A Sip of Murder (Japanese Tea Garden Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  A team of forensic specialists surveyed the scene. Yellow caution tape roped off the area. Once the forensic people were satisfied, the body was hauled out of the water and placed on a stretcher. My stomach did a summersault.

  Trying not to retch, I ran for the gate. I needed to distance myself. I squatted down outside of the front gate at the edge of the parking lot and focused on breathing. A death on the first day the gardens were reopened? Suddenly, all of my half-conceived premonitions felt justified.

  The wheels of the stretcher rattled past me. One pale arm tumbled off of the edge and dangled limply.

  “Angela? Angela!” A panicked voice made me look up. Agatha Jenkins was running towards the stretcher.

  “Ma’am, you can’t go over there. A woman is dead.” A policeman held up his hands to slow Agatha down.

  “What happened? Get your hands off of me. She’s my sister!”

  “Your sister? Ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss. Do you know what she was doing in the tea garden?”

  Agatha’s eyes followed her sister’s body as it was loaded into the ambulance. She seemed too shocked to fully take in the news of Angela’s death. “She was with me a moment ago. We were having lunch on our back porch. I don’t know why she suddenly disappeared, or what she was doing in that forsaken place.”

  “Did your sister have a habit of disappearing during lunch?” The policeman was scribbling on a notepad.

  “What? No!” Agatha’s eyes landed on me. Her finger shot out accusingly. “She’s the one responsible! That vile girl killed my sister! They had words a week ago about this horrible place reopening. It’s not a coincidence that Angela died the very day the garden opened its gates again. She did this!”

  “Huh? No, I didn’t!” I looked at the policeman in horror, praying he didn’t believe her wild accusations.

  He passed the hysterical twin off to another officer and walked over to me. “Excuse me, Miss. I’m Detective Michael Sullivan. Would you be willing to come down to the police station to answer some questions?”

  “Do you really believe I did this?” My blood pounded in my ears.

  “I try not to pass judgment on people until they’ve had a chance to share their side of things. All I’m asking is for you to come down to the station and talk.” He flashed a compassionate smile at me.

  I tried to put the nervous butterflies in my stomach to rest. His handsome features made the prospect of going down to the station a little less intimidating. “O-okay. I think I can do that.”

  “Good. Do you need a ride?”

  “Maddie?” Kelly’s pale face appeared at the gate. She looked between the detective and me, a worried expression furrowing her brow.

  “No. I can drive myself. Just let me take care of something really fast.” I turned away from the cop and walked up to Kelly. In hushed tones, I quickly filled her in. “They want me to go to the police station for questioning.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous. They can’t possibly think you had anything to do with this.”

  “Well, that’s not what Agatha told them.”

  “Ugh! Those twins are terrible!” Realization of the situation at hand dawned over her, and she clutched her hands to her mouth. “I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

  “Kelly, can you do me a favor?” I asked.

  “What do you need?”

  I glanced over at the detective who appeared to be waiting on me. “Could you lock up the giftshop for me and close up the gardens? I don’t know how long this is going to take.”

  “Yes, of course. If you need anything else, you have my number.” She gave my hand a squeeze and slipped back inside to take care of the few remaining visitors.

  “Ready?” Detective Sullivan raised one eyebrow as I turned back towards him.

  “As I’ll ever be.” I let out a shuddering breath and climbed into my car.

  In a few moments, I was pulling out of the parking lot and following his police cruiser down the unfamiliar roads towards the police station. In the span of a few hours, my proudest achievement had withered on the vine. A death on the premises was sure to impact business. I was disappointed in myself for thinking about my potential monetary loss when a woman had died.

  Each turn took me deeper into the bowels of the city. Maybe it was just my outlook, but everything seemed darker and more severe. Ahead, a brick building loomed starkly against the city’s skyline. Even though I had done nothing wrong, I felt anxious to be going into a police station.

