A Berry Horrible Holiday

by A. R. Winters

  “Seriously? You actually want to spend time with them?” I asked, unable to believe my own ears.

  Zoey smiled affectionately. “They’re idiots. They make me happy. Watching them’s like watching a baby get frustrated that it can’t fit a six-inch cookie in its mouth all in one go. It’s just so cute!”

  A group of guys trying to find what they believe is a fake killer when a real killer is afoot, possibly planning for more victims… I wasn’t sure what was scarier: that they were so clueless they could end up dead, or that Zoey’s brain associated the whole scenario with the cuteness of a baby trying to eat a cookie.

  “I gotta go too,” Joel said, putting on his jacket and retrieving his camera. “Need to see if they want anything else documented.”

  Zoey paused at the door and glanced back at me.

  “Pimento,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  Her smile was evil. “That’s what kind of sandwich I want.”

  I threw a pillow at her, but the throw went wide, and Joel caught it one-handed in midair.

  He returned the pillow to me, kissed my head, and said, “Later, babe.”

  And then the two were gone.

  I stared at my closed door for several minutes, watching for the doorknob to turn and Gaunt-Face to reappear.

  I imagined him screaming an order of roast beef with horseradish sauce on a toasted Kaiser roll. Maybe with a side of coleslaw. Maybe even some potato chips. No—onion rings!

  My stomach growled.

  Dang it!

  Now I was hungry.

  I unfolded myself from my spot on the bed and headed out the door. It took several steps to work the stiffness out of my ankle, but it quickly eased into only a mild ache.

  I was cautious when I opened the door in case someone was there lurking and waiting, but the hall was empty. In fact, I didn’t see anyone as I made my way down to the first floor and wove through its beautiful rooms to that heavenly kitchen.

  There, I was met with a sight that had me stopping, staring, and wondering if I should make a hasty retreat.

  Mama Hendrix was sitting at the long table pushed up against the wall, and the poor woman looked utterly broken. Destroyed, even. In fact, she looked done.

  Morgue done.

  Her heavy shoulders were slumped, her head hung down, and her legs sprawled topsy-turvy.

  “Mama? Mama Hendrix?” I asked, timidly.

  I had never tried to start a conversation with a dead person before, but when it comes to me and finding bodies, there’s always a first for everything.

  Chapter 10

  I wasn’t sure what to do. My cell phone didn’t even work properly way out here in this signal dead zone. Mama Hendrix was dead. She didn’t look well when I’d last seen her. I should have done something! I should have insisted she get medical attention. I should have—

  My brain halted in its tracks.

  Mama Hendrix was dead.

  Another person had died.

  I did a quick count of the empty holes remaining to be filled and the number of bodies available to fill them. There were still plenty left. The killer could be about to walk into the kitchen behind me. I could be next on the list.

  “Oh my gosh,” I whispered as panic wrapped icy tendrils around my spine. “What do I do?”

  “What was that, honey?” a croaky voice asked a half-second before Mama Hendrix’s body stirred.

  My heart skipped three whole beats. I forgot how to breathe and staggered off balance, slamming backward into the refrigerator.

  “Honey! You okay?” Mama Hendrix asked, alarmed. She was now sitting straight up in her chair and staring at me with big, unblinking eyes.

  “I thought you were dead,” I gasped.

  Mama Hendrix’s alarm seemed to double. “Me? Why would I be dead?”

  “I don’t know! You were there, with your head down, not moving.” I slumped to the floor with my hand pressed above my racing heart.

  “Oh, sweetie. You come here and sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea or something.” She rose to stand but only got up halfway before her color drained away. Rather than sit back down, she practically fell into her seat. “Well, aren’t we a pair?” she said with an embarrassed laugh. “I guess you can sit there a bit, and I’ll sit here.”

  Mama Hendrix’s complexion was pasty and waxy. I would have been more comfortable if she were lying dead on a mortician’s table. At least my brain would have been able to make sense of her appearance. She looked like she’d died hours ago.

