by Abby Byne
“Do you know if Cherise is working right now?” Bitsie asked Roscoe.
“No. She’s off today. She’s always off on Saturdays.”
“Do you happen to know where I might find her on a Saturday?”
“Not sure,” said Roscoe. “Although, she said something about going to her brother’s birthday party.”
“Did she say where the party was?” Bitsie wasn’t keen on crashing stranger’s birthday parties, but maybe she could catch Cherise as she was coming or going.
“She said something about a family picnic at Brink’s Lake.”
Bitsie wasn’t sure she wanted to make another visit to Brink’s Lake. The first and only time she’d visited Brink’s Lake, she’d been in search of a dead body. Still, crashing a family birthday party couldn’t be as bad as looking for the remains of a murder victim, so Bitsie decided she’d head straight out to the lake as soon as she left Shady Grove.
But first, there was someone besides Roscoe that she wanted to see.
Malcolm was in his room, looking surly and a sporting a bruised neck, but otherwise unharmed. Bitsie felt a little sorry for the man, at least until he opened his mouth.
“Not done with poking your nose around other people’s business yet?” Malcolm said in lieu of a greeting.
Bitsie ignored his jab and asked him how he was feeling.
“Tell me,” Malcolm growled, “how would you be feeling if people kept trying to kill you?”
Bitsie admitted that she wouldn’t be feeling too well.
“As long as you’re going to persist in prying into my private business, why don’t you take a look at this.” Malcolm opened the drawer to his bedside table and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.
It was a note, handwritten on a yellowed page torn from an old spiral notebook. It was written with sky-blue spidery printing that meandered up and down like gentle waves on the sea. Bitsie’s eyes skipped straight to the bottom, looking for a signature; there was none.
“Who sent you this?” Bitsie asked Malcolm, who just shrugged.
Bitsie looked back down at the letter. It was long, and some sections read like gibberish, but the gist of it was a warning. Someone wanted Malcolm to leave Miss Fay alone, and, according to the letter, they were prepared to take drastic measures if he didn’t.
“Who would write something like this?” Bitsie asked again.
Malcolm shrugged a second time.
“You can’t believe for a minute that this is Roscoe’s doing,” said Bitsie. “If he were going to write a threat letter, he’d come up with something a lot more intelligible than this.”
Malcolm just grunted again, but Bitsie could tell he agreed.
“This is written by someone with an unsteady hand and soup for brains,” she announced. It was an unkind way of putting it, but the barely-comprehensible dreck she held in her hand could not possibly be the product of a stable mind.
The first person Bitsie thought of was Ruby. Had Ruby written the letter pretending to be another man in love with Lavinia? It was possible. Ruby was obsessed with Malcolm and might be misguided enough to think that if he stopped pursuing Miss Fay, he would be more likely to return her affections.
“Could I take a copy of this?” Bitsie asked as she handed the letter back to him.
“What are you? Some kind of pretend-detective?” Malcolm snatched the letter out of her hand.
Bitsie supposed that was a fair assessment of the situation, although it smarted a bit to have it phrased that way.
“Why did you show this to me?” she asked.
Malcolm refused to answer, but he shoved the letter back into her hand and said something about not going and losing the durned thing. Bitsie took the letter and folded it carefully before slipping it into her purse.
“Are you going to tell the police about getting this?” Bitsie asked.
“Don’t know.”
“I think you should.”
“I doubt they’re interested.”
“I beg to differ,” Bitsie argued. “It may contain a lot of nonsense, but it’s still basically a death-threat.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Malcolm. “And don’t you go losing it.”
It was the middle of the afternoon before Bitsie got to Brink’s Lake. As she pulled into the picnic area, she spotted the birthday party easily enough. There was a cluster of balloons tied to one of the picnic tables, and the remains of a birthday cake lay in ruins among a clutter of hotdog fixings and potato chip bags.
There were lots of people in the vicinity of the table, and Bitsie realized, too late, that she had no idea what Cherise looked like.
She dialed Roscoe’s extension in his room at Shady Grove, but he didn’t answer. Roscoe didn’t believe in cellphones. According to him, they caused brain tumors, and besides, he said, he never went anywhere, so it wasn’t like anyone needed to know where to find him.
Bitsie started to call Anabel but decided against it. She sat in the car for a few minutes and watched the group at the tables, trying to figure out which one might be Cherise. She finally settled on a short firecracker of a woman who seemed to be in the center of cleaning up the remains of the picnic lunch.
Bitsie waited until the woman was returning to her car laden down with a Styrofoam cooler, before getting out to greet her.
“Are you Cherise?” Bitsie asked.
“Yes,” the woman said, whirling around and giving Bitsie a wary look.
“I’m Bitsie.” Bitsie extended her hand, and the woman put down her cooler and took Bitsie’s hand suspiciously.
“This is going to sound very strange, but we have a sort of three-degrees of separation thing going on,” said Bitsie.
“Oh?”
“I’m a friend of one of the residents of Shady Grove. Roscoe Crismond.”
“Yes, I know him. He’s a real sweetheart,” Cherise said, some of the wariness in her expression dropping away.
“I’m also the owner of Bitsie’s Bakeshop.”
