“Are you okay, Mom?” Hayley asked.
“I’m fine.” Maybe not the exact truth, but she was still upright.
“C’mon, let’s go,” Hayley said. “My car’s over there.” She pointed to her burgundy Nissan parked partway down the road.
Lia blinked. Her brain had grown fuzzy with fatigue. “What about mine?”
“We can get it later, Mom. You don’t want to drive right now. You need to get home.”
Lia surrendered without further argument. There were times when giving up control was a good thing.
* * *
* * *
After she got home, Lia tried to reach Belinda, but her calls and messages went unanswered, leaving Lia with little choice other than to wait. She allowed Hayley to fuss over her a little and sipped at her second cup of tea, her feet propped on a hassock.
“I’m so sorry for all the vendors,” she said after going through all the details of the scene at the barn with Hayley and moving on to the collateral damage of the murder. “This was going to be such a big day for sales. Everyone loaded their booths with particular things for Mother’s Day. Oh, and poor Olivia! She had a special order. It would have been her best sale in a long while. She was so excited.”
“At least it’s not perishable,” Hayley said. “Olivia’s stuff, I mean. And yours and a lot of the others.”
“But not Carolyn’s,” Lia said, shaking her head. “She and her daughters probably baked loads of coffee cakes and every other kind of pastry for today. I don’t know what they’ll do with it all.”
Hayley clicked her tongue. “That’s a shame. Maybe they can sell them out of her house? I wouldn’t mind running over for one.” She set her own cup on one of Lia’s narrow end tables. “What do you suppose will happen to the craft fair itself?”
“Well, the barn won’t be sold, at least not to Darren Peebles. But, gosh, even if it isn’t, the murder itself might cause plenty of damage to the fair’s reputation.”
“Unless it’s solved right away, over and done with, back to normal.” Hayley appeared to think that cheery thought over. “But I guess a lot will depend on who did it.”
“Yes,” Lia agreed. “Who.” If the murderer was someone connected to the Crandalsburg Craft Fair, it was doomed, and they both knew the fair’s manager, Belinda, was in a tight spot. There was the very public fight she’d had with Darren, and the fact that his death would clearly benefit her. To top it off, she had been the person on the scene when Lia had arrived, gazing down at her dead ex-husband.
“But,” Lia said, coming to her friend’s defense, “besides the fact that Belinda would never do such a thing, if, hypothetically speaking, she had, she wouldn’t kill Darren at the barn, would she? It’s just common sense that she’d pick anywhere else.”
“Maybe it wasn’t planned, Mom. It could have been one of those heat-of-the moment things.”
“But she didn’t look the least bit heated when I walked in. And the candles? The clown sculpture? Why in the world would she drag those around him?”
“I don’t know,” Hayley said with a helpless shrug. “If you’re crazy enough to commit murder, maybe you’ll do lots of other crazy things.”
Lia frowned. “Maybe.” But maybe not, too. It didn’t sit right with her.
“So what exactly did him in?” Hayley asked. She shifted position in her chair, curling her bare feet under her. “You said there was blood.”
Lia nodded. “Around his head, along with broken pottery. My guess is he was hit hard with one of Annie Bradburn’s beautiful pots.”
“Ugh! How much strength would that take?” Hayley asked. “Could a woman do it? I mean, if not, maybe that would let Belinda off the hook.”
“I have no idea, dear.” But Lia pictured Belinda’s solid build and remembered how effortlessly she’d lifted Lia’s packed moving boxes out of the back of her car. That argument wasn’t going to fly. “We’ll just have to wait for an official report.”
Hayley offered to stay overnight with Lia, but Lia waved the suggestion off. “No need. Go back tonight as planned and arrange for your time off. Do you think that’ll be doable?”
“Sure. I’m between projects right now so nobody’ll mind. Huh! They might not even notice I’m gone!”
“Is that the problem?” Lia asked gently.
“Just kidding. No, it should be fine as long as I tie up a couple of things first. Is my coming Thursday or Friday okay with you?”
“Absolutely, for as long as you need.”
They heated up the leftovers from the previous night—Lia hardly able to believe it had been only twenty-four hours—and ate a quick meal, after which Hayley drove them back to the barn to collect Lia’s car. They hugged one final time before Hayley took off, promising as usual to text Lia that she’d made it back to her place in Philadelphia safely.
As Lia watched her daughter drive away, she wondered about the remark that Hayley had passed off as a joke. They might not even notice I’m gone. Sometimes jokes could be revealing. Lia would hold on to it and wait for more to come along.
* * *
* * *
At ten the next morning, after multiple calls to Belinda continued to go to voice mail, Lia decided to go to her house. She knew how Belinda tended to hole herself up, convinced that not talking about a problem meant it would go away. That wasn’t going to work so well this time.
Belinda’s house was the one she and Darren had once shared and which she had retained after their divorce. It had impressed Lia and Tom when they first saw it years ago, with its vaulted-ceiling living room, roomy eat-in kitchen, and airy sunroom, along with the beautiful landscaping. But Lia saw signs of neglect in that landscaping—overgrown or dead shrubs—and siding that needed a good power wash, along with several missing or broken slates on the roof. Whether the unkempt condition was from lack of money or time, Lia didn’t know, but it set a depressing tone as she drove up.
She rang the doorbell, banged the knocker, and called out until she finally saw an upstairs curtain twitch and in a minute or so heard the locks turn. Belinda stood before her, dressed in sweat pants and a long shirt. Her hair looked like she hadn’t touched it since getting out of bed.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, looking puzzled and just a little annoyed.
“I came to see how you’re doing. You aren’t answering your phone.”
“I’ve been too busy using it. All the events at the barn have to be rescheduled, which is a major headache. Then there’s the cleanup. Did you know you can’t just send in a regular crew? It has to be done by a licensed crime scene cleanup crew. I just spent half an hour explaining that to Alfred Schumacher, who’d love to push the expense onto me. In his dreams!”