Peach Clobbered

by Anna Gerard

  After supper, Wally McFadden had shown up on my doorstep with a shiny new insurance policy in hand to match his shiny bald pate. To be sure, my first guests would be nuns who, I assumed, already came with some pretty big built-in coverage from The Guy Upstairs. But Wally had warned me that even divine intervention wouldn’t provide sufficient protection for me should I find myself on the wrong side of a litigious guest.

  Sunday proved just as busy. I’d already emailed Gemma with a heads-up about my new innkeeping venture and a plea for a bit of help on the cuisine end of things. After allowing myself to sleep in for what I suspected might be the last morning for some time to come, I fed Mattie and managed a quick shower. Then, after twisting my hair up into a messy bun, I threw on shorts and a Hawaiian-print linen top and hoofed it over to Peaches and Java. With the “bed” portion of my B&B pretty well handled, it was time to work on the “breakfast” end of things.

  “We’re down to a couple of homemade cinnamon buns left.” Gemma greeted me with a harried smile while I squinted to read the whiteboard on the wall where the daily specials were posted. “If you want one, speak up now, or you’re out of luck until next Sunday.”

  I knew the culinary bliss that was one of Daniel’s oversized sticky rolls swimming in icing and topped with chopped pecans. I debated between that and another serving of his cobbler.

  “Cinnamon bun and a cup of light roast,” I hurriedly decided. “Oh, and a side of that maple-jalapeño bacon you have on the specials board.”

  “You got it.” Then, with a glance around the packed room, she added, “Things should start clearing out in about twenty minutes. If you can wait a little while, I’ll have time then to talk about your catering.”

  Given that it likely would take a good twenty minutes just to finish off the cinnamon bun portion of my breakfast, I nodded.

  It was closer to half an hour later, however, when the crowd finally began to thin. Gemma dragged over a chair and sat with an exhausted but satisfied whoosh of breath.

  “Here’s our catering menu,” she said, producing a brochure, which she set on the table between us. “We’ve got a special breakfast option that’s probably what you’re most interested in, and it includes Daniel’s peach cobbler. But why didn’t you say anything the other day about opening a B&B? I thought you told me a while back that the town council wasn’t going to give you a zoning variance.”

  “Actually, this whole thing was the town council’s—specifically Melissa Jane’s—idea, not mine. If you want to know the truth, I got arm-twisted into it about five minutes after I left your place yesterday.”

  While Gemma stared in surprise, I gave her a quick rundown of my meeting with the Sisters of Perpetual Poverty and the devil’s bargain I’d struck with Cymbeline’s mayor. When I’d finished, the coffee shop owner was shaking her head.

  “I’d say I’m surprised, but I’m not. I’d heard something was going on with the convent, but I didn’t know Gregory was involved. Gregory, as in Gregory Bainbridge,” she clarified for my benefit.

  I nodded as I took a last bite of cinnamon roll, recalling Bainbridge as the name of the developer Melissa Jane had mentioned. But Gemma wasn’t finished.

  “That man is a real piece of work,” she went on, tone growing heated. “He’s the one responsible for that new development going up south of town … you know, Southbridge Acres. He claimed all the homes were going to be on minimum one-acre lots, and so the town council signed off on the deal that gave him approval to break ground. Then he found some loophole in the agreement and quadrupled on density. And that was after all the new streets were built, so traffic is a nightmare getting in and out of the development now.”

  “Yeah, it is pretty bad,” I agreed, hoping I didn’t sound ironic. I’d been in that part of town a few times during what passed for rush hour in Cymbeline. Compared to Atlanta traffic, it was nothing. Still, folks living nearby who were accustomed to a couple of stop signs would see a hundred or so additional cars and two new traffic lights as major gridlock.

  “Plus the town has to build a new elementary school now to handle all the families that moved in,” Gemma continued to fume. “Which comes out of our tax dollars. Meantime, good old Gregory is rolling around in all that extra cash. I imagine he’ll pull the same kind of stunt with the convent property.”

