Say Yes to the Death

by Susan McBride

  I very nearly blurted out, Sandy, you’re home! Then I blinked and realized it was Millie dressed in a pair of jeans and one of Sandy’s classic sweater sets. She had her white hair brushed away from her face and held back by a plaid headband. Her eyes looked bright behind her owlish glasses. And she was singing as loudly—­and as off-­key—­as my mother while she opened the double oven doors to check on whatever scrumptious-­smelling recipe she was cooking.

  After closing the oven doors, Millie did a quick spin as if twirled by some imaginary partner, and my mother chortled merrily.

  My hand went to my mouth, and I stifled my own laughter.

  What a pair! You would have thought the two of them were long lost friends. And maybe in a way they were. They had known each other as long as I’d been alive, yet they’d never really mixed or mingled. I couldn’t help but think it was a good thing they’d been brought together like this. My mother could use more down-­to-­earth friends like Millie and Sandy. She had enough superficial society pals to field several ball clubs.

  For a moment I just hung back and watched them, loving the sight of Millie and my mother so relaxed. It was wonderful that Millie had taken up Cissy’s offer to stay over, since apparently Stephen wouldn’t return until the next afternoon. That Millie didn’t want to be alone was understandable. I’m not sure I’d want to go home to an empty house that had been rifled through by the cops, especially after having spent the morning at the police station being treated like a criminal. That kind of thing tended to shake a person up.

  I waited until Sinatra’s voice trailed off again before I made a point of stomping through the doorway into the kitchen and saying, “Hey! It looks like a party’s going on. What have I missed?”

  “Andrea!” Mother drawled, swiveling on the stool and nearly missing the granite when she set down her wineglass. “I didn’t hear you come in!”

  “Oh, Andy, you’re here! Wonderful!” Millie chimed in. She plucked off an oven mitt and reached for the CD player that Sandy had installed beneath the cabinetry. Poor Frankie got cut off in the midst of crooning about the summer wind that came blowin’ in off the sea. “I’m making beef Wellington,” she told me, her face aglow, “and I’ve got glazed carrots and green beans almondine in the oven as well. There’s plenty for four.” She glanced around me. “Where’s Mr. Malone?”

  “He couldn’t make it,” I said. Millie looked crestfallen. “But don’t stop dancing on his account. I’ll take him home some leftovers,” I promised, setting my bag on the floor and slipping onto the empty stool beside Mother. “Wow, beef Wellington. And I thought pastry chefs only knew how to make pastry.”

  Millie’s smile returned, although it seemed to stutter. “My granny was a fabulous cook,” she explained, “a disciple of Julia Child more or less. She taught me everything she knew about cooking and baking, and I fell in love with both.”

  “What a coincidence,” I said, leaning over to nudge Cissy with an elbow, “my mother taught me everything she knows about cooking and baking.”

  “And Andrea’s grandmother taught me everything she knew, which is a whole lot of nothing,” Mother said and guffawed, waving her arms in front of her like a referee after a bad field goal. She narrowly missed knocking over her wineglass. “I can’t even boil water to save my life.”

  “I used to cook for Henry every night until I got too busy with the cake shop,” Millie went on, and the hesitant smile vanished. “I actually thought of opening a restaurant back then, one that had its own bakery. Then when Henry passed away, I had no one to cook for. We never had children. It used to eat at me a little but now I’m glad. I wouldn’t want them to see what’s happening now because of that damned Olivia . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, her chin quivering. It made me want to cry.

  “Oh, Millie, I’m sorry for you . . . for Henry . . . I’m sorry for everything,” I said, and I would have jumped down from my stool to go hug her if my mother hadn’t slid off hers and headed Millie’s way.

  “Now, now,” Cissy cooed and draped an arm around Millie’s shoulders. “Don’t let’s get maudlin,” she said. “Things are always darkest before dawn, n’est-­ce pas? It will work out, you’ll see. The police will find the bad guy, just like they always do on Law & Order, and you’ll be free to come over and teach Andy a thing or two about how to use an oven so Mr. Malone won’t die of starvation.”

