His wide-eyed gaze strayed to the body and then quickly back to Julie. "Yeah, I think I will." He hustled out of the room as if someone had set fire to his feet, leaving Julie and Daniel alone with Alice"s body.
Julie sighed. "Now I guess we wait?"
Daniel nodded. "But I don"t think we should wait in here. It"s probably best if we join the others in the tearoom-if for no other reason than to keep a war from breaking out."
Julie slowly nodded, although joining the others was the last thing she wanted to do. Or was it that she didn"t want to leave the body of Alice sprawled out on the dining room floor? It seemed wrong somehow to simply walk away when someone had just suffered such a wicked end.
"And you"re sure she"s ...?" Julie waved a hand around, reluctant to say the word.
"Unfortunately, yes."
Julie gave a stiff nod. "I guess I"d better go tell Hannah. I"m not sure she has any idea what"s really going on in here."
"I"ll go check on the others."
Julie managed a small smile. "Thank you, Daniel. I"m so glad you"re here."
He looked to the body on the floor and then back up to Julie"s eyes. "Me too." He sighed, giving Julie a wan smile, and then headed toward the tearoom.
Julie couldn"t stop her gaze from darting back to Alice one more time. She tried to remember what she had learned about the woman from their earlier conversations. Alice was fifty-something with a couple of grown children, recently divorced, and a bit bitter about it if the downward curve of her mouth was any indication. That was about all Julie knew.
"Oh my stars!"
Julie whirled around as Hannah walked into the room carrying two large pillar candles and a box of matches.
"What happened in here?" Hannah asked as she dumped the candles onto the table.
Julie shook her head. "I"m not sure. But Alice is ... dead."
"But she wasn"t even supposed to be the victim." Hannah searched Julie"s face as if waiting for her friend to laugh and say it was all a joke.
"No," Julie said simply. "She wasn"t."
A noise sounded from the foyer.
"The police must be here," Julie said. With any luck it wouldn"t be the same officer who had investigated George Benning"s murder last fall. Julie had seen enough of Detective Everett Frost to last a lifetime. "Stay close by," Julie said to Hannah. "I"m sure they"ll want to speak to everyone, whether you were in the room when it happened or not."
Hannah nodded, cast one last look at poor Alice, and then scuttled to the kitchen as fast as she could go.
Julie left the dining room just in time to see her "favorite" detective duck into the tearoom.
Fabulous, she thought wryly.
Two more uniformed officers and a paramedic rounded the corner and walked toward her.
"Is this where she is?" the paramedic asked.
Julie nodded mutely.
They pushed into the dining room, and the paramedic knelt beside Alice. He felt the pulse points. "No vitals," he said. "I"ll call it in. We"re either going to have to transport her or wait for the coroner to make the official call."
One of the officers nodded and then headed toward the tearoom. Julie followed close behind. When she entered the room, she met the shocked expressions of her guests.
The weekend was not going at all as planned.
The officer joined Detective Frost and said something quietly to him that made the detective nod. Then the officer left the room again.
"You don"t understand. She wasn"t supposed to die," Shirley blurted. She appeared to be on the brink of tears.
Julie cringed as Detective Frost turned his hawklike stare from Shirley to her. "h.e.l.lo, detective."
"Julie Ellis," he greeted. "Why am I not surprised to find you in the middle of all this?"
Before Julie could reply, Susan asked, "If she wasn"t supposed to die, who was?" The woman"s nose was red, a telltale sign she"d been crying. Her husband had one arm wrapped protectively around her, even though his eyes sparkled with interest.
"What do you mean?" Frost demanded. "Was this a murder gone wrong?"
"We had a murder mystery event planned for this weekend," Julie said. "There was supposed to be a fake murder, part of the act."
"I was the one who was to die," Inga said stiffly as she stepped forward. A few people started at her words, as if they hadn"t realized she was there until she spoke. Julie could sympathize. Inga had the same effect on her.
"Well, settle in, folks, because no one"s going anywhere until I get some statements." Detective Frost pinned them each with one of his cold stares. "From what we can tell, someone was murdered here tonight, and it"s my job to get to the bottom of it."
Julie sighed. It was going to be one long night.
Thankfully, two more detectives arrived to help take witness statements. One was talking to Susan and Kenneth while Sadie and Joyce sat down with the other. Liam, Gregory, and Carrie sat at a table with Shirley and drank coffee. Everyone was obviously shaken.
It was just Julie"s luck that Detective Frost was the lead on the case. Naturally, he wanted to talk to her personally.
"Now, tell me how this all came to be," he said to Julie.
She ran through the highlights: Millie wanted them to host a murder mystery weekend, and today was the first day of the event. Alice was a guest at the inn. Julie didn"t know who would want to kill her or why. She didn"t know anything about her other than what they had talked about in the tearoom. Everything at dinner had been in character.
"And the ... uh ... dress is all part of the play?" he asked, waving a hand toward her.
She glanced down at her dress and nodded her head. How could she have forgotten they were all still in costume? She thought about explaining again how the murder mystery weekend worked and why the guests looked like extras in historical movies-though not the same one-but she decided against it. He was a detective; it was his job to deduce.
"It was more of a costume party," she said. There. That was a good answer.
Detective Frost c.o.c.ked his head. "Why were the lights cut?"
