Assault and Buttery

by Kristi Abbott

  In short, I sucked.

  “Maybe we should move,” I said to Sprocket. “Maybe we should pick up and find someplace else to go ruin. Someplace where there are fewer people I care about.”

  He looked up at me with that head tilt that read as quizzical.

  “Yeah. I know. There would be people that other people would care about and that would spread more misery. Maybe we should become hermits.” We could find a little cave someplace and only come out twice a year to buy supplies. I could stop shaving my legs. There were all kinds of potential benefits.

  We got to POPS. There was music, but the thump was pretty quiet. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Sprocket and I pushed through the front door and I almost needed to sit down.

  All the smoke damage had been scrubbed away. The dust had been cleared off the glass shelving. The counters glistened. Tentatively, I walked into the kitchen. Then I really did need to sit down. I grabbed a chair and sank into it.

  “Girl.” Carson rushed over to me. “You okay?”

  I pointed around the room at the new shining stove, the gorgeous cabinets, my old French-country table holding court in the center of the room, albeit with a few scorch marks, but still holding court. The scorch marks just gave it character.

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It’s almost done. I figured I’d spring it on you in a day or two. You seemed busy.”

  “Oh, Carson,” I said. Those were the only words I could get out because the feels were so strong. They broke over me in waves. The feeling when I signed the lease on the place with Coco by my side. The feeling when Carson and I finished the renovations the first time and I knew I had created a new happy place for my heart. The feeling when I made my first batch of Coco Pop Fudge and knew my store would be okay.

  Yes. Things had gone wrong. Terribly wrong on occasion, but things had gone right, too. I had held my little niece hours after she was born. My nephew counted on me for his Friday night bath and fun times at the park. My sister knew I would always be there for her. My best friend trusted me and relied on me. My boyfriend had proposed.

  I sprang up, threw my arms around Carson and said, “Thank you. Thank you for this beautiful kitchen.”

  Before he could reply, my phone rang. It was Dan. “I’ve got the search warrant. It’s on.”

  • • •

  Searches look exciting on television. Crowds of law enforcement officials race through the house, empty out drawers, check under cushions, rummage through closets. Then somebody yells, “Got something!” Everyone races over and the case is solved.

  The reality? Not so thrilling.

  In reality, a small group of people slowly and carefully make their way through a place wearing plastic booties on their feet so as not to track in mud. Nobody yells anything, because Sheri’s house is neat and tidy and nobody’s finding anything except the occasional Lego under the sofa and a tiny hand-knitted sock stuffed between the couch cushions.

  Sprocket and I stood next to Dan out by his cruiser. “We’re not finding anything,” he said. “Not anything to link her to the poison. Not anything to link her to the diary.”

  “Can I go in?” I asked.

  He sighed. “It’s not like there’s any evidence we’ve collected that you could taint. I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

  I went in through the side door into the kitchen, leaving Sprocket outside with Dan. Her kitchen was set up much the same as mine was at POPS. It made sense; the houses had been built at about the same time. Of course, her kitchen wasn’t as fabulous as mine was currently. It was then that it struck me. Her dishwasher was in the exact same place as mine. I rushed out the door. “Dan, you should look under the counter.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked up from where he’d squatted down to pet Sprocket.

  “In the corner. Next to where the dishwasher is. There’s nothing but empty space back there. It would be the perfect place to hide a body.” I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t slow myself down.

  Dan straightened up. “And you know this how?”

  “Because when Carson pulled my dishwasher out, I could see under my counter and that it was a big old empty space perfect for hiding something. Ask Evan. He thought it was a super fun cave to play in until he saw a spider.”

  “Ain’t that always the way?” He shook his head. “So I’m getting tips for crime-solving from my four-year-old son?” He strode into the kitchen with me at his heels. It took a few minutes to call the team together and get all the tools they needed.

  They slid the dishwasher out. I could only see darkness behind it. Huerta strapped on a headlamp and crawled into the space and for a few minutes all I could see was his khaki-covered behind. It’s not that the view was bad, it just wasn’t what I wanted to be seeing.

  “What do you see? Is something there?” I craned my neck to try to see around him.

  Sprocket whined.

  Dan put his hand on my shoulder.

  Huerta backed out, sat down heavily, and snapped off the headlamp.

  “Well?” Dan asked.

  Huerta shook his head. “Nothing. Some spiderwebs. A lot of dust. Maybe some mouse droppings. But mainly nothing.”

  Sprocket barked. We all looked at him and then back at one another.

  “Look again. Take your time,” Dan said.

  Huerta went back in. This time when he came out, he was holding something.

  It was a tooth.

  In the end, they found three teeth and a finger bone. There was no DNA to match it to, so there was no real way to know if it belonged to Esther Brancato. The age of the bones was about right, but that didn’t mean much. What did mean something was the rest of the skeleton that they found underneath Sheri’s compost pile and the small bag of pesticide that they found hidden under a loose floorboard in Sheri’s garden shed, the same kind of pesticide she’d gotten them to stop using at the school and the same kind that had been used to poison Lloyd McLaughlin and Marta Hansen.

