Icing Allison

by Pamela Burford

  That had been her first update on December 26. The one below it was dated December 25 and showed a photo of a lopsided Christmas tree, groaning under approximately a thousand pounds of ornaments, garlands, and lights, and standing sentry over mountains of unwrapped presents and discarded paper and ribbons. A white cat batted at a low-hanging plastic icicle.

  Had the picture been taken in her parents’ home? For the first time I wondered about the family that had produced Skye Guthrie. The post read: Snowball trying to pull down the tree! Like all her updates, this one had received scores of likes from her myriad Facebook friends.

  “So much for a smoking gun.” I sat back, deflated. “Not that I really expected her to ‘check in’ from the nature preserve the morning of the twenty-sixth if she was up to no good, but a girl has to dream.”

  “It was worth a shot.” Jim peered into the dark outside the window, where swirling snowflakes glittered. “It’s coming down heavier. I’d better get going.”

  I walked him to the front door and watched him brush off his car before steering it down the long cobblestone drive. It was after eleven, but I was far too wound up to consider sleep. I grabbed a cold slice of pizza from the fridge and opened my laptop once more. I found myself continuing to scroll through Skye’s Facebook timeline even as I recognized it for the sick compulsion it was. What did I expect to find?

  The proverbial smoking gun, that’s what. Some part of me simply couldn’t fathom that a woman who shared practically every moment of her life with the world at large wouldn’t have left some hint about her role in her friend’s mysterious death—if indeed she’d played a role, and if indeed said death was mysterious and not the tragic accident the authorities considered it to be.

  I raced through the timeline in a sort of halting reverse movie of her recent life, unslowed by the occasional bite of congealed buffalo-chicken pizza. A golden-brown roasted turkey shot past the screen—Thanksgiving already?—followed moments later by a toothy jack-o-lantern, the holiday updates nearly lost amid a bottomless litany of shopping, eating, and drinking, with occasional side trips to worship the holy trinity of grooming goddesses: Haira, Nailos, and Orangish, Goddess of Spray Tans.

  Beach selfies, fireworks, more beach selfies—and what appeared to be an honest-to-God, if sadly fleeting, summer tan. I bit off a chunk of pizza crust, wondering whether Skye’s Facebook timeline would ever bottom out, imagining it continuing back through generations, through centuries, through the murky, formless eons of prehistory, and wishing I’d thought to grab a bottle of soda from the fridge, when an image zipping past my eyes triggered recognition, halting me in midchew.

  I’d already moved past it, whatever it was. What had I seen? I reversed course, moving forward in time now, experiencing June 12 along with Skye. Here was a pouty, post-blowout, heavily made-up selfie. Hot date. Will I do? Here was a picture of two hot-date outfits laid out on her messy bed. Decisions, decisions. Help me choose. Her friends favored the purple bandage dress. Here was a full-length selfie taken in front of her bathroom mirror, showing off the whole package. Think he’ll approve?

  We moved on to June 13. Egg McMuffin. Bikini shopping. Brenda’s living room.

  My heart sucker-punched my rib cage. I grabbed the edge of the desk, suddenly dizzy.

  Nope. Wrong. Impossible. That selfie backdrop had to be someone else’s white fireplace mantel, not Brenda’s. And the pale abstract seascape hanging over it? Definitely not the same one I’d seen eight days earlier in Brenda’s living room.

  Skye and Brenda hadn’t know each other back in June. They knew each other now, kind of, having been briefly introduced by Porter Vargas during Allison’s funeral reception last week. Before that, they’d been strangers.

  Hadn’t they?

  I thought back to the reception, to when Brenda and Lou Yates had shown up. I’d taken their coats and the bakery box they’d brought. Since they didn’t seem to know anyone there, I’d introduced them to the Vargases. Porter, in turn, had introduced them to the woman he’d been led to believe was Allison’s best friend.

  Skye and Brenda had both appeared ill at ease as they’d shaken hands and murmured their Nice to meet yous. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now...

