“Got it. What should I tell people?”
“Take down the signs and just say we ran out. It was a limited time. It was a first come first serve thing,” Bert advised. It wasn’t a lie. They just hadn’t known it was a limited time thing until Ronnie’s body had randomly turned up.
The whole thing was still bothering Bert to no end. How had a young and healthy woman died?
“You can count on me,” Wyn said with a salute of her hand.
“Thanks.”
“But we’re still taking pre-orders, aren’t we?”
Bert smiled from ear to ear. “Of course.”
The rest of the morning and into the early afternoon was crazy busy. Entire families tromped into the shop in order to all place the pie orders together, every child getting a vote on what their favorite Thanksgiving dessert was. The fact that there were no more tickets was disappointing to many but didn’t stop people from ordering anyway.
Thankfully, Bert’s delicious pies stood on their own for quality and taste.
As always, many of the families decided to have some pie while they were there as well. Parents got coffee and kids got hot chocolate or cider to go with the treat.
Things finally started to slow down around two in the afternoon. Bert was grateful she’d made a double batch of her new acorn squash pie. They’d already gone through over half of what they’d prepared for the day and she wondered if they’d have enough to last through the evening crowd.
She couldn’t believe she was thinking it, but she hoped for things to stay slow until closing.
“I’m ready to work again,” came a voice from the stairs.
Bert glanced up and saw Shiv coming down from the apartment. She looked fresh like she’d retouched her makeup. Her pitch-black hair was in an intricate braid.
“Hey, how are you doing?” Bert asked, concerned.
“I’m okay. I think working will be good. It’ll help keep me distracted.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me. Nothing wrong with staying busy,” Bert said, thinking back to her days when she’d gone to see a grief counselor after losing her husband. One of the biggest and most helpful tips the counselor had given her was distraction. Taking time to read, watch TV, play a game, anything to distract from the pain was one helpful coping method.
Working was even better.
“Well, come on down. I think we should get a head start on these Thanksgiving pies,” she admitted.
Shiv reached the bottom step, walking around the counter into the open kitchen area.
“Isn’t it a little too early still?” Wyn inquired.
“Not at all. For many of the customers, they’re wanting to pick up their pies and bake them at home.”
“That way they can have it fresh and hot,” Shiv added.
“Oh, I see.”
“We include specific baking instructions with each pie,” Bert said, opening a drawer where she had the paper slips, ones she had gotten printed at the same time as her cookbook, hidden away. Pulling one out, she showed it to Wyn. Printed on an auburn colored paper, there were cute cartoon images of a turkey and a little pilgrim holding a pie.
“It’s adorable.”
“And any pies that customers want baked here, I can still make ahead of time.”
“Because you can bake them later,” Wyn declared happily.
“Yep,” Bert acknowledged with a big beaming smile. In between late afternoon customers, the three women got hard to work whipping up pies to put in the cooler. They rolled out huge sheets of crust and then placed them in tins. Large mixing bowls of pumpkin, apple, pecan, and acorn pie filling would accommodate many pies.
Bert couldn’t help herself and had a little sampling of the pecan filling. It was her absolute favorite, and she had a special version of it up her sleeve for Christmas the next month. She loved having little secrets like that to look forward to.
“Some of these fillings are pretty liquidy,” Wyn noted as she poured one of the bowls into a waiting crust.
“That’s why we chill them. It helps everything set up until it’s ready to be picked up by the customer and baked.”
“Ooh, I see,” she said, wide-eyed. It reminded Bert of a child learning new things for the first time. Of course, when you were in your sixties, someone in their early thirties did look like a child at times.
It was fun watching her employees get excited for the holiday, the idea of death and possible murder a disappearing thought in the distance.
The peace wasn’t meant to last.
The door to the shop burst open, the bell ringing and announcing Carla’s entrance. “Bert, have you heard the news?!” she exclaimed, shutting the door against the cold wind outside. Tiny flecks of snow could be seen dancing down from the gray sky.
Bert hoped it didn’t get too snowy before closing time when the girls had to drive home.
“News?” Bert asked innocently, already aware of where this was going. If anyone had a nose for murder it was Carla. Whenever Bert got involved in some local homicide case Harry was working on, you could bet her best friend was close behind.
“About the murder,” she expelled.
Shiv went pale again, the colorful flush from earlier vanishing in an instant.
“Carla, maybe we can talk about this later,” Bert suggested to her friend.
“They’re saying she was found in a locked room,” she noted, leaning on the counter.
