by Celia Kinsey
“Are you having an allergic reaction?” I asked Clarence. It was a stupid question. It was obvious he was.
“Onions!” Clarence repeated.
“I didn’t give him any onions,” Arnie insisted.
“Well, somebody clearly gave him some.” I had my phone to my ear, waiting for 911 to pick up.
Seven minutes later, the ambulance arrived and took Clarence away. Thankfully, he was still able to breathe on his own, but he didn’t look good. He obviously hadn’t been exaggerating his onion allergy.
I looked around for Fritz so I could offer to pay for his dental work. I hoped he wouldn’t sue. If it had been almost any other resident of Whispering Palms who’d broken their bridge, I’d have chalked up the threat to a fit of pain and anger that would subside, but Fritz had a vindictive streak about him.
“I think we’d better file a police report,” Arnie said.
“For what?”
“This is the second time someone has contaminated our food. What if they move on to broken glass or cyanide?”
Arnie had a point. The fake spider could be seen as an ill-advised attempt at a practical joke, but putting a bolt in someone’s food? It didn’t take a very intelligent person to realize that chopping down on a bolt was likely to result in a broken tooth or worse.
“I suppose we should,” I told Arnie. “Do you want to go down to the station, or shall I?”
“Why don’t we both go,” Arnie said. “Let’s close up for the day. I’m afraid we’d better go through all the ingredients we have on hand to make sure nothing else has been tainted.”
It seemed more likely that both Prue’s hot dog and Fitz’s chili cheese fries had been messed with after they were plated, but Arnie was right. There was no way of knowing for sure, and we shouldn’t take chances.
“We’d better stop putting orders up on the counter,” I said. “It will be a pain, but it’s safer to let the plates pile up on the prep surface inside the truck and then hand out the plates directly into the hands of the person who placed the order.”
Down at the station, Officer Scott Finch took down our report.
Scott used to be my boyfriend, way back when. Now we’re strictly platonic, to the point that he keeps bugging me about getting around to admitting to Arnie that I’ve been secretly in love with him for years. Whenever Scott, Arnie, and I are together in the same place I feel like I’m on pins and needles. I live in mortal dread that, one of these days, Scott is going to let slip some tactless remark and render my friendship with Arnie forever awkward.
After getting down all the details, Officer Finch asked, “Does somebody have it out for you, Felicia?”
“Out for me? Why would you think that?”
“It seems to me that someone might be trying to get you shut down. What if that lady who got the spider in her hot dog complains to the health department?”
“Prue wouldn’t do that.”
“All right, what about the man who broke his tooth on the bolt? He threatened to sue. What makes you believe he won’t file a complaint?”
Scott was right. It was overly optimistic not to entertain the possibility that someone was trying to shut us down by planting foreign objects in our food.
“I can’t imagine who would have it out for me,” I told Scott.
Officer Finch looked pointedly over at Arnie.
“I have no idea, either,” Arnie said.
“Well, I’d keep a sharp eye out,” Officer Finch said. “Somebody clearly has it out for somebody.”
That afternoon Arnie took the folding chalkboard he uses to announce the special of the day and wrote “Closed for Cleaning.” He set the sign out by the street, and we set to work going over the truck and all its contents. After hours of looking, we found nothing amiss.
Around five, I suggested that we might open up for supper. I could see that Arnie was nervous we might have missed something, but he agreed.
The supper hour was slow, but nobody complained about finding anything weird in their food.
Around eight, just as we were closing up for the evening, Prue, Patsy and Flo walked by on their way back from the grocery store.
“Well, it happened again,” Patsy said as she set down her shopping bags on one of the few tables that wasn’t yet piled high with chairs.
“What happened again?” I asked.
Chapter Four
“Clarence Conroy found an eyeball in his burrito,” Flo said.
“An eyeball?” Arnie said. “You mean like from a cow or something?”
He sounded horrified. So was I.
“Not a real eyeball,” Patsy said, erupting in giggles.
“It was one of those fake glass eyeballs,” Prue chortled. “You know that kind people get when one of their eyes gets gouged out.”
I thought that was a gratuitously gruesome way of describing it.
I looked at the three tiny ladies who were practically beside themselves with glee. They were clearly treating the whole thing as one delightful joke. I’m afraid I was unable to share their amusement.
“Was Clarence hurt?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s fine,” said Flo. “But I think he’s still a little under the weather from his reaction to eating onions at lunch.”
“But the eyeball didn’t hurt him a bit,” said Prue.
“How long did they keep him at the hospital?” I asked.
“Not long,” said Patsy. “I guess they gave him a shot, and he deflated right back down to normal, although he still looks pretty rashy. He was back by suppertime. That’s how he came to be eating a burrito at Café Tijuana.”
“Why do so many people dislike Clarence?” I asked the ladies.
“Because he’s such a fastidious so and so,” Patsy said.
“I meant besides that. Lots of people seem to dislike him for specific reasons,” I said. “Let’s start with Fitz. He keeps claiming that Clarence is trying to get him kicked out of Whispering Palms, but I’ve never managed to work out why.”
