Murder Takes A Bow - A Betty Crawford Mystery (The Betty Crawford Mysteries)

by Marvin, Liz

  This was exactly what she was looking for: an entire website on how to cope with and integrate care for diabetes into her life. They had everything, including an eitre section of the website devoted to recipes. She bookmarked a “Carb Safe” recipe to try and cook for dinner that night before grabbing the boxes and heading out the door for the basketball game.

  CHAPTER 9

  The post office line had been longer than she’d dreaded. Out of the entire team, Betty arrived to the game last. Apparently, Clarise usually showed up half an hour early to run through plays with the team and help them warm up for the game. Betty barely made it there with five minutes to spare. When she arrived, Clarise’s team was gathered with their parents on the sidelines while the other team ran drills.

  When Betty let them know she’d be coaching the game, there was an immediate outcry. “Where’s Coach Clarise?” one of the players asked. “Is she okay?”

  Luckily, Betty had prepared an answer for that question. She just hoped the team would accept it. Somehow, she didn’t think that telling them that their coach was in jail for murder was the best idea. “She has some personal business she has to see to,” Betty said. “She might not be able to coach for a while. She asked me to step in for her until she could come back.”

  Her statement didn’t go over well. Parents demanded to know how to reach Clarise, saying she had made a commitment and shouldn’t be allowed to just back out. Players complained that they’d never win, since Betty hadn’t even known enough to show up to the game early. When they found out that she hadn’t brought half time snacks, their confidence in her fell even farther. What type of coach didn’t bring snacks?

  By the end of the game’s first quarter, Betty had determined that Clarise deserved sainthood for doing this on a regular basis. Her head throbbed from the shouts of the crowd and the sharp squeaks of sneakers on the gym floor. She had no idea what plays the team knew, so in time outs it was up to the girls to decide what their next move would be. She didn’t even know if they had practiced one on one or zone defense, let alone which players worked best together at the bottom of the key. The best she could offer was yells of encouragement from the sidelines and mediation if the girls disagreed.

  “Coach Betty,” one of the player wheezed at half time, “why didn’t you sub me out? I’ve been signaling you for ever.”

  “Are you okay?” Betty asked, concerned.

  “Yeah,” the girl said, wincing. “But my ankle hurts a little.” Betty looked at the girl’s foot. It didn’t look swollen, but she wasn’t going to take any chances.

  Betty told her to put her foot up on the bench. “Ref!” she called to one of the officials standing nearby. “Do you know where I could get some ice and a bandage?”

  The referee looked at her like she was mad. “Didn’t you bring your First Aid kit?”

  Crap.

  “Why don’t you sit out the rest of this one honey?”

  But it wasn’t until the last minute of the game that the everything went completely haywire.

  The score was 44 to 45, with her team in the lead.

  Betty was watching one of her players trying to set a pick at the top of the key, so she didn’t see what happened to cause another one of the girls on her team hit the floor near the basket. The referee didn’t call it a foul, so she assumed that the player had tripped or something else blameless. Stranger things had happened in the wide world of sports.

  A girl from the other team stole the ball and broke away down the court while the team was preoccupied with making sure their friend was okay.

  Of course, she scored. And the buzzer sounded.

  End game. The other team won.

  The girls were still slapping hands with the other team as they walked down the post game line when the first of the angry parents descended on her.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” A tall, angry woman in her late forties demanded. “Didn’t you see that foul?”

  “Is Grace okay?”

  “Why didn’t you call a time out?”

  “Do you even know how basketball works?”

  “I want Clarise’s number—you don’t even know how to sub.”

  “Is Grace okay?”

  Betty ignored them, focusing on her players returning. She held her hand out to high five them as they passed.

  “Good game!” She told them, smiling. “You all played really well.” And they really had played well. The whole team had worked together to come up with the right plays. It was clear that Clarise had coached them very well by the way they collaborated and communicated on the court.

