by Hannah Reed
“How long will you be gone?”
“Don’t wait up,” he said, smiling.
After Hunter left, I walked home with Dinky trotting along on her leash. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get Tom and Ford out of my mind. I made a quick salad with some of the vegetables from my garden and ate dinner outside. The garden needed attention and I thought I should look in on my bees, make sure my girls were happy. Getting back into my regular routine, and getting a little dirt under my fingernails, might clear my head so I could sleep tonight.
For the next several hours until the sunset, I worked hard. First, I cleaned up the honey house, my sweet little shed where I harvested and bottled honey products. I sterilized jars, getting them ready for the upcoming honey harvest, which promised to be a bumper crop.
Then I weeded the garden, hoeing between the rows of beets and Brussels sprouts and my greens. I like to grow mustard greens, arugula, and a wild assortment of leaf lettuces. And I love tomatoes. The tomato vines were heavy with fruit, still green but starting to ripen.
Working my muscles felt good after the stressful day I’d had.
But later when I tried to fall asleep, I still couldn’t get Tom and Ford out of my mind.
Or should I call them Cain and Abel?
Fifteen
Dinky and I arrived at Grams’s house before the sun rose, but I knew she and Mom wouldn’t mind. They’re the early-to-bed, early-to-rise, get-the-worm type of women. Peeking in the screen door, I saw Grams already at the stove, making blueberry pancakes, my favorite breakfast food. She wore a brightly colored flowery robe and had a fresh daisy tucked into her bun.
I love anything with blueberries—pancakes, buckle, pie, crisp, you name it. My ex-husband had hated them, which should have been a big tip-off that there was something majorly wrong with him. Shaking Clay out of my mind, I made a mental note to talk to Milly about putting a blueberry recipe in the next newsletter.
“Come in, sweetie. Is everything okay?” Grams looked worried. My early appearance in her kitchen must have seemed like the dreaded late night phone call, the one that always brings bad news.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly to reassure her, then took a seat at the table in front of a Ball jar filled with maple syrup. Grams put a steaming cup of coffee in front of me. “Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“She’s fixing herself up. She’ll be out for breakfast soon. Want pancakes?”
“You bet.”
Grams eyed me up, still suspicious. Well, to tell the truth, since Mom moved in with her, I didn’t exactly pop in on a regular basis. Mostly just when they invited me, and even then I made more excuses than appearances. Mom and I crossed swords more often than the Vikings raided coastal towns. Why would I willingly go into that arena?
The only reason I made an exception this morning was that I wanted to save my mother from Tom Stocke. I couldn’t let her continue to see him until this whole business was behind us. I might say a lot of negative things about my mother, but deep down I love her immensely and would never stand back and let someone dangerous near her.
“Hey, sweet puppy,” Grams said to Dinky. “Want a treat?” And Dinky trotted right over to where she knew Grams had a stash of liver snaps.
While I was waiting for Mom and pancakes, Holly called my cell, giving me the same kind of scare I’d just given Grams. My sister isn’t usually functional until closer to noon. I hustled outside for privacy and confirmed that Holly was fine except she couldn’t sleep because yesterday’s drama continued in her dreams. Or nightmares.
I told her why I was over at Mom’s, and that led to relating the inside information I had on Tom thanks to Patti.
“Mom isn’t going to be happy with you if you interfere,” Holly said. “Not one bit.”
“What else is new? I just want her to be careful around Tom, that’s all.”
“I’ve been analyzing Mom, and I’m pretty sure she’s been depressed.”
“Depressing, you mean?”
“No. Depressed. She has all the symptoms of someone suffering from depression. Ask her if she’s been sleeping. Or if she’s had suicidal thoughts.”
“I’m not asking her that.” I really wish my sister would give up with the psychoanalyzing stuff. She had me almost convinced I really was passive aggressive. I sighed into the phone before saying, “She’s always been like this.”
“Only since Dad died.”
