The Pumpkin Muffin Murder Page 24

  “That’s not necessary. Someone else took those boxes and delivered them.”

  “I’ll apologize personally to Dolly for letting her down. I sure didn’t mean to.”

  Phyllis heard car doors and looked past Jenna to see Taryn Marshall getting out of a vehicle at the curb. Another car pulled up behind hers, and one stopped in the driveway. Phyllis recognized the teachers who got out of them carrying covered dishes. They were just acquaintances, but for today they were her guests, so she smiled and waved at them and called, “Come on in, folks.”

  That was just the beginning of a period of joviality as people continued to arrive bearing food. It really did feel almost like a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving with a houseful of friends and relatives, Phyllis thought as she greeted guests, found places on the kitchen counter for the food they brought, tended to her own cooking, and supervised the preparations for dinner. Carolyn came in and said, “I spoke to Jenna out in the living room. We must have just missed each other.”

  Sam and Bobby, perhaps wisely, stayed out of the way.

  The only problem was that Eve wasn’t there. She had called to say that she was running late and might not make it for dinner but would be there as soon as she could. Phyllis had tried to find out what was going on with her, but Eve had already hung up.

  With the whirlwind of activity, Phyllis didn’t have time to worry about Eve or to think any more about the nebulous idea that had come to her earlier. In fact, she barely had time to pause and take a breath until dinner was on the table. When all the food was ready and everyone was gathered around, she asked Sam to say grace. He obliged by thanking God for the bounty in his deep, rumbling voice that appropriately reminded Phyllis of what an Old Testament prophet must have sounded like.

  Then, when Sam said, “Amen,” everyone echoed, “Amen,” and then sat down to stuff themselves.

  It was a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner.

  Afterward, with the guests sitting around the living room and talking while the announcers on the TV set the stage for the Cowboys game that was about to kick off, Phyllis found herself in the kitchen surveying what was left of the food. They’d made a big dent in the two turkeys, but there was still plenty of meat on the bones for leftover turkey and dressing sandwiches, one of her favorites. The various desserts had been heavily sampled as well.

  A tiny frown formed on Phyllis’s face as she looked at the counters. Something was missing, she thought, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

  Carolyn came up behind her and said, “It was a beautiful dinner, Phyllis. You outdid yourself this year.”

  Phyllis smiled. “You did plenty yourself, you know.”

  “Not this year,” Carolyn said. “Too much else was going on. All this horrible business with Dana . . . At least she seemed to enjoy herself today. There’s some life in her yet, thank goodness. For a while there, it looked like whoever killed Logan might as well have killed Dana, too.”

  Phyllis stiffened. With an almost audible click, the pieces finally fit together in her brain. She turned to look at Carolyn, who must have seen something in Phyllis’s eyes that caused her to take a hurried step backward.

  “Oh, my God,” Carolyn exclaimed quietly. “Phyllis, what’s wrong? You look—Oh, my.” Carolyn’s eyes widened. “I’ve heard Sam describe that look. You just figured it all out, didn’t you? You know who killed Logan.”

  Phyllis drew in a deep breath. “I think so, but I’m not sure. Is everyone in the living room?”

  “That’s right. Jenna just brought those muffins of hers in there and was going to pass them around before the football game starts, even though everyone’s insisting that they’re too full to eat anything else.”

  Phyllis leaped into the hall and headed for the living room at a dead run. She barely heard Carolyn’s startled cry behind her.

  Now she was sure.

  And that was confirmed as she reached the living room and saw Jenna handing a muffin to Dana, saying, “Here, I made this one especially for you.”

  “Dana, no!” Phyllis said as she came to a halt, startling just about everyone in the crowded living room. “Don’t eat that!”

  Dana and the others in the room looked at her in confusion. Not Jenna, though. Her eyes locked with Phyllis’s, and they burned with the cold fires of hatred.

  “Dana, put that muffin on the coffee table in front of you,” Phyllis said. “Don’t eat it. The rest of you, don’t eat your muffins, either. Don’t take even a little bite.”

