Cinnamon Rolls & Cyanide

by Beth Byers

  I couldn’t be sure, since I didn’t know Roberta, why anyone would think that she had killed George. From where I was sitting, I had a pretty good motive. I sighed and then asked, “Why would anyone think you killed him?”

  Other than she’d been arguing with him on the street yesterday, I thought. But I didn’t see any reason to help her fill in the blank.

  Roberta stared at me and then said, “You really don’t know anything do you?”

  Zee snorted meanly and then handed me a plate of waffles that Az had made me. “Why would Rose care about your doings, Roberta? No one cares about being the mayor except you. And no one cares you are our mayor until you screw it up. Given as small as Silver Falls is, one would think that you wouldn’t mess it up quite so often.

  I took the stool on the employee side of the counter and added too much ketchup to the hash browns Az had served up. Just how I liked them. Crunch with an overdose of ketchup. There was a side order of two pieces of bacon and one sausage. Az had already buttered my waffles and drenched them in blueberry syrup, added fresh blueberries and whipped cream. I could feel my hips getting wider as Roberta scoffed at my breakfast.

  But then again, it was Simon who had pressed a kiss to my forehead—not hers—as he’d left for work during the middle of the night. His only complaint about what I was eating would be whether I would make sure he got what he wanted to eat and not an egg white omelet with salsa.

  I cut a bite of my waffle and said, “I don’t like you very much. I don’t see why I’d want to help with this. Like Zee was saying this morning. It’s our busy season. I have a lot to do. Your dead friend was doing his best to mess with my business.”

  “I don’t like you either,” Roberta snapped. She sniffed once and then took the stool across from me asking, “Zee would you get me some coffee? Black.”

  Zee scowled at her and said, “You’ll have to pay for it this time.”

  “I’d like it in a cup and not over my head then,” Roberta snarled back. “I could make you help me.”

  I glanced at Zee and back at Roberta and then took a leisurely bite of my waffle before I asked, “How?”

  “Your employee assaulted me.”

  “Take it up with her boyfriend, the sheriff,” I countered.

  I deliberately lifted my sausage link and bit a bite off the end simply because I knew it would appall her. It did.

  Az chuckled as he put up an order of biscuits and gravy and pancakes for one of Roxy’s tables. She darted over, grabbed it, delivered it, and was back to eavesdropping before I’d even said anything else.

  I grinned at Zee as Roberta scowled at a both of us and then she said, “Az may I have an egg white omelet with salsa and a side of fruit.”

  I laughed and Az joined in. Simon’s punishment breakfast. Or his torment breakfast if I was feeling like teasing him.

  “You wouldn’t be so chubby,” Roberta told me, “if you ate more egg whites and less sausage.”

  “She really knows how to ask for help doesn’t she, Az?” Zee observed taking another stool across from Roberta and tapping her fingers against the counter. “You have until Rose is done eating and then I’m going to kick you out on Rose’s behalf.”

  Roberta looked between Zee and I before she asked, “What do you want from me? I’m trying here.”

  “You need to apologize, first,” Zee said holding up a finger, “for being evil to Rose since she moved to Silver Falls.”

  Roberta scoffed, but Zee held up a second finger and added, “And you need to ask nicely for her help. Offer something in return for her help, and probably something that is different from not blackmailing her. Rose helping to find murderers isn’t a public service or her job. She doesn’t have to do it. And, remember, she doesn’t like you.”

  Roberta leaned back on her stool, her hand to her chest as if she’d been wounded as Zee added, “And finally, you should answer her questions for real. Holding back the things you don’t want Rose to find out won’t help her find the killer. It will only prevent her from doing so. And let’s be real here…she doesn’t want to find the killer all that badly given the way you throw yourself at the man who loves her.”

  Zee’s volume had risen on the last word and Roberta threw down her napkin and slammed her hand against the bar.

  “Fine, look, I might have been dating George Lavender,” she said. “It’s why I’m a suspect.”

