I slipped my arm around hers as we walked, because the parking lot was slick with wet leaves and her flip-flops didn’t provide much traction.
“Antoinette Chloe, let’s go shopping for a pair of boots for you. I hear that the tractor store got in some of those waterproof boots in lots of bright colors and—”
“Boots?” She paused, shaking off a wet leaf that got stuck between her toes. “I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing boots. I’d have to be hiking in a blizzard before I’d give up my flips.”
“I’ve seen you in the snow with your flips on, and it’s a wonder that you still have all your toes. Really, you should get boots and socks. This isn’t Margaritaville, girlfriend. Sandy Harbor is more like the North Pole.”
I was starting to sound like Sister Mary Mary, my fourth-grade teacher at St. Maggots . . . oops, I mean St. Margaret’s.
“Socks? You can’t mean those ugly cotton things you put on your feet.” She stopped shuffling through the wet leaves. “That is so not going to happen.”
“You know, I have an extra pair of boots that I can give you and some wool-blend socks. They are all brand-new. What size feet do you have?”
“Eleven,” she whispered. “I wear an eleven.” She looked around furtively to see if anyone might be able to hear her, but the parking lot was empty except for us. “Yes, my feet are as big as canoes.”
“I wear a ten, so my boots might not work, but I’d love to go shopping with you,” I said.
She gave me a look, and I decided to drop the subject after this, because I felt like I had started to drift into nagging territory. And that wasn’t my intent. Besides, it was obvious that my friend didn’t welcome my flip-fop bashing. ACB had her own fashion sense, which obviously included various shades of frostbite, and I was content to leave her to her ways, even if I didn’t agree with them.
Finally, we made it to the cement ramp, which was leaf-free, thanks to my handy guys, Clyde and Max. I opened the door, and the scent of bacon and fresh coffee permeated the air. As the sign said, BREAKFAST SERVED 24 HOURS A DAY.
And the diner was packed. Yes! As we made our way to the last vacant booth, I waved at my two waitresses on duty, JoAnn and Kathy.
JoAnn started to hand out two menus, but on second thought picked one of them back up and erupted into a low, throaty chuckle. “Trixie, I bet you could recite this menu by heart.”
“I totally can.” I turned to ACB. “Antoinette Chloe, you know JoAnn, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. JoAnn used to work for me at Brown’s right after she graduated from high school.”
“It was my first job,” JoAnn said, shifting on her feet, looking a tad embarrassed. “I left for Nashville to cut a record, but the closest I got was cleaning rooms at the Opryland hotel.” She put her hand on ACB’s shoulder. “And Antoinette Chloe sent me plane fare to return home.”
Tears pooled in JoAnn’s eyes as she hugged ACB, and then she hurriedly left.
“That was nice of you,” I told my friend. In my ten or so months in Sandy Harbor, I’d heard of several touching things that ACB had done for other people.
She shrugged and waved off my comment. “I told JoAnn that I’d pay her rent for a couple of months, that she shouldn’t give up on her dream, but her mother got sick, and JoAnn felt she should come home and try again some other time.” ACB shook her head. “She never went back, but she sings in the church choir and at funerals and weddings, and, well, I think that makes her happy.”
ACB picked up her menu and studied it, while I looked at the purple-black sky. We were going to have rain. A lot of rain.
“Antoinette Chloe, this is Meat Loaf Monday, but it’s also Meatless Monday, which means vegetarian lasagna is on special tonight, too. Juanita made it, and it’s fabulous.”
“Sounds good to me. I’ve been thinking of going vegetarian.”
Within minutes, JoAnn appeared again with pad and pencil in hand, looking much cheerier.
“Have you ladies decided yet?” she asked.
ACB handed her menu back to JoAnn. “I’ll have the vegetarian lasagna with three meatballs on the side, a salad with Thousand Island dressing, and a glass of chocolate milk. And can I get some extra veggies?”
“I can get you mixed veggies,” JoAnn said.
“That’ll work as long as there’s lots of butter on them,” Antoinette Chloe said.
