Cherry Chocolate Murder Read online

  Chapter Five

  The next morning, Bitsie finally crossed paths with Anabel’s elusive boyfriend, James. When Bitsie arrived at ten, Anabel’s car wasn’t parked in its usual place. Bitsie hoped that Anabel hadn’t decided to stay home from work without telling anyone, but when Bitsie got inside, Anabel was there, hard at work frosting freshly-cooled cupcakes from that morning’s bake.

  “You didn’t bring your car to work today?” Bitsie asked.

  “It wouldn’t start,” said Anabel. “Hector stopped by on his way and picked me up this morning, and James will be here in half an hour to get me.” Anabel paused nervously before continuing. “You don’t mind if I leave a little early. I don’t really know exactly when James is coming, and he doesn’t like to wait—I’ll finish up the frosting before I go—“

  “Sure,” said Bitsie over her shoulder as she headed into the tiny office off the kitchen.

  Anabel wasn’t one to ask to leave early, but she also wasn’t one to take a lot of sick leave, at least not according to Liz, who’d been her boss for nearly six years and ought to know. Bitsie was betting that Anabel didn’t really want to leave work early, but she was more afraid of making her boyfriend angry than she was about lost wages or what Bitsie might think.

  Ten minutes later, Bitsie emerged from the office to find Anabel’s frosting job abandoned. The door that opened from the kitchen to the alley was propped open, and Bitsie could hear the voice of Anabel and a man arguing.

  “You should have called me instead,” said a man’s voice. “Why’d you call him? Are you having an affair with him?”

  “Hector was coming in to work anyway, and he just lives down the street.”

  “How very convenient!” said the man’s voice, dripping with sarcasm.

  “Did you really want me to wake you up at three o’clock in the morning?” asked Anabel.

  At this point, the mystery man, who Bitsie could only assume was James, let loose a string of abusive language that Bitsie could not bring herself to stand by and listen to.

  She knew she should stop and think before she acted, but she was just too angry. No one deserved to be spoken to that way, regardless of what they’d done, which in Anabel’s case—Bitsie was betting—was nothing at all. James’s accusation that Anabel was having an affair with Hector was absurd. Quite possibly, even James didn’t believe a word of what he was saying; it was just a made-up excuse to get angry.

  “Excuse me,” Bitsie said, stepping out of the doorway and into the alley.

  She stopped in her tracks. James had Anabel pushed up against the wall, both hands closing around her throat. Bitsie couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  She pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, she said, “I’d like to report an assault in progress.”

  James abruptly dropped his hands and let Anabel go. He turned on his heels and left, but not before he said, “You’ll pay for this.” He was looking at Bitsie, but she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that the person who would be paying was not herself, but Anabel.

  Anabel walked shakily to the back steps and sat down. She shook her head silently at Bitsie and mouthed, “Don’t,” as Bitsie started to give her location to the dispatcher.

  “Just a minute,” Bitsie said to the dispatcher. “You really don’t want to report this?” she asked Anabel.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Anabel just shook her head.

  “He’s gone now,” Bitsie said into the phone, “but I’d like to have an officer down here, anyway.”

  Anabel was silently protesting, but Bitsie persisted. The dispatcher said she’d send an officer out and that Bitsie should stay on the line. It might just make things worse for Anabel in the short-term, Bitsie realized, but how was doing nothing at all the right thing to do? It was her employee and her bakery, and even if it hadn’t been, she couldn’t stand to see anyone treated the way she’d just seen James treat Anabel.

  Bitsie hit the mute button on her phone and went and sat down on the steps next to Anabel.

  “You don’t have to let him do this to you. You know that, don’t you?” Bitsie said.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Anabel.

  Bitsie doubted that very much. She was sure Anabel had her reasons for staying with James, one of which was, undoubtedly, that she was too scared to leave him. Abusive men didn’t let go of their victims easily. Sometimes, the women who left them didn’t survive the experience, but risking the worst was the only way to break free from a man like James. Anabel needed someplace to go for a while where James couldn’t find her.

  “If you need a few weeks off,” said Bitsie, “you could go out of town for a while until—“

  “No, no,” said Anabel. “

  “I have a friend in St. Lewis,” said Bitsie, “she runs a place where you could stay. It’s not that hard to get a restraining order—you’ve even got a witness.”

  “I’m fine, really,” said Anabel, her voice still shaking.

  Bitsie wanted to say, “You are not even close to being fine,” but instead, she let the matter drop. When she had a chance, she’d look up the number of her friend who ran the women’s shelter and make Anabel take it, just in case she needed to make a quick getaway later on.

  The officer came and wrote a report, based largely on what Bitsie told him. Anabel didn’t want to press charges, she insisted. In fact, she all but implied that Bitsie was greatly exaggerating.

  After the officer left, Bitsie offered to take Anabel home, but she declined. She’d call her cousin to come get her, she said and wandered off in the direction of the convenience store down the street where Bitsie suspected James was waiting for her.

  That evening, Bitsie got together with Stan and Liz for supper. When she told Stan what had happened, he just shook his head.

