The Pumpkin Muffin Murder Read online

  “Mrs. Newsom,” Chief Whitmire said.

  “Hello, Chief.”

  Whitmire frowned. “You found the body?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Wilbarger and I did.”

  Whitmire looked over at Carolyn, nodded, and said, “Mrs. Wilbarger.”

  Carolyn just said, “Hmmph.” She hadn’t forgotten that both she and her daughter had been suspects in a murder several years earlier. Probably she never would.

  Whitmire turned to his men and went on, “All right, secure the area. Crime Scene’s already on the way, along with an ambulance.”

  “Do we close down the festival, Chief?” one of the officers asked.

  Whitmire looked around at the park and at all the people already crowded into it. He sighed and said, “No, just get some crime-scene tape and string it around these trees.” He waved a hand at the oaks surrounding the two cabins. “We’ll keep everybody away from this part of the park as much as we can, but let them go on and enjoy the rest of the festival.”

  “What about a canvass?”

  “With this many people, and the manpower we have?” Whitmire shook his head. “Impossible. Anyway, we don’t even know for sure that there’s been a crime here.” He glanced at the corpse. “Something weird, for sure, but maybe not a crime.”

  One of the officers who was first on the scene pointed at Dana, who wasn’t crying anymore but still stood huddled in Sam’s arms. “That’s the dead guy’s wife, Chief.”

  Whitmire nodded. “Thanks.” He looked at Phyllis. “Who was close by here when you found the body?”

  She half turned and held out a hand to indicate the judges from the cooking contest, which surely wouldn’t be going on now since all the entries were sitting smack-dab in a possible crime scene.

  “Okay, folks,” Whitmire told them, “I’m going to need you to stay right here until we have a chance to talk to you.”

  “Is the contest canceled?” Dolly Williamson asked.

  Whitmire managed a tired smile. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then should we let all the people who brought food for it take their entries?”

  “No!” Whitmire said. “Nothing and nobody who was in this area when the body was found leaves until we figure out what happened here.”

  Dolly looked a little surprised at the chief’s vehemence, but she nodded and said, “All right.”

  Whitmire hunkered on his heels next to the body, studying it without touching it, and asked, “Who is he?”

  The officer who had asked Phyllis the same question said, “Name’s Logan Powell, Chief.”

  Whitmire looked up. “The real estate guy?”

  “I don’t know, Chief. I just got his name.”

  “Yes, that’s him, Chief,” the president of the chamber of commerce said. “We all knew him.”

  “You have any idea what happened to him?”

  All Whitmire got in response to that question were shaking heads.

  A siren wailed. The music from the other cabin had stopped, but there was still a lot of hubbub in the air. It went silent for a moment at the sound of the approaching siren. When the wail cut off, the noise came back up, only to die down again as a team of EMTs wheeling a gurney over the rough ground made their way from the parking lot to the cabin where Logan’s body lay.

  Everyone gave the paramedics room as they gathered around the body. One of them took out a stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat. Not finding one, he searched for a pulse in Logan’s neck and failed to locate that, too. He looked up at Whitmire and said, “We’re gonna have to declare him dead on the scene, Chief.”

  Whitmire nodded. “Got any idea what killed him?”

  The EMT looked over the body. “No visible sign of wounds. I think COD’s gonna have to wait for the medical examiner. . . . Wait a minute.”

  Whitmire leaned forward tensely. “You see something after all?”

  “I think there’s something in his mouth,” the man said as he bent closer to peer between Logan’s lips, which were parted slightly. Carefully using a couple of gloved fingers, he opened Logan’s mouth a little wider and put his face close enough that he could sniff. Phyllis shuddered as she looked away. There was something so intimate and yet so grotesque about the scene that she had a hard time looking at it. She was glad that Sam had Dana turned so that she couldn’t see what was going on. It was bad enough that she had to hear it, although Phyllis thought she might be in such a state of shock that she wouldn’t actually understand what she was hearing.

