A Fatal Competition (A Rose Harbor Cozy Mystery Book 1) Read online

  Fatal Competition

  A Rose Harbor Mystery

  Ella White

  Copyright © 2015 Ella White

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Chapter One

  The sirens of the police car went silent as it parked in front of The Scented Blooms Flower Shop. Chief Robert Wyatt exited the vehicle with a couple of other officers while a few more cars drove up. Lydia sat on the step leading to the back door of her shop, keeping her arms wrapped around her chest as she continued to stare at Meredith’s dead body.

  She scanned through her camera’s memory card to look at the pictures she had taken while she waited for the police. She was no crime scene analyst, but she knew that she needed to take as many pictures as she could in case they missed anything. Given Chief Wyatt’s lazy track record, she certainly didn’t have much faith in the diligence of his detective skills.

  That being said, she made sure she took pictures of the body in full, close ups of the body, where the body was in relation to other landmarks, such as her store’s back door, and any other things around the body that she thought looked interesting or suspicious. Lydia had to steel her stomach to keep herself from losing her breakfast at the sight of her dead business rival. She may not have liked Meredith, but that didn’t make looking at her corpse any easier.

  Lydia kept her notebook close at hand in case she needed to write anything down. She made sure to pen down every detail she could recall, as she knew she was going to be questioned and she wanted to be prepared. If there was one thing Lydia was, it was meticulous. At only twenty-seven years old, Lydia co-owned the flower shop, which had sharpened her ability to laser focus on a task.

  Her blue-gray eyes glanced over at the entrance of the alley as all the police cars arrived. The chief ordered the officers to secure the scene of the crime while he left to speak to Lydia and some of her employees who were waiting inside. They had arrived at work without a clue about what had taken place, and they had been just as shocked as she had been. The chief approached Lydia slowly, his dull brown eyes narrowing as he watched her.

  “Lydia White?” he called, and she jumped a little at his loud tone. He sure didn’t seem happy. Still, she dutifully looked up at the sixty-year-old police chief. She stood up and held out a hand to shake, but he ignored it. “I have a few questions for you.”

  “Of course,” she replied. She had expected that. Lydia said, “Let’s go inside. I don’t want to be out here anymore.”

  Chief Wyatt tipped his cap to her, exposing his black hair that quite frankly shouldn’t be naturally that dark at his age. Lydia turned to open the back door of her shop, but as she open the door something sleek and brown sprang through the doorway and out of the building. The chief let out a gasp as Lydia called out.

  “Melvin! Watch out!”

  “What was that?” Chief Wyatt asked, instantly suspicious of anything unusual.

  “Melvin, my cat,” Lydia explained. “He sometimes stays at the shop. Helps to keep rodents out of the flowers.”

  “He better not disturb the crime scene,” he warned.

  “He won’t,” Lydia appeased him. “Melvin doesn’t like loud noises like the sirens. That’s probably why he ran.”

  The chief just huffed as they entered the shop. It was a nice enough flower store, with plants in bloom everywhere. One could tell Lydia was a very organized person based on the planning of her store. As her main attraction, her award-winning flower arrangements were on display at the front of the store, but behind those everything else was sorted out. She kept annual plants in one place, perennials in another, and next to those were the biennials. She also sorted the flowers by their origin, by color, and by reproductive stage. Trees and shrubs were kept separate from the herb and spice plants, and she even had some climbing vines draped around and hanging from the ceiling. How she kept track of all of these plants, let alone how she sold them, was completely beyond the chief’s comprehension.

  Lydia offered him a stool to sit on, but he just shook his head and took out his own notepad and pen.

  “Can you tell me what happened exactly?”

  “I was just about to open up shop,” Lydia described, looking down at her notes as if there was something there that would help her. “I came through the back way like I always do. I saw this pile of dark bags, which I thought was just some garbage that the trash man had left behind. He’s been doing that a lot lately.”

  “Please stay on topic, ma’am,” he commanded, considerably impatient.

  “Sorry. I went to check on the bags, and they made me really nervous,” she continued. “And I mean really nervous. I had a really bad feeling. As I got closer, I realized that it was a body. It was Meredith!”

  “And you called the police?” Chief Wyatt asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know her full name?”

  “Meredith Blake.”

  The chief wrote down the name and passed it to one of his officers. “Here, this is the victim’s name. Try calling her family. So how did you know this Meredith?”

  “Chief, you know how I know her!” Lydia announced. “Nearly everyone knows everyone in this town. But anyway, Meredith and I competed in the Annual Flower Arrangement Competition yesterday. We tied for first place.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “About tying for first?” Lydia asked for clarification, and the chief nodded. “I was disappointed and frustrated of course, but Meredith was downright spiteful about it.”

