Smoked (The Alex Harris Mystery Series) (4 page)

“So you think your father was upset enough about the blog that he killed her?”

Ellery shook her head. “No. They loved each other. Really. They did. They would have left each other years ago if they didn’t. And this whole thing with being a vegan? Ha! My mom liked to start things and after a while, a year tops, she’d lose interest. She never gave away her leather shoes or belts or purses. She still kept all that stuff for when she was done playing vegan. She may have continued on with the site and blogs and product line, but her being a vegan and giving up bacon forever? No way. That would have ended soon enough, trust me. Listen,” Ellery leaned forward. “My mom told me all about the murder in your house. And she said you solved some other crimes as well. So I want to hire you.”

“You want to hire me? For what? To help you sort through your mother’s things? To keep the blog up?” I didn’t know how I could help her, but if she wanted my help to pack up her mother’s belongings, or to find someone to take over the blog posts I was more than happy to do it.

“No, silly. I want to hire you to prove my father didn’t kill my mother.”

I couldn’t believe someone just hired me as a private eye. How cool was that? Wait. What was I thinking? Number one, I didn’t have a PI license, didn’t have a clue how to go about getting one, and doubted I could obtain one in the next twenty-four hours. And number two, John. There was no way on God’s green earth he was going to let me investigate what looked like the murder of Maria Kravec.

Which meant one thing. I wasn’t going to tell him. I would just leave for work each morning after dutifully planting a passionate kiss on his mouth and then I would surreptitiously work the case eliciting the help of my cohorts in crime, i.e., Millie and Sam. I couldn’t wait to tell them.

I took a right at the next corner and mentally slapped myself; Mrs. Kravec was dead. Murdered. I shouldn’t be so giddy about her demise. And I wasn’t. I just wanted to solve the case and free Mr. Kravec. Maybe I should have T-shirts printed up à la
Downton
Abbey
’
s
Free Mr. Bates
T-shirts. Everyone in my family and my close friends were fans of the show and I was sure I could get them all to wear one of the shirts. Geesh.

I pulled up in front of my grandmother’s house and locked the car. She was already standing on the front porch holding the door open. Once we were inside her tiny house, I gave her a big hug. I usually visit her several times a week but she had been gone the last five days down in Atlantic City gambling her little heart out. And from the text messages she sent me, she seemed to be on a winning streak. Yes, my grandmother knows how to send text messages. I had to ask Millie how to send one back.

“I missed you,” Meme said. “Have you had dinner yet?”

“Just some crackers and cheese at the office.”

“I got manicotti I made last week. I’m heating it in the oven. Sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

My grandmother, Meme to one and all, bustled around the kitchen filling the tea kettle and setting out plates. Meme is in her eighties, short and round, and most times has a little hat on her head. It was there now. It’s a throw-back to the time she went to church almost on a daily basis. Not so much anymore. She still likes to go, but she figures God knows where she lives and doesn’t mind whether she prays at home or in a church. As a kid, I loved going with her. Most of the time I was in a pair of shorts but Meme would bobby pin a tissue to my head, call it a hat, and off we’d go. No one wears hats to church anymore, but Meme’s from a time when all women did. I always got to light a candle and that was the big draw for me. Churches kind of freaked me out. Hard stone floors, dark, and statues staring at you from all angles. But I did like those candles. And playing bingo in the church basement on a Saturday night.

“So you did pretty well at the casinos,” I said as I took a cup of tea from my grandmother’s hands.

“Came home about eight thousand dollars richer.”

I almost choked on my sip of tea. “Wow! I had no idea. Good for you, Meme.”

My grandmother didn’t need the money. I knew for a fact a good portion of it would be going to the town food bank and the local animal shelter.

“I got you something.” Meme put a package along with a card in front of me.

I smiled at her and untied the bow and then pulled the wrapping paper from the thin box. “Oh, wow, thanks, Meme!” I planted a kiss on my grandmother’s cheek. Inside the box was a new cover for my iPad. It was a beautiful burgundy leather.