  “You’re very sweet,” Millie said, and her smile reappeared. But this time it was melancholic.

  “Seriously, Millie, that would rock,” I chimed in, trying to keep the mood upbeat. “It’d be a chance to see you more often besides. You were part of my growing-­up, you know. Some of my best memories are of your cakes.”

  “Oh, Andy, that’s so dear of you to say.” Millie sighed, and I saw a tiny spark ignited in her eyes.

  “Please, feel free to come by and take over my kitchen now and then, Millicent. It would be one way to get my darling daughter here more often. I hardly see her as it is,” Cissy opined and pouted at me.

  I felt a sudden stab of guilt, because it was true that I didn’t get to Mother’s house much these days. I was always so busy with my work and with painting and hanging out with Malone. I needed to make more of an effort, I told myself. Cissy wasn’t getting any younger, and neither was I. Soon Stephen would be my stepfather and, one of these years, I’d have rug rats crawling around my ankles. Life was changing so quickly, and I wasn’t doing a very good job at keeping up. I didn’t want to get to a place in my life where I was looking back, like Millie, and counting my regrets.

  “If you give me cooking lessons,” I said, “I could offer my Web design services. Anytime you want a site update, just call.”

  “I may very well take you up on that, Andy,” Millie said, “maybe once we’re caught up at the shop. The crew’s doing the best they can without me, but I need to get back to work without this noose hanging over my head.”

  “Malone will have you back to work in no time,” I said, avoiding her eyes. I slipped off my seat to wander over to the ovens. Turning on the light inside, I took a peek at the bubbling carrots with glaze and the green beans almondine. They were a nice distraction. “Everything looks amazing,” I told her, and that was no lie.

  Millie blew out a breath. “Truly, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, the both of you, but I’m so afraid that I’ll be—­” She hesitated. “—­that Mr. Malone won’t be able to—­” She couldn’t go on. She put her head in her hands and gently shook it.

  “There, there, sweetheart, it’s okay,” Cissy said. “I’d be frightened, too, but you have to believe in your own innocence, or no one else will believe you.”

  I watched the pair of them hugging each other, and that darned lump in my throat returned with a vengeance. My mother was surprising me a lot these days.

  Millie took a deep breath and lifted her chin. “I want to believe in myself and in Mr. Malone, but it’s scary,” she admitted and shivered. “I have a bad feeling this might be the last beef Wellington I’ll ever make.” She stopped talking, and Mother squeezed her shoulders.

  “Mother’s right,” I said. “You can’t think like that. You will make beef Wellington again, and you will bake more cakes. Don’t let Olivia take that away from you.” If I sounded angry, I was. I was furious at Olivia, not only for the misery she’d inflicted on my younger life, but for making Millie’s life miserable even after death. “What’s going on is totally crappy, yes, but it’s not the end.”

  “On the contrary,” my mother jumped in, “it’s the beginning, Millicent, of an even stronger you. It’s a lot like losing the love of your life and feeling a piece of yourself die as well, or being diagnosed with an illness that seems like a death sentence until you realize that it’s not. It’s just a dreadful curveball that fate has thrown at you. You’re being forced to trudge through the muck, and it’s painful. But you will survive. Yo
u survived losing Henry, didn’t you? And I’ll bet at the time you thought you never would.”

  “Yes,” Millie whispered. “I did.”

  “There, you see,” my mother said, “all things are possible.”

  “Oh, Cissy, you’re right.” Millie lifted up her glasses to brush tears from her cheeks. “I have to trudge through the muck,” she repeated, nodding to herself. “I will get through this. I have no choice.”

  “Of course, you will,” Mother told her. “I have faith in you, Millicent.”

  I stood there, looking at my mother and blinking, utterly dumbfounded.

  The force of her comments—­the compassion she’d shown Millie—­surprised me far more than Millie’s beef Wellington. What the heck was happening to her? She was turning into a fully empathetic being, sensitive to the plight of others and downright huggable.