  “Chief, I’d better not mess with this anymore,” the EMT said as he straightened from the body. “I’m not trained in forensics. But there’s definitely some sort of . . . brown slime in his mouth. You’ll want to have your crime-scene people check it out, and of course the ME will, too.”

  “Brown slime,” Whitmire repeated. “Like poison of some sort?”

  The EMT shrugged. “Could be.”

  Whitmire lowered his voice and asked, “Maybe some sort of biological weapon?” As always these days, terrorism was one of the first things the authorities considered whenever something mysterious happened.

  “Oh, Lord, Chief, don’t ask me. All I know is that it had sort of a familiar smell, kind of sweet and doughy and almost like . . . pumpkin, maybe?”

  “Oh, my God, Phyllis!” Carolyn exclaimed. “Your pumpkin muffins!”

  Phyllis felt all the pairs of eyes as they turned to look at her, and as she felt the weight of the stares, she burst out, “Oh, come on, people! What are the odds that a . . . a dead man would have one of my pumpkin muffins in his mouth? That’s crazy!”

  But even as the words left her lips, she wished that she wasn’t wondering the exact same thing as everybody else here. She really did.

  Chapter 12

  By this time, the police had moved all the festival-goers well back, away from the cabin and the dogtrot where Logan’s body lay. They unrolled bright yellow crime-scene tape and strung it from tree to tree to close off the area, leaving only a gap where they could come and go and where the body could be wheeled out once it was placed on the gurney that had been brought from the ambulance.

  The body couldn’t be moved, though, until the photographer and the forensics team arrived and did their work. Phyllis knew this because of Mike’s involvement with police work and her own brushes with murder over the past few years; plus, like everyone else, she watched TV and movies and had such things ingrained in her knowledge now.

  She had never forgotten what Mike had once told her about police procedure and forensics science as they were presented on television, though: Part of what went on was realistic; a larger part was far-fetched but barely plausible; the biggest part of all was pure fantasy.

  Following Chief Whitmire’s orders, several cops herded Phyllis, Sam, Dana, Carolyn, and the other judges from the contest into the area in front of the cabin, gathering them around a circular rock wall that was supposed to look like a well, even though there was nothing inside it but more dirt. “Wait right here,” one of the officers told them. “Either the chief or a detective will be talking to you in a little while.”

  Dana was able to stand up on her own now, but Phyllis and Sam both stayed close to her in case everything overwhelmed her and she started to collapse again. She wiped at eyes that were red rimmed from crying and said, “I . . . I just don’t understand. How can he be dead? I . . . I saw him just last night.”

  “It’s a terrible thing, Dana,” Carolyn told her. “But remember that you have plenty of friends ready to stand by you and do whatever you need to help you get through this.”

  As if to prove that, someone called Dana’s name from beyond the crime-scene tape. Phyllis looked in that direction and saw four women standing there with worried expressions on their faces. She recognized Barbara Loomis and Jenna Grantham from the day before at Loving Elementary. She was acquainted with the other two women as well. The one with curly brown hair falling around her shoulders was Taryn Marshall, the art t
eacher at the elementary school, and the woman with short blond hair and glasses was Kendra Neville, the librarian.

  Dana started to cry again as she saw them. Jenna got a determined look on her face and suddenly lifted the crime-scene tape, ducking under it and starting toward Dana. The other three women hesitated for a second, then followed her.

  One of the officers moved swiftly to get in their way. He held up both hands, palms out, and ordered, “Hold it, ladies. You need to get back on the other side of that tape right now. This area is off-limits.”

  “That’s our friend over there,” Jenna said angrily, “and she’s in pain. We’re going to do whatever we can to help her.”

  “Not now you’re not,” the cop insisted.

  Jenna glared at him. She was tall and athletic enough that she looked like she might be able to take the officer, if it came to that, Phyllis thought, although in reality that was highly unlikely.

