Cookies & Catastrophe

by Beth Byers

  I leaned down and scratched Daisy’s ears. “Why Daisy? Why would anyone kill instead of just challenging her?”

  I walked out to the dining area. Simon wasn’t there, but I called him. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said. “How was your breakfast?”

  “You trying to pick fights with me?”

  “Asparagus is good for you. As are egg whites.”

  “Funny,” he said. “I’m not expecting to be hungry for the rest of the day as those pancakes are cementing my insides.”

  “Meet me outside? Right after the diner closes?”

  “Everything all right?”

  “I just have something to say.”

  Chapter 7

  “It’s not Henrietta,” Zee said. She pushed her hair back and scanned the page of notes. “Geez, I knew Henrietta had caved too many times to Donna, but I didn’t know about her kid or her grandkid. And Shawn…who’d have guessed it? She seems so nice.”

  I took a bite of my cake. It didn’t make me feel better. None of this did. The diner would be closing soon, and I needed to meet Simon. I leaned down to scratch Daisy’s ears and told Zee, “I hate this.”

  “What about Paige? I didn’t know about that.” Zee snorted, “Though I don’t think Donna was blackmailing her. They were pretty chummy. Even still, I didn’t think Jenny’s files contained anything I hadn’t figured out.”

  I shoved my cake aside and said, “Owning this place is going to make me gain 1000 pounds. I might need to join a gym.”

  “You freak,” Zee said, “The beach is outside, go for a run.”

  “It’s raining,” I whined.

  “You like the rain.”

  “I hate you,” I told her. “And I like the smell and the sound of rain.”

  I got up and said, “I have to go meet Simon. I’ll be back. Pick one. We’ll go see them.”

  * * * * *

  Simon was standing at the end of the block talking to someone I didn’t recognize. Given their gear, I’d guess that they were tourists. He pointed down the street towards the beach, and I walked towards him, trying to ignore the rain soaking my clothes.

  “I was going to meet you inside,” he said.

  I put my hand on his chest, rose up onto my toes, and kissed him. “If I have to choose a team, I choose you.”

  He didn’t pull away. I hadn’t been sure what I was going to get from him, so I considered that a real plus.

  “You choose me?” His hands brushed down my arms and he took my hand. “What does that mean?”

  “Donna was a blackmailer,” I said. “Of a lot of people. She ferreted out secrets and used them to finance her perfume bottles and the shoes she never wore and her fancy panties.”

  “Woah,” Simon said, and I laughed.

  “You knew,” I reached up and cupped his face.

  “So what? She’s blackmailing Zee? I’m surprised Zee didn’t just destroy her.”

  I stepped back at that one.

  “I didn’t think that Zee would pay blackmail,” he said.

  “I don’t know that it’s Zee secret…specifically,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Zee knew a lot of things. She’s the type of woman who knows everything.”

  “Now that,” Simon said, “Is very true. Why are you telling me?”

  “I told you that already.”

  “So you’ll stay out of it now?”

  I grinned and said, “Mmmmm I gotta get back. I need to finish tomorrow’s pies.”

  * * * * *

  When I came back into the diner, Zee’s head tilted at me and she asked, “What you been up to, Rose?”

  I shrugged.

  “You been causing trouble with that boy of yours?”

  “Simon is a man,” I told Zee.

  “I’ve noticed,” Zee said lasciviously. “What were you talking about…out in the rain?”

  I looked at her, shook my head, and said, “Who are we visiting?”

  “Betty, of course, you need to pay her anyway. I figured out the wages for you. We’ll catch her off guard.”

  Zee drove this time. She had a late 70’s rusted piece of metal that was disguised as a car, but she drove it like it was a brand new muscle car. As she revved her way down Main Street making everyone turn and scowl while I held on for my life.

  “So, what did you do?” Zee asked conversationally trying again to catch me off guard.

  Given that I’d heard that innocent tone from her before, I played stupid and said, “What do you mean?”

  She snorted at that and then said, “There’s hope for you yet.”

  I wasn’t stupid enough to respond since she’d pin me down like a rare butterfly. I simply looked out the window and prayed for my life.

  Betty lived in a trailer park between Neskowin and Silver Falls. I’d passed it before but never realized what it was. It was half RVers who were there for the ocean and half permanent residences with flower gardens, outdoor swings, and little fences around their trailers.

  A part of me—the nasty part—wanted to find Betty’s trailer to be rundown. But only because she’d irritated me. I told myself I was glad that her home wasn't beat up when I saw the lovely rose bushes cut back for the winter and the cool weather flowers planted and thriving in the mild coastal climate. The yard was pretty spare of flowers because of winter, but I bet come March or so, it would be a riot of colors. Even in December, there were little bushes in pots that were flowering and inside the white picket fence around her trailer, I saw a pretty little white fluffy dog with a pink bow in her hair. She yipped at us with jagged teeth and angry eyes.

  “Her dog matches her,” Zee said mildly. She tricked the dog, grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, and carried its wriggling, growling body up to the porch and slammed her fist against the door. “Seemingly innocuous and ready to rip off your face.”