  • • •

  Later that evening, Garrett and I were back at my apartment. “I’m still confused,” he said.

  “Because it was confusing. We’d been looking at it all wrong.” I stood there with the wooden spoon stuck up in the air. I was making a béchamel sauce, one of my specialties and the base for quite a few of my sauces.

  “I don’t think there’s a wrong way to look at your béchamel. It’s delicious from any angle,” Garrett said, sneaking in and taking a taste.

  “Not the béchamel. The city council. The poisoning and the blackmail and the anonymous tips to the newspaper. We’d been looking at it like it was all one chef, like there was one person responsible for all of it.” It was a muddle, a mess, a mad, mad mishegoss, just like the beer cheese soup that Megan and I had tried to serve at the diner. There had been too many chefs, literally in the case of the soup, but metaphorically in the case of what had been happening around us.

  “There’s not one person behind it all?” Garrett scratched his head. “It seems like Sheri’s at the center of a lot of it.”

  “Yes and no.” I turned around to face him.

  “Maybe you better put down that spoon and explain it to me.” He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer.

  “We kept looking for one person to be responsible for all of it, but they were all crooked. None of them were the people that Allen thought they were when he made his big speech to them.” Poor Allen. He had to call off the election since none of the candidates were left standing. I’d thought he was going to cry when we told him.

  Garrett kissed my neck. “Poor Allen.”

  “What I don’t understand is why Sheri felt she had to poison anyone.” I tried to reach over my shoulder to stir the béchamel.

  “Don’t worry about it. Dan will get her to talk.” He reached over and turned the heat off from beneath my saucepan.

/>   I started to protest then decided I could always make another béchamel.

  • • •

  “I couldn’t get her to talk,” Dan said the next morning, head resting on his pillowed arms on the kitchen table. “Not a word.”

  “You’re kidding.” I poured him a cup of coffee and set it in front of him.

  “Nope. Well, she did say a couple of words.”

  “What were they? That she wanted a lawyer?” Sheri wasn’t stupid. Maybe she’d try to hire Cynthia. I would if I were her.

  “Nope. She wanted you.” He looked at the cup of coffee like he wanted it, but didn’t have the energy to pick it up.

  I sat down across from him. “Me?” That made no sense. I wasn’t a lawyer. I supposed I could bake a very nice cake with a file in it, but having been locked up, I still wasn’t sure how that would help in any way.

  “You. So will you come downtown?” He sounded so miserable.

  “Of course.” I got out my mother’s old waffle iron. He looked like he was going to need some real sustenance to get through the day. Pancakes weren’t going to cut it.

  “You were right about her grandfather, I think. Huerta started checking back through his records and the guy basically didn’t exist before 1949. The crazy cousin might have been right all along. He might have been a guard at a concentration camp who escaped from Germany in the chaos at the end of the war, assumed a new identity and settled here.” He finally took a sip of coffee.

  “Wow.” I looked in the refrigerator. Haley had no buttermilk. Whatever. I’d make my own. “I still don’t understand why she would poison Justin, though. What did that have to do with anything?”

  “If she doesn’t talk, I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

  • • •

  Two hours and quite a few waffles later—Haley and Evan needed sustenance, too—I was seated across from Sheri in the same old interrogation room down the hall from Dan’s office. I had to admit, I liked the view from this side of the table a whole lot better than I did from Sheri’s side. Looking at her, I could almost feel the scratch of the orange jumpsuit against my skin. I hoped never to be locked up again, never to be shackled, never to be forced to be without decent hair conditioner.

  “Here,” I said, pushing some magazines across to her. “I wasn’t sure what you liked to read, but these might help you pass the time.”

  She looked at them, but made no move to accept them. “You think this is enough?”

  “Enough to entertain you forever? No, but it’ll get you through the day. If you tell me what you like to read or do, I’ll see if I can get something more long-lasting.” I hadn’t expected effusive gratitude, but a thank-you wouldn’t have been out of place.

  “Do you think it’s enough to make up for what you’ve done to me?” She spit out the words like peas hitting a hot frying pan.

  I pushed back in my chair. “What I’ve done to you?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  She gestured down to her orange jumpsuit as best she could with her hands handcuffed to the table. “You realize this is your fault, right?”

  “What?” That made no sense. None at all. “What does this have to do with me?”

  She snorted. “Only everything.”

  “How did anything I did make you try to poison Justin Cruz?” My brain was scrambling for an answer.

  Sheri shook her head. “I wasn’t trying to poison Justin Cruz. Well, not really. That was just a side benefit.”

  “A side benefit to what?”

  “To getting rid of you.”

  Now I really was confused. “You thought I was going to eat the popcorn and die? How? I’d already sent it out.”

  “No. I thought you’d get blamed for poisoning the popcorn. Then you’d be too busy worrying about that to spend any more time looking at that stupid diary from that stupid girl that my stupid grandfather killed and stowed under my stupid kitchen counter.”

  I couldn’t have felt more stunned if I’d dropped a cast-iron skillet on my own head. “So you knew about that all along?”