  She abruptly broke off as Daniel left his spot behind the counter, plate of pancakes in hand. He set the dish before an eager tween at one of the tourist tables and then sauntered over to where Gemma and I sat.

  “Talking about the guy everyone loves to hate?” he asked with a snort. To me, he said, “Seriously, like she said, that guy is a piece of work. On top of everything else, he thinks he’s some ladies’ man. Do you know he actually tried hitting on Gemma right in front of me? Not that I blame him”—he paused and wiggled his eyebrows meaningfully at his wife—“but that’s some kind of cojones to hit on a lady in front of her husband. Just let him try that again.”

  He drew his forefinger across his beefy throat in the cliché slicing gesture. I was trying to decide if he was serious or not when another, sour voice broke in.

  “You’re gonna have to stand in line, Danny boy.”

  The speaker sat at the table across from us, scowling over the top of his coffee mug. Jack Hill, the ice cream shop owner. Involved as I’d been in my conversation with Gemma, I hadn’t noticed him come in. Tall, wiry, and in his midfifties, he had salt-and-pepper hair and lean features that verged on being handsome. He wore a black logo Taste-Tee-Freeze T-shirt that set off a pair of surprisingly big guns. Apparently, hand-churning ice cream and wielding a spatula and knife on a marble slab built up the old arm muscles.

  “Yeah, that lowlife Bainbridge tried putting the moves on my wife, too,” the man complained. “I told him I catch him doing that again, and it’s lights out.”

  Daniel gave him a commiserating nod. “Don’t worry, brah,” he replied, the Hawaiian slang reminding me that, unlike his wife, Daniel wasn’t a native Cymbeliner. “Not a jury in the world would convict you. Now how about I get you another cup?”

  “Thanks,” he said, putting his coffee down, “but I gotta get back to the store.”

  While Jasmine rang him up, I leaned a bit closer to Gemma. “Well, that was interesting. This Bainbridge definitely sounds like the kind of guy who wouldn’t have any compunction about leaving a bunch of old nuns homeless.”

  “He’s pretty darned lucky Laverna didn’t catch him alone in a dark alley while the deal was going down. She would have changed his tune for him, right smart.”

  “Laverna?” I echoed, promptly picturing a very tall and very broad woman wearing a sneer and likely wielding a baseball bat. Obviously, Bainbridge had a target the size of Georgia on his back in this town. “What, is she Cymbeline’s official enforcer?”

  Gemma snorted at that. “Not exactly. If you met the nuns, you met her … though you probably know her as Sister Mary George.”

  I’d been finishing the last piece of maple-jalapeño bacon. At her last words, I started choking and had to wash down the sweet and spicy scraps with a swig of coffee. When I could speak again, I demanded, “Wait, what? You’re talking about the nun who could be on the cover of Elle?”

  “Don’t let that pretty face fool you. I’ve known her ever since she was in high school, and believe me, she sure wasn’t holy back then. You see, Laverna is my brother’s wife’s younger sister. And Luther was already dating Simona—my sister-in-law—back when it all happened, which means I had a front-row seat to all the trouble Laverna was getting into.”

  I took another sip of coffee while I mentally unraveled Gemma’s family tree. And while I didn’t approve of gossip on principle—I’d been the subject of gossip myself while still married to the ex—I could see Gemma was dying to tell all.

  Besides, how often did you get to hear dirt on a nun?

  “So, what happened?” I asked her.

  Gemma glanced about. Jack Hill was gone, and the rem
aining customers all appeared to be tourists who were yakking among themselves. Apparently satisfied that being overheard wasn’t an issue, she turned back to me.

  “Now, what happened went down about thirty years ago,” she began in a low tone. “By now most people have forgotten the whole thing, which is how it should be. Laverna—Sister Mary George—is a true woman of God now. So you have to swear you won’t talk about this with anyone.”

  “I swear,” I swore, and pantomimed zipping my lips.

  Gemma continued, “It started when we all were still in high school. Her and Simona’s mother died in a car accident. That’s a terrible blow for any child, but for girls that age … well, you know. Anyhow, Simona—she was a senior like me that year—coped by taking over her mom’s role as best she could. But Laverna, well, she covered up her grief by acting out. And I’m not talking the drama club.

