by Ami Diane
Across from her, Jimmy subtly shook his head. At the same time, hot breath scraped across Ella’s ear as Flo whispered too loudly, “There are peanuts and corn in there.”
Ella shoved the old lady back. “What did we say about personal space?”
Wink leaned back in her chair, patting her flat stomach. “We were getting worried about you two.”
“I wasn’t.” Flo held a salacious grin on her face.
Ella’s mouth was currently stuffed with buttered roll, so she elbowed Will, who sat on her left, gesturing for him to fill them in.
“Hmm? Oh, Ella found a body. Again.” He took a large bite of ham.
She’d managed to swallow. “I appreciate the assist, Will. Maybe next time don’t give so many details.”
“Yes, I was worried I’d given too much away.” He grinned and took another bite.
After taking a long sip of lemonade, Ella gave a brief recount of the hanging privateer.
“And the body was just… gone?” Wink’s mouth turned down. “That’s odd.” Her hand dropped to her lap where a snoozing Chester lay, dressed to the nines in a cowboy costume. He reminded Ella of a cuter, furrier Six.
“Maybe somebody packed off with it,” Jimmy suggested.
“Possibly,” Ella said. “But it would’ve been crazy difficult. Also, why would someone do that?”
Flo gestured with her hand while she talked. The fact that it was currently holding a cup of lemonade clearly didn’t register. “Lots of reasons for wanting a dead body.”
Ella folded her arms on the table, leaning forward. “Name one.”
“Body snatchers. A whole Frankenstein scenario. Maybe wanting to practice dissecting people.” Her eyes lit up. “Perhaps it was Pauline wanting to brush up on her skills.”
Ella shook her head, picking up her fork again, not even bothering to respond to the crazy woman’s supposition. Gesturing at a pineapple slice on her ham, she said, “I didn’t know there were pineapple trees in the greenhouse.”
“There’s not too many,” Rose said. “That’s from a can. The town picked up a few pallets on one of our stops.”
“Bushes.” Flo’s lemonade sloshed over the table.
Ella confiscated her cup. “You mean, the presidents?”
“What presidents? You can’t speak gibberish and expect others to follow, Poodle Head.”
“You’re the one blurting out random words.”
Wink let out a long-suffering sigh. “I believe what my geriatric friend was implying is that pineapples grow on bushes, but on that, she’s wrong. The fruit grows on pineapple plants.”
Ella nodded. “Yeah, that makes more sense.” She glared pointedly at Flo. “See? Context is everything.”
Rose brought the conversation back to the pirate. “Who would want to kill him?” Then she abruptly switched topics again. “Are you going to eat your dessert, dear?”
Ella had polished off everything except for the wobbling red gelatin currently dancing a rumba on her plate. There went her plan for smearing it around to make it appear like she’d taken a few bites.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Jimmy said. “He was killed for his treasure.”
“Maybe he wasn’t killed at all.” Flo’s hand was slowly reaching for her cup of lemonade again. “Because Poodle Head saw a ghost. It’s the only explanation for the body disappearing.”
As Ella lifted Flo’s glass to relocate it between her and Will, she caught a whiff of alcohol. “Dear God, woman. What do you have in here?” She sniffed it and recoiled. “I’m cutting you off. And it wasn’t a ghost. Speaking of, what can you all tell me about the pirate? For example, just off the top of my head, how about his name?”
The table fell quiet as everyone looked at each other.
“I don’t believe I ever heard his name,” Rose said, her cheeks flushing.
“I don’t recall it, either,” Jimmy agreed.
Wink shook her head. Will shrugged, and Flo lunged for her “lemonade.”
“You have to understand,” Wink explained, “when he first came to town, he’d nearly drowned. He didn’t do a whole lot of talking his first weeks here while he convalesced.”
Rose nodded. “Maria brought him here to the inn.”
“Maria… the same Maria who kicked us out of art class today?”
Will chuckled. “You got kicked out of art class?”
“I was with Flo.”
He held up his hands in a say no more fashion.
“That’s the same Maria,” Rose continued. “The pirate didn’t speak English and slept most of the time he was here. He stayed in one of the upstairs rooms. He’d probably still be living here if word hadn’t gotten out about him being a pirate.”
Will scooted away his empty plate, his gelatin smeared around. The dirty rat had stolen her trick. “People thought if they stalked him long enough, bugged him enough, he’d reveal where he hid his treasure.”
