“Very admirable.” Allen raised his glass in a toast.
“She also started the recycling program at the schools,” Faith said. “And she started a meditation group to help kids deal with stress.”
“I see we know which way you’re voting,” Annie said.
Faith blushed. “I know she’ll represent the ideas that are important to me. She’s all about keeping the kids safe and making the planet a better place.”
“That does sound pretty good.” I took a sip of my martini, a small one.
Annie nodded. “Those are all good things, but she doesn’t always have a way to pay for all those pretty plans. The high school had to petition the school board for two thousand extra dollars to pay for that recycling plan. That money could have gone to buy books or subsidize kids who can’t afford to go on field trips. Plus, some local businesses suffered. Didn’t Justin’s landscape company have the contract for the schools before she got everyone to go organic?”
“He still does,” Allen said. “It’s just costing him a lot more to fulfill the contract than he expected. They had quite a fight about it.”
“So everybody else loves her?” I asked.
Faith made a face. “Of course not. Nobody is universally loved. All the right-minded people love her.”
“And by right-minded people you mean . . . ?” I asked.
Faith smiled. “People like me.”
I handed over a cracker with Brie. “We really need to work on your self-esteem. You’re not confident enough in your own convictions.”
“I’ll start saying an affirmation about it.” She popped the cracker and cheese in her mouth.
“Are you mocking my affirmations?” Annie asked.
Faith swallowed. “I’m not sure. Are we still saying ‘The tulip crop will be amazing’ every morning three times while looking deeply into our own eyes in the mirror?”
Annie shot me a look. “Of course not. That was last year’s affirmation. This year we’re saying ‘Seasonal flowers will stay in style.’ But back to Sheri. Who doesn’t like her?”
I tossed a towel at her. “You are such a gossip!”
She shrugged. “Honestly, it’s like a business thing for me. If I know who’s fighting or who’s getting lovey-dovey or who’s not feeling well, I know what kind of flowers to stock.”
“Justify it however you want. It’s still gossip.” I drank a little more of my martini.
Faith took an even bigger sip of hers. “Cheryl Watson hates her.”
“Why?” Annie asked.
Faith waved her hand. “It’s ridiculous.”
Annie licked her fingers. “I love ridiculous.”
Faith looked back and forth as if she were checking for spies. “It was a birthday-treat issue.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Annie rolled her eyes.
“I am not kidding. Sheri wanted the parents to pledge not to put peanuts in the birthday treats they brought into school.”
“Was someone in the class allergic to peanuts?” Peanut allergies aren’t funny. People die.
“No.” Faith shook her head.
Now I was confused. “Then why bother?”
“Someone could be and not know it yet. She just wanted to err on the side of caution. She said that it takes a village to raise a child and that if any one child in the village was allergic to peanuts, she wanted to be as vigilant in keeping that child safe as if she had given birth to him or her herself. Cheryl thought it was too much caution and since her son’s favorite dessert is a rocky-road fudge with peanuts in it, she brought it anyway. Sheri threw it out.”
“Threw out fudge?” Inconceivable!
Faith nodded. “Every last square.”
“I might hate her a little, too. Who are you voting for?” I asked Annie.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m still weighing the possibilities.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger.
“Okay. Who are you voting for, Allen?” I asked.
He made a face.
Annie laughed. “He won’t tell. He takes this political stuff very seriously. He doesn’t mess around.”
“How many people are on the council?”
“Four members plus me.”
“Are any of the people already on it?”
Allen gave me the look that Chef Emanuel, the pastry teacher at the Culinary Institute, used to give me when I didn’t take the time to let my eggs and butter come to room temperature before I started baking. Disappointment. It cut. “You don’t know your city council members, Rebecca?”
“No. I guess I never paid that much attention.”
“You should. Your city council steers the town. The decisions they make affect everyone in all facets of their life.”
I snorted. “All facets, Allen? Really?”
“Yes. Really. We make zoning decisions. That means we impact what kind of business is next to yours or next to your house and how fast the city grows, which might impact the worth of your house. We make decisions about your trash pickup, equipment for law enforcement, signage.” With each subject he pounded on the table. “We are everywhere.”
“Now I’m a little frightened. I’m making Sprocket look under the bed before I go to sleep.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Rebecca.”
“She doesn’t know how to be anything else,” Annie said. “You might as well ask her not to breathe.”
I shrugged. She had a point. “Okay. The council is important and I should know their names. Educate me.”
Dana Nelson, Sophia Estrada and Isaac Turner have been serving on the council for the last two years and each have a year left in their terms. Hector Goodwin passed away last month, leaving an open seat.”
“How did Hector die?” I’d always kind of liked Hector. He was a bit of a lush, but he was a lovey lush. He was more likely to tell you that he’d always admired and respected you than to try to pick a fight. I liked that in a man.
“Hit by a train.” Allen shook his head.
I winced. “How? Did his car stall on the tracks or something?”
“No. He’d been at the tavern all night and decided to take a shortcut. Best we can guess, he stopped to, uh, relieve himself on the tracks and got tangled up in his pants and couldn’t get out of the way of the train.” Allen looked uncomfortable just talking about it.
