A Berry Home Catastrophe

by A. R. Winters

  “You did! And now I know why! Roberto wanted this place for himself, so you took it upon yourself to make sure I failed. You started out by telling everyone that I’d put Dan in the hospital with my cooking.”

  Dorothy arched one eyebrow and looked me up and down. “People have a right to know the truth. They have a right to know that they’re putting their lives at risk every time they eat your cooking.”

  I lowered my voice, menacingly. “Then I guess that everyone has the right to know the truth about you, that you tried to sabotage my business for the sake of your lover.”

  Dorothy gasped and then fanned her face with her hand. “Blasphemy! Nothing impure is going on between Roberto and I! I will not have you spreading lies saying that I’m a harlot.”

  “I’m not so sure they would be lies, but you don’t want me telling people what I think I know, then I suggest you stop telling people what you think you know.”

  “You cannot hide from the truth, girlie.”

  Oh boy. She called me girlie. If she had a dagger in her hand, she’d be waving it at my throat. Time for the gloves to come off.

  “Dorothy, stop trying to ruin me and I won’t call the cops at midnight tonight. I’ll tell them a complaint that has them knocking on your door, and Roberto’s door fifteen minutes later.”

  It was a bluff, sort of. I could tell the police that Roberto was with Hank at the time of Hank’s death. I could also tell them that Dorothy and Roberto were working together to maneuver Hank up to the empty banquet hall, the place from which Hank had fallen. Both of those things were true, and both could earn Dorothy and Roberto some one-on-one time down at the police station with their very own interrogator.

  Dorothy’s eyes narrowed, and she smiled slyly. “Did I ever tell you about the crush Judge Hammond had on me all through high school? He swore he’d never marry if he couldn’t have me… and he never has. He still sends me flowers on my birthday. So go ahead. Take your best shot. There’s no way Judge Hammond would ever let anything bad happen to me.”

  I narrowed my eyes, too. “Does he feel the same about your maybe-lover? Could be he wouldn’t mind getting Roberto out of the way.”

  Dorothy’s smile flatlined and the color drained out of her face. “He wouldn’t do that. Not again.” Then she gasped as if she’d said too much. Her eyes darted left and right. She turned as if to go, but I had the impression that she was fleeing. “Stay away from Roberto,” she hissed.

  “Stop terrorizing me,” I called after her, but I wasn’t sure she heard. She was too busy dashing out the café’s door.

  With Dorothy gone, the café seemed incredibly quiet and still. I glanced around at my customers. Everyone had gone back to doing their own thing except for the one lady who had decided that Café Berry was her new favorite live-action show.

  She saw me looking at her, grinned big, and gave me a wave so energetic that it had her bouncing in her chair. My return wave was more Queen of England, that is to say demure and understated. When she didn’t look away to go on with the rest of her life, I escaped into the kitchen to start on dinner prep.

  I had a lasagna to mangle into submission.

  12

  “That’s it,” Patty said as she watched me fold whipped egg whites into cake batter. I was getting an early morning baking lesson. “Rotate the bowl as you do it. It’ll make it easier.”

  Patty was my secret weapon. She was my pastry genius. She was either psychic and could hear random peoples’ thoughts, or she had multiple people living inside her head. I guess at one time in history the doctors might have said she was possessed. All I knew was that she and her internal cohorts could bake like angels. I’d been able to save her from a life of homelessness, and she’d saved the café from almost certain ruin. Now she came in to bake for me and to give me baking lessons whenever the voices in her head were agreeable.

  “Looking good there, boss,” Jonathan said from where he stood peering over my shoulder. He was sixty-something going on sixteen. Tall and slender with white-gray wavy hair and matching beard, Jonathan was my second recruit from the streets. Actually, he was Patty’s recruit. I’d been trying to manage the café on my own, a feat that had led me to the brink of exhaustion. I’d told Patty I needed help, and she’d made Jonathan magically appear. He was my dishwasher, floor scrubber, sous chef, and everything guy. And to my immense frustration, he was rapidly becoming a better cook than me.

  Okay… so that bar’s not set very high. But still. I was here first! It wasn’t fair.