"Well, in reality, I"m not sure what made them go out so early. It"s a mystery." Julie did her best to ignore the detective"s stern frown. "But in theory, Hannah was supposed to turn out the dining room lights for a few seconds. When they came back on, Inga was going to pretend she was dead. But the lights went out too soon. When we realized Hannah hadn"t turned the lights off, Daniel and I went to find the breaker box."
"Daniel Franklin." His frown deepened as he said the name. "How long do you suppose the lights were out?"
Julie thought about it for a moment. "Twenty minutes maybe. Long enough for us to get our bearings, find a flashlight, go upstairs, check that box, and then return to the main box down here."
"Here?"
She pointed to the corner of the tearoom where the main breaker box was located.
The detective turned to one of the uniformed officers hovering by the door. Julie wasn"t positive, but it seemed that every peace officer in the area had shown up for this one. "We need to dust that breaker box for prints."
Great. "Daniel and I both touched that," she said.
Detective Frost nodded.
"Has the coroner been called?" she asked.
"Yes." The detective smiled grimly at her. "I know how to do my job, Miss Ellis."
Best not to respond to that. "How long is she, Alice, going to be ... uh ... here?"
Frost looked at his watch. "Hard to say. Couple of hours. Maybe more."
A couple of hours?
"It"s going to take a while for us to get all the prints and process the crime scene," the detective continued. "Then we"ll remove the body and notify the next of kin."
Julie shivered. "She"s got a couple of kids. Adult kids."
"Husband?"
She shook her head. "Divorced."
"Well, he"ll have to be notified too," Frost said.
"What about my guests?"
"Everyone will need to come down to the station to be fingerprinted."
"What"s this? We"re going to be fingerprinted?" Sadie called from her nearby chair.
"Well, I never!" Joyce exclaimed. "Treating us like a bunch of common criminals."
A chorus of grumbles joined in from around the room.
Frost did not appear pleased. "Folks, this is standard procedure and completely necessary. It"s as much to eliminate you as suspects as anything else. We will transport you to the police station and bring you all back to the inn when we"re done."
"Then what?" Gregory asked. Of all the guests, he appeared to be the angriest. Julie couldn"t tell if it was because an inconvenient murder had ruined his weekend plans or if he just had something against cops.
"Then we investigate," said the detective. "No one leaves town for the next seventy-two hours."
"You have got to be kidding me!" Gregory"s face turned redder with each word he spoke. "You can"t keep us all here for seventy-two hours."
The detective c.o.c.ked a brow in the man"s direction. "Actually, I can."
"But that"s not right," Gregory protested. "Making us stay here with a murderer on the loose. There"s no telling which one of us might be next."
Susan let out a gasp at his cryptic words. The poor woman was clearly distraught.
Julie wished there was something she could do to make her feel less anxious-to make everyone feel less anxious. Except for the killer, of course. That monster didn"t deserve to be treated so kindly. If only she knew who the monster was.
"I need to lie down," Susan choked.
Kenneth patted her on the back rea.s.suringly. He whispered something in her ear, and she nodded. Whatever he said appeared to calm her, if only a bit.
Joyce and Sadie also seemed to calm down.
"Will we still be able to quilt, dear?" Sadie asked.
"I don"t see why not." Julie looked to the detective He remained expressionless and then shrugged.
"Well, I say, this sure puts a new spin on things." Kenneth seemed more than a little excited by the gruesome turn of events. Given his previous disinterest in everything, Julie found his heightened enthusiasm odd at best.
The only remaining guests who hadn"t sounded off at the detective were Liam and Carrie. Julie looked to the young blonde. "Do you have any questions?" she asked.
"If we have to stay, we have to stay," Carrie said.
Despite her shaky voice, Julie thought she caught a look of relief in the girl"s eyes. But there was no time to dwell on it. "Dr. Preston?"
Liam Preston continued to stare at the table in front of him. Julie could almost hear the wheels turning in his head.
"Dr. Preston?" she repeated.
"What?" Liam seemed to snap out of his stupor. "Oh, yes, if the law requires it ..."
"I still say this bites." Gregory crossed his arms over his ample chest and glared at the detective.
It seemed Frost was accustomed to such looks. He simply turned away and addressed the group as a whole. "I expect everyone to remain here until Monday night. You are free to move about the town, but you"re not free to leave. Anyone caught trying to skip town before I release you will be arrested for obstructing justice. Are we understood?"
A murmur of reluctant agreement went up all around.
"Does that mean we"re arrested?" Kenneth asked. He actually seemed excited by the idea.
"I"ve never been arrested before," Sadie said in amazement.
"Me neither," Joyce chimed in.
"No one is arrested," Frost explained. "But you are all on the short list of suspects."
"But isn"t it possible that someone else entered the building at some point and committed the crime?" Liam asked.
"Absolutely," Frost said. "We"ll be looking at all possibilities."
Julie was not looking forward to calling the inn"s owner and trying to explain to her that another murder had happened in their sleepy little town, and this one in her very own inn! Millie would be beside herself. Julie decided then and there to handle it herself. That was why she was in charge. Millie could find out when she returned home. Plus, there wasn"t anything she could do from Baja anyway.
"What do we do now?" Susan asked. The poor woman looked like she needed a tranquilizer and a two-day nap.