  But then Jenna sighed and nodded. “All right,” she said in a surly voice. “But I don’t have to like it.” As the officer began herding the four of them back toward the yellow tape, Jenna called over the man’s shoulder, “If there’s anything we can do for you, Dana, just let us know!”

  Carolyn patted Dana on the back and said, “See, I told you that you have lots of friends. We’ll get you through this, Dana.”

  “I’m not . . .” Dana swallowed hard. “I’m not sure I want to get through it. I never even thought about what it would be like to . . . live without Logan. Even with all the problems we had, I . . . I just can’t imagine. . . .”

  Her shoulders started to shake, and once again tears welled from her eyes. This time it was Carolyn who embraced her in an attempt to bring her whatever meager comfort was possible at this terrible moment.

  The forensics team arrived, prompting the ambulance crew to step aside from the body. If they didn’t get any other calls, they would wait until the police were finished, then transport Logan’s remains to the morgue at the hospital a couple of miles away. Phyllis watched as the investigators photographed the body and all the area around it, then set about gathering whatever evidence they could find. They put the straw hat Logan had been wearing into a plastic bag and sealed it. The burlap bag that had been pulled over his head was treated the same way. One of the technicians swabbed some of the brown slime out of Logan’s mouth and dropped that swab in an evidence bag. Phyllis couldn’t see it very well, but she could tell it was about the same color as one of her pumpkin muffins.

  But that still made no sense at all, she thought. All the muffins she had brought to the park for the contest were still in their plastic containers, sitting on the table at the front of the dogtrot. They hadn’t been touched since Bobby had placed them there. Whatever it was in Logan’s mouth had to be something else. He couldn’t possibly have been eating one of Phyllis’s muffins when he died.

  Then every muscle in her body suddenly stiffened as she recalled that Dana had taken one of the muffins with her the night before when she left Phyllis’s house.

  Phyllis looked over at Dana, who stood there with Carolyn’s arm around her shoulders looking as pale and haggard and grief stricken as ever. She had said that Logan never came home from the park the night before, and Phyllis had no reason to think that she was lying. According to Carolyn, Dana had left the park before Logan, so if she’d given him part of the muffin she’d brought from Phyllis’s house, or even the whole muffin, it wouldn’t have still been in his mouth when he died later. Therefore, Phyllis reasoned, the brown slime in his mouth couldn’t be from her muffin.

  Unless Dana had come back to the park while Logan was still here but everybody else was gone . . .

  That still wouldn’t explain how Logan had died. Phyllis had once been accused, briefly, of baking something that had killed someone when they ate it, but she knew perfectly well that wasn’t the case here. There was nothing in those muffins that would hurt anybody. As far as she knew, there wasn’t even anything that could have caused a dangerous allergic reaction in someone who was hypersensitive to certain foods.

  She told herself to stop worrying about the muffins and concentrate on the tragic loss Dana had suffered instead. But there was nothing else any of them could do to help with that right now. They were stuck here until the police were through with them.

  Phyllis saw Chief Whitmire talking to an attractive woman with short, midnight black hair and olive skin who was wearing black slacks and a black jacket over a white blouse. She recognized the woman as Detective Isabel Largo. Detective Largo had investigated one of the crimes in which Phyllis had found herself unwillingly involved.

  That didn’t necessarily mean that the police already considered Logan’s death a homicide, though. It was much too early for anyone to draw such a conclusion. But any mysterious death would be investigated thoroughly, Phyllis knew, and she supposed that Detective Largo had been assigned to this case.

  A few minutes later, Detective Largo nodded to the chief, then walked through the dogtrot and came over to where the witnesses were gathered. She nodded to Phyllis and said, “Mrs. Newsom.”

  “Hello, Detective.”

  “Chief Whitmire tells me that you discovered the body.”

  Carolyn said, “Actually, Phyllis and I both did.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Wilbarger,” Detective Largo said with another nod. “I’ll be talking to you, too, in a few minutes.” She turned back to Phyllis. “But right now, Mrs. Newsom, I’d like for you to come with me.”