  “Did he die in your bed?”

  She tapped her fingers together and said, “No. Not quite.”

  “Did you murder him?” Zee asked.

  Roberta gasped and then said, “Of course not. We just had quite an argument before he died.”

  “You mean the one on the street?” I pulled out my phone and tossed it to Zee to show her the picture. She cackled at it but refused to let Roberta see it.

  “There was another…later…maybe two more. He was…it wasn’t serious between us. But he wanted it to be.”

  “And?” I asked when I saw her glance to the side. She was trying to avoid saying something.

  “And…look, before I realized what I was doing, I told him something he wanted to know. I shouldn’t have, but he was using the fact that I’d told him to…blackmail me. To keep us together even though I wanted to get back…” Roberta’s face blanked out but her gaze darted to mine and back.

  I was surprised Zee didn’t touch what was clearly going to be the “get back with Simon” comment and instead asked, “Blacking mailing to you just date him?”

  “Dating him. Making things easier for him.”

  Zee cleared her throat, gaze fixed on Roberta’s face. It was a clear demand for clarification.

  “Um, ignoring some complaints. Getting his inspections through.”

  She was still not looking at me. “I knew that you don’t always lock the backdoor of the diner when you leave the dogs here, so Simon can get them. I…followed him to the back one day and saw him go in.”

  My gaze narrowed on Roberta’s. We hadn’t lost any money. We hadn’t been vandalized. I clearly needed to get Simon a key. The only reason I hadn’t was because I kept forgetting.

  “You conniving shrew,” Zee shouted. “You're the reason why Rose’s Diner has such good food. Oh my…” Zee choked off a curse and then said, “Rose, your recipe book. The one Roxy thought might have fallen into the trash.”

  I gasped and stared at Roberta just as the bell of the diner rang. Those cinnamon rolls the day before had the orange extract. They’d had my topping. I was an idiot. I should have known he wasn’t just trying to duplicate my rolls—he was making the recipe and screwing it up. George Lavender was lucky he was dead. If he hadn’t been murdered already, I’d be killing him slowly. Simon and his boss, Carver, came in. Carver was carrying an evidence bag with a red binder in it.

  “Oh. My….” I couldn’t speak. I stared at the binder. all the years of hard work. Some of those recipes, I had experimented with for, literally, 100s of variations.

  Zee grabbed my shoulder and whispered something to me, but I couldn’t hear her over the pounding of my own heartbeat.

  “You stupid cow,” I leapt for Roberta, claws out. She screamed and darted away before I could pull the hair out of her head. “I am going to kill you slowly. Then I’ll get Jane to bring you back to life and kill you again.”

  I rounded the corner of the bar, ignoring the shouts of my friends as I went after Roberta. She hid behind Simon begging him to save her as Carver grabbed me to hold me back.

  “I didn’t kill him,” I told Carver. “But if I’d known he’d stolen my recipes, I would have.”

  FOUR

  “Great,” Simon muttered as he shoved Roberta at Carver and hauled me away from them both. Az had left the kitchen long enough to flip the sign to closed and lock the door. The few customers in the diner who had made it in after opening were staring in shock as I cursed at Roberta.

  “Calm down, baby,” Simon said, voice low and calm in my ear.

  “She…she…
she…” I couldn’t get it out.

  “I know,” he murmured. “I know.”

  They had made the banana split waffles, but I hadn’t expected them to have made mine, to have taken the recipe I had played with since that first random moment of inspiration. “She told him how to get in here. She…she told him how to steal my recipes.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “It’s ok.”

  “It’s not ok,” I yelled. “I made 100 chocolate cakes before I found the right one that layered just right and stayed moist for a few days. I baked thousands of cinnamon rolls before I found the perfect recipe. And, Maddie bought some from that evil diner yesterday.”