  Zee was holding the small dog's mouth clamped shut and looked as smooth as if she were carrying a basket of muffins.

  “You snatched up that dog like it was no big deal,” I said.

  “It is no big deal,” Zee said. “This dog weighs 5 pounds. It can’t hurt you if you don’t let it.”

  I considered that and realized I was a wuss. I had found myself too often surprised thinking that I was tougher than I was.

  Betty opened the door with a scowl on her face and then gasped and grabbed her dog from Zee.

  “That creature,” Zee said, “Is a menace.”

  Betty started to slam the door in our faces, but Zee said, “So you don’t want to be paid then? There are two of us, so you can’t pretend that you were screwed.”

  She stopped and then turned back to the door.

  “Well, where is it?”

  “You need to sign some paperwork,” Zee said, pulling a folder from her purse.

  “For what?”

  “I’m not standing out in the drizzle to explain. You can come by the diner or call your lawyer, I’m sure that’ll go over well.”

  Betty’s eyes narrowed, but she begrudgingly swung the screen door of her home open.

  “You have a lovely garden,” I said, as I walked past her.

  She snorted, and I thought it was a good thing that Betty wouldn’t be working at the diner. She and Zee could have had a “snort-off” and I’d be the victim of it.

  “So,” Zee said, without preamble. “You kept an illegal pot farm with your boys. Did you kill Donna over it? She was blackmailing you, wasn’t she? If y’all are still growing, you’ll still get in trouble.”

  Betty leaned back, face stone, and lied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Please,” Zee said. “Please, I’ve known about that for a while.”

  Betty’s face jerked just a little bit and then asked, “Why did you hire me then?”

  It was Zee who lied this time, but she was much better at it. “I didn’t see how a years-old crime would affect your ability to work. We just didn’t intend to let you make the deposits.”

  “Look
I was desperate,” Betty said. “Things were harder for me then when my boys were home.”

  “I imagine,” Zee said. “It was really them who was doing it, wasn’t it? The planting and growing. Did they even give you any money?”

  “They paid for my home and my car,” Betty said. “It’s why I can get by now. Zee…your daughter is upstanding and good. Isn’t she a doctor?”

  “She’s a dentist,” Zee said.

  “She was a good kid,” Betty said. She let a tear roll down her cheek. “My boys were rotten. They took after their dad that’s for sure. He was no good, and they’re no good.”

  I sniffed and thought about how many people on that list of ours were there because of their children. I guess it made sense. You’d only pay blackmail for so many things. If it didn’t approach the nearest and dearest parts of your heart, then you’d never pay. Maybe that was why it was so strange to me that people even paid. I couldn’t think of anything in my life that I’d pay blackmail over. Did that mean I was upstanding or that I didn’t have anything in my life that would really twist me up?

  I rubbed the space between my brows. Was I just extra hormonal these days? I felt like I’d played weird games with Simon the last few days and Jane was making me want to slap her. Maybe being around people who had full lives—like in Silver Falls—was making me jealous. At the call center back in Gresham, I’d been the same as everyone else. We’d all been drudging through life. There were a few with kids and a few with grandchildren. There were a lot of single people who’d had to share apartments and spent much of their feuding with roommates and swapping apartments. Perhaps, my problem was that my old life had been a life for young people, and I’d just gotten stuck there.

  It didn’t matter now. What mattered was that we needed to find Jane’s blackmailer, make sure whoever the murderer was, they weren’t going to do any more damage and leave the finding of the murderer to Simon and his other police officers.

  “Were you paying Donna?” I asked Betty.

  She shrugged and glanced away.

  “We’ll take that as a yes,” Zee said.

  “She would have sent my boys to jail. They may be no-good scoundrels, but they’re all I have.”

  “Did you kill Donna?”

  “What? No. Why would I? She was asking for $100.00 a month. I mean…even unemployed, I could afford that with my pension and disability.”

  Zee humped, and Betty smiled viciously. “Your problem is that Donna was clever enough to never ask for more than I could afford. I bet she did the same for everyone else.”

  I rose. I didn’t like Betty, and I didn’t think she’d killed Donna. Not for $100.00—even monthly. I also didn’t like her comment about disability. She had been intending to scam someone if she thought she could work for me and collect disability. This woman was shady, I thought. I was glad she was out of The 2nd Chance Diner before I was in a situation where I needed to hire a lawyer.

  “You need to look for the big fish on Donna’s hook. Maybe they were paying enough to kill over, but I sure wasn’t.”

  “Thank you for your help,” I told her. I rose, handed her a check, and left. When Zee followed me out to the car, I said, “I’m not sure you should do any further hiring.”

  Zee’s glance was mean, but I laughed and she said, “We were desperate.”

  Chapter 8

  Zee revved her car engine and said, “We’ll go see Roxy now.”

  “Who is that?”

  “The one you saw with Donna. The teenager.”

  “Why her?”

  “The killer would have hiked through the woods on the trail, she would have been capable of knocking Jane over, she would have been able to outrun Mattie when she gave chase.”

  I tapped my finger against the window and held on for life as Zee roared through Silver Falls

  “Henrietta’s daughter could probably do those things,” I said. “Or Paige.”

