by James, Emily
“We don’t talk about poopy at the table,” Claire said, but it lacked its usual force.
This time I had to raise my napkin to hide a smile. It felt good to smile, like it was a release valve for life.
Janie hopped up so that she balanced on her toes. “Can I leave the table and go look at shelter kittens on the iPad?”
“Two more bites of beans,” Dan said, “and remember that some of the kittens you see might already be adopted by the time we get there.”
“Look at the older cats, too,” I said. “They’ll be the most excited to have a new home.”
Janie shoved her mouth chipmunk-full with the rest of her beans and scuttled away before anyone could tell her to chew and swallow first.
Claire laid her silverware down on her plate even though she’d barely eaten anything. “You’re going to regret that.”
My normal policy was to avoid contradicting Claire. But tonight her comment felt like one more person trying to control another. Dan had clearly already made his decision about allowing Janie to have a pet. Claire didn’t need to make him worry it’d been the wrong call.
“Pets are good for kids.” I kept my voice soft so it at least wouldn’t come across as an attack. “They learn responsibility and empathy.”
Claire huffed, but didn’t argue.
Dan shot me that smile of his that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Another knot of tension in my stomach floated away.
He shifted to face Claire. “That’s the most you’ve said all night. What’s going on?”
“You already know what.” Claire swiped up Janie’s empty plate and my nearly empty plate without asking if I was finished. She didn’t move away once she had my plate in hand. “What about you? You’ve been abnormally quiet tonight too.”
Dan hadn’t seemed abnormally quiet to me, but Claire knew him better than I did.
Silence fell on the room, and I looked up. Both Claire and Dan were watching me. Oh. She wasn’t asking Dan. She was asking me.
The part of me that’d been watching Claire and Dan dig into each other’s lives in a method that would seem nosy if they weren’t so close had wondered what it’d be like to have someone care about me that way again. Just a few months ago, I felt the hole in my life where people should have been—where I didn’t even have someone to tell about my day.
The part of me that was used to having to hold everything inside said differently. It wanted to clamp down tighter than a lobster claw and claim everything was fine.
How could something I wanted so much still be so scary?
Claire glared at me with an expression that said don’t you dare lie to me. I’d seen her use it on Janie before. My hesitation cracked. You didn’t give that look to a stranger. She didn’t think about me as a stranger anymore.
Or, at least, maybe I didn’t have to keep being one. Maybe.
“I had to give up one of my regular spots.” Sharing even that much felt as uncomfortable as streaking down the middle of the street. I wasn’t about to tell her why I’d had to give it up. Baby steps. “My income’s been down ever since. I’m…worried.”
That was putting it mildly, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit to feeling terrified. I’d been eating regularly again, and when my truck needed new brake pads last month, I’d been able to replace them. I didn’t want to go back to eating one meal a day and praying my frayed tires would prove to be magically eternal.
Claire plopped the dishes into the sink. She turned back around and the expression on her face reminded me of my dad when I’d told him I’d tried my best, but I was still failing calculus. First he’d hugged me. Then he’d told me he’d failed calculus on his first try too. And then he’d sold our beater car, and we’d taken the bus for the rest of the year so he could hire me a tutor. Claire had that kind of look on her face now.
Something that felt a lot like hope filled my chest.
She planted her hands on her hips. “You should be doing the summer festivals. I can help out if you can’t handle that volume by yourself. The sandcastle competition is next weekend, and then the hot air balloon festival is shortly after that.”
The hope bubble popped as quickly as it’d formed. Yes, I’d be hard-pressed to serve people quickly in a high volume environment, but that’s not what held me back from taking my truck to the big events Lakeshore held in the warm weather. “I applied when I first moved here. I’m on a wait list for next year for the sandcastle competition, but this year was filled six months ago. I’m still waiting to hear about the hot air balloon festival. The woman I spoke to didn’t sound encouraging.”
Claire scowled. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was as invested in fixing my problem as I was.
And maybe she was. Maybe by fixing my problem, she’d have the hope or courage she needed for her own. The one that she didn’t seem to want to talk about yet.
“That’s not necessarily true,” Dan said.
Claire and I turned to face him at the same time, as if he’d pulled strings attached to each of us. If I’d been on the outside looking in, it would have been funny.
“Which part?” I asked. “I was told that I couldn’t just show up. There’s limited spacing, and all the vendors need a special permit issued for the particular event.”
“That’s all true. But every year there are some last minute drop-outs. My station’s running security for the sandcastle building, so I could put you in touch with the coordinator. There’s only one catch.”
Of course. Everything in life came with a catch. I raised my eyebrows, indicating he should go on.
“You’d need to be able to fill in on short notice, sometimes less than twenty-four hours.”
I didn’t care. If it meant bolstering my flagging income until I could find a new location for the lunch-time crowd, I’d do it.
3
If I’d been asked to describe myself, over-ambitious wouldn’t have been one of the terms I’d have chosen. But I felt like it suddenly should be after I ended the call with the coordinator of the twenty-fifth annual Lakeshore sandcastle-building competition.
