Beef Brisket Murder: Book 11 in The Darling Deli Series

by Patti Benning

  Moira refused to meet her daughter’s gaze as the young man got up and undid the brakes on Reginald’s wheelchair. The truth was, she did want to find out who the young woman had been, and she wanted to get justice for her if possible. She had never been the sort to ignore a mystery that was sitting right in front of her, and by Candice’s smirk, she was guessing her daughter knew just what was going through her mind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Do you know if Meg is still planning on coming in?” Allison asked Moira the next day when she got to the deli.

  “Um, I think so.” Moira blinked, trying to get her mind back on deli things. She had been thinking about the dead girl again. “Why?”

  “Just because Darrin had said he wouldn’t be able to make it in time for this shift, so she was going to come in early, but now Darrin is on his way, and I was hoping to still get a chance to talk to Meg,” explained Allison.

  “Well, she hasn’t called in, so I’m guessing she’s still coming,” the deli owner said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I just wanted to chat with her.” The young woman flashed her a quick smile and ducked back into the kitchen, leaving Moira bemused. She never felt so old as when she was talking to her employees. They were all under twenty-five, and sometimes it seemed like they lived in a different world.

  She had opted to watch the register today. She enjoyed interacting with her customers, and felt like she didn’t do it often enough. Since she was in charge of the special most days, she tended to spend the majority of her time at the deli in the kitchen, cooking and preparing the food. While she loved working with food, she also felt that it was important to get to know the people who stopped by every day to buy it.

  With the tourist season mostly over, business at the deli was slowing down. A few people came in during mid-afternoon after she got there, but after that there was a lull for a couple of hours. It got so slow that Moira pulled out the latest romance novel that she was reading and let herself be sucked into the plot once more.

  When her phone buzzed in her pocket she reluctantly put the book down and checked the caller ID. It wasn’t a number she recognized, and her first thought was that it might have something to do with the skeleton that she had found. She wasn’t far off the mark; it was Eli, and he was calling on behalf of his grandfather.

  “Did he remember anything?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, he says he found a few old articles that jogged his memory. He thinks cell phones cause cancer, so he won’t talk to you himself, but I have a list I can email you in a little bit.”

  “Definitely,” she said. “Thanks so much, Eli. You’re awesome.”

  He chuckled. “Nah, just doing my best to be helpful.”

  A few minutes after she gave him her email address and got off the phone with him, he sent her a text saying the email had been sent. Feeling a bit guilty for pulling out her tablet at work after she had asked her employees to keep their technology use to a minimum, she began reading through the articles.

  Sure enough, they described disappearances from years ago. She would have been in her teens and early twenties when most of them happened. In each case, a young woman had gone missing and wasn’t heard from again. Only two of them were from the area—the others were from neighboring towns, some as far as an hour away. There had never been any proof that any of the women had been killed. In fact, one of them had returned a few months later. When questioned by the police, she admitted that she had run away from home, but had run out of money and came back when she realized no place would hire her since she was only seventeen and didn’t have any ID. This, unfortunately, seemed to lead the police to believe that the other women had run away as well, and the investigations slowly petered off until the cases were eventually closed.

  Would any of this help her figure out who the dead girl had been? Probably not, she thought. And I’m sure the police have all of this information already. It was nice of Reginald and Eli to go to all of this trouble for me, though. She really had no idea how to figure out which of these young women was her skeleton, if it was any of them. It could very well be from an entirely unrelated case.

  The real-life mystery was beginning to frustrate her, so she turned off her tablet, slid it back into her bag, and picked up her book again, meaning to immerse herself in the fictional romantic mystery until the next customer came in. It was hopeless. She just couldn’t concentrate on the story any longer. She wanted to know who the dead girl in her basement was, and she couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that she was missing something.

  When a middle-aged man walked into the deli a moment later, she was grateful for the distraction from her thoughts.

  “Welcome to Darling’s DELIcious Delights,” she said. “What can I get for you?”

  “Just looking around,” he said with a polite smile. Moira had been running the deli for long enough to know when to let someone just browse in peace, so she told him to feel free to ask her if he was curious about anything, and busied herself with reorganizing the cheeses, which always seemed to get put back in the wrong spot whenever someone looked at them.

  “I think I’ll just take one of the daily special sandwiches,” he said at last.

  “Okay. That’s ham, avocado, tomato, and cucumber with a drizzle of creamy French dressing on a freshly baked kaiser roll. Did you want anything else on it?”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said.

  “It’ll be just a moment.” She gave him a quick smile, ran his card, and ducked into the back to tell her employees the order.

  She was surprised to find the kitchen empty and the side door propped open.

  “Darrin?” she asked. “Meg? Allison?”

  Three employees had been a bit overkill for a slow day like today, so she had set the trio to cleaning out the big freezer. But they seemed to have disappeared. She heard voices coming from through the open side door, and walked quietly over to check it out. Had they run into some sort of problem? Maybe the neighboring business had forgotten to take the padlock off the big dumpster again—though if that had happened, she didn’t know why they hadn’t just come to get her.

