The Quiche and the Dead

by Kirsten Weiss

  At six o’clock, I closed up and went over the receipts. It had been a decent day. Not spectacular by weekend standards, but okay. Most of the business had come from tourists who’d never heard of Joe’s death and had no reason to fear my baked goods. But there had been some locals as well. Still, dissatisfaction niggled. Drumming my fingers on the desk, I fidgeted in my seat.

  I bounced from the chair, and it drifted backward. Walking into the dining area, I looked around. The setting sun sparkled golden on the pink tabletops. Everything was spotless, my neon TURN YOUR FROWN UPSIDE DOWN AT PIE TOWN sign alight. But tonight the usual glow of contented ownership the logo inspired didn’t come.

  I stepped outside. A couple pushing a stroller walked past, laughing. On impulse, I locked up and followed them down Main Street’s brick sidewalk. Flower baskets hung from ornate streetlamps and swayed in the light breeze. The couple crossed the main bridge leading into town. It hung low over the creek, splashing along grass-covered banks. Four thespians practiced Shakespeare on a wide patch of lawn beside the water. I stopped and leaned against the railing, listening.

  An actor clutched at his breast, wrinkling the fabric of his comic hero T-shirt. “Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes, That they behold and see not what they see?”

  I looked across the street, at a plaster-faced building from 1910 that housed an art gallery and café. Vines, verdant and lush, twined around the bridge. Birds twittered, hidden, nearby. Love might have blinded me to a faulty relationship, but not to this town.

  A thorny bundle of worry unknotted in my chest. Pie Town would survive, and so would I, but it was time for me to stop using it as a refuge. I loved Pie Town. It had gotten me through a ruined wedding. But it was time to build a life outside the shop. And if that meant spending a night on a cliff with a conspiracy-addled cryptogenarian, I was all in.

  The bushes rustled. A whisper floated from beneath the bridge. “An orange, coffee beans, and a knife.”

  I knew that whisper. I’d heard it in the alley at Pie Town. Leaning over the railing, I thrust aside a branch.

  A white-haired man in stained, mismatched clothing passed beneath me. He carried a cane over his shoulder, a cloth knotted around one end making a bag.

  “Don’t forget the knife,” he hissed.

  Cold fingers trailed up my spine. There was probably a perfectly innocent reason he was whispering about knives. Maybe he needed the knife to cut the orange? My brain clicked into place, and I said out loud, “The Case of the Whispering Wanderer!”

  A woman walking a Chihuahua jerked away from me, startled. The dog yipped, irate.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking for a path beneath the bridge. I ran to one end, then the other, and finally found a path leading down the hill to the amateur theatricals in the park. By the time I reached its grassy slope, the Whispering Wanderer was gone. I hustled along the bank, searching as the light dimmed, but he’d vanished.

  Defeated, I returned to Pie Town and got detecting, surfing the Internet for information about Roy’s niece, Joy. She’d been investigating Pie Town. Turnabout was fair play, and she’d inherited Joe’s property. That made her a suspect. I finally found her on one of those social media career sites. Her job history stopped two years ago, with a health food store in Philadelphia. She’d mentioned she was an herbalist. I typed castor beans into the search engine. Hm . . . They looked a lot like coffee beans. They were also believed to have medicinal properties—the sort of thing an herbalist such as Joy would know.

  Heading over to Twitter, I located Charlene’s feed and began reading. My wedding dress had gotten a lot of comments, not all of them flattering: What happened when the bride was jilted at the altar? The wedding went off without a hitch!

  “That isn’t even funny,” I said to my laptop. “And I was not jilted!”

  My computer didn’t respond.

  Charlene’s brief updates on our “detecting” would get us arrested if anyone on the SNPD read them, particularly the photo of Roy Royer’s corpse. Her picture of the strange lights in the fog had gotten retweeted by several paranormal sites. Charlene would be proud. I was just relieved none included me.

  Chapter 19

  Someone pounded on Pie Town’s alley door. It snicked open.

  “Hi, Charlene,” I called, ambling into the kitchen.

