“So what will going and talking to Clara in the middle of the night do for us?”
I shrugged and slouched in my seat. “We’d get the chance to really annoy her and cross her off our list of suspects?”
“Or we’d get to rattle her by showing up at her house in the middle of the night and get a confession out of her about what she really knows, ‘cause she does know something. That coffee she brought over for Betty when we were talking to her was really well timed.”
I was feeling happier and happier. “We gonna do this?”
“Let’s do it.”
Zoey put on her coat, and we collected our dishes and took them to the kitchen. Patty was clearly in her element. She was calm and focused, and she was working the red velvet cake cookie batter like it was second nature to her. All of her ingredients were measured out, and there was a tray of white goo sitting off to the side.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Marshmallows,” Patty said.
“Marshmallows? You made your own?” I was in awe.
Patty looked shocked. “How else would I do it?”
I was too happy for words. I was going to be serving customers cookies with homemade marshmallow in them! I had served so many cookies, cakes and other sweets bought straight from the store. Patty’s homemade marshmallows made me feel as though a new culinary level had been reached by my little café.
“We’re going out,” Zoey told Patty. “We’ll be gone maybe an hour. You okay with that?”
“Sure,” Patty said, and I believed her. She never once paused in her work. She was at home inside this kitchen. She was at peace, and she was confident.
“Thanks, Patty,” I said, as Zoey shoved my coat into my arms and pulled me out the café’s back door.
“She’s making homemade marshmallows,” I said to Zoey as soon as we got outside. “Homemade!”
“Yeah.”
A noise to our left drew our attention, and we turned as one to see someone halfway up my fire escape.
“Looks like we don’t have to go anywhere after all,” Zoey said.
The person on the fire escape twisted around, revealing their face.
“Clara!” I said, the happiest I had been so far that night. I really, really, really needed to do some soul-searching about that. I turned to Zoey to gloat. “It’s Clara.”
“I—” That was all Zoey got the chance to say before ending up sprawled on the ground. Unconscious.
Chapter 31
Zoey!” I reached for her, bending over, and felt the glancing blow of something unimaginably hard against the back of my head. I fell to my knees.
Another blow whizzed toward me, but I ducked my head and took the blow on my shoulder. Standing up, I staggered to the side and threw my back against the café’s back door. Finally, I was able to look my would-be killer in the eyes.
“Betty!” She was standing a few feet away wielding a crowbar like a baseball bat. “I knew it!” Okay, that probably wasn’t the best thing for me to say at that moment, and gloating wasn’t helping, but I had been so sure that she was the one who had killed Mike.
But Clara’s presence surprised me. A part of me had really wanted her to be the killer, so I had discounted my suspicions about her, dismissing them as jealousy-driven. I wished that I’d trusted my intuition a little bit more. “When did the two of you start working together?”
Clara hopped down from the fire escape ladder. “After she went snooping through Mike’s personal emails. It was allll in his emails. The dummy contract he was going to trick me with, and the fact that he was about to dump Betty and triple her rent.”
“Shut up, Clara. This is all your fault.”
“My fault?” Clara screeched. “Killing Mike was your idea!”
“No! My idea was to kill Mike and pin it on Tina, not Susie! But nooooo, you had to go off script, didn’t you?”
“What was I supposed to do? She was there. She made the better patsy!”
I frantically tapped on the door at my back with my fingertips. I didn’t know if it would be enough to draw Patty’s attention, but I didn’t want to alert Clara or Betty to my efforts. Zoey still wasn’t moving. We needed the police, and we needed an ambulance.
“If you hadn’t tried to frame Susie, these two imbeciles would have never gotten involved,” Betty yelled, and then swung the crowbar so that it was pointing at me. “Don’t think I didn’t see you take a picture of my schedule book.”
“What does it matter?” Clara hissed.
“How long do you think I could have kept her away from those two idiot assistants of mine? They would have told her I’d left the salon. She would have known it was me!”
Clara took a challenging step forward. “But she wouldn’t have known it was me, would she?”
The two were facing off like Godzilla and… whoever the heck it was that Godzilla fought. Whoever it was, I was getting very concerned about being caught in the crossfire. But, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. There was no way I could leave Zoey.
I had to keep them talking. The longer they were talking, the longer they wouldn’t be killing me, Zoey, or each other, and the more likely someone would happen by and interrupt the whole situation.
“I still don’t understand what happened. What was in the email to make you want to kill him?”
Clara shifted her attention toward me. “He was going to trick me into having sex with him!”
At Clara’s mention of having sex with Mike, Betty’s hands inched up on her bat hold of the crowbar. While Clara was looking at me, Betty’s eyes were fixed on Clara.
