Chapter 10
The next morning, I decided a trip back to the hotel was in order. I hadn’t remembered to swing by to talk with the manager on Saturday, and he’d been out of the office on Sunday—go figure. Since I wanted to chat with him about a possible business arrangement, and I also wanted to pick the brains of some of his employees to see if there were any details I missed on the scene, I decided I could kill two birds with one stone.
Because I’m efficient like that.
Before running to the hotel, I decided to go to the diner for breakfast. I usually cooked for myself—most of the time my own food was best—but I was in the mood for a big omelet stuffed with everything, and a side of greasy hash browns. If I could get a couple slices of almost-burned bacon as well, I would be in heaven. When I went out to get in the Outlander, I saw my tires were flat. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
At first I thought it was just the front passenger’s tire that was flat, then I walked around and realized it was all of them. They were slashed, not accidentally flattened. In a town where the crime rate was usually miniscule, this couldn’t be random, could it? I sighed and went back inside to call the police department and a tow truck.
Officer Lambert, a little man with a thin mustache, came to the house and took the report. “We can check to see if anyone saw anything strange, but the chances that we’ll catch the perp aren’t good.” He studied all the tires and took a couple fibers off one wheel, but it was impossible to know when they had gotten there.
The tow guy didn’t arrive until after the officer had been gone for twenty minutes. He hauled the car up onto his flatbed truck and said they’d return the vehicle to me when they finished it. In the meantime, he took my AAA information, my insurance paperwork for the damage and my credit card information for the deductable. There are some advantages to small towns. In the city, I would have had to park my tush in a chair at the tire shop while I waited—which would have added insult to injury.
Still, this was so not what I needed. I went back inside to call my insurance company to start the paperwork.
Several hours passed while I tried to clean downstairs and waited impatiently for the guys at the garage to return my wheels.
As I’d anticipated, the hotel offices were located down a long hall on the far end of the building. The front desk clerk, a perky-looking girl with huge blue eyes, directed me where to go. I found Jet Larsen in his office, speaking on the telephone. I had to wait several minutes for him to finish the call, and he asked me to sit while he made a note or two. This gave me time to check out his degree in hotel management, his mounted fish—was it a swordfish? It was enormous—and his family pictures.
Finally, he turned my way. “Didn’t I see you around this weekend?” he asked before recognition crossed his face. “Tess, aren’t you? The cake lady?”
I loved that he already knew who I was. It smoothed things a bit. “That would be me. I’m impressed with your hotel.”
“Thanks—we’re trying to fill a need for the community, and I think we’re doing it well. The murder has put a major cramp in our bookings, though.” He leaned in and lowered his voice, as if someone might have his office bugged, wanting to know his company secrets. “We’ve even had a number of cancellations, which is never good.”
I nodded and gave him sympathetic looks. “I am sorry about that. Hopefully the police will be able to wrap it up soon. Having worked in a hotel for years, I know sometimes crazy things can throw off bookings.”
“Yes, but I’m sure that’s not why you came to me today. I saw your work on that cake, and I’d love to have someone with your abilities on staff, but I hope you know we can’t afford to hire a pastry chef full time.” He slid a pen through his fingers.
All the better for me. “I understand that, of course, but I thought we could consider a mutually beneficial arrangement. I’m opening my own business. Maybe we could arrange a sort of partnership.”
He set the pen down and crossed his arms in front of him on the desk, leaning in. “What did you have in mind?”
When I left his office twenty minutes later, we’d thrown around numbers, plans and ideas, and I promised to get back to him with some basic prices. He agreed to have a contract written up. If there were no bumps along the way, I’d become the exclusive provider of the more elaborate occasion cakes. I’d be happy to leave the everyday desserts to his restaurant staff.
As I headed down the hall, I came across the laundry room. The door was open and three women were in there with a large laundry cart, filling washing machines. The familiar hum of dryers, the slosh of front-loading washers and the babble of women’s voices was so familiar. I never worked in the laundry department, but over the years I made lots of trips there to collect clean towels for the kitchen.
“Hey, did any of you work on the wedding this weekend?” I asked when they noticed my presence.
A sandy-haired young woman with a bright smile turned, and I recognized a server from Sunday night. “I did. You made that gorgeous cake, didn’t you? Can you believe the murder? It, like, totally freaked me out.”