  She held a thermos beneath the coffee urn and pressed the tab. Nothing poured out. “Is it empty already?” She was dressed in her cat burglar attire: black yoga pants, a black tunic, and a black parka made of one of those soft microfibers.

  “I cleaned it,” I said.

  Slipping the thermos into the bag slung over her shoulder, she lowered her chin and stared.

  “I’ll make more,” I said.

  “Good. And I see you’ve got that sign up about closing Pie Town on Mondays. Mondays are always rotten anyway.”

  “You think it’s a good idea?”

  “Everyone thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “Where’s Frederick?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want white cat hair on my new black jacket. What do you think?” She pirouetted.

  “It’s pretty slick. Hey, I packed up some leftover hand pies for tonight’s stakeout.”

  Her lips pursed. “Cherry?”

  “And blueberry.”

  “I’ll drive,” she said.

  “My VW’s parked in the alley.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  Sighing, I pocketed my flashlight and prepared for a case of whiplash. “I think I got a lead on the Case of the Whispering Wanderer.” I locked the alley door and climbed into her Jeep.

  “I told you that was likely a dead end.”

  “But I overheard an old, homeless-looking man whispering down by that park along the creek. He was carrying a pack like a traveler. Or a wanderer. What’s that park called?”

  “Creek Park.” She started the Jeep.

  “How literal. Anyway, have you seen him around?”

  “No.” She drove down the alley and turned toward Main Street. “There’s only one homeless man in town. His name is Paul, and he likes to smoke his pipe on the bench on the corner of Main and Lark Streets. So either your fellow is new, or he’s not homeless.”

  “Then maybe this new guy is our Whispering Wanderer.”

  “If you enjoy wild goose chases, chase away. But the real case is at Miss Pargiter’s.”

  Annoyed, I folded my arms over my chest. “You’re only saying that because there’s nothing supernatural or conspiracy-oriented about the Whispering Wanderer.”

  “Hmph.”

  The lights were off in Miss Pargiter’s old Victorian when we pulled up beside the picket fence, but the garden lamppost was lit. Beads of moisture glittered on the lavender bushes surrounding its black, iron post. Mist twined through the tops of the cypress trees.

  Charlene yanked up the parking brake. “I called and told her we’d be here tonight, so she shouldn’t sic the police on us. But you never can tell with Pargiter.”

  We clambered down the brush-strewn slope to the tree stump. This time I’d come prepared, and I laid a dry dish towel across it before sitting. We ate hand pies and passed the thermos, and I whispered to Charlene about my day’s investigations.

  “The board members I met were snarky but didn’t seem particularly villainous,” I concluded. “And they didn’t say anything helpful about Antheia. But . . .”

  “But what?” she prompted.

  “Nothing.” Everyone seemed to think an investigation of the library board was laughable or insulting. But I’d gotten the impression that the mayor had brought the librarian and those two members of the library board to Pie Town for a reason. I rubbed my jaw with the back of my fingers.

  Charlene sprang to her feet. “Do you hear something?”

  I strained my ears, listening to the soft rhythm of surf. A man’s voice drifted to me and faded. Flashlights off, we crept toward the edge of the cliff. A red light bounced along the steep slope to the so
uth, toward the bay.

  “That’s one of those red flashlights, so you don’t lose your night vision,” Charlene said in a low voice. “Someone’s down there.”

  “More than one person, I think.” Two masculine voices rose and fell. The light meandered up the hill, moving toward us.

  “Miss Pargiter’s trespassers!” Charlene dug her phone from the pocket of her thick parka. She frowned, held it high. “No signal. I’m going to walk up the hill and call the police. You stay here.”

  “There’s at least three guys down there.”

  “If they try to get away, stop them.”

  “Right! Of course!” I hissed, waving my arms. “Why don’t I surround them?”

  “Use your feminine wiles.”

  “I don’t have . . .” But Charlene had plunged through the brush and up the hill.

  The light grew larger. The men’s voices grew louder. Definitely at least three. I shifted, trying to look small. This was stupid. I wasn’t going to stop them, so I might as well get the heck out of here and wait with Charlene. I started up the hill, and a feminine shriek pierced the air.

