A Catered New Year's Eve

by Isis Crawford

  “We weren’t that far, either,” Libby told her sister as Bernie put on another burst of speed.

  The five-second delay had cost her, though, and by the time Bernie got around the next corner, she could see the tail end of the SUV fishtailing around the third corner. She followed, but the SUV was farther away than it had been before, and by the time she got to the front parking lot it was heading toward the exit. Bernie put her foot to the floor. Mathilda began to rattle. It was not a good sound.

  We’re going to die, Libby thought as she watched Bernie take one hand off the steering wheel and dig into her parka pocket. This is so not worth it. “What are you doing?!” Libby screamed. “Put your hand back on the wheel.”

  “Obviously, I’m getting my phone out,” Bernie explained to Libby as Mathilda hit a bump and Libby’s head hit the van’s roof. “Here,” she said, taking her cell out of her pocket and handing it to her sister.

  “What do I want with this?” Libby demanded.

  “Take a picture of the SUV’s license plate, of course.”

  “Of course. I don’t think I can,” Libby said to her sister as Mathilda went over a garbage can cover and Libby’s head connected with the van’s ceiling again. “It’s too dark.”

  “Whoever is driving is going to have to pass under the streetlight,” Bernie said, putting on another burst of speed. “Do it then.”

  “I’ll try, but you’re going too fast and I can’t keep the camera steady,” Libby told Bernie. “Can’t you slow down?”

  “If I slow down, I’ll lose him,” Bernie replied, her eyes fixed on the SUV in front of her.

  “I feel like a milkshake,” Libby complained as she brought the phone up and attempted to look through the camera lens. But the van kept bouncing up and down and she couldn’t steady her hands. First, she saw the ground, then she saw the sky, then trees, then more ground. She cursed under her breath. Finally, Libby aimed the lens in the SUV’s general direction and started snapping away. A moment later, the van passed out from under the cone of light and into the darkness. Libby put Bernie’s cell phone down on her lap.

  “Did you get it?” Bernie asked her sister.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I got,” Libby answered as Bernie tried to coax a little more speed out of their van—and failed. Libby looked over at the speedometer. They were going fifty miles an hour. “I didn’t think Mathilda could go this fast,” Libby commented.

  “Neither did I,” Bernie replied.

  “It feels as if she’s going to come apart,” Libby observed as the rattling increased.

  By now they were out of the parking lot and Mathilda was making seriously unhappy noises as Bernie kept her foot on the gas and followed the SUV onto the road. The SUV was getting farther and farther away.

  “Come on, baby, you can do it,” Bernie crooned to the van as she tried to get Mathilda up to fifty-five miles an hour.

  Mathilda shuddered, then she slid. Bernie steered into the slide, but she couldn’t regain control. We must be on black ice, she thought as Mathilda headed off the road while the SUV pulled farther ahead. Bernie cursed under her breath as she took her foot off the gas and wrestled with the steering, trying to turn the van, but she couldn’t. It was like trying to steer an elephant. The van continued its inexorable slide.

  “Do something!” Libby cried.

  “I’m trying,” Bernie replied. She slammed on the brakes.

  Which was when she remembered that was the one thing you weren’t supposed to do in this situation. The van spun around. Now they were facing the wrong way.

  “Oops. My bad,” Bernie informed Libby as they headed toward the guardrail on the wrong side of the road.

  “No kidding,” Libby replied as she closed her eyes again and braced for impact. What a stupid way to die, she thought.

  Chapter 31

  As the guardrail got closer, Bernie recalled what her dad had told her to do in this kind of situation and tapped on the brake. The van started slowing down. Bernie guessed that part of the reason for that was because they were on a slight uphill incline and off the black ice. At least she hoped they were.

  “Come on, come on, baby,” she urged Mathilda. “You can do this.” The van slowed down even more. Finally, it plowed into a pile of snow the plows had left behind and came to rest.