“We can do that.” JoAnn nodded and scribbled on her order pad.
ACB tapped a long, sparkling nail on the table. “Oh, JoAnn, could you add a couple pieces of sausage to my order, too? After all, what is vegetarian lasagna without meat?”
JoAnn chuckled. “It’s vegetarian lasagna.”
ACB and I laughed. JoAnn was always quick with a joke and a tease. Everyone, but especially the truckers and the county snowplow guys, just loved to verbally spar with her.
“How about you, Trixie?”
“I’ll have the vegetarian lasagna, as well, with meatballs and one sausage, and house dressing on my salad.” As God is my witness, I’ll watch my calories tomorrow, at Tara.
“What would you like to drink, Trixie?”
“Iced tea.”
“Got it. I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
When JoAnn left, Antoinette Chloe took off her peacockless hat and fluffed up her hair. “Trixie, I also called because I wanted to talk to you about the Miss Salmon Contest. We have a lot of work to do for it, since it’s our first contest, and I don’t want to overlook a single tiny detail. But I did overlook a big detail—a major big detail.”
I sat back in the coziness of the red-vinyl booth, not wanting to hear what ACB had to say. I had so much on my mind, running the diner and the cottages, that one more thing was going to make my head explode. So I crossed my arms and let the well-worn vinyl take me away to the 1950s, when the diner was shiny and new, when I wasn’t the owner, and when ACB didn’t have a major problem with the Miss Salmon Contest.
I don’t know what it was, other than age, but the stuffing inside the booths adjusted to everyone’s body type. I’d been toying with the idea of getting all the booths reupholstered, but I’d decided against it. Why tamper with a good thing?
But ACB was still talking about the major problem, and I was still desperately trying to tune her out. Anyway, any problems with the contest should be presented to the Miss Salmon Committee, not me. I decided I should probably point that out to her before she got carried away.
“Antoinette Chloe,” I said. “We have a Miss Salmon Committee meeting today. Remember? It’s being held at my house in exactly two hours. Which reminds me—I need to vacuum. Yet again.”
Blondie, my sweet golden retriever, sheds so much hair every day that I could make another dog with all of it. I vacuum twice a day. Three times if I’m having company, and I’m not a cleaning fan.
I was dreading the Miss Salmon pageant meeting. As chairperson of the event, ACB wanted to be the mistress of ceremonies. She was panting to be a part of all the glitz, glamour, and costume changes that the Miss Salmon Contest could muster. However, our mayor, Rick Tingsley, who was running for New York State senator, wanted the podium, the microphone, and the photo ops. Rose Starr of the Salmon Committee was going to talk him into being a judge instead and letting ACB be emcee.
The next ten days were going to be an epic battle, the likes of which no one has seen since the British sailed into this area during the War of 1812.
“But I’ve overlooked a really, really big detail,” ACB continued. “I’ve been getting e-mails from a bunch of contestants, especially from a girl named Aileen Shubert, telling me that there’s no room at any of the hotels in the area and that even the campgrounds are all filled up with fishermen. And Aileen wants to come early and settle in so she can take some time to practice before the big day. Oh, Trixie, this is a huge problem!”
I nodded.
“Well, all my cottages are full for the next couple of weeks. I have a huge waiting list.”
JoAnn returned with our drinks, and we both reached for them at the same time and took a couple of sips.
“And on top of that, I feel like we have a responsibility to keep an eye on the contestants.”
“Won’t their parents be with them?”
“No, most are too old for chaperones, and a good dozen are coming a week earlier to work with our resident Broadway choreographer for our special dance productions. Aileen is one of them.”
Dance productions? Resident Broadway choreographer? Hm. I hadn’t missed a meeting, had I? This was all news to me.
“Who are you talking about, Antoinette Chloe? Who’s this Broadway person?”
“Margie Grace, of course.”
“Margie Grace isn’t a day under eighty-eight years old. She hasn’t been on Broadway since they named it Broadway.”
