by Elise Sax
“Felicia wasn’t exactly all sweetness and light. I bet there are more than a few people who will gladly dance on her grave. Amy’s a good person. Eccentric but good. Not that you could tell in this town. Look at Bunty over there,” Frances said pointing at my semi-regular who worked out every morning across the street from the soup shop. She was wearing a long coat in the sun. “Bunty in her perspiration coat. She wears it every once in a while to help her lose more weight, even though she has zero body fat. On her cheat day, she allows herself to eat two stalks of celery. The woman’s obsessed with her body. I mean, who isn’t obsessed with their bodies, but we still eat the occasional sweet. You know what I mean? Her husband Sid is weird like that, too. He must be lying passed out in his perspiration coat somewhere.”
I nodded. I wasn’t obsessed with my body. When a person’s lived as long as I had, the fascination with thin thighs wanes over time. “And Irving and Doris, right next to Bunty. You don’t think they’re eccentric?” Frances asked, gesturing to a spot next to Bunty.
Where Bunty was wearing a perspiration coat, Irving was wearing Magnum PI-level short-shorts and knee socks. Doris was wearing leggings that revealed a lot more about her lower half than I wanted to know. They were both carrying beach chairs, and Doris had a large, long half-duffel bag slung over her shoulder. I couldn’t imagine what she had in it.
The pier was still packed with people taking pictures of themselves at the scene of the crime. Frances and I crossed the street, and I held the soup shop door open for her to walk in before me.
Inside, I felt a wave of relief to be back in the dimly lit, cool shop with the high ceilings and the cauldrons bubbling in the fireplaces. The big lunch rush had ended, but the Area 38 crowd had grown. They had pushed the stacks tables together, and they were in deep conversation about government conspiracies. There was a lot of hand waving and voice raising going on.
The group of knitters had grown, too. They took up half of the remaining tables. They were fast knitters, and blankets and sweaters were being created at a breakneck pace.
“I hate knitting, but I’m going to enter the competition too. All that time that we’re sitting there knitting, I bet I can get my hands on a few houses,” Frances confided in me. “And look over there. Your boyfriend’s here.”
Frances waved at a couple knitters and took a seat at their table. My boyfriend was there? I scanned the shop for Remington, but Frances had a totally different idea of boyfriends for me.
Donald White was standing in the corner of the shop by the kitchen with his cellphone plastered to his ear. My heart skipped a beat, and I clutched at my chest. My heart revved up again and beat wildly. I had lost Donald, but now here he was, like he was a Christmas present under the tree. I wasn’t a failure as a detective. I was crazy lucky as a detective. A wave of optimism filled me.
I walked as calmly as I could to the kitchen and pretended to wipe down the counter, in order to overhear Donald’s conversation. “How long until I get the check?” he asked into his phone.
He continued talking, but I couldn’t hear him because the flour delivery guy arrived, and Mouse was gushing all over him. “You guys sure go through a lot of flour,” the delivery man said, dropping a twenty-pound bag of flour onto the counter. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with Bakerman Love written on it. He was a young guy with a long beard and long hair tucked into a blue ski cap.
“You have the best flour,” Mouse gushed all over him. She twirled a strand of her hair around and around her finger.
“I just deliver it. I’ll tell the boss you like it,” he told her.
“You deliver it so well. Like an artist,” she said without a touch of irony. She batted her eyelashes at him, and he blushed.
“Most guys don’t respect the flour, but I do,” he agreed.
“I can tell. It really shows in the flour,” she said.
It dawned on me that I was watching flirtation up close and personal. Remington flirted with me, but I hadn’t learned to flirt back. Sort of like the flour guy.
“I have a lot of pride in my work,” he continued.
“And carrying the flour has given you muscles.” Mouse giggled and put her hand over her mouth.
The flour guy flexed his bicep. “I don’t even work out. This job keeps me in shape.”
“I like your shape,” Mouse told him.
