Roast Turkey and a Murder

by Kathleen Suzette

  Agatha took hold of my arm and we walked slowly toward whatever was lying in the alley just out of the glow of the streetlight.

  Agatha inhaled sharply. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I hesitated for a moment and then nodded my head. “I’m afraid it is,” I said and Agatha let loose of my arm as I hurried over to Tori’s side. She was staring sightlessly into the sky, the snow having lightly covered most of her face. I kneeled down, reached out and touched the side of her neck. I already knew it was too late, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Her skin felt firm beneath my gloved fingers. Tori had been dead for a while.

  “Oh my goodness,” Agatha breathed out from behind me. “What do you suppose happened to her?”

  “From the looks of the tire tracks in the snow, she was ran over,” I said. I fumbled for the phone in my pocket, pulled it out, and quickly dialed Cade.

  “Cade,” I said when he answered the phone sleepily. My teeth began to chatter in the cold and I tensed my muscles to try to keep the shivering to a minimum. “I’m down here with Agatha at the community center and Tori Wells is dead.”

  I heard a groan over the phone. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m pretty sure I know a dead person when I see one these days, Cade. I’ve had a bit of experience with that.” I didn’t mean to be short with him, but this was no time for being funny.

  “What time is it?” he asked and then I heard another groan before I could answer. “Seriously? What are you doing down there at 4:00 a.m.?”

  “We need to get the turkeys cooked for the community center Thanksgiving Day meal. There are people depending on us.” I suddenly felt responsible to carry on with the meal Tori had planned. Someone had to take over, and it looked like that someone was going to be me.

  “I’ll be there in just a few minutes,” he said and hung up before I could say anything else.

  I looked at Agatha. She was staring blankly at Tori’s face. She turned to look at me. “I just can’t imagine what happened,” she said numbly. “Wouldn’t you imagine if someone had accidentally ran her over, that they would have realized what they had done and gotten her some help?”

  I nodded and shivered, pulling my coat tighter against my body. “Yes, I would have thought so.”

  She nodded. “Well, it won’t be long and people will be showing up to eat. Cade needs to get her body out of here so people don’t see it.”

  I nodded. We still had a community dinner to put on, I thought resolutely. I hated to leave Tori alone out here in the cold, but there wasn’t much else we could do. “Cade will be here in just a few minutes.”

  “Oh! How stupid of me!” She fished in her purse and pulled out a set of keys. “I have a key to the community center. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. Perhaps we should go inside and begin preparations?”

  I looked at her numbly. She had a key?

  “I suppose we should,” I said slowly. “I don’t want to disappoint all the people that will be here later.” If I remembered right, Tori said they’d had over two hundred people last year that had come for dinner. That was a lot of people to let down.

  We headed to the back door, and I watched as Agatha stuck the key into the back door lock. It turned easily, and she pushed the door open. I glanced over my shoulder at Tori and felt a darkness cover the day.

  “There now, let’s get those turkeys going,” she said brightly. “You Americans and your turkey dinners.” She chuckled, and I followed her inside. She flipped on the kitchen lights and I shielded my eyes for just a moment until they adjusted. Agatha was a British transplant, and she had spent the last twenty Thanksgiving Days with my family. She loved a good turkey dinner as much as anyone else did.

  The kitchen was pristine in stainless steel and along one counter sat individual electric roasting pans that would handle the majority of the turkeys. “Let’s get those turkeys stuffed, seasoned, and into their roasting pans,” I said.

  The thought of Tori lying dead out in the cold made me shiver. Had it just been an accident? Had someone accidentally ran her over and gotten scared and left the scene? Or had someone gotten tired of Tori and her constant bragging on herself? It seemed an extreme thing to do if it were the latter, but I was learning that some people would stop at nothing to put an end to their problems.

  Chapter Three

  Cade got to the community center in less than ten minutes. He wore a sweatshirt and jeans beneath a black thigh-length wool coat and a tuft of dark brown hair stood up at the back of his head. Sleep showed on his face, a faint blanket pattern still on his face beneath his left eye. Agatha and I met him behind the community center. He parked crosswise to block the alley and got out, heading straight to where Tori lay.

  “Someone ran her over,” I explained.

  He squatted beside her, taking in her condition. “So I see,” he said. He looked up at me. “How long have you been here?”

  “Around ten minutes,” I said. “She cornered me at the coffee shop yesterday and talked me into coming down to help her out with the turkeys.”

  “This place will be teeming with people in just a few short hours,” Agatha said. “Are you going to call an ambulance to take her away?”

  Cade shook his head without looking at Agatha. “Not yet. We may have to postpone the dinner to another day.”

  “Oh no, we can’t do that. There are a lot of people who depend on this. Without the community meal, many won’t have any Thanksgiving dinner,” I said.