“The place that sold the poisoned cupcakes?”
There had only been one poisoned cupcake, and, as far as Bitsie knew, no one was seriously thinking it had arrived at Shady Grove already poisoned, but Bitsie bit her tongue. “I guess you could say that.”
“Sorry,” said Cherise. “I didn’t mean—“
“Of course not. My point is that I’ve become involved, and I wondered if you’d mind me asking you a few questions.”
“I can’t talk about my patients,” said Cherise. “That’s confidential.”
“I don’t need you to talk about your patients,” said Bitsie. “James is the one I want to know about.”
“You mean the CNA?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t talk about what happened with Malcolm,” said Cherise.
“Because it involves a patient.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t want to know about that.”
“Oh.” Cherise looked confused.
“I’m not particularly interested in what happened when James tried to choke Malcolm. I’m much more interested in confirming his alibi for the evening that Malcolm ate the tainted cupcake.”
“James was on shift that evening.”
“Yes. But was he in the building during the period of time leading up to the poisoning? I have it from a reliable source that you can confirm that he was not in the building for almost an hour before Malcolm collapsed.”
“What reliable source?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
Bitsie was afraid Cherise wasn’t going to tell her anything. Was it that she was afraid of James, or was it that she hated him so much that she wasn’t willing to give up information that might exonerate him?
“I can’t tell you anything,” Cherise finally said. “But if you can get a look at the security camera footage for the door at the north end of the building, I think it’ll prove your point far better than anything I can tell you.”
Stan wasn’t talking to Bitsie about the case, which tempted her not to share anything she knew with him, but this was too big to keep to herself. Besides, one needed a search warrant to go around demanding access to security camera footage.
Bitsie tackled Stan on the subject of eliminating James as a suspect when she met him and Liz for supper at Bub’s diner.
“I have a juicy bit of information regarding the poisoned cupcake,” she said as she bit into her sandwich.
“Do you?” Stan asked nonchalantly.
Bitsie finished chewing and took another bite, stringing him along.
“You going to tell me what it is?” Stan asked.
“Haven’t decided.”
“OK,” said Stan and returned his full attention to his plate of honey-smoked ribs.
He really wasn’t going to press her on the subject, Bitsie decided. Sometimes, her brother was a real spoilsport.
“I’ll tell you,” said Bitsie. “But you have to promise me that you’ll tell me if I’m right or not.”
“Without knowing what it is,” said Stan, “I don’t see how I can make a promise like that.”
Bitsie sighed deeply.
“Alright, I’ll make it easy on your scruples then.”
Stan looked amused but still refused to press her to reveal her information.
“I’m assuming that you’ve looked at the security camera footage from the entrances to Shady Grove on the evening that Malcolm got poisoned.”
Stan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hadn’t looked at the footage yet! Bitsie barely suppressed a smile.
“Ok, I guess I’d better not assume one way or the other,” she said, “but I think you’ll find that if you check the camera from the north entrance, starting about an hour before Malcolm collapsed, you’ll find that you can eliminate one of your suspects from the running.”
“Do you think so?” said Stan
“I know so.”
“You’re very confident. If you’re so sure, why do you need me to tell you you’re right?”
“I just like to hear the words said out loud,” said Bitsie and took another enormous bite of sandwich.
“You know I saw Nick the other evening,” said Liz, abruptly changing the subject.
“Oh?” Bitsie didn’t know why Liz seeing Nick out in the evening counted as news, but maybe there was more to it.
There was.
“I don’t know how to make this sound any better than it is,” Liz continued. “I’m not too happy about it myself.”
Bitsie didn’t understand, but she didn’t want to give the wrong impression by seeming overeager about anything relating to Nick, so she just quietly chewed her sandwich and waited for Liz to go on.
“I think Nick might be getting back together with his ex-wife,” said Liz.
“No way!” Stan stopped chewing and dropped his half-finished rib back onto his plate. “He can’t be. Not after what she put him through.”
“I was surprised, too,” said Liz. “But I was at the Fayetteville Mall on Friday evening, and I saw them standing in line to get movie tickets.
“Maybe they were just hanging out together,” Stan suggested. “You know, doing the ‘let’s be friends after-all’ thing.”
“They were holding hands,” said Liz.
Bitsie’s heart dropped into her stomach. She wished she could unhear what she had just heard. It was ridiculous for her to expect Nick to stay single forever. She had no right to be disappointed to hear that he was dating someone else—not even if that someone was his ex-wife.
She finished her sandwich, one interminable bite after another, none of which tasted nearly as delicious as they had a few minutes previously.
She waited to get home before she let the tears fall. It was silly to be sad, she told herself, but she couldn’t help thinking that if there really hadn’t been anything between her and Nick, then why was he suddenly giving her the cold shoulder? If they were really just friends, why should it make any difference that he was giving it another go with his ex-wife?
“What should I do?” she wailed to Max, who turned back his ears in distaste at the sound. He stared at her with his big yellow eyes.
“There’s nothing I can do, can I?” Max stood up, walked around in a circle, and then curled up again on the bed, this time with his back to her.
“You’re right,” said Bitsie. “That’s what I should do. I should turn my back on the situation.”
