Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 01 - Death by Chocolate

by Sally Berneathy

  King Henry sauntered out into the yard, then dropped into a sudden crouch, his tail swishing slowly as he peered intently at something in the clover.

  I turned away and went upstairs to the bedroom designated as my home office. Unlike Fred’s sophisticated equipment, however, my computer was so ancient, my word-processing program wrote everything with a quill. But it did everything I needed, everything I was capable of doing. I’ve never been very computer literate. I’ve always suspected a little green man lives in that computer and makes it run or not run, depending on his mood, and I’m good at pissing him off. For one thing, he really hates Coke in his keyboard.

  Instead of a high tech modular work station, I had a huge wooden desk built in the early ’50s that weighed somewhere around five tons. At least, that’s what the movers said when they had to wrestle it up the stairs. Rick’s office threw it away when they converted to high tech modular work stations about five years ago. I saved it, much to his dismay. It was a toss-up whether he was happier to see me or that desk leave his house.

  I located Paula’s records on my computer, called Fred on my equally antiquated cell phone that did nothing but make phone calls and gave him the information.

  Then I went back downstairs and out on the porch, hoping to catch a last glimpse of King Henry, see what direction he was going. Maybe I could visit him occasionally. We could talk about our chance meeting and maybe even wax philosophical, chat of mice and men and the best way to torture them.

  He was still lying in that same spot, staring intently at something in the clover. I went out in the yard and checked it out, but didn’t see anything. In fact, as I looked around me, I didn’t see anyone or any activity anywhere. Ever notice how extra quiet it is on Sundays, like the whole world’s a church?

  I felt very much at loose ends. I could go back in and read or watch TV or wash my hair or arrange my toiletries in alphabetical order. Somehow none of that appealed to me.

  I could go visit Paula, but I hated to do that while I was having Fred check her out. It just didn’t seem right.

  I strolled across the street, half aimlessly and half drawn to the hedge with the hole in it.

  Henry came with me.

  “We’re trespassing, you know,” I advised him as I shoved through the gate. Henry darted in as if to say that cats couldn’t trespass because the entire world belonged to them.

  I checked out the hole again, just to see if it was really as distinct as I remembered.

  It was. Definitely man made. Definitely a hole. Definitely strange.

  But this time I was looking through it from a different angle…and had a perfect view of my house!

  Had Rick hired a private investigator to get the goods on me?

  Yeah, right. And what goods might those be, Lindsay the Boring? Anyway, that made no sense. He was already getting everything he wanted in the divorce.

  So maybe Ms. Huffy Muffy had hired a private investigator to see if Rick was cheating on her. I smiled at that thought and suddenly felt much better about letting Rick spend the night. Perhaps it had served a good purpose after all.

  I looked up at the big old three-story house. Needed a lot of work, but it had potential, at least from the outside. A turret, big windows, fish scale siding, lots of gingerbread. It reminded me of an elegant, aging lady whose feather boa was molting.

  I walked around the side of the house with no idea what I was looking for. Nothing, I guess. Just killing time, avoiding a return to unpacking and such burning decisions as whether to store my hair spray under H or S or be really creative and put it under G for glue.

  If I was looking for nothing in that yard, I found it. I didn’t see any more cigarette butts or any body parts or even any footprints suggesting somebody other than Henry and I had been there lately. Of course, except for that squashed-down spot in the corner of the front yard, the grass was so high Big Foot could have been there five minutes before us without leaving a sign.

  The back yard had a gate that opened onto an alley. That gate wasn’t quite as overgrown as the one in front and when I got closer, I could see fresh leaves and twigs broken off.

  Okay, so those tidy teenagers who sat in the front yard to smoke and spy on either me, the Queen of Ennui, or Paula’s closed and curtained house with no signs of life, had entered through the back gate. Maybe they even had wild parties in the old house. Well, not very wild or Fred would have noticed.

  King Henry darted over to the porch and sprang up like a ballet dancer then sniffed the wood delicately, his nose not quite touching the surface. Suddenly he laid his ears back flat against his head and jumped down. Giving the porch a final scathing look, he disappeared around the house. Whatever had been on that porch wasn’t something Henry wanted to meet.

  So he didn’t like tidy teenagers who smoked and watched the world through a hole in the hedge. Big deal. I didn’t, either.

  If I really believed that was all that had been going on around the old house, I wouldn’t have hurried so fast to follow Henry’s lead out through the front gate.

  Henry and I strolled around the neighborhood a bit, enjoying the nice weather. I kept expecting him to recognize his home and run up to the front door…or for somebody to recognize him and run out to claim him.

  When he followed me back inside my house, I realized it was time to buy cat food and a litter box. Henry obviously did not remember where he lived. Maybe he had feline amnesia.

  I got the items at the grocery store, fed him, put his litter box in the basement then went back upstairs to clean the mess I’d created while making signs. I left the rusty skillet, the antique ice tongs and the ancient iron where they lay…in case I needed to iron an ancient blouse, cook a rusty steak or haul in a fifty pound block of ice.

  Or threaten Rick.

  Or the teenagers peeping through that hole in the hedge.