“She’s a pessimist, that’s all. She can’t help it. She’ll always be like this.” As I said it, I couldn’t help noticing I’d started to sound just like my mother. Mom didn’t believe that people could change. Was I thinking the same way? Jeez.
Holly went on, “Don’t you notice how nice she’s been since dating Tom?”
Now that I thought about it, Mom hadn’t given me any grief recently except our brief encounter over the observation beehive. Was Holly onto something?
“So you think she just needed a little romance in her life?” I said. What a simple solution to the conflict between us that would be. “If she has a love interest in her life, then she’ll be sweet and loving to me?”
“That’s what I think. You better leave things alone.”
“Let her go out with a possible killer?”
“I would,” my sister said and hung up.
Grams stuck her head out the door. “Your pancakes are ready,” she said.
Behind Grams, I saw Mom come into the kitchen. She already had her makeup on. And she was wearing a brand-new shade of lipstick, cranberry colored.
“Hi, Story dear,” Mom said from the doorway, causing me to trip and fall on the steps, banging my left knee. “It’s those things you wear on your feet,” she said. “Thongs are the worst footwear.”
“We call them flip-flops now,” I said, bouncing up, going in, and sitting down at the table. “Thongs are skimpy underwear.”
“What’s the reason for this lovely surprise visit?” Mom had a smile on her face. Now that Holly had pointed it out, I couldn’t believe the change in her.
“Is Mom sick?” I asked Grams. “Why is she in such a good mood?”
“She’s been like this since the other night.” Grams flipped a pancake in the air. “Since her last date with Tom Stocke, but she’s keeping the juicy-fruit details to herself.”
Mom actually blushed. “And the poor man just lost his estranged brother in a horrible, horrible way,” she said, all sadness and concern now. “Has there been any new news? Did they catch the killer yet?”
“Nothing on the early morning news,” Grams said. “I bet the killer is long gone. They don’t stick around waiting to get caught, you know.”
It was obvious that Mom and Grams hadn’t come to the same conclusion I had. “Maybe someone local did it,” I ventured, easing into the subject, hoping someone else in this kitchen would mention Tom before I had to.
Grams put a plate of blueberry pancakes on the table and sat down. “That’s not possible,” Grams said. “Nobody around here would do such a thing.” That’s my grandmother, never thinking a mean-spirited thought about anybody, even about the bottom-of-the-barrel kind of humans.
“That’s right,” Mom agreed. “Besides, nobody around here would have done it that way, leaving him in a fireplace like that. A local would have hauled him out to the woods and buried him under a pine tree. I mean, if one of them had a reason, which they don’t, they would have handled it completely different.”
“Was he shot?” Grams wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I said. Then I thought about Grams’s question, and what might have really caused his death. I hadn’t seen any blood around his body. And Patti and I didn’t find any blood the night before, nor had Ben been able to pick up the scent even with his keen sense of smell. If not shot, then what? Poisoned?
We dug into the pancakes, so talk at the table came to a halt, which suited me just fine, since I needed to regroup and decide how to present my warning to Mom without losing the sweet new mother sitting next
to me.
Nothing simple and easy came to mind. Instead, I ate so many pancakes I couldn’t move. That’s the problem with pancakes—they’re delicious, but they sink to the bottom of your stomach like chunks of concrete.
“The Wild Clover opens soon,” Grams said. “Who’s taking care of business?”
“The twins. I’m really going to miss them when they go back to college. Then it’ll only be Carrie Ann, Holly, and me opening up. And you know how that goes.”
Mom snorted, like the woman I used to know. She doesn’t approve of my cousin. Carrie Ann has issues, nothing I consider really major or unfixable, but Mom thinks she’s nothing but trouble and I should fire her. Mom should be snorting about Holly instead, who shows up whenever it suits her.
“Want me to make more pancakes?” Grams asked.
“I’d explode,” I said.