  Sheri laughed. “You really think I wouldn’t notice the corpse of a girl under my counter? And that if I did notice it, I wouldn’t do anything about it?”

  None of this was making sense to me. “She stayed hidden for more than sixty years. Why wouldn’t you think she could just stay hidden?”

  She turned away from me as if she was dismissing me. “You’re insane.”

  That was rich. “I’m not the one who poisoned two people.”

  “No. But everyone thinks you are, don’t they?” That thought apparently made her smile.

  She had a point. “Okay. I think I’m beginning to see what you’re saying. You poisoned the popcorn so I’d stop trying to figure out who the secret Nazi in Esther Brancato’s diary was.”

  She clapped her hands, making her chains clank. “Bravo. You aren’t as stupid as you look. But then it took you and Sheriff Dan too darn long to figure out that the poison had been in the popcorn because of stupid Justin Cruz and his stupid nut allergy.”

  I paused for a second to appreciate the irony of her being undone by an unknown nut allergy after trying to make the entire elementary school nut-free in case of just such a thing. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “So then I had to poison Marta, too, to make sure people would suspect you. I thought I was totally home free when Dan locked you up. What damage could you do from there?” She shook her head. “Apparently plenty with all your little minions running around town, signing petitions to free you, protesting, asking questions for you. Unbelievable. The nightmare wouldn’t stop.”

  A smile quirked at my lips. It felt good to know people had my back. Or had had my back for a little while at least. “But, Sheri, you were the person who poisoned the popcorn. Why would investigating that instead of the diary take the heat off you?”

  “I didn’t think you’d investigate the poisoning! I thought Dan would keep you out of it. Then your business would fail because no one wants to eat potentially poisoned popcorn and you’d be gone and no one would remember the moldy old diary you found in the wall of your failed store.” She slumped back in her seat.

  She’d been right about the effect of the poisoned popcorn. Look what had happened to Megan’s and my diner experiment. “What made you think Dan wouldn’t figure it out?”

  “With everything else everyone running for council was pulling? He’d have too many suspects. It would take him forever to sort it out. He’d still be investigating it as a deliberate murder of Lloyd McLaughlin if it wasn’t for you.” She made a shooing gesture as if she could get rid of me like a fly.

  Sheri’s motives were never going to make sense to me. “How long have you known your grandfather killed Esther Brancato?”

  “I found the bones there when I was painting back when I first moved into the house. I wanted to get all around the dishwasher, so I pulled it out. It was so filthy in there. So dirty. I couldn’t stand it.” Sheri shuddered. “I crawled in to clean and there they were.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t call the authorities?” I was pretty sure that would be my first call if I found human remains under my kitchen counter.

  “And let everyone know my grandfather was a murderer? I mean, not just a Nazi, which would have been bad enough, but the murderer of a young woman in this town? Don’t be insane!”

  I actually grabbed hold of the table. I felt so at sea, I thought the room might actually be moving. “Wait. You already knew your grandfather was a Nazi?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course I did, Rebecca. When I started doing my genealogy research on him it became clear pretty quickly that there was something fishy. It was as if he didn’t exist at all before 1949. Then when I was going through some of his things, I found a pin. It had what looked like two lightning bolts on it. It didn’t take a
lot of research to figure out it was an SS pin, the kind a Nazi officer would have worn.”

  I gasped.

  “Don’t get all dramatic about it, Rebecca.” Sheri rolled her eyes.

  “No need to get all snippy with me, Sheri. I’m not the one who killed someone to cover up the fact that my grandfather had killed someone to cover up the fact that he was a Nazi.” I rolled my eyes right back at her. No one out eye rolls me. No one.

  “No. You’re not. You’re the one who’s constantly sticking her nose into everyone else’s business. You’re the one who’s always asking questions about things that have absolutely nothing to do with her. You’re the one who was going to start digging into that stupid diary you found and eventually figure out who the Nazi was and what happened to Esther Brancato.”

  “So you poisoned Lloyd McLaughlin? How does that make any sense whatsoever?” I still couldn’t see the connection.

  “You are such an idiot. No one was supposed to die. He was just supposed to get sick. And I’m not talking about Lloyd. I’m talking about Justin.” Sheri shook her head.

  “Why Justin?”

  She shrugged. “I figured a little pesticide would wipe that smirk right off his face and I was hoping it would make him sick enough that he wouldn’t be able to campaign for a while. We were neck and neck in the polls, you know.”

  I did know. I’d been one of the people planning to vote for Sheri. That made me feel a little ill.

  “Justin kept saying those pesticides were so harmless, so I thought he wouldn’t mind eating some. I thought it would take care of you, too. If everyone thought you’d accidentally poisoned someone, POPS would go under and you’d leave again.”

  “How did you even know about the popcorn?”

  “You told me. That day at the park. I saw you there with your nephew and wanted to find out what you knew already. You practically sketched out the plan for me to frame you right there and then. You told me about the popcorn. You told me about Marta Hansen. You might as well have given me a blueprint.”

  “Weren’t you worried the poison would be traced back to you?” I asked.