  I frowned as I thought again of that stupid hole. If the cops hadn’t come around asking Paula questions, if she didn’t dye her blond hair brown, if she wasn’t so scared of something, I wouldn’t have obsessed about that dumb hole.

  I went outside to the porch. Evening was coming on. The shadows were growing long, and the old vacant house suddenly looked creepy rather than shabbily elegant.

  The setting sun and the evening breeze did strange things with the light and shadows. Was that just leaves moving or had a curtain on the second floor moved? Was that glint of sunlight reflecting off the attic window or off a metal telescope? Or even a gun barrel?

  “What are you doing, trying to see through that hole in the hedge from here?”

  I jumped and let out a small yip! at the unexpected sound of a voice.

  “Fred! What are you doing, sneaking up on me?”

  He shrugged and stepped onto the porch. “The entire Marine Corp band could sneak up on you when you’re that intent on something.”

  I ignored his remark and looked at the file folder he carried. “Did you find anything about…?” I inclined my head toward Paula’s house.

  “Sort of.”

  I opened the screen door and we went inside and sat down on the sofa.

  “Okay, what did you find?” I asked.

  He handed the file folder to me. “Paula Walters died thirty years ago at the age of two.”

  Chapter Five

  “Died?” I repeated. “Paula’s dead? Of course she’s not dead. What are you saying, that she’s a ghost? You’ve been watching too many of those old horror movies. This is not a movie. Paula is not a ghost.”

  Fred heaved a long sigh, scrunched up his mouth and rolled his eyes. “I know she’s not a ghost. But she’s not Paula Walters, either. My guess is, she stole the name and social security number of somebody who died in infancy and used it to change her identity.”

  “Wow. That’s the kind of thing you see in the movies. Real people don’t do that.”

  He sighed again. “Real people do it all the time. That’s where they got the idea for the movies.”

  �
��I meant, people we know don’t do that. Real people like Paula.”

  “Either she faked her own death at the age of two, she’s a ghost, or she changed her identity. Take your pick.”

  “All right, I guess we have to go with option C.” I opened the folder and flipped through it. Fred had printed out several sheets of documentation.

  “Buying that old car she came here in was Paula’s first appearance upon returning from the hereafter,” he said. “Renting your house was the second.”

  I studied the documents and finally found one I could comprehend. “She bought the car in Kansas City.”

  “For cash from an individual. Then she applied for a driver’s license, stating she’d never had one before.”

  “I guess not if she died at the age of two. She’d have been too short to reach the gas pedal.”

  “Probably have a little trouble passing the written test, too, unless she was awfully precocious.”

  I thumbed through the papers. “I’m impressed with all the stuff you came up with. You ever thought about being a professional detective?” Might as well use the occasion to open the ongoing discussion of his mysterious occupation.

  He shrugged. “You just have to know where to look. I’m not finished. I checked Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and the surrounding states and couldn’t find a birth certificate for Zachary Walters.”

  “Why are you so secretive about what you do all day?”

  “I work at the computer all day.”

  “I know, but what do you do at the computer all day?”

  “I spent this afternoon looking for Paula.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what you do?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But not today.”

  “There’s nothing on TV tonight,” he said, changing the subject. He does that a lot. “Want to come over and watch The Day the Earth Stood Still?”

  “Might as well. Hey, you know what we need to do? We need to go talk to that apartment manager where Lester Mackey lives, see what we can find out about him.”

  “We don’t need to do any such thing.”

  I didn’t argue. I recognized his stubborn tone. I’d either have to figure out a way to convince him or I’d have to go by myself. Unless Lester Mackey was listed in the phone book, I wasn’t sure I could get the address without Fred’s help, but I still had Detective Adam Trent’s business card. I could probably figure some way to get the information out of him. I’d picked up a few things from Rick about being sneaky.

  “I’ll bring the Cokes and microwave popcorn,” I offered.

  “Orville Redenbacher’s Pour-Over Movie Theater Butter?”

  “Of course.” I used to eat whatever was on sale, but Fred had me trained.

  “I’ll go set up the movie.”

  Fred left and I headed for the kitchen to grab the snacks.

  As I walked by my recliner, King Henry, without lifting his head, lazily reached out one oversized paw and patted me as if in approval.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Sunday night at the movies with a good friend beats the heck out of Saturday night with my cheating, con-artist, almost-ex husband.”

  ***

  I wasn’t surprised when Paula showed up for work the next day with dark circles under her bloodshot eyes. She’d colored her hair, effectively hiding the blond roots. It was all a uniform, muddy brown. Nondescript.

  She always brought Zach with her since the day care center wasn’t open at four a.m., the hour we started work. He’d sleep on the sofa in the closet that we facetiously called our office. Even after he woke, he was never a problem. We kept a small television and several of his toys in there, and he was good about entertaining himself. Heck, it was all the kid had ever known. When Paula started working with me, he stayed with us all day because she was too broke to afford child care.

  Too broke and too scared to let him out of her sight.

  Today she had that same frantic expression, and, as we rushed around making bagels, doughnuts and other pastries, I noticed she’d resumed her old habit of checking on him every few minutes. I made up my mind that, before the day was over, I would have some answers from her.

