The Coffee Shoppe Killer

by Rod Kackley

  Mary Eileen found herself in a scene from a horror movie. Blood, flesh, and bone fragments flew into the air, coating her face and becoming entwined in her hair. The noise was even worse. The sound of the saw and the grinding sound it made when the chain of blades hit bone bounced off the stone walls right back at Mary Eileen.

  But she kept at it. Finally, she had David in several manageable pieces. Lying at her feet were a head, two legs, two arms and a torso.

  Mary Eileen was soaked with her sweat and David’s bodily fluids. She might have even peed herself. Her jeans were such a wet, soaked mess that Mary Eileen couldn’t be sure. But her work was not finished. Now she had to get rid of the body parts.

  The next night, she came back with a bag of concrete, a wheelbarrow and a hose that she ran down from a faucet on the side of the building.

  She mixed concrete for each body part, poured it into metal tubs. Then she added the arms, legs, and head to their own individual tubs. Mary Eileen carried the metal buckets that contained the pieces of David farther back into the cellar and stashed them with the rocks, stones and other junk that had been piled up over the decades.

  Mary Eileen was getting better at anticipating the challenges faces a murderess. Thinking ahead, she also brought air fresheners with her to hang and hide the smell of David.

  Outside, it was dark. Pitch black. Mary Eileen stripped naked in the backyard and set her wet clothes on fire. It was like an appalling part of her life was going up in smoke along with her jeans and t-shirt. She even burned her shoes and socks. All of it went up in flames.

  Back upstairs in her apartment, which smelled so fricking clean now, she couldn’t believe it; Mary Eileen turned the shower on as hot as she could stand it and thought about what would have to happen next.

  She would have to tell two lies to finish the coverup.

  “WELL, DAVID’S GONE,” Mary Eileen announced as she breezed through the front door of the Coffee Shoppe the next morning.

  “What?” Christina said. “Oh no!”

  She felt for Mary Eileen. Even though David was a total jerk, nobody liked to be dumped. It was okay to be the dumper, but never the dumpee. And Mary Eileen was obviously hurting. Her eyes were as red as if she had been up all night crying and the bags under her eyes were carrying luggage.

  Christina moved to Mary Eileen’s side, put one arm around her shoulders and used her free hand to rub her back.

  “About time,” said Jack, one of the regulars at the Coffee Shoppe who had spent the past month falling asleep with a tall coffee cooling on the table beside the overstuffed chair that was his second home.

  “I don’t believe it,” Amanda whispered to Joy, her partner in crime reporting at the St. Isidore Chronicle.

  Joy heard but didn’t care. She just wanted to get her two coffees and get back to the Chronicle. The newspaper was her second home, and oh yeah, the two coffees? She would down both by the time she and Amanda hit their desks.

  “What? Who?” Joy whispered back.

  “Her ex,” Amanda said. “They got divorced I don’t know how long ago. But he never moved out.”

  “Wow,” said Joy. “There’s a guy who is totally illiterate when it comes to reading the writing on the wall.”

  “He just left?” Christina said.

  “Packed his bags. Gone for good, I hope,” said Mary Eileen.

  “Everything’s gone?”

  Oh crap, Mary Eileen thought to herself. Everything was not gone. Damn! David’s clothes were still in the closet. His stuff was still in the bathroom, shampoo, and all that crap. Damn!

  “Uh, yeah,” Mary Eileen stammered while making a note to herself about scheduling another late night open-pit fire in the alley.

  “I guess he finally got the message,” Jack said as he picked his book back up and started reading again about Hitler’s invasion of France.

  The curtain came down on Act One.

  The next day, after taking three showers to wash the smell of smoke out off her body and out of her nose, Mary Eileen called in sick for the morning.

  “I just can’t do it,” she whispered to Christina, choking up as she spoke a sentence she’d been rehearsing for the past hour.

  “Don’t worry,” Christina said. “We can cover for you.”

  “Thanks!”

  Amanda and Joy looked at Christina with eyes open and accepting, should she choose to share.