  The timers began to ping on the double ovens, and Millie suddenly forgot her woes. She sprang into action, pulling on oven mitts and withdrawing meat and vegetables from the racks. The steamy goodness of the food pervaded the kitchen, and I almost forgot that there was anything going on worth worrying about. My stomach growled. I hadn’t done enough eating today, and I was suffering the consequences.

  “Andrea, could you set the table?” my mother was saying, but I couldn’t move for a minute or two as I watched Millie begin to carve the beef, the knife slicing through it like butter. Juice from the pink center of the meat dripped as she filled a silver serving dish with plump pieces. The sight unsettled me, and I pressed my eyes shut, hoping that would ward off the thought of finding Millie standing over Olivia with the bloody cake knife.

  “Andrea.” Cissy pinched my arm.

  “Ouch,” I said and opened my eyes wide. I rubbed my skin where she’d left a mark.

  “Sorry, pumpkin, but it looked like you were sleepin’ on your feet. Can you grab some silverware,” she said, unapologetic. “I’ll get the napkins from the linen closet.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I told her, “right away.”

  Thankfully, no one said anything more about Olivia or the mess she’d left behind. Instead, we all sat down at the kitchen table and Millie led us in a very simple grace, something I hadn’t done in longer than I’d cared to admit.

  After the “Amen,” Mother began nattering on about some upcoming charity ball or another, and I found my appetite again. I dug into the beef Wellington even though I didn’t usually eat red meat, particularly when it was pink. But it was calling to me like a Siren’s song, and I didn’t fight it. As I listened to Cissy and Millie chat about non-­earth-­shattering events like Penny Ryan Trippelhorn’s real due date and a braless Jennifer Aniston appearing at the NorthPark Neiman Marcus to plug perfume, I did nothing but chew, savor, and swallow until I’d cleared my plate of carrots and green beans and beef and, à la Oliver Twist, politely asked, “Please, may I have more?”

  Millie seemed thrilled to see me demolish the meal she’d prepared, although I noticed she barely touched hers. Ditto my too-­thin mother who ate, like, three carrots, two beans, and two forkfuls of beef before she pushed away her plate, groaning and insisting that she couldn’t eat a bite more without popping the button on her size zero pants. Maybe it was the wine—­I abstained, but Cissy and Millie managed to empty the bottle—­because suddenly Millie began to talk about Olivia.

  “It seems wrong, doesn’t it, when someone with the face of an angel can be so cruel. She wasn’t so bad at first, just arrogant.” Millie waved a hand dismissively. “But so many young people are these days, like the world belongs to them. Once she got that silly show, she went from bad to worse, treating us all like we were her minions, there to serve her. She had no respect for anyone’s talent or hard work. She only cared about what we could do for her.”

  Mother and I both made sympathetic noises but neither of us spoke.

  Millie paused and wet her lips. “I worked my fingers to the bone on Penny Ryan’s cake, and to hear that Olivia had bad-­mouthed me at the reception, pretending she didn’t know the first layer of the cake was foam? I was horrified. Of course, she knew every detail about that cake. She had what amounted to an architectural drawing of the danged thing on her tablet the day we met to discuss it months ago. She made me study it and sketch it out on paper for my own file.”

  Very clever of Olivia, I mused, not giving Millie the electronic file or a hard copy so Millie wouldn’t have proof to back up her words that the fake first layer had been Olivia’s idea.

  Hearing that reinforced my theory that Olivia’s take-­down of Millie was scripted. Was it Olivia’s doing? Did she figure that would spice up the drama? Or had someone else written that particular script? What about Janet’s contact, Sammi Garber, the producer?

  “Did you get the feeling Olivia meant to embarrass you from the start?” I said, because I couldn’t help myself. “Like she set you up?”

  Millie looked confused. “Set me up? I don’t know, Andy. All I do know is that she was trying to get me to write the cake off, and I wasn’t going to let her win. I wasn’t going to let her drive me out of business like she did Jasper.” Her voice turned into an angry whisper. “I could have killed her for double-­dealing like that—­”

  I glanced at Mother.

