The Quiche and the Dead

by Kirsten Weiss

  “What a cow,” a feminine voice from the gamer’s table said.

  I regarded the shaggy-haired blond who’d spoken. Samantha, I presumed. “Sea Hag?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yo.”

  I gathered the remaining shreds of my dignity. “We’re closed today, but I’ve got some pie in the freezer if you don’t mind waiting for it to reheat. Cherry on the house?”

  They cheered, and I went to the kitchen, my hands shaking. I’d been such a fool. Mark had been right, I hadn’t completely let go. If I had, the revelation that Mark was seeing someone wouldn’t have been such a dagger to the heart. Worse, I’d deluded myself that he’d missed me too. But Mark had moved on some time ago.

  Charlene stood before a toaster oven. “Good thing we froze all those pies from last week. I turned one of the big ovens on, in case you need it.”

  Swallowing, I pasted on a smile and grabbed a cherry pie from the industrial freezer. “I do. Thanks. Did you tell Officer Carmichael those hand pies were frozen? I don’t want him to think our standards are slipping and our fresh pies are going downhill.”

  “Of course. I explained the situation. I think he was a little embarrassed when he learned Pie Town was closed today.” She stared through the glass front of the toaster oven. “Mark’s a horse’s ass, and Heidi’s a demanding . . . Well, I’m trying not to cuss so much, but you get the idea. You’ve got better things ahead of you.”

  The timer on the toaster oven dinged. She peered inside, frowning, and closed the door. “A few more minutes.”

  “Did you hear what Heidi said?” I asked.

  “Hard not to. That girl’s got a voice like an electric drill.”

  “Heidi leased the gym thinking she could expand into Pie Town. You don’t make that sort of decision on the spur of the moment. She and Mark must have been plotting this for weeks, maybe even months.” Was Heidi the reason he’d turned so churlish at the end? She said she’d moved here three months ago, but she could have met him earlier.

  She patted my shoulder. “Now, now. No sense crying over spilled Kahlúa. She’s not taking Pie Town, and that’s that.”

  “No, she’s not! I can’t believe Mark would do this to me.”

  “You’re lucky you learned the truth about that one before it was too late.”

  I knit my bottom lip. “Your Twitter feed is right. I am a sap.”

  “Not anymore.” The toaster oven dinged, and Charlene removed the pies with a spatula, sliding them onto a white plate. “Why don’t you take these to Officer Carmichael?”

  “Sure. Oh, and can you take care of reheating the cherry pie? It’s for the gamers.”

  She saluted with two fingers. “Will do.”

  I took the hand pies to Gordon, seated at the counter not far from the coffee urn. “This one’s on me,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I did it for the gamers. It doesn’t feel right to ask you to pay for a couple hand pies, especially when they’re not fresh baked.”

  “I’m sure they’re fine.”

  I studied him. His color was high, and his green eyes seemed to snap. “Rough morning?”

  He grunted, taking a bite of an apple hand pie. Flakes of crust dropped onto the plate. “How’d you guess?”

  “You don’t look like the eight-AM-apple-pie kind of guy.” Not with those biceps. Or washboard abs. Okay, his abs were hidden beneath his blue uniform, but judging from the rest of the man, I was fairly certain they existed. “Though we will start serving breakfast pies next week.” I needed to do some testing first. The bacon and hash brown pie seemed to be a winner. My spinach quiche should appeal to the calorie-counting crowd, but I wasn’t sure how customers would react since my first taste tester had died.

  He rolled his eyes. “You have no idea.”

  “Does it have to do with a surfboard?”

  Laying down the pastry, he raised his brows.

  My lips quirked. “I overheard you on the sidewalk.”

  “A guy called in because someone cut him off on his surfboard. In the ocean.”

  I laughed. “You get stuck with that sort of stuff?”

  “Normally a call like that wouldn’t get past the dispatcher. But I’m the new guy, so he thought it was a good joke.” He angled his head toward the door. “Problems with your ex?”

  “Oh.” I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “You overheard that.”