  “I can do this,” I said, forcing myself to stand. My knees were like Jell-O. I didn’t know if they would support me. “How long since you ate something?”

  “Oh, I…” She eventually shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” A tear slipped down her cheek.

  I thankfully didn’t have to travel far to open the fridge.

  It really only took me turning around. I loaded up my arms full of food and then unloaded it on the table. I did two more trips that were just the same.

  One of the items I’d gotten out was some leftover quiche from that morning. I popped it on what I hoped was an oven-safe plate and slid it into one of the oven cubbies. The oven was already hot and waiting.

  I was pretty sure there was no way to turn the thing off.

  I then got to work making coffee and before long had put together a roast beef sandwich on rye for Mama Hendrix and a chicken salad croissant for myself.

  I bit into the buttery, flaky pastry and sighed. The chicken salad was a savory delight, with just the right amount of mayo, but the croissant was heaven. “Did you make this yourself?” I asked after I’d swallowed.

  “Mmm, yes,” Mama Hendrix said. She’d taken a couple of bites of her side of potato salad and was already looking better. Suddenly sitting up straighter, she gave the kitchen a quick look around. “I’ve got a girl somewhere. Sandra.”

  “A little taller than me? Early twenties? Cute? Wears earbuds to listen to… music?” I had to guess at the last.

  “Yes,” Mama Hendrix said. There was an unspoken question in her face.

  I was sure she couldn’t take one more ounce of bad news, but there was no way around it. “She ran off…” I grimaced. “Crying.” My face scrunched some more. “I made her cry.”

  Mama Hendrix didn’t have to ask me to go on. Her what-the-heck expression was enough.

  “She asked why everyone was coming and going up the mulch trail.”

  “Ohhhh… And you told her.” Sad comprehension softened her eyes.

  “I did.”

  Guilt worked at me despite the fact that I hadn’t actually done anything wrong—at least nothing beyond being a little callous in my delivery of the news.

  But whether someone rips a band-aid off or gently tugs at it, the thing has to come off eventually. Given the wound waiting underneath for poor Sandra, her experience was sure to be traumatic either way.

  Mama Hendrix shook her head. “I should have thought of her sooner. She was over the moon for Doug.”

  I recognized the opening. This was my chance to pry. “Had they been together long?”

  Mama Hendrix gave a little shrug with rounded shoulders that looked fit for a draped afghan. “Hard to say. The change between them was slow. First there were little looks and blushes from Sandra. Then Doug would find excuses to linger in the kitchen. I’m not sure when they actually started dating, but it seemed to me like they’d gotten pretty serious. I was expecting to be hosting a wedding for them sometime in the coming months, to be honest.” She shook her head again. “Now that’ll never come.” She turned misty eyes on me. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him. The orchard hadn’t been properly tended to since my George died. I don’t have the know-how, and there’s so much needing to be done.”

  I covered Mama Hendrix’s hand with my own and gave it a squeeze. Mama Hendrix was carrying the world on her shoulders. Now, she was left without anyone to even help her in the kitchen.
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  “Mama Hendrix, I want to say sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe if I’d delivered the news about Doug a little more gently, maybe Sandra wouldn’t have run off. Now you don’t have anyone to help you in the kitchen.”

  “Well, I’ve got you, darlin’,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Ohhhh, I know it’s an imposition and you’re here as a customer, wanting a vacation and all, but if a trained professional like you could help me out, it would just mean the world to me.”

  Crickets. Where were the crickets? There needed to be something to fill the resulting silence that spread between us. The seconds stretched out, and I kept thinking a retraction of Mama Hendrix’s request would come at any moment, but it didn’t.

  “Mama,” I said, “I would love to help you but I, um, I’m not that good. In the kitchen, I mean.”

  Mama Hendrix threw her head back and laughed. “A modest chef,” she said, swiping a tear away from the corner of her eye. “Now I’ve seen it all. But still, I’d love the chance to learn a thing or two from you, and I’d be happy to share my recipes.” She gave me a wink. “I know how collecting recipes is like panhandling for gold for people like you.”

