A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  In front of us was a large herd of white and gray geese waddling past. Most were tall enough that their heads would reach halfway up my thigh. At the far edge of the crowd, two geese were squabbling over something on the ground. And next to them was a bright blue Ford Fiesta.

  We’d found Morgan’s car.

  I leaned forward in my seat. “What have they got?” I asked, doing my best to see through the slow moving sea of white and gray.

  Joel got out of the car first, and several of the geese nearest us stretched their necks out before them, hissing and honking. They didn’t like the intrusion.

  Deciding I’d climb on top of Zoey’s car if I needed to make a fast escape from getting wing flogged, I got out and Zoey got out as well. I still couldn’t see what now had three of the big birds fussing with each other.

  “We’re going to have to go through them,” Joel said.

  “We could wait ’til they pass,” Zoey said.

  One of the birds managed to get control of whatever they were fighting over and hurried off a full three feet with his treasure before one of the other geese knocked it out of their beak. Waiting until the crowd of geese passed didn’t seem to be an option. If the fussing geese had something important to the case, the evidence could end up getting lost.

  “We’ve got to go in,” I said, moving forward. My step faltered when three geese hissed and then two charged, but Joel clapped his hands and yelled as he walked forward. The geese glared at him with coal black beady eyes, honked and hissed, but sidestepped away from Joel’s advancing steps.

  Zoey and I followed in his wake as the geese parted like an ocean of white and gray.

  “Hey!” I screeched and did a fast high-step when I felt the nip of one of the birds on the back of my calf.

  Joel did a fast lunge toward the squabbling geese, and they scattered, leaving their treasure behind.

  Zoey, Joel and I all stopped, stood and stared. The geese’s object of longing was a man’s shoe. Its leather was badly scuffed.

  “Is that Morgan’s shoe?” I asked Joel. “Is that what he was wearing when you two had your fight?”

  “I don’t know,” Joel said. “I don’t remember. Could have been. That’s not a huge shoe, and he wasn’t a huge guy…”

  “Do we touch it to pick it up?” Zoey asked.

  That was a good question. If we touched it, we’d be contaminating the evidence. But even if we didn’t touch it, the geese had gone to town on it. Even now, the three geese that’d been fighting over it stood at a slight distance, wanting to reclaim their treasure.

  I glanced around us, trying to spot something that we could use to weight the shoe down with or maybe even a bucket that we could use to cover it. “What are all these marks?” I asked, pointing a finger at one of them. I barely saw it beyond the shuffling feet of the geese marching over. “Oh, there’s another one.” I pointed a few feet to the right. The mark looked like a scuff mark or a skid mark across the pavement. It was brown, several inches wide, and a foot and a half long.

  “There’s more over here,” Zoey said.

  Next to us, Joel turned around in place. “There’s more over there… and there too.” He pointed them out in every direction he turned.

  As a realization came to me, my chest tightened, my stomach turned upside down, and my feet froze in place. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, my voice thin and shaky.

  “What’s wrong?” Joel asked, his voice full of concern.

  “This…” I said, jabbing a frantic finger at the ground. “This is the crime scene. We’re standing in it!” I remembered Brad’s words. Morgan’s hand had been crushed with a blunt force. His body, when they’d found the rest of him, had been in tatters. They’d suspected he’d been dragged, and we were standing right in the middle of where that had taken place. The rows and rows of brown skid marks… they were Morgan’s blood!

  Chapter 11

  It was fifteen ’til six when I made it back to the café, and I sprinted from Zoey’s car through the back door into the kitchen. I’d gotten five texts from Sam that the dinner crowd had started coming in, and people had been getting upset that he only had cupcakes and muffins to offer them. I’d told him to offer them at seventy-five percent off, and to let the customers know that dinner service would begin by seven.

  I barely had enough time to make it happen.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” Zoey asked as she and Joel appeared in the kitchen’s back door.