“Thanks,” he said and left. Mouse watched him leave, and I watched Mouse watching him.
“Mouse, we have a hundred pounds of flour in the back,” I told her when he was gone.
“I know,” she said, looking at her shoes.
In fact, we had a huge surplus of flour ever since we got the new flour delivery guy.
“Were you planning on making bread for the knitting championship or something?” I asked her.
She looked up at me and smiled wide. “That’s it! That’s what I’m planning. I’m going to make lots of bread for the knitters. I wasn’t just ordering flour that we didn’t need.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Mouse, can I get a bowl of tomato?” Frances called.
“Right on it,” Mouse sang in response and skipped happily to the tomato soup cauldron.
I turned my attention back to Donald, but he had already hung up. Drat. I had screwed up, again. I was never going to solve the mystery and find justice for Felicia if I kept dropping the ball where Donald was concerned.
He sat down at a table in the corner, and I went to him. “Today’s soups are tomato, creamy leek, Tuscan white bean, and Irish stew,” I told him.
“I’ll have the Irish stew and whatever bread the girl made today,” he said. His phone rang, and he answered it. “I thought we went over this,” he said, testily into the phone. I dropped to a crouch and pretended to pick something up from the floor, while I listed in to his phone conversation.
“Make the check out to cash,” he said. “Yes. Cash. Can you FedEx it to me for tomorrow? I got places to go and things to buy. You’re not taking any service fees out of the insurance policy, are you? Good. So, the whole five hundred thousand? Perfect. Music to my ears.”
He clicked off the phone, and I stood up. “I’ll get that stew for you,” I said and smiled a big, honest smile.
Gotcha. I was finally getting somewhere with the investigation. Felicia had a very healthy life insurance policy, and Donald was the beneficiary.
Donald had five hundred thousand reasons to kill his wife.
Chapter 8
“The roof might fall in; Anything could happen.”
–Dashiell Hammett
Donald stuck around the shop for a while after that. I kept an eye on him, while I waited on the ever increasing numbers of Area 38 people and knitters.
“I mean, go big or go home,” one of the Area 38 guys told the others at his table behind the stacks. “Am I right? I mean, am I right, justice warriors?”
There was general agreement that he was right, and two people ordered iced tea. We were completely out of bread and baked goods. Even though we had enough flour to last until Doomsday, we were out of sugar, and Mouse left to buy some in order to make a few quick batches of cookies.
With her gone, it was harder to keep tabs on Donald. The knitters and Area 38ers were keeping me busy.
“If the government for the people is going to do the people wrong, we’ve got to burn the place down,” one of the Area 38ers shouted and stood on a chair, like he was going to break out into a song from Les Miserables.
“Communists!” one of the knitters shouted and pointed a knitting needle at the conspiracy theorist.
“You’re going to give our knitting championship a bad name,” another knitter complained. “Knitting is wholesome! Don’t sully knitting by burning down the government!”
“Listen lady, you go back to reading your AARP magazine and leave the world to someone who doesn’t need Metamucil to get through the day,” the Area 38 guy said.
More than one knitter threw her knitting needles at him
.
That’s when Remington walked into the soup shop. I hadn’t seen him since the day before, and I had forgotten how attractive he was. He was the tallest man in the place, especially since it seemed that conspiracy theorists were all below average height. He was wearing slacks and a button-down shirt, but no suit today. There was a handgun clipped to his waistband, and his sleeves were rolled up, revealing several tattoos.
I never understood the attraction to tattoos until that moment when I saw Remington’s.
I wanted to touch them. I wondered where else on his body he had tattoos.
Remington was carrying a basket, and my heart sank when I realized that it was the one that I had left in the dirt at Donald’s house. Remington caught my eye, and he winked at me. I felt my face get warm, and I was sure that I had turned a deep shade of red.
He took three steps with his long legs and reached me across the shop. “I came to ask you what you’ve been up to, but now I want to know what they’re up to.”