  I peered closely at the image in Skye’s Facebook timeline, the image she’d taken back in June, a half year before Allison’s death. It wasn’t stamped with a location, but I didn’t need it. There, behind her smiling face, was the white mantel. There was the lower left quadrant of the boring seascape. And there, peeking out from behind her black hair, was the edge of the crystal sailboat positioned as if to sail off into the painting.

  No doubt about it, it was Brenda’s living room, all right.

  “They knew each other,” I breathed.

  What had Skye been doing at Brenda’s house back in June? What else had been happening in June?

  Mitchell’s death. His fatal hiking accident had occurred on June 8, which I knew from having been hired by Allison to arrange his funeral reception. Skye had no doubt uploaded this selfie to Facebook as soon as she’d taken it, at 3:13 in the afternoon of June 13. I imagined her impulsively posting the photo with no inkling that anyone would recognize the background and draw a connection between her and Brenda. Allison herself hadn’t been on Facebook, according to Jim.

  I used the Print Screen key on my laptop’s keyboard to take a screenshot, capturing the image in case Skye wised up at some point and deleted it from her timeline.

  And where was the lady of the house while Skye was immortalizing her drab taste in home furnishings? Ever the polite hostess, Brenda was probably in the kitchen pouring coffee and arranging homemade cookies on a plate.

  Before uploading her latest selfie to her timeline, Skye had tapped out a few words to accompany the picture.

  It’s my turn now!

  12

  Something About the Whole Thing Stinks

  “WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?” I asked, as Sophie Halperin and I crossed Main Street, heading for the entrance to the Rose Bookshop. Twenty or so people stood lined up on the sidewalk, waiting to get in, undeterred by the damp cold or the gray, swollen sky that presaged more white stuff to come. The snowstorm had ceased around daybreak and the town had plowed and sanded the roads, but it was a bleak day, too bleak to be standing outside waiting for... what?

  The line continued inside the shop, snaking through the section that actually sold books and into the middle room, which was an offbeat café that also hosted musical performances and book signings. Beyond that was a large third room that sold children’s books and toys. The Rose, which had occupied the same storefront since 1946, had survived, when so many other independent bookstores had not, by adapting.

  Sophie and I were headed to the café for lunch and a long-overdue gab session. We hadn’t seen each other since Allison’s funeral reception nearly two weeks earlier, and we hadn’t really had a chance to talk then.

  “Don’t hear music,” Sophie said as we bulled our way through the crowd, exchanging greetings with friends and neighbors along the way. “Some celebrity must be signing books.”

  If there was a poster in the window advertising the signing, it had been obscured behind the line of people standing in front of the place. I wondered who had enough clout to get the Rose to agree to a weekday signing. They were usually reserved for evenings and weekends.

  “Maybe we should have gone to Patisserie Susanne,” I said, with visions of chocolate croissants cavorting in my cranium.

  “Eh, I’m there all the time.”

  And little wonder. The patisserie was located on the ground floor of the Town Hall. Mayor Sophie Halperin’s office occupied the fourth floor of the historic building, a onetime hotel that had housed not one but two speakeasies during Prohibition. Her office had, in fact, been a gambling den and saloon back then.

  “Make way for the damn mayor!” Sophie bellowed in her brusque, good-natured way. “I don’t have all day.”

  I won
dered how long Sophie would hold the office. She was up for reelection in March, and it was well known that Nina Wallace intended to unseat her. Nina did not fight clean, as had been amply demonstrated during her successful bid for the presidency of the Crystal Harbor Historical Society. Sophie was popular and she was tough, but was she popular and tough enough to prevail against Nina’s penchant for mudslinging and dirty tricks? Fervently I hoped so. Crystal Harbor did not need Nina Wallace at the helm.

  At last we made it into the crowded café, with its heavenly mingled aromas of coffee, grilled sandwiches, and new books. The food-service counter was at one end of the room. There were a few small tables, all occupied. At the other end of the room, a young woman arranged stacks of hardcover books on a cloth-draped table while a middle-aged man I recognized as a store employee assured those at the front of the line that the signing would commence in a few minutes and counseled patience.