“I got it at the hotel gift shop. They got some nice stuff there. Open the card.”

I did as asked and then held the gift card to my heart doing a little dance in my chair. “I’ll have to stop over there this weekend.”

“Your mom says you been spending a lot of time over at
HomeGoods
getting stuff for the house. Figure you could use a gift card.”

Meme set the manicotti on the table and I dug in. “So what have you been up to?”

“Meme, have you ever heard of someone named Maria Kravic? She writes a blog on veganism?”

“Nope. Why do you ask?”

“She died. Looks like murder. She was my neighbor. I’m the one who found her and called the ambulance.” Over dinner I told Meme the rest of the story.

“So it looks like you’re back in business.” Meme’s eyes were gleaming. I had created a monster. My grandmother loved sleuthing as much as I did.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

Meme wiped a bit of sauce from her chin. “The daughter says they fought a lot and he cheated but that doesn’t mean anything. Me and my James argued all the time. He liked the ladies and I kicked him out over it, but we still loved each other till the day he died. So go with that.”

“So you’re saying you think he really is innocent?”

Meme shook her head. “All I’m saying is it’s possible to argue and cheat and still love your spouse so don’t just rely on that and write him off as guilty. And remember the daughter is always going to stick up for her father. It’s only natural. You gotta find out what this lady was all about. Turning the table on your husband and writing a blog about his profession and maybe smearing his name is a pretty devious thing to do.”

“It is, I guess. I never thought of that.”

“Maybe she was a real nice lady and maybe, well, maybe she went after other people too in that blog of hers. And I hate to say it, but you gotta check into the relationship between the mother and the daughter. The kid may have had it in for the mother.” Meme took another bite of her manicotti. “It’s a real inventive way to kill someone though.”

It was at that. And it had to be premeditated. The ivy could have been underneath the pile of leaves for days, which meant I couldn’t rule Mr. Kravec out at all. He could have set the whole thing up before he left.

I took my empty plate to the sink and washed it with a sponge and a bit of soap. Meme handed me her plate and I repeated the process and washed the baking pan as well. When I was finished I folded the dish towel and turned to Meme. “What do you say you grab your laptop and let’s find out exactly what Maria Kravec was up to.”

When I was a kid if you wanted information you had to go to the library or pull a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf and hunt for what you needed. It was kind of a pain but that was what we had and it worked.

I’m not even sure if anyone still has encyclopedias anymore, and let’s face it, they took up an awful lot of room, cost a lot of money, and became outdated almost before they hit your shelf. I admit I didn’t take to modern technology as quickly as the next person. I still don’t have one of those 4G phones and for the life of me I just don’t understand Twitter. I tried it a couple of times. Sent out my thoughts into cyberspace. I even got one follower. For a day. And then he dropped me. So I don’t tweet anymore. The rejection is just too much to handle. But the one thing I do have is an iPad. It took me about five months of checking them out, going back and forth on whether I would ever use it or not before I decided to buy one. I figured if I didn’t like it, I could give it to my nephew Henry. But as it turns out, I love the darn thing. Like a book, I take it with me most days and I just happened to have it in my tote bag now.

Meme and I got comfortable in her living room with fresh cups of tea and a plate of cookies. I spread out on the sofa while she plopped down in her comfy chair. I pulled the iPad out and took off the cheap cover I had purchased when I bought it. I replaced it with the one Meme had given me and it looked pretty spiffy if you ask me. Meme already had her laptop fired up and was checking to see if any of her friends were online playing bingo.

“That Ellen Templeman is winning again,” Meme said with disgust. “I should of never told her about online bingo. Now every time I want to play, there she is. And she’s on a winning streak.” Meme snorted. I smiled at my grandmother. Meme hated losing.

“You’ll just have to wait it out. Winning streaks don’t last forever. Now, go to the Vegan View.” I brought the site up on my iPad and looked around. It was quite an impressive site. Maria Kravec had it organized with various pages. There was the home page and the blog page. There was also a page with vegan recipes, and another called
All About Vegan
. Meme was busy reading something on her laptop but I wasn’t sure if it was the vegan site or if she was still checking up on Ellen Templeman.