  With a shaking hand, Dana placed her muffin on the coffee table. “Phyllis, what . . . what’s going on here?”

  Dolly Williamson said, “Yes, what’s the meaning of this?”

  “We’re just about ready to kick it off here, folks,” the football announcer said on television.

  “Jenna killed Logan Powell,” Phyllis said, “and I think she was just about to try to kill Dana again, and maybe everyone else here.”

  A stunned silence hung over the room for a couple of seconds that seemed much longer. Then Jenna said in a curiously flat voice, “You meddling old bitch,” and suddenly lunged at Dana with her arms outstretched, obviously intending to lock her hands around Dana’s slender throat and choke the life out of her.

  She didn’t get the chance, because Sam brought her down with a tackle as good as any that would take place at Cowboys Stadium that afternoon. They crashed to the floor, and as Jenna started to scream and thrash around, Sam grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the floor.

  “I’ve already called 911,” Carolyn said from behind Phyllis. “The police are on their way.”

  “You’re going to have to explain all this to me,” Detective Isabel Largo said as she sat across the living room from Phyllis and Carolyn an hour later. Chief Whitmire was there, too. The guests had all left, and Sam had taken Bobby upstairs again. He was full of questions about what had happened, and Phyllis didn’t envy Sam the job of trying to explain it to the little boy.

  Dana was upstairs as well, lying down. She had taken one of the sedatives that the doctor had given her when she was being released from the hospital a few days earlier.

  Jenna had been taken into custody as soon as the police arrived and was locked up by now.

  Detective Largo arched her thin, dark eyebrows. “Well?”

  “I was gathering my thoughts,” Phyllis said. “This isn’t easy.”

  Chief Whitmire said, “Murder’s usually a simple crime. You never seem to run into any of those, do you, Mrs. Newsom?”

  “This one was simple in its motivation,” Phyllis said. “Love. Jenna Grantham was in love with Logan Powell. She’d been having an affair with him. She wanted him to leave his wife and marry her, especially when she found out that Logan stood to make a lot of money off the new mall that’s going to be built here in town.”

  “New mall?” Largo repeated. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “You will,” Phyllis told her. “Also, someone might want to check the bank accounts of the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission. There might be some large, unexplained deposits in some of them . . . but that doesn’t have anything to do with the murder.”

  “No, but we’ll have to talk about it later,” Whitmire said. “What about Powell and the Grantham woman?”

  “Jenna decided that since Logan wouldn’t leave Dana, she would get rid of Dana herself. She decided to murder Dana Powell.”

  Detective Largo said, “But it was Logan Powell who died.”

  “That was an accident, and his own fault, in a way. You see, Logan told all the women he was fooling around with that his wife was really very sick and that he had to spend a lot of time with her because of it.”

  “Wait a minute. Women? You mean he was having an affair with someone else besides Jenna Grantham?”

  Phyllis nodded. “I think so. There were probably several of them. I don’t know who they all were.” That wasn’t strictly true, since she suspected that Kendra Neville and Taryn Marshall had been i
nvolved with Logan, too, along with Barbara Loomis, but she wasn’t going to ruin their lives by revealing that unless it was absolutely necessary. “You see, he used Dana’s phony illness as an excuse to give himself time to juggle all his affairs. He told the women that she would slip into a coma from her low blood sugar unless he made sure she kept it up by sucking on those peppermints he carried around. He told the women he carried the candy for her, when really he was the one who needed it. He was just too vain to admit that.”

  Detective Largo leaned forward. “So Jenna Grantham substituted the sugar-free peppermints thinking that by doing so, she would cause Mrs. Powell to fall into a coma and die?”

  “That’s what I think happened, yes,” Phyllis replied with a nod. “She stole Dana’s keys from the school office Friday afternoon. I think she probably intended to use them to get into the Powell house on Saturday, while Logan and Dana would both be at the festival, so she could switch out all the peppermints there. Before that, though, she used them to get into Dana’s car while Dana was at the park arguing with Logan because she’d started to suspect that he was cheating on her. Jenna probably figured that Dana carried peppermints in the car, too, and she was going to switch them out. Jenna didn’t know that Dana doesn’t even really like peppermints.”