  “Got one!” Eagle-eyed Sophie launched herself at a table whose diners were just beginning to rise, establishing squatter’s rights by plopping into a chair before its previous occupant had fully relinquished it. To me she said, “Get me the eggplant and goat cheese panino. And some of their good potato salad. And a peach iced tea.”

  “You got it.” For myself I ordered a chicken panino with tomato, arugula, and asiago, along with the café’s yummy signature coleslaw and store-made raspberry soda. I ferried everything over to our table in two trips.

  As I was peeling the paper off my straw, I heard, “Jane!” I looked around to see who’d called my name as excited squeals and a scatter of applause erupted from the crowd awaiting the book signing.

  “Think I just lost my appetite,” Sophie groaned.

  I followed her disgruntled gaze and saw a woman hurrying toward me, enveloped in a cloud of outrageously expensive French perfume. She looked about forty years old, but I knew her to be fifty, the beneficiary of extensive plastic surgery, weight-loss surgery, and a head-to-toe makeover.

  Leonora Romano, in the flesh.

  “Hello, Lee,” I said, as she yanked an unoccupied chair from a nearby table without bothering to ask whether it was taken, swung it around to our table, and deposited her trim bottom on it. Said bottom was encased in a royal-blue pencil skirt, which she’d paired with a peach bouclé jacket and matching silk blouse. My gaze zeroed in on her brooch, a big, glittery leopard—diamonds and sapphires, and I’d bet anything they were real—snarling over its shoulder as it crawled up hers. As always, her feet were shod in lethal-looking designer stiletto heels. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a neat chignon. More diamonds and sapphires adorned her ears.

  She and Sophie exchanged chilly greetings.

  I was about to ask Lee what had brought her to the Rose Bookshop at lunchtime on a Thursday when the answer smacked me upside the head. I took in the eager patrons queued up out the door, the excited whispers, the adoring stares directed at Lee.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re the one signing books today.”

  She laughed. I’d like to tell you it was a friendly, teasing laugh. I’d also like to tell you I’m a Nobel-prizewinning lingerie model, but I cannot tell a lie. Except when it’s necessary for some greater moral purpose or, you know, really convenient.

  “You just realized that?” she said. “I used to think you had decent observational skills, Jane.”

  Despite claiming a loss of appetite, Sophie was making headway with her lunch. Over a mouthful of potato salad she said, “Don’t you have some books to scribble in, Lee? The natives are getting restless.”

  “Let them wait.”

  Her tone said, I’m a star. I wish I could say it was all attitude and no substance, but the weird truth was that Leonora Romano was indeed a star. The onetime chef and restaurateur now hosted The Romano Files, a sensationalist “news” TV show that had little to do with actual news and everything to do with Lee’s abrasive personality and talent for eviscerating any individual or organization she deemed worthy of public humiliation

  The network had offered her the show several months earlier in the hope of enticing viewers away from the loathsome Ramrod News, hosted by the loathsome Miranda Daniels, which aired in the same time slot. They’d sweetened the deal by giving Lee a second show in which she eviscerated—yeah, more evisceration, it suited her—restaurants’ signature dishes and taught their chefs how to do it right. She was uniquely suited to this starring role as well, being both a world-class chef and meaner than the proverbial junkyard dog. With rabies. And a really bad case of fleas.

  Both shows had done extraordinarily well, quickly soaring to number one in their respective categories and turning Leonora Romano into the household name she’d been determined to become. As much as I disliked the woman, I had to admire the laserlike sense of mission that had turned her from a homely nobody into a genuine celebrity, one the viewing public couldn’t seem to get enough of.

  The book-buying public, either. I know you’re wondering what kind of book she’d written. All those fans were lined up to purchase a copy of Leonora’s Kitchen, a slick, hefty cookbook with a price tag to match. This wasn’t Lee’s first signing at the Rose. Last fall she’d sat behind that very same table, pen in hand, without scrawling her signature in a single volume. Now she had hordes of people waiting outside in the cold for the privilege of forking over forty bucks for a signed copy of Leonora’s Kitchen. I wondered how many of these fans would actually read any of the recipes it contained, much less haul out a saucepan and attempt to replicate her famous arrabbiata sauce.