I read for a bit more and then reached for a cookie, which had butter in it. “I wonder how far Mrs. Kravec took this vegan stuff. You aren’t supposed to have any animal products. None. No butter. How can you eat without butter?” I found this a horrendous prospect. I love butter. And when I was in Europe on my honeymoon a few months ago and got the really good stuff, freshly made, well, let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you smear a piece of multi-grain, freshly baked dark bread with
real
butter made from the milk of cows over in Jersey, not to be confused with
New Jersey
, which would probably produce radioactive butter, but the island of Jersey.

“Maybe I should become a vegan,” my grandmother said sincerely.

I tried not to laugh. “Meme, you wouldn’t like it. You live on pasta and cheese and bread and butter. And pastries from Marzulla’s.”

“I couldn’t have any of that?”

“No. And if you want to be an ethical vegan, you can forget about leather shoes, leather car seats, belts, a whole bunch of stuff. And there’s even a debate about honey.”

“It doesn’t sound like living to me from some of these articles.” Meme shrugged.

“You mean the blogs?”

“Yeah, the stuff she writes. From the sound of it, she was a nut case.”

“Sometime in the last couple of months she started sounding off on some vegan restaurants in the area and then she went after butchers, well, the industry in general. She makes several references to a
butcher who shall remain nameless
,” I said as I scrolled through the blogs.

“The husband?”

“Must be. Unless she had issues with another butcher, but if she didn’t eat meat what was she doing in the shops? She’s making vague references to unclean environments and questionable sources of the meats.”

“Sounds like she really had it in for Mr. Kravec. Why bother staying together?” Meme shook her head in true puzzlement.

I started to roll some thoughts around in my head. If Maria Kravec took it to the extreme, I could see all sorts of problems living with a butcher. It must have been hell. For both of them. But was it hellish enough for one of them to kill? Starting tomorrow, I planned to find out.

John didn’t arrest Mr. Kravec. The police questioned him for quite some time and ran down his alibi in Boston, but as I had come to the conclusion, so had the police. So what? The poison ivy could have been there for days. There just wasn’t any way to tell.

“But you’re sure it is in fact murder?” I asked John the next morning over breakfast.

“How could it not be? It was a big pile of leaves and there were a lot of them, but there was a ton of the ivy as well. How do you explain that?”

I couldn’t, but I was hoping John would leave soon so I could go and ask Mr. Kravec. I’m sure he explained it all to the police but so far the police, including the cop sitting next to me, didn’t seem so keen on explaining it all to me. I intended to head on over to the Kravec home just as soon as I got rid of John, who for some unknown reason, seemed to be lingering over breakfast longer than usual or maybe I was just being impatient.

John finally took his cereal bowl to the sink and rinsed it out. “Okay, I better getting going,” he said. “Want to walk out with me?”

I walked over to him and gave him a quick kiss. “I would but I want to do a couple of things around the house before I leave.”

“Dinner out tonight?”

I smiled. “Sure.”

I waited a couple of minutes after John left to make sure he hadn’t forgotten something and wouldn’t be coming back. I tidied up the kitchen, grabbed my purse and walked over to the Kravec’s home. I didn’t recognize the car in the driveway but hoped it was Ellery. I assumed she told her father about “hiring” me but just in case she hadn’t I didn’t want to intrude on the man unexpectedly. In fact, I wasn’t actually taking any money. I told her I was not a private detective but I would be more than happy to see what I could do. After all, I had a vested interest in this whole matter. I was, after all, the person who found Mrs. Kravec and the guilt over not doing more was weighing on me. In part I was being selfish. I wanted to find out what happened so I could convince myself there was nothing I could have done. I was making it all about me and that wasn’t right. I knocked on the door vowing to get to the bottom of this for Mrs. Kravec. And for Ellery.

“Perfect timing.” Ellery stood before me, a cup of coffee in one hand. “We just finished eating. I told Dad all about you. He’s glad you can help. Come in.”