  “That’s one of the most frustrating things about law enforcement,” Stan said. “Sometimes you know in your gut that something pretty terrible is going on, but the victim either can’t or won’t cooperate, and then there’s not much you can do—“

  “What do you think I should do now?” Bitsie asked.

  “At this point,” Stan said, “there’s not much more you can do.”

  “Just let her know that you’ll be there to help her when she’s ready for it,” said Liz.

  “In my opinion,” said Stan, “a guy like that, who has so little impulse control that he goes to his girlfriend’s workplace and spontaneously attacks her, he’s going to mess up again in a big way, sooner or later.”

  Stan was right, but James’s big mess-up turned out to be sooner than Bitsie could have imagined it, and she was even there to witness the immediate aftermath.

  A few days after James came to the bakery, Bitsie and Nick went to visit Roscoe. As they pulled into the parking lot, they saw three police cruisers pulled up at the entrance, lights flashing.

  Bitsie and Nick got out of the car and headed inside. Just inside the entrance, they were met by two officers practically dragging a red-faced and handcuffed young man in a nurse’s uniform. He had a nasty head wound that was bleeding down his neck and onto his scrubs. His face was distorted with rage, but not so distorted that Bitsie didn’t recognize him. It was James: Anabel’s James.

  Bitsie and Nick stepped aside to let the officers and their prisoner pass and headed on to Roscoe’s room.

  “You know who that was?” Bitsie asked, pausing outside Roscoe’s door.

  “The guy in the cuffs? No idea.”

  “That was Anabel’s boyfriend.”

  “The one who came to the bakery the other day and tried to choke her?”

  “Yeah,” Bitsie answered. “His name is James.”

  “James.”

  “Yeah. James.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Are you thinking that Anabel’s jerk boyfriend is the same person as the nurse who may have threatened to suffocate Malc
olm?”

  “They are both named James,” Nick pointed out.

  They were barely through the door of Nick’s Granddad’s room before Roscoe announced that there’d been another attempted-murder at Shady Grove.

  “Someone tried to kill Malcolm, again,” Roscoe said.

  “What happened?“ asked Bitsie. “On the way in we saw a nurse getting hauled away by the police.”

  “Well, you know that CNA that Malcolm says threatened to put a pillow over his face? Well, he just attacked Malcolm for real, only this time there were witnesses.”

  “Who?” asked Bitsie.

  “Ruby Sheers. She came to Malcolm’s room, and James was in there on top of him with both hands wrapped around Malcolm’s neck. Ruby screamed for help, but even then, James didn’t let go, so Ruby let him have it over the head with the lamp from Malcolm’s bedside table. That still didn’t make him loosen his grip, but, fortunately, there was another nurse and a couple of cleaning ladies out in the hall, and they pried him off.”

  After what she’d witnessed in the alley behind the bakery, Bitsie supposed that she should just be grateful that James hadn’t refused to let Anabel go when she’d caught him closing his hands around her throat. She doubted that James would be let out on bail too quickly, although she didn’t hold out much hope that they’d be able to hold him at the police station indefinitely, so she dialed Anabel’s number. If there was ever a moment when she’d be in grave danger, it would be right after James was released from custody.

  “I’d feel a lot better if you’d left town altogether,” Bitsie said to Anabel, as she made up the couch in her tiny living room to create a makeshift bed.

  “You really didn’t need to do this. I don’t think James would do anything to me. He’s mad at that old guy right now, not me.”

  Bitsie begged to differ with her, but it was no use arguing with a woman in denial. Unstable characters like James were always ready to transfer their anger onto the closest and most vulnerable of their available targets.

  “You don’t think he’d think to come here to look for you, do you?” asked Bitsie. She tried not to act like she was frightened of James, but she was. The man was clearly dangerous.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t.” Anabel tried to sound reassuring and failed.

  “You will go see a lawyer tomorrow, I hope. I really think you need a restraining order. The sooner, the better.”

  “That’s just a piece of paper,” Anabel pointed out. “It doesn’t really protect you. It only makes it easier to get a conviction after-the-fact.”

  Bitsie knew that was partially true; getting a conviction after-the-fact couldn’t make bruises or broken bones heal any faster, and it certainly couldn’t bring a dead person back to life. But it was an important first step towards getting free.

  “Promise me that you won’t take any calls from him,” Bitsie insisted.

  She knew she was overbearing, but, sometimes, interfering was the right thing to do.

  Anabel nodded her head.

  “I have to ask you something, Anabel,” said Bitsie. There would never be a better time to ask if James might have somehow been involved in poisoning the cupcake that had sickened Malcolm. Early on, Bitsie had viewed James more seriously as a possible suspect, but now, after seeing how he operated, poisoning as a murder-method didn’t seem his style.

  Still, James would have been in a position to have access to the medications of all the patients, and since he’d tried to take out Malcolm by brute force, it wasn’t entirely out of the question that he’d have already tried a subtler method.

  “James was on duty at Shady Grove the night Malcolm was poisoned,” Bitsie continued, watching Anabel intently for changes in her facial expressions. People might be very good at hiding their emotions, but no matter how good they were at lying, there was always that brief second when their true feelings flickered across their faces.