I stifled a laugh. “What an entirely undignified way to go.”
“The poor conductor has had a very hard time. He refuses to work on any night with a full moon.” Annie slipped off her shoes and put her feet in Allen’s lap.
“Okay. So you’ve got one open seat and five people running for it? That’s some pretty stiff competition.” Odds were not in anyone’s favor.
“Lots of good civic-minded people here in Grand Lake. It’s one of the things that makes us so special.” Allen rubbed Annie’s feet. She moaned a little.
“We’ve also got lots of people with their own agendas in Grand Lake. That makes us a different kind of special,” Annie said.
“What do you mean?” I sank down onto the floor with my martini.
“Well, each of the people running is doing it for reasons that aren’t entirely altruistic.” Annie sipped her drink.
“What can you get for being on the city council?”
“Did you not hear what Allen was saying? The city council controls how this town runs. A little shift here or a little shift there can make a big difference. Sheri has a whole organic agenda, which, granted, isn’t going to line her pockets, but it’s important to her. Justin is going to stand in her way because having to go organic is hard for his landscaping business. Geraldine is very pro-business. She’s going to do everything she can for business owners in town.”
“What about Chris and Taylor?” I asked.
Annie looked over at
Allen, who shrugged. “I’m not sure what their agendas are yet, but rest assured, they have them.”
“What do you say to that, Allen?” It seemed to contradict his thoughts on altruism.
“I say the bears get some. The bulls get some. But the pigs get nothing.” He set his drink down with a thump.
• • •
Garrett had insisted on spending the night, but I was still mad, so he’d ended up on the couch. He woke up about the time that my coffee started brewing.
“That smells good,” he said, rubbing his eyes. Then he cringed and rubbed at his neck. My apartment is small. So is my couch. My boyfriend? Not so much. The couch was about six inches shorter than Garrett. Watching him try to work out the crick in his neck almost made up for the nights I’d spent on the crappy plastic mattress in the jail before Faith had brought me that memory-foam topper for it. Almost.
“I’m making the coffee to take over to Haley,” I said.
“You can’t spare a single mug?” he asked, looking forlorn.
“I don’t know. Are you certain it won’t endanger you somehow? I might be a poisoner. I need constant supervision, and you were asleep while I made this.” I peeked in my fridge. Everything was old. With any luck, Haley would have cream and sugar at her place.
I put on my thickest cardigan, picked up my French press and headed toward the door with Sprocket at my heels.
“Hold on for two seconds,” Garrett grumbled, shoving his feet into his shoes. “I’m coming.”
Outside, the frosted grass crunched under our feet. Garrett picked up a tennis ball from the box of Sprocket’s toys at the bottom of the stairs and tossed it. Sprocket leapt and caught it midair. I couldn’t help but smile. There was a crisp perfection to the air, and the way his apricot fur looked against the background of the grass and trees made a picture that gladdened my heart.
Sprocket dropped the ball at Garrett’s feet and Garrett threw it again. Grudgingly I said, “I suppose there’s enough coffee for you to have some, too.” It’s hard to stay mad at someone who’s nice to your dog.
We all trotted up the stairs. I knocked lightly even though I was pretty sure everyone was up.
The door flew open, but instead of my sister, it was Dan.
“Oh. You’re still here, then,” I said, shouldering past him.
“I live here,” he said, following me into the kitchen.
“Sister!” Haley jumped up from her chair and gave me a hug.
Evan wrapped himself around my knees and crowed, “Auntie Becca!”
For a second I couldn’t move. The feelings rushing through me were too strong and they were all mixed up. Relief. Love. Frustration. Anger. Hurt. Pride. I set the coffee down and wiped at my eye. “Hi, champ,” I said, kneeling down to give Evan a hug.
I sat down, pointedly keeping my back to Dan and Garrett.
Haley stayed standing. She looked from me, over my shoulder, to them. Then shook her head. “This won’t do. We need to sit down and talk this out.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked, pouring myself a mug of coffee and helping myself to the cream that sat on the table. “They and the rest of this town are a bunch of Big Brother asshats who think women should stay in their place in the kitchen.”
“But you love being in the kitchen,” Garrett protested.
“Beside the point.” I waved a hand at him to dismiss him.
Haley said, “Dan, I think you should start. You’re the most at fault here.”
That surprised me enough to make me turn and look at him. Dan is not the chatty sort. When he does want to chat, he usually meets me on the porch with a beer. Of course, it was getting a little cold for that and the fact that he’d kept me locked up in a cell downtown for the better part of a week made that trickier than usual. Desperate times, I supposed.
Garrett and Dan both walked around so they were in front of me, backs to the refrigerator. They stood in that weird fig-leaf position that some men stand in, as if they thought I was going to kick them in a sensitive spot. They shouldn’t do that. It gave me ideas.
My eyes narrowed. Were they going to say something that would make me want to kick them in a sensitive spot? Pretty much everything out of their mouths for the past week or two had made me want to do exactly that.
Dan cleared his throat. “Rebecca, Garrett and I would like to apologize.”
I set my coffee cup down with a soft thump and leaned back in my chair. “You do? What brings this on?”