  Libby uncovered her eyes while Bernie took a deep breath, sat back, and took her hands off the steering wheel. They were shaking. “Are you okay?” she asked Libby when she could talk.

  Libby unfastened her seat belt, turned around, and punched her sister as hard as she could in the arm.

  “Ouch. That hurt.“

  “Good.” Libby sat back in her seat. “Now I feel better,” she said.

  Bernie rubbed her arm. “What did you do that for?” she cried.

  “Because you nearly got us killed.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yes, really. And I’m not even going to mention the fact that I probably have a concussion from hitting my head on the van’s ceiling twice and that my neck is killing me and that I think I have whiplash and that I thought we were going to die.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I’m sure I can come up with a few more things, if you want.”

  “I don’t,” Bernie told her. Then she took another deep breath and let it out. Keep yourself together, she told herself. Don’t go to pieces.

  “We’re lucky we’re still here, Bernie,” Libby continued. “If a car had been coming in the other direction . . .”

  Bernie interrupted. “But there wasn’t, Libby.”

  “But there could have been.”

  “But there wasn’t.” Thank God, Bernie added silently as she watched the snow fall. She lifted her hands up. They’d stopped shaking. “There aren’t any vehicles on the road.”

  “Which should tell you something,” Libby responded. Then she said, “I hope we’re not stuck in the snow,” the thought suddenly occurring to her.

  “Me too,” Bernie agreed. She looked up and down the road just to make sure no cars were coming. Then she put the van into reverse and applied the gas.

  The wheels spun, but nothing happened. They stayed where they were.

  “I knew it,” Libby cried.

  “Hold on,” Bernie told her sister as she gave Mathilda more gas.

  “You’re going to dig us in deeper,” Libby said.

  “You want to do this?” Bernie snapped.

  “No need to get pissy.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “What would you call it? Do we even have a shovel in the back?”

  The van started to move.

  “Here we go,” Bernie said as she slowly backed the van out onto the road and drove a few feet. She couldn’t hear anything clunking or clattering or smell any gas. “Seems as if Mathilda is okay, aren’t you, girl? I’m sorry,” she cooed. “I owe you a detailing job.” Then she patted Mathilda’s dashboard and apologized to her again for almost getting her into an accident.

  “Almost?” Libby echoed.

  “Yes, almost,” Bernie replied. “Mathilda appears to be fine.”

  Libby snorted. “And what about me?”

  “What about you? You’re fine too, withstanding your litany of complaints.”

  “I’m talking about apologizing to me,” Libby said.

  “For what?”

  “The accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident. It’s only an accident if someone gets hurt or if you have property damage.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. That’s the definition of an accident. This was a near accident. Google it if you don’t believe me.”

  Libby turned and stared out the window instead. “Don’t sulk,” Bernie told her.

  “I’m not sulking.”

  “You most certainly are,” Bernie said stealing a glance at her sister before she turned her eyes back on the road. “Fine. I’m sorry. There. Are you satisfied? Does that make you feel better?”
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  “Just barely,” Libby replied.

  “We need to get a faster car,” Bernie reflected, thinking about the chase. “I could have caught whoever that was if we had one.”

  “I’ll put it on the list,” Libby told her, “along with the jet plane and the chalet in the alps.”

  “I think I’d prefer a beach house in Santa Cruz,” Bernie commented as she leaned forward again to better see out the window. They were the only vehicle on the road. Three miles later, Bernie made a U-turn and drove into a Popeye’s parking lot. Please let them be open, she prayed. She felt cold all of a sudden. Her hands were shaking again. So were her legs and she could hardly keep her eyes open. I’m crashing, she thought. This is the adrenaline leaving my body. “I need to get something to eat,” she explained to Libby. “Something fried. With gravy. And a biscuit.”

  “Make that two biscuits for me,” Libby replied, suddenly realizing how hungry and tired she was, too.

  “Did you get anything we can use, picturewise?” Bernie asked Libby after they’d placed their orders at the drive-thru window.

