building if you promise not to talk anymore about whodunit.”

  “Wasn’t my idea for us to start looking into it in the first place.”

  “Ah. Ah. Ah.” I held up a finger to stop her. “Deal?”

  She lifted an eyebrow, saying she wasn’t sure if she could make that promise or not.

  I sucked my tongue. “C’mon,” I said. “By the time you eat that sub, it’ll be cold.” I shook my head. “Didn’t do you any good to get it hot.”

  “Yes, it did,” she said. “I got to cross one suspect off my list. I found out that Ari Terrain didn’t do it.”

  “Oh my lord!” I gave her a push. “C’mon, Agatha Raisin, let’s go!”

  chapter

  EIGHT

  We crossed to the other side of the street after leaving Ari near the town hall and landed in front of the hardware store.

  Our village’s hardware store was a thing from the past. It had three different sets of windows and all were filled with displays. Some hardware-like, some not so much.

  That was when I saw Myles Mason.

  He was down on his luck these days, and it seemed that people had started to avoid him. He was an artist by passion, but to make a living he had sold life insurance for years, including a five-hundred-dollar policy to my grandparents that hadn’t covered a thing when my grandfather had to bury Grandma Kay. But my grandmother loved him. When she was alive he’d come once a month to collect the premium and end up spending the afternoon “chewing the fat” with her.

  Even after she took sick, he’d still come and sit with her on her bench. That gave him a special place in my heart.

  “Hello, Mr. Mason,” I said.

  He turned to look at us. Initially a blank look on his face, then it brightened. “Win,” he said. “Hi.”

  “You remember Maisie?” I asked. “She’s Rivkah Solomon’s granddaughter.”

  “The Village Dragon.”

  “Right,” I said and nodded.

  “Did he just call my grandmother the village dragon?” Maisie leaned over and asked.

  “He was talking about the name of her restaurant.”

  “I talked to your grandmother yesterday, Win,” he said.

  “You did?” I said and smiled. He was down on his luck, but I’d never known him to talk out of his head.

  “Yep. Sure did.” He gave me a lopsided smile that showed me the two or three teeth he had left. “You want to know what she said?”

  “I sure do. What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said she was real pleased with the way you was running her ice cream shop.” He nodded his head as he spoke, as if it were a fact.

  I grinned and blushed despite knowing he couldn’t talk to the dead. Sure, he went over to the cemetery, I’d seen some of his paintings from there. He could actually make the tombstones and landscape look beautiful—hauntingly beautiful.

  “Were you there painting?”

  “Oh no.” He hung his head and started rubbing his right arm. That was when I noticed he held it funny, like it was weak. “I don’t do that anymore. Those people are nothing but a jack of spades.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew how much he enjoyed painting. I was sorry to hear he wasn’t doing it anymore. “That’s too bad,” I said. “You’re so good at it.”

  “If I were painting,” he said, “I’d get that.” He turned and pointed to something in the window of the hardware store. I leaned in and peeked around him.

  “A tackle box?” I asked.

  “No, next to it,” he said and smiled at me.

  I looked and saw he was talking about a gun. An old-time revolver that was part of a cowboy display. “You don’t need that.” There had been enough shooting. “Why don’t you get the tackle box? You have paint to keep in it, don’t you?”

  “No.” He grinned again. No shame in being toothless. “I threw them all away,” he said. “You know what else I saw?” he asked, changing the subject without warning.

  “What else did you see?” Maisie asked.

  “I saw a red ball bouncing down the alleyway.” He pointed toward the street that ran behind the shops.

  “A red ball?” I asked.

  He nodded. Still grinning.

  “We have to go, Mr. Mason,” I said, not sure how to interpret that comment, or any of the things he’d said. “You come by the ice cream store sometime and get yourself a scoop.”

  “Will do,” he said and tipped an imaginary hat.

  “You see why I have to set up my community center,” Maisie leaned into me and whispered. “To help Chagrin Falls residents like Mr. Mason.”

