Death Under The Fireworks: A Culinary Cozy Mystery (A Murder In Milburn, The Novellas Book 2)

by Nancy McGovern

  “Johann hero-worshipped his father. But me? What did I think of Reynold? Well, he was an old man, and a sharp man, and a capable man, but I never thought of him as my husband’s father. I thought of him as my husband’s boss! Oh, he’d act with strangers and the public as if he were the most generous, romantic man in the world. But with us, with his family, all he was is cruel.”

  “I got a taste of what he was like today,” Nora said.

  “Exactly,” Lila replied. “He was paranoid too. Johann said nothing about the man, but Reynold just assumed Johann had to be talking about him.”

  “Why?” Nora asked.

  “What do you mean why? He was unbalanced.”

  “Did he have reason to think Johann didn’t like him?”

  “Why wouldn’t Johann like him?” Lila laughed. “Johann was everything that Petyr wasn’t. He was a devoted son. I sometimes think that he tried extra hard to be seen as the “good boy” because Petyr was so rebellious.”

  “Petyr was rebellious?”

  “I heard about their childhood,” Lila said. “Johann used to be at the top of his class, while Petyr failed everything other than math and art. Johann used to be on the football team, while Petyr quit playing soccer because he was too busy chasing girls and playing in a rock band.”

  Nora laughed.

  “They’re almost like two brothers from a sitcom, aren’t they? The good boy, the bad boy.”

  “Except it almost felt exaggerated to me,” Lila said. “Both of them. Johann especially. It always felt like they’re just playing the roles assigned to them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Johann’s so different when he’s with me,” Lila said. “He’s nothing like the boring COO who helps his father’s business. He’s immensely creative. He’s extremely funny. He’s talented. Then, when he was around his parents, he’d become like a little boy again. Always looking to please his daddy.”

  “So if he was obedient, why did Reynold suspect that he might be bad mouthing him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he realized that Johann was slowly beginning to itch under the collar. Maybe he realized that Johann had finally had enough of all the insults and accusations.”

  “Johann’s father insulted and accused him of things?”

  “Oh. No.” Lila’s lips tightened. “They had a good relationship. Anyone who knew them would tell you that. Johann would never hurt or embarrass his father.”

  “But his father did hurt and embarrass him?”

  “Well, I’ll put it this way. Johann was COO of Von Kyburg Industries, but Reynold was the CEO and Managing Director. So sometimes, even if Johann had a good idea about how the company should move forward, Reynold would veto it. But Johann didn’t mind. He knew that he was the one who’d be taking over the company sooner or later.”

  Perhaps, Nora thought, Johann had decided on sooner rather than later.

  *****

  Chapter 4

  Katya looked miserable. Nora sat beside her, patting her on the shoulder as she clutched a pillow and bit her lip. They were upstairs in Nora’s room, with Petyr having been taken away for questioning by the police.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nora said.

  “It’s horrible,” Katya said. “Oh, he was a ruthless beast, Petyr’s father, but this is horrible nevertheless. I hated him, I hated him for Petyr’s sake. But now, I don’t feel like hating him. I just feel very, very unhappy.”

  “Petyr hated Johann?” asked Nora.

  “He ran away from home a few years ago,” Katya said. “Things were complicated.”

  “Katya, can you think of… well, you know Petyr. Do you think it’s possible...”

  Katya looked up at Nora, her eyes sparking fire.

  “Possible that he killed his father? How dare you say so! Reynold was an evil man anyway, but Petyr wouldn’t hurt him!”

  “He was a man,” Nora said. “You judge him now, but you have no right to. He had a life, and he deserved to live, and in his death, he deserves to be grieved for. And for his death, his killer deserves to be punished.”

  “Yes.” Katya’s eyes almost changed color as they began to glisten. “You’re right about that, Nora. 100% right. No matter how angry he made me, or how badly he treated us, Reynold did not deserve to die. His killer though? His killer deserves to hang.” Then she paused. “But it has to be one of us who did it, doesn’t it? There’s Maria, Petyr, Johann, Lila and me, five people. A twenty percent probability of each of us being the murderer.” She paused for a moment, and said, “Well, I’ve decided it. You’re going to help me and I’m going to catch the person who did this.”