  Patty walked me through finishing the cake and getting it in the oven with strict instructions of what to do when it got out. She then verbally walked me and Jonathan through making chicken, mushroom and wild rice meat pies. She showed us how to make a flaky, buttery crust, talked us through how to prep all the ingredients and how to prepare family-style meat pies versus individual portions.

  And then the traitor left. Out the door she went, leaving us with half the food containers in the kitchen open and scattered on every surface available.

  I was overwhelmed, but Jonathan was exhilarated.

  Flour poofed out in a cloud as he slapped his large hands together and then rubbed his palms. “We can do this, boss. We got this.” His smile was manic.

  It usually took me a good twelve or fifteen tries before I started getting a recipe right, so I didn’t share his upbeat enthusiasm.

  Working side by side, we settled into the business of chopping, mixing, measuring, cooking and then baking. When we were done, we surveyed the results.

  “It’s not so bad,” Jonathan said, slipping a sympathetic arm around my shoulders. Sitting in front of us was his pie and my… well, I didn’t want to call it a pie. It was more like the amorphous glob that crawled its way out of a swamp.

  “I don’t understand,” I whined. “I did everything you did.” Yet his pie looked good enough to grace the cover of a magazine. The pie crust had a glossy, golden sheen. A hole poked in its center released aromatic steam that had my mouth watering.

  In contrast, my pie’s crust went from almost burnt at its edges to being soggy, pale, wet, and collapsed at its center. There was nothing flaky or appetizing about it. I’d smushed a hole through its center to release the steam within, but nothing about it made me want to even taste it.

  “We all got our talents, boss,” Jonathan consoled. “Maybe meat pies just ain’t one of yours. But you’re still good at lots of other things!”

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “Mmm, not getting killed!”

  I looked up at Jonathan dourly.

  “Oh, sorry, boss. Was just the first thing that came to mind.” He shrugged. “People talk.”

  Suspicion rose like hackles on the back of my neck. “And say what?”

  Jonathan shrugged again. “That I should quit.” He’d announced it with all the nonchalance in the world.

  Jonathan turned away to stack some of the dirtied bowls, and I grabbed the counter’s edge as I choked on my own breath.

  “Jonathan, why do people want you to quit?”

  “It’s some of my cousins. They say I’m gonna end up in a body bag just like everyone else around you if I keep on.”

  “And you?” I asked. My voice sounded like a frog croaking. “What do you think about it?”

  Jonathan turned and studied me a minute. “I think this is the safest place on earth for me to be. See, I got a theory.” His smile was becoming manic again.

  “Do tell…” I encouraged.

  “It’s the people who are right outside your circle of connections that bite the big one. But everyone who stays close, they do just fine.” His smile was absolutely beaming.

  I thought about his theory, and then slowly nodded. “I like that,” I said, and truly I did. It was oddly reassuring. A part of me really had started to wonder if I might be cursed, and some small worry had started to grow in the recesses of my brain. I felt guilty for having friends. I was worried the curse of knowing me might extend to th
em. But if Jonathan’s theory was right, then being my friend was like finding a safe harbor in the storm!

  “You just made my day a whole lot better, Jonathan,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I then looked at the meat pies. His was good enough to list on the full price menu board. I wasn’t sure if mine would even qualify for the heavily discounted Oops Board. “You, um, mind taking over here?” I asked.

  “I gotcha covered, boss,” Jonathan said with his usual easy-going smile. “We’ve got a couple of breakfast casseroles done, and I can always fire up the griddle and make some made-to-order pancakes. In between that, I can get these meat pies prepped for lunch. Go do your thing.”

  And that’s exactly what I did… three and a half hours later. By the time I did leave, I felt a little guilty abandoning Jonathan to take care of the café, but he wasn’t alone. My waitress Melanie had come in for her shift.

  The café was having a good morning with a slow trickle of customers. It was enough to keep Jonathan and Melanie busy, but not enough to overwhelm them. Between the two of them, I knew that they could manage all that needed doing.

