Death Over Easy

by Maddie Day

  The rest of the hour went smoothly with Abe’s band playing tunes the audience recognized. People tapped their feet, clapped, and bobbed to the music in their chairs. A few couples even got up to dance on the dance floor in front of the seats. Pia apparently had recovered her equilibrium and played right along with the other musicians. Me, I had eyes mostly for Abe. I loved to watch this artistic side of him. His face was focused on the strings, sometimes glancing up at the audience and beaming his thousand-watt smile at us.

  After the last number, we folded our chairs. Before we headed toward the parking area, I gave the stage one more look. Sue Berry had Pia cornered, and the conversation didn’t look like a pleasant one. Sue gestured emphatically with one hand. If I hadn’t known she was a Hoosier born and bred, I might have sworn she’d learned to talk in Italy. Pia crossed her arms and shook her head. I knew Sue and her husband were pretty well situated financially with Glen’s thriving liquor store mini-chain. But why she would lend money to an Italian musician remained a mystery.

  We made our way to the car Roberto had rented in Indianapolis two days ago, since my old van provided neither a comfortable nor a completely reliable ride, although it usually got me to where I needed to go. My father handed me the keys.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind going home for a bit?” I asked.

  “It is no problem for us, Robbie. We will return this evening.”

  Which I couldn’t do. I had prep to do for tomorrow, and my five-thirty alarm wouldn’t ring any later because I stayed out late. “I’m glad. On the way home there’s something cool I want to show you.”

  From the backseat Maria murmured to Roberto in Italian. He responded in kind to her, then twisted to face me in the front.

  “Maria wants to know what the fight onstage was about, the one between Pia and Abraham. Can you explain? It was going too fast for me to follow.”

  “Pia wanted to play a tune she had written, and Abe told her they hadn’t planned on it and hadn’t rehearsed it.” Seemed like a lot of anger from her for only one song, though. Abe would tell me what was really going on next time we talked.

  Roberto thanked me and translated for Maria as I drove along the small roads of the unincorporated town, roads lined with the lush greenery of early June.

  Five minutes later I turned onto Covered Bridge Road and slowed when we reached the eponymous bridge, barely wide enough for one modern car. The bridge was the picture of picturesque, with its faded red paint, a peaked roof, and two tracks of thick wooden planks to drive on. A yellow highway sign read ONE LANE BRIDGE even though anybody who attempted to drive through could tell at first glance. Above the entrance were the painted words Beanblossom Bridge 1880.

  “It is safe to go across?” my father asked.

  “Yes, it’s safe.” I crossed my fingers anyway. The sunny afternoon made the inside even darker and more mysterious as the car bumped slowly over the planks. Graffiti marred—or as some would say, decorated—the rough wooden walls. I didn’t peer at it too closely in case obscenities were part of the scrawls. Once through, we could see Beanblossom Creek more clearly, full and rushing from the spring rains. I slowed to read a white laminated sign nailed to a tree trunk next to a wide gravel path.

  I read aloud. “It says, ‘Pastor’s driveway. Keep clear for emergencies. Thank you.’ A pastor is like a minister,” I added, figuring my father might not know the term.

  He laughed as his brown eyes lit up. “What kind of emergencies does a pastor have? An urgent lesson to the sinners in church, perhaps?”

  I laughed in return but then became serious. A pastor could be called out on all kinds of sad emergencies—to comfort the victim of an accident, the family of a person who’d drowned, or to watch over any number of calamities that befell the residents of even such a beautiful place as Brown County, Indiana.

  Chapter Three

  I was starting to wonder if having bed-and-breakfast rooms upstairs from Pans ’N Pancakes, my breakfast-and-lunch restaurant, was such a great plan, after all. I’d wanted to utilize the unoccupied second floor of my country store here in South Lick. Since I already cooked breakfast for the public six mornings out of seven, adding Innkeeper to Chef on my résumé seemed like an obvious moneymaking plan. I’d done all the carpentry work and painting myself, skills I’d learned from my late mom. I’d hired out only the drywall, plumbing, and electric work. The Italians, plus several musicians with gigs at the festival, were my inaugural guests.

