Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,64
kill me because he thinks I’m getting close to the truth because . . .” No dice. As much as I tried, I knew I couldn’t get past the very real objections to mesh with Beth’s theory. “There’s no way. He has an alibi. I checked it out. He was at that coaches’ meeting the night Vickie was killed, and according to the minutes of the meeting, he didn’t leave. He was there at the beginning, and he was there at the end.” I thought about everything Tyler had said about murder. And marriage. “The police think it’s somehow possible that Edward might have murdered Vickie, but . . . But you think . . . you think he killed her, too?”
“I don’t just think it,” Beth said, and she nodded like a bobble-head. “I know it for certain. And”—she burst into tears—“it’s all my fault!”
IT TOOK A WHILE TO GET BETH CALMED DOWN. I found a plastic cup, poured some water, and made her drink, then I led her into the playroom and plunked her down on one of those video chairs. I sat in the one next to her, already worried about how I was going to get out of it again. When it stopped wobbling enough for me to think straight, I got down to business. I pinned her with a look and wondered if she could even see me through her teary eyes.
“You seem pretty certain about Edward being guilty,” I said. “You want to tell me why? And why do you think it’s your fault?”
Beth started crying all over again. “Because . . .” The word bubbled past her tears. “Because I’m the one who told him about Vickie and Alex.”
“Whoa!” I held up one hand to stop her in her tracks. There was only so much I could process at any one time, and this was a biggie. I leaned forward. My chair swayed. “You knew about Vickie and Alex? But I thought one of the rules was—”
“That we never discussed what we did on Tuesday nights, not even with each other. That’s right.” Beth wiped a finger under nose. “We always followed the rule, too. Every one of us. But then a few weeks ago, Vickie and I were working on the girls’ Girl Scout cookie project. You know, tallying up sales and filling out order forms and deciding where we were going to put all those cases of cookies when they were delivered. I admit it, I was pretty overwhelmed by the whole thing. That kind of stuff always knocks me for a loop.”
“And Vickie?”
“Vickie was never fond of numbers. She used to say . . .” Beth smiled through her tears. “Vickie used to say that the only good number is a dead number. Silly, but that gives you some idea about how she felt about math. But that day, even though we were counting and adding and balancing orders against how much money people owed, Vickie was in such a good mood, I couldn’t believe it. She was humming and smiling. I asked her what was up. And she said . . .”
“Alex.” Beth didn’t need to confirm or deny. Apparently the way Vickie felt about Alex meshed with the way he felt about her. And the timing sounded right, too. According to Alex, he’d been meeting Vickie at Swallows for a few weeks.
Beth plucked at the skirt of her jumper. “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” she whispered. “Nobody ever meant it to. Going out on Tuesdays and meeting guys, it was just supposed to be a way for us to be ourselves. You know, without even our friends looking over our shoulders or judging our behavior. Nobody was ever supposed to fall in love.”
It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it. And the way she looked when she was talking, too. Suddenly there was a whole new sadness in Beth’s eyes. When she leaned back into the video chair, she looked tired and disappointed.
Call me Dr. Phil, I knew exactly where this was going. “Vickie wasn’t the only one, was she? You fell in love with someone you met on a Tuesday night, too.”
One corner of Beth’s mouth thinned. “I never told anyone. Not anyone but Vickie. I mean, it was perfect, wasn’t it? She had a secret and so did I. And we were both dying to share our news. Oh.” She blanched. “I didn’t mean that. Not about the dying.”