  “She was only a freshman, but before long she was hanging with the wrong crowd. She started skipping class, drinking, smoking a little weed. Her dad tried to rein her in, but he didn’t have much luck. I guess since he was the only parent she had left, he felt like he couldn’t be too hard on her.”

  I gave a sympathetic nod. “I can understand that. But it still doesn’t sound like Laverna did anything more awful than a lot of teenagers do.”

  “Believe me, it got worse.”

  The woman glanced over at Jasmine behind the coffee counter. Lattes and cold press appeared to be the last thing on the girl’s mind, however. Instead, she was merrily laughing with a lanky, red-haired teenage boy sporting a Cymbeline High School Band T-shirt. Jasmine was just a couple of years older than Sister Mary George—Laverna—had been when her young life had been shattered. From the troubled expression that momentarily clouded Gemma’s strong features, the woman had to be picturing her own daughter under such circumstances.

  Shaking her head again, Gemma resumed her story.

  “By her senior year, things had gone really bad for Laverna. She’d go out partying on a Friday night and not come home until Sunday. She was picked up for shoplifting a couple of times, though the stores never pressed charges. And she was pretty well on the road to not graduating because of all the skipping. But then, on one of the days she actually showed up to class, she accused some girl of stealing her boyfriend. She pulled a knife on her.”

  My mouth dropped open. A knife-wielding nun?

  “Wow! So, what happened?” I managed after a few startled seconds. “Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Thankfully, it was one of those little pen knives she was waving around, and Laverna swore she was only trying to scare the girl. But they scuffled, and the other girl got a cut on her hand, so they hauled Laverna off to juvie.”

  Juvenile hall, I mentally translated.

  “Anyhow, Laverna was gone almost six months,” Gemma remembered. “When she came home again, it was seriously like night and day. The first thing she did was announce to the family that she was converting to Catholicism and planned to join the Sisters of Perpetual Poverty as a novitiate.”

  “Well, it’s not unheard of for people—even teenagers—to find God in jail.”

  “I guess not … though everyone thought it was a joke, at first. I mean, we’re all good Baptists around here. We don’t hold much with bells and smells.”

  I suppressed a grin, for I hadn’t heard that particular down-home quip in years. Gemma referred to her church’s aversion to the Catholic preference for incense and, well, bells during their services … basically, rejecting anything that smacked of ritual. For my part, I rather liked that sort of formality.

  Gemma went on, “It turned out that one of the order’s nuns came to the juvenile facility to counsel the girls on a regular basis, and whatever she said really resonated with Laverna. We figured she’d get over it, but she didn’t. Just like she said, she became a novitiate, and after a couple of years she took her first vows. By then she had her new name, Mary George, and we all finally accepted that’s who she was now. That brawling, backtalking Laverna was long gone, and this mild-mannered, soft-spoken nun lady had replaced her. Well, pretty much …”

  She trailed off with a knowing look that I couldn’t let pass. “What do you mean, pretty much?”

  She grinned. “Well, there was this time about ten years back when some beer-swilling hunter wandered onto the convent property and started taking pot shots at the livestock. Luckily, he was so drunk he couldn’t hit a barn, let alone a little goat. But that didn’t stop Sister Mary George from going all Laverna on his sorry butt.” Her grin broadened. “From what I heard, she grabbed his shotgun and chucked it into the stock tank, and then frog-marched the guy right off the property.”

  “Amen, Sister Mary George,” I agreed with a matching grin. “I have a feeling the Lord probably let her slide on that one.”

  “Well, like I said, she’s a woman of God now. And she watches over those old sisters like they’re family … which I guess they are. As long as they have her, they’ll be okay, no matter where they end up after this.”

  Then, abruptly switching gears, she asked, “So, Nina, what do you want to do about the catering?”