He gestured to the knitters who were now threatening open combat with the Area 38ers. If they did erupt in battle, my money was on the knitters because they had some serious strength in their hands and forearms from the knitting. As for the Area 38 group, I just assumed they had carpal tunnel from playing video games.
“Dude, it looks like they’re going to trade shots in the phone booth,” Remington said with an appreciative tone.
“Where?” I asked. “Where’s a phone booth?”
Remington threw me a look that made my insides turn to jelly. “It’s a fighting expression. It means they’re close, and in this case, someone’s going to wind up with a shiner, and probably both of them are going to wind up in jail for the night.”
One of them was an eighty-something woman with a walker, and the other one was a twenty-something guy in khaki cargo shorts, an I believe t-shirt, and creamy leek soup in his long beard.
“Are you going to arrest them?” I asked him. “I think Mavis there sleeps on an orthopedic mattress because of her rheumatoid arthritis. Do you have orthopedic mattresses in jail?”
“Don’t worry, Aggie. I won’t arrest either of them. I’m working on a homicide. Speaking of that…” he said and lifted up the basket.
“Where did you find that?” I asked. “I must have misplaced it.”
Remington laughed. “Did you just try to lie again? Too funny. Are you doing that just for me? Very thoughtful, Aggie. I find it very endearing. Your nose crinkles when you try to lie, and you look so cute.”
I was cute? No one had ever said I was cute. Even when I was a little girl, none of my aunts ever called me cute. I wasn’t sure “cute” was even in their vocabulary. Remington took a step forward, and I took a cowardly step back. Heat bounced off him. Really good heat. The best kind of heat.
“I wasn’t lying,” I lied. “I misplaced it at Donald’s house. I brought it over to give to him because his wife was eaten by a shark.”
“Not a shark. The shark was a cover,” Remington said.
I was like a deer caught in the headlights of his gaze. I was so transfixed by him, that I was only mildly aware that skeins of yarn were flying overhead, and the Area 38ers were goose stepping around the shop, chanting about the evils of fascist dictators.
When Donald walked out of the shop, I barely took notice. And when Frances whispered “You go, girl,” in my ear as she left too, I didn’t register that, either. Ditto when Mouse ran back into the shop with a sack of sugar.
Remington was garnering all of my attention. “This is from me to you because I like you, Aggie,” he said. “You should stay away from Donald because you’re not exactly off the suspect list. Felicia was last seen in public at your soup shop.”
“You think I killed Felicia?” I asked.
“I’m not sure you could lug a shark onto the pier, but stranger things have been known to happen.”
If he knew about the stranger things in my life, he would probably arrest me right then and there, I thought.
I leaned forward. “Donald White is very happy since his wife died. He’s waiting for a big check from the life insurance company,” I whispered.
“I know, Aggie. That’s why you shouldn’t be visiting him with baskets. It makes you look suspicious, and it might make you dead.”
I almost laughed. Dying was the last thing on my mind. But then I thought of Auntie Prudence. She had been a lot older than I was, and I would have bet money that dying was the last thing on her mind when she died under mysterious circumstances two weeks ago.
One of the Area 38 guys approached Remington with three knitting needles in his hand. “You’re a cop, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, bro. What can I do for you?” Remington said.
“Arrest that lady, would ya? She almost put my eye out.” He handed Remington the three knitting needles as proof.
“Why don’t you let bygones be bygones? Go back to your table and eat a cookie,” Remington suggested.
“That young man has ruined my knitting time,” the old lady in question complained, joining our huddle in the middle of the shop.
“He’s going to mind his own business now, ma’am,” Remington told her. “How about we all go back to our corners and take a load off?”
“His presence is triggering me!” the woman insisted.
“You’ve invaded my safe space!” the Area 38 guy shot back.
“Can’t we all just be friends?” Remington asked.
“No!” they shouted back in unison.
Things were escalating fast. I needed to put a stop to it before someone got arrested. “I’m going to close up early,” I said.
