EMMIE
“No way.” Zoe shook her head as we split the leftover lobster mac ‘n’ cheese she’d brought from Girl Meets Fig. “Rosie? I don’t believe she’d kill Brooks. What’s even the motive?”
“She loved him. He told her that he wasn’t going to leave Oakley for her, and she offed him. Snuck into my kitchen, poisoned the cupcakes, brought them to him as a gift. He ate them because he’s a pig, and then he came to my shop and croaked.”
“If she did kill him, she did you a favor in more ways than one.” Zoe speared another noodle.
It was true. The café had never been busier—even with the cat-committee protestors, there was a line down the block to go to the murder cat café. And we were doing a brisk business of cat adoption, though it never seemed to make a dent in the number of kitties in the shop. Maybe I had more cats than I thought.
There were so many customers that I’d hired on two of the young Svensson sisters, who were in town, visiting their brothers. They were working the cash register and making coffee like seasoned holiday-tourism pros.
“If you wouldn’t potentially be on the hook for a murder, I’d say just leave it alone,” Zoe added, scraping out the last of the cheese sauce with her spoon. “Let’s go confront Rosie. I bet she caves.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I argued as I followed Zoe out of the shop and down Main Street. “What if she’s not guilty and we start unnecessary rumors?”
“Jack-fucking-pot,” Zoe murmured as we stopped in the doorway of the pungent-smelling Essence & Earth herbalist shop. “This place is nothing but poisons.”
Little glass vials and bottles lined the light birchwood shelves on the walls. Soft spa music played from unseen speakers. The soothing atmosphere was disrupted by Rosie and Alice talking furiously in a corner.
I managed to catch Rosie saying, “He was poison to me,” then an angry man yelled, causing them to jump away from each other.
Rosie smiled widely at me then glared at the man next to me. “Charles, you can’t come in here and scare away the tourists.”
“There’s another cat in my shop!” he ranted.
“That one isn’t one of my café cats,” I countered. “You just stole a random person’s cat.”
“Yes, it is!” He shook the confused white cat at me.
Alice hurried by to scoop the kitty up in her arms.
“My cats have a custom-knitted collar,” I informed him.
“Maybe the cat slipped it off,” Charles blustered, “or maybe you removed it so you could gaslight me, try to make me think I’m crazy to take the heat off of you.”
“You’re the one with the motive, not Emmie,” Zoe said hotly. “Murderer!”
Charles shot a final angry look at us, muttered, then scuttled off back to his shop, almost bowling over a confused Marius.
“What happened?”
“Petty small-town drama.” I sighed.
Marius had a protective hand on my lower back.
“We didn’t get to interrogate Rosie,” Zoe argued as Marius tugged me back outside onto Main Street.
“Save it for later. I just got the toxicology reports back,” he said in a low voice.
My eyes widened.
“It’s not good. They found trace amounts of cyanide.”
“Brooks was murdered. Oh my God!”
“Cyanide is used to clean jewelry,” Zoe said flatly, “and Rosie was just at a jewelry shop. Means, motive, and opportunity. Boom. It also has an almond smell, which would be disguised in a baked good.”
“Charles is a more likely suspect at this point.” Marius shook his head. “He hates you, snuck into your kitchen, put cyanide in the cupcakes, then tried to frame you for Brooks’s murder to get your café shut down.”