  At times like these, though, all I wanted to do at the end of the day was put my feet up and work on a crossword puzzle. Having extra people in the building was a no-brainer in the not-too-smart category. Not my father and Maria. They didn’t get underfoot. Right now they sat companionably at one of the restaurant tables, Roberto reading something on his phone, Maria making her way through a magazine. But the musicians had questions, wanted information, and were kind of a bother—of course in the nicest possible way. Ed and Beth had come in shortly after we’d gotten home. They waved and strolled arm in arm into the cookware area.

  A minute later voices raised in the heat of emotion floated out. I grabbed a duster and edged closer.

  “It just ruined the night for me, seeing her there,” Beth said. “I shouldn’t have to!”

  “Babe, it’s a public festival. You can’t keep Pia from performing or sitting in the audience.”

  Pia?

  “I want to go home. This was a stupid idea.” Beth spit out the words like bitter pills.

  Ed’s voice lowered so I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded like murmured assurances.

  “Okay. I’ll stay for our gigs.” Beth didn’t lower her own voice. “But I’m not agreeing to play nice with that witch if I see her again. I can’t forgive her. I’ll never forgive her.”

  Wow. What had happened between Beth and Pia? The argument seemed to be over, so I scooted back to the cleaning closet and stashed my duster. By the time the couple emerged I’d washed my hands and was drying them.

  Ed sidled up. “Where’s the closest place to buy beer?”

  “The gas station down the road has some, and the IGA out on the road to Nashville sells it, too,” I said. “For more selection you’d be better off shopping in Nashville, though.”

  “Thanks,” Ed said. “We wanted to check out Brown County State Park, too.”

  I explained how to get there. “It’s a great place to go walking at any time of year.”

  “What about the best place to eat in Nashville?” Beth asked.

  “There are lots of restaurants.” I had to muster my inner patient self, or perhaps my long-suffering inner innkeeper, to politely list some of my favorite eating establishments until they went off on their explorations.

  Talk of food had made me hungry, so I threw together a big veggie omelet for Roberto and Maria and me. I added a salad, a warmed sourdough baguette, and a glass or two of red wine each, and called it dinner. I cooked and served it in the restaurant, since seating in my snug apartment kitchen in the back was pretty tight for three. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t supposed to serve wine in the restaurant except on a BYOB basis, but my establishment was closed to the public after three o’clock every afternoon, and I figured it was okay.

  We were chatting comfortably, sipping the last of our Chianti, when the occupant of my third B&B room clattered down the stairs. I’d thought all the pickers and strummers would be out at the festival from dawn to after dark, but apparently I was wrong. The guest was Chase Broward, a slim older gentleman who had rented a room for the duration of the festival. He strode toward us, guitar case in hand, an easy smile on his tanned face, silver hair neatly trimmed and combed. Snaps gleamed on a black western-style shirt and the pointed tips of his tooled boots glowed from many polishings. He paused in front of the shelves of cookware, then approached us.

  “Good evening ladies and gentleman.” He smiled particularly at Maria, who nodded and smiled back with the briefest hint of sardonic playing at the corner
of her mouth. “Ms. Jordan, you have an amazing array of utensils and devices. My wife would love this place. I’ll plan to bring her over sometime soon, but I think I’d better purchase a piece to tide her over.”

  “Everything for sale has a price on it. Peruse the shelves as much as you’d like.”

  “Thank you. I’ll do it before I check out. Well, I’m off to play some music, as we say in the trade.”

  “You’re a musician full-time?” I asked. “I thought you said you were a Bloomington city councillor, Mr. Broward.”

  “I am, Ms. Jordan, but please call me Chase. I aspire to be in the music trade, but I might just have to settle for representing our lovely state in the United States Congress, instead.” He beamed.

  “Really? You’re running for our representative’s seat?”

  “I would have aimed no higher than that, but I’m receiving a great deal of encouragement to campaign for the honorable role of senator, as it happens. Such a goal never would have occurred to me without urging from certain Monroe County Republicans. I cannot deny the call to a greater duty than my own.”