  “—­but I didn’t,” she finished and slugged down what wine was left in her glass. “Instead I was planning to sue her and that show of hers. Someone had to make her stop behaving so recklessly. Though I guess someone did, didn’t they?” She turned her owl eyes upon us. “Only it wasn’t me.”

  “Had you told anyone yet,” I asked, “about wanting to sue?”

  “I told Olivia.” Millie nodded. “I sent her an email telling her I was going to take her down, no matter what it cost.”

  I groaned inwardly. I could only imagine what the police thought of that email when they’d read it. It sounded like a death threat, not a warning that a lawsuit was forthcoming.

  “Is there anything else you can think of that might help your case?” I said. “Maybe there’s some small detail you didn’t figure was important at the time.”

  Millie set her mouth in a grim line. “You know, I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to think of something important that I missed, something that would help the police find her killer, but it’s all such a blur. Although”—­she bunched up her forehead—­“something odd did come to me as I lay down to rest on your guest bed this afternoon, Cissy, but it’s so foggy that I’m not sure if it’s real or a dream.” My mother leaned forward, like she was going to interrupt but didn’t. “When I went into Olivia’s building and found her office door unlocked, I heard strange sounds above me. A thumping . . . or maybe it was more like a drumming that got dimmer and dimmer.”

  A thumping or drumming sound?

  “Like footsteps?” I suggested. “Could it have been someone running away?”

  Millie cocked her head. “I wondered that same thing. Only the building is just two stories tall. If someone ran, they were going across the roof.” She sighed. “I must have been imagining things.”

  My mother glanced at me across the table, as though she was waiting for me to decipher what Millie meant.

  I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do or say. I hadn’t seen anyone else in the building. Millie was right: if she’d heard footsteps drumming overhead that meant someone was on the rooftop. So how did they get down? Had they used a fire escape and left a getaway vehicle parked somewhere near the lot at Highland Park Village? That certainly implied lots of malice aforethought.

  Unless the noises Millie thought she heard overhead at Olivia’s office were something else, or weren’t real at all, as she’d suggested, and whatever drug my mother had slipped into her nap-­time tea had caused her mind to play tricks.

  “You need to tell Brian,” I said firmly. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “I’m seeing him tomorrow,” Mill
ie replied. “He’s coming for me early so we can get to work. I hope I can sleep so I’m clear-­headed enough to be of help.”

  “Watch some mindless TV or have Mother bore you with her tale of running into Bill Gates outside the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva and shoving her bags in his hands, thinking he was a dorky-­looking bellman,” I suggested. “That’ll knock you unconscious.”

  “Oh, Andrea,” my mother pooh-­poohed me.

  “I do need to rest,” Millie said and took off her glasses to rub her eyes. She looked utterly wrung out. “But I’m afraid I might stare at the ceiling all night.”

  “You will sleep,” my mother said, “I’ll make sure of it.”

  I had to wonder if she’d laced Millie’s glass of wine or had plans to give her more spiked tea.

  “First, let me take care of these.” Millie started to stand and pick up her plate, but I made a noise of protest.

  “No, no, I’ll clear,” I told her. “You two should head into the den and put your feet up.” I pushed my chair back from the table to start gathering the dirty dishes.

  As I took a load over to the sink, I heard my phone playing “Highway to Hell.” I scrambled for my bag and dug it up, hoping like heck it was Malone calling from an office phone rather than his cell, telling me he was heading home.

  “Hey!” I said without checking the number. “I missed you.”

  “Aw, shucks, Andy, that’s so sweet. I missed you, too,” replied a voice that wasn’t Brian’s, or any man’s for that matter. It belonged to Janet Graham.

  “Sorry, I thought you were Brian,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “So what’s up?”

  “I found him,” she said, fairly bubbling with excitement.

  But my brain was so addled I couldn’t recall exactly who she’d been looking for. “Found who?”