  I was tying on an apron, mind racing as my mouth answered all on its own. “No, that’s okay. I’ve got this.”

  Idiot! I berated myself. Of course I needed help.

  “Are you sure?” Joel asked.

  “Yep, yep,” I said, unable to regain control of the gaping hole in my face. “It’s all good. I set things up early this morning so that all I’d have to do is throw things in the oven. You two go on into the café. Take a load off. I’ll send some coffee and muffins out.”

  I sounded so calm, but my heart was racing like a rabbit’s.

  I waved farewell to Zoey and Joel as they headed out into the café, and then I started my frantic prep. I referenced the instructions I’d left for myself that morning on a napkin. Then I turned on both ovens, one for the already tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, and one for baking the feta and herb stuffed bacon-wrapped chicken breasts.

  I then let Sam know that he could start taking dinner orders but to let people know that the wait would be about an hour. The baked potatoes would take at least that long.

  Sam came back a few minutes later. “I’ve got one dinner order.”

  “Just one?” I had prepped for thirty-five dinners.

  Sam’s young face contorted into a grimace. “Sorry. Three customers walked out when they heard it was going to be another hour.”

  Panic filled me. There would be so much loss of goods, and I’d be in the red for Sam’s pay—which I had raised to offset the low offering of tips provided by such a small customer base.

  You can offer everything for lunch tomorrow, I told myself and felt the panic abate.

  “Thanks, Sam,” I said, giving him a sure and confident smile, one that was totally and completely fake.

  He left, and I felt like the room was spinning. My breathing was shallow and fast, but I felt like I couldn’t get any air.

  I leaned over and put my hands on my knees. “One thing. Just do one thing,” I told myself.

  One of the ovens dinged. It was up to temperature. I got the industrial-sized tray of potatoes and slid it in, then set the timer.

  “Done.” I told myself. “Now another thing.”

  The room was settling, and my head was no longer feeling like it was ready to float away.

  Over and over again, I did one thing at a time. I seared one of the bacon-wrapped chicken breasts on each side before sliding the whole pan into the other oven to finish cooking. I tossed a claw-sized handful of green beans mixed with mushrooms into a pan, added butter and the other seasoning I’d listed on the napkin, and let it cook.

  The potatoes finished.

  The chicken finished.

  The green beans finished.

  I put them all together on a plate. I put butter, cheese and sour cream in little ramekins on the side for the potato, and I texted Sam to come get it.

  It went out the door, and I sat down on a stool and rested my head against the cool, solid wall in the corner. At the old mill where Morgan had been dragged to his death, Zoey, Joel and I had sat in Zoey’s car for twenty minutes, waiting for the police to arrive. We’d been questioned for fifteen minutes and chewed out for thirty by the case’s lead investigator, Detective Gregson.

  Brad had thankfully not been among those called to the scene.

  Sam reappeared in the kitchen doorway. His eyes were large and bright and his toothy smile was practically from ear to ear. “I’ve got eleven more orders.”

  I sat up straight. “Eleven?”

  “Yeah! Agatha’s knitting
group is in the back corner. When I ran the plate, they called me over and asked what you’d made. They said that it smelled so good that they all wanted to order dinner as well.”

  “No!” I couldn’t believe my ears. Agatha’s knitters didn’t put down their knitting for anything, but they’d have to if they wanted to eat their dinner. This was a huge compliment!

  “Yes! And then on the way back to the kitchen, four more people walked in. They said that it smelled great, wanted to know what was for dinner, and they all ordered before I even sat them.”

  My smile was growing as big as Sam’s. This had a chance of turning into a profitable dinner service after all. “I’ll add two more dinners to the list,” I told Sam. “For Joel and Zoey, on the house.”

  “No need,” he said. “They’ve already ordered, and they pre-paid.”

  It was a struggle not to tear up. They knew that I’d want to feed them. We’d been through so much together tonight, and I knew that they were out there waiting on me to join them so that we could talk over the night’s events. Yet there they were, taking care of me.