“But the contestants don’t know that,” she said with a smile.
“Can you spell fraud?”
“Oh, they’ll love Margie. And she might be an old bat, but she can still put together a dance number. She did the Tango of the Shepherds for the Episcopal Church’s Christmas play last year, remember? It was brilliant.”
“How could I have forgotten that? The shepherds had red roses in their teeth and they tangoed with their sheep.”
“It was unprecedented. Creative. Just what I want for the dance number in our pageant.” She pulled a little notebook from her—wait for it—cleavage closet again, along with a pen, and started scribbling. “Maybe Margie Grace could choreograph a tableau depicting salmon swimming upstream?”
I bit my lip to stop myself from bursting out into laughter. I didn’t think that the rest of the committee members would go for dancing, spawning salmon.
“Getting back to our problem of the girls without rooms who are studying with Margie Grace, what can we do?” Antoinette Chloe sat back into the booth as JoAnn returned with our orders.
Both were presented nicely with carrot curls and radish roses to decorate the plate. ACB’s meatballs and sausages were served on an oval side dish with spaghetti sauce and fresh parsley. Her lasagna was a generously sized portion, as was mine.
Just how I wanted everything plated. I made a mental note to compliment Juanita Holgado, my day cook, when I saw her next.
“How many girls do you figure will come early?” I asked.
“About twelve or fourteen.”
“Hm. Maybe we could rent some trailers for them. I’d say we could have them park on my land, but they would require water hookups and pump-outs and all that, which I don’t have handy.” I shook my head. “That’s just too much. It just won’t work.”
ACB buttered a slice of Italian bread. “What about your house?”
Oh no. No way. No way am I going to entertain a houseful of young beauty contestants. “Whoa. My house? Antoinette Chloe, what are you sniffing?”
“Yeah. Your house. The Victorian you call the Big House.”
I waved her statement away. “Oh, it’s not that big. I should really call it the Little Cottage.”
“You have—what?—like, four full bathrooms and a couple of half baths?”
My late, and dearly loved, uncle Porky believed in porcelain and lots of flushing, and expected a lot of visiting relatives when he built the house.
“That seems like a high estimate,” I protested.
“It’s way low. You have more like eight or nine bedrooms.”
“Perhaps. I never counted them.”
“Trixie, please! Help me out. It’ll only be for a couple of weeks. And when the pageant ends, they’ll be all gone and everything will go back to normal.”
How could I say no to my friend when she was in such a jam?
But there would be endless chatter, lots of toxic hairspray and perfume, and hair in the drains. Not to mention giggling and sneaking out at night to meet up with boys, snacking in the beds, smuggling booze inside, smoking . . .
Oh, wait! I was thinking of my college-dorm days.
“Okay, Antoinette Chloe. Okay. On one condition: You have to move in and chaperone them and get them to clean up after themselves. They can take their dinner at the Silver Bullet. And you can make breakfast and lunch for them at the Victorian.”
She sniffed and blinked tears back. If she let them fall, there’d be two rivers of makeup dripping down her cheeks and onto her muumuu.
I couldn’t let that happen. ACB’s muumuus were like living things, plus mascara stains were a beast to get rid of. Reaching into my purse, I pulled out a little packet of tissues and handed it to her.
She pulled out a few, closed her eyes, and blotted them. “You’re a lifesaver, Trixie, and a good friend.” She sniffed and blotted again.
But no turquoise or purple eye shadow appeared on the tissues that she set down on the table. No black eyeliner, no black mascara, no orange blush, and no Pan-Cake makeup.
“And you are quite clever, Antoinette Chloe. I smell a setup. And the fake tears were a nice touch, by the way.”
She laughed. “Well, I was in show business, after all.”
ACB always astonished me. “You were?”
“Most definitely. I was a ticket taker at the Sandy Harbor Bijou when I was in high school.” Her eyes twinkled and she grinned. “I considered that show business.”
She’d set me up again, and I walked right into it.
“Sheesh. I didn’t see that coming.”