  “Yes, he was working that evening,” said Anabel. “But I know he didn’t do it.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Bitsie.

  “Because he was with me,” said Anabel. “He snuck out to the parking lot, and we—um—spent some time together in my car.”

  “But that surely doesn’t account for the whole evening,” said Bitsie. “He can’t have spent too much time out in the parking lot without his supervisor realizing she was short a staff member.”

  “No,” said Anabel. “We were only out there for about an hour, but it was during the time that Malcolm ate the poisoned cupcake.”

  “But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Malcolm could have tucked a cupcake he’d tampered with ahead of time into the box of cherry chocolate cupcakes that Nick and I brought in with us. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that someone either came into the shop, possibly days earlier, and bought a cherry chocolate cupcake with the intention of tampering with it, or they snitched a cupcake from the box Nick brought in the week before the poisoning and managed to keep it well enough to pass for fresh the following week. I think if a cupcake were sealed in a plastic box and kept in a refrigerator—“

  “You’re probably right that whoever tampered with the cupcake did it ahead of time, but they’d still have to have been there between the time you and Nick arrived with the fresh box and the time that Malcolm ate the cupcake in order to substitute the poisoned one for one of the fresh ones.”

  “True.”

  “I know James couldn’t have done it because I saw you arrive with Nick while I was out in the car with James. When James went back inside, it wasn’t more than five minutes later that he texted me and said that Malcolm had collapsed.”

  “Did he seem happy about it?”

  “Yeah, of course. He hates Malcolm.”

  “But not enough to poison him?”

  “Maybe, but he couldn’t have been the one who did it.”

  “But five minutes between the time he left you and the time Malcolm collapsed would be plenty to slip him a poisoned cupcake,” Bitsie said. As soon as she said it, she realized that her reasoning was fundamentally flawed. It takes time for the poison to work on the system, and, according to Malcolm’s story, several minutes had passed between the time he’d taken those first two bites and started to feel dizzy and then another delay between the time he’d sent Roscoe for a nurse and when he’d actually passed out.

  “If James had gone to all the trouble to plan a poisoning,” Anabel argued, “why would he have been out in the parking lot with me when he should have been inside waiting for an opportunity to slip Malcolm the tainted cupcake?”

  Anabel had a very valid point. Bitsie didn’t think Anabel was lying about having been in the parking lot with James, but she’d still like to see proof of the time-line.

  “Do you still have the text he sent you?” she asked Anabel. “Do you mind if I check the time on it?”

  Bitsie expected Anabel to protest, but she didn’t. She found the text and handed her phone to Bitsie.

  The text said precisely what Anabel had suggested that it would. It had been sent at 7:58 PM, just a few minutes after Malcolm had collapsed.

  “Did anyone else see you and James together that evening?” asked Bitsie, handing Anabel’s phone back to her.

  “Yes. We got caught by one of the other CNA’s. She was really mad. She found us out in my car and yelled at him. Said she’d spent the past half-hour trying to locate him.”

  “Did she report James to their supervisor?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Anabel. “She was mad, but she’s kind of scared of James, I think.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Cherise.”

  Chapter Six

  James ended up being held for just twenty-four hours before he was released on bail, but by that time, Anabel was gone.

  Anabel had a sister in Chicago who invited her to come to stay for a couple of weeks, and Bitsie encouraged Anabel to go. Her job would be waiting for her, when she returned, Bitsie assured her.
The morning before Anabel got on a flight to Chicago, she’d gone to see a lawyer and started the paperwork to file for a restraining order.

  Bitsie should have felt relieved, but she didn’t. As long as James was out and about, she couldn’t rest easy. She still wasn’t entirely convinced that he couldn’t have been the one to poison Malcolm, so, even though she was exhausted from taking Anabel’s place on the early-morning shift at the bakery, she went straight to Shady Grove after she got off at noon. She wanted to track down Cherise and see if she’d corroborate Anabel’s claim that James had spent almost the entire hour leading up to Malcolm’s collapse out in the parking lot and well away from the scene of the crime.

  When she arrived at Shady Grove, she went straight to Roscoe’s room.

  Roscoe was happy to see her but disappointed that she’d arrived alone.

  “Didn’t bring Nick with you today, I see,” he said. “Not seen much of that boy, lately.”

  Bitsie hadn’t seen much of Nick, lately, either. Ever since the arrival of the mystery woman from Nebraska, she’d seen much less of Nick than she’d grown accustomed to. Nick was perfectly friendly, but there were no more dinner invitations or suggestions that they catch a movie. He even seemed to be suddenly avoiding any discussion of the poisoned cupcake case, though he must be concerned about it.

  As of yet, the police investigation hadn’t yielded any evidence leading to an arrest, and Stan was keeping quiet about how things were progressing. He was happy to hear anything Bitsie might have to tell him, but the flow of information coming from his direction was nonexistent. Bitsie supposed that she didn’t blame him. She was too close to one of the suspects in the case, and for Stan to tell her anything that she might be tempted to pass on would be unethical. Still, Bitsie couldn’t help being curious about what he’d found out.