“But it’s two o’clock,” Mouse said, running out of the kitchen covered in flour and sugar. “That’s two hours early. The soup shop has never closed two hours early.”
There was a general gasping and murmuring all through the shop, as customers were in shock that the unthinkable was about to happen. It was so surprising to close the shop two hours early that all talk about sharks, murder, government conspiracies, and knitting fell to the wayside, in order to be replaced with talk about how I had control of the shop for a mere two weeks and already I was letting it go to hell.
“But the shop will be open tomorrow for knitting practice!” I announced.
“That’s more like it,” one of the knitters said and began packing up her yarn.
“That’s discrimination!” one of the Area 38 guys said. “We have rights, too!”
“Fine. Fine,” I said. “It’ll be open for all groups tomorrow, but there won’t be any food or drink. Just a place to meet.”
“Closing early. Open on Sunday. It’s like the whole world has turned upside down,” one of the customers noted as I shooed everyone out of the soup shop.
“First, a naked man glows blue. Then, a woman’s got her head down a shark’s throat. And now this,” another customer said, as she left.
Finally, Remington, Mouse, and I were the only ones left. With the shop empty, we could see the extent of the damage left in the wake. Soup was all over the floor. There were two broken chairs. Knitting needles and yarn littered every surface.
It was a mess.
“I’ll help clean up,” Remington offered, rolling up his sleeves above his elbows.
“I’ll start on the kitchen,” Mouse announced.
“No, you can leave it. I’m going to lock up,” I said.
“Even though I’m a man, I can help clean up,” Remington assured me.
I gathered my purse and dug out the skeleton key. “Not necessary,” I said.
Mouse got her purse, too, and slung it over her shoulder. “Agatha has some magical way she keeps the shop clean,” she explained to Remington.
“That’s not true. There’s no magic here. No one ever said magical. Don’t say that,” I said, completely flustered. “You shouldn’t throw accusations like that around.”
I held the door open for them to leave, and I locked the door with the key. “What do y
ou do? Come here in the middle of the night to clean?” Remington asked.
“Magic elves,” Mouse said, laughing. “She’s got magical elves that come and clean every day.”
I broke out into a sweat. “There’s no such thing as magical elves,” I said. “There’s no such thing as elves, either. Take that back, Mouse.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” Mouse said, hugging me goodbye.
“Wow, you sure get upset over elves,” Remington said to me after Mouse walked away. “I love elves. I’m a Lord of the Rings fan. I’ve got Gandalf’s staff in my apartment, if you want to see it. I love Lord of the Rings, but I’m really more of a Star Trek fan. I’ve got an authentic Borg suit, too. You’re free to come over anytime and try it on.”
His eyes were twinkling, and his face had turned decidedly boyish. “I didn’t understand most of what you just said,” I told him.
Remington smiled wide and slipped his arm around my waist. “It just means that I’m a geek. A very cool geek. Don’t worry, Aggie. I can bring you up to speed. Teach you. I could teach you a lot of things,” he added for emphasis, his voice low and sexy.
“Oh,” I said.
“What’s he doing?” Remington said, changing the subject suddenly. He dropped his arm from my waist. I followed his gaze to a place across the street. Donald was there, looking through the window of the lifeguard tower, which was next to the pier.
We continued watching as Amy stepped out of the lifeguard tower and began an animated discussion with Donald. “I need to get closer to that,” Remington said. “You stay right here.”
He dashed across the street, and I followed him. I stopped on the sidewalk across the street and stood behind a van, spying on him, spying on Donald. Remington waved toward a policeman in uniform, who was walking his beat near the pier, and gestured to the policeman to join him. When he did, Remington made a show of talking to him, but I was sure that he was really listening in to Donald and Amy’s conversation.
Donald didn’t look happy with Amy, and Amy looked downright pissed off at Donald. I was dying to know what they were saying, and I wasn’t sure that Remington would share that information with me later.