Cookin' the Books

by Amy Patricia Meade

  ‘Yes, quite a few actually.’ Tish resisted the temptation to explain that her café was literary-based because she had double-majored in English Literature and Business.

  ‘Then I dare say you’re more qualified for the director’s position than Binnie Broderick was,’ Roberta quipped as she sunk her teeth into a Finnegan’s Cake. ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Roberta nodded as she gobbled two more bites of cake and then tossed it in the trash can with an upturned nose. ‘Ick. That’s far too sweet! I can’t see how anyone can view Celestine as anything other than a purveyor of sugar, butter, and fat. Only Binnie Broderick with her ridiculously bitter tongue could have viewed that as palatable.’

  ‘You seem to be in the minority. Those cakes have actually gone down quite well with everyone else who has tasted them,’ Tish replied with a pasted-on smile.

  ‘Well, I guess if sweets are your sort of thing,’ she dismissed with a wave of a hand. ‘I’m sure Daryl raved about it. If only because it was made by Celestine Rufus.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, he’s sweet on her. Pun fully intended. Has been since they were kids. Honestly, I’m surprised it wasn’t old Lloyd Rufus who was bumped off. Rumor has it Daryl’s been waiting for the playing field to be clear for years.’

  Tish filed away the information about Daryl; their conversation had suggested that his feelings for Celestine were more than just neighborly. ‘How about you? Were you surprised by Binnie Broderick’s death?’

  ‘Surprised, yes. But not shocked.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Well, I was surprised to see her die, especially the way she did. Poisoned at our table. It was horrifying, really.’ Roberta’s dry tone belied her words. ‘But I’m not shocked that it happened. Why, just hours before the fundraiser, she had provoked Enid Kemper and got into a heated argument with Augusta Wilson and her husband.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about Enid’s bird being banned from the library,’ Tish conceded. ‘Why did Binnie have it in for her?’

  ‘No idea.’ Roberta shrugged. ‘Seemed to be an ongoing feud between them. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less if Langhorne was in the library. So long as he didn’t bother other patrons or poop on the circulation desk, he was more than welcome. Daryl felt the same way. It was one of the few things on which he and I agreed.’

  Tish was tempted to remark upon how the maintenance of poop-free circulation desks was a cause probably every librarian could get behind, but given Roberta’s distinct lack of humor, she thought better of it. ‘And the Wilsons? You said they engaged in an argument with Binnie. Do you know what it was about?’

  ‘Oh, the usual, most likely. Augusta May had been demanding Binnie’s resignation for weeks. This was the first time Augusta’s husband, Edwin, had accompanied her to such a meeting, though. I’m not sure why he did. Augusta is entirely capable of handling these things on her own. However, I did notice that she didn’t look at all well that morning.’

  ‘Perhaps she heard about the mayor’s decision to back Binnie?’ Tish suggested.

  ‘I haven’t a clue. I’m not the sort of woman to listen at keyholes, you know,’ Roberta said with a smirk that implied she might, however, be the sort to engage in other equally dubious behavior. ‘All I can say with any certainty is that the conversation ended in a shouting match. Binnie declared – at the very top of her lungs, so that the entire library could hear it, no less – that she was going nowhere and that perhaps Augusta May Wilson should be the one to resign. Edwin volleyed by announcing he’d see Binnie in hell first.’

  ‘Wow. What did Augusta say?’

  ‘Nothing. She followed her husband as he stormed out of Binnie’s office. She looked even more tired than she had when she first entered the library, although I wouldn’t have thought it possible.’ Noticing Tish’s frown, Roberta added, ‘That wasn’t a catty remark, by the way, and Lord knows I’m capable of them. That was simply an observation. Typically, Augusta May Wilson is the epitome of confidence and grace.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that at the fundraiser,’ Tish said. ‘She was quite elegant.’

  ‘Yes, well, Augusta was back to her usual self at the fundraiser. She was far from it that morning.’

  ‘Tell me, did you take Edwin Wilson’s words as a threat?’

  ‘Well, of course I did. Men will do crazy things for the women they love. Not that I would know, of course.’ Roberta stared into the distance. After several seconds had passed, she asked, ‘Have you ever been married?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m divorced now. And you?’