Dan spun one of the kitchen chairs around and straddled it. “Don’t do this, Bec. Don’t break my balls over this.”
“Excuse me? You keep me locked up in a cell without even decent toothpaste or a wide-toothed comb for my hair and then I’m not supposed to break your balls when you go all googly-eyed and meek? What the actual heck, Dan?” I turned to Garrett. “And you? Are you sorry, too?”
“I am.” Garrett sat down, chair facing forward like a normal person. “I really am.”
“You need to tell her why,” Haley prompted. “You need to explain it to her or nothing’s going to change.”
Dan nodded. “Here’s the thing, Rebecca. I don’t want you to keep your nose fully out of it. Your nose has proven to be too good. What I want is to be able to consult you, to talk things over with you, to bounce ideas off you. If you hadn’t seen that popcorn tin, I would have still thought someone had been trying to kill Lloyd McLaughlin. I needed your input to get on the right track. You see things that I don’t. You hear things I don’t. I need us to communicate.”
I had never done anything to keep him from talking to me. Never. “Of course you can talk to me. We’ve been talking to each other since we were seven. You’re the one who went all silent about stuff. Not me.”
He dropped his head for a moment, but then looked up again, fixing me with those bright blue eyes of his. “I want to be able to talk to you and know that you’re not going to go running off and putting yourself in danger.”
He had a point about that. There was a reason that Phillip had such a compelling argument about the safety of the community when we were in court. I still had bad dreams about Sprocket getting shot, and the smell of smoke made my heart race faster, which isn’t a great thing for someone who works in a kitchen. “I don’t like being in danger any more than you like me being in it.”
Garrett shoved back from the table and started to pace the kitchen. “Then why do you do what you do? Why do you confront people in lighthouses? Why do you go to the wake of someone who ate the popcorn people think you poisoned?”
I sat back in my chair. I wasn’t sure I had a good answer to those questions. I thought through what had brought me to those particular places in the past. “I think when they handed out fight-or-flight reflexes, I got an extra helping of fight.”
Dan snorted. “I’ve known that since you punched me in the nose for putting a worm in your chocolate milk in second grade.”
“It’s part of who I am. If I feel attacked, I push back.” I studied my hands for a moment.
“Rebecca,” Haley said. “Do you have anything to say?”
Did I? I thought about the file on Lloyd McLaughlin. All the interviews Dan had done with the very people I thought I was so smart to point out as suspects. All the evidence he’d sifted through. All the work he’d quietly and efficiently done. “I’m sorry.”
Dan straightened in his chair. “For what?”
“For not giving you the credit you deserve.” I felt too bad about it to actually look him in the eye as I said it. I turned my coffee mug in slow circles on the table. “You’re good at your job and you deserve my respect.”
Dan asked, “Are you playing me?”
I looked up at that. “Playing you? When have I ever played you?”
He made a face at me. “Well, there was the time you convinced me you knew how to drive and
we nearly rolled a station wagon into the lake. Then there was the time you got me to break into the junior high by telling me that you thought the janitor was hiding gold bars in the supply closet.”
I held up my hands. “Point taken. No. I’m not playing you. I’m being one hundred percent sincere.”
“What brought about this change of heart?” Dan asked.
“Seeing the files you’d compiled on all this already. I . . . I wasn’t giving you the credit you deserve. You’re good at your job. You’re smart and efficient and loyal and kind and . . .” Damn it. Something was making my eyes sting.
“Okay. That’s enough,” Haley said. “Enough with all the lovey-dovey stuff. Are we all on the same page, then?”
“If it’s the page where I make everyone cinnamon rolls, then absolutely.” I stood up and started getting out mixing bowls.
Twelve
I slid the plate of cinnamon rolls away from Dan. “Leave at least one that we can drop off at Garrett’s office.” He couldn’t wait for the time it took for the rolls to rise, so he’d left. Apparently leaving me in the custody of the sheriff was good enough to satisfy the terms he’d agreed to. He’d looked really sad, though. I wasn’t sure if it was because he wasn’t getting cinnamon rolls or if it was because I wouldn’t kiss him good-bye. I wasn’t one hundred percent ready to forgive him.
Dan licked icing off his fingers. “Does that mean you’re going to say yes?”
“To what?” I cleared off the rest of the table.
“Are you serious?” He went over to the sink to wash his hands. “Have you forgotten that he proposed to you?”
I hadn’t. Not really. I’d been purposefully not thinking about it. “He didn’t really. He didn’t have a ring. He didn’t get down on one knee. There was no champagne or flowers, and let’s not forget, he didn’t actually even ask. I don’t think it counts without those things.”
“Did Antoine have all those things when he proposed?” Dan dried his hands on the dishcloth and then leaned back against the counter.
He had. He’d had dozens of bouquets delivered to the soufflé class I was taking at the Culinary Institute. Then as class ended, a string quartet started playing in the hallway. Antoine had strode in, gotten down on one knee, and in front of my entire class, he’d professed his undying love and told me that I would make him the happiest man on earth if I would agree to be his wife. The room had gone wild when I’d said yes. I looked over at Dan and nodded.
Assault and Buttery Page 17