  “Paige is pretty chunky,” Zee countered. “She huffs on the walk from the beach.”

  “But she walks it daily,” I shot back. “She works that store by herself. And she loves it. What if whatever Donna was demanding threatened that?”

  Zee’s glance at me said she thought I was epically stupid, but maybe Zee didn’t get how important it was to keep something that was wholly yours after you’d had it. I loved my diner. I’d do a lot to keep it. I wouldn’t kill someone over that, but…I wouldn’t have paid blackmail to keep up a lie like Jane had. Or like Betty had.

  Jane’s son was about 14 years old. Did that mean she’d been paying all this time? That much money might be something worth killing over. Especially if Donna had upped her money requests. Would Jane have kept paying beyond her son getting to the age where he might understand? Perhaps the endless question of it all was driving here. The edge of morals and into the willingness to set aside what you believed to end the madness? Jane could have walked that trail. Jane could have killed Donna. What had it been? Some sort of tampering with the house? Who would have figured that out more easily than Jane? She probably had similar wiring and gas.

  But…Jane had been in the house when she’d been knocked down and Mattie had chased someone out of the house. Of course…with multiple blackmail victims…anyone could have been there. And, come to think of it, that house had been intended to burn. If I hadn’t been there to pick up cookies in the neighborhood, it might have burned to the ground, with the evidence inside.

  Whoever had murdered Donna…had murdered Donna thinking that all the evidence from their—whatever it was—their secret had been safe. They were going to be upset. Maybe upset enough to kill again if someone else ended up with their evidence.

  As if Simon had read my mind, he called saying, “Where are you?”

  “With Zee,” I said.

  “But where?”

  “Ummm…Zee? What street is this?”

  She glanced around and said, “Freemont.”

  “Freemont,” I said, “Why?”

  “What about Jane and Mattie?”

  “I would guess they’re working,” I replied. “Why?”

  “Someone broke into the police station.”

  “And you thought I did?” I got why, of course. But my feelings were hurt. It bothered me a lot.

  “I didn't want it to be you. You or your crew of idiots.”

  “Rude,” I gasped, but I had to laugh. Zee was driving through Silver Falls like an idiot, except she crawled through the school zone.

  “Why’s he asking?”

  “Someone broke into the police station looking for evidence.”

  “Well now,” Zee said. “That is interesting.”

  “What did Zee say?” Simon asked.

  “She’s intrigued,” I told Simon.

  “Tell her no,” he said and then cursed.

  I was too busy laughing to reply. Tell Zee something? I was her boss and I couldn’t get her to do anything. If she wasn’t a good employee on her own, I’d have had to fire her. I got why Jenny, the previous diner owner, had made me promise not to fire her staff. Zee was someone people would fire not realizing she’d be impossible to replace.

  Simon hung up on me, and I said to her, “See what you do to him?”

  “You’re the one feeding the poor man buckwheat pancakes. Those things mess you up for days.”

  I laughed at her and then said, “You told me to lock him up tight.”

  “So you’re tormenting him? Haven’t you heard of going through his stomach to capture his heart?”

  “You think someone else hasn’t tried that with Simon?”

  “And what are you doing?” Zee scoffed.

  “Playing straight?”

  “What?” Her tone was mean and derogatory again.

  “I thought about it all after we broke in, and I saw his face.”

  “You thought about what?”

  “That if I wanted to be something more with him, I wasn’t going to play games. I was just going to be me. This is the second cha
nce, right? The chance to re-create my life. I’m not going to do that manipulatively.”

  Zee looked at me again, revved her way past the school zone and then said, “That’s not a bad idea. You know he dated the mayor?”

  “I guessed,” I said. “Roberta called him directly when she found me behind her house. She wanted him to arrest me. She was furious when he didn’t.”

  “She played games,” Zee said. “Lots of them.”

  I didn’t want to know this. Wasn’t this his new life too? Wasn’t this his chance to do things differently? I had no more desire to make my choices based off of ‘anti-Roberta’ moves than anything else.

  “She…” Zee continued.

  “Stop,” I countered. “I don’t want to know about Roberta or any of his other…ladies.”

  “He’s had a string of them,” Zee said.

  I shook my head and then said, “I don’t care.”

  “Well now,” Zee said. “You’re feeling feisty.”

  She stopped her car in front of a little yellow house. It was adorable, and there were two kids playing in the front yard. She turned off the car and it rumbled to a halt in the way where it didn’t really want to give up but finally did in an objecting sort of way.

  I got out of the car and walked up to the steps. Once you looked past the yard, you could see a teenager sitting on the porch watching the kids.

  Zee turned to the kids and said, “You guys know the ice cream shop over on Main?”

  The kids nodded.

  “It okay if they walk down there?”

  “Zee,” I said.

  “We’re allowed to go that far,” the older of the two girls said. “If we stay together and we’re back in a half hour.”

  “Rose,” Zee said.

  I didn’t object to buying the girls ice cream. What I objected to was Zee making me do it with an order. I shook my head and then handed the girls a ten dollar bill.

  “You kill Donna?” I asked the girl straight out.