  “Yeah,” said one of the players scathingly. “No thanks to you.” She brushed past Betty, scowling. Betty lowered her hand.

  “Yeah Coach,” another girl said, seething. “Why didn’t you call the ref on not seeing that foul? You lost us the game!”

  “Now wait a minute,” Betty said. Where was this coming from? “What foul are you talking about?”

  “Come on Grace,” one of the mothers said to the girl who had fallen. “We’re leaving.” She glared at Betty. “What foul? Are you serious?”

  The rest of the team walked by her silently, gathering their belongings.

  In her car, Betty banged her head against her steering wheel.

  To quote one of her favorite books as a child, today was a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” And now her head hurt.

  CHAPTER 10

  Food Lion grocery store was on the way home, and Betty wanted to pick up the ingredients for the diabetes friendly recipe she’d pulled off of dlife.com. Betty pulled into the parking lot and deliberately parked far from the door. One of the tips she’d read on the dlife website was to force yourself to walk more simply by parking farther from your destination.

  It wasn’t until she entered the store and looked in her purse that Betty realized she’d left the recipe sitting in her printer at home. She huffed in exasperation. Well, she’d just have to try and remember it. The recipe was for a type of pork chop, but she knew that she wanted broccoli as a side. Maybe she’d make a salad to go with everything.

  Betty actually had to follow the signs to the fresh produce section. How sad. She knew her way around the store and could pick her favorite chips and chocolate chip cookies from the shelves blindfolded, but it was as though the fresh vegetables section of the store was foreign territory. Everything looked bright and fresh and in need of more preparation than she had energy for on a regular day, let alone a day like this one.

  Buck up Betty, she thought. It wasn’t the end of the world to cook fresh vegetables. It might take a little longer than zapping some warm with a microwave, but it would be worth it in the long run. And for tonight, she’d just find something that was pre made.

  There were pre made products in the fresh vegetable section, right?

  And then there it was. The Dole section. Freshly made salads in bags, chopped up vegetables and something she’d never seen before: broccoli slaw.

  Betty almost laughed out loud. Really? Chopped up broccoli stems weren’t a type of slaw. Slaw had dressing. Somebody in marketing had far too much time on their hands. But she picked up a bag and added it to her cart along with a low carb blue cheese dressing. She’d mix the two together for a side.

  Betty went around the store, picking out pork chops and trying to remember the rest of the recipe. On her way to one of the aisles, Betty passed the bread aisle. Out of curiosity, picked up a loaf of a type of bread she liked and read the carbohydrates on the side before putting it in the cart. Each slice had twenty one grams of carbs! She checked her favorite grape jelly and nearly fainted. Tweny six carbs per tablespoon? She headed to the dairy aisle, now very concerned. Sure enough, even cream cheese had carbs. She’d been eating nearly one hundred carbs in every jelly and cream cheese snack sandwich.

  Well, she obviously had to find new snacks. Betty stubbornly searched the aisles for replacements for her normal, carb loaded choices. She refused to go hungry
just because she was eating healthy.

  After some searching, Betty found low carb whole wheat flour tortillas and oat bran and flaxseed low carb lavash. They only had 5 carbs per piece. The package contained 4 large flat squares of bread. She could make her own roll up sandwiches, and not feel guilty for eating them. And the tortillas would make great pizza!

  Betty’s stomach growled. She checked her cell phone for the time and was startled to learn that she’d been in the store for over an hour. She’d have to really rush to get dinner ready for her parents on time. She bolted for the check out counter, completely forgetting the rest of the ingredients for the night’s dinner.

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time Betty got home, she was starving. A starving Betty meant a cranky Betty, even on a good day. And a cranky Betty was impatient. So when Betty realized that she was missing garlic and half the ingredients for the pork chop recipe she’d selected, rather than spend time hunting for another recipe she decided to try cooking the meal with what she had.