  ‘I’ve never been married. Never even came close.’

  Tish used the conversation as a springboard to dive into the subject of John Ballantyne. ‘And no significant others?’

  ‘None to speak of, no.’

  ‘None to speak of or none you can speak of?’ Tish asked with a sly grin.

  ‘My, you are observant for a caterer, aren’t you?’ Roberta cleared her throat and awkwardly shifted her weight from one foot to another.

  ‘Not inordinately. I’m simply reacting to what I’ve heard in town these past two weeks.’

  ‘And what might that be?’ the librarian demanded.

  ‘That you and John Ballantyne are … close.’

  ‘Me and—? Why, that’s preposterous! He’s a married man.’

  ‘Married or not, it’s rumored that he slipped a message into your hand at the fundraiser last night.’

  ‘And I can guess who started that rumor. Daryl Dufour!’

  ‘Um, well—’

  ‘Tell me no all you like. I know what that weasel is capable of both saying and doing. From online role-playing and gaming to his love of sci-fi and werewolves to his obsession with Celestine Rufus, Mr Dufour leads a very rich fantasy life. A very rich fantasy life, indeed.’

  ‘Um, actually—’ Tish attempted to argue, but Roberta shut her down without hesitation.

  ‘Now, if we’re finished, I have a valuable, non-catering job to which I need to attend.’ With that, Roberta Dutton slammed the door to the break room and headed back to the circulation desk.

  TEN

  Having created more turmoil than she had wished for, Tish exited the Hobson Glen Library as discreetly as she could – despite Veronica’s fervent waves, mouthed goodbyes, and silent ‘thank yous’ for the cupcakes – and climbed behind the steering wheel of the Matrix. Once there, she locked both the windows and the doors, turned on both the ignition and air conditioning, and leaned back against the headrest, her brain and body both appreciating the silent, familiar comfort of controllable surroundings.

  She was cut out to be a cook, a baker, a creator of food, a nurturer of people, and, perhaps, in her past life, a banker, and maybe even a writer, had she been given the opportunity. But being a detective, the person who listened to everyone’s tales of woe and then sifted through their words to separate the truth from the lies, was tiring in the extreme.

  Tish was drawn from her reverie by the ring of her cell phone. ‘Hello?’ she asked upon pressing the green ‘answer’ button and drawing the phone to her ear.

  The phone’s Bluetooth activated and Jules’s voice came booming through the Matrix’s stereo speakers. ‘Tish? Thank God you answered.’

  Startled and inundated by sound, Tish flung her head against the headrest before lowering the car radio volume and replying. ‘Jules, are you OK?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. Positively peachy. But I desperately need your recipe for cornmeal rosemary madeleines.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll write it down for you when I get back.’ Tish smiled as she once again relaxed and leaned back against the headrest.

  ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. I need it now.’

  The sense of urgency in Jules’s voice caused Tish alarm. ‘Why do you need it now?’

  ‘Because we’re nearly out of cupcakes,’ came Julian Jefferson Davis’s breathless reply.

  Tish leaned in toward
the radio, as if questioning Jules face to face. ‘Out of cupcakes? I left you with just under two hundred of them. I know you’re a stress-eater, Jules, but seriously—’

  ‘I didn’t eat them,’ Jules practically shrieked. ‘At least not all of them. We simply need a savory alternative to all that sugar.’

  ‘How about I make us a nice salad for supper when I get back?’ Tish suggested. ‘It’s far healthier than all that buttery pastry.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ an exasperated Jules sighed. ‘All I asked for was the madeleine recipe. Could you just tell me where I might find it? I’ve searched the French shelf at the café and couldn’t locate it anywhere.’

  ‘That’s because it’s in my head,’ a confused Tish answered. ‘I rarely ever write down recipes.’

  ‘Well, a hell of a lot of good that does me right now. I guess I’m just going to have to wing it,’ Jules exclaimed before hanging up the phone.

  Tish exhaled and leaned back against the headrest again. She trusted Jules’s and Mary Jo’s judgment implicitly, yet part of her felt slightly uneasy about what might be happening back at her café.