“I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Mom jumped up and left the room. I hated to imagine what it was. Mom’s presents usually involved changing my life around to suit her image of what it should be. Like a new floor plan for the store, since she thought I could do a better job of organizing the shelves. Or a subscription to a dating service to remind me of her preemptive warning about Hunter. Maybe this time it would be old lady shoes because she dislikes my flip-flops. Or…
Mom came back with something wrapped in pink tissue paper. “A gift,” she said, handing the package over.
“For me?” I acted like I was excited.
“Open it.”
So I did. And held up a gorgeous tiger-print scarf with crystal beaded fringe. My mouth slammed open, almost hitting the table. “For me? Really?”
“It’s handmade,” Mom said. “The minute I saw it, I thought of you. The colors go with your complexion.”
“It is beautiful.” I fingered a topaz bead, then wrapped the scarf around my neck and loosely knotted the fringed edges. I was pretty sure Mom had bought it from Aggie Petrie, because it was the same style as the one I’d admired on Milly, only a different print. I quickly rationalized that I could keep it since Milly had said Aggie’s daughter-in-law made them, and I didn’t have a problem with Alicia like I did with her in-laws. “It’s beautiful,” I said.
Mom smiled again. She was breaking records today.
“Have you been sleeping okay?” I asked Mom.
“Like a rock. Why?”
“No reason.” Okay, here it came, time to spit it out. “Mom, tell me about Tom. Are you two really an item?”
Mom actually giggled. “We’re just friends at this point,” she said. “I’m going over to his apartment in a little while to see how he’s doing. He’s distraught about his brother, as you can imagine.”
“What do you know about Tom’s history?”
“Enough to know he’s a decent man, with integrity and honor.”
Grams got up and brought over the coffeepot. “He wears a wedding ring,” she said. “What’s the story behind that?”
See, Grams can say things any old way, just blurt them out, which is my style, too. But if I did that with Mom, right away she’d bristle and get all snappy.
“He was married once,” Mom said. “But his wife died from a dreadful disease. He wears his wedding ring because he’s loyal to her memory, to the woman she was before she got sick.”
“What a nice man,” Grams said.
So he hadn’t told Mom about the part where his wife ran off with his brother.
“Let me get my camera and take a picture of you looking so smart, Helen,” Grams said. “It’s about time you found a man to have fun with. And, Story, don’t take off that beautiful scarf yet. I want a picture of you wearing it.”
At that point, I gave up. What else could I do? Burst her bubble? Without the full support of my sister and grandmother to interrogate my mother and demand she stop seeing Tom, I decided to crawl back into my shell. At least for now. If Tom Stocke had brutally killed his brother in a fit of revenge, then maybe Ford asked for it. Or it could have been an accident. Who knows at this point.
In any case, that certainly didn’t mean that Tom would harm Mom.
From now on, though, I was going to keep an eye out for trouble from him. Luckily, since Tom worked at his antique store during the day, all I had to worry about was nighttime.
“Are you two going out tonight?” I asked Mom, acting all nonchalant while I wrapped the scarf back up in the pink tissue paper.
She didn’t answer, but by the Mona Lisa smile she had plastered on her face, it was a sure bet.
Sixteen
I parked my truck behind The Wild Clover and waddled around to the front of the building, still stuffed from Grams’s wonderful blueberry pancakes. She had offered to dog-sit for Dinky, so I was free from that responsibility for the entire day.
As a small business owner, I’m here to say that sometimes I really feel the weight of the burden I carry, especially when I’m forced to work with family members. Mom’s adjusted attitude and her scarf gift, which I actually like for once, gave me a temporary high. But the thrill was fading.
I felt grumpy because Holly’s Jag wasn’t behind the store, and she’d promised to be on time in the future. While hiring Carrie Ann had been my idea from the very beginning and I was prepared to accept full responsibility for any problems my cousin created for me, Holly had been forced on me by Mom and that stupid contract I’d signed when I borrowed money to pay off my ex-husband. So now I had to put up and shut up and I didn’t like it one bit.