  “I don’t know,” Libby replied, and she picked up Bernie’s phone off the floor—she realized it had slid off her lap during the chase—and clicked on the photos, wondering what she’d snapped because she didn’t remember.

  Evidently she had taken ten pictures. Five were of trees, one was a white blur—which Libby thought must be the sky, although she wasn’t sure—three were of the top half of the SUV, but the tenth pic contained a partial shot of the SUV’s license plate. Libby enlarged the photo and handed it to her sister.

  “It’s something,” Bernie said when Libby showed her the two letters she’d managed to capture.

  “Not much, but at least this wasn’t a total loss,” Libby noted.

  “Now, all we have to do is find out whose license plate this is and we’re in business,” Bernie observed. Suddenly she felt a little bit better.

  “And how do you propose to do that, Bernie?”

  “Ask Dad to ask Clyde.”

  “And you’re going to tell him what?”

  “A somewhat censored version of the truth.”

  “He’ll find out the whole truth,” Libby said. She was so tired she was slurring her words. “He always does.”

  “I’ve been thinking . . .” Bernie began.

  Libby interrupted, “Whatever you’re thinking I don’t want to hear it.”

  Bernie ignored her. “. . . that Kate Silverman isn’t done with her shift yet. What do you say we pop down and talk to her after we eat. I bet the diner is still open.”

  “What do you say I punch you in the arm again?”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Bernie said as she drove to the pickup window. Their food was waiting for them. The smell filled the car. “Here,” Bernie handed the bag to Libby, and then she pulled into the nearest spot and parked Mathilda. The sisters spent the next five minutes eating.

  “God that was good,” Libby said as she threw the remains of the chicken thigh into the bag and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “All I want to do is go home, climb into bed, curl up underneath the covers, and go to sleep.”

  Bernie couldn’t argue with that. She started up the van and as she made a sharp right she heard a clunk coming from the back of the van.

  “What’s that?” Libby asked.

  Bernie shook her head. It wasn’t there before. Or maybe it had been and she hadn’t heard it. She had just about decided that whatever it was could wait until morning when she remembered the three cases of wine in the back. The three cases of expensive, hard-to-find wine that they’d ordered for Mr. Wiley’s dinner party. She cursed under her breath and stepped on the brake.

  “I think it’s the wine,” Bernie said.

  “What wine?” Libby knew she should remember but her brain wasn’t functioning very well at the moment.

  “The wine for Wiley’s dinner party.”

  Libby frowned. “I thought Googie was supposed to deliver it to their house.”

  “He was, but no one was home. I said I’d drop it off tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll be okay.”

  “It had better be, considering how long it took to get it,” Libby said. The muscles in her legs were aching. She stayed in her seat and watched Bernie get out and go around to the rear of the van. She could feel a slight movement as Bernie opened the van’s back doors.

  Libby yawned. Despite her best efforts, her eyes started to close. She couldn’t help it. They were too heavy to keep open. She was drifting away when Bernie started banging on her door. Libby woke up with a start.

  “What?” she cried, disoriented. “What’s the matter?”

  “Libby,” Bernie said. “Get up.”

  “Huh?” She hugged herself.

  “You won’t believe what I found.” And Bernie opened the door and showed her sister what she’d discovered.

  Libby stared at it. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Suddenly she was wide awake.

  Chapter 32

  It was ten-thirty in the morning of the following day and Libby and Bernie had come upstairs to eat a midmorning snack with their dad.

  “At least it’s stopped snowing,” Bernie commented as she handed her dad a mug of hot chocolate and a plate with two pieces of crusty French bread toasted, then topped with butter and cinnamon and sugar, and quickly run under the broiler.

  This is going to be good, Sean thought, and he wasn’t talking about the plate Bernie was holding, either. Then he felt guilty. These weren’t suspects after all. They were his daughters. “My favorite,” he commented to atone for his thought.

  “Mine too,” Libby agreed.