  “Just like that?” Nora asked, unnerved. “First, I’m not qualified in any way, second, that’s the police’s job.”

  “The police!” Katya scoffed. “I’ve seen them at work before. My mother died when I was seven, do you know that? She was killed in a hit and run right in front of my eyes. The police gave us every assurance they’d catch who did it, and in the end, they told us they just didn’t have the time or resources.”

  “Katya--”

  “Look, we might not get anywhere. We probably won’t find any proof, but I believe that we can help the police tremendously if we at least ask around, and find out what everyone’s motives could have been. Let’s talk to everyone who was in that room about what they saw and heard and felt the last few days, and then, my plan is to figure out who’s killed him.”

  “It won’t be that easy,” Nora said.

  “You’ve got to be optimistic,” Katya said. “But never mind, I like you as you are. You’re going to make a good stand-in for Watson to my Holmes.”

  “Oh Katya, you can’t be serious.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Katya, this is madness.”

  “It’s all I can think to do,” Katya said, with a sudden sob. “I can’t help poor Petyr in any other way.”

  Nora nodded.

  “Will you help me, or not?”

  “I’ll help,” Nora said. “But I can’t promise it’ll do any good. At best, I promise to not do any harm.”

  “You’re a sharp woman and you’ve been going around observing all of us. You’ll see things from a different angle while my brain treads the tired old tracks of thought. If you help me, with my insider knowledge and your outsider’s perspective, we can solve this.”

  “All right,” Nora said. “Let’s see what we can do.”

  Katya got up, and some of the color was coming back in her face.

  “Great!”

  “How about first, you tell me a little about your father in law, and your relationship with him?” Nora asked.

  “I didn’t have a relationship with him,” Katya said “We’d never met before today. I met Petyr in Portland when I was trying to get my yoga studio running. He was in my photography group. We met while we were taking photos at the Japanese Garden. It wasn’t love at first sight. I mean, Petyr’s very good looking, so of course I noticed him. But I didn’t like his personality. Actually, I found him intolerable and cocky at first. I liked his friend better.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We met again at his friend’s party,” Katya said. “The friend had invited me, but ended the evening by kissing some blonde in the kitchen. So I went out on the roof to clear my head, and he was there with his camera, taking photos of the tiles.” Katya laughed. “He was a different person when he wasn’t showing off for a group. He was quiet, and introspective. He and I sat and watched the stars, and talked to each other all night about all the things we wanted to do. I think I fell in love with him right away.”

  Nora smiled, wondering if Katya and Lila would ever realize the mirror-images in their love stories.

  “Petyr’s very driven,” Katya said. “Growing up, his father would taunt him all the time about being too feminine, and so he took up bodybuilding and weightlifting. It seems to me sometimes that all his choices are a rebellion, a way to prove his father wrong. That’s what Petyr
wants most.”

  Nora nodded.

  “Petyr loved art, but his father looked down on that. He said artists were lazy people who didn’t make money, and always ended up being leeches on the relatives. Petyr was determined to prove his father wrong, and it was important to him that his business succeeded. He said most of the pride he felt from earning money was the feeling that he could throw it in his father’s face, that he could say, ‘I made it without you, even though you told me I’d fail.’”

  “It’s sad,” Nora said. “Sad to have a relationship like that.”

  “I felt much more thankful for my own uncomplicated dad,” Katya said. “He’s been supportive of me no matter what I did. Petyr loves him too.”

  “It sounds like Petyr had a lot of anger towards Reynold.”

  “He did,” Katya said. “I’ll be honest about it, he did. Even today, he was scared before he announced that he’d be married. He knew his father wouldn’t take it well, but he wanted to show me off. He wanted to make it clear to his father that he made his own choices.”