  Normally when Betty cooked, she threw some pasta in a pot and mixed in whatever looked good. She was used to cooking fast. And her parents would be home any minute, expecting dinner to be on the table. So, rather than waste time pre heating the oven to bake the pork chops, she cranked up the burner on the gas stove and threw them in a frying pan with some olive oil. The recipe called for lime. Figuring that she needed a side other than the broccoli slaw and blue cheese experiment, and not wanting to waste time boiling water, she tossed some freshly washed fiddleheads in the pan with them. The water hit the hot oil, causing the oil to pop and splatter all over the stove.

  Betty cursed. Why, oh why, couldn’t she be okay just making pasta?

  Pasta is loaded with carbohydrates, she reminded herself. Carbohydrates turn into sugar. No pasta for you!

  Betty whirled through the kitchen, mixing the blue cheese dressing with the broccoli slaw and some cracked pepper and clattering plates and silverware down onto the table. Every so often she would flip the pork chops and stir the vegetables. Everything was browning nicely, even if they seemed to be cooking a little fast.

  Then again, she’d never cooked pork chops before. Maybe they were supposed to cook quickly. She’d let them cook just a bit longer, just to be safe.

  BEEEEEEEEP. The smoke alarm went off.

  “Oh for the love of God, shut up!” she yelled at it, desperately waving a dishtowel beneath the sensor. When it stopped beeping, she turned on the kitchen fan and opened a window, so it wouldn’t start again. Then she flipped the pork chops.

  Black burnt bits flaked off the pork, to be lost amongst the fiddleheads. The vegetables were still crunchy.

  It was a disaster.

  “Betty?” Her mother called as she swung open the kitchen door. “Are you home?”

  A complete, and utter disaster.

  Well, it was what she had. Betty threw everything onto a platter and plunked it down just as her parents came in.

  Betty’s parents couldn’t have looked more different if they tried. Her mother, Mary, was a tall, thin woman in her mid fifties, with skin already tanned this early in the season and laugh lines creasing her face. She was dressed in blue jeans and a comfortable, grey t shirt with a circle of birds on the front. Her brown hair, just beginning to grey, was pulled back in a pony tail to keep it out of the way. Her father was several inches shorter than his wife and a bit of a beer belly flopping over the top of his jeans. Though he was the same age as Mary, Chet’s hair had already gone completely grey. He wore is cropped close in a military crew cut, which did little to hide the prominent bald spot on the top of his head.

  “Betty,” her mother asked, setting the bags in her hand down by the door. “Is everything okay? We heard the smoke alarm.”

  Betty straightened her shoulders and plastered a smile onto her face, hoping that she passed as cheery. She must not have succeeded very well. Her mother still looked concerned.

  “Betty?” she asked, placing her parcels by the door. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing!” Betty said. Her voice came out far too high pitched for comfort. “I made dinner. Come sit! Would you like some water? I’ll get you water.”

  Her father lumbered in. “What’s that smell?” He asked, laughing. “Smells like something died in here.”

  Betty focused on the running water, forcing herself to take a drink before she turned around and snapped at him. That smell was dinner, thank you very much. She’d busted her butt to get it ready in time for them. So what if it wasn’t exactly gourmet cooking? It wasn’t poisoned! She took a breath to steady herself. There was no reason her rotten day had to be taken out on them.

  Betty’s mother elbowed him. “Shut your mouth Chet—not now.”

  Betty could tell when her father caught sight of her at the kitchen sink. He stopped making any noise at all. She knew her shoulders were shaking, and even though she wasn’t facing him her father had an uncanny knack of knowing exactly how she was feeling without her saying a word. She heard him take a step towards her.

  “Betty?”

  She turned around, determinedly cheerful. “How was your day? Let’s eat, I’m starved.”

  When Betty took the first bite of her pork chop, she almost gagged. It was burnt on one side and oily on the other. It was all she could do not to spit the meat into her napkin and down a glass of water. Across the table, her parents seemed to have the same reaction. Her mother coughed, and her father’s face tensed up.