  “Hard not to.”

  Charlene leaned through the kitchen window and winked at me.

  “He seems to think I’m staying in San Nicholas just to be near him,” I said.

  “Sure, it’s got nothing to do with this business you dumped all your money into.”

  “How did you know I dumped all my money into it?”

  He grimaced. “Sorry, didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.”

  “You investigated me.”

  His eyes widened, all innocence. “Why would I do that? Detective Shaw is handling the accidental deaths.”

  “Eat your pie. You’re a lousy liar.” I began to walk to the kitchen.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I stopped and turned.

  “For the record, he’s an idiot.”

  “Shaw?”

  “Your ex.”

  I nodded, lips tight, and walked into the kitchen.

  Charlene leaned against the counter and rubbed her hands together. “So? How did it go?”

  “Excellent. I successfully delivered his pie and have now returned to the kitchen. Mission accomplished.”

  “I saw you two talking. He likes you.”

  Unreasonable hurt spiraled through my chest. “He investigated me. To him I’m a suspect.” And even if Carmichael was interested in me, which I doubted, I couldn’t go out with him. Even if I wasn’t lying to him, I obviously still wasn’t well and truly over Mark.

  “But that’s a good thing that he investigated you,” she said. “Now he knows you’re innocent. Did he ask you out?”

  “Charlene, he can’t do that. I’m part of a murder investigation.”

  “Accident investigation. Totally different thing.”

  I raked a hand through my hair and realized I was serving food with my hair loose, another code violation. Hastily, I twisted it into a bun. “No, he did not ask me out.”

  “Then do you want to come over and watch Stargate tonight?”

  All I wanted to do tonight was huddle on my bed with a fork and warm pie. Preferably strawberry-rhubarb.

  “I’ll make my special root beer,” she wheedled.

  “Eight o’clock?”

  Chapter 22

  Slumped on Charlene’s floral-print couch, I took a sip of her root beer and Kahlúa concoction. The lights were off, the blue glow of the TV screen flickering across the living room walls, hung with photos of Charlene’s husband and daughter and glorious past. Charlene really had been in the roller derby. And so far, what had I done? Fell in love with the wrong guy, got dumped, and wallowed in my office closet while Mark found a new love.

  “When’s your daughter getting back from France?” I asked.

  “She’s a busy executive.” Her expression shifted, and Charlene looked down at her wrinkled hands. “It’s hard for her to get away from work.”

  I focused on the TV, ashamed I’d brought up a sensitive subject. Had I really needed to prove to myself that Charlene was lonely? All the signs were there—her social media obsession, her unwillingness to part with the cat, all the time she’d been spending at Pie Town.

  Theme music blared, triumphant, and credits rolled across the screen. Unmoved, Frederick lay draped over the arm of the sofa.

  Beside me on the lumpy couch, Charlene patted my knee. “Right then! We’ve still got a case to solve.”

  “Sure.” Pulling my backpack over the arm of the couch, I rummaged inside and retrieved my photocopies of Joe’s casebook. “Have you got Frank’s? I want to take another look at them both.”

  “Of course.” Lurch
ing from the couch, she hobbled into the kitchen. There was the hum of a freezer, the rustle of plastic being unwrapped, and she returned and handed me the casebook.

  “It’s cold,” I said.

  “I put it in the freezer.”

  “Why did you put the casebook in the freezer, Charlene?”

  “In case someone broke in to my house, looking for it. No murderer would look behind the rocky road.”

  Unable to fault her logic, I joined her in the kitchen and spread the photocopies and casebook side by side on the black granite countertop. Frank’s first page: Library bd.—sec—the Case of the Bloated Blond.

  Library bd had to mean “library board.” Sec was “secretary,” who happened to be a blond. I flipped to the backside of the page. It was blank. I looked to Joe’s book and its Chapter heading: Case of the Bloated B. Why hadn’t Joe written out blond? There were no notations beneath it to explain.