“Betty! Betty!” I yelled. She shifted her glare from Clara to me. “What happened? What made you want to kill him? You were planning on marrying him.”
“But he wasn’t planning on marrying me.” She shook her head. “How could I be so stupid? I wanted to marry him so much, and he never asked, but he never said no to any of my plans. He’d always pat me and give me a hug and say it ‘sounds nice’ or something else like that. I’d thought he was just one of those guys, you know? One of those guys who don’t like to come out and tell you just how he feels.”
“Yeah,” Clara snarled. “Turns out you were right. It’s just that how he felt for you was nothin’.”
Betty took a swing at Clara, but Clara jumped back. In truth, Betty had missed her by a mile. If only was able to say the same about Zoey. Looking down at her, I saw her finger twitch, and it was the most glorious sight I’d ever seen. She was alive!
“And what about you?” Betty said. “What about you being willing to whore yourself out for lower rent? I should have let you go through with it after I found out he was planning on feeding you a dummy contract not worth the paper it was printed on.”
“And let your boy have some fun with this?” Clara motioned her hands up and down the length of her own body.
Betty took another swing, and this swing came much closer than the previous one.
“So you worked together,” I said, eager to keep them both alive. Clara was preoccupying Betty, but if Clara went down, there would be nothing to keep Betty from turning her crowbar on Zoey and me. “How did you manage doing, you know, what you did?”
“I seduced him,” Clara said, smug. She wasn’t looking at me. She was giving all her hate to Betty. “I got him all distracted playing kissing face, keeping the shredder between us as a teaser. I even put that stupid scarf on him. Then Betty—“
“Shut up.”
“—came up behind him—“
“Shut up.”
“—and held his shoulders down once I turned the shredder on.”
“Shut up!”
“Should have seen her. She cried like a baby the whole time, told him how sorry she was.”
Betty took another swing at Clara, and this time I was rooting for her. Clara was vile. Of course, Betty had killed the man she loved in cold blood, so the two of them were in good company with each other.
The crowbar conn
ected with Clara’s side with a dull thud and the whooshing exhale of all of her air. She went down on her knees, and Betty raised the crowbar for a killing blow.
“Wait!” I started to take a step forward only to be propelled off balance by the door behind bursting open. I fell on top of Zoey, and did my best to shield her body from whatever it was that was about to happen next.
Twisting, I witnessed the most awesome sight of my adult life. Patty was standing in the doorway. She had three forks in each hand, and each fork was topped with a huge glob of white goo—and that goo was on fire.
Patty pulled her arms back and then let fly. Mounds of flame soared through the air. I screamed, covered my head with my arm and covered as much of Zoey as I could with my body. Clara and Betty screamed as well, then their screams turned to sounds of sheer panic.
“Get it off! Get it off!” they both screamed, and I looked up to find them both high stepping and waving their arms. Their coats were on fire! And that’s when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, the flick of flame. My own coat was on fire!
A scream was only halfway up my throat when Patty’s strong arms grabbed me and jerked my coat off my shoulders and threw it to the side. Then while Clara and Betty were trying to shed themselves of their own coats, Patty and I got on either side of Zoey and dragged her back inside the café.
“What was that?” I asked after we got the door slammed shut.
“Roasting marshmallows,” Patty said, grinning from ear to ear.
Through the door, we could hear Betty and Clara fighting with each other again. Their car keys were in their burning coat pockets. The sound of a police siren blared its way through the door next.
“Did you call the cops?” I asked Patty.
She nodded yes.
“What about an ambulance? Did you call an ambulance?” It wasn’t me who asked that question. It was Zoey.
“Zoey! You’re okay!” I pulled her into my arms.
“Hey, hey… Broken noggin here. Easy. No hugs. No hugs.”
I ignored her and hugged her even more.
Chapter 32
Macaroons, sugar cookies, spice cookies, red velvet cake cookies, pecan sandies, molasses crisps, gingersnap cookies, butter cookies, snickerdoodles, oatmeal raisin and a half dozen other types of cookies lined every available inch of the grill’s serving counter. Mixed in among them were an assortment of cupcakes, including carrot cake, mocha chocolate chip, banana bread, and German chocolate.
Today was open house, customer appreciation day and the cookies and drinks were free! It was an unseasonably bright, sunny day, and the café’s front door stood wide open. An A-sign was set up outside letting all passersby know to come inside and enjoy. Joel had even run an ad in his paper at a steep discount (aka free), and boy had it worked. The café was teeming with customers! And to my utter shock and surprise, people weren’t just getting their fill of the freebies and leaving. No, they were ordering food. Full priced food. Patty had warned me to be sure to have plenty of buy-ables on hand because I’d be making a bunch of sales, but I hadn’t believed her. I was glad that I’d done as she’d said on blind faith.