  I had good friends, I realized. Really good friends.

  I started cooking, and Sam headed back out to the café floor. Three more orders came in, then five, then two, then two more. By the time the dinner rush was done, only four chicken breasts remained and I’d almost run out of green beans and mushrooms. As for the potatoes, I’d made extra, and I’d have some to work with tomorrow. I’d turn them into something.

  I made two more dinners. One for me and one for Sam. Sam chose to eat his in the kitchen, and I carried my dinner out to the dining room to find Joel and Zoey. They’d been waiting on me for two and a half hours. When I spotted them, they were sitting in the cozy corner with Agatha’s knitting group. But there were a lot more people than what was usual for Agatha’s knitting group. The cozy corner had so many people in it that it almost looked crowded.

  I popped back into the kitchen and loaded up a platter of muffins and cupcakes to take out to the group. I’d seen more than one empty dinner plate among them, and I didn’t want to show up with my dinner without something to offer to everyone else.

  “Oh, how delightful,” Agatha exclaimed when I laid the heavy, food-laden tray down on a nearby coffee table. Sage was curled up inside of Agatha’s satchel of yarn, sleeping. It was such a nice thing for Agatha to let her do, and it endeared the octogenarian to me even more.

  I placed a stack of saucers and a wad of forks on napkins on the coffee table that sat in the center of the group.

  “Honey, you eat!” Nancy encouraged. “You look dead on your feet.” Nancy was in her late sixties and had to be close to six feet tall. Her legs were long and slender, she had neck-length light brown hair, a long neck, a long face, and a long nose. She was one of the knitting group’s regulars, and was always pleasant to be around.

  Zoey was sitting in one of the deep cushioned armchairs on the far side. She’d kicked off her shoes and had her legs tucked up under her to the side.

  Joel sat in a wingback chair, looking comfortable and at home. He had one long leg crossed over his other knee, and his head was resting against the chair’s tall back. I realized that it was probably one of the few chairs with a back tall enough for him to be able to rest his head. Knowing that my café had a chair that fit him gave me the warm fuzzies.

  But there were several other people, too—all of them women of an older generation—tucked in amongst Agatha’s regular knitters. They were people I’d never met before, yet it seemed that their eyes were eagerly, and possibly even expectantly, on me.

  “We were just talking about Morgan,” Joel said.

  Some of my warm fuzzies left me as I glanced around at the group. I was concerned about the effects of such a gruesome topic on the ladies. If they were uncomfortable with the subject matter, they’d associate that feeling with being here. If that happened, they might not come back and I’d lose customers. But to my relief, instead of looking uncomfortable, they looked profoundly interested.

  Agatha’s gentle ladies were as morbidly curious as the rest of us! I should have known, of course, given how many times I’d sat in this very spot talking with Agatha’s knitting group regulars about other people who had died by somebody else’s hand, but none of those deaths had been quite so messy.

  “Morgan was a pocketbook Romeo,” Prudence said. There was a touch of pride in her voice as she made the announcement, and I wondered if it had been her who had coined the phrase.

  “Pocketbook Romeo?” I said as a way to ask what she meant.

  “Mmhmm, he liked the ladies,” Agatha said. “Older ladies…”

  “Ohhhh…” My memory flashed to Morgan leaning close to Agatha at the grill counter. He’d been a man in his late twenties, but didn’t hesitate to invade her space. She’d gotten him out by dumping my failed attempt at making aglio e olio in his lap.

  “It was when I saw him take my neighbor, Felicity Jameson, out on a date that I became suspicious. I’d already known that he’d taken Belinda Jackson”—she nodded at one of the ladies sitting near—“out on a date. When he’d asked Belinda out, I’d thought, ‘Good for you!’ Every woman could do with the affections of a younger man now and then.” She winked at Belinda. “But then I saw him take Felicity out on a date as well. Now Felicity is a lovely lady, but him dating two different women so much older than him and within such a short period of time of each other… well, I knew he was up to something. And then I heard about Calista Jones, too! It was just too much.”