  Phyllis looked around. Even though the crowd had been moved back, she didn’t have any trouble spotting Eve and Bobby. Many of the festival-goers had drifted away, determined to enjoy their day at the park, but quite a few still stood behind the yellow tape watching the scene around the old cabin, and Eve and Bobby were in the forefront of that group.

  “My grandson is here,” Phyllis told Detective Largo. She gestured toward Eve and Bobby. “My friend is watching him right now, but I need to talk to her for a minute before I go anywhere.”

  The detective considered Phyllis’s request for a few seconds, then nodded. “All right. You can go over there and talk to them. But come right back.”

  “I will,” Phyllis promised.

  She walked up to the crime-scene tape that was holding back the onlookers. Bobby asked anxiously, “Gran’mama, are you all right?”

  She smiled at him. “I’m fine, Bobby, but I may be busy here for a while. Maybe most of the day. Do you mind seeing the festival with Mrs. Turner?” She glanced at Eve. “If that’s all right?”

  “Of course it’s all right,” Eve answered without hesitation. “You know me, Phyllis. I’d absolutely love to spend the day with a handsome young man, and Bobby certainly qualifies.”

  “Thank you.” Phyllis looked down at her grandson. “Okay, Bobby?”

  “I guess. I wish I could have one of those punkin muffins we brought, though.”

  “I’m not sure anybody’s going to get them,” Phyllis told him. “But we can always make more when we get home, can’t we?”

  That brought a smile to Bobby’s face. “Yeah!”

  Phyllis looked at Eve again and said, “I’ll give you the key to my car. You can use it to take Bobby home whenever the two of you are ready to go.”

  “How will you get back?”

  “I’ll catch a ride with Sam or Carolyn,” Phyllis said as she took the key ring from her purse and handed it over.

  Eve nodded. “All right. Is there anything else I can do to help?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m just glad you were here, Eve, and you didn’t get caught in this mess like the rest of us did.”

  “What if Mike calls? Do I tell him—?”

  “Good Lord, no.” The last thing Mike needed to hear while he was out there in California with his wife and his dying father-in-law was that his mother was mixed up in another murder back home. She added, “There’s nothing he could do, anyway.”

  Phyllis glanced back and saw that Detective Largo wa
s watching her with a particularly intense stare. She knew she had probably already stretched the detective’s patience as far as she ought to. She bent down under the crime-scene tape and hugged Bobby, then said quickly, “I’ll see you later,” and walked back over to Detective Largo.

  “Why did you give Mrs. Turner your keys?” the detective asked.

  “So she could take Bobby home,” Phyllis explained. “Eve didn’t bring her car.”

  Detective Largo considered that answer for a moment, then nodded, apparently accepting it. “Follow me,” she said.

  She led Phyllis away from the taped-off scene, through the park, and back to the parking lot. She opened the passenger door of a nondescript sedan that was either her personal car or an unmarked police vehicle.

  “Have a seat,” Detective Largo said. It was an order as much as an invitation, Phyllis knew.

  “Are you taking me to police headquarters?”

  The detective shook her head. “No, I just thought this would be a good place for us to talk.”

  That relieved Phyllis’s mind a little. She slid into the car. Detective Largo closed the door and went around to get in behind the wheel. It was warmer and quieter in there.

  Detective Largo took a small digital recorder from the pocket of her jacket, switched it on, gave the time, and identified herself and Phyllis. She said, “You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Newsom, and you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

  “That’s all right,” Phyllis said with a shake of her head. “I don’t mind answering your questions. I want to help. I want to find out what happened to Logan Powell as much as you do.”

  “Fine,” Detective Largo said. “Tell me how it happens that you discovered a body under mysterious circumstances . . . again.”

  Chapter 13

  Phyllis felt a brief surge of annoyance at the detective’s tone, but she told herself to be reasonable. Most people went through their entire lives without ever finding even a single dead body, if they were lucky. There was no denying that she had stumbled onto more than her fair share of them over the past few years.