  “I think he needs help more from someplace like my brother Bobby’s clinic.” I turned back and looked at him still standing in front of the hardware store peering in. “He seems to be eating okay, at least from the way he looks.” My heart went out to him. “Don’t know how he’s making money if he’s not painting anymore, though, so I don’t know how he’s living. And why would he want a gun so he could paint? That makes no sense.”

  We had to pass my ice cream shop to get to Maisie’s building, as well as the other shops that resided on the leg of the triangle where the proposed mall would be built. There were currently five occupied, and the empty one that Maisie wanted. It was located next to her community garden. To the back of it was another grassy plot of land.

  As we passed each building, Maisie read out the shop name and announced, in her opinion, whether its owners were guilty of Zeke’s murder based on whether they had been present at the meeting or not.

  “Blue Moon,” she read off the sign as we passed the boutique. “Who owns that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I glanced in the storefront window as we passed. “They’ve only been there a year. I was too wrapped up in renovations all year to go and introduce myself. Plus, they’re Ms. Devereaux’s competition. My grandfather would hold me out as a traitor if I befriended whoever owns that place.”

  “Do you think the owner was there last night?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Maisie, seeing, like I said, I don’t know who the owner is.”

  “So, there’s another possible guilty proprietor,” she said.

  “Or not.”

  “Are you going to be a naysayer through this whole investigation? Because we’ll never find anything out with that attitude.”

  “Did you know that Blue Moon . . .” I said, ignoring her comment and tilting my head, “and all these shops”—I waved my finger toward the buildings in the block we were walking—“are having a fire sale?”

  “Has there been a fire?” she asked.

  “I asked the same thing,” I said. “Although I was being sarcastic when I asked, it appears that the answer to that is no. It’s just the name they came up with for this big sales event they’re having.”

  “Did you know about the big sale?” she asked.

  “Not until this morning when Amelia Hargrove came in and asked could she post an advertisement for it.”

  “So, what, you want to go to it?”

  “No,” I said and scrunched up my face.

  “Participate?”

/>   “No, I mean, I might come up with some special or something to get people into the store while it’s going on. I just wondered why I hadn’t heard about it.”

  “Maybe it’s a conspiracy.”

  “What?” I said, my eyebrows wrinkling.

  “Zeke’s murder.” She was matter-of-fact. “Maybe the shop owners involved in the fire sale all killed him, and now they’re selling off their wares and leaving town because they don’t want to get caught.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense,” I said. “Wasn’t he only shot once?” I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t that mean they couldn’t have all been involved?”

  “Uh . . .” she started, but I interjected.

  “I thought your premise was that if the shop owner wasn’t there, they’re not a suspect.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right. That’s what I think.” She gave me a firm nod. “So?”

  “Well, Amelia Hargrove was there. At the meeting. And she’s taking part in the fire sale.” I pointed over my shoulder to her shop, which we’d already passed.

  “Oh.” Maisie clucked her tongue. “Still,” she said, undeterred, “I probably should make a list of the shops, their owners and their attendance at the meeting.”

  “Why?” I asked. Geesh! Hadn’t I just proved her shaky theory wrong?

  “For my suspect list.”

  I groaned. “Didn’t we have a deal?” I looked at her. “No Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot talk. We’re supposed to be going to check on your building.”

  “And I could go over the list with your grandfather.” She was still running the logistics of corralling her suspects through her mind. “I could ask him if the owner of each shop was at the meeting last night.” She nodded like that was a good plan. “He would know.”

  “Why do you think he’d know?” I asked.

  My grandfather was as big of a wannabe sleuth as Maisie. I found out he’d been following me around while I tried to investigate the last murder on my own like he was an old-time gumshoe. Said he was trying to protect me. He was seventy-nine years old—what did he think he was going to do if someone attacked me? Help me scream? Then he came up with people he wanted me to question. His own little suspect list.