  Agatha’s recounting of events had me hanging on every word. Zoey, Joel and I had been so absorbed in the idea that someone had wanted to get even with Morgan for being a snitch or a blackmailer. That there was now a third possible motive for his murder was blowing my mind. “So he was taking older women out on dates and… I don’t know, getting them to buy him things?” I wasn’t sure how a Pocketbook Romeo worked. Was it the same as a younger woman finding a “sugar daddy” to pay for all of her living expenses?

  I turned my attention to Belinda, whom Agatha said had gone out on a date with Morgan. I guessed her to be in her mid-sixties. She was tall with long legs and a slender figure. She looked as though she might have been a very athletic woman in her day. I could imagine her on a basketball court or even as a track and field runner.

  “Did he ask you to buy him anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. In fact, he paid for dinner. He was the perfect gentleman.” She didn’t seem to be shy or wilting about answering, but there was a bit of extra pink in her cheeks. I was sure that she would rather not be the center of attention in this particular line of questioning. Yet there were things that we needed to know. We needed to understand more about Morgan’s life in order to have a better understanding of his death.

  I frowned and looked back at Agatha. “I don’t understand. Where does the pocketbook of his pocketbook Romeo act come in?”

  Agatha’s gaze went from me to Belinda, and I took her cue that I needed to return my attention to her.

  Belinda’s clasped hands parted as she offered a further explanation of events. “We talked a lot during dinner. He shared so much about himself, things that were very intimate. Things that gave him a sense of… vulnerability. I… well, I shared too. He put me at such ease. I felt I could share with him. I… well, I guess I even felt it would be rude if I didn’t share with him.”

  Morgan was very smooth. He was practiced. It sounded as though he’d known exactly how to present himself so that he could gain the upper hand over Belinda, and I was sure that I was going to be hearing the word “blackmail” very soon. I wondered if Belinda would be willing to expose to us whatever private little tidbit she’d shared with Morgan that had given him leverage over her.

  “The evening was very nice,” Belinda continued. “I was a little hurt when I never heard from him again.”

  Oh… I had not seen that coming.

  “He didn’t ask you for money? Didn’t wa
nt you to buy him anything?”

  “He paid for dinner and left a nice tip. I never once got the impression that he was hoping I’d spend money on him.” She looked at her fingers, then, before meeting my gaze again. Something about what she was going to say made her feel uncomfortable, but she went on to say it anyway. “You see, I’ve done well enough for myself, but that’s because I have a pension. I don’t have any great savings or anything. I don’t have much money. I have a monthly income that covers my expenses, but there’s not a whole lot left over after my expenses.”

  The lightbulb finally flickered on in my head. “So he asked you out on a date and got personal information out of you about your finances. Then after he learned that there wasn’t any money to be had out of the relationship, he shifted his interest to someone else.”

  Belinda’s lips thinned a little, but she didn’t flinch away from my recounting of what she had said. “Yes, that is what we think happened.”

  But Agatha had mentioned a pattern. I wasn’t convinced yet. I was listening to Belinda’s story, but the reason why Morgan never asked her out again was purely speculation. It was always possible that Morgan hadn’t found her companionship to be something he wanted to make a more frequent part of his life. It might not have been about the money at all.

  “Do you mind me asking how you met Morgan?” I asked.

  “My podiatrist recommended a certain kind of shoe, and Morgan worked at the only store around that carried it.”

  “Sole Support,” Agatha said. “I do believe they specialize in shoes for an older clientele.”

  I was again in a situation of trying to work through a series of mental gymnastics. I knew that what Agatha was saying about Sole Support was very important, but I hadn’t put it all together yet. “Do you think that Morgan got the job there specifically because it catered to older people?”

  Agatha looked at Belinda again, and so did I. Belinda shrugged her shoulders.