by Jessica Beck
“I’d think that we had more than one,” I admitted. “Are you talking about Chester’s murder, or is there something else that’s happened that I don’t know about?”
“Grady Simpson just left,” she said, and I didn’t need any further explanation than that. Grady ran the town’s pennysaver, a combination gossip sheet/newspaper/swap meet/flea market of a paper that rarely had any news deeper than who was spotted leaving town in the middle of the night or what prominent member of our council was known to take a sip or three too many of red wine sitting on her porch after work most nights. Grady was, plain and simple, a gossip hound. How women ever got the reputation for spreading stories was beyond me. When it came to Maple Crest gossip, Grady was king, queen, and every member of the royal court all wrapped up into one.
“Why am I not surprised? You had to know that he’d hear about the murder sooner or later, Kathleen.”
My older sister frowned. “I told you to call me Sheriff when I’m working in my official capacity. I was willing to let it slide earlier because of what you’d been through, but it’s important to me that you do it now, okay?”
I looked around to see who might be listening to us standing on the back porch, but if anyone was there, I couldn’t see them. Still, I understood her desire to keep her family life and her work status separate, so I decided to do my best to comply. After all, if she found out what Pat and I were about to do, I’d need every last bit of goodwill from her that I could muster.
“Sorry,” I said as contritely as I could manage without sounding sarcastic. “Pat and I were wondering if you wouldn’t mind moving your cars so our customers can drive up and park in our lot.”
“You’re not upset about Grady? He’s going to slander you up one side and down the other. You know that, don’t you?”
“Isn’t it libel when he does it in print?” I asked her with a grin.
Kathleen snorted. “Of course it is, but you’re missing my point.”
“Sheriff,” I said carefully, “worrying about Grady Simpson is about the least productive thing in the world that I could do with my time. He’s going to say what he’s going to say, and folks are either going to take it all with a huge pinch of salt, or they’ll be inclined to believe him. Either way, I don’t see how it’s my problem.”
“Not until it impacts your business, anyway,” she said seriously.
“I appreciate you worrying about us, but right now, the only thing that’s slowing up our business are the two police cruisers sitting out front.”
“We’ll move them over to the side lot in a second,” she reluctantly agreed, “but I’m not sure how you’re ever going to get your customers to come inside. Most folks are going to want to have themselves more than a little peek at what we’re doing, though they won’t have Chester to look at for much longer. We’ve taken all of the video and the photographs that we need, and Doc Blackberry is already on his way.” Our one town GP, Doctor Jacob Blackberry, was a jack of all trades, delivering babies, holding general office hours, and working as the town coroner. I didn’t know how he managed to get by, but he loved small-town life, and we knew that we were lucky to have him.
“Just let me know when we can have the front porch back,” I said.
For a moment, my sister’s hard exterior softened a bit. “Annie, are you really as okay as you’re acting?”
“That depends. Is it the sheriff asking me, or is it my older sister?”
She smiled ruefully at me. “For one second, let’s assume that it’s your sister.”
“Honestly, I’m probably still in shock,” I admitted. “I may need to call you later and talk.” My sister was an excellent listener, and while I usually discussed everything going on in my life with Pat, there had been some things growing up that I wasn’t going to share with any boy, even if we had occupied the same egg once upon a time.
“Day or night, Analeigh, I’m there for you,” she said, her voice still soft.
“I know that, and I appreciate it,” I answered as Skip came out carrying a sign nicely printed on a sheet of white cardboard and attached to a wooden stake.
“How’s this look?” he asked me.
I read the words aloud. “‘Yes, we’re open. Come in around back.’ I like it. I’ve got to say, your printing is a lot better than mine.”
“When you make as many homemade greeting cards as I do, you get pretty good at it over time,” he said proudly. “Where should I put it?”
“Come on,” Kathleen said. “I’ll show you as soon as we move our cars.”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile.
“You’re welcome. I still think that you and your brother are crazy for opening the store after what just happened, but you’ve both always been a little odd to me.”
“To you and the rest of the world,” I replied. I glanced over my sister’s shoulder and saw an ambulance pulling up in front. “Is that really necessary?”
“We can’t exactly haul the victim off in the back of a pickup truck,” Kathleen said. “Don’t worry. You should have your porch back around four.”
“Perfect. That’s just in time for us to close the place for the day,” I said, this time letting a bit of my frustration through.
“What can I say? These things take time. Just be glad you’re getting it back at all. Talk to you later, Annie.”
As Skip and Kathleen headed toward the front of the building, I decided that it was time to go back inside and get the grill ready to serve breakfast, just in case any of our customers dared step inside after what had happened to poor Chester.
I loved having my very own fancy range/griddle/oven combo in my little space near the back of the store. The entire unit ran on natural gas, so even when our power was out because of snow or even heavy rain, I could still feed the masses when they came by the Iron for a meal. The range sported six burners, a twenty-four-inch griddle, and two standard ovens, everything I needed to cook except a fire pit, but there were no worries there, either; I had one of those out back, where I taught rustic cast iron cooking classes four times a year. The best thing of all was that the entire operation was just five feet wide and three feet deep, a real economy given the cramped space I had to work in. All in all, my little setup took up minimal floor space, including the seating and the bar. It might have been a small part of the Iron, but it was all mine.