  As for me, I headed out as soon as I got a text from Zoey that she was ready to go. What that really meant was that she’d woken up about an hour ago, stood under the shower for at least ten minutes, drank half a pot of insanely strong coffee, and finally figured out what Xena Warrior Princess look she wanted to emulate today.

  She picked me up at the café’s kitchen’s back door. I gave her one of the personal-sized meat pies Jonathan had made and had a second one for myself. They looked like a fruit turnover but were stuffed with chicken, mushroom and wild rice. I’d wrapped both in parchment paper, and they turned into a perfect meal on the go.

  “You ready for this?” I asked Zoey. She was hidden behind dark-lensed Jackie Onassis sunglasses. I wasn’t yet sure if she was zombie-Zoey or awake-and-alert Zoey.

  “Mmm,” she grunted in response.

  Okay… so she was zombie-Zoey. Yet she still looked good. She was wearing black legging jeans with four-inch-heeled ankle boots and a loose gray knit tunic that could have doubled as a sleep shirt. Her shiny raven hair was wild with large curls that went wherever they wanted, and her lipstick was black at the edges of her lips but a bright cherry red at their center.

  She looked amazing.

  In comparison, I felt like yesterday’s leftover ham sandwich. Wispy strands of red hair had escaped from my French braid. My makeup was all but nonexistent, and I was pretty sure I smelled like bleach. I was wearing comfortable jeans—that is to say, loose and unflattering—and I had on sneakers. My blouse was flattering, though. It was a lavender button-up. I had it open halfway down to expose the white shell beneath. Give me some earrings, a fresh coat of lipstick, and a pearl necklace and I’d be downright presentable.

  “Let’s go do this,” I said as I settled into my seat and took another bite of the meat pie followed by a sip of stout coffee.

  “Mmm,” zombie-Zoey said.

  The car shifted into drive, and we were off.

  13

  Zombie-Zoey had managed to transform into alert Zoey by the time we reached Hank’s gym, Results Gym. It was in a long building that looked as though it might have once housed several small shops. At the far end was Yancy’s Ground Up. Even though the little coffee shop and juice bar was physically tacked onto the same building that held the gym, it stood out from the painted concrete front of the converted strip mall by having brick walls, large windows and a small wooden patio at its side. It looked a little bit like a Starbucks.

  The gym’s entrance was the furthest possible door away from the coffee shop and was marked by a green awning and nice, wide glass doors.

  Across the street from the gym was a bank. I guessed that it was the bank’s surveillance system that Zoey had tapped into to track Hank’s movements. From that footage, we knew Hank had been at the gym prior to coming to my café to meet Roberto. And we knew that going to the gym was part of Hank’s daily ritual. In fact, if he’d still been alive, he would have been at the gym at the very moment we were standing out in front of it. That made our visit’s timing perfect.

  There were bound to be other gym regulars who knew Hank’s schedule. People who could have killed Hank. And they were bound to be in the gym at that very moment.

  We were about to meet Hank’s killer. I was sure of it.

  With a tote the size of Kansas under her arm, Zoey slid her Jackie Onassis sunglasses onto the top of her head as we pushed through the wide glass door that led into the gym. There, we immediately came face to face with the gym’s reception counter, where a tall young man was at his post. He was skinny but didn’t appear to have any muscle tone, and his poor face was ruptured with angry welts from runaway adult acne. His shoulders sloped at a steep angle and seemed perpetually stuck in a rolled forward position, which made him look like he was slouching. He had the jawline and features of a man who could be much more handsome than he was, but his complete lack of confidence stole all his sex appeal away.

  As soon as he saw us, he gave us a smile that contained more teeth than I thought a smile could, while his hands darted across the countertop to straighten items that had already been straight and well organized.

  At the far end of the counter was a portrait of Hank. It was surrounded by lots of baby’s breath, a few white lilies, and a lit white candle. Stuck among the flowers was a tip jar and a handwritten note reading, “All proceeds to go to Suicide Prevention Hotline.”

  The inference was that Hank had thrown himself out that window. Someone was announcing to the world that Hank’s death had been a suicide and not a murder. But was that something a person believed… or was it something they wanted others to believe? It could be that whoever had killed Hank was doing what they could to shift suspicion away from any possible wrongdoing.