  He turned to look at me, considering. “I’ll give the coroner a call and see if I can get him out here quickly, but I doubt he’s going to appreciate being dragged from his warm bed this early on a holiday.”

  “Well it’s a shame he’s going to be inconvenienced then,” I said, feeling a little irritated. “Maybe you should impress on him the importance of the meal for the less fortunate. Agatha and I are going inside to start the meal. If he doesn’t come and release her body in time, maybe you can just have the alley blocked off so no one will come back here.”

  He gave me a nod and pulled his phone from his pocket. He pulled his coat tightly around himself as he made a phone call. I didn’t mean to be snippy with him, but the coroner needed to think of others before himself on a day like today.

  “Come on Agatha, let’s get those turkeys in the roasting pans,” I said taking her by the hand and leading her back to the kitchen.

  “What a terrible shame,” Agatha said when we were inside the kitchen. “I can’t imagine who would want to kill Tori.”

  “Maybe it was just an accident and someone panicked and ran off,” I said as I began pulling defrosted turkeys out of the industrial-sized refrigerator.

  Agatha reached in, pulled out a turkey, and took it over to the stainless steel counter. She set it down with an ‘oof’. “These things are huge. I hope they’ll fit in the roasters.”

  “What doesn’t fit in those will hopefully be able to go into the ovens,” I said.

  “You know, Rainey,” Agatha said thoughtfully. “On second thought, I don’t think we should be surprised that someone ran Tori over.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, removing two more turkeys from the refrigerator and putting them on the countertop.

  “She was so obnoxious. I would think there are a lot of people that wouldn’t be sorry to see her dead. I for one, don’t feel terribly sad about it.”

  I turned to look at my friend. “Seriously? I mean, I know she was a pain, but you really don’t feel bad that she’s dead?”

  She shrugged. “You don’t know how the business owners of this town have struggled under her so-called leadership. The fact is that she was an overbearing cow and I expect an awful lot of people will be happy.” She chuckled and returned to the refrigerator for the next turkey.

  I was stunned. To hear Agatha speak that way of someone that had just died was completely unexpected. I had never known Agatha to speak an ill word of anyone. “Well, let’s just hope it was a hit-and-run and
not a murder.”

  She nodded. “Perhaps so,” she said. “But now that I think about it, I’m not that surprised it happened.”

  As soon as Agatha and I had the turkeys in their roasting pans, I ducked out the back door to see what was going on with Tori’s body. The police had blocked off the alley from both sides and were milling about in the cold morning air. The coroner hadn’t arrived yet, but someone had covered Tori’s body with a thin blue tarp that looked like it came from the hardware store.

  When Cade saw me, he headed over in my direction. “I put a big pot of coffee on and as soon as it’s done, Agatha and I will bring you and the officers some,” I told him.

  He nodded. “They’ll appreciate that. It’s gotten awfully cold out here.”

  “Nothing from the coroner yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Like I said earlier, he wasn’t excited about coming out here on a cold holiday morning.”

  I snorted. “It’s a shame that Tori’s death is inconveniencing him.”

  “It is a rough one isn’t it?” Cade said with a grin. “How are the turkeys coming?”

  “I put them all in their roasting pans and they’re cooking now. And by the paper I found hanging on the refrigerator door, I think we’ll have a small crew of helpers in shortly. I didn’t ask Tori what the plans were for the day when I spoke to her because I didn’t intend to stay beyond putting the turkeys on to roast. Agatha said Tori usually arranged for lots of helpers to come in later in the day, and the sheet of paper I found has names, times, and job duties on it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it all out then,” he said confidently. “You are a professional, after all.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I have dinner to cook at home as well, you know. I expect a lot more sympathy out of you.” I was teasing him, but I was a little concerned about how I’d get both meals done in time.

  He chuckled. “I’ll certainly work on the sympathy thing.”

  I pulled my coat tighter around myself. “What do you think? Do you think it was an accident?”

  “I suppose it could be, but there aren’t any skid marks to indicate the driver tried to stop. It could be they simply didn’t see her until the last moment, but the dim light from the streetlight should have been enough for them to see her. Of course, she could have suddenly stepped out of the shadows.”

  I nodded, considering this. “Isn’t it weird that she was quite a distance from the back door? Her car is parked around front, so I’m assuming she entered from the front and went through the building to the kitchen. What was she doing out here?”

  He nodded. “I was thinking about that, too. She was beyond the dumpster, but that may have happened from the impact.”

  I winced. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said turning away from the tarp. “For some reason, I just thought she was ran over.”

  He shrugged. “I doubt it. The body would have been thrown from the impact. We’ll have to try to figure out what the rate of speed of the vehicle was, but to be honest, it looks like she was hit and flew quite a distance.”

  I looked at him. “How do you figure?”

  “I took a look at her, and she’s got some pretty massive damage to her right hip. It looks like she was faced away from the community center door and heading away from there.”