Temporarily, Bert ignored Carla and turned to Shiv. “Shiv? Do you want to do inventory in the back room?” she asked, giving her employee an out from having to talk about her friend’s death again.
“No, no. It’s okay. I’m fine, really,” she said, not looking fine at all.
However, even if it was extremely difficult to discuss the topic of her friend’s death, Shiv was the kind of strong-minded woman who wouldn’t run away or escape to another room. She’d rather stay and hear what the news was saying about the situation.
“Did you hear me, Bert? There was a murder?” Carla noted with a hint of excitement.
Bert turned back to face her friend. “Yes, I heard. We know about it because it was Shiv’s friend.”
Carla instantly went white, realizing her social mishap. “Oh! Oh, my. I’m so sorry, Shiv. Here I am blabbering on about the news like an excited goon and it’s all about someone you knew and are were close to,” she apologized, nervously smoothing back her dyed brown hair.
Bert had never bothered dying her own hair and accepted the silvery gray locks as they came in. She’d also never gotten the traditionally short “mom cut” that most women her age sported. There was nothing wrong with it, Carla looked good in it in fact, but it had never much been Bert’s speed.
“It’s okay, Carla. Really,” Shiv answered, bringing Bert out of her adjacent thought process.
“No, no. I was making a fool of myself.”
Shiv came out from behind the counter space and hugged Carla. “You’re great. I actually am interested in what the news had to say.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Leave it to the young woman to show aged maturity in the face of a crisis, Bert thought. She was frequently impressed with Shiv.
“Go on, Carla. What did the news say?” Bert urged, honestly interested herself. If she had a little more info about the situation in question, perhaps she could better help solve what happened and bring a little peace to Shiv’s life.
The idea of a friend’s unsolved murder hanging over her head during the holidays sounded miserable.
Carla shuffled her way into a chair at the table closest to the counter, folding her hands in front of her. She’d never bothered removing her heavy overcoat or woolen scarf. “According to the news, the poor girl was found in a locked room on campus.”
Shiv bobbed her head in agreement, knowing this information already.
“Turns out, she was poisoned.”
“Poisoned? Really?” Bert wondered, thinking of the possibil
ities attached to this new information.
“Yes. Some sort of neurological upset or something. Overstimulation of the system followed by a shutdown.”
To Bert, that sounded like some sort of synthetically extracted or created poison.
“How was she poisoned?” she questioned, already attempting to deduce an answer.
“The news didn’t have a lot of details, but potentially through a puncture wound on her hand?”
“Puncture wounds,” Shiv clarified, making the word plural.
Carla’s eyes grew large. “You saw the body?”
Shiv hesitated, glancing at Bert before answering. “I-I was the one who found her. I unlocked the door and went inside.”
“Oh, my heavens. That is so scary. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Shiv lied.
“There were multiple wounds?”
“Yeah, almost like her hand had gotten pricked by something multiple times.”
“Like someone had stabbed her hand with a needle?” Bert asked calmly, simply looking for facts.
Shiv shook her head. “They looked much fatter than a needle. They were bleeding and it was hard to tell just how big they were or how many. All I know is that it couldn’t have been a needle unless it was a really big needle.”
At the very least, now Bert knew why the police thought it was murder. Poisoning was no accident, most of the time, especially not the kind Carla seemed to be describing. It sounded like something, fast, potent, and deadly.
“And you unlocked the room?” Carla asked again, piecing together her own set of clues in her head.
“Yes, so whoever did this had to have a key. Ronnie didn’t have one and couldn’t have gotten out of the room. You needed a key for both sides, which is one reason it was selected for the escape room.”
Once again, the door to the shop opened and the bell rang. Almost as if in response to their conversation, Harry stood there bundled up against the increasingly falling snow.
“Harry, come inside,” Bert said, rushing over and shutting the door behind him. “Do you want some coffee?” she asked, wondering if she could question him about the escape room and whether it would be allowed to still run once this whole thing was cleared up.
“I wish I could, but I don’t have time,” he admitted, stomping and shaking the snow from his body. “I actually was hoping I could bring Shiv down to the station with me.”
“To the station?” Carla and Bert exclaimed in unison.
“Yes, for questioning.”
Chapter Six
Bert offered to drive Shiv down to the station herself, which Harry cordially agreed to. Carla agreed to stay behind and help Wyn with the pie shop while they were gone. Bert had tried to argue that Carla needed to worry about her own shop, but her friend claimed that she’d hired on a handful of the young teenage women from their church congregation to help that season. Under her regular store manager, they worked like a well-oiled machine.
