The Grim Steeper: A Teapot Collector Mystery (7 page)

That seemed like a particularly tortured theory to Sophie, but she took it in and thought about it. “So you’re saying Jeanette, knowing what Paul did, is trying to throw shade on Jason, hoping her boyfriend won’t get caught?”

“Exactly!” Elizabeth said. “You go to the head of the class.”

Sophie peeked around the drapes; Rhiannon was swamped, so she excused herself from Elizabeth and returned to the booth.

“You’re Sophie Taylor, right?” said a young woman who stood with a friend looking over the teapots.

“I am! How’d you know?”

“My aunt described you. I’m Vienna Hodge.”

“Laverne’s niece? Eli’s little sister?”

“One of the many . . . nieces, I mean,” the young woman said with a laugh. Midtwenties and slim, wearing a peacoat
over leggings, she had the most gorgeous long-lashed hazel eyes. Her dark hair was shiny and short, sleeked forward and dyed mahogany on the ends. “Eli’s my half brother; I’m from Daddy’s third marriage. Anyway, Auntie Lala called me and said you would be here, and asked if I could stop in and talk to you. She wouldn’t say what about.”

Well, this was awkward. Vienna’s similarly slim but blond and blue-eyed friend was talking to a fellow in the aisle. “I don’t want to take your time. You work in admissions here, right?”

The young woman nodded.

“I really just . . . it’s about Jason Murphy. He’s my friend, and is in trouble, as you likely know.”

“That’s all anyone is talking about. None of us want to see him fired,” she said, motioning to her friend. “He’s the hot prof, you know? The one all the girls have a crush on.
And
he’s nice, not a jerk like some of them. Whenever he comes in to the office, he always stops to chat. But what can I tell you? I’m just an assistant in admissions.”

“I guess I’m grasping at straws. You know these people, though; have any of them been acting odd? Or has anyone said anything about who the dean is leaning toward blaming?”

“My boss is friends with the registrar, Vince Nomuro. Do you know him?”

“Just enough to recognize him.” Sophie explained about the basketball game she had attended.

“Yeah, no doubt. Vince is such a big basketball fan that he’s at
every
game. I overheard them talking this morning, the registrar and my boss. Vince is worried. I don’t know if he did it, or if he just worries in general, but I
did
hear him say that he won’t go down without a fight.”

Vienna and her friend were meeting people at the Crook’s Lair, the on-campus pub, so they bustled away. Sophie
pondered what she had just heard; surely it would be an even more serious thing for someone like Vince Nomuro, whose whole career was based on trust with data on students. He had certainly seemed nervous at the basketball game, and was keeping his eye on Dean Asquith.

The evening was winding to a close and the hall was emptying, with the last few customers chatting to vendors and finalizing orders. Sophie helped Rhiannon tear down the booth. They loaded the shelves and product on a dolly cart and wheeled it through the convention center, with Rhi pausing to talk to people along the way. At one of their stops, Sophie noticed Dean Asquith speaking to a thirtyish woman with auburn wavy hair and a curvaceous form, hugged by an expensive dress. Asquith looked around with a nervous twitch, then grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her away. Interesting.

But irrelevant.

They circled the active area of the convention floor, beyond the long curtains, and threaded through pallets of boxed products to a garage-style door. “Wait here, and I’ll go get my van and back it up to the door,” Rhiannon said.

Sophie sat on the edge of the dolly cart and considered what she had learned so far. Paul Wechsler, Jeanette Asquith’s boyfriend, had the motive and could easily have changed Mac MacAlister’s grade in exchange for a bribe from some source, possibly the guy’s parents. When one considered the size of the paychecks NBA players received, a bribe could well be worth it, but would it matter if he got good grades or completed his schooling? Couldn’t he go directly to the NBA if he was so talented? She didn’t understand all the ins and outs of the athletic and academic worlds. Maybe there was some scouting opportunity Mac needed to be a part of, or maybe getting into the college basketball finals would bring him to the attention of NBA scouts more surely than anything else.

Vince Nomuro, according to Vienna Hodge, was worried about his own job, though. He was certainly in the best position to change the grade, but why would he do it, unless bribery was also his motivation? Or was he so much of a basketball fan that he would have done it out of love for his college team’s prospects? That was a big jump to imagine him risking his good job to keep Mac on the team.

Another merchant wheeled a dolly cart into the area, raised the steel door with a loud rattle and pushed the laden cart out to a waiting cube van, where the driver helped him load up. They left the door open and drove away, with a roar of the engine and smell of exhaust fumes. A cold wind swept in, along with some dried leaves. What was taking Rhiannon so long?