  “This is all speculation,” Largo said. “You can’t prove it.”

  “Jenna might still have Dana’s keys,” Phyllis suggested. “Check what she had in her pockets when she was arrested, and if they’re not there, I’m sure you can get a search warrant for her apartment.”

  Chief Whitmire lifted a hand and said, “Let’s worry about proving it later. Just tell us the rest of what happened, Mrs. Newsom. How do you know the Grantham woman got into Mrs. Powell’s car Friday night?”

  “Because of the muffin,” Phyllis said. “Remember, Jenna thought that Dana was the one whose health was bad, not Logan. She had already switched out the peppermints Logan carried in his pockets, probably the last time they had a rendezvous somewhere. She didn’t know that his health was so precarious that his blood sugar would plunge quickly without them. By Friday night, he was already having trouble. Jenna met him at the park after everyone else had gone home. When she saw that he was having trouble, he must have confessed to her that he was really the one who was at risk of falling into a coma. She didn’t want him to die. She’d been trying to kill Dana. So she ran back to her car and grabbed the pumpkin muffin she had swiped from Dana’s car when she got into it earlier.”

  “Pumpkin muffin?” Detective Largo said, her voice rising. “Pumpkin muffin?”

  Phyllis remained calm and nodded. “Yes, I had given it to Dana earlier that evening when she stopped by here to find out if I still had the keys she’d let Carolyn and me use that afternoon. I didn’t, of course. Jenna had them because she’d taken them from the school office while Katherine Felton was distracted. Jenna and Barbara Loomis were there in the office when I brought the keys in and handed them to Katherine, who must have set them down on the counter and forgotten about them. So I knew Jenna was aware of who the keys belonged to.”

  “What about this Barbara Loomis?” Whitmire asked. “Couldn’t she have filched the keys?”

  “She could have,” Phyllis admitted, “but she couldn’t have given the muffin to Logan on Friday night because she was home with her husband at the time.”

  Detective Largo took a deep breath. “So you gave the muffin to Mrs. Powell . . .”

  “Who put it in her car and took it with her to the park,” Phyllis said. “But it wasn’t there later, Dana told me when I asked her about it. If she was telling the truth, then the muffin disappeared while the car was at the park, and while maybe it was possible someone besides Jenna could have taken the keys—and the muffin—she was certainly the most likely suspect. It was a petty thing to do, stealing a muffin . . . but she had already tried to steal Dana’s husband from her, and when that didn’t work, she decided to steal Dana’s life.”

  “There was no muffin in Ms. Powell’s SUV when we searched it; that’s for sure,” Detective Largo admitted.

  Whitmire nodded. “So when Powell starts fading and realizes that his blood sugar must have dropped, he tells the Grantham woman what’s going on and she remembers that she’s got the muffin.”

  “Which has quite a bit of sugar in it,” Phyllis said. “She must have run back to her car and gotten it, then tried to feed it to Logan in hopes of raising his blood sugar. But she was too late. He had a heart attack and died.”

  “So that really was part of your pumpkin muffin in his mouth.” Whitmire shook his head in amazement. “If that doesn’t beat all.”

  “Okay, maybe we can prove some of that; maybe we can’t,” Largo said. “What about the blasted scarecrow costume?”

  “Jenna found herself alone in that deserted park in the middle of the night with the body of the man she loved, the man she had just inadvertently murdered, and she panicked. She didn’t know what to do. So she decided to hide the body in plain sight. She dressed him in the scarecrow’s clothes, hauled the body and the hay bale down to the dogtrot, and set them up there. She wouldn’t have had much trouble doing that, as athletic as she is. That gave her some time to think about it and figure out a way to dispose of the body later on. She must have planned to come back and get it Saturday night, after the festival was over and no one was at the park. But of course Carolyn and I discovered it Saturday morning, and that ruined the plan.”