Suddenly, the smile left her face and she became quite serious. “I agree to your terms, Trixie. Matter of fact, I welcome them. I’ve been so . . . lonely lately. I’m sure chaperoning the girls will cheer me right up.”
Oh my. My friend was displaying a full menu of emotions tonight. She was ecstatic over her drive-in idea, mad at Nick for disappearing without saying anything to her, worried that the pageant contestants wouldn’t have a place to stay, sad that Sal was in jail and that her dreams of a retirement home on the water were dashed, and then joking about being in show business.
I was exhausted by it all and worried that Antoinette Chloe was headed toward a nervous breakdown.
“Trixie, it’s just awful being so lonely,” she continued. “Sal tried to kill me, and now his brother is ignoring me. I mean, is it me? What’s wrong with me?”
This time her tears were real, and they did drip down her cheeks. But, thankfully, she caught them before they hit her muumuu.
My heart was breaking for her. But I didn’t know what I could do other than to help her get some answers from Nick. Maybe if she had that, it would help her move on.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Antoinette Chloe. Maybe it’s the Brownelli brothers, but together we’ll find out where Nick went off to.” I patted her hand and vowed to give Nick Brownelli a piece of my mind. “And when we do, you can hear what he has to say for himself; then you can take him or leave him.”
“Yes!” She pounded her fist on the table, and it made me jump. The customers around us were also airborne. I swear our meals shot two inches into the air, then landed back on their plates.
I slid her ice water closer to her, thinking that a cold drink might refresh her, but she ignored the water and picked up the steak knife at her place setting and held it upright on the table.
Oh, this didn’t look good! For everyone’s safety, I got ready to spring into action.
She rapped the handle of the knife on the table. “As soon as I find Nick, I’m going to make sure that he never lies to me again!”
Could she be any louder?
Everyone turned to look at Antoinette Chloe as if this was a dinner show. And, boy, she didn’t disappoint the spectators.
Very dramatically, she gripped the knife with both hands and lifted it over her head, and before I could blink, she plunged i
t into a plump sausage on her plate.
“Take that, Nick Brownelli!”
Chapter 2
The Miss Salmon pageant meeting at the Big House was a disaster. The committee members got loud to make their points over each other, and Blondie started barking like a mad dog.
I phoned Sandy Harbor deputy sheriff Ty Brisco, one of my first friends when I moved here. Ty’s a transplant from Houston, Texas, and he can really work a pair of jeans and a white cowboy hat. If he adds his snakeskin boots and his brown suede bomber jacket, women of all ages melt like butter on toast.
But not me. I’m not interested. I’m still shell-shocked from my divorce from Deputy Doug of Philadelphia.
“Ty, can you come over and take Blondie? I have a real heated meeting going on here, and she’s barking her head off.”
“Sure, Trixie. I’ll be right over to get her. We’ll go for a long walk.”
“Thanks, Ty.” I just loved his drawl. I could listen to him read the phone book.
It wouldn’t take Ty long to walk to the Big House. He lives above the Sandy Harbor Bait Shop on the other side of the Silver Bullet in a fabulous apartment that Uncle Porky and Mr. Farnsworth, the bait shop’s owner, built. It also has a huge corner window that overlooks the lake and the Big House. Sometimes I can see Ty in that window, looking at the lake.
“Trixie! We need you in here!”
The melodious voice of ACB bounced off the walls of my house. Blondie howled. I wanted to howl along with her.
“I’m coming.” I guess I couldn’t stall any longer.
I didn’t see Ty yet, so I got Blondie’s leash and headed into the kitchen until he arrived.
“What did I miss?”
Pam Grassley, the third-grade teacher at Sandy Harbor Grammar School, raised her eyes to my vintage tin ceiling. “Someone needs to take charge of this meeting. I haven’t got all day.”
I looked at Blondie’s pink leash loaded with fake rhinestones. Some were missing. When I looked up, the committee members were staring at me.
Diners, Drive-Ins, and Death: A Comfort Food Mystery Page 2