Sophie got up and paced away from the big open door. It was getting colder. There was a protected spot beyond the open door where she could still keep the loaded dolly cart in sight. She squeezed herself into it, and warmed her hands under her armpits. Another set of people left, loading their few boxes in a car trunk and taking off. Where was Rhiannon?

She heard voices again, but this time they were just beyond the long heavy curtains that separated the storage and loading dock area from the convention center floor. “. . . you can’t keep me hanging on. I won’t have it!” a female’s shrill voice complained.

A male voice with a condescending tone responded, “You’ll have to put up with it, Sherri. I’m not getting a divorce, and neither is my wife. I like things the way they are.”

“To hell with that, Dale.”

“Hey, you’re seeing other men; don’t try to tell me you aren’t. I have spies everywhere, Sherri.”

“That was just . . . I
wanted
you to know, Dale. I wanted you to know I can have anyone I want.”

“Look, let’s end this as friends. No hard feelings, okay?”

“No! I’m
not
going to put up with this anymore. You made promises, Dale. I’ll talk; I swear I’ll talk, and you won’t like what I have to say. I know that some of your precious student athletes aren’t doing all their own work, are they? What about that? A nice, fat, juicy cheating scandal.”

“You will not say a word to anyone!” There was a bit of a scuffle, and the curtain wavered, then there was silence, and the sound of a woman weeping, and more words, soothing in tone, as they both appeared to move away.

Dale? That was Dean Asquith’s first name, if she was right. Sophie nipped across the open space and peeked out of the curtains just in time to see the tall figure of the dean with his arms around the flame-haired woman Sophie had seen him with earlier. Well, that was interesting; so that was his mistress. If Sophie was a gossip, she would spread that little scene around, but she couldn’t care less. More important was the news that cheating at the college may not be confined to grade hiking. How bad a scandal would that be, if students weren’t doing their own course work?

At that moment Rhiannon backed the van up to the door and got out, apologizing. “Darn thing wouldn’t start! I had to get some guy to give me a jump. I can’t shut it down in case it won’t start again, so help me load up and I’ll get out of here.”

Sophie grabbed the box of Auntie Rose’s tea out of the back, got a lift across the parking lot to her Jetta and drove home.

Chapter 7

A
untie Rose’s was closed, as it was a Sunday. Most Sundays were quiet, calm, peaceful days. Nana would spend it reading or talking on the phone to friends; sometimes she accompanied Laverne to church. Sophie would piddle around in the kitchen, inventing new recipes, getting ahead on prep and enjoying the sunshine that streamed through the window.

But this Sunday was crazy busy, as they were getting ready for the Fall Fling Townwide Tea Party. Laverne had helped with organizing, her strong suit, but then headed home to have a nap. Sophie made her grandmother go upstairs to lie down, telling Nana she would not let them open otherwise. Sophie tiptoed around for a couple of hours, preparing everything she could, then had a sandwich for dinner while reading restaurant reviews in an old
New York Times
.

And then it was showtime. Sophie was actually nervous, more so because the tea walk would mean the dean and many
others from the college would be stopping by, and she wasn’t sure how to talk to them, especially with all she was thinking and feeling about how they were treating Jason. But she needed to set that aside for one night. She would be herself. At In Fashion she had hosted senators and movie stars, authors and fashionistas, among other luminaries, so a college dean and his entourage should be small potatoes, as Nana said.

There was still that niggling doubt in the back of her mind, though. Academics seemed a whole different breed to her, and academic culture was strange, insular, snobbish, almost inbred.

Cissy Peterson was helping her grandmother and Gilda at Belle Époque, and Dana had offered to help Sophie at Auntie Rose’s, but both were late. Sophie lugged a sturdy folding table out to the front of Auntie Rose’s. The structure itself was a big white clapboard house, the entire main floor converted many years before into a tearoom. Nana had explained to Sophie when she was a child that when she lost her husband, she needed to find a way to make a living, and she had always loved tea and enjoyed baking, so opening a tearoom was her answer.

Sophie understood more now about how much Nana had suffered many years ago, losing her husband and a son—her oldest child had died in Vietnam—and having the other son disappear. No one had heard from Jack for forty years, though Nana had hired a private detective at one point to try to find him. He had drifted into the drug scene in California in the nineteen seventies, the detective was able to discover, but then he disappeared. The tearoom and Laverne’s friendship were her saving graces.

The garden in the front of Auntie Rose’s was kept simple so that maintenance would be easy. It was contained by low box hedges, and much of the area was graveled with white
marble, though there was a section of lush green lawn, too, with a flowering crabapple tree. In one corner by the front window there was a pretty Japanese maple. Sophie hung a teacup mobile in the tree, tied a light to the branch and ran an extension cord thorough the front window. She set the tea table up under the light and spread a plastic cover over it, clipping it with clothes pegs in case a breeze came up.