  She found her three employees in a huddle around an unfamiliar man in a brown uniform. He glanced up when she came out, and Meg followed his gaze. The moment she saw Moira, her eyes widened in shock and she made a hurrying motion to her fellow employees.

  “Thanks so much, we’ll call you,” she said quickly to the uniformed man. “We’ve got to get back to work now.”

  The man nodded at her and left, while the three employees turned to approach their boss. Meg and Allison both looked sheepish, and Darrin looked concerned.

  “What’s going on?” Moira asked.

  “He just had some questions,” Allison said apologetically. “Sorry, I know we shouldn’t have left the kitchen empty. Did you see the freezer? We cleaned it out and reorganized it. It looks great now.”

  “That’s good.” She frowned. Something didn’t seem quite right, but she had never had reason to question any of the three standing in front of her before so she decided to let it slide. Remembering her original reason for going into the kitchen, she added, “We need a special, just the sandwich, to go.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” Darrin said. He cleared his throat, gave her a nervous smile, and jogged back inside.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the next couple of days, she watched her employees closely, but other than a couple of quick glances traded between them when they thought she wasn’t looking, they didn’t do anything out of place. Eventually she decided that whatever had been going on, it wasn’t anything bad. If she started to be suspicious of her own employees, she would never get any rest. One last batch of tourists had made it up to Maple Creek for the end of summer, and business at the deli was picking up unexpectedly. Looking at a double shift on Thursday, along with the exciting, yet likely time-consuming, launch of the deli’s new website, she did the only thing she could do. She called Lo
gan to watch the dogs.

  Logan was the nephew of one of her closest friends, Denise Donovan. Due to a family tragedy, he was living with his aunt for the foreseeable future. Still just a teenager, and one with a tendency towards the Goth, he had revealed himself to have an unexpected gift with animals. Maverick and Keeva both adored him, and Moira was more than happy to pay him to come out on her longer days and spend some time with the two pooches.

  “Gosh, thanks, Ms. D,” he said as she handed him his pay before she rushed off to the deli. “You really don’t need to pay me so much, you know. I feel bad taking it when all I do is hang out with the dogs and go on a walk or two.”

  “You deserve it, Logan,” she said. “I wish I could offer you a new job, but going into the fall we usually just aren’t that busy at the deli…” She trailed off, struck by a sudden idea. Candice was looking for an employee for the candy shop, specifically a someone younger than her that would be trustworthy. Was it possible that Logan would be the perfect candidate? She wasn’t sure how he would feel about driving all the way to Lake Marion to go to work, or how Candice would feel about hiring someone who wasn’t even eighteen yet and whose school schedule she would need to work with, but it was definitely a possibility. The only problem was she didn’t know who to approach first. She supposed it would probably be best to talk to Candice before broaching the subject with Logan; after all, she wouldn’t want to get his hopes up if her daughter was set on hiring someone with more availability.

  Logan gave her a querying glance and she realized she’d trailed off in the middle of a sentence. Just managing to keep her idea to herself, she said her goodbyes to Logan, Maverick, and Keeva. Unwilling to let her idea get lost, she jumped into her car, backed out of the driveway, and dialed her daughter’s number. With the cell phone on speaker, she waited for her daughter to answer.

  “I’ve got an amazing idea,” she said when Candice picked up. Her daughter, who was a late sleeper, sounded groggy as she asked what it was. Moira cheerfully explained to her daughter her idea about Logan working for the candy shop, then waited as the young woman yawned into the phone.

  “Yeah, I’ll give him an interview if you want,” she said. “Just give him my phone number and tell him to give me a call or stop by the shop if he’s interested.”

  Paul the web designer was waiting for her at the deli when she got there. She quickly set her purse down in the back, grabbed a cup of hot coffee from the kitchen, and double-checked the schedule to see who was coming in that day. Those things done, she joined him at the same bistro table they had used before.

  “The website is up and running,” he said with a grin. “I think it looks great myself, but of course I’m a bit biased.”

  He pulled up a beautiful website with a bright, colorful picture of the deli front and center. He showed her the sitemap and how to navigate to different pages, and she was amazed that he had managed to organize so much information so well. There was an entire page dedicated to information about catering, and, just as she had requested, one dedicated to thanking all the farmers and local producers that made the deli possible.

  “I love it,” Moira told him. Seeing the website made her realize just how quickly the deli was growing. Now anyone in the world could read about them. It was both exhilarating and a little frightening. Would she be able to keep up with the deli, or would it outgrow her soon?

  “That’s what I want to hear.” He pulled a slender binder out of his satchel and put it on the table between them. “That was the fun part. Now for the hard part. Are you ready to learn about editing your new website?”

  Though a lot of what Paul said went way over her head, actually editing the website turned out not to be too difficult. The binder contained easy, step-by-step instructions—with pictures—explaining how to do various things. She had already decided that keeping the website up to date would be Darrin’s job, but it was good to know that she would be able to figure it out in a pinch. Once she paid the young web designer for his work, the deli owner went to join Dante in the kitchen.