  I returned to Frank’s page about the library board. His notes had been written in pencil, and a pink streak of eraser smeared the word blond. I squinted, held the book closer to the hanging welsh lamp.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “What?” Charlene bustled inside the kitchen, empty glasses in hand. “Are you out of root beer?”

  “Charlene, Frank’s casebook doesn’t say blond. Look how faint the L is.” I turned the book on the counter and pointed. “Someone erased a word beneath, but the L wasn’t completely erased. It’s not blond, it’s bond.”

  “What?” She poured more root beer and Kahlúa into the glasses and handed me one. Opening a drawer, she pulled out a pair of reading glasses. “Give me that casebook.” She slid the glasses onto her nose and peered at the page. “Hells bells, I think you’re right.”

  “Which means library bd might not mean ‘library board’ at all. It could mean ‘library bond.’”

  “But even if that’s true, the library board was responsible for the library bond.”

  “With guidance from the town council,” I said.

  “And you did say Antheia was the only one on the board who really knew what was going on,” she said. “Antheia would have been instrumental to getting that bond issued, and she is the secretary. And she’s dead.”

  “Bond, not blond.” Had we been on the right track by accident?

  She pocketed her glasses. “All right, let’s review the evidence.”

  “Joe and Frank both thought the library was a waste of money and refused to set foot in there.”

  “Check.” She nodded, her wispy hair bobbing. “Antheia was the only person on the board with her eye on the ball. She would have understood the bond issuance—according to her legal secretary, at least.”

  “Not just her legal secretary,” I said. “The other people on the board pretty much admitted they were clueless. But what could she have done with the bond that was so wrong? The library was built. It’s beautiful.”

  “Oh, there are all sorts of ways to steal when there’s a big, fat packet of money floating around.”

  “Steal the bond money?”

  Charlene nodded.

  “But she couldn’t have pulled a fast one with the bond, not with city oversight. They couldn’t have even put forward a public vote on the bond without someone on the town council taking a close look at the finances.”

  She rubbed her chin. “It does seem unlikely.”

  “We need to learn more about this bond. What if sec doesn’t mean ‘secretary.’ What if it means ‘SEC,’ as in the Securities and Exchange Commission?”

  “I’ll get my laptop,” Charlene said.

  I drank more root beer and paced the modern kitchen. If Joe had been investigating the bond, Mark was off the hook. The bond issuance was before his time on the board.

  She brought her computer into the kitchen, laying it on the butcher block work island, and we searched for municipal bonds on the SEC Web site. After thirty minutes, Charlene threw up her hands. “I don’t think sec means ‘SEC.’ Everything we’ve read says the SEC doesn’t have any real oversight of the issuance of municipal bonds.”

  “But look at this article,” I said. “Because they can’t control the issuance, the SEC has started investigating fraud after the fact. Look at these cases—undisclosed conflicts of interest, pension fund abuses, pay to play.”

  “Pay to play is a fancy phrase for ‘bribery.’”

  “But if the SEC was investigating the library bond,” I said, “why would Joe and Frank get involved?”

  “Maybe they were planning on tipping off the SEC?”

  Taking another sip of root beer, I slumped in my chair. “These were their first notes on the case. At that point, they wouldn’t be sure they even had a case. It would be way too early in the game to bring in the SEC. It has to mean ‘secretary.’ This has to be about Antheia.”

  “Maybe she was blackmailing somebody, and her husband knew about it. Maybe he went after the same target and got killed for the same reason.”

  “We have no evidence of that,” I pointed out.

  “We don’t have any evidence of anything.” She hiccupped.

  “Let’s assume they were investigating the bond. Why? Something must have made them think there was a case, raised their suspicions.”

  “Do a search for the library bond.”

  I tapped at the keyboard, and a list of articles popped onto the screen.

  “Useless search engine.” Charlene pointed at an article headline. “That’s for a library in another town on the Peninsula.”

  “Hold it.” I clicked on the article for the other town. “How much was the San Nicholas Library bond for?”

  “Twenty-five million.”