Dana pulled up with Cissy in the passenger’s seat of her car. Cissy jumped out, waved to Sophie, shouted “We’re late!” then trotted into Belle Époque as Dana pulled around back and parked. Thelma’s establishment was almost identical to Auntie Rose’s in front. Not surprising, Nana said, since Thelma had her grandson, Phil, copy her ten years before when she had the front redone. It, too, had a hedge, though it was scrubby and undergrown, and unlike the flowering crabapple tree in front of Auntie Rose’s, Belle Époque featured a small ornamental tree. Sophie snorted back a laugh. She’d name Nana’s crabapple tree Thelma.

Dana approached from behind the tearoom. There was something different about the always-gorgeous woman, Sophie thought, examining her. She was wearing cinnamon-colored jeans and a heavy cable-knit sweater with a fleece vest over it. Somehow she managed to make even that warm outfit chic. Then Sophie looked down at her footwear. “You’re wearing Uggs! I thought you said they were ugly. I thought—”

“That was before Eli said I made them look hot.”

Sophie chuckled and asked her friend to retrieve the box of tea stuff from the tearoom. In between dashing in and out of Auntie Rose’s to fetch things, Dana chattered nonstop about Eli. They had met in the summer in Butterhill, an hour’s drive away, while Sophie and the others were up there at a teapot collectors’ convention where a murder had
happened, a murder that her nana was a suspect in! Eli had gotten himself assigned to the case, concerned about his aunt and grandfather, and intent on apprehending the killer. Dana had spotted him immediately and fell for his good looks, intelligence, but most of all his care for his family. The couple’s relationship had moved swiftly, but Sophie was still surprised at one of Dana’s confessions.

The setting sun lit the golden streaks in her gorgeous mane of hair, which she tossed back over her shoulder. She turned toward Sophie. Her voice trembling with excitement, she said, “Soph, I think Eli is going to ask me to marry him.”

“Really?” Sophie paused as she reclipped the tablecloth for the outdoor table and stared at her friend. “But you’ve only known each other . . . what, three months? Not even?”

Dana shrugged. “When you know, you know. And I
know
. I knew right away, and I think he did, too. I love him and I want to marry him.”

It seemed awfully quick to Sophie, but who was she to judge? “He seems like a great guy.”

“He is a wonderful man, kind, thoughtful, sweet. He loves his family, and he’s good to his nieces and nephews. He’ll make a great father.” She grinned and dropped a saucy wink. “And it doesn’t hurt that he is smoking hot.”

Next door, Cissy hauled a table out front as Gilda gabbled at her, flapping her hands. Poor Cissy, having to deal with cranky Thelma and flighty Gilda. “Dana, I’ve got this under control. Do you want to go help Cissy?”

“No. But I will anyway.”

Sophie laughed. The Earnshaw-Peterson family was sometimes a trial to get along with. As much as she had tried to get Thelma involved with her and Julia’s plans for their street’s part in the Fall Fling, Mrs. Earnshaw seemed to have a chip on her shoulder and had refused or, rather, ignored
her offer. At least Cissy was there to help, but her old friend, usually a pleasant companion, could be petulant and moody if she felt she wasn’t the center of attention. Dana crossed the drive and helped Cissy, who brightened up and sent Gilda back in to work with Thelma on the inside preparations.

Laverne pulled in, driving the stately old car she had owned since it was new, in the seventies. She parked in back, where Auntie Rose’s and Belle Époque had a modest joint parking lot, room enough for a dozen or so cars. Laverne stuck her head around the corner. “You need any help out here?”

“No, I’m good. Just go in and make sure Nana doesn’t try to do too much.”

“Honey, I’ll try, but she’s a grown woman. You can’t stop her from doing what she wants.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.”

Laverne’s dark eyes were warm with love. “I know, Sophie. She’s the big sister I never had. You know I’ll take care of her.”

“I don’t know when I became such a worrier.”

Nana had a vintage electric samovar stored in the attic. Sophie had retrieved it, cleaned it up and now had it full of water, from which she would make fresh pots of Auntie Rose’s tea as the evening progressed. Nana had insisted on using some of her jumble of assorted teacups and saucers for the full Auntie Rose experience. Sophie stacked them up, plugged in the samovar and got the plastic tubs of treats, setting them on a stool beside the table. She set up a couple of the domed treat plates and filled them, stacking more on a triple cake stand.

She checked her watch. It was seven, and their section of the tea party stroll was just starting. In fact, as she looked down the street, she could see some folks parking cars and gathering, starting at SereniTea, as she and Julia had suggested. Gracious
Grove, as a dry town, had an inordinate number of tearooms and cafés. The committee had decided that groups would be directed to the three “districts” in the town where tearooms were clustered. The first had been visited at five, the second at six, and their string, SereniTea, Belle Époque and Auntie Rose’s, was last.