  “How’d it go?” he asked her.

  “Surprisingly, I think I actually learned something new about computers,” she told him. “I doubt I’ll retain much of it, but I think I’ll remember the important stuff. Are those quiches nearly done?”

  She had just caught the delicious scent of maple, bacon, and sausage wafting from the oven, and realized how hungry she was. The deli’s breakfast quiches had been a huge hit with their early-rising customers, mostly thanks to Dante’s almost magical touch with them.

  Once the mini quiches were out of the oven, she plopped two of them on a small plate and sat down on one of the kitchen stools to eat them. They were too hot at first, but after blowing on them for a few seconds she thought it would be safe to take a bite. They tasted even better than they smelled—egg, breakfast sausage, crumbled bits of maple bacon, and gooey cheese all baked inside a flaky, buttery mini pie crust. Her mouth was in heaven, and it was only with substantial willpower that she managed to resist grabbing a third one.

  “Wonderful, as always,” she told Dante. “It’s no wonder that people have begun coming here just for breakfast.”

  She was about to tell him more about their new website when she heard the bell on the deli’s front door jingle. Their first customer of the day was there—it looked like Darren had pulled the quiches out of the oven just in time.

  Carrying a metal tray loaded high with the bite-sized breakfast delights, Moira bumped the swinging door that led from the kitchen to the main room of the deli with her hip and went to greet the customer. She was surprised to see a couple that she had met with several times a few months back. Standing at the counter, waiting patiently, were the middle-aged pair who had owned the stone house before she did.

  They smiled in recognition when they saw her, and Moira greeted them warmly, but she couldn’t ignore the sudden icy rush of suspicion that had swept over her when she first saw them. The couple had moved to another town hours away before even selling the house. What were they doing back now? Why they had returned just weeks after the body had been found?

  “We’re just visiting some family since Jimmy has some time off work,” explained the wife with a smile when the deli owner asked what had brought them back to town. Still, Moira couldn’t help but wonder if the timing of their visit was more than just a coincidence.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Mom, can you get over here like… right now?” Candice asked. Moira could tell even over the phone that her daughter’s voice was strained and stressed.

  “What’s going on, sweetie? Where are you?” The early morning, panicked call from her daughter set her on edge, as it would with any mother.

  “I’m at my place right now, but I need you to meet me at Misty Pines. Eli’s grandfather is missing, and we need people to help look for him.”

  “Oh my goodness, I hope he gets found soon. I’ll be over there just as soon as I dress and let the dogs out.”

  Though relieved that nothing was wrong with her daughter, she still felt heavy with the weight of the worry she felt for Reggie. The elderly man had seemed clear-headed when she had dinner with him, but she knew that he likely wasn’t always so—there must be a reason he needed to live in an assisted-living home, after all.

  She had intended to spend the morning at the park with David and the dogs, but obviously finding the missing man was more important. She would just have to wait to tell the private investigator about her encounter with the previous owners of her house the day before. Once she was in the car and on her way to Lake Marion she called him and let him know the situation. He offered his help immediately, and agreed to meet her at Misty Pines in a few minutes.

  When she pulled up she saw a crowd of people already outside. It looked like half the town had come out to search for Reginald. She wondered how he had managed to go missing, anyway. From what she had seen during her dinner with Eli, Candice, and Reggie, the old folks’ home had good secu
rity measures and alert staff. I really hope we can find him before something bad happens, she thought. At least it was warm outside—if this had happened during the winter, she knew chances for his rescue would be slim.

  “Thanks for coming, Mom,” Candice said as her mother got out of the car. “Every set of eyes helps.”

  Eli was standing at the head of the group, looking worried as he told people where some of his grandfather’s favorite places were. David came up behind Moira as he spoke, and took her hand. They listened together.

  “We don’t know how long he’s been gone,” Eli said. “He could have left at any point during the night, which means that we don’t know how far he might have gotten. He could be all the way to town by now, if that was where he was heading.”

  “How did he get out?” called a voice in the crowd.

  “We don’t have any idea,” Eli admitted. “According to the staff, the code on the doors changes after nine in the evening, when visiting hours end. No one but staff is supposed to know the code, and he was definitely in his room at nine when they did their lights-out check.”

  Eli then asked everyone to pair up, choose a direction, spread out, and start walking. He and Candice met up with Moira and David on the edge of the forest.

  “Thanks so much for coming out here, you two,” he said. “I know you guys barely know him, but my grandpa is the only family I have left, so it means a lot to me.”

  “You don’t need to thank us,” Moira told him gently. “We’re just doing what we can to help.”

  He and Candice disappeared into the woods a few yards to the left of her and David. She traded a look with the private investigator, who gave her an encouraging nod, and they stepped into the forest together.

  At first she called out Reggie’s name every few steps, but soon realized that that was overkill. David pointed out that it would be best to call out every couple of minutes as they walked through the forest, and spend the rest of the time listening.