  “Your future father-in-law didn’t approve of his choices,” Nora said. “Did he?”

  Katya sighed.

  “I think he would have disowned Petyr if he’d insisted on marrying me,” she said. “I think that Petyr would have chosen to marry me anyway.”

  Nora nodded. She had a thoughtful look on her face.

  “Look, I know I’m telling you all this, and maybe you’re thinking that Petyr sounds like he could have killed Reynold, but that’s not true. Petyr’s incapable of it. Besides, don’t you see, it’s all wrong.”

  “All I see is that Petyr was the one who took the tray of mushroom toast from me,” Nora said. “He served it on each person’s plate, too.”

  “I know,” Katya said miserably. “The police asked me about it. I wanted to lie, but I knew I had to tell them the truth. He was the one who placed the mushroom toast on Reynold’s plate. Thing is, though, Petyr had no motive for killing Reynold!”

  “You just told me he hated his father. From the way you made it sound, I’d say he had plenty!”

  “He hated his father, but he wanted to show off for his father,” Katya said. “You see? He’s finally become successful. He’s finally started earning good money. He wanted to show his father that he had done it. That despite his father’s attempts to control him, he was living a happy life on his own terms, with his own chosen life partner and his own chosen business. He wanted to show off his success more than anything, and he needed his father alive for that.”

  Nora nodded, seeing her point.

  “And you?” she asked. “Didn’t you have the slightest of anger towards Reynold?”

  “I had a lot of hate for Reynold for the way he treated Petyr,” Katya said. “But why would I want to kill him? I had no need to. Petyr had chosen me. Petyr would stand by my side. That’s all I need in life.”

  Was it? Nora wondered, looking at her friend’s unhappy face.

  She hadn’t met Katya in a very long time, but Katya was an expert with food. She’d worked in the restaurant business, and she could easily have tampered with the mushrooms. Couldn’t she?

  *****

  Chapter 5

  Maria lay on the sofa with her eyes closed, while Johann massaged her legs in an attempt to help her relax. When Nora and Katya entered, they both sat up.

  “It’s been a horrible day,” Johann said with a sigh. “I could use some iced tea. Or maybe even something stronger. Lila’s away being interviewed. She always makes the best iced tea. Oh look at me, babbling about stupid things while my father… my father...”

  His lower lip began trembling.

  “Come on,” Katya said gently, raising him up. “You do need a drink, Johann. I’ll help you out.”

  “I can’t bear that he’s gone,” Johann said with a sob. “I don’t know what’s harder, the fact that he’s gone.. Or… or the fact that part of me feels relieved!”

  “Johann!” Maria said sharply. “Shut your mouth. There’s other people in this house who don’t know you as well as I do. They might believe you!”

  “But I mean it, Mother,” Johann said. “I’m glad he’s gone, Part of me is happy I’ll never have to deal with him again!”

  “Katya, take him away,” Maria said, waving her hands. “Nora, come sit by me.”

  Katya led Johann away, squeezing his hand affectionately.

  Nora sat next to Maria, who said coldly, “I suppose to you, this is just dramatic and maybe even fun?”

  “A death is never any fun,” Nora said quietly. “Especially if it’s a murder.”

  “Murder! Oh! I hate that word!” Maria said. “People throw it about, never knowing the kind of everlasting doubt it can create. My uncle Joseph was poisoned when I was 13, you know. This was when I still lived in Italy, in my village. It was a lovely place, and once we village-folk all made up our minds about something, well, we’d never be persuaded that we were wrong.

  “We all thought it was his wife. For years, she was ostracized. We smiled at her and were polite, but the children, they would happily say what their parents said behind closed doors. They’d throw rocks at her windows, and sing nonsense-poems calling her names. The rest of us, we gossiped behind her back. And one day, she killed herself! She decided she’d rather face punishment in heaven than hell on earth.”

  Maria took a deep breath.

