Flipped For Murder

by Maddie Day

  I plated up three tuna, one veggie, and one turkey burger, added the specified sides, and hit the button on the round bell signaling they were ready. An hour later things calmed down enough for me to stuff a quick cheese sandwich into my mouth and use the restroom. When I emerged, Corrine held court at the table nearest the door. Don sat next to her, studying the menu, looking like he might have gotten over his antagonism toward her.

  “Oh, Robbie,” Corrine called, beckoning me over. “I have a wonderful proposal.” When I passed Danna, she rolled her eyes. I continued toward the mayor.

  I greeted her and Don. “What’s up?”

  “I want to hold a fund-raiser for the Brown County Animal Shelter. I think we should have it here Saturday night. I already have half the local merchants on board, right, Don?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Eddie has a real soft spot for animals, too, and he’s promised to sponsor the event in a big way,” Corrine added.

  “So a week from tomorrow?” I asked. “That should be doable.”

  “No-o-o.” Don drew out the word. “She means Saturday, like in tomorrow. I think it’s too soon.”

  “Tomorrow night?” I tried not to screech.

  “Are you busy?” Corrine demanded. “Think of all those poor kitties and doggies languishing in crowded little cells like common criminals.” She widened her eyes at me. “We can’t wait a minute longer.”

  “But what if people already have plans for tomorrow night?” I folded my arms. “It’s pretty short notice.”

  “This town needs something to take our minds off the, you know”—she waved me in closer and lowered her voice—“the murder. And it will be great publicity for you and your restaurant, Robbie. Set yourself down, now. Let’s make plans.”

  This woman was a force of nature. An answer of “no” was clearly out of the question. Don gave me a sympathetic look and raised one shoulder.

  “I’ll get banners made and strung up across Main Street,” Corrine said. “You can hang one out front, too. We’ll print up flyers and deliver them to every household.”

  “Who’s we?” Don asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “I snagged a intern from IU this week. He’ll do it.”

  “You realize it’s Friday afternoon?” Don asked.

  Corrine tsk-tsked. “Turner’s an eager beaver. He’ll stay as long as I need him. Now, what about food, Robbie?” Corrine folded her hands in front of her and batted black fake eyelashes at me.

  “You mean, what am I going to prepare with one day’s notice? I hope you don’t think I’m donating the cost. I can’t afford to do that yet.”

  “We’ll pay you back. Or, maybe you and another restaurant can work on it together.”

  I thought for a minute. “I could ask my friend Christina over at the Nashville Inn. She’s the chef there now and they’re much more well-established. They might donate the raw materials to get the publicity, and she and I can prepare the food together.”

  “Excellent. Just a bunch of appetizers is fine. Little meat pies and mini buffalo wings, you know, stuff you can eat with your fingers. And what’s that Greek stuff called?”

  “Spanakopita.” She’d just described the most labor-intensive kind of food. Maybe Christina and I could make a trip to the Costco freezer section and pass their hors d’oeuvres off as homemade. I shook my mental head. Nah.

  “That’s it. Oh, Danna, take and bring us some coffee, baby, would you?” Corrine called, stirring the air with one lacquered hand.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait at least another week?” I asked. I’d been feeling tense before she showed up with her harebrained idea, and it sure wasn’t helping to calm my stressed-out stomach.

  “No, we need to do this now. I’ll get a special liquor permit for you to serve wine and beer. Don, ask that cute brother of yours to bartend.”

  “You mean Abe?” Don looked at me. “Is he cute?”

  “Actually, he is.” I laughed at his bewildered reaction, the tension broken for a minute.

  “Maybe we can auction stuff off, too.” Corrine tapped her nails on the table. “You’ll donate a gift card from the store, Don, and we’ll get Ed to do the same.”

  Don nodded with a head made of lead, and the set to his mouth wasn’t a happy one, either.

  “Robbie, you ask Adele what she can give us for an auction,” Corrine continued. “That wool of hers is getting pretty famous. I’ll think on what else.”

  Danna set three mugs of coffee on the table without a word. I thanked her, but the words bounced off her back as she returned to the grill. She must figure she was getting roped into this crazy scheme, too. I imagined she was right.