  Okay, just try not to look guilty. You’re going to be fine. I parked next to Detective Sullivan’s cruiser and glanced over to see him staring at me. Wait, I wasn’t talking out loud to myself again, was I? Grimacing, I climbed out of my car to face my fate.

  Chapter 5

  “Please state your name for the record.” Detective Michael Sullivan turned on a tape recorder with a stiff click of a button.

  I cleared my throat and looked around the bare room. Only a simple wooden table was between us. “Maddie Morgan.”

  “And what were you doing at the Japanese tea garden today?”

  “I inherited it from my grandmother. I was opening it back up today.”

  “Can you tell me your relationship with the victim, Angela Jenkins?”

  “We didn’t really have a relationship. I only met her and her sister once. Agatha and Angela were against me reopening the gardens. They thought the tourists would litter on their lawn and disrupt their quilting meetings. I put up ‘no littering’ signs and extra trashcans to try and appease them.”

  “But it wasn’t enough, was it?”

  “Huh? Wait, do you seriously think I’m a suspect?”

  “Everyone is a suspect right now. Try not to take it personally.”

  I scoffed. “It’s hard not to take a thing like that personally.”

  “Just like it was hard not to take your disagreement with Angela Jenkins personally?”

  “You’re twisting my words around! I never said that. If anything, I wanted to keep the peace with them! If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t have made an effort to fix the issues they had with the garden’s reopening.”

  He chuckled and smiled at me. “Very well, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “It’s ‘miss’ actually.” My temper was starting to bubble up.

  “I’ll make a note of that.” He cleared his throat. “So, Miss Morgan, do you have any idea why Angela Jenkins was in the garden today?”

  “No, I don’t. I have no idea why she or her sister would want to be in a place they so openly disapproved of. It just doesn’t make sense. I mean, it was broad daylight. What could have possibly lured her over there?”

  “That’s what we intend to find out.”

  “Detective, is anyone else being questioned like this?”

  “At this time, you’re the only one we have at the station. I feel like I should tell you, since you’re the owner of the garden, we’ll need you to keep the place closed for a few days while we continue our investigation.”

  “Yeah, of course. Whatever you need. I’m nothing if not accommodating. I’ll cooperate with you as best I can. I have nothing to hide.” I held out my hands with my empty palms facing up as if to prove my innocence.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  After what seemed like hours of questioning, I was left feeling drained. Detective Sullivan had made me leave my contact information in case the police had any more questions to ask me at a later date. All I wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. I managed to drag myself out of the station to my car.

  The sky was dark now. Puddles of light from the streetlamps overhead illuminated patches of asphalt. There was a chill in the air that seemed to shred through the thin t-shirt I was wearing like claws. It suddenly dawned on me that if there was a murderer on the loose, and I was the main suspect, then the real murderer could be anywhere. Every shadow now contained the sum of all my fears. My fingers scrambled frantically, raking the bottom of my purse, trying to find my keys. Suddenly,
I felt a pressure on my shoulder. I jumped and screamed. In one fell swoop, I slung my purse around and slammed it into my attacker.

  “Hey, careful with that, or I’ll have to add assaulting an officer to your list of charges.” Detective Sullivan caught my bag in an impressive show of reflexes.

  “Oh! It’s you. Wait, charges?” Had the police already made up their minds about me?

  “Relax. It’s just a joke. I was trying to lighten the mood. Maybe not the best idea under the circumstances, now that I think about it.” Releasing his grip on my purse, the detective cleared his throat. “I just wanted to make sure you made it to your car safely.”

  “Well, I did.” Aside from my heart pounding erratically after my fright, I was fine. “Thanks for the concern.”

  “If you think of any details you may have left out, just give me a call.” Sullivan held out a business card for me to take.

  “Will do.” Why wouldn’t he just leave me alone? Hadn’t he already terrorized me enough for one day? “I’ll just be going now.”

  “Have a safe trip.” He tapped the top of my car as I revved up the engine.

