A Real Pickle

by Jessica Beck

  He just laughed, and I was happy to see my mother willingly giving up the cleaning supplies to her father-in-law.

  “Ellen,” my mother said, “if you bus the tables, I’ll get things started in back. We should easily be ready to reopen in under an hour.” Mom looked back at me as she added, “If that’s still the plan.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “What do you think, Moose?”

  “The quicker we’re open again, the less time rumors have to spread that we killed somebody here today,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Do you honestly think that anyone’s going to say that?” I asked him.

  “You’re naïve if you think for one second that they’re not,” he said. “Don’t worry, Victoria. This too shall pass.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said, but I suspected that my grandfather was wrong.

  I just didn’t know how wrong at the time.

  Chapter 2

  “He didn’t make it,” Jeffrey said solemnly as he walked back into The Charming Moose two hours later. He looked as though he’d just lost his best friend, and I didn’t doubt that it was true. I knew from past experience that the two of them had been very close.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said as I touched his shoulder lightly.

  “Thanks. I appreciate that,” he said. “You know, Curtis hired me away from his sister, Charlotte, and brought me here three years ago. I’ve been an orphan most of my life, and that man ended up being the only family that I ever really had.”

  “How did that all come about?” I asked. Clearly the man needed to talk to someone, and I would have to do.

  “Charlotte hired me out of high school to drive for her in San Francisco,” he said. “The odd thing was, she was only at the house for a month or two each year. The rest of time, the staff just tried to entertain ourselves waiting for her to come back. Three years ago though, her brother showed up unexpectedly, and Curtis and I hit it off from the start. He asked me to come work for him back here on a full-time basis, and I jumped at the chance.” Jeffrey let out a deep sigh, and then he added, “That was a long time ago, though. I still can’t believe that he’s gone.”

  “What are you going to do with yourself now?” I asked him.

  “I’m not quite sure, but I know one thing: I’m not going back to work for Charlotte.”

  “Was she that bad as an employer?”

  “I don’t know if I can say that, but once I worked for Curtis, I knew that she and I were finished. I suppose I’ll find something, but I saved my money, so I don’t have to do anything drastic right away.” He looked back at the limo, and then Jeffrey added, “After I take that back to the house, I suppose my work is done. You don’t happen to know of any places around here for rent, do you? I don’t need much, just a one bedroom apartment.”

  “Let me call a real estate agent I know,” I said. “If you can wait, I’ll see if she’s free right now.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble on my account,” Jeffrey said.

  “It’s no trouble at all. She’s a customer here.” I dialed Diane Meadows’s number.

  She picked up on the first ring. “Meadows Properties,” she said automatically.

  “Diane, it’s Victoria Nelson. I need a favor. Do you have any one-bedroom apartments available?”

  “Oh, no. I can’t believe this,” she said. Diane was clearly upset about something.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “You and Greg are splitting up. Victoria, how can you be so calm about it?”

  “What? No. We’re not. Where did you even get that idea?”

  “You just asked me for a one-bedroom apartment, Victoria. It doesn’t take a leap in logic to know what that means.”

  “You need to get that imagination of yours in check,” I said with a laugh. “Greg and I are fine. It’s for a friend of mine, a man named Jeffrey…” I held the phone to my shoulder as I asked the chauffeur, “What’s your last name?”

  “Graham,” he said.

  I put the phone off my shoulder. “Jeffrey Graham. I’ll vouch for him personally, Diane. He’s a good guy.”

  “I’ve got two places at the moment, depending on how much he has to spend. If he’s loaded, I’ve got a real beauty that just came on the market.”

  “That sounds good, but let’s go in the other direction,” I said. I didn’t want to come right out and say that Jeffrey wasn’t rich, but then again, I didn’t want Diane trying to set him up with something well beyond his budget.

  “Got it,” she said. “If he doesn’t mind Spartan surroundings, I’ve got a real deal for him.”

  “Let me check,” I said, and then I asked Jeffrey, “How do you feel about a simple place?”

  He grinned broadly. “I love it.”

  “He’d like to see it,” I told Diane.

  “Have him come by my office at three this afternoon, and I’ll show it to him. Thanks for the lead, Victoria.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  As I jotted Diane’s address and phone number down on a napkin, I told Jeffrey, “I assume that you’ll be free by three this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said as he took the note from me. “Wow, I thought stories about small towns were all lies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You hardly know me, and yet look at all that you’ve done for me already.”

  I smiled. “I like the way you looked after your boss,” I said. “That makes you a good guy in my book. Don’t let me down, okay? I vouched for you, after all.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Well, I’d better get moving if I’m going to get everything done in time for my meeting with Ms. Meadows.”

  “If you need a different appointment time, I can always call her back.”

  “No, I should be fine. There’s really not all that much left for me to do. Thanks again.”

