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“Detective Carter’s on the way,” I said. I’d placed the call as I left the parking lot. Once I’d explained, he said he’d be right over. We weren’t completely sure the blackmailer would show up right away, but he said he’d take the photo and letter as evidence.
“Why?” I asked as she sat up, rubbing her head and groaning.
“Why what?” she snarled.
“Why are you trying to blackmail me? I also assume you put Xylitol in the punch.”
“I’m not admitting anything.”
“I can see why blackmail might appeal, especially if it’s lucrative. I’ll be honest, though. I barely have ten thousand dollars to my name, so the well would’ve gone dry after one request.”
“You have more. Grannie Rose told me how much you got from your dad.”
“Ididhave more. When he died, I inherited the little he’d saved, plus his few possessions. I used most of the cash to open Creature Cones. I was saving the rest to upgrade equipment.” I shook my head. “Did you put the Xylitol in the punch?”
She snarled.
“I can’t understand why you’d want to ruin Grannie Rose,” I said.
“I didn’t want to ruin her.” Ginny got to her feet and glared at us both. “I was trying to ruin you, Melly. Pretty, perfect Melly who could do no wrong. You always had things easy.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Grannie took you in. She raised you. She gave you everything you needed. She lets you have the apartment above the garage for practically nothing. She rented you the building on Main Street even after I offered her more for the chance.”
“That’s right. You wanted to open a coffee shop to compete with Mystic Mocha.” It was so long ago; I’d forgotten about it.
“That building is the perfect location for a place like that. But, no, Grannie only wanted to rent to her precious granddaughter. Not me. Never me.”
“You’re my stepcousin, her sister’s stepchild. She does care about you.”
“Not since the divorce.”
“Why did you want to ruin me?”
“Because then she’d see you for what you are, a leech, and she’d ditch you like she should’ve done when you were twelve.”
“That’s enough,” Elrik snarled. “Melly has more worth in her pinky finger than you do in your entire body.”
“Lay it all out for me,” I said, noting out of the corner of my eye that Detective Carter was standing inside the woods, listening. “You put the Xylitol in the punch because you knew I’d made it while Grannie was recovering after fracturing her hip. You must’ve thought I’d made it that night as well.”
“I didn’t knowshe’dmade it that evening,” Ginny said. “You were supposed to. I wanted her to be angry with you for poisoning her friends.”
“You dumped it in even though you knew it could hurt someone. Sue was hospitalized.”
“She’s fine.”
“People were throwing up!”
She shrugged. “No one was seriously harmed.”
“Then you cut Elrik’s radiator lines and left that threatening note.”
“Which should’ve made you stop looking into this,” she said.
“I couldn’t let my grandmother go to jail,” I snarled. “Then you review-bombed Creature Cones.”
“That should’ve ruined you too. You should be cryingwhile closing your ice cream shop, begging someone to step in and buy your used equipment, which I would’ve done at a fraction of the cost. I would’ve sold it for a nice profit.”