  The detective stared at me as I backed out of the parking lot. I could feel his eyes following me as my car disappeared into the night. It was a little too much attention from the local law enforcement for my liking. I shivered anxiously. The idea of checking into a well-lit hotel for the night crossed my mind, but my pocketbook pleaded otherwise. The responsible thing to do would be to just go back to my grandmother’s old home. Unfortunately, when fear was involved, it was often hard to do the responsible thing.

  “You’re being silly. Just go home. You can leave all the lights on. You’ll be fine.” I tried to convince myself everything would be okay, but after the day I had, it wasn’t an easy task.

  My headlights spanned the length of the driveway. Everything seemed to be in order. There was no sign of danger, but if someone was capable of committing murder unseen in a crowded, well-lit place, then they were probably capable of lying in wait undetected. The sooner I was inside and safely behind a locked door, the better.

  Fueled with childish fear, I counted to three before running from my car to the door of the house. My hands were in a panic as I stabbed the lock with the key and rushed inside. Clicking the lock behind me made me feel incrementally better. Flipping on all of the interior lights helped to ease some of the rest of my fear.

  There was no reason to assume the killer was after me, but since the crime scene was the garden so close by, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had been the target after all. Aside from worrying about my own neck, I had the business aspect to think about as well. Who would want to visit a tea garden where people were murdered?

  My weary feet plodded up the stairs to the room I had claimed for myself. I flopped unceremoniously onto the bed and closed my eyes. The detective’s face hung behind my eyelids. Unfortunately, suspicion made him less attractive. What a shame. It was hard to think that someone was handsome when they were trying to pin a murder on me.

  I rolled onto my side and curled up into a ball. The house and the garden had been subjected to enough death for a lifetime. Stories from my childhood seemed triggered by the recent events. Snatches of memory from my grandmother’s tales of Japanese folklore came back to me. I could remember her telling me about a pond and river spirit called a Kappa. A Kappa was a mischievous and sometimes evil spirit that lived in rivers and ponds. They would sometimes kill passersby and eat their livers. Remembering such a story in the middle of the night made me huddle under the blankets. It was just a tale to frighten children and keep them from swimming alone, but the memory of my childhood fears didn’t seem so ridiculous in the dark.

  Eventually I fell asleep, tormented by youthful nightmares I thought I had put behind me long ago. Angela hadn’t been missing any internal organs. Logically, I knew it was impossible for such a creature to exist—even in a traditional Japanese garden like my grandmother’s. No, the real monster behind the murder was undoubtedly human. Somehow, that rationalization did nothing to ease my discomfort.

  Chapter 6

  A finger of sunlight slithered through the blinds and raked across my face. I sat up and stretched. My first thought was that I had to get to the garden, but yesterday’s events soon surfaced in my mind. Sighing, I grabbed my phone and sat cross-legged on the bed. I hadn’t updated Kelly at all since I had gotten home so late.

  “Hello?” Kelly’s happy voice seemed to have a tremble in it this morning.

  “Hey. It’s me. Look, there’s no point going to the garden this morning. The police want it closed down to keep the crime scene from getting contaminated. It might be a few days before we open again. I don’t want to do anything until I hear back from that detective that took me to the station last night.”

  “I wanted to ask you about that. How did it go? Do they have any ideas about who could have done it?”

  “It was just a lot of redundant questions. I don’t think they’ve ruled anyone out at this point.”

  “Oh…”

  Was it my imagination, or did she seem disappointed? Kelly’s questions might have just been normal concern over the incident, but something told me it was more than that. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Kelly around the time of the accident. My mind leapt to a crazy thought. Could she have been the one who killed Angela?

  “Uh, I need to take care of some things around the house,” I said suddenly.

  “Okay. You’ll be sure to call me if you hear anything, right?”

  “Sure. Yeah. I’ll call you.” The phone call was making me uncomfortable.

  “All right, talk to you soon. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Right. Okay. Bye.” I hung up quickly.