  “Ok, ok, ok. It’s gonna be ok.” He was speaking so softly, right into my ear that I felt like a child having a tantrum. I pulled back and met his gaze. He was pained for me and that more than anything else calmed me down.

  “I worked so hard on those,” I whimpered, low, just to him. My eyes were swimming tears. How could someone do this to me? Why hadn’t they just made their own recipes? I wasn’t the only person who could cook. If you wanted to own a diner, surely you enjoyed cooking?

  “I know you did. I know they were your babies.”

  “They were mine. It’s not right. I was trying to be good about that stupid diner, but it’s not right. I even didn’t throw a fuss when Maddie wanted to go there yesterday. I was trying to be better.”

  He smoothed back the hair on my forehead and cupped my jaw and said, “It’s not right. It really isn’t. It’s not right or fair or good.”

  I laid my face into the crook of his neck, trying to fight back the tears and whispered, “I love you.”

  My answer was the feel of him running his hand down my back while I gathered my control. It was hard fought, but Carver kept Roberta from interrupting while Simon soothed me. I hadn’t known I could get quite so angry, but I had been rushed with fury. My gaze really had turned red and I hadn’t known anything at that moment other than rage.

  “I…I’m ok now,” I told him. I shook my head and then added, “Can you believe she came in here and asked me to help her find the killer? She’s sleeping with him. Was sleeping with him. Whatever. She asked me for help after helping him to try to ruin my diner and steal from me.”

  “I can believe it,” Simon said. “I know her rather better than I wish I did.”

  I leaned back and saw regret in his face. He tugged my ponytail and laid a kiss on my forehead. The look on his face had me taking a deep breath. I said, “Simon, I’m sure you gave her the benefit of the doubt, like you always do. It’s not your fault she didn’t live up to the kind of man you are.”

  I sighed and seated Zee, Roberta, Carver, and Simon at the back of the diner. I had Roxy and Lyle seat everyone away from us.

  “You want me to move your food, Rose?” Roxy asked.

  I shook my head. I’d lost my appetite but I went ahead and took my coffee. Some things were just necessary to function. Az went ahead and made Simon and Carver the chicken fried steak breakfast specials and I laughed at the look of joy on Simon’s face followed by the look of disgust at Roberta’s breakfast.

  “You know I eat healthy, Simon honey,” Roberta said.

  He scowled at her, and Carver said, “Let’s keep the terms of endearment out of this interview, mayor.”

  As the sheriff, Carver might be the only who even remotely cared that Roberta was mayor. Other than her, of course. My lips twitched as I thought about how she worked so hard to be and stay mayor and I hadn’t met anyone who even cared who the mayor of Silver Falls was. It was sort of like being beauty queen of a festival. Fun for a little bit, but no one thought much of it.

  When Carver opened his mouth to ask a question, I beat him to it, “So you helped Lavender into my diner because you were jealous?”

  Roberta’s face flushed and she hemmed before she said, “I…didn’t really think. And then it was done and…I’m sorry?”

  The apology was so weak it was more question than statement, and I didn’t believe it for a second.

  “Then you should have said so after you did it. And told Rose her recipes had been stolen,” Zee said.

  Roberta flushed and said, “I knew that you could outlast him, Rose. Your food was still better. Jake, George, his sons. They had your detailed instructions right in front of them and couldn’t make the same thing.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I was surprised that I was shaking.

  “You stole from Rose. You stole from her and then you didn’t make it right,” Zee said. She turned to me and then added, “You should press charges.”

  “Wait. I didn’t take anything,” Roberta said. “I didn’t go into the diner. I just…knew someone else had.”

  “You were involved,” Carver told her. “Rose has every right to press charges.”

  I stood, crossed the diner to refill my coffee, and took the chance to filter through everything I had been told so far. For one thing, I didn’t think Roberta had killed George. She sure had a motive and all the evidence that there was so far pointed to her, but she’d never have told us about helping him get into the diner. I bet she only said that to make us realize that she wasn’t the killer.