  Chief Wyatt stopped writing. “How so?”

  “She kept asking the judges to recount the votes,” Lydia declared. “Time after time, when the votes kept coming back as tied. It was the most frustrating thing!”

  “Frustrating enough that you would fight her for it?” the chief inquired.

  “Well, it was a contest, you know?” Lydia answered. “And our stores have always been competing, but what was frustrating was that she wouldn’t just let it go.”

  “She runs…ran The Purple Petal, right? Another flower shop?”

  “That’s right. It’s across town.”

  “So the two of you didn’t get along very well, I take it?”

  Lydia shook her head slightly. “We weren’t good friends, but I never wanted it to go further than competition between businesses.”

  He wrote something else down, not looking at her. “And the contest?”

  She sighed. This was getting repetitive. “I told you, it was a contest. I was frustrated by our tie, but I wouldn’t let our fight go beyond that.”

  “Sounds to me you wouldn’t mind if she wasn’t around to compete with your store,” Chief Wyatt concluded.

  Lydia practically froze. “What? You think I did it?”

  “You have a pretty good motive, and her body was found at your store,” the chief described. Lydia stared at him in disbelief, and he shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I’m just saying.”

  “Where is she?!” another woman’s voice called out piercingly. “Where is my cousin’s killer?!”

  “Who is that?” the chief asked.

  No one had a chance to answer him before another woman, who appeared to be in her mid-forties, came barging into Lydia’s shop. She glanced around, her dirty-blond hair spinning around in the process. Eventually her eyes fell on Lydia, and she stalked up to her.

  “You!” she yelled, shoving her pudgy finger into Lydia’
s face. “You’re the one who killed Meredith! It’s all your fault!”

  “Hold on! I didn’t do anything to her!” Lydia protested, backing up a little. “She was dead when I found her!”

  “Likely story!”

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” Chief Wyatt interrupted her tirade, holding up a hand to separate the two ladies. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Maura Blake,” she declared, her tone rather self-important. “Meredith was my cousin. I demand you arrest this woman for her murder!”

  “I told you, I didn’t kill her!” Lydia insisted.

  “Maura, we don’t have any proof identifying the killer yet,” the chief told her. “Please let us do our investigation.”

  “And what exactly are you doing to find my cousin’s murderer?” Maura interrogated the chief, turning the questioning on him.

  Chief Wyatt sputtered for a minute, but not used to being the one interrogated, he was unable to give her a coherent answer. Maura instead turned back to Lydia.

  “If you didn’t kill Meredith,” she practically hissed, “then who did?”

  Lydia stared at her, her voice escaping her as well. She really had no idea who might have done this. She reasoned that whoever did this must have something against her, since the killer was trying to frame her for Meredith’s death…but really, the only person Lydia could think of who would hate her that much was Meredith herself. There must have been something else, but she didn’t know what. All Lydia could do was shrug helplessly.

  Maura let out a rather undignified humph and spun around, leaving the store almost as quickly as she had arrived. Lydia watched her go and blinked multiple times, not sure how to react to this. She could hear Maura shouting out orders at the other officers outside, apparently thinking she was in charge of the crime scene. One of the police officers came inside, looking just as frazzled at the woman’s sudden appearance as Lydia felt. He walked over to the chief and handed him a piece of paper.

  “Here ya go, chief,” the officer said. “The coroner has ruled initial cause of death as suffocation, based on the bruising around her neck. He says he’ll need to perform a full autopsy to be sure.”

  “Thanks,” the chief said, rather shortly. He gave Lydia a stern look. “We might have more questions later. Don’t leave town.”

  Somehow Lydia thought his warning was not only because he was concerned about having more questions.

  She watched as the police finished exploring around her shop, questioning her employees and looking for evidence both inside and out. One officer eventually told her that she should just head home for now, and that they would contact her with any new information. She was about to leave when she heard the sound of a small purr and felt soft fur press against her leg. Looking down, Lydia realized it was her brown tabby cat, Melvin.

  “Hey there, little one,” she greeted, bending down to rub his head. His purr intensified, and he bent down to grab something at his feet. He held it up to her. “What’s this? I hope it’s not another mouse or lizard. The last time you gave me one of those it was while I was in bed!”

  Melvin just stared at her with his big green eyes, but Lydia still didn’t pay attention to what he had in his mouth.

  “I swear I’m innocent,” she whispered to herself. “But Chief Wyatt’s right, everything does point to me, even if it’s just circumstantial.”