While I loved the amazing feedback I was getting about all of the delicious cookies and other baked goods, I was a little sad that Patty wasn’t with me. I’d tried to get her to come out with me to greet customers. I'd been eager to showcase her for her talents, but she’d quietly and politely declined and had left by the café’s back entrance when the cooking was done.
That was okay. She was doing what made her happy and helped her to feel good, and that’s all that really mattered. And better still, Joel had helped Patty find a home. She was now “renting” a room from his great-aunt, Aunt Bella. Aunt Bella was an elderly lady, widowed and living alone with no children of her own. Joel said she’d been tickled pink at the idea of sharing her home. As for the rent, it consisted of companionship and a few home-cooked meals. Patty had cried tears of joy after meeting Aunt Bella and being made to feel so welcome. Her new bedroom was light, airy and full of lovely antiques. And Aunt Bella was over the moon when she learned from Patty that Patty knew how to quilt by hand. The two promised to take on a project together.
“You got any horseradish for this thing?” Zoey asked, waving a roast beef sandwich on sourdough bread at me. It was one of the buy-ables that I was offering today. I had all the sandwich parts prepped, making them super fast to throw together.
“Horseradish?” I was mortified. I didn’t have any horseradish sauce. I looked around at everybody else who had bought a roast beef sandwich from me, wondering if they were missing it, too. I didn’t know what it was about not having the food that was going to make people happy, but it made me feel downright awful. “I never even thought about. I didn’t know people did that.”
Zoey put one hand on my shoulder and gave me a wink. “It’s okay. Breathe. But next time, horseradish sauce.”
I looked past her, over to where Agatha and Conrad sat at a table next to one of the large windows. “It’s nice of you to treat them to lunch.”
Zoey shrugged. “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
“What convinced you that Conrad was an okay guy?”
“I called up and talked to his first wife. He married very soon after their divorce. I figured if anyone would be willing to dish dirt on him, it’d be her.”
“What happened?”
Zoey shook her head like she still couldn’t believe it. “She raved about him. Couldn’t get a bad word out of her. She’d wanted the divorce. He insisted his lawyer be fair in splitting their assets. During the divorce, he fell in love with his attorney’s assistant and married her, and he stayed devoted to her until her death.” She shrugged again. “And that’s it. No dirt. No underhanded dealings. Nothing.”
Zoey headed back to their table, and I gazed wistfully at Agatha. She was radiant in her happiness. If a much younger, successful man were interested in me, I’d worry myself into misery about our differences. I’d let all my insecurities ruin what was good. But not Agatha. I had so much to learn from that wonderful woman.
But Zoey was no slouch either, even with her contrasting distrust of men and generally surly disposition. She was as resilient as a volcano. After being hit on the head, she’d bounced back quickly. She’d nursed a massive headache for about three days, but she was now back to her old self. In fact, I wasn’t sure but I think she might have been hired to hack a bank trustee’s records in Zurich in search of unreported war artifacts. All I know is that I’d overheard several snippets of conversation that had been very interesting.
As for the rest of my regulars, they were tucked away in the cozy corner. I wasn’t sure they were enjoying my customer appreciation day as much as I was. They’d been pushed aside while every Tom, Dick and Harry found their way off the street to check out what the café had to offer. But it was worth it. My earnings from today were looking like they would put a good dent in what I owed on the new boiler, which was now thankfully installed and operational.
“Could I order an assortment of four dozen cookies for pickup two weeks from now?” a woman asked as people meandered around her, picking this or that cookie to take with them back to their tables.
“Uh… Um…” A cold sweat broke out on my upper lip. Patty had made every single one of the cookies on display. She’d given me the recipes, but I was nowhere near being able to pull them off. I’d tried to make the sugar cookies, but they’d tasted like bland cornbread. “I… sure. Yes. I can do that.” My cold sweat migrated to my forehead. Either Patty was going to help me fill that order, or I was going to have a lot of late, late nights practicing her recipes.
“Great!” the woman said.
“Oh! We can order these?” a man next to her asked with more excitement than I was comfortable with. “I want a dozen and a half of the red velvet cupcakes and a dozen and a half of the German Chocolate cupcakes.”
I opened my mouth but only a squeak came out, and my cold sweat was well on i
ts way to turning into a full body-drenching flop sweat. “I… We…” I swallowed hard. “When do you need them?”
“Day after tomorrow,” the man said. “I can pay for them now.” He already had his credit card in his hand, and he hadn’t even bothered to ask how much the cupcakes would be.
I was in over my head.
I was in over my head with success.
Oh my… My biggest challenge yet!
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