  “Good morning!” the young man behind the counter said in a voice that seemed artificially loud. It made me wonder if he had practiced improv in a theater to overcome his social awkwardness and had there learned the importance of projecting his voice. On his cream-colored knit polo shirt was a name tag that read “Andy” and under that, “Assistant Manager.”

  “Good morning,” I said, using a volume easily heard but still on the low side. I hoped that it would nudge the young man into quieting down as well. I smiled and shifted my gaze to the memorial of Hank. “What’s going on here?”

  I hadn’t thought that Andy’s shoulders could slouch any more, but they did. He reached a long-fingered hand made for playing the piano out to Hank’s picture and straightened it unnecessarily. “We lost one of our regulars, ma’am. Hank Harrison.” This time he spoke in a volume that didn’t threaten to burst my eardrums and that wasn’t at risk of alerting all of the gym’s inhabitants of the nature of our conversation.

  “What happened?” Zoey asked.

  Andy gave Zoey a quick glance up and down and seemed to do his best to fight against a shy smile.

  I found myself wishing that Andy was Zoey’s type. He seemed like a nice guy, and she was way overdue for a nice guy. She’d met her lifetime allotment of homicidal maniacs.

  “He jumped from a building down on Main Street,” Andy said.

  I noticed that he didn’t call Zoey “ma’am” the way he’d done with me. Such a small thing, but it made me feel old. But the good news was that he didn’t name the building from which Hank had presumably jumped.

  “You know, that café where people keep dying,” Andy added.

  Dang it!

  First, he inferred I was old, then he spread rumors about the café. My goodwill toward Andy was quickly evaporating.

  “Andy,” I said, and then quickly adjusted my tone to hide my annoyance, “it was awfully nice of your gym to remember Hank with a memorial like this. How is everyone taking his loss?”

  “They’re sad,” Andy said and then winced when the sound of laughter drifted through the overlapping partition that obscured the activities going o
n inside the body of the gym.

  Zoey reached her arms high over her head in a back-arching stretch. It got Andy’s full attention. With that achieved, she asked in a sweet, sing-song voice, “Andy, did anyone here not get along with Hank?”

  Andy opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again. He tilted his head to the side and had a puzzled look on his face.

  “Hey, moron… Oh, sorry, ladies.” A man who I guessed to be in his mid-to-early sixties appeared from around the partition that obstructed the view into the gym. He was thickly built with what I guessed to be muscle gained in his younger days and then maintained. He moved with an abundance of confidence and energy. His face was craggy with deep grooves that looked as though they’d been earned by living life rather than by simply growing older. His dark blue T-shirt was tight over his chest and arms, and his forearm had a faded tattoo of the world with an eagle on top of it, an anchor going through it, and a pin-up girl leaning against it. I could just make out the letters “USMC.”

  I had the distinct sense that he should have had a chewed, half-burned cigar hanging from one corner of his mouth.

  I was pretty sure that the letters of the tattoo stood for United States Marine Corps. If that was the case and he had been a member, then Zoey and I were looking at a man who had been trained to protect, serve… and kill.

  “Kid,” he said to Andy, “clean up on aisle three. Hot Hannah spilled her drink. Go take care of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Andy said and disappeared in a hurry behind the partition.

  The newcomer turned his attention on Zoey and me, and he smiled a toothy grin with teeth so white they could have glowed in the dark. He leaned straight-armed with powerful hands on the countertop. “Now, what can I do for you ladies? I’m Guy, owner of this fine establishment.”

  I paused as I contemplated. Tell the truth or lie? My gut said that I should tell the truth, but I was so good at lying!

  “Hi,” I said finally and extended my hand to shake. I was a business owner, and Guy was a fellow business owner. I hoped to find a camaraderie in that fact. “My name is Kylie Berry, and I am the owner of The Berry Home.” I smiled brightly but saw no recognition whatsoever in Guy’s eyes. My smile faltered. “Formerly known as Sarah’s Eatery,” I added.