  Deeming it prudent to move on to the next visit so that she could return home as swiftly as possible, Tish sat upright, positioned her seat for driving, and, after checking in the visor mirror to ensure that her brownish black mascara hadn’t smudged during her brief respite, shifted the Matrix into drive.

  Upon arriving at the Wilsons’ house, Tish felt foolish for even moving the car out of the library parking lot, for the three-story, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian was located high upon a hill in the center of town, just a few blocks’ walk away from the library. Shrugging off her stupidity, Tish pulled the Matrix into a curbside parking spot, fed three quarters into the adjacent meter, and hiked up the flight of concrete steps that led to the cluster of late-nineteenth-century homes known locally as Hobson Glen’s ‘Grand Dames.’

  Number seventy-two, the Wilsons’ home, was a yellow clapboard edifice with dark green shutters, and gingerbead trim. Tish approached the house to find Edwin and Augusta May reposed upon the sprawling wraparound porch. Edwin, looking fresh from the golf course in a navy-blue polo shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts, swayed to and fro on a chain-suspended porch swing, his brown legs stretched out before him. Augusta, her face scrubbed clean and her shoulder-length curly hair pulled back with a white headband, reclined upon a whitewashed wicker chaise lounge, a floral-printed cushion tucked behind her head, and, despite the late-summer heat and humidity, a crocheted cotton throw draped over her legs.

  At the sight of the caterer, Augusta waved an arm in welcome. ‘Good afternoon, Ms Tarragon,’ the library board president greeted when Tish had drawn closer. Edwin, meanwhile, left his spot on the porch swing to drag a straight-backed wicker chair from a hidden section of the wraparound porch and place it beside Augusta’s chaise.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Tish replied.

  Dressed in a plain white cotton T-shirt and khaki-colored Capri pants, Augusta’s appearance was far less glamorous than it had been on the previous evening. But there was more to Augusta’s altered appearance than simply a pared-down wardrobe. There was, in the lines on her face and in her mannerisms, a sense of battle fatigue. ‘Edwin,’ she ordered her husband, ‘go get my handbag from the foyer table. Ms Tarragon’s check is in there.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no rush for that. I just came by to drop off some cakes.’ Tish held the plastic container of confections aloft. ‘To be quite frank, I’d completely forgotten that I hadn’t been paid.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want you to think that we didn’t appreciate your services.’ Augusta asked Edwin to take the cakes to someone named Brenda and then reminded him to grab her bag on the way back. ‘I assure you, I had every intention of paying you at the end of the event, Ms Tarragon, but then …’

  ‘Yes, things got rather strange, rather quickly. I’m sorry about Mrs Broderick. This whole thing must have come as quite a shock.’

  Edwin had returned, bearing an oversized black leather satchel which he handed to his wife. Augusta reached into the bag, extracted a windowed envelope, and passed it to Tish.

  ‘Thank you,’ Tish murmured as Augusta waved her into the seat beside her.

  ‘It was a shock, yes. It still is in many respects, but it wasn’t really a surprise.’

  Tish was startled to hear Augusta May Wilson utter the same sentiment as Roberta Dutton. ‘Not a surprise?’

  ‘When a person’s spent their entire life treating people the way Lavinia Broderick did, it’s not surprising someone finally said enough is enough,’ Edwin asserted. His sentiment echoed that of Celestine Rufus.

  ‘Not that either of us condone murder, of course,’ Augusta was quick to clarify.

  ‘Of course not. But Lavinia could push even the sanest soul to the edge,’ Edwin said with a stern glance at his wife.

  ‘It sounds as if you both knew her for a long time,’ Tish noted.

  ‘I didn’t, but Augusta did,’ Edwin stated.

  ‘Since she and I were both children,’ Augusta explained.

  ‘Oh, so you grew up together?’

  ‘Grew up together? Oh, no. That wasn’t possible back then. But I always knew who Lavinia was. Hobson Glen was smaller than it is now, so everyone knew everyone else. But Binnie and I lived in different worlds. I went to public schools, she went to prep schools. I got my first job at age sixteen while Binnie was planning her debutante ball. I went to UVA; she went to Smith. Every now and then our paths would cross. On the playground and at local fairs when we were younger, and, in more recent years, board rooms, town hall meetings, and the occasional courtroom. Typically on opposing sides,’ she added with a weak smile.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard about the great library debate,’ Tish admitted.