  Christina took a deep, dramatic breath and said, “The poor woman is still hurting. She could barely talk.”

  If Mary Eileen had heard what her favorite employee had announced to the customers at Coffee Shoppe, she would have laughed and noted she was half right.

  Well, maybe close to eighty percent correct. Mary Eileen’s back and arms were a little sore from carrying all of David’s crap out for the 2 a.m. alley bonfire. So she was hurting.

  “And, yeah, I am having trouble talking,” Mary Eileen might have said. “Next time I’ll wash the cinnamon scone down with some coffee before I try to say anything.”

  Always an accomplished actress — and a real trooper who could play through her pain — Mary Eileen burst into tears that afternoon while working on the books in her office at the Coffee Shoppe.

  As one giant, caring mass of humanity; her employees and customers, who let themselves into her office thanks to a conveniently open door, put their arms around Mary Eileen to console her and remind her that she was well rid of David.

  Hearing that, Mary Eileen couldn’t help but smile through her tears and nod in agreement. She bit her lip too. Everybody thought she was trying to hold back more sobs.

  But in truth, was just hoping the door to the cellar, which was just down the hall from her office, was closed and locked tight.

  “You are right,” she said, “thank God, David’s gone!”

  She stood to break the group hug — a little of this sympathy was going a long way, and she was having trouble holding back a laugh — and everyone backed off.

  “We need to go back to work,” Mary Eileen said with a sniff. “Life goes on, right?”

  “Life always goes on,” said Amanda.

  “At least for most of us,” Mary Eileen said to herself.

  “What?” Christina said.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” Mary Eileen said, choking back another sob and covering her mouth with her hand to hide the beginnings of a smile.

  Christina looked at her with a new respect a couple of hours later when the after-work crowd hit the Coffee Shoppe. Mary Eileen kept her head up the whole time. She is laughing and smiling when she must be a mess inside, Christina thought.

  Mary Eileen was laughing at that moment when Cheryl, the neighbor who ran the boutique dress shop next door and, like Mary Eileen, lived in an apartment above her business, asked about the noise she heard the other night.

  “It sounded like a chainsaw,” Cheryl said. “What were you doing over there?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. I just got a new coffee grinder in and was trying it out before I took it downstairs.”

  “At 1 a.m.?”

  “So, sorry to wake you,” Mary Eileen said, while she wondered how tough it would be to shoot this bitch in the back of the head and add her to the body shop in the cellar.

  “Won’t happen again, I guarantee it.”

  Nine

  Mary Eileen could imagine what they were saying. She could almost hear them talking.

  “Where is David?” one customer might ask another.

  “I don’t know,” another would answer. “I haven’t seen him in a month.”

  “Do you really think he just vanished?”

  “Do you really think she expects us to believe that?”

  Mary Eileen knew that sometimes there was a difference between being paranoid and being correct.

  “They are all talking about us,” Mary Eileen mumbled to herself.

  “I’m sorry,” said Amanda. “What?”

  Mary Eileen blinked and fell back a step from the count
er. Amanda, the reporter from the Chronicle that she knew from their gun class, had said something. Mary Eileen felt as stupid as she had in school when she was living in some fantasy world in her mind rather than paying attention to the teacher.

  “No, I am the one who should be sorry,” Mary Eileen said with a laugh, putting on the brogue, playing the Irish clown. “I am terribly sorry, Joy. What was it you wanted?”

  “Amanda.”

  “Oh, of course, Amanda,”

  Damn! Mary Eileen thought. Gotta get back up to speed her. Rejoin reality.

  “I just need two large coffees and one regular.”

  “All for you?” Mary Eileen laughed. She was recovering. “Oh, now, I see Joy.”

  “Hi, Joy,” Mary Eileen called out waving her fingers in greeting when she spotted Joy, sitting at a table by the window.

  Boy, she’s been putting on weight, Mary Eileen thought.

  “You both look so good,” she said, “you and Joy. Everything going all right at the paper?”