  As one, they reached for the fiddleheads.

  The fiddleheads weren’t much better.

  “Betty,” her mother said. “This is an interesting recipe. Where did you get it?”

  “Online.” Betty took a big bite of the pork, hoping that eating it in larger amounts would feel a little better. At least then, it was over with more quickly. Large chunks of food in her mouth even had the added benefit of not forcing her to explain which site she’ been on.

  She was wrong. Large bites were worse.

  She poked at the broccoli slaw and dressing side on her plate, as though afraid it would leap out at her and attack with another horrible flavor. Surprisingly, though, it actually wasn’t that bad. It was nice and crunchy, and the blue cheese packed a flavorful punch that almost eliminated the other horrible flavors from her mouth.

  Well, almost. And, as wonderful as the new side tasted, it wasn’t very filling. It certainly wasn’t enough for a full meal.

  Was this really how she’d have to eat for the rest of her life? Betty thought longingly of tuna fish casserole and chicken burritos.

  Her father sighed, putting own his fork. “I’m sorry Betty, I can’t eat this. Would you like some pizza? I can order out.”

  “No thanks,” Betty mumbled. She looked at her plate, blinking furiously to forestall the tears in her eyes. Clarise was in jail. She was diabetic. An entire team of middle grade students and their parents hated her. And to top it all off, she couldn’t even manage to cook one healthy meal.

  She pushed her chair back from the table. She couldn’t stay down here and pretend that everything was normal.

  “I’m going to my room,” she said. “You guys eat what you want.”

  Over the sound of her footsteps, Betty heard her father’s low, rumbling voice.

  “Let her cool off Mary. We can bring her up something to eat in a little while.”

  Betty closed her bedroom door on the sound of dishes being cleared and leaned against it. She closed her eyes, willing herself not to shed tears of frustration.

  CHAPTER 12

  Betty flopped on her bed. She curled up under the top comforter and hugged a pillow to her head, staring at nothing.

  God, why on earth was she so moody today? Even with all the complete and utter crap that had happened, there was no reason for her to continually fall apart. She was strong, damn it! She should be able to deal with life better than this.

  The pile of diabetes pamphlets sat on the table by her bed.

>   There had been something in there about blood sugar affecting mood swings. Was she moody because everything was going wrong, or because she had a stupid disease? Did diabetes give her permanent PMS?

  Great. Just great. Permanent PMS and not a single chocolate bar allowed. Her own personal version of Hell on Earth.

  Betty’s stomach grumbled.

  Well, she wasn’t going downstairs, that was for sure. It probably still smelled like burnt pig and raw fiddleheads, and the idea of facing her parents wasn’t exactly something she relished.

  Note to self: follow the recipe next time.

  Betty closed her eyes, just for a moment. She inhaled through her nose, and out through her mouth, letting the rhythm of her breath lull her into a calm state of mind. She’d be okay. Really. She just needed to get a grip and get to work. It would help to get something done and end the day feeling productive. She stretched, feeling her spine and shoulders pop, and headed over to her computer.

  The to do list welcomed her.

  To do lists were wonderful things. They let you never have to think about what needed to be done next—it was all there in writing. And those missing jeans still needed investigating. That would be a good project to lose herself in.

  Betty looked back in her e mails, writing down any complaints she’d received. When she was living in L.A., her business had run for six months with only 2 shipping errors. One of them was a lost box, and one had been sent to the wrong address. The second mistake was her fault, so Betty didn’t count it as a post office error. But, in the year she’d been back in Lofton, her business had received more than a dozen complaints. They were mostly for lost boxes, clothes or small amounts that were missing from large shipments. No wrong addresses, and all boxes were checked and double checked to make sure they had the correct quantities before she sent them out.

  Someone had to be tampering with her shipments..