  ‘Oh, there’s no debate about it,’ Edwin said angrily. ‘Or at least there shouldn’t have been a debate. Lavinia Broderick made a huge mistake and she should have lost her job for it.’

  ‘So why didn’t she? Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to agree that she was guilty of misconduct.’

  ‘Have you ever heard the phrase “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”?’ Augusta asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Tish nodded.

  ‘If that phrase isn’t scrawled in Latin across the Broderick coat of arms, then it should be etched on Binnie’s tombstone. The woman had the entire board in the palm of her hand. That’s how she got the position in the first place. You’d think the woman appointed as director of a library would have had, at the very least, some experience working for a non-profit, never mind running one.’

  ‘I’m not sure Lavinia even understood what the term non-profit meant,’ Edwin scoffed.

  ‘What do you mean when you say Binnie had the board in her hand?’ Tish felt it important to corroborate the accounts of the librarians.

  ‘Before she became a Broderick, Binnie was a Darlington,’ Augusta explained. ‘Everyone who’s anyone can trace their wealth and/or reputation back to the Darlingtons, a fact which Eugenia Darlington, Binnie’s mother, reminded her daughter, and everyone else in town, of regularly. Eugenia raised Binnie to be lady of the manor, didn’t she, Brenda?’ Augusta asked the dark-skinned, apron-clad housekeeper who had emerged from the house to serve iced tea and a tray of Finnegan’s Cakes. ‘Brenda worked for Binnie for five years before she came to me.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Brenda agreed with a melodic Southern accent more Georgian or Carolinian in origin than Virginian. ‘I’m not one to speak ill of the dead, but Mrs Broderick was a cold, cold woman. Thought she was better than everyone, even her own husband. Time and time again he asked her to move out of that old house of hers and into a new home near Washington so that Mr Broderick could be closer to work, but the answer was always no. She was a Darlington, she’d say. Darlingtons had lived at Wisteria Knolls for centuries and she wasn’t going to give that up for some McMansion surrounded by heathens and Yankees.’ Brenda took a break from serving to look at Tish, ‘S
orry about the Yankee thing, Ms Tarragon. That was Mrs Broderick’s choice of words, not mine.’

  In the twenty plus years she had lived in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Tish, a native of upstate New York, had been called a ‘Yankee’ only once: when Jules opened the door of Tish’s refrigerator to find a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise instead of the obligatory Duke’s.

  ‘That’s OK.’ Tish smiled and sipped her tea. ‘No offense taken.’

  Brenda went back to both her serving duties and her gossip. ‘Mr Broderick wound up taking an apartment in Washington for during the week and driving home to Wisteria Knolls on the weekends. Of course, when he was home, there was no relaxing. Mrs Broderick scheduled the two of them to attend every party and event in the county. Drove him crazy, the schedule he was on. Sure it’s what caused the heart attack that killed him, too. Why, just look what all that woman’s nonsense has done to you, Mrs Wilson, and you’re in far better shape than Mr Broderick was.’

  Tish declined the deposit of what would have been her third Finnegan’s Cake of the day on to her plate. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to have inconvenienced you, Mrs Wilson. I didn’t realize you were ill.’

  ‘I’m not ill. Brenda is overstating the matter,’ Augusta maintained with a heavy sigh.

  ‘You’re not exactly well, either, honey,’ Edwin argued as he removed his eyeglasses from the bridge of his nose and cleaned them with a handkerchief he had pulled from the pocket of his plaid shorts. ‘It’s not as if we spent the night before last at Bon Secours St Mary’s emergency room because of an ingrown toenail.’

  ‘The hospital? Oh my goodness,’ Tish exclaimed. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Augusta sighed once again.

  ‘You’re not fine,’ Edwin piped up and placed the glasses back on to his head. ‘I thought you were having a heart attack.’

  ‘I wasn’t. It was simply stress and anxiety.’

  ‘And chest pains. Chest pains brought on by that woman.’ Edwin accepted his cup of tea and immediately took a sip.

  ‘Yes, but I’m fine now. A little tired, but much better than I was. In fact, I’m certain I’ll make a full recovery.’