“We had all sorts of people wandering the inn during that time,” Jimmy said. “Felt like a circus. I began locking the doors after I found a group dragging the poor man from his bed.”
Rose dabbed her napkin over her red lips. “He had to go into hiding. No one knows where he lives.”
Ella grimaced then wondered how someone could go into hiding in a small town with finite space. “What about friends?”
They all shook their heads before Wink threw in, “The few times I’ve seen him in town, Maria was hanging on him.”
Ella chewed over this information while at the same time chewing her dessert—a dessert that had no business being chewy. “If he doesn’t speak English and the ship is empty, what makes everyone think there’s treasure?”
Will’s brows bunched together. “I’m not really sure how that rumor started, to be honest.”
“I heard it from Sal while getting my hair cut,” Jimmy said.
“Stew,” Wink added.
Flo slurped at her lemonade and studied her nails.
Ella looked at Rose, raising her eyebrows in a silent question.
“I heard it from Maria.”
“Did she actually see any treasure?”
“That’s a good question.”
“Well,” Jimmy said, blowing out a breath, “if there was buried treasure, the secret to its location died with him.”
“It’s a shame.” Ella nibbled at a bite of gelatin, crunching on a peanut, before pushing her plate away. “I know so many pirate jokes, too. Now, I’ll never get to tell them.” She looked around the table and tested the waters. “Right? Because it’s insensitive?”
Rose’s mouth thinned into a disapproving line before she said, “Yes, Ella. Pirate jokes would be in very poor taste.”
“Just checking.”
Flo, who’d finally decided the conversation had become interesting, leaned over, her hot breath once again violating Ella’s ear. “You can tell ‘em to me later.”
“Pass.”
The evening slid by slowly, and Ella’s adrenaline finally began to dissipate after such a busy day. As they drank decaffeinated coffee, conversation rolled around Ella like incoming water around a seashell, enveloping her as a warm comforter would. However, her mind dwelled on the body she’d seen, the body that no else had.
He’d been real; there was no doubt in her mind. And yet… where had he gone? And who would kill him? Had someone wanted the treasure bad enough they’d accidentally killed the one person who knew where it was buried?
The treasure angle seemed the most plausible since it sounded like the man was a hermit. However, experience taught her there was always more to a murder than met the eye.
If Chapman couldn’t do anything without a body, then it was up to her to figure out what had happened. But first, she needed to know who was after the treasure. She already knew of one. Would he have killed to get what he wanted?
Chapter 4
THE SOUND OF sizzling bacon greeted Ella as she stepped through the back door of Grandma’s Kitchen.
Horatio stood at the griddle, flipping pancakes and singing in Italian. After nodding a greeting, she joined him for a few verses while she tied on her apron, making up the lyrics as she went. Then, she wandered into the diner to pour a cup of coffee for herself.
Wink waited on a few patrons at the lunch counter. Behind the customers, in the middle of the floor, were two large installers, crouching and stretching out measuring tapes.
After her boss had slapped a ticket in the passthrough window and shouted out the order in diner speak, Ella pointed at the two workers now crab-walking over the large mat that not-so-discreetly covered the singed floor. “Couldn’t they come after hours?”
Wink’s pink hair was already puffed out, a sign of just how frazzled she was, as she glared in their direction. “They said it would ruin their game night.”
Ella shook her head. “Does everyone in this town play cards?”
“What else are we going to do?”
“We really need to figure out a way to get a local TV station going.”
Wink tilted her head. “We have the local radio station.”
“Two hours of Bob Campy learning to play the ukulele doesn’t count as entertainment.” Ella doused her coffee with cream then heaped in enough sugar to qualify as hummingbird food. “Hey, what’re you doing tonight?”
Her boss’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I was going to sew another outfit for Chester. Why?”
Ella thought Chester already had too many outfits to begin with but held her tongue. “I thought maybe we could hang out.”
Wink blinked at her.
“It means spend time together.”
The confusion cleared. “That’s right. I remember that phrase making the rounds just before our first flash.” Wink took a rag and wiped the counter. “Tired of Rose’s cooking?”
“It’s not that—well, yeah. But when I offer to help, she refuses to let me near the stove.”
“Rightly so.”