  “You’re most welcome,” I said. “Jeffrey, would you do me a favor?”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “Be careful what you promise,” I said with a smile. “This shouldn’t be too difficult, though. Will you drop by and tell me when the funeral’s scheduled? I’d like to go.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  I was a little hurt by his outright refusal. “Why, is it for family only?”

  “That’s not it. You see, there isn’t going to be one. Curtis didn’t believe in them. He never focused on his death while he was alive, and he didn’t want us to after he left us. He’ll be cremated within the hour, and his ashes will be spread under his favorite oak tree on his property. It’s the way that he wanted it—no fuss and no muss.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “I’ll miss him and the tiny plastic pickles he used to leave behind.”

  “If you’d like some, I have three boxes of them in the limo,” Jeffrey said. “He never wanted to run out. I guess in the end, he didn’t.”

  A tear started tracking down his cheek, and Jeffrey left the diner quickly before he lost it completely.

  Ellen came over and joined me after he was gone. “It’s so sad, isn’t it?”

  “I’m surprised by how hard it hit me. It’s not like it was a big secret that Curtis was dying, but I hate that it happened here at the diner.”

  “Me, too,” she said as she looked over at the booth where he’d died. “Am I crazy, or is there a white shadow hanging over that booth?”

  I looked where she was pointing, and sure enough, it appeared that a ghostly image was hovering above the surface of the table. Feeling a little shaky, I started walking toward it, determined to see what was causing it. My hand went right through it, and I looked down at the napkin dispenser. The stainless steel surface was reflecting sunlight off the tabletop and into the air. I moved it a quarter turn, and the spectral image suddenly disappeared.

  “It’s gone!” Ellen said loudly.

  “Take it easy. It was just a reflection.”

  She shivered noti
ceably. “It still gives me the creeps. I’m glad that my shift’s about over. Thanks for letting me take off an hour early today.” Ellen usually worked until two, but she’d asked for permission to duck out early today, and I hadn’t seen any reason not to accommodate her.

  “You can take off now, if you’d like.”

  “No, I’ll wait it out,” Ellen replied.

  Wayne, the mechanic who was sweet on her, came by the diner ten minutes later to pick her up. Ellen still had five minutes left on her abbreviated shift, but I told her, “Go on. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Bye,” she said as she put her arm through Wayne’s. They had gone through some tough times lately, but it was finally starting to look like they just might make it.

  Greg came out of the kitchen as they left and smiled at me. “It’s just the two of us now,” he said. “Care for a quick bite to eat before things get crazy again? I know for a fact that your lunch was interrupted twice by customers, and you ended up throwing most of it away, so you’ve got to be starving.”

  “I could eat,” I said, answering his smile with one of my own. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Would grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken soup be too plain for you?”

  “Not if you’re the one who makes them,” I said. Greg had a knack for taking the most mundane ingredients and turning them into the most delightful meals.

  “Two of each, coming right up.”

  As he ducked back to the grill to make our food, I looked around the diner. There were fewer customers than I’d hoped for at that time of day, but it might not have been because of what had happened at the diner earlier. It could just be part of the lull we usually experienced between the lunch and dinner crowds. I just hoped they found their way back to us, and quickly. We couldn’t afford to have too many customers leaving us, not if we were going to keep The Charming Moose afloat.

  “I’m afraid that I have some bad news,” Sheriff Croft said when he walked into the diner a little later.

  “Thanks, but we already heard,” I said.

  He looked shocked by my admission. “How is that possible? I know that Jasper Fork is a small town, but somebody’s going to jail for this.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Jeffrey came by earlier to let us know that Curtis didn’t make it. There’s no reason to lock him up for it.”

  “Is that all that you know?” he asked me.

  “What else could there be?” What was the sheriff talking about?

  “It was murder, Victoria,” he said softly.

  “Murder?” I asked, no doubt much louder than he would have wanted. I couldn’t help myself. Someone had killed a friend of mine in my diner! “Was it poison?” I asked softly. That was every restaurateur’s nightmare, and I was no exception. We could lose our business if someone had slipped something into Curtis’s meal.

  “No, he was stabbed in the chest with a thin metal rod, and it went straight into his heart. The poor man didn’t stand a chance. Whoever did it left the weapon in, so there wasn’t very much blood at all, and with the red shirt he was wearing, it was easy to miss. The EMTs found it on the way to the hospital, but I ordered them to keep a lid on what they found until I had time to investigate. That’s why I was threatening to lock somebody up for telling you about it.”

  “Jeffrey just assumed that it was cancer that killed his boss,” I said. “Sheriff Croft, why would someone murder a man so close to death anyway?”

  “That’s what I aim to find out,” he said. “It’s probably crazy for me to even ask you this, but you’re not going to stay out of this case, are you?”

  I shook my head. “You know that I can’t. He was my friend, and someone killed him in The Charming Moose. What choice do I have?”

  “You could be patient and let me do my job,” he said a little impatiently.

  “Be reasonable. Moose and I might be able to go places you can’t,” I said. “You should trust me enough by now to know that if we find something significant, we’ll come to you with it.”