  Corrine drew out her phone and began tapping notes into it at what sounded like a hundred words a minute. If I tried that with fingernails like hers, it would be 100 percent typos, but she must have figured out how to make it work.

  “All right, we’re all set, then.” She took a sip of coffee and plonked the mug down. “Come on, Don, we have work to do.” She rose and sailed for the door. Don trailed behind her like an unhappy towed dinghy.

  By the time I got over feeling like I’d been hit by a stun gun, they were gone. True, the event would be good exposure for Pans ‘N Pancakes. If people didn’t think a murderer was poisoning their spanakopita, that is. Speaking of a town’s worth of food, I pulled out my own phone and hit Christina’s number as I watched Danna at the grill.

  After I greeted my friend, I said, “I need a big favor from you and the Nashville Inn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s . . . Why do you sound like you’re in stereo?”

  “Because I’m right behind you.”

  I whirled to see her bent over, laughing. “Dude, quit laughing at me,” I protested.

  “You’re funny.” She disconnected the call and slid her phone into the back pocket of skinny jeans she wore with a simple yellow sweater. “Nice place you’ve made here. I like it.” She gestured around the space.

  “Thanks,” I said, putting away my own phone. “I kind of like it, too. But what are you doing here? You don’t work Fridays?”

  “I needed to pick something up in Bloomington and dinner prep’s all done. I thought I’d stop by, see what you’ve got going on, maybe wangle lunch, too. But what’s this big favor you need?”

  “Sit down and let me fix you a tuna burger, then we’ll talk.” I waved at a couple that was leaving and called out a thank-you.

  “Ooh, sounds fab. I’m going to check out the pans while you cook.”

  It didn’t take me long to grill her burger and crisp up the bun, then assemble it with the sauce I’d made, plus lettuce and a big tomato slice. I added a scoop of potato salad and a pickle to the plate and brought it to the table that Danna had prepped with a place mat and a napkin-wrapped packet.

  “Soup’s on,” I called to Christina. I brought over two iced teas and sat down.

  She sat opposite, saying, “I love those Swans Down hexagonal cake pans. I might need to buy a couple of those for home.” She bit into the burger. “Mmmm.”

  “Thanks. So our new mayor got a total bug up her, um, rear end. She wants to hold a fund-raiser for the animal shelter here.”

  Christina swallowed. “Good idea. Good PR for you.”

  “Except it’s tomorrow, and she only told me an hour ago.” I filled Christina in on the details. “Do you think the inn would donate materials? You and I can make the apps in the afternoon, maybe?”

  She finished another bite before she spoke. “Crazy timing. I’ll have to ask the boss, but I do think the inn will make the donation. However, we have a two-hundred-person wedding reception scheduled for tomorrow night. I’m flat-out busy. Was just picking up the cake in Bloomington.”

  I frowned. “I’ll never get it all done myself.” I glanced at Danna. Maybe I could enlist her help with cooking.

  “But listen. We have bunches of extra hors d’oeuvres in the freezer. Mini meatballs, little qui
ches, buffalo wingettes, that kind of thing. Somebody scheduled a function and then canceled at the last minute. The appetizers are taking up space and aren’t going to keep much longer. How about we donate them? Save you all that time.”

  “Seriously? That would be perfect. When Corrine described a menu that takes more work than any other kind of food, I was wondering how I’d pull it off.”

  “Yeah, so you simply heat up ours. The work’s already done, and the inn gets credit for homemade. You can add something of your own, like mini cheese biscuits, maybe. Or how about tiny tuna sliders? This is incredible. Sure beats White Castle.” She pointed to the burger. “Capers, right?”

  “Exactly. That’s a really good idea about the appetizers. You’ve saved my bacon, girlfriend.”

  “Happy to help.” She looked around and then leaned toward me. “I also came by because I heard a morsel of news about Ed Kowalski that you might be interested in.”

  “Gossip or hard fact?”

  She tilted her head sideways a couple of times. “Some of both. Appears he’s in trouble with the Board of Health. Had kitchen violations—grease, vermin, that kind of thing.”