I stepped into the room. “I know, crazy, wasn’t it? I’ve worked a lot of celebrations, and seen a lot of insane things, including a number of fights, but I’ve never found a body before. Did you see anything strange that day?” I leaned back against the folding counter, allowing my shock to leak onto my face. “I ask because I’m still trying to figure it out. Friday night she was there, eating my brownies, and Saturday she was dead.”
“Spooky,” the forty-something redhead across the room agreed. “I wasn’t sure if I should come back to work after that. What if the hotel is cursed or something now?”
The third woman, a short Latina in her fifties, crossed herself and muttered something in Spanish.
That kind of thinking was exactly what we didn’t need, not if the hotel was going to get lots of bookings and send me scads of new clients. “Are you kidding? A murder gives the place character. What’s a hotel without a little juicy story here and there? Lots of high-class resorts are proud of their history, even the bad stuff. Besides, this could end up being interesting, don’t you think? Was it a lovers’ quarrel? A dispute over work? Maybe an illicit deal gone wrong? It’s practically a made-for-TV movie.”
The Latina moved a pile of towels off the folding table onto a set of shelves, and I sat in the empty space.
“Yeah, and the psycho could still be hanging around here, waiting to off another one of us,” the redhead said.
I hoped it was something personal against Valerie and not some new serial killer, but I wasn’t going to even think about that possibility. I didn’t have to feign a shudder at her suggestion. “Was there anything . . . off or unusual going on? Anything you remember?”
The Latina woman approached, opened a dryer and pulled out a gleaming white towel, starting to fold. “Dere was da tableclot.”
“Tablecloth?” I hadn’t heard anything about this yet.
“Yeah,” the younger woman piped up. “All the tables were covered with the centerpieces and everything Friday night when dinner finished up. But when we came in again the next day, one of the tables—one close to where the brownies had been set up—didn’t have the tablecloth anymore. The centerpiece had been moved to another table, and there was no sign of the cloth. And someone forgot to take away the leftover brownies the previous night—what few were left. I had to haul them off before the wedding party started coming down.”
She started up a washer at the end of the row and turned to help fold the fresh towels. “Anyway, we thought someone had stolen the cloth, so we pulled another one from the closet. Sunday morning, though, when we were cleaning, they found it stuck under the stairs in the corner exit. It had blood all over it, like they’d used it to clean up the floor in there—though polyester would be my last choice for that kind of job. I heard the detective say he thought that was what happened. They said someone, like, cleaned up the original mess because they found traces of blood smeared all over the floor.” She looked a bit sick when she added this.
I didn’t blame her, as I felt a bit sick myself. “That’s awful. I wonder why they didn’t stash the cloth with the body?” It seemed odd that the killer had carried the cloth anywhere when someone might have seen him or her with it. If they had the presence of mind to cover up the crime by hiding the body and cleaning the floor, why would they wander around with the tablecloth?
“Maybe they didn’t want it to be obvious that they’d moved the body. Someone didn’t want her to be found, I think. At least not until after the wedding.” The redhead started stuffing sheets into an open washing machine in the middle of the row.
“I’m sure Analesa would have thrown a fit about her maid of honor disappearing, but the ceremony would have gone on without Valerie if I hadn’t found her.” That was an angle I hadn’t considered. Did the killer want the wedding to happen before the body was found? That would make it who? Analesa herself? Her parents? Tad’s family? So many options, so little apparent motive for the murder. They all seemed like petty complaints to me.
Except no one but the married couples seemed to have alibis, and who trusted the spouse’s word, anyway? “Did any of you see or hear anything else odd?”
“Nope.” The young woman looked around her; the other ladies shook their heads as well. That was it, then.
“All right, thanks. Never a dull moment around here, is there?” I hopped off the counter.
They agreed and I said goodbye, hoping they thought I was just curious and that they wouldn’t make a big deal out of my visit.
Now I had to look more closely at all the people who had a stake in getting the wedding out of the way before the body was found. Who would want to kill Valerie, but hide her until the end of the day? One of the parents? A member of the wedding party? They had already been on my list, with few exceptions, as it was. Instead of leaving me with answers, the discussion only created more questions.