Menus were simple enough. For breakfast, I offered waffles, pancakes, biscuits, bacon, sausage, and of course, the basic egg, served all the way from scrambled to fried. There were omelets on the menu occasionally, stuffed with peppers, onions, ham, and cheese, but those were offered only now and then. I liked to keep my morning fare plain and predictable. Lunch could be anything I felt like making in my cast iron, from stews to chicken to ribs, with cornbread, more biscuits, and even dessert prepared in the dense black metal. For those with more pedestrian tastes, I also served up hamburgers, hot dogs, and grilled cheese sandwiches, something that never changed. I liked serving breakfast and lunch, leaving dinner for others to prepare and serve. The grill suited me, and I was at my happiest wielding a spatula or one of my precious cast iron pots or pans.
I whipped up some biscuit dough as the left oven preheated. The griddle surface was as smooth and as slick as a mirror, and why shouldn’t it be? I spent every afternoon honing it with a pumice stone, making sure that it was pristine before I left for the day. I loved my old cast iron, particularly my Griswolds and Wagners, cast from a different generation, not that there wasn’t room for the occasional Lodge in my armory of cookware. No matter what year it was made, cast iron was my favorite way to cook, and I used it whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was for just about anything in the spectrum with two notable exceptions: I wouldn’t fry eggs in my iron cookware, and I wouldn’t use tomatoes in most forms. As far as I was concerned, the acid cut straight through the seasoning, which was a thin coating of carbonized oil that built up over the years on the pans and made them all virtually nonstick surfaces.<
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Cast iron was my profession as well as my hobby, but trivets were my indulgence. First created to hold hot skillets and pots, they were also beautiful in their own right, in my opinion, and always hanging within reach, I had mostly Griswold editions featuring stained glass patterns, eagles in wreaths, ornately designed trees, stars, intricate circular patterns, and more. Their delicate yet iron-tough characteristics really sang to me for some reason.
For eggs, I kept a few aluminum pans on hand, and for my tomato sauces and chilis, a couple of porcelain enameled cast iron pots worked wonderfully.
As I looked over my array of pots and pans, I was satisfied that I was ready to create any order that came my way.
Now all I needed was customers.
CHAPTER 6: PAT
If someone from the outside happened to glance in through one of our windows, it probably looked like a typical day at the Iron. Annie was getting ready to serve breakfast, Edith was busy sorting the day’s mail and shoving it into all of the quaint little boxes, Skip was restocking the batteries and pumpkin butter, and I was restocking the till with cash from our safe. I felt secure enough about the money we kept on hand at the shop, since the safe was embedded in concrete under the floor and was only accessible by a trapdoor behind the counter up front, where I spent most of my days. If someone wanted to break into it, they’d probably need a jackhammer to do it. I was just adding the singles to the appropriate slot in the register when I heard the back door open. We’d installed little bells on both the front and back entrances so we’d know when someone was coming in or going out when we’d first opened, and though it had taken a little time to get used to at first, it was music to my ears now.
I was even happier when I realized that it wasn’t my sister, Kathleen, or one of her deputies.
It appeared that we had an actual customer, our first of the day.
It was Bryson Oak. He stopped at Annie’s station, so I figured he must be having his typical breakfast, but he surprised me by not lingering there for very long before he walked over to me. Somewhere in his late thirties, Bryson was short and heavyset as well as balding prematurely, not a generally attractive combination. Despite all of his physical limitations, Bryson considered himself a ladies’ man, and to my constant surprise, he seemed to do quite well with the opposite sex. I had to wonder if it had more to do with his air of confidence than anything else, but somehow he’d found a way to make it work for him. Usually, at any rate. I knew from the town scuttlebutt that Bryson and Chester had been rivals, not friends, in business as well as in love, so I wondered what was bringing him to me the morning his nemesis was murdered on my front porch.
I didn’t have long to wait until I found out.
“Pat, do you have a second?”
I closed the till before I answered him. “Sure thing, Bryson. What’s up?”
He lowered his voice when he answered, though no one else was within earshot of us. “I just heard about Chester.”
“News travels fast around here, doesn’t it?” I asked noncommittally.
“Have you spoken with your sister?”
I looked at him oddly before I replied. “I talk to Annie just about every minute of every day that we’re awake. Why?”
Bryson shook his head. “I’m not talking about that sister. I meant Kathleen.”
“The sheriff? Yes, she and I have discussed what happened.” What was he getting at? Was the man actually expecting me to disclose something to him that my sister might have shared with me in confidence? Kathleen wouldn’t do that in the first place, and if she had, I wouldn’t tell Bryson, and he should know better.
“What did she have to say?”