  I nodded. “Maybe she was running from the vehicle?” I asked. “I was hoping it was just an accident, but maybe she knew someone was coming after her.”

  “We’re looking over the scene. We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner and see what he thinks based on the injuries. But from what I’m seeing now, I do feel like somebody hit her on purpose.”

  A cold breeze blew across the alley and I shivered. I didn’t care for Tori much, but I couldn’t say I really disliked her. I didn’t have to deal with her on a regular basis like others did and I could see where Tori could get on a person’s nerves. Every time I saw Tori, all she did was talk about herself and how wonderful she was, but some people have an inflated view of themselves. I found it best just to avoid or ignore her.

  My mother and the other business owners had to deal with Tori on a regular basis. The business owners association had monthly meetings, and I knew that ever since Tori was voted in, there had been issues. If Agatha and my mother had issues with Tori’s leadership, then I was sure there were others that did as well. I just wondered who would feel strongly enough to kill Tori.

  Chapter Four

  “Rainey, what’s going on with all the police outside?” My mother asked as she walked through the door of the community center kitchen.

  I looked up from the can of sweet potatoes I was opening. “Tori Wells is dead,” I said quietly.

  Mom gasped, stopping in her tracks.

  “Aunt Rainey!” Natalie exclaimed as she came through the kitchen door. She ran to me and we embraced. “I missed you!”

  “I missed you too, Natalie,” I said giving her a tight squeeze. Natalie was my oldest niece and had been away at college in California. The Thanksgiving holiday was her first chance to come home to visit since she started school in August.

  “What do you mean Tori Wells is dead?” Mom asked. “Where can I put my coat?”

  I pointed to the office door. She went in there to stow her belongings and my twin sister Stormy walked through the kitchen door.

  “What did I just hear you say?” Stormy asked, her eyes wide. “Tori Wells is dead?”

  “Who’s Tori Wells?” Natalie asked me.

  “Tori Wells was the nosiest, most self-absorbed woman you’d ever have the displeasure of meeting,” Agatha said, coming over to give Natalie a hug. “Not that you’ll meet her now that she’s dead.”

  “I don’t think I know her,” Natalie said, embracing Agatha.

  “What happened to her?” Mom asked, returning from the office.

  “It looks like she was ran over by a car in the alley,” I said. “Cade is back there checking out the scene. We need to get working on the side dishes for the dinner. I’m glad you all showed up. We need the help.”

  “Cade doesn’t think it’s murder, does he?” Mom asked. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it was murder, you understand. I’m just wondering if he knows yet.”

  “It’s far too early to know anything about that,” I said. “And let’s all try to feel a little sorry that someone died on Thanksgiving, shall we?”

  Diane Smith, one of the waitresses that I worked with at Sam’s Diner, came through the door and looked at me. “What’s going on with all the police out back, Rainey?” she asked.

  “There was an accident back there,” I said. “Can I ask you a favor, Diane? Will you run down to the donut shop and get some donuts for the police officers out back? I’ve been supplying them with hot coffee, but I’m sure they’re starving. They’ve been here since just after four o’clock this morning.”

  She nodded. “Sure, I can do that. It wasn’t a serious accident, was it?”

  I nodded. “I’m afraid it was. Tori Wells was hit by a car and is dead.” I hated to tell people what happened, but it wasn’t like they weren’t going to ask with all the police back there.

  She stared at me. “Really? What an awful shame,” she said, looking like she was struggling to keep a straight face.

  I sighed. I was afraid I was going to get this reaction all day long. “Don’t tell me, you weren’t crazy about her either?”

  She stared at me a moment and then smiled. “Was anyone?”

  “I’m sure someone was. I’m sure her family was crazy about her and I’m sure they’re going to be absolutely distraught when they find out what happened. And because they probably haven’t been notified yet, I’m sure we’re all going to keep this to ourselves.”

  Diane stopped smiling. “Of course Rainey. I don’t know what I was thinking. Her family will be absolutely destroyed.”

  “I appreciate your understanding,” I said and pulled out a gallon of milk from the refrigerator. I was tired and a little cr
ankier than I normally was. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much that Tori’s death wasn’t eliciting a more sympathetic reaction.

  “I’ll go get those donuts now,” she said and turned to leave.

  “And don’t forget to get enough for the kitchen staff,” Mom told her. “We’re all starving, too.”

  I shot Mom a look and she shrugged.

  “Now then, we’ve got sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and vegetables to get cooking. I saw some large pans of Jell-O salad and cranberry sauce in the refrigerator, and we need to get some potatoes peeled and ready to boil.” My mind was going over lists of things that needed to be done before we started serving and I was starting to hit my stride.

  “Natalie why don’t you help me with the sweet potatoes,” Mom said, taking her oldest granddaughter by the hand.