Sophie and Dana at Auntie Rose’s, and Cissy and Gilda at Belle Époque were to stand outside, pour tea, talk about the blends and hand out treats. Sophie was going to guide inside those who wished to warm up or have a tour of Nana’s teapot collection. Poor Cissy was wrapped in a winter coat and still hopped from foot to foot, her fragile frame not affording her enough internal heat to ward off the October evening chill.

A few strollers started with Auntie Rose’s. Some folks said the tea tasted off but when Sophie took a cup herself, it tasted fine, and most found it perfectly delicious. Maybe some weren’t used to the blend, or the strength. Kimmy Gabrielson and her book club arrived and took their time, enjoying the tea and treats. Kimmy and Dana chatted, then the group wandered on to Belle Époque and from there to SereniTea.

The treats were a big hit with everyone. Nana had made lemon bars and Hello Dolly squares, while Sophie had made macarons—delicate egg white, powdered sugar and almond flour cookies—in the college’s royal blue, as well as cupcakes with blue icing, dusted with silver. Dana, who skipped back and forth between the two side-by-side establishments, reported that Thelma was offering platters of store-bought cookies, which was probably a safer bet than her usual homemade fare.

It seemed a thin crowd to Sophie, but at about a quarter to eight she found out why. A large group moved down the street toward them, many more than were supposed to come to each establishment together. She noticed the tall figures of Dean
Asquith and his wife, Jeanette, in the center of a group of older, well-dressed individuals. With them was Mac MacAlister; what was the basketball player doing on the tea stroll? He was accompanied by an older couple, the woman tiny and birdlike, but the gentleman almost as tall as Mac, his large head covered in a spray of sparse hair with faint tinges of a ginger hue among the gray hairs; the pair had to be his parents, or even grandparents.

The big group also comprised duos and singles: Vince Nomuro with a natty tweed duffer cap pulled low, and Brenda Fletcher wearing a black-and-white peacoat with a fluffy white scarf; Heck Donovan, looking as hangdog as usual in a rumpled trench coat, and Penny with an odd assortment of colorful scarves wrapped around her; Julia and Jason strolling together, looking uneasy; Sherri Shaw, of all people, whose exotic style had been toned down. She wore a tan shawl-collared wool coat over camel dress slacks.

The crowd broke up into smaller clusters. The dean and his wife stuck close to the well-dressed men and women who Dana explained to her were Cruickshank College’s Board of Governors, mostly responsible for fund-raising, cultivating alumni to encourage gifts and bequests, and scholarship programs. Dean Asquith appeared grim, as he tried to herd them together and keep them close while avoiding his mistress, who lingered nearby, though she never spoke to him.

It was an oddly assorted group. It appeared to Sophie that the MacAlister clan refused to break away, grimly shadowing the dean like jaguars following a wildebeest. Jason waved to Sophie, and she waved back, but he stuck by Julia close to the dean’s group, as did the coach and his morose wife. Vince, eyeing them all with trepidation, sipped tea and kept his eye on Asquith, though his assistant drifted away and texted on her phone in a pool of light from the streetlamps.

Lurking beyond the college crowd were a few strays. Tara Mitchells hung back in the shadows snapping photos, her flash illuminating startled expressions. Maybe she was shooting the tea party for the
Clarion
. Sophie hoped that was it, and that she wasn’t there to stir up trouble. There was a nice-looking dark-haired fellow who appeared to observe; he never got a cup of tea, nor did he eat anything, he just watched. Kimmy Gabrielson had evidently parted from her book group and joined with the college crowd. She trotted up to Mac, taking him by the arm and pulling him aside. They spoke for a moment, with vehemence on her part, but he shook his head and pried her grasping hand off his arm. She appeared miffed and stood with her arms crossed over her bosom, looking like she was trying not to cry.

Tara Mitchells was taking notes, Sophie noticed; it would do the academic adviser well to not wear her heart on her sleeve, because no matter what she said, it appeared she had deeper feelings for the basketball player than just a professional relationship, on her part at least. Dana approached her and they chatted for a moment, then Kimmy walked away, back toward downtown Gracious Grove, where she had probably parked. Even as Sophie kept an eye on them all, she served and chatted with the three older gentleman and two ladies, the Cruickshank College Board of Governors members.

“These are lovely macarons,” one tall older lady said, giving the cookies the correct French pronunciation, rolling the
r
. She was neatly dressed in a gray wool skirt suit with a dark blue caped jacket, her iron-gray hair stiffly waved under a sophisticated little hat. A Cruickshank College crest adorned the jacket. “I haven’t had such lovely ones in ages, certainly not here in America.”