  “Oh yes, about as good as ever,” Amanda said, pausing before she went in for the kill.

  “How are you doing? I understand David left. I am so sorry.”

  Amanda putting her fingers on the back of Mary Eileen’s hand that was resting on the counter, a hand that Mary Eileen snatched back like she’d been touched by a red-hot spider.

  “Yes, fine, well...” Mary Eileen hadn’t been ready for this. But she did her best to summon tears on command, again.

  “I wouldn’t ask. I would never dream of prying,” Amanda said with half a smile, “but the thing is, David hasn’t been to work in a couple of weeks. We are all very anxious.”

  “Well, I am worried too, “ Mary Eileen stammered. “I mean I had no clue that he was going to leave. I haven’t heard from him either.”

  “Well, if you hear anything...”

  “Oh yes...

  “Anything at all...”

  “Anything at all,” Mary Eileen said, “any word at all, and I will let you folks at the Chronicle know right away.”

  “Thanks,” Amanda said with a wink as she managed to hold three coffee cups between her hands and walked back to her table.

  As soon as Amanda’s back was turned, Mary Eileen nearly fainted. She put a hand down on the counter to steady herself and looked out the window. She glanced down a few inches and saw Joy’s smiling face looking back at her.

  “Oh, hi again,” Mary Eileen mouthed silently.

  She turned her back to the window as Joy got out of her chair to help Amanda.

  AMANDA WAS QUIVERING when she got back to the table. Her hands were trembling so badly that drops of coffee were spilling out of the cups she was barely managing to hang on to as Joy rose from her chair.

  “Here, give me those,” Joy said as she tried to prevent what could be a bath of hot coffee.

  Just as she got up, some moron outside started honking at another motorist taking too long to move from the traffic light on the corner of DeVos Avenue and Butterworth Street. Amanda jumped at the sound of the horn. Joy overreacted and the scalding hot coffee that the Coffee Shoppe was famous for splashed onto her forearm.

  “Goddamn, it girl!”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  Joy and Amanda smiled at each other and took deep breaths before seating down without further loss of coffee or skin.

  Joy looked over Amanda’s shoulder as she licked her wrist where the coffee had splattered. She locked eyes with Mary Eileen who seemed unable to shift her gaze from the Chronicle reporters sitting by the window that served as the Coffee Shoppe’s eye on DeVos Avenue.

  Joy decided she wasn’t going to be the first to blink and she wasn’t

  As tough as Mary Eileen was, moving alone to the U.S. from Ireland, finding her way in New York and then starting her own business in St. Isidore — she had met her match in Joy Ellis.

  After all, Joy, and Amanda too, had made their names in St. Isidore by tracking down a serial killer. They had not captured him, nor had they freed the women he was holding. But they had found his lair, his dungeon, and that was more than anyone had ever done for the women who were always disappearing in St. Isidore.

  So neither of them were about to be frightened by Mary Eileen Sullivan.

  Mary Eileen blinked first. A customer had distracted her. But as soon as she could, she returned to watching Joy and Amanda.

  Now the two women were locked in an animated and heated discussion, both whispering intensely, worrying Mary Eileen even more.

  “Incoming,” Christina said as she gently nudged her boss and nodded her head toward the front door. A busload of Suicide Forest tourists was unloading.

  “More deadies,” Christina said, referring to the people that came from around the world to visit St. Isidore’s Suicide Forest, the place where the world came to die. These people would probably go home alive, Mary Eileen thought. They were just there to see if they could find some corpses swinging in the trees.

  It was disgusting and ghoulish, but also highly profitable for the merchants of St. Isidore. So, Mary Eileen had to attend to the fanny-packed senior citizens who were dying for a coffee and sweet roll before they began their search for the dead in earnest.

  But Mary Eileen was not able to give them her full attention. She happened to glance up and over the shoulder of one of the tourists in time to see Joy and Amanda trying to work their way through the mob.