  Of course, she could have done both, but I didn’t think she had. She was too selfish to murder someone. She knew the police department here. Yeah, they were a small town and better able to deal with shoplifting and tourists than murderers, but the cops chose to be here. They were smart. They were trained. They’d have found out both about how she helped George and that would have made her even more of a suspect.

  She needed to work with them in order to help them find whoever actually killed George. In the end, the reason I believed that Roberta hadn’t killed George was simple. She’d argued with him so openly, I’d been able to take a picture of her and she hadn’t even known.

  I added cream to my cup, helped deliver a couple of orders, and returned to the table with the others.

  “How did George die?”

  “Well…that’s the weird thing…” Carver glanced at Simon and then back at Roberta before Carver said, “It looks like he was being poisoned for a while. Probably with cyanide. But the final dose, the one that pushed him over the edge, it was too much all at once. If whoever killed him had just worked slower, they probably would have gotten away with it.”

  I stared at Carver, sick to my stomach. I thought back to those moments of sheer rage when I’d wanted to kill Roberta and George. I could see how, in those circumstances, that someone could have committed murder. That moment of fury before common sense and humanity kicked back in.

  But a slow murder. Something deliberate and planned and continually in progress that I wasn’t sure I could ever understand. I took Simon’s hand and squeezed simply to be able to feel a good man.

  “Did you have to do that?” Roberta snarled. “Just because you two are together doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

  “We are together,” Simon told Roberta firmly. “She isn’t jumping into my lap, she’s holding my hand. So yes, we have to do it. You know you don’t love me, Roberta. You just don’t like how things ended.”

  My gaze flicked to Zee and the slight shake of her head said she didn’t know. I bet that only Roberta and Simon knew how things had gone down between the two of them. Simon was too honorable to talk about something like that and Roberta wouldn’t speak of it either. Especially if it made her look bad.

  “What a mess,” I said to Zee.

  “I’m not a fan of murders. Or you two being involved in our cases,” Carver said. He grinned and then from the way his body moved, I was pretty sure he’d just wrapped his legs around Zee’s before he said, “I don’t mind one bit having to come into 2nd Chance and eating this good food, Rose.”

  I let my finger run over the top of the booth and glanced around. The wide-planked wood floors shone in the sunlight coming in through the window. The funky cake plates I collected one-by-one had been filled by Az in between the delivery o
f orders.

  Roxy was joking with someone her age as she processed their bill while Lyle and his mom were laughing together and rolling silverware. Az moved to the kitchen window, his deep brown eyes glinting as they glanced around the diner. He kept it going while Zee and I were unavailable without breaking a sweat.

  “Thank you, Carver,” I said. “We’re a family here and we make home cooking to fill the belly and warm the heart. You’re one of us.”

  He grinned at me, and I realized that my words had touched him. He and Zee had a bit of a rocky relationship so far, but they’d somehow settled into a snarky affection that seemed to be as easy for them as getting kisses from a puppy.

  Carver and Simon didn’t let us stay for the rest of the interview with Roberta, and when they left, Simon stopped to kiss my forehead.

  “Can you take the dogs out today, sweetheart?”

  I nodded. My gaze met Zee’s and I could see by the glint in her eye that she wanted in on this case. It seemed poor Carver and Simon assumed we wouldn’t get involved because Roberta was the suspect.

  I had to admit I despised the woman. But that didn’t mean I was going to just watch her get pinned for a crime I was sure she hadn’t committed. That being said…I just might press charges against her for helping in stealing my work. The mere thought of those charges being pressed warmed my heart.

  “Zee,” I said as the two of us watched our loves leave, “You’d think they’d know us better than this.”

  “That’s for sure,” Az said. He grinned through the kitchen window shaking his head at the two policemen who were walking down the sidewalk together.

  “They’ll learn,” Zee said sagely. She shot me a sideways glance and then asked, “You gonna press charges against Roberta?”