She reached out to stroke Max’s head, and he began to purr and knead his claws into the bedspread.
“I think this is an occasion which calls for ice cream,” Bitsie said, climbing off the bed.
Max followed her into the kitchen and sat down expectantly in front of his bowl.
Bitsie dished out three large scoops of vanilla ice cream into a dish and set it down on the counter while she poured a generous serving of Svelte Kitty Cat Food into Max’s bowl.
She picked up the dish of ice cream, but she didn’t start eating just yet.
“This is a situation that calls for drastic measures. You know what drastic measures are, don’t you, Max?”
Max didn’t even look up; he was too busy inhaling his Svelte Kitty Cat Food.
“Drastic measures call for chocolate sauce!” Bitsie said. She went to the fridge and pulled out a jar of chocolate sauce and spooned a generous dollop over the top. Then she sat right down on the kitchen floor beside Max and ate the whole thing.
Chapter Seven
“You were right,” said Stan’s voice on the other end of the line. Bitsie almost dropped the pastry bag of banana cream filling right onto the tray of half-filled cupcakes. She didn’t have to ask Stan what she was right about.
“Anything else I should know?” she asked.
“Nope,” said Stan and hung up before she had a chance to ask any questions.
Well, that settled it. James had an alibi. That left Bitsie with a very slim roster of suspects. She wasn’t counting out Ruby just yet, but there wasn’t much to suggest she was the one who had poisoned the cupcake.
However, there was one person Bitsie was very curious about but had yet to question. That person was Miss Lavinia Fay, the woman at the center of the whole drama. It was definitely time to corner Miss Fay and see if she would talk.
Bitsie didn’t know if Nick had stopped taking treats to his grandfather since the unfortunate incident with the poisoned cherry chocolate cupcake, but she suspected that he had. Now, Bitsie decided, was an excellent time to resurrect the tradition.
She finished up filling the last banana cream cupcake and moved on to frosting and sprinkles. When the cupcakes were complete, she selected a dozen and put them in a box.
Nick would be arriving in a few minutes. It was really too early for her to be leaving, but Bitsie decided that she wasn’t up to seeing Nick. Maybe tomorrow, she told herself, or maybe the day after that.
Bitsie picked up the box of banana cream cupcakes and quietly slipped out the back door. She’d text Hector, who was out front restocking the cases, and tell him that she’d had to leave a little early. Nick and Hector would be fine on their own. Business had been a little slow, lately, and Bitsie had a sinking feeling that it had something to do with the poisoning. Sure, people might not say they suspected her shop of selling tainted cupcakes, but until they knew the full story of who had poisoned that cupcake and why, it was only natural that they’d be less enthusiastic about buying from a bakery that had been involved in a near-miss to murder.
Bitsie had been visiting Shady Grove so often lately that the girls at reception knew her by name, and she knew theirs.
“Going to see Roscoe?” asked Sue, the receptionist.
Bitsie wasn’t really, but the truth would just make her look nosey, so she nodded her head.
“Malcolm’s been asking after you. Wants you to come to see him, next time you’re in,” said Sue.
That was a surprise to Bitsie. She thought the old man couldn’t stand her.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll stop by his room.” Maybe he just wanted the threat letter she’d taken to make a copy of. It was safely nestled in her handbag.
She’d stop by and see Malcolm, but first, she’d tackle Lavinia. As she walked through the common room, she kept her eyes peeled but didn’t see Miss Fay.
Bitsie knew Lavinia lived on the same hall as Roscoe, so she walked down the north wing corridor toward Roscoe’s room, reading name plates on doors as she went until she came to one that said, “Lavinia Fay.”
The door was slightly ajar, and, as she knocked, she could see Miss Fay sitting next to the window in an armchair.
“Oh, Nick’s girlfriend,” Miss Fay said, as Bitsie entered the room.
Not even close! Bitsie didn’t know what to say, so she settled on something halfway between brutal honesty and an outright lie.
“Nick and I aren’t really seeing much of each other at the moment.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Miss Fay. “I apologize, my dear, but I seem to have forgotten your name.”
“Bitsie, Bitsie George.”
“Ah, Bitsie. That’s not a name you hear every day.”
“It’s a nickname. My real name is Beatrice. My brother Stan was already six years old when I was born, but he still had a hard time with Beatrice, so he gave up and called me Bitsie. It’s stuck ever since.”
“I think it suits you,” said Lavinia.
There was a pause in the conversation. Lavinia motioned for Bitsie to sit down on the chair next to her. Lavinia gazed blankly out at the gray November sky for a few minutes while Bitsie stared around the room.
“What a cute teddy bear!” said Bitsie, pointing to a huge fluffy white bear with a big red bow around its neck and a heart embroidered on its chest. The bear was nestled into a corner next to Lavinia’s television set.
“It talks,” said Lavinia.
“The bear?”
“Press on the heart.”
Bitsie pressed on the heart. “I love you beary much!” the bear said. Bitsie pressed the heart again. “I love you beary much!” it repeated.
She’d heard a robotic recording just like it recently, but, for the moment, when or where she’d heard it escaped her memory.