  “We all took this as proof of her guilt at first. Surely, we said, it was a guilty heart that drove her to kill herself. Not us. Not our gossiping and our lies. Well, soon after, the pastor went in to clean their house, and do you know what he found? A letter hidden in a dusty diary that had not been seen for years. A suicide letter. Turns out, my uncle Joseph had killed himself because he was facing financial ruins.”

  Nora nodded.

  “You must all have felt horrible.”

  “I do penance for my sins even today,” Maria said. “I suppose that’s why I stuck with Reynold, no matter what. I knew he needed me. I knew his was a soul that only I could save.”

  “Reynold was a good husband to you, I hope,” Nora said.

  “Reynold tried,” Maria said. “He was… an impulsive man, that’s what the children never understood about him. Most of us, we decide on our feelings based on the facts, you see? If someone slaps me, a fact, I feel hurt, a feeling.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Reynold was the opposite. He’d adjust the facts to suit his feelings. If he felt you were angry at him, then everything you did was a plot against him. If he felt that he was a loser, then no amount of money that he made was good enough for him,” Maria said. “Reynold tried hard to control his impulses, but sometimes, he’d lash out in pain and fear. He was a hard man to live with.”

  “Why was he that way?”

  “Inside, he was insecure,” Maria said. “I know not many people would believe me. A man like Reynold, insecure? Impossible! After all, he had a multimillion dollar business empire. How could he feel unlovable or unworthy? Yet he did. All his life, he searched for someone who could fill the grand canyon of pain that he held in his heart.”

  “Oh!”

  “I loved my husband, but there were many a time when I wanted to separate myself from him,” Maria said. “All the things that made him good could be forgotten when he was in one of his moods. When he was in one of his moods, no matter how much you loved him, you were the enemy. No matter how much he had achieved, he was a loser.”

  Nora said, “He was a very unhappy man, was he?”

  “He was more than unhappy.” Maria sighed. “I think there was something wrong with the way his brain worked on a fundamental level. If one has a disease on the skin, it’s visible, and you take more efforts to cure it. But a thought pattern that’s wrong or twisted? That’s not so easily visible. He was great at denying things too. If I confronted him after his temper tantrums about the things he’d said, he’d either deny that he’d ever said them, and do it so well that I’d be con
vinced he was right. Or worse, he’d tell me that I deserved every single thing he’d said.”

  “So why did you stay?”

  “Because…” Maria said. “Because he’d hold me sometimes, and sob. He’d tell me all the ways he’d failed in his life. He’d count them off. He couldn’t save his younger sister from dying of scarlet fever. He couldn’t save his father’s business from imploding. He couldn’t save his mother from her grief when his father ran away. He couldn’t save himself when he’d gotten beaten up by bullies.” Maria sighed.

  “I loved my husband, Nora. Not just for his weakness, for his strengths too. He could be a bad man, but he was, at times, very generous. When I told him about a bad drought in my old village, he went and paid everyone’s taxes that year, and he never even told me about it. I didn’t find out until five years later, when I visited!

  “He could be romantic too. He’d make me feel like I was the most wonderful woman in the world. More than once, he filled my house with flowers for no reason at all! One time, he rented out an entire theatre just so the two boys could see their favorite cartoons, and he let in all the children in their class for free, with popcorn and soda paid for.”

  “It sounds like he was trying to buy love,” Nora said.

  “It does,” Maria admitted. “I can see why you’d think that. But it isn’t true. He was generous, and he was creative and he was a good man. Unfortunately, he was too many things at once. He was also cruel to the children and me at times, and almost always cruel to himself.”

  “The children didn’t love him for it,” Nora said. “It sounded to me like Johann and Petyr both had issues with their father.”

  “Oh, these children,” Maria said. “They’ve had it easy in life. They haven’t come up the hard way, the way Reynold and I did. We struggled for every penny we’ve ever earned, and we had the heart to give it all away and start again, even now, in our old age. The children were a little spoilt. Especially Petyr. He insisted on things being his way. He couldn’t understand that his father needed understanding love, not toughness.”