  “I… uh… well…” How could I tell her just how bad a chef I was without completely humiliating myself?

  The people back home knew how bad I was, but I did my best to make up for it in other ways. I didn’t think that tactic would work here though.

  She really needed to make the best impression possible with each and every customer she had, and she had a very short window in which to do it. Her continuing business survived by making a wonderful impression the first time, every time.

  Of course, my cooking couldn’t get in the way of her customers’ pleasure any more than a dead man’s legs sticking straight up into the air. Right?

  I thought about the other holes out there in the cold, still waiting to be filled.

  “Mama Hendrix,” I said, my voice half an octave higher than normal as I prepared myself to launch into an uncomfortable question, “do you know anything about the hole that Doug was found in, and the other holes spread out around it?”

  “The sheriff asked me that same question.” She rubbed the spot between her eyebrows. “The questions that woman made me answer. I thought they’d never quit coming.”

  And here I was, adding to her stress. I’d thought the woman was dead just a few minutes ago. Fear filled me that if I piled my usual prying on top of what she was already going through, she’d keel over from a heart attack.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I bet this stuff is the last thing you want to talk about. I’ll let you eat in peace.”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t mind talking to you. Makes me feel better, to be honest, having someone to talk to. Just talk to, you know? Being under a magnifying glass makes my skin itch, but getting to just speak my thoughts, well, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  Out of worry and concern for her, I’d tried to close the door on my interrogation, but she’d opened it right back up. It was hard to contain my eager smile as I pressed on in my search for new and ever juicier information.

  But priorities first.

  “Do you know Sheriff Palke?” I asked.

  “Mmhmm, known her since before her pageantry days. What a stunning beauty she was.”

  Was? She used to be more beautiful?

  Distress welled within me. “I’m sure her husband, or, uh, wife, finds her as lovely as she ever was.” I held my breath, waiting for the answer to the question I didn’t ask.

  “Oh, that’s a sad story, that is.”

  “What happened?”

  “The sheriff went into a local cave system after a little girl who’d gotten lost. When the sheriff hadn’t shown back up after two days, her husband went in after her. An expert team was on its way, but her husband didn't want to wait,” she added, almost as an aside. “Then the experts did show up. They went in, and the sheriff came out with the little girl ten hours later all on her own.”

  A huge rock sat heavy in my stomach. “And her husband?”

  “Nobody ever saw him again. I heard the sheriff goes back in looking whenever she’s got a few days off.”

  “You mean there’s a chance he’s still alive and they aren’t there right now, looking for him?” Terror filled me at the thought of the poor man, alone and lost. Yet, despite that sadness, my spirits also lifted a bit—which was really sick and twisted of me. No way would Brad be seriously interested in a woman who would abandon her husband like that.

  “Oh, honey. That was four years ago now. He’s gone, the part that matters anyway. She’s just looking for him for, you know—” she wrinkled her nose “—for closure.”

  Dang it! The woman was a saint. It was all but a done deal. I was going to lose Brad forever.

  “So what you’re saying is that she’s gorgeous, ” hence the by-gone days of pageantry, “and amazing at her job.” My inner deflation and impending sense of ‘all hope is lost’ must have been broadcasting a little too loudly, because Mama Hendrix followed up with a question of her own.

  “But is that something you even need to worry about, hun?” Her words were soft, but the glint in her eye was razor sharp.

  “Oh… I, uh…” My words trailed off with absolutely nowhere to go.

  “I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want a straight answer,” she said. Her focus was one hundred and twenty percent on me. Nothing else existed. “Where’d you get to yesterday… and last night?”

  “Get to?”

  “Yes, as in how did you spend your time?”

  I knew exactly what she was asking. “I didn’t kill Doug. I didn’t know him enough to even want to kill him. Plus, I’m on a romantic weekend with my boyfriend. I was with him the whole time.”

  “Like you’re with him right now?” Her eyes were narrowed and her brows arched.