  Sean looked at his daughters as they sat down on the sofa and began to eat. “Everything okay?” he asked, trying for casual as he remembered the call he’d gotten last night as he was falling asleep.

  “Absolutely,” Bernie said brightly. “That is if you don’t count the fact that we watched Ada get arrested last night.”

  “So I heard,” Sean replied, thinking that he’d need to take a nap later in the day. He’d heard his daughters coming in last night, but hadn’t come out to greet them because he’d wanted time to consider the phone conversation he’d had. Then, because he’d been unable to fall asleep until a little after three in the morning, he’d overslept and gotten up after Bernie and Libby had gone downstairs to work.

  “Clyde told you?” Libby asked.

  “No. Ada’s arrest was the lead story on the news this morning.” Sean absentmindedly rubbed his cheeks with his right hand. He had to shave. Or maybe he would grow a beard. “Do you still think Ada is innocent in the deaths of Peggy Graceson and possibly Henry Sinclair?”

  “I do,” Bernie replied.

  “Me too,” Libby chimed in.

  Sean shifted positions, trying to get more comfortable. He’d woken up with a crick in his neck this morning. Probably because of the damp and the cold. Still, it was better than the alternative, as his mom used to say. “And you’re continuing on with your investigation as per Ada’s request?”

  “That’s the plan,” Bernie said, remembering the expression on Ada’s face as the police took her away. She’d seemed so lost. So small. Then Bernie added, “She claims she’s being framed.”

  Sean lifted an eyebrow and reverted to his cop persona. “That’s what she’s been saying all along.”

  “So, doesn’t that prove that she’s right?” Libby asked.

  “No. On the other hand, it doesn’t disprove it, either. So, let’s just say that I’m agnostic on the subject at the moment.”

  “You told her aunt you’d help,” Bernie reminded him.

  “And I will,” Sean replied. “One thing doesn’t obviate the other.”

  “What would it take to turn you into a believer?” Libby asked as she watched a city snowplow start to widen Longely’s main street and thought that they were certainly having a banner year when it came to snow and that they had at least two more months to go.


  Sean sat back in his armchair. “Good question. I’ll have to think about that.” Then he changed the subject. “Are you sure everything is all right?” he asked again, giving Bernie another chance to come clean about last night.

  “Positive,” Bernie replied, leaning forward. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Because you don’t look as if everything is,” Sean told her. Which, he reflected, wasn’t exactly a lie. But it wasn’t exactly the truth, either.

  Libby stifled a yawn. “We just got in late, Dad,” she said, shooting a quick look at her sister. “That’s all. Really late.” And then once she’d gotten into bed, despite being exhausted, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep.

  Sean took a sip of his hot chocolate. It was perfect. As always. Bernie had melted 80 percent dark chocolate, combined it with gently heated whole milk and cream, and added a dash of cinnamon and two tablespoons of sugar per cup, then topped it off with a tablespoon of whipped cream.

  “You girls need to get more sleep,” Sean said, putting his mug down on the side table by his chair. “Sleep is the cornerstone of good health.”

  Libby and Bernie both nodded uneasily. They could tell from the way their dad was talking that he was up to something. They just didn’t know what.

  “I spoke to McCready last night while you were away,” Sean added, trying and failing to keep his tone casual.

  “And?” Bernie asked, wondering how much her dad actually knew about last night’s misadventures.

  “I just wanted to talk to him again and make sure I hadn’t missed anything about the two earlier deaths. He’s sending me the file, but he’s fairly confident that I’m going to come to the same conclusion that he did.”

  “Did McCready have anything else to say?” Bernie asked. “Any words of wisdom?”

  Sean bit into the toast and felt the slight crunch of the bread and tasted the sweetness of the butter and the sugar and the slight heat of the cinnamon. “No, but I do. Be careful.”

  “We’re always careful,” Bernie said.

  Sean choked on his bread and started coughing. “Really?” he replied after he’d taken a drink of his hot chocolate to wash everything down.