Thanks to Dan connecting us, I had a spot.
What I didn’t have was even twenty-four hours’ notice. I had a bit over twelve. And seven to eight of those hours were ones I should have been using to sleep. I’d never pulled a baking all-nighter before, but I’d done the calculations and that’s what I’d need to do to be ready for the competition tomorrow.
Calling Claire to see if her offer of help extended to a marathon baking session would have taken off some of the pressure. But Claire would inevitably wonder why we weren’t baking the cupcakes in my apartment. Wouldn’t we have had more counter space there?
Short of trying to make up some lie about my apartment being fumigated, I couldn’t think up a believable reason. If Claire got suspicious enough, she’d push until she learned that I lived in my truck. I couldn’t let that happen. Neither she nor Dan would want me to continue living in my vehicle, not to mention the health code violations. I’d be closed down if the wrong people found out.
No, I’d taken care of myself for this long. I could handle this event by myself. I’d go to my designated lot next to the beach where the sandcastle competition would take place, and I’d bake with the haste and fervor of a Food Network competitor.
* * *
The sound of a diesel engine and voices calling out instructions woke me. I jerked my head up from where it’d been resting on my countertop. My neck ached, my cheek felt sticky, and my eyes burned like I’d rubbed dirt into them.
I couldn’t have been asleep long. I’d finished up the last batch of buttercream, and I’d sat down for just a minute to rest before I started decorating. Normally, I didn’t like to prepare too many cupcakes in advance. Today, with the crowds the sandcastle competition website said they drew every year, I was expecting to have to serve at a rapid pace without many breaks.
I stretched and opened my door. The sound I’d heard was the
organizers arriving. They had a temporary tent partway erected, and a table set up where competitors would get their numbers and lot assignment.
When Claire and Dan had first mentioned a sandcastle competition, I’d thought it would be mostly children or families. This was more like the American Ninja Warrior of sandcastle building. The competitors didn’t just build castles. They built dolphins, octopii, a Medusa head surrounded by snakes, and castles that looked like recreations of the real thing, right down to windows and stones. Last year’s winners had constructed a dragon that looked like it could have come to life.
It was hard to believe that the pristine, roped-off sections of beach in front of me would be able to transform into works of art in such a short amount of time. Working this event was probably going to be the most fun I’d had in years.
A taco food truck rumbled in to park five spaces down from me.
I popped open the front flap of my truck so I could watch everything come to life and set to work on decorating. It was too bad my Russian piping tips hadn’t arrived in time. With the short notice, I didn’t have time to pipe any buttercream flowers for decorations, and the Russian piping tips claimed to be able to create multi-colored flowers over the top of a cupcake in mere minutes.
While I filled and piped and turned the leftover bits into cake pops to set in the fridge for later in the afternoon, the spaces along the beachfront grew crowded, reminding me a bit of a farmer’s market or county fair.
The slots between my truck and the taco vendor filled up with a woman selling beaded jewelry, and a husband and wife selling essential oils and all the gadgets that go along with aromatherapy. The mayor had a booth with calendars and individually wrapped chocolates—an amateur move in this kind of heat—reminding people to vote for him in the upcoming election.
The smell of freshly popping kettle corn wafted on the air along with the moist seashell scent I always associated with the water.
The early morning sun glittered off the ripples and caught me in the eyes. I squinted. If this went well, maybe I could afford to buy myself a new pair of sunglasses. The arm had popped off of mine, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me since I bought them at the dollar store. This time, I’d like to get a pair that wouldn’t rub the sides of my nose raw if I wore them for more than a couple hours.
The sun shifted, and my vision cleared. A petite woman with dark hair and sunglasses perched on top of her head bobbed past. She had a Rigman & Associates Insurance sign under one arm, flapping slightly in the breeze.
Eve?
I couldn’t get a clear look at her face. That’d be just my luck. The last thing I needed was for Eve to be here, manning her company’s booth, and for her boyfriend or whoever he was to show up.
Hopefully, if he did, he’d be rational enough to realize that I wasn’t here to cause him trouble. I was here working, like everyone else.
My throat felt tight. What would I do if he caused a scene and I lost customers…or even my place here.
I forced my focus back onto piping the strawberry buttercream onto my strawberry shortcake cupcakes. I couldn’t think about that now. It might not even happen. It might not have even been Eve.
And with the competitors filing out into their designated parts of the beach, it wouldn’t be long before the crowds grew. Cupcakes might not seem like a morning food, but I knew from my time working near the beaches in Fair Haven, that if you put fruit in it, people would start buying at around mid-morning.
The group of two men and one woman who took the allotment of sand almost directly in from of my truck had big number three armbands wrapped around their biceps and matching t-shirts.
One of the man wheeled a wheelbarrow full of supplies, and the other two competitors carried shovels and rakes.