  “I wish you luck, Mr. Broward,” Roberto said. He murmured a translation to his wife.

  “Thank you very much. I’d best be heading over to Beanblossom. You all are sitting out the music tonight?”

  “I can’t go,” I replied, “but Mr. and Ms. Fracasso were planning on returning.”

  “You should ride with me, then.” Chase looked at my father. “Please. Our country roads can be confusing in the dark, and I have plenty of room in my sedan.”

  Roberto and Maria exchanged a moment of silent communication, then he stood. “We should like to, how do you say, take you on your offer?”

  “Take you up on your offer,” I corrected. “Thank you, Chase. It’s very nice of you.”

  “But I am afraid we might want to leave while the evening is still young,” my father went on. “The jet lag, you understand, which you are not having. We have the GPS, and the days are long here. We will arrive back safely.”

  A wise move, come to think of it. Chase might want to stay out late jamming with the other musicians.

  Chase nodded. “As you wish. I hope I’ll see you over there, though.”

  “We shall look for you.”

  Maria nodded her agreement with her husband. She was a handsome woman with smooth unspotted skin despite being nearly sixty. Her wavy black hair was untouched by gray, and her eyebrows had a natural shape that started low in the middle then arched up and floated down. Roberto, on the other hand, made me feel like I was looking in a gender-changing mirror. We had the same brown eyes right down to the same smile lines around them. We had the same sideways curve to our mouths when we smiled and the same dark curly hair, although his was silvering at the temples and combed straight back from his brow. I couldn’t get enough of looking at him.

  A couple of minutes later they were all out the door and headed Beanblossom way, only a few miles distant. I let out a breath and upended the last bit of the Chianti into my glass. I strolled along my store’s shelves of antique cookware, wineglass in hand. My store had been open for less than a year and it felt like I’d always been here. I guess that’s a sign of being where you should be. I idly straightened a vintage grater here, an antique mixing bowl there, and blew a speck of dust off the heavy cast-iron meat grinder nobody ever bought. I didn’t care. I loved the look and feel of it, a hand-cranked machine built to last. I loved the smell of my store, too. While meals were underway, it filled with the aromas of bacon, biscuits, and burgers. But at times like this, when it was just me and the store, I could inhale the seasoned scent of old wood and more than a century of memories.

  At a plaintive mew from my apartment, I set the glass down. As soon as I opened the door, my foundling kitty Birdy streaked past into the restaurant. Like the wine, my tuxedo cat technically wasn’t allowed in here, but the outer door was locked and I never let him stroll, wash, or catnap on any cooking surfaces.

  “Was I ignoring you, little Birdman?” Always a streaker, he’d paused long enough to urgently lick a spot near his tail, so I had a moment to stroke his head. I knew I’d left him plenty of dry food and water when we’d gone out to Beanblossom. He hadn’t been crying because he was hungry. He simply held a firm conviction everything was always more interesting on the other side of the door—any door.

  I glanced at the clock and sighed. Nearly seven. In a scant twelve hours this place was going to be packed with hungry musicians and bluegrass fans, as well as the usual crew of locals. I’d better get some breakfast prep underway.

  As I cut butter into flour for biscuits, as I measured out the dry ingredients for whole-wheat pancakes, as I cubed the green and orange flesh of ripe melons, my thoughts strayed to Pia Bianchi. She had quite the talent for getting people mad at her. I’d seen her in action at puzzle group, and she apparently wasn’t paying her loan back to Sue. And to top it off with raising Abe’s dander? She’d often seemed kind of defensive in the short time I’d known her, self-centered, too.

  Maybe tomorrow I’d get a chance to ask Maria or Roberto what they knew about the reason for Pia coming to America and never going home. I thought most identical twins remained close their entire lives. Given how prickly Pia seemed, she could have had had a falling-out with her twin sister.