“Clarence thinks Fitz is a hoarder,” Prue said.
“Is he?”
“Well, he has a whole box of your plastic spoons, for a start,” said Patsy.
That was why we kept running short of plastic cutlery.
“He has the country’s most complete set of National Geographics,” Flo said.
“And three years’worth of the Bray Bay Crier,” added Patsy.
“Have you seen this for yourself?” I asked.
“I have,” said Prue. “His place is so crammed with junk, it’s hard to make it from the front door to the kitchen.”
“But why should Clarence care how Fitz chooses to live?” I asked. “It Fritz really hurting anyone but himself by surrounding himself with so much junk? It’s not like it’s led to a rat infestation or anything, has it?”
“It’s because there’s a clause in the bylaws,” said Patsy. “There’s something you have to sign when you move in that says you promise to refrain from ‘making waste’ on the property.”
“And boxes of plastic cutlery and stacks of old magazines and newspapers is what Clarence classifies as ‘making waste’?”
Apparently, it was.
The three ladies started to collect their shopping off the table, but I wasn’t done with them yet.
“Now that we’ve sorted out Fitz, I want to know what you three have against him.”
Patsy, Prue, and Flo seemed a lot more eager to talk about Fitz, but I finally pried it out of them.
Patsy was mad at Clarence because she was convinced that he’d strong-armed the board into giving him an apartment at Whispering Palms even though Patsy’s sister had been on a waiting list for six months longer than Clarence and should have been the one to move in.
Flo was hopping mad that Clarence had backed over her cat. Further questioning revealed that it had actually been Fluffy’s tail which had come into contact with Clarence’s tires and that Fluffy had emerged with no greater injury than a permanently crooked spo
t at the tip of her tail.
“Fluffy’s afraid to leave the apartment, now,” Flo insisted. “She used to be such a beautiful cat.”
“Surely that was an accident,” I said. “Do you really think Clarence tried to run over your cat on purpose?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Patsy said. “He’d filed a complaint with the manager about Fluffy the week before he ran her over.”
“Aren’t cats allowed at Whispering Palms?” I asked.
“They aren’t allowed to do their business in the bushes,” said Prue.
“Was Fluffy doing her business in the bushes?”
“Certainly not.” Flo was seething with righteous indignation, but I was doubtful that Fluffy discriminated between the bushes directly outside her own door and those directly outside of Clarence’s.
“What about you, Prue?” I asked. “What do you have against Clarence Conroy?”
“I don’t have anything against him,” said Prue. “I just don’t think he’s a very nice person.”
Prue, it seemed, was not alone in that opinion.
“It wasn’t one of you?” I asked, studying the faces of Patsy and Flo.
“What do you mean?” Patsy demanded.
“It wasn’t one of you who planted the spider, or the bolt, or the eyeball?”
“Certainly not!” Patsy said.
“How could you think such a thing?” said Flo.
Prue didn’t bother to defend herself, but she was the only one I felt was above suspicion.
The Three Amigos of Whispering Palms huffed off. I’d offended them, and I felt a little bad about that, but not so bad that I was going to cut short my questioning of all possible suspects.
I finished locking up the truck and headed for Café Tijuana.
(Chapter Five continues after image)
Chapter Five
It was nearly nine when I got to Café Tijuana.
“I’m sorry, we’re closed,” the waitress who was wiping down tables told me. Her name tag said, “Hola, I’m Mariel.”
“You might be able to still get something to go,” Mariel continued. “Would you like me to ask?”
I told her it wasn’t supper I was after; it was information.
“I’ve had several incidents of strange objects showing up in the food at my food truck,” I told Mariel. “I was hoping to talk to someone who was here when Clarence Conroy found that glass eyeball in his burrito.”
“I was here when it happened. I’m the one who brought the burrito to the table.”
I asked Mariel to tell me, in detail, everything she’d observed, but nothing she told me added much to the abbreviated version of the story I’d heard from the Three Amigos of Whispering Palms. When Mariel had taken the burrito off the passthrough between the kitchen and the dining room, she hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
“Do you recall noticing any other residents of Whispering Palms in the dining room just before you served the burrito?” I was convinced the culprit was a Whispering Palms resident, and I was becoming increasingly certain that the intended target had always been Clarence Conroy.
When Prue got the spider, I suspected her plate had been intended for Clarence. That’s why she’d ended up with a mustard-covered hot dog.
Ditto the day that Clarence had gotten the chili fries with onions. Fitz must have taken Clarence’s onionless order on purpose and ended up with the bolt (which some third party had intended for Clarence). Poetic justice, considering Fitz must have known that Clarence was allergic to onions and made a near-duplicate order just in order to make the swap.
That ruled out Fitz as the culprit but left the rest of the field wide open.
Mariel said she thought there’d been several Whispering Palms residents in Café Tijuana at the time, but she couldn’t name any names.
“What does Clarence always order on Wednesdays?” I asked.
“Beef and cheese burrito, with a side of rice and beans.”
“Would it be possible to check the order slips and see if anyone else ordered a beef and cheese burrito shortly before Clarence did?”