Bert hadn’t taken the time to argue, concerned about her own employee at the moment. If Carla said things were in hand, Bert was inclined to believe her. She and Shiv had quickly left, tailing the detective to the station.
Thankfully, it wasn’t as if Shiv were under arrest, but it seemed clear to Bert that her young employee was a suspect.
As they’d just learned, the room was locked from both sides. The only people who could have gotten either in or out were people with a key—unless the killer was a very adept lock-pick. Bert supposed that was a possibility but chose to ignore it for the time being. It would make this whole case more complicated if they believed anyone could have gotten in.
No, it had to be someone with a key.
Concentrating on the road, Bert navigated toward the police station behind Harry. Swirling snow danced across the pavement but hadn’t started to really settle down and stick yet. So far, the white stuff had only stayed on trees and grassy medians. It would only be a matter of time before it began to freeze on the roads, creating a hazard.
Even though conditions were fairly dry, Bert still put all her effort into driving safely. She wasn’t as worried about herself, but more about other drivers.
Too often Bert caught sight of people going too fast or taking turns too quickly. The lack of sensible thinking on the road seemed to increase. Unfortunately, while cell phones were a great blessing of the modern age of technology, they also were the culprit for distracting one too many drivers—and not just young folks, as so many of her peers seemed to believe.
She’d seen in the news and in person too many times where an older businessman got in an accident checking his work notifications, or a woman of the same age having a quick glance at her e-mail, or even a retiree who was trying to let a friend know they were running late.
It was just too much, sometimes.
Bert had gotten in the habit of telling the young men and women at her church, the ones who were just learning to drive, to treat their time behind the wheel in the snow as if their own grandmother were in the passenger seat with a huge crockpot full of chili or soup without a lid.
And she knew these women. You didn’t dare spill a drop of their precious “famous” dish.
It was a relatable analogy, considering many of the church’s youth had grandmothers in the congregation who prided themselves on their favorite winter meal that they brought to parties and holiday functions. Much of the time, these grandmothers could no longer drive themselves and relied on family to get them to and from the church.
Better safe than sorry was Bert’s motto.
However, sometimes you couldn’t avoid being mixed up in tragedy—not unlike this current murder.
“Does Harry think I killed my friend?” Shiv whispered, breaking the silence and bringing Bert out of her deep train of thought about the murder.
“I don’t think so. He is probably just getting as much information as possible to figure out who killed her.”
Shiv folded her arms, sliding farther down in the passenger seat. “He thinks I had something to do with it,” she whispered.
“Harry is doing his job. You found the body, so he’ll have a lot of questions for you,” she said, trying to comfort her. “Believe me. I’ve been in the same boat before.”
Shiv didn’t respond right away. Her sallow expression gave the impression that she was on her way to the gallows or electric chair. While this was no light matter, there was no reason to believe she was the number one suspect on the list.
At least, Bert hoped she wasn’t.
Determined to put her friend’s mind at ease, she decided to focus on finding some solutions herself. “So, who all else has a key to the escape room?” she inquired.
Shiv thankfully straightened up a bit from her depressed slouch. “I’m not sure. As far as I know, just Dale and I had keys to the room which we’d been given when we reserved it for the season.”
“Could anyone else get a key?”
“Well, we got three keys to the room when we signed up to use it. One for each of us.”
“I thought you said Ronnie didn’t have a key?” she thought out loud. If the young woman had a key, couldn’t she have escaped the room on her own?
“She didn’t take one. We needed at least one key to act as part of the scenario, you know?”
“Ah, so that the players could actually escape the room at the end of the game?”
“Yeah. After they find the antidote in the scenario, they get a key to get out.”
“Makes sense.”
“Since Ronnie wasn’t going to be working on the room itself, and was just in charge of accounting and finances, she agreed to let it be her key we used.”
Bert turned down the road behind Harry, the police station coming into view. “So, no one else had a key?”
“I’m sure people did. Janitors, maybe? Administrators? Maybe even my professor.”
“How could I find something like that out?” she wondered.
Shiv shrugged. “Ask the dean of st
udents, maybe?”
It was worth a shot, Bert supposed. However, if too many people had keys, it would muddle everything up.
Parking on the street outside the building, the two ladies got out and headed up the steps. Harry had gone around the back of the station to the employee parking lot. He’d enter through the back, most likely.
Rushing through the front door to get out of the chill and the cold, they stomped their feet to get rid of the snow that had accumulated on them. “If it continues like this, we’ll have a foot by morning.”
Killer Acorn Pie Page 4