  “Charlene!” I struggled up the hill, slipping on the loose ground, catching my clothing on prickly branches.

  She screamed again.

  Oh, God. What if she’d fallen? What if she was dangling off the cliff? What if she was . . . I stopped beneath a cypress tree.

  Charlene stood, frozen, opposite me. “Don’t move.” She spoke like a bad ventriloquist, jaw clamped shut.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Raising a shaking hand, she pointed past me.

  I looked over my shoulder.

  A mountain lion paced the hillside, weaving between bushes, its tail lashing.

  I screamed and backed into Charlene.

  She grabbed me around the waist. “Make yourself big! MAKE YOURSELF BIG!”

  “I CAN’T GET ANY BIGGER!”

  The mountain lion growled, showing off its gleaming teeth. There was no way we could outrun it. We were going to die. Horribly. My legs shook.

  “Pepper spray! I brought pepper spray!” Fumbling in her pockets, she pulled out a pen-shaped object, aimed it. A red dot wobbled across the animal’s forehead, zoomed across the uneven ground. The great cat snarled.

  “THAT’S A LASER POINTER! You’re making it angry!”

  She wailed, dropping the pointer. It rolled beneath a bush. “I told you there were jaguars.”

  “IT’S A MOUNTAIN LION!”

  “You’re young, save yourself!” She clung to me.

  “We can scare it off.” My voice trembled. Would Miss Pargiter find our mauled bodies on the hillside, another terrible San Nicholas accident? Oh, God, maybe the high body count here was due to natural causes.

  Charlene’s breath burst in and out. “You’re right,” she shouted. “It’s probably more afraid of us than we are of it. Shoo! Scat!”

  The cat prowled closer.

  We screamed.

  The mountain lion hunched its shoulders, readying to pounce.

  “What is wrong with this town?” I moaned.

  A flashlight beam hit us, blinding, and three men crashed into the clearing.

  “GET OUT OF HERE, YOU DAMN VERMIN,” a white-haired man roared.

  The mountain lion whipped around and bounded into the trees.

  I whimpered. “We’re alive.”

  “Damn,” one of the men said. He and another man carried a toilet between them. “Was that a mountain lion?”

  I did a double take. A toilet? “Mark?”

  My ex grunted. “Hi, Val. I thought that was your voice.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  The white-haired man, the harbormaster, directed his flashlight beam down the cat’s path. He wore a thick, navy peacoat and a captain’s hat. “I think we scared it off.” He scratched his thick beard.

  “Loomis?” Charlene said. “Is that you?”

  I braced my fists on my hips. “What are you doing here at midnight? With a toilet!”

  “I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t heard you scream,” Mark said. “I thought you were in trouble.”

  The inside of my chest expanded, my arms and legs tingling. “I was in trouble. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You recognized my voice?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Mark said. “Jake thought it was some teenagers messing around, but I knew it was you.”

  “No names!” Jake shifted the toilet, his gaze darting about.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, thanks.”

  “We were engaged, Val. Relationships like ours don’t just end.” Mark gave me that look that had always turned my insides to butter, and my resistance crumbled like a flaky piecrust.

  Except our relationship had ended. We were over, and he was a decent guy, and he’d saved my life, and I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. But my traitorous heart warmed at the thought that he’d suffered too. He still had feelings for me, even if we were over, and I didn’t know what to say. “But . . . that’s a toilet!”

  “No kidding, Sherlock,” Mark’s helper, Jake, snarled. “And it’s not getting any lighter.”

  Charlene pointed at the commode. “That’s not a low-flow toilet. That’s high flow. It’s contraband! Loomis, I thought you’d given up smuggling.”

  The older man removed his captain’s hat and scratched his head. “Aw, Charlene, it’s only a bit of fun.”

  My hands dropped to my sides. “You’re smuggling toilets?”

  Charlene walked to the two men hauling the toilet and caressed its glossy white porcelain. “These high-flow jobbies are gold here in California. How much do you want for it?”

  Mark’s chin jutted out. “It’s not for sale.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, it isn’t, is it?”