Mariel retrieved the hand-written order slips from the back, and we each took half. When we were done, we’d found three other orders for beef and cheese burritos in the half-hour preceding the glass eyeball incident. That wasn’t enormously helpful. The order slips told us the table number and the servers’ names, but the two servers in question had already gone home for the night.
“I’ll ask them when they come in tomorrow,” Mariel promised. “They might remember something.”
I left Mariel my number in case she came up with any useful information, and as I headed out to my car, I was surprised to see a text from Arnie.
WANT TO GO TO A CONCERT THIS WEEKEND?
Arnie rarely goes anywhere on the weekend. Come to think of it, neither do I. We never, ever go anywhere together because one of us has to be here to open up the food truck. There’s a part-time girl I used to waitress with who comes in to help out on occasion, but she doesn’t come often enough to be ready to handle things on her own.
I wondered what had gotten Arnie so interested in going to a concert. I decided that it must be some favorite band of his, and whoever he’d planned to go with had had to cancel at the last minute. It wasn’t like Arnie, though, not to check in with me in advance and tell me he needed an evening off. I decided that the tickets must have been a gift from someone else.
I decided it wouldn’t hurt to close up the truck early just for one evening, so I texted back.
SURE. THIS WEEKEND?
SATURDAY NIGHT
OK
GREAT! I’LL BUY TICKETS
That shot my theory of whoever he’d planned to go with canceling on him at the last minute, or the tickets having been a spur of the moment gift, but I was too tired to get caught up in overanalyzing anything. I was so tired I went home and straight to bed. I had somewhere to be early the next morning.
I was up before it got light. I parked my car three blocks from Whispering Palms, got out, and started down the street at a slow jog. I never jog, so I soon downgraded my ambitions to a brisk walk. I was hot, sweaty, and out of breath even though the sun had barely peeked over the horizon.
I make two circuits around the outskirts of Whispering Palms before I spotted Patsy, out for her sunrise stroll. I waved at her from across the street and kept moving. I’d made another four trips around the block before I saw Marcella Edwards coming out of Whispering Palms dressed in a neon pink sweatsuit set and carrying a set of hand weights. I followed her a couple of blocks to the entrance of the beachfront walking path.
It was almost a mile before Marcella paused to take a breather on a bench overlooking the beach.
“Good morning, Marcella!” I sang out in an obscenely cheerful voice.
Marcella jumped. I’d have jumped too if somebody had greeted me that aggressively. I decided I’d better tone it down a bit. I dialed back my smile.
“May I join you?” I asked.
“This bench is public property,” said Marcella, which hardly counted as an enthusiastic invitation for company, but I sat down anyway.
“Beautiful morning,” I said.
Marcella shuffled her feet. I had a feeling she was about to get up, so I got straight to the point.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said. “I have this older female friend who’s interested in Clarence Conroy, and I was wondering if I set them up if I’d be stepping on any toes.”
Marcella looked at the toes in question and grunted. I could see I wasn’t going to get any straight answers regarding the current or past relationship between Marcella and Clarence, so I went in for the kill.
“You know,” I said. “Some people are saying that you are the one behind all those weird objects people keep finding in their food.”
Chapter Six
When I told Marcella Edwards that “some people” were saying that she was behind the weird objects showing up in other people’s f
ood, I was “some people,” but Marcella didn’t need to know that.
Marcella sprang wordlessly to her feet. If I hadn’t been a foot taller than she was and close to half a century younger, I’d have been worried. I’m pretty sure she wanted to hit me with one of the little hand weights she carried.
I expected Marcella to indignantly defend herself from my accusations, but she didn’t. Instead, she took off down the trail, her arms pumping vigorously.
I was at a loss. This was the woman rumored to tip tables at restaurants when the waiter got her order wrong and carry past-the-sell-by-date produce in her capacious tote bag to throw at the caller when she attended bingo games in the basement of the Baptist church (although the story of her beaning Pastor Pritchett in the head with a rotten orange may have been more legend than fact).
Marcella Edwards did not seem like the sort of woman who’d take false accusations lying down, or, indeed, founded accusations standing down. What was she hiding? Was she the guilty party, or did she know who was, but had some reason to keep their identity to herself?
I was planning to head home for a much-needed shower and a hearty breakfast after my unaccustomed exertion. Instead, I headed back to Whispering Palms and rang the doorbell at Fitz’s apartment.
He answered right away and invited me in. I could tell he found it very odd for me to be dropping by at all, never mind so early in the morning, but he told me to sit down and brought me a cup of coffee.
I found it odd that Fitz was wearing an eye patch. I found it doubly odd that he wasn’t wearing it on his left eye, which was still heavily bruised from being punched by Clarence.
“Did you get into another fight with Clarence?”
Poor Fitz. What with his missing bridge, the black eye, and now the eyepatch, he was looking more and more like something the cat dragged in. There was no danger of Fitz dethroning Clarence Conroy as the most eligible widower of Whispering Palms any time soon.
“This?” Fitz pointed to his eye patch. “I didn’t get in another fight. My glass eye went missing.”
I almost dropped my coffee cup.