  “Are they going to shut him down?”

  “The little bird who told me said he only got a warning this time. But Board of Health violations are never a good thing—mainly for the customers. Who wants mouse droppings near their breakfast? And now the Board of Health will be breathing down his neck about everything.”

  By two o’clock the restaurant was empty and quiet. Outside the rain had blown through and sun streaming in through the windows warmed the old pine floor. I checked my e-mail, but there was nothing from Italy. I blew a breath out and set to wiping down the tables.

  “What’s up, Robbie? Seems like something’s bugging you,” Danna said over her shoulder from the sink.

  I walked over to join her and leaned my back against the now-cool grill. I tossed the rag back and forth from one hand to the other.

  “Kind of a long story.” I kept tossing.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “It’s just that I never met my father. Mom and me, we didn’t need him. But this week I found out who he was, and I dug up his e-mail address. And then I sent him an e-mail. In Italy.”

  “Italy? That’s awesome.” She turned her head to look at me. “You look Italian, now that I think about it. So, did he write back?”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s the problem. If I’d never found him, I wouldn’t even care. But now, well, I guess I care.”

  “That sucks.” She turned back to the sink. “If you can find his number, you could text him. E-mail’s kind of old-fashioned, you know.”

  “I’ll give him another day or two.”

  “I never knew my own dad, either,” Danna said, her arms up to her elbows in the soapy water, her hands jostling the pots and pans as she scrubbed.

  “Really?” A big old grabber on a crane pulled me out of my own stupid swamp of dejection. “Did your mom want it that way?”

  “She didn’t have much choice. He died when I was a little baby.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that, Danna.” I stopped tossing my rag around and started to wipe down the counter next to the grill.

  “It’s okay.” She rinsed a big pot and set it upside down on the drainboard. “One of my uncles used to take me to the father-daughter dances and stuff like that. Mom and I were cool by ourselves.”

  “That’s how it was for my mom and me, too. Corrine’s very attractive, though. I’m surprised she never found another partner.” Come to think of it, my mom was a knockout, too, in her sun-bleached surfer way. I’d never thought about why she didn’t find a man to love her.

  “Mom dated some. She likes to be in control, though.” Danna raised one eyebrow and grinned at me. “Maybe you’ve seen that.”

  I laughed. “Sure. Like this fund-raiser thing. If anybody can pull it off, I guess it’s her.”

  “She’s pretty bossy, but she can get business done, for sure.”

  I checked my e-mail one more time after Danna headed home at two-thirty, even though I’d looked at it less than an hour before. I saw the invoice from the delivery. A solicitation from the American Culinary Federation. A coupon from a restaurant supply company. But nothing from Italy, not even in my SPAM folder.

  Stretching, I walked with leaden feet to the front door to turn the sign to CLOSED. I opened the door, instead. A gust of wind blew a few dry leaves into a mini cyclone scudding down the street, the same wind that had blown the storm through and east to Ohio. Everything was washed clean by the rain, but the air held a taste of winter. A fox squirrel dug its brownish orange head in the golden leaves at the base of a beech tree across the road, then the critter hurried into the woods.

  I took a deep breath. The week’s puzzles would get solved one way or another. I knew I wasn’t a murderer. Even if Buck arrested me on some kind of false evidence, the truth would come out sooner or later. And Roberto? Well, I’d lived without a father my whole life. I didn’t need one now.

  But I did have an aunt down the road I hadn’t seen in a few days. I shut and locked the door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and tossed my apron in the laundry bin. I wasn’t due at Jim’s until six, and Danna and I had completed a bunch of the prep for tomorrow as we’d continued to talk, as well as cleaning up from today.

  On my way to Adele’s, which was out on Beanblossom Road, I realized I was in front of Stella’s house. I slowed to check it out. Her front garden already displayed a look of neglect. An oak leaf sat pasted to the top of a green gazing ball, which perched atop a three-foot-high dirty white pedestal with Grecian curlicues. Next to it, a garden decoration almost lay in the dirt, one of those boards cut and painted to look like the behind of a hefty aproned woman bending over to weed. Curled, dry leaves nestled behind the corner of a low picket fence, which needed a paint job.