I felt even grumpier when I discovered that Aggie and Eugene Petrie had already set up for business, and they’d expanded from one table to two, doubling the amount of junk from the past weekend.
“Wait just one minute,” I said. “You can’t do that. Twice as big was not part of the deal.”
“Eugene,” Aggie said, smirking at me, “would you get another table out of the van?”
“Another table! Eugene, stop right there. This wasn’t the deal!” Eugene slowed and was about to do just as I said, until Aggie got through to him with a more commanding voice than mine. “Eugene, that table. Now!”
This was not going to endear me to the other business owners in Moraine. I’d caved to Aggie’s trespassing charge threat, but I’d been so mad at the time, I didn’t take into consideration how it would affect anyone else. We’d tried so hard to keep the festival revenue in the hands of our residents, and here I was, looking like I was welcoming the competition. Maybe I should just take my medicine, let nasty old Aggie Petrie press charges, and make Johnny Jay’s day.
Now I knew exactly how it felt to be between a rock and a hard place. And it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
Carrie Ann came out of the store to watch. “Uh-oh,” she said right away. I followed her gaze and saw Tom Stocke heading our way and looking upset. I immediately felt defensive about how having Aggie here must look to him.
“Can I have a word with you, Story?” Tom said.
“This isn’t my fault, Tom,” I said before I could corral the Fischer blame game words. They’d just slipped out automatically. “I take that back. This is my fault, but I can explain.”
Tom looked at Aggie’s tables as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Oh, that,” he said. “I have bigger problems today.”
“I’m so, so sorry about your brother,” I said next, rather awkwardly, because I was sorry he even had Ford for a brother in the first place.
“I’m sorry, too,” Carrie Ann said from the doorway.
Aggie was in the process of ignoring our existence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her putting sales pressure on one of my regular customers. And really hoped she didn’t drive away business. I hadn’t thought of that before.
“I want to talk to you about yesterday,” Tom said to me. “What you saw, what you think might have happened. Since you found him and all.” He had pulled me aside, out of earshot, and kept his voice low. “We need to go over the facts.”
The last thing I was about to do was shar
e any information with Tom Stocke. He was the number one suspect in my book. So I used that stupid directive ordered by Johnny Jay. “I can’t talk to you. The chief would have my head on a platter. Remember what he said about staying away from each other?”
“I forgot all about that,” Tom said. He didn’t look so good—hair plastered in spots where he’d slept on it wrong, red and unfocused eyes—but if I’d just lost a sibling, I’d probably look even worse.
“Johnny Jay was pretty clear,” I said.
“Sorry. Forget I mentioned anything.”
“Who’s minding your store?”
“I didn’t open. I just can’t. Not after what happened. Finding Ford like that, well, it brought back lots of bad memories. Horrible ones.”
I couldn’t imagine how awful his wife’s treachery must have been for him. Infidelity is an ugly, soul-wrenching thing to have to go through. I knew exactly how he felt. My ex-husband should have had philanderer branded on his forehead for eternity. And imagine if my sister had run off with the sex addict? That would hurt even worse. And finding out the other man was his own brother… Maybe Tom could plead self-defense. Or temporary insanity. Against my will, I felt my heartstrings tugging for him. Money didn’t buy happiness and Tom’s millions weren’t going to comfort him now.
Tom probably didn’t even plan to kill his brother. Total blinding rage must have taken over.
“You should turn yourself in,” I suggested. “No jury is going to convict you.”
“You think I killed my brother?” Tom had a haunted look in his eyes. “I didn’t even know he was in Moraine. You have to believe me.”
“I’m trying, Tom, but nobody else around here knew your brother at all. None of us had a reason to want him dead.”
“Somebody did. Nobody is going to believe me when I say I didn’t murder my own brother. And that crazy woman, Patti Dwyre, has been stalking me. She’s threatening to write up a big piece in the newspaper.”