  Lydia felt Melvin bump his head into her hand again, and she took a better look at what he held. She took it and glanced at it. It was a very elaborate hair clip, with multiple colored beads that made the shape of a feather. Lydia had never seen anything like that before, and she was pretty sure it didn’t belong to any of her employees.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked Melvin. The cat looked back and forth between the back door, where the officers were still searching for clues, and his owner, as if pressing Lydia to take some sort of action. She smiled at the kitty. “You’re right, Melvin, this is serious. We know Chief Wyatt isn’t going to do anything about it. If I want to clear my name, I’m going to have to do it myself!”

  Chapter Two

  It didn’t take long for Lydia to come up with a plan to solve this mystery. She drove to the local newspaper publishing office. It was practically just around the corner from her shop.

  If Lydia was going to clear her name, she was going to need some help, but she knew she wasn’t going to get any from the police. The next best thing was her best friend Gwen, who worked at the paper. She was a journalist and photographer, and she had been at the flower arrangement competition the previous day. Surely she knew something about Meredith’s whereabouts yesterday. Even if Gwen hadn’t noticed anything strange, she had an eye for detail that Lydia could really use right now. Gwen was always thorough when she was writing a report for the local paper. That was part of the reason why she was one of the top journalists at the Rose Harbor Gazette, especially at her young age. She even had her own corkboard for pictures and notes to help keep herself organized, which hung on the wall behind her desk.

  Lydia was a fairly regular visitor to the newspaper offices, so it wasn’t considered unusual when she arrived and asked the receptionist if she could head back to see Gwen. She didn’t even need directions to Gwen’s desk, which was a little bit off in the corner. Melvin, who followed Lydia nearly everywhere she went, was able to sneak into the building nearly unnoticed as well. The few people who did see him just smiled and waved at the little kitty, more amused than upset by his presence. One of the researchers, Harper, reached down to pet him and give him a kitty treat.

  The young woman in question was already typing furiously at her computer, likely working on her latest report. She kept her auburn hair up in a loose ponytail, which was held back by a floppy rubber band and a pencil that could twist around her hair. Her tongue was sticking out of her mouth as she finished her work and looked up as Lydia approached.

  “Morning, Lydia,” she called, pulling the pencil out of her hair, letting the wavy curls flow down to her shoulders. “What’s up?”

  “Something big has happened, Gwen,” Lydia told her, “and I could really use your help.”

  It only took Lydia a few minutes to explain what her morning had been like, and when she asked to see the pictures Gwen had taken at the competition, she practically jumped up to get them.

  Most of the photographs from the previous day had been removed from the corkboard, however, since Gwen already wrote the article last night so it could be printed in the paper that morning. She had to dig through her completed reports boxes to get the pictures and notes back out, and she dumped them all on the main table in the news office, much to the chagrin of some of the other reporters.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea, Lydia?” Gwen asked her as they looked through all the photographs she had taken the previous day. She got her wavy auburn hair caught in her fingers, like she always did, as she nervously ran her hand through it. “If this really is a murder, shouldn’t we just leave it to the police?”

  Lydia shook her head as she searched through the photos.

  “I’m in big trouble if we don’t find something about who really killed Meredith,” she insisted. “The chief of police already has it out for me. The circumstantial evidence points right to me. I need to find something to clear my name.”

  “Well I know you didn’t do it,” Gwen concurred, smiling at Lydia. “Considering I grew up as your neighbor, I would know better than anyone that you would never do something like that. You’d never hurt a fly, even it if was chewing on some of your flowers.”

  It was true. The two of them had known each other for a number of years, as they were childhood friends.

  Lydia grinned at her. “Thanks, Gwen.”

  “But maybe we should just leave this to the police to figure out?” her friend persisted. “I mean, wouldn’t getting mixed up in this just make things worse for you? Surely they’ll find the evidence of who really did it.”

  “You know as well as I do that Chief Wyatt is
a lazy bum and near retirement,” Lydia described. “And it already looks like whoever killed Meredith is trying to pin it on me. I can’t let that happen.”

  “Okay, you’ve convinced me,” she replied, though it clearly didn’t take much to make her convinced.

  “We’ll be fine. And besides, you love a good mystery.”

  “That I do. Plus I’ll have a really great story if we do solve this case.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  The two women continued to scan all the photographs. Most of them were of the flower arrangements themselves, although there were quite a few of the contestants, including both Lydia and Meredith. Melvin was either searching the photographs for clues like they were, or he was trying to make a bed out of the photo paper; Lydia wasn’t quite sure. As Gwen’s sharp gray eyes looked the pictures over, she noticed that Meredith was unhappy in all of them, especially in the last few where she had to stand next to Lydia as it was announced that they had tied for first place. There didn’t seem to be a single picture of her where she wasn’t looking like she had rotten eggs placed under her nose.