  We spent the next few minutes going over the list, settling on a basic menu of various quiches and a batch of Daniel’s cobbler that Jasmine would bicycle over every morning around seven. I’d be in charge of coffee and hot tea, and I’d hit the grocery store for a selection of fruit and cereal (including prunes and bran, Gemma suggested, given the women’s average age) and cheeses to supplement the baked goods. She also gave me a ten-minute crash course on food storage and presentation, since my last foray into restauranting had been as cashier at the Burger Castle when I was in high school.

  “Normally, we’d do up a little contract,” she said once we agreed on the details, “but since this is a fluid situation, let’s play it by ear. Since the sisters are moving in tomorrow, I’ll send Jasmine over starting on Tuesday. Just give me a heads-up the day before they leave, okay?”

  “Perfect. You’re the best.”

  With final goodbyes to Daniel and Jasmine—by now, the second seating was rolling in, so they were gearing up for that rush—I left Peaches and Java. The next item on my to-do list was a run to the nearby Piggly Wiggly to see about my portion of the food offerings. Though this grocery store had a smaller selection than the supersized supermarket right outside town, it offered home delivery as one of its amenities. I made my selections, arranged a delivery time, and then headed back to the house to track down a coffee maker. The appliance in question unearthed from the back of the pantry, I carried my laptop into the kitchen and started inventorying.

  That’s the key to holding down costs, Gemma had assured me during my mini-course. Set yourself up a spreadsheet of everything you’re serving and update it every time you shop.

  Within a couple of hours, I’d put together a credible document that would hopefully also pass muster with my accountant. I was tweaking a final formula in the spreadsheet when Mattie woofed and scrambled to her fuzzy feet. A moment later, the doorbell sounded.

  “Who the heck is it now?” I muttered in the Aussie’s direction as I strode toward my front entry. The Piggly-Wiggly delivery kid had already stopped by earlier, and I wasn’t expecting anyone else. With Mattie crowding at my heels, I peered out the sidelight window for a look.

  Nobody I recognize.

  This visitor was male, probably early sixties, maybe an inch taller than me. His regular features were, well, regular … though in his twenties and with a more youthful jawline and firmer cheeks, he had probably been considered a “catch.” His catchability factor was diminished now by his wide fringe of gray hair that wrapped from ear to ear and verged on Bozo poufiness. But what caught my eye was the polo-style yellow shirt he sported, embroidered with one of those same tiny penguins that once waddled across the chest of almost every American male.

  I frowned. He might be wearing a limited-edition reboot of that nineties fashion, which would mean he was rich and i
ronic … or he might simply have kept the pullover stashed in his closet all these years, which would mean he was cheap. All in all, however, he looked pretty harmless.

  Tourist, I decided as I opened the front door and looked through the screen. “Yes, can I help you?”

  “I do hope so,” he replied, and sent a tight smile my way. “You are Ms. Fleet?”

  “That’s me. And you are …?”

  “The name is Bainbridge. Gregory Bainbridge. I am—”

  “I know who you are. You’re the heartless SOB who kicked a whole bunch of old nuns to the curb.” I cut him short and slammed the door in his face.

  Chapter Five

  Not much to my surprise, the slamming-in-his-face thing didn’t faze Bainbridge. He rang the bell again, followed by a genteel, “Ms. Fleet, I’d appreciate a moment of your time. It’s important,” called through the door.

  I exchanged glances with Mattie, who didn’t look impressed. For my part, I couldn’t think of a single important thing the man could possibly have to discuss with me. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty at my rudeness, even though my reaction had been reflexive. Just because he was a Class A jerk didn’t mean I should follow suit.

  Grudgingly, I reopened the door. “All right, we’ll try again. What do you need from me, Mr. Bainbridge?”

  “Just a chance to tell my side of the story. I’m sure you’ve heard the worst, and, well …”

  He paused and dabbed at his glowing expanse of forehead with a crisp white hankie he’d whipped from the back pocket of his khakis. “It is a bit warm out today. Perhaps we can do this inside where it’s air-conditioned?”

  “Fine, I’ll give you five minutes,” I agreed, and pushed open the screen. “But I’m pretty short on time, seeing how I’m getting the place ready for all those old nuns you dumped on the street.”