  I shuddered, speeding up again, and soon the van was clunking along the rutted gravel road to Adele’s farm. The woods opened up to a peaceful vista of sheep grazing on a gentle slope beyond a fence. I pulled up next to her cottage, which looked like it belonged in an English village. The front garden, bounded by a low picket fence, held a riot of fall-tinted flowers still blooming in shouts of yellow, red, and gold. Vines trailed over the fence and the doorway, and a peach tree grew flattened and trained against the side of the house. A big pot overflowing with pink geraniums occupied the front stoop, since Adele never used that door. The garden featured her own gazing ball, as many Indiana gardens did, this one a blue-swirled globe held up by a whimsical pink metal flamingo.

  A small Honda sat behind Adele’s red pickup. Oops. She had company. Maybe I should have called first. Maybe I wouldn’t be crying on the shoulder of my only relative, after all. When I climbed out of the van, her Border collie, Sloopy, ran up and yipped at me, then stuck his white snout into my offered hand. After I rubbed his black head, I reached back into the van for the container of biscuits I kept for him and handed him one. Adele had showed me how adept he was at rounding up the sheep and told me “collie” meant “sheep-herding dog” in Scottish.

  I knocked on the side door and waited. I glanced down and groaned at the flecks of pancake batter mixed with grease spatters on my jeans, but I knew Adele wouldn’t care. She still didn’t come to the door. She could be out in the barn. I hadn’t seen her in the fields anywhere and hoped she was okay. She was a tough cookie, but she wasn’t a young one. I didn’t recognize the car from anywhere and I shivered. With a murderer skulking around free, what if . . .

  No. Don’t go there. She was probably out in the barn. I pressed the doorbell and, after a minute, turned away.

  The door opened behind me. “Robbie, come on in,” Adele said.

  I turned back. I started to greet her, but then stopped when I saw a man behind her. This was definitely not a dangerous situation, though. Adele’s cheeks were suspiciously rosy and her oversized shirt was misbuttoned, one sid
e of the collar sticking up into her neck and the shirttail on the opposite side flapping forlornly against her yoga-pants-clad thigh.

  “I don’t want to interrupt—”

  “Nonsense. Come in and set with us. Do you know Samuel?” She stepped back to reveal a barefooted and smiling Samuel MacDonald next to her, also looking like he’d just pulled on his clothes.

  “Phil’s grandfather. We met, when, just this morning?” I greeted him and shook his hand when he extended it. I had no idea Adele had a love life. I wasn’t so prudish or ignorant I didn’t think people in their seventies couldn’t enjoy a physical relationship, but I kind of wished she’d told me. I gave a mental shrug. Maybe it was new. Or maybe Adele wanted to keep her private life private.

  “How about a mug of hot cider with Sorghrum to warm you up?” Adele asked after I followed them into a kitchen that smelled deliciously of freshly baked bread. “And I have sourdough in the oven. Should be done right about now.” A timer dinged.

  “I’d love some,” I said.

  A couple of minutes later, we were all seated at the table with steaming mugs of mulled cider in front of us, mugs fragrant with scents of cinnamon and cloves. The bread rested on a cutting board on the counter, smelling like heaven. Samuel set a squat, round-shouldered bottle of an amber liquid in the middle.

  “What in heck is ‘sorghrum’?” I asked. Despite being a chef in the area for the past three years, I’d never heard of it.

  “Sorghum spirits. It’s new,” Samuel said. “A local guy distills it from an Amish farmer’s sorghum. An Amish farmer with thirteen children. He doesn’t even drink alcohol, himself.” He laughed. “They wanted to call it sorghum rum, but the state wouldn’t let them.”

  “Want to try a hit?” Adele asked, uncorking the bottle and pushing it in my direction.

  “Why not?” I sniffed the spirits, its heady aroma hitting my sinuses. I poured a little into my cider, tasted it, and grimaced. “It’s kind of molasses-y.”

  “Too sweet?” Adele asked.

  “No, it’s okay.” I took another sip. “I guess it grows on you.”