  “It worked out for Jenna, though,” Carolyn put in, “because somebody decided that Dana was the one who’d killed Logan.”

  “All the evidence pointed to her,” Largo snapped. “We didn’t know any of that crazy business about car keys and . . . and muffins!”

  Whitmire said, “I’ve got to admit, it all makes sense, though, the way you explain it, Mrs. Newsom. But is it enough to convince a jury?”

  Phyllis pointed to the muffin that still sat on the coffee table, the one Jenna had baked and given to Dana. “It will be if there’s poison in that muffin, like I think there is. In Jenna’s twisted mind, she blamed Dana for Logan’s death, and she was still determined to kill her. She may have poisoned all the muffins she brought today. She might have been willing to commit mass murder just to get her revenge on Dana. But more than likely, if she put anything in the others, it was just enough to make the rest of us sick without killing us. She might have been planning to eat one herself, just to make it look good. That way, when the rest of us got sick and Dana died, it would look like a case of tampering with one of the ingredients she used. Things like that aren’t nearly as common as they once were, but they’re not unheard of.”

  Chief Whitmire gestured toward the muffin. “Better bag that up, Detective. Get the others, too. We’ll take them all in as evidence. Better mark ’em clearly, though. That bunch back at the office sees a bag of muffins, they’re liable to help themselves.”

  “Yes, sir,” Largo said. “I’ll get search warrants for Ms. Grantham’s apartment and car first thing tomorrow, too.”

  “You do that. And depending on what you find, I suspect I’ll be calling District Attorney Sullivan on Monday morning and recommending that all charges against Ms. Powell be dropped.”

  “Now, that makes it a good Thanksgiving,” Carolyn said.

  The chief and Detective Largo stood up to leave a few minutes later. Largo paused in the doorway and said to Phyllis, “I don’t know how you figure these things out, Mrs. Newsom, but I just hope it doesn’t backfire on you one of these days.”

  “I don’t set out to catch murderers, Detective. I just like to know the truth.”

  “Well, the truth is, I’m going to go salvage what I can of the holiday with my little boy.” Largo managed to smile. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too, Detective.”

  Sam and Bobby came downstairs a few minutes later. “Cops gone?” Sam asked.

  “They’re gone,” Phyllis said.

  “And Dana
’s name has been cleared,” Carolyn added.

  “If everything works out.”

  “It will and you know it,” Carolyn said. “When they tell Jenna everything that you figured out, Phyllis, she’ll confess. She’s smart enough to know she won’t stand a chance.”

  “But not smart enough not to commit murder,” Phyllis said quietly. It was a shame. She had liked Jenna. But the young woman’s friendly facade had been just that: a false front that hid the hate she really held in her heart.

  Bobby was obviously excited and had been holding something in. “The Cowboys are winnin’!” he finally burst out.

  “Well, why don’t you and Sam sit and watch the rest of the game down here?” Phyllis suggested. “I’m going to try to call Eve again. I can’t imagine where she could be. She’s already missed most of Thanksgiving.”

  “Not to mention all the excitement,” Carolyn said dryly.

  Phyllis had just picked up the phone when the front door opened and Eve’s cheery voice called out, “Hello, everybody! I’m so sorry we’re late. Roy’s plane was delayed—”

  Eve stopped just inside the front door and looked around at the mostly empty living room. Behind her stood a distinguished, silver-haired man in a topcoat.

  “Where is everybody?” Eve asked. “I know we missed dinner, but I thought we could have leftovers and visit with everyone.”

  “A lot happened while you were gone,” Carolyn said; then she added with her characteristic bluntness, “Who’s this?”

  “Oh, my goodness, that’s right,” Eve said. “I have introductions to make.” She turned and took the stranger’s arm. “Come here, dear, and meet my friends.” She smiled as she faced Phyllis, Carolyn, Sam, and Bobby, and went on. “Everyone, meet Roy Porter. Roy and I are engaged. Do you believe it? We’re going to be married!”

  Recipes

  Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffins

  Filling:

  1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened

  1 egg

  3 tablespoons brown sugar