As much as I wanted a long line of customers, I almost hoped there might be small breaks as well. And not only so I could do any small prep tasks. I couldn’t imagine how the images I’d seen online could be built and sculpted from sand. It seemed like magic. I wanted a bit of a chance to watch it happen.
The burliest of the men on Team 3 picked up one of the shovels and spaded it into the sand. It stopped partway in.
He frowned and waved at the other over. “Just our luck. We got driftwood or something down a foot or so.”
“Too many pieces of that and we’ll have to complain,” the woman said.
I suppose that made sense. My only experience with competition was what I used to watch on TV cooking channel shows. Those often cared more about good TV than fairness. In real life, it seemed like everyone should be given a block of sand to build that was equally easy to work with.
The woman and the other man grabbed their shovels and dug in.
The second man poked his shovel in, moved down, and poked it in again. “This might be too big for us to move. We might need a different spot.”
Shoot. If that happened, I’d lose my front row seat.
A couple came up and ordered two cupcakes, taking my attention away. The woman joked that anything with fruit in it should count as breakfast.
“Of course,” I said brightly. “If you want me to give you a reason why another variety should count as lunch, just come on back.”
She smiled so big at the man next to her that her eyes crunched up.
“Nope,” he said. “You promised if we got cupcakes for breakfast we could get pickles on a stick for lunch.”
A scream broke the air before the woman could reply.
And it didn’t stop.
What was going on? Whoever was screaming sounded terrified, like Jaws had jumped up out of the lake.
I craned my neck.
The woman from Team 3 had stepped back from where she’d been digging. Her shovel lay on the ground. Her hands covering her mouth barely muffled the keening still coming from her throat.
The organizers were running toward the site from one direction, and the officers who’d been walking the opposite way a moment before had turned back and were sprinting that way too.
One of the organizers skidded to a stop next to the woman and cursed.
He spun back around to the approaching police officers. “It’s a body.”
The man and woman who’d been in front of my truck moved toward the gathering crowd. I’d thought Eve seeing me would be the worst thing that could happen today. I’d been wrong.
The police were shouting at the crowd to stay back, and one of the officers was on his cell phone, presumably calling in the situation.
I started packing up the cupcakes I’d set out. The competition wasn’t continuing today, and I wasn’t sticking around to see how this turned out. I couldn’t afford for everything I’d baked to have to be sold tomorrow as day olds. And the last thing I wanted was to be questioned about yet another dead body.
At this rate, I’d have to change my sign from advertising red velvet cake to offering dead velvet cake.
4
The man in the suit had been sitting on the park bench near my truck for the past ten minutes as I worked my way through the line of customers. Even though he wore sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes, I got the feeling that he was watching me.
Maybe it was simple paranoia. I almost always felt like someone was watching me. And most people wore sunglasses this time of year.
The suit man might just be uncomfortable with such a large crowd of children. A crowd of children who easily outnumbered the women with them were taking their time picking which cupcakes they wanted. They were all barefoot, having just come up from swimming, damp, sandy towels draped around their shoulders.
For me, seeing so much joy next to a beach would—I hoped—eventually help me forget that someone had used a similar beach to bury a dead body. That hope was a large part of why I’d decided to try a beach-side location as a potential new spot to replace the one I’d lost. I didn’t need another bad memory to follow me around. I didn’t want to live my life haunted by ghosts that weren’t even mine.
The crowd of women and children paid and wandered off toward the grass at the edge of the sand, where the women tried to convince the boys and girls to lay out their towels and sit before eating. Only partially successfully.
The suit man rose languidly from the bench, stretched, and ambled over to my truck as if it were the most natural thing in the world for someone to wait until everyone left rather than stand in line.
The moisture that had built at the base of my hair from the heat suddenly felt cold.
A few months ago, when I’d helped Dan figure out who killed his grandfather, my real name had ended up in the police files. Jarrod had called Dan’s precinct. Even though Dan had thrown him off my trail for now, that didn’t mean Jarrod couldn’t have hired a private investigator to poke around in Lakeshore just in case.
The man stopped in front of the truck’s order window. He pushed his sunglasses up off his face and pulled aside his jacket. Beneath hung a gun holster.
And a police detective’s badge.
Relief with a pinch of uncertainty flooded through me. He probably hadn’t been sent by Jarrod. He had to be here about the dead man at the sandcastle competition. I couldn’t think of any other reason why a police officer would show up at my truck. I also couldn’t think of what I could possibly add to the investigation into how a body ended up buried at a public beach.
“I’m Detective Strobel, Ms. Addington. Would you be able to join me out here for a few minutes?” He inclined his head toward the bench where he’d been sitting in the shade before. “You’ll still be able to watch for customers, and I have a couple quick questions for you about the body that turned up at the sandcastle competition this past weekend.”
I nodded and climbed out of my truck mechanically.
I didn’t need to panic. I hadn’t had anything to do with the body other than that I’d seen the competitors dig it up. And this detective called me Ms. Addington, so my real name wasn’t going to end up in another police report where Jarrod would be able to find out that I was still in Lakeshore.