  Chapter Four

  As I’d expected, when I unlocked the front door at seven the next morning, the porch of my store was full of folks wanting breakfast. I welcomed them. My helper, Danna Beedle, and I were ready. Sausages sizzled and the pancake batter was mixed and ready to go. Two dozen biscuits waited hot and ready in the warmer. Our morning special was fried mush, always a favorite. Danna had arrived even before her usual time of six-thirty, saying she was ready for some action. Her cheeks were extra pink, which probably meant she’d spent the night with Isaac Rowling, her boyfriend who lived off the grid out in the woods. Danna had turned twenty recently, and even though she lived with her mother, the mayor of South Lick, Corrine didn’t mind if Danna had slumber parties with Isaac.

  “Good morning,” I greeted the first couple, early morning regulars, and the dozen or so who followed them in. “Sit anywhere you can find a place.” I hurried around pouring coffee and taking orders. I smiled to see Adele and her steady guy Samuel grab the last open table.

  I caught her gaze and held up a finger, indicating I’d get there as soon as I could. And I did, when things calmed down a little. I planted a kiss on her papery cheek and did the same for Samuel. Seventy-one and eighty-something, respectively, these seniors were marvels of energy and activity. Adele’s cheeks were suspiciously pink, too. They’d probably come straight from their own sleepover. I approved, happy Adele had found love in her later years.

  “What are you hungry for this morning?” I asked.

  “Boy howdy, it smells good in here.” Adele tilted her head back and inhaled deeply through her nose, smiling as she exhaled. “I’ll have me some of that fried mush and an order of pancakes. What about you, honeyboo?” She patted Samuel’s hand.

  Samuel beamed at her. “The same, plus two fried eggs over easy, if you don’t mind, Robbie. I got a hunger this morning.”

  I didn’t ask him why. “Have you made it over to Beanblossom yet?”

  “No, but we’re planning to go today,” Adele said. “The Good Ol’ Persons are playing and I’ve been wanting to see them gals in person for a long time.”

  “It’s an all-ladies bluegrass group from out your way,” Samuel added. “San Francisco, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I’d love to hear them,” I said as Danna dinged the bell indicating an order was ready. “Right now I’d better get to work, though.”

  The next hour was consumed with one of the busiest breakfast days we’d had in quite a while. The room buzzed with conversation punctuated by laughter, the clink of flatware on thick white plates, the sizzle of sausages atop the grill. Luckily Turner Rao, my other assistant cook—plus order taker, busboy, and
dishwasher—showed up promptly at eight. The three of us did a well-choreographed dance until the rush lightened a few minutes before nine, when Roberto and Maria drifted downstairs, yawning. I hadn’t heard them come in last night, having hit the sack before ten.

  I greeted the pair and sat them at a table for two, glad the rush had let up a bit. I hadn’t seen Chase or the other two guests yet. I opened my mouth to ask my father how the evening had gone when Buck ambled in through the door. Lieutenant Buck Bird, second in command in the South Lick police force. He was tall and skinny and possessed a truly hollow leg, eating more than I ever believed possible. Unlike most mornings, he didn’t look either hungry or happy to be here.

  He beckoned to me. I nodded my reply, then glanced around and gestured for Turner to come to Roberto and Maria’s table. I introduced my assistant. “Turner will take your breakfast order, okay? I have to talk to the man who just came in.”

  That the man who just came in was Buck finally registered on Turner, whose pale brown skin suddenly lost its color.

  “It’s not about you, dude. You’re fine,” I whispered to Turner. He’d had a far too close encounter with murder this spring and I was sure the mere thought of a uniform made him blanch.

  He swallowed. “Okay. Thanks, Robbie.” He mustered a smile for the Italians.

  When I reached Buck, I said, “What’s up? You don’t look your usual cheery self.” Several murders had intersected my life over the last year. Buck had gotten used to accepting any information I happened to pick up about the crimes and the various persons of interest, as he put it. “Did something bad happen? Has there been another—”

  “Keep your voice down now, Robbie,” he said, cutting me off. He led me into the shelves of cookware. “How did you know we’ve had a homicide?” He bent his head down to peer at me, being over a foot taller than my five-foot-three.

  “I didn’t. You had that look on your face, plus you didn’t come in wanting breakfast.”