  “Why are you smuggling a toilet?” I shouted.

  “Shhh!” Nervously, the men looked about the clearing.

  “Why are you smuggling a toilet?” I said in a calmer voice.

  “It’s none of your business,” Mark said, stiff.

  “You’ve been trespassing and frightening the nice old lady who lives in that house.” I jerked my thumb up the hill. “Charlene was about to call the cops before that mountain lion showed up.”

  “The mountain lion I saved you from,” Mark said.

  “Spill it,” I said, “or I’m spilling the beans.”

  “Oh, come on, Val,” my ex wheedled. “It’s no big deal. The plumbing in these old houses can’t take the new low-flow toilets. It’s cheaper to get a new high-flow than to replace all the pipes.”

  “And illegal,” Charlene said.

  “And you’re bringing them in by boat like the old bootleggers?” I asked. “Why not use a car or truck? Toilets aren’t exactly hot contraband.”

  “He insisted.” Mark jerked his head toward the harbormaster.

  “I’ve always liked the old pirate stories.” Loomis smiled, his blue eyes going misty, and he replaced his cap. “We’d bring the toilets in on foggy nights—but not too foggy because that can get dangerous.”

  “And the weird lights people have been reporting in the bay,” I said, “was that you too?”

  Loomis shrugged, the thick fabric of his coat bunching. “I suppose. I’d signal from our boat to the lads on shore.”

  “Can we put down the toilet?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Mark said, “let’s get going. They’re not going to stop us.”

  My neck corded. “Hold on. You need to stop bothering Miss Pargiter. And I want my stuff from your storage locker.”

  “What stuff?” Jake asked.

  “Never mind,” Mark said.

  Loomis dropped his chin to his chest. “We had no idea we were disturbing anyone, miss. We’ll leave your Miss Pargiter in peace and take a different route from now on.”

  “Oh, yes you will,” Charlene said, “right to Pie Town.”

  Mark’s eyes widened. �
��You can’t have the toilet! It’s for a client.”

  “We don’t want your toilet,” Charlene said. “Well, I could use one. Later. But you boys need to learn a lesson. Business has been slow, and you’re all going to eat lunch at Pie Town. And you’ll bring friends, and come by once a week for a month.”

  “Val . . .” Mark gave me a let’s-be-reasonable look. “This is ridiculous.”

  I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of Mark in Pie Town. My insides still got squirmy whenever I laid eyes on him. But Pie Town needed the business. “I’ve got coupons.” I drew a fistful from my pocket.

  Charlene smacked my hand away. Coupons fluttered to the rocky soil. “No coupons! You will come once a week, and you will pay full price, and you will like it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Loomis said, eddies of fog swirling around his hat. “I’ve heard good things about the pies, except for the killing part.”

  “My pies do not kill people.” I raised my chin. “It was in this morning’s paper. We were maligned.”

  “I don’t know that word, but have you got mince?” Loomis asked. “It’s been ages since I’ve had a decent mince pie.”

  “We’ve got mincemeat.” Stooping, I collected my fallen coupons, damp from the ground.

  “With meat?”

  “Of course!” These days people were making mincemeat without meat, but vegetarian mincemeat seemed blasphemous. “Oh, and we’re closed on Mondays.”

  “Fine,” Mark ground out. “Once a week for a month. Are we done here?”

  Charlene stepped aside. “We’re done. And we’ll talk,” she muttered to Loomis.

  The men trudged up the brush-strewn hill.

  Charlene and I looked at each other and scuttled after them. That mountain lion was still on the prowl.

  “That cat must have been ten feet from whiskers to tail.” She clutched her chest. “My life flashed before my eyes. My wedding, holding my child in my arms, my time with the roller derby . . . What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you kept a calmer head than I did.”

  “I wasn’t calm.” Slogging up the hill behind her, I jammed my hands in my pockets. “I didn’t have a highlight reel to review, at least not until the grand finale of death by wildcat.” I lived on the dull, butter-knife edge, and I could imagine the epitaph on my tombstone: She never lived, but what a way to go.