  I pointed to the young woman arranging Lee’s books in aesthetically pleasing stacks, angled just so. “Who’s that? I’ve never seen her here before.”

  “Oh, my publicist assigned her to me,” Lee said with a negligent flick of her manicured claws—the same pretty peach hue as her jacket and blouse. “She keeps the line moving so I’m not sitting there all day. Good grief, the way some of my fans prattle and gush, you’d think I was the Second Coming.”

  Lee could pretend to be irritated by the attention, but everyone at that table knew this was precisely what she wanted, what she’d spent years working for: to be recognized and revered by the public at large.

  “And of course I have to be in the city in a few hours to tape the show,” Lee continued. “Somehow they managed to squeeze this signing in, but it’s tight. Thank God the limo has a fully stocked bar.”

  I swallowed a bite of my sandwich and forked up some slaw. “So what do you want, Lee?” I ignored her affronted look. She had to want something. We had a history, she and I, and that history had not turned us into gal pals, no matter how loose your definition.

  After a few moments she gave up the pretense of friendship. Glancing around and lowering her voice, she said, “I want the Zaleski story.”

  Sophie and I exchanged a look. Neither of us liked where this was going.

  “What story?” I asked. “Allison Zaleski’s death was a tragic—”

  “Accident. Right. Until some startling new fact comes to light and it turns out to be something juicier.” She leaned forward. “And if that happens, I have no intention of letting that talentless hack Miranda Daniels beat me to the story.”

  Juicier. As if a bright, creative, beloved young woman dying at the hands of a murderer amounted to nothing more than a swell way to boost ratings in the six p.m. time slot.

  Sophie must have sensed me struggling to control my temper, because she responded for me. “What new facts, Lee? You know something about Allison’s death the authorities don’t?”

  “Don’t be deliberately obtuse, Sophie,” she said. “It doesn’t become you. It’s the responsibility of any good journalist to be suspicious.”

  And to sell more cornflakes and drain cleaner on behalf of her network’s sponsors, I thought.

  “And I’m suspicious about Allison’s death,” Lee continued. “It’s a gut feeling. Something about the whole thing stinks.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her she might be right, m
uch less to share what little I knew. Lee had described herself as a good journalist. As much as I hated to admit it, she did indeed possess some of the personality traits required of effective investigative journalism, including doggedness, skepticism, and distrust of authority.

  I said, “If there is anything more to her death, what makes you think I’d know about it?”

  “Well, you discovered her body,” Lee said, as if stating the obvious. “I don’t doubt you’ve been in touch with the authorities. And then there’s the grisly way you make a living. Who knows what juicy little tidbits you’re keeping under wraps?”

  There it was again. Juicy. Before I could tell her where she could stuff her juicy tidbits, Sophie came to my rescue.

  “I’m the mayor of this damn burg,” she said. “Don’t you think if there were anything to know about Allison’s death, I’d know it? Why aren’t you pumping me for info?”

  Another dismissive flick of the talons. “You’re a puppet, you don’t know anything.”

  I jerked my thumb toward Sophie. “Aren’t you concerned about burning off a valuable contact with that kind of talk?”

  “This ‘valuable contact’ will be out of office after the March elections.” Lee turned to Sophie. “I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock, Mayor, but it’s common knowledge. You’d be wise to prepare yourself.”

  I saw Sophie stiffen. Now it was my turn to step in for my friend. “You seem to think you know everything that goes on in this town, Lee, but—”

  “Not everything.” She rose and smoothed her skirt, lowering her voice further still. “I don’t know all the facts about Allison Zaleski’s death. If you can supply verifiable information that it was more than a simple accident, the show is prepared to make it worth your while. We’re talking about a very generous honorarium.”

  Honorarium, huh? Well, la-di-da. “Forget it, Lee, I—”

  “Don’t say no yet. You have my number.” And then she was off, striding through the crowd, accepting handshakes, hugs, and breathless declarations of devotion on her way to the signing table. Her obsequious fans did everything but kneel and kiss her ring.