  “Why would I kill him? It wasn’t me.”

  Her lips thinned as she pressed them together before asking, “Then why do you care how good Sheriff Palke is at her job?”

  “Because Brad’s my boyfriend!” I blurted.

  Joel chose that moment to walk in through the kitchen door.

  Plant me upside-down in one of those holes already.

  Chapter 11

  I did not just say that. Tell me I did not just say that.

  “Joel…” I gave him my best pleading look with a dose of apology and abject mortification.

  Joel stopped in his tracks. “I… Hmmm. Right.”

  He did a full one-eighty and marched right out the door he’d come in through.

  “Ohhhh,” I moaned, draping forward to rest my forehead atop my hands on the table. I’d come on this mini-vacay with two boyfriends. Now it was very possible I had none.

  “Me and George had a special friend, too,” Mama Hendrix said, her voice wistful.

  I lifted my head just enough to look at her. She gave me a wink.

  I sat up but slouched heavily against the chair’s back. “What am I going to do?”

  “What is there to do?” Mama Hendrix asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is that what you do depends on what you want. What do you want?”

  I wanted my two boyfriends back. I wanted Brad to be starry-eyed over me, not that sheriff. And I wanted Joel to still be okay with me having someone else to care about than just him. “I want everything to be how it was,” I finally said.

  “Oh sweetheart, that’s… boring.”

  Ouch.

  “Life changes,” she went on. “George up and died, but I’m still here. Living life. Making decisions. Taking action!” She shook a fist in the air. “Growing old isn’t a pastime for the meek. It takes courage. A lot of it. Now you gotta figure out what’s worth risking all of yourself for. That fella who just high-tailed it outta here? He worth everything you can give him?”

  I was quiet a moment. “Yeah...” I so
unded exactly like one of those meek people she’d mentioned. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yes, he is.” This time, I announced it with confidence.

  “And that other guy… Brad. What about him?”

  “He’s worth what I can give him too.”

  “Okay, then. That’s a start. It’s not everything, but, well, you’ll figure the rest out as you go.”

  I really, really liked that advice.

  The kitchen door burst open again, and my heart jumped into my throat. Joel had come back!

  But no… It was Gaunt-Face. He looked at me. He inspected the kitchen, and then he looked at all the sandwich fixings on the table. “You’re kidding me!” He jabbed the tip of his finger against his wrist, presumably at his imaginary watch. “Tick tock! I’m wasting away here!” He turned and stormed out.

  “I’m going to spit in his food.” The words were out of my mouth before I even realized it. I shot Mama Hendrix a worried glance. “I swear I didn’t mean that, not literally.” And I hadn’t.

  “Honey, it needed to be said. That boy’s a tool.” From Mama Hendrix’s mouth to God’s ears!

  He really was a tool.

  It wasn’t my job to make everybody sandwiches, but no way was I going to put the task on Mama Hendrix’s shoulders. She looked worlds better than she had when I’d first walked in—you know, when I thought she was dead and all. I guess comatose would have been a huge improvement over that. Still, I wasn’t willing to risk my misinterpretation of the situation turning into a premonition. Mama Hendrix needed her rest.

  I set to work making a wide variety of sandwiches of every type and nature, everything from peanut butter and jelly to turning the last of the quiche into egg salad and stuffing into a Kaiser roll. There was even enough pimento cheese to cover Zoey’s special request. Mama Hendrix tried to help, but I insisted that she assist in a strictly supervisory capacity.

  We chatted while I worked.

  “I’ve never met anyone better with orchards than him,” she said.

  “Was he with you long?” An enormous dollop of homemade boysenberry jelly plopped out of a delightful antique Ball jar onto a soft yeast roll. I scowled as the heavy jelly collapsed its pillowy insides. Spotting a slender log of what I knew would be hearty sourdough, I cut it lengthwise and turned it into a peanut butter and jelly hoagie. Cutting the hoagie into sections gave me five sandwiches from the one loaf.