  Yeah, just like I’d forced Fred to tell me what he does all day.

  But I was going to give it my best shot.

  Cooking, especially on a tight schedule with no room for error such as leaving the baking powder out of a cake, required intense concentration. Sometimes we had a few brief moments of calm before the rush of customers at breakfast and again at lunch, but not usually. Usually we were busy from the time we walked through that door until we finished cleaning up after lunch. Mondays were especially hectic, so I knew my questions would have to wait…and I’m not a patient person. Just watching her, sensing her tension, and not knowing what was going on was making me almost as stressed as Paula.

  When the customers began to arrive, I noticed she’d resumed her old habit of jumping every time the door opened, keeping her head down and face averted and staying in the kitchen as much as possible. That had been okay when she’d first come to work with me and we weren’t nearly as busy as now. Now we actually needed a third person to help. With the tables and the counter close to capacity with customers, both Paula and I had to stay front row center most of the time. Today every time somebody came in, she darted into the kitchen, then reluctantly returned, her steps wooden and her eyes darting around the room, scanning each person there.

  After the breakfast crowd, we closed from nine-thirty to eleven to get lunch ready. That was when she normally left to take Zach to the nursery. I wasn’t surprised when she told me she wasn’t going to do that today, that he was running a slight fever. I doubted Zach was sick, but I did know his mother was sick with worry, so I played along.

  About ten o’clock, as I was spreading the cream cheese filling on a Chocolate Earthquake Cake and Paula was chopping scallions for a chicken pasta dish, the door bell rang. Paula gasped and jumped. I went to answer the door.

  A delivery boy stood there with a huge arrangement of yellow roses. My favorite flower. They had to be from Rick. I should refuse them.

  “Lindsay Kramer?” the boy asked.

  I’m a twenty-first century kind of girl so I’d never legally given up my birth name of Powell though I let friends and family call me Kramer for the sake of simplicity—until the infamous Muffy night.

  However, in the interest of what looked like at least two dozen roses, I could be Lindsay Kramer one more time. I didn’t see any reason to pass up something I enjoy just because the source was disgusting. I like hot dogs, too.

  I tipped the boy and accepted the bouquet.

  Ignoring the card which probably said something really gooey that would only mess with my mind, I set the flowers on the counter, inhaled their sweet fragrance and admired them for a moment before I started back to the kitchen.

  Paula stood in the doorway, arms wrapped tightly around herself, doing her impression of a terrified, anemic ghost.

  “Who?” she choked out. “Who are they from?”

  “Rick.”

  “Are you sure? You didn’t read the card.”

  “Positive.” Nevertheless, I plucked out the card and brought it to her. “You read it.”

  “Before I knew Mariah’s name...? That’s a strange message.”

  I hadn’t meant for her to read it out loud so I could hear it.

  I sighed. “It’s from a song about the wind. Before I knew Mariah’s name and heard her wailing whining, I had a girl and she had me, and the sun was always shining. Rick used to sing it to me.”

  “Oh.” Paula looked vastly relieved while I was starting to feel pretty stressed. I’d been right. The card was messing with my mind. That was Rick’s specialty.

  “Sitting in a tree in the park when we were young.” I wasn’t telling Paula so much as reliving the incident myself for the second time in just over twenty-four hours.

  “Oh?”

  I shrugged, tore the car
d in half and tossed it into the trash. “I guess you had to be there. Give the devil his due, he sure knows how to get to me. I knew I should have refused to accept those flowers. I need to get back to my cake.”

  But as soon as I got a chance, I was going to give Paula the third degree. I was going to find out why she’d faked her death at the age of two and why roses frightened her.

  ***

  I didn’t get the chance before we left work. Customers were around, Zach was around, and then she and Zach left to go home. When I pulled into my own driveway, there was no sign of either of them in the house next door. They could be inside behind those closed curtains, down at the park where she often took him to play, or they could have taken a fast plane to Mexico.

  King Henry was waiting on my porch. I’d thought he might leave for his old home or even for someplace new while I was gone, but he was still there. He strolled to the edge of the porch to meet me and wound himself around my legs. Cats must have very flexible bones.

  I set the flowers on the porch while I unlocked my door, and Henry sniffed them suspiciously.

  “They’re from the disgusting man who was here yesterday.” I wasn’t going to lie to him. “But we can pretend I picked them on the way home, if that’s all right with you.”

  He looked pretty disdainful. I could tell he wasn’t into pretend.

  I lay down for my customary afternoon nap. It was the only way I could deal with getting up at three in the morning. I couldn’t go to bed at eight o’clock in the evening, so I slept a split shift.

  I woke a couple of hours later, went downstairs and poked through the pantry. My pickings were getting a bit slim. Opening a can of sardines would seriously compromise the fragrance of the roses, and I just didn’t feel like another peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I found a coupon for buy one pizza, get one free. I could invite Paula and Zach to join me. Ply her with pepperoni then give her the third degree.

  She didn’t answer her phone until the fourth ring, and then it sounded as if she dropped the receiver and fumbled with it before finally getting it to her mouth. “Hello?” Her voice was breathless and confused.