  “This town’s library bond was for thirty million.”

  “So our library was cheaper,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it was also lots smaller. The San Nicholas Library is only twenty thousand square feet. That town’s library is ninety thousand square feet.”

  Charlene yelped. “We paid 1,250 bucks a square foot?”

  “That does seem kind of high,” I said. “But what’s normal for libraries?”

  “Do the math. The library in the other town cost only 330 dollars a foot, and that still seems ridiculous. Think about it. We paid an extra 900 dollars per square foot, and at twenty-thousand square feet . . .” Charlene rumpled her brow, thinking. “That’s an 18-million-dollar overage! Who got that money?”

  I typed, searching for other library bonds. We couldn’t compare California prices to other states—everything here costs more. But it was little wonder Frank and Joe thought the library was overpriced.

  “Why did anyone vote for this?” I asked, stunned.

  “Because the public didn’t look at the numbers, and hardly anyone understands that a bond like this is a loan. People think it’s free investor money. They don’t understand bonds are a debt. The city borrows the money and repays it with interest. That means the people of San Nicholas have to pay for this boondoggle.”

  “There’s got to be something we’re missing,” I said. “Even if the average citizen didn’t look at the numbers, the town council would have had to. I can’t believe someone on the board just walked away with that extra eighteen million.”

  “And I can’t believe that our library really cost nine hundred dollars more per square foot than a library only twenty miles away. Someone pocketed that extra money.”

  “But who?”

  “Contractors in cahoots with board members, town council members, maybe the librarian . . . It’s a conspiracy.” She clutched my arm, and my root beer spilled across my shirt. “I knew it!”

  Grabbing a dish towel from a wall hook, I blotted my black, knit top. “Or it’s completely innocent, because we don’t understand an important piece of the puzzle. The library may have been overpriced, but that information isn’t exactly secret. We found it online in a few minutes. Plus, there’s still Joy. She had motive, means, and opportunity to poison Joe. Joy spent enough time around them both. Sh
e could have pushed Frank down the stairs too.”

  “But Joe wasn’t investigating his niece.”

  “Maybe he should have been,” I said. “And what about Mark’s real estate dealings with Antheia? If we’re wrong about the bond, and Joe was investigating Antheia, he could have been killed over that. Or even the Whispering Wanderer.”

  “Forget the wanderer. Do you really think your ex is murdering lawyers?”

  I sagged against the granite counter. “No. But a week ago I wouldn’t have pegged him for an illegal plumbing smuggler either.” It was clear I’d misjudged him in more ways than one.

  “There’s lots we don’t understand. We need to attack the problems we do understand and can manage.”

  “Right.” Except I was more flummoxed than ever about the murders. Were there any problems I was in control of? Pie Town. Customers seemed to be finding their way back. But there wasn’t anything I could do to speed that process tonight. Mark? That ship had sailed, sunk, and disintegrated on the ocean floor. That left getting on with my life. I could make a bonfire of my wedding gown, but doubted Charlene would appreciate that use for her barbeque pit. “Can I borrow your Jeep?”

  “Absolutely not. Only I drive the Jeep.”

  “I’m a good driver,” I said, offended.

  “That Jeep belonged to my husband. Besides, you’ve got your own car. It’s a lemon, but—”

  “I want to get my stuff out of Mark’s storage locker, and the VW’s too small.”

  “We can go together.”

  “Um, I sort of wanted to go now.”

  “No time like the present, eh? I’m game.”

  I checked my watch. “It’s nearly midnight. Are you sure?”

  “I don’t need much sleep.”

  Piling into her Jeep, we trundled off. The storage center was outside town, hidden from the highway by a stand of eucalyptus trees. A heavy-lidded guard met us at the gate.

  Leaning across Charlene, I showed him my key.

  “So?” he asked.

  “So let us in, you big lunk,” Charlene said.

  He squinted. “Is that Crazy Charlene McCree?”

  “Hey!” My head snapped up, heat spurting through my veins. “That’s Mrs. Charlene McCree to you.”