  Joy looked back. Her eyes locked on to Mary Eileen. The owner of the Coffee Shoppe realized she had a new problem.

  Ten

  Esther had taken over the St. Isidore Chronicle publisher’s office from her father about a year ago, and the first thing she had done was to move Joy, Amanda and their staff of six interns out of the basement office that served as a base of operations for their first missing person quest.

  It was in this new brick-walled, airy, timber-ceiling office that Amanda and Joy landed after the morning visit to the Coffee Shoppe.

  “So how do we begin?” Amanda asked Joy.

  “It’s settled in your mind? We need to look for David Van Holt?”

  “Yes, I can feel it. Mary Eileen is not being honest with us. She’s...”

  “Proof is what we need. Suspicion is excellent, but proving it. That’s the challenge,” Joy reminded Amanda as she got up from behind her slick, chrome desk that had replaced the wooden monstrosity no one could lug out of the old basement office.

  “Is anyone else looking for David? Has a missing person report been filed with the St. Izzy police,” Joy asked with a tone that always got under Amanda’s thin skin.

  There was nothing Amanda hated more than rhetorical questions. Joy knew the answer to everything she had asked.

  “Isn’t there something to be said for a reporter’s intuition?” Amanda said. “Besides, I’ve shot guns with this woman. I am more than a customer.”

  Joy needed coffee. She’d gone through her two large Coffee Shoppe cups. It was time for another round. She got up to go down the hall to the employee kitchenette, thinking Amanda would take the hint.

  She didn’t.

  “I am close to her, and I could get closer,” Amanda said, walking as fast as she could to keep up with Joy so she could put her face in front of the galloping coffee hound to get her boss’ full attention.

  It wasn’t that Joy thought Amanda was wrong. She had read the guilt in Mary Eileen’s face. When their eyes had locked, it was like a mutual electric shock had passed through the women.

  Joy had no doubt Amanda was right. Something was wrong at the Coffee Shoppe. There was something mysterious about David’s disappearance.

  But Joy also believed in hedging her bets. It would be one thing to discover David had disappeared without a trace. It was quite another challenge to find him dead or alive especially without putting themselves in harm’s way. She didn’t want to launch into a wild goose chase with no chance of success.

  Joy also didn’t want to get either she or Amanda killed. What her heads
trong, quite attractive and very talented protege failed to realize was that if Mary Eileen did have something to do with David Van Holt’s disappearance, she might want to keep her role in that mystery quiet.

  And if Mary Eileen had killed once, she might be willing to do it again.

  “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument that you are right. We know David is gone. Mary Eileen said he just picked up his stuff and left. She was as surprised as any of us. Let’s say there is something more to it. Let’s say she had something to do with his disappearance...”

  “Exactly what I am thinking.”

  “I know what you are thinking. But what I am thinking has not occurred to you, I am afraid. Let’s go crazy on this and say that, God forbid, Mary Eileen Sullivan killed David Van Holt.”

  “You think?”

  Jesus, it is like trying to tame a wild filly every time Amanda gets on one of her journalistic missions, Joy thought.

  “No, I don’t believe that, right now. I don’t have any proof of that at all. I don’t have one iota of evidence and neither do you. We suspect something is going on over there. But we have no proof.”

  “Well, how are we going to get proof if we don’t investigate,” Amanda said with her arms crossed, blowing a wisp of her blonde hair away from her face.

  This happens every time I have an idea, Amanda thought. God, Joy can be so stubborn.

  “What do we do? Sit here until the proof comes walking in the front door?”

  Joy leaned back against the counter top of the employee kitchen between the Mr. Coffee and the sink.

  “No, we don’t wait for it to come walking in the door. Do you want to investigate? Then get to work with my blessings.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But think about this: If Mary Eileen did, just hypothetically, kill David Van Holt, what do you think she’ll do to you or me if we get close to the truth?”

  The thought did give Amanda pause. She knew Joy was right. They had come close before, very close to getting killed, when they tried to get the goods on a guy they suspected of being a serial killer.