  Kelly had been so eager to help me with the garden. I should have known nothing in life came for free. If she really was the killer, then Angela had paid the ultimate price. It was unlikely that the twins had kept their feelings about the tea garden to themselves even years ago when Kelly had worked for my grandmother. Could Kelly have held a grudge for that long, waiting for the right time to exact her revenge on the sisters? She said herself that she loved the garden. When we first met, she said the chance to work there again meant the world to her. Did the garden mean enough to her for her to kill someone who put its reopening in jeopardy?

  I had to admit that as motives for murder went, this one seemed pretty farfetched. Still …

  “I need to keep my mind busy and think about something else.” The police would surely get to the bottom of the situation soon enough. Until then, I needed to stay busy and try not to overthink things. There was something I had been putting off as long as I could. Maybe it was time now.

  My bare feet slipped into a pair of house slippers at the edge of my bed. Clenching my jaw, I plodded down the hall towards my grandmother’s room. It felt disrespectful to go inside, like an intrusion of her privacy. I tried to bury the queasy feeling in my stomach. I had to do this. No one else was going to do it. I had to sort through her belongings and decide what should be saved and what should be disposed of. It was an awkward job, but it was just part of life.

  Taking a deep breath, I turned the handle. Inside, the room was darker and chillier than the rest of the house. Old photographs of my parents and grandparents hung on the wall. I had never known my grandfather. It suddenly dawned on me how lonely my grandmother’s life must have been. The gardens were her one constant companion through everything. It was no wonder she had poured so much life and love into them.

  Sadness settled into my bones. The blankets on the bed were shoved to one side. The pillow still held the indention of her head from when she passed away in her sleep. Her closet door was ajar. Each piece of clothing was arranged neatly on hangers. One hanger was bare. It occurred to me that it was probably the hanger that had held whatever outfit they had buried her in.

  A wooden chest at the foot of her bed caught my eye. I opened it to find silky kimonos and delicat
e paper fans inside. There were also some hair pins carved out of jade. One lay across the other, reminding me of crossbones. My fingers hesitated to touch anything so clearly sentimental to my deceased grandmother.

  My eyes scanned the room for something less meaningful to start with. A desk was placed in the corner of the room. Shrugging my shoulders, I crossed over to it and began riffling through the drawers. Something unexpected caught my eye.

  “What’s this? A rough draft of her will?” I muttered.

  I had seen enough of my grandmother’s handwriting in the bookkeeping at the giftshop to know it was authentic. The part of the document that made my stomach twist in knots concerned the inheritance of the tea garden. It wasn’t my name on the paper. It was Kelly’s. My jealousy over Kelly’s relationship with my grandmother flared up again. Kelly said the two of them had been close. Apparently, they had been close enough for my grandmother to consider leaving her business to Kelly. It wasn’t exactly surprising considering my grandmother’s estranged relationship with her blood relatives, but it did cast some doubt on the current situation.

  The document appeared to be incomplete and was dated a long time ago. Was it still valid even if my grandmother hadn’t signed it? I was fairly certain the copy of the will leaving the place to me was more recent, but there was no way to tell without comparing the dates on both documents. Had my grandmother really intended to leave everything to Kelly instead? Had she changed her mind and decided to leave it to me in the end? Surely the old will was nullified by the one naming me as heir, right?

  Doubts and worries clouded my thoughts. What if I was wrong about the dates on the wills? Did Kelly know about this version of the will? Had my grandmother ever hinted at the fact that she might inherit the business? Suddenly, the suspicious thoughts I had about Kelly came back in full force. Her supposedly friendly offer to help me reopen the gardens might have just been a way for her to get close enough to sabotage me. Killing someone at the tea garden and then hoping that it would be pinned on me might be just the thing Kelly needed to seek revenge on me for taking what she thought of as rightfully hers. After all, she had been the one helping my grandmother. She knew the business backwards and forwards. I was just an outsider who had never been involved in the old woman’s life.