I wasn’t going to answer his question, but it didn’t keep me from making a query of my own. “Why the sudden concern? You two weren’t exactly best friends when he was alive, were you?”
Bryson looked at me distastefully. “Just because we weren’t drinking buddies doesn’t mean that I don’t care about what happened to him.”
“Sorry, but I don’t buy it,” I said.
He looked stunned by my response. “Why not?”
“It’s simple. You’ve never shown any interest in Chester one way or another unless it was a way to top him at something, so your sudden concern about what happened to him this morning doesn’t ring true.”
Bryson pursed his lips a moment or two before he spoke again. “I’m guessing you haven’t heard, then, have you?”
“Heard what?”
“I’ve been dating Julia for the past three weeks,” he finally admitted.
“Julia Crane?” I asked.
“She’s the only Julia in town, as far as I know.”
I whistled softly. “You don’t say. How did you manage to keep that a secret? I figured if you were dating Chester’s ex-wife, the whole town would know about it.”
“As a matter of fact, I was fine with it being out in the open, but Julia didn’t want Chester to find out,” he replied sullenly.
“They’ve been divorced for over a year now. Why should what he thought matter to her in the least?” This was a curious conversation I was having with Bryson, but if he was going to share information about possible motives with me, I wasn’t about to stop him.
“That’s what I kept asking her.”
“What did she say?” I asked, and then I noticed Annie heading over to us. If she joined our conversation, she might inhibit Bryson from saying anything else, so I shook my head so slightly that I doubted Bryson would pick up on it. It was a part of the “twin language” that Annie and I had developed early on. Some folks believed it was ESP, and I don’t have any cause to doubt that it’s a possibility in some twins under certain circumstances, but this was just a case of subtle signs that we’d spent a lifetime developing. Annie veered off at the last second and headed over toward Skip to lend him a hand in restocking the shelves. It was so subtle that I doubted that Bryson had even noticed. “Surely she had to give you some kind of reasonable answer.”
“She said that he was still in love with her,” Bryson admitted.
“Did she feel the same way about him?”
He gave me a brief glance full of contempt. “How could she? She was with me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I pressed.
“I just wanted to know if the sheriff had mentioned me, that’s all.”
“Your name never came up in our conversation,” I replied. Though it certainly will now, I added, but only in my own head. Bryson was showing way too much interest in Chester’s murder as far as I was concerned, and that only served to make me suspicious about his motivation. Was his confession of a relationship with the victim’s ex-wife simply a way to get it out into the open before my older sister uncovered it? What other motive would he have had for sharing the news with me?
“Good. Let’s keep it that way, okay?”
I wasn’t about to honor that particular request. I glanced over at Annie, who was waiting for a sign from me that she could join us, and I figured that it was time. I barely winked at her, a flash of recognition that I doubted anything but a high-speed camera could pick up, and she was with us before I was forced to lie to Bryson about what I was planning on doing next.
Annie smiled brightly at our visitor. “How about that breakfast? I can have your usual whipped up in half a shake.”
“Thanks, but I’m not all that hungry this morning after all,” Bryson said.
“Come on, Bryson. Starving yourself isn’t going to do Chester any good,” Annie prodded good naturedly. “How about if I give you a discount, good today and today only?”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but like I said, I’m not interested.”
Bryson headed out the door, and I doubted that he would have moved any faster if the place had been on fire.
“Annie, I’ve never heard you offer a discount on your food since we opened the Iron,” I said to my sister after Bryson was gone.
“It’s a first, but I wanted to s
ee just how strong his urge to leave really was.”
“He seemed pretty intent on getting away from us, didn’t he?” I asked.
“What did he just tell you?” she asked earnestly. “And don’t even think about leaving anything out. I want to know every word that he said.”
“The gist of it was that Bryson’s been dating Julia Crane for the last three weeks.”
Annie looked suitably startled by the news. “Chester’s ex? You’re kidding.”
“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what he just told me,” I said.
“What did Chester have to say about that?” Annie asked.
“As far as Bryson knew, he wasn’t aware of it. It seems they were keeping it from him.”
“That doesn’t sound like Bryson Oak,” Annie said. “I’m surprised he didn’t take out a full-page ad in Grady’s pennysaver newspaper. I wonder why they kept it so hush-hush.”
“According to Bryson, Julia told him that Chester was still in love with her.”
Annie frowned upon hearing the news before speaking again. “That might explain things if I’d found Bryson’s body out front this morning, but it doesn’t help us figure out why Chester was murdered.”
“Here are a pair of possibilities,” I said off the top of my head. “Let’s assume for one second that it’s true that Chester still loved his ex-wife. What if he found out that Bryson was dating her, and he confronted his rival on the front porch? Things could have gotten ugly fast.”
“Then again, it could have been Julia. Chester could have invited her here for breakfast to talk to her, and somehow it came out that she was dating Bryson. Chester could have reacted badly to the news about the relationship, he and Julia could have struggled, and he was murdered in the bargain.”