  “I do, and I appreciate it, but this killer is something I haven’t seen before. Killing Curtis Trane in front of a room full of people sounds sociopathic to me.” He shook his head as he added, “I don’t know anybody who could get into the head of a killer like that.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, though that wasn’t strictly true.

  The sheriff looked at me skeptically. “If you’re not lying, then I’m even more concerned about you. Victoria, you should be terrified.”

  “Well, maybe a little,” I said. “Are you afraid?”

  “Let’s just put it this way. I’m glad that I’m armed all of the time. I can’t tell you how strongly I recommend that you sit this one out. Leave the investigation to people who have been trained and are paid to take the risks.”

  Greg popped out of the kitchen, noticed me talking to the sheriff, and raised his eyebrows. I blinked slowly, and he stepped back into the kitchen. We were so in synch that we could communicate volumes with glances, and I knew that I’d be lost without him. There was no doubt in my mind that he would be devastated as well if something happened to me. Did I have the right to risk my life? When I’d taken my vows with Greg, I’d made a promise to him forever after. Was I breaking it now?

  “Victoria, what are you going to do?” the sheriff asked me.

  “I can’t make any promises one way or the other,” I said. I couldn’t, either, at least not to him.

  “I figured as much,” he said. “Just be careful, okay? And tell that crazy old grandfather of yours the same thing.”

  “That I can do,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “It will be out soon enough. I’m not naïve enough to think that I can delay the news much longer. Folks are going to react to this; you know that, don’t you? Some will come by to see where it happened, but you won’t be able to get others within ten miles of this place. You should expect rumors of poison to start surfacing, too. After all, we know that he was stabbed, but most folks won’t let the facts keep them from telling a good story, and being poisoned to death in a diner is going to be too good to pass up, no matter what the truth might be.”

  “We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” I said. “Just catch whoever did this.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  Moose came in half an hour later. “So, how are we going to tackle this?” he asked me with a grim expression on his face.

  “Tackle what?”

  “Haven’t you heard the news? It’s already all over town. Somebody stabbed Curtis Trane in our diner right under our noses. We’re not going to let them get away with it, are we?”

  “I’m not so sure we should dig into this one,” I said hesitantly.

  “What? Why not?” He looked hard at me for a few seconds, and then my grandfather asked me, “Victoria, are you spooked by this case?”

  “Aren’t you?” I asked him. “The sheriff came by to tell me what happened, and he put some pretty dark thoughts into my head while he was here.”

  “What did he say? Did he scare you?” Moose asked.

  “Let’s just say that he pointed a few things out to me that I should have seen myself. Moose, the cases we’ve worked on in the past have been pretty tame compared to this.”

  “Nonsense. We’ve tracked down killers before,” Moose said.

  “Yes, but they haven’t been psychopaths, either.”

  “What makes you think this murderer is any different?”

  “The killer acted boldly in a crowded diner,” I said. “Doesn’t that strike you as someone who doesn’t care if they’re caught or not?”

  “I think it was probably pretty savvy, actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When is the only time that you’ve ever seen Curtis without Jeffrey close behind him?” Moose asked me. “I know for a fact that the only time it happened when I noticed was when Curtis was here having a meal.”

  “Why would the kil
ler strike in front of a dozen people instead of in plain sight of just one? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not if Jeffrey is everything that he appears to be, but what if he’s not?”

  “What else could he be?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it’s something that I’d like to ask him.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said.

  “That’s because my cynical old mind is working overtime on this. I’ve got a hunch that Jeffrey is more than he’s shown us so far.”

  “You honestly don’t think that he’s a bad guy, do you?” The thought appalled me. It went against the Jeffrey that I knew, but that didn’t mean that I might not be wrong. I was a decent judge of character, but sometimes I ran into someone who could fool me just as much as he did everyone else.

  “I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is what if he was Curtis’s bodyguard as well as being his driver?”

  “I suppose that it’s possible,” I said.

  “If I’m right, which would you rather face? A dozen uninterested strangers, or one very determined man trained to protect his charge?”

  “You could be right,” I said.

  Moose looked up, clearly surprised by what he saw. “Well, speak of the devil and he appears.”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “Look,” he said as he pointed over my shoulder.

  Jeffrey was headed toward the diner with a determined expression on his face. It would give us the perfect opportunity to question him about his resume, but I wasn’t sure what purpose it would serve at this point.

  After all, Curtis Trane was dead, and no new information we might get about his chauffeur would bring him back.

  “Let’s see what he wants before we start grilling him,” I said to Moose as Jeffrey came in the door.

  “I need to speak with you,” the chauffeur said as he approached us.

  “This isn’t about the apartment, is it?” I asked, knowing in my heart that whatever Jeffrey wanted to discuss was a great deal more dire than his current housing situation.

  “No, I’m staying right where I am, at least for now. I already called Ms. Meadows and canceled our appointment.”