Ella sidestepped the jab. “It’s just, when was the last time I was at your place, you know? Just the two of us girls, gossiping and… braiding each other’s hair.”
“You’ve no idea what females do when they hang out, do you?”
“Not the slightest.”
The lines around Wink’s mouth deepened as she grinned. “Sounds fun.”
“Perfect. You be in charge of food, and I’ll bring the entertainment. Don’t do anything fancy or time-consuming. Really, mac n’ cheese sounds great. Maybe nachos.”
Wink shook her head firmly. “A fancy meal would be wasted on your palate. Maybe while we’re playing games, you can tell me the real reason you want to hang out.”
Ella made a non-committal noise as she dipped her lips into her cup of sugared mud. At that moment, Horatio saved her from having to respond by setting two steaming plates of pancakes, sausage, and scrambled eggs on the window and slapped the bell. “Order up!”
Setting down her coffee, she grabbed the plates and deposited them down the counter, turning her back to her friend. All the while, in her mind’s eye, she saw the map of the town and the west Twin Hill in its center.
After the breakfast rush came and died, Ella stood in the kitchen, munching on a sandwich and giving Horatio another American Sign Language lesson.
“No, this is beer.” She moved her hand to the side of her mouth using the “B” handshape. “This is breakfast.”
“I do not see the difference.”
“Look. Watch my hand.” She made the movements again, showing both signs in succession. “Breakfast. Beer.”
“Like this?” His accent mangled the words.
“No, that’s bitch.”
The cook’s face reddened. “Spiacente.”
“I’ve been called worse.” She took another bite of sandwich, enjoying the complex flavors that popped from something so simple. From the diner section came pounding as the floor installer tore up the old floor. “I wish they wouldn’t be so loud.”
“At least Wink was able to get them to take a break earlier when we were busy.”
The bell jingled in the other room.
Setting down her sandwich, she swiped her hands down her jeans—the rare casual attire she was allowed one day a week—and swung through the door.
“Hey, Stewart. How’re you doing?”
The older gentleman who owned Stewart’s Market stepped over one of the installer’s meaty legs, sparing him a confused glance. “Doing well. Yourself?”
“Can’t complain. Well, I could, but I won’t.”
She held up the coffee pot, raising her eyebrows. The sounds of vinyl floor cracking and being ripped up drowned out his response. In the end, he waved her off.
“Hey, boys,” she hollered until the two guys sprawled on the floor looked up. “You want to take five?”
“Five what?” the slightly smaller one with the slightly bushier eyebrows asked.
“She means minutes, dummy.” The larger one wiped his forehead, looking up at her. “We just had a break, lady. Do you want this floor done or not?” He bent over again, using a pry bar to rip up more flooring. “How’d you get a fire on the floor anyway? Don’t look like anything else burned.”
“You should ask councilwoman Patience that.”
The striations across Stewart’s forehead deepened. “I can’t believe she was simply charged and released.”
Ella couldn’t believe it, either. If Chapman hadn’t been listening in to their conversation that day, she would’ve been more cooked than a rotisserie chicken. As it was, with the town’s backward judicial system—or lack thereof—he couldn’t prove Patience had been, in fact, intending to kill Ella.
Also, there was the simple matter of infrastructure. If Chapman kept everyone locked up who would be if they followed twenty-first century sentencing, there wasn’t space big enough nor staff enough to accommodate such an incarceration rate.
She motioned for the market owner to join her in the kitchen where they could hear themselves. “I’m hoping her BBQ of Wink’s floor will kill her chances of being elected mayor. Not that she had much of a chance to begin with. She’s about as likable as a rash.”
She followed this comment up by asking him if he wanted anything to eat as they sidled up to the island in the kitchen. Horatio greeted the store owner with a nod before returning to the grueling task of cleaning the fryer. The air smelled like McDonald’s.
“Please, call me Stew. And I’m fine, thank you.”
“Wink’s not here. She ran… actually, to be honest, I couldn’t hear over those jackhammers in there. I smiled and nodded when she told me.”
“She ran across the street to get her hair touched up,” Horatio supplied.
Stew scratched his slightly crooked nose. “That’s right. I forgot she had an appointment today.”
“Everything going okay between you two?” Ella resumed eating her sandwich.
“I’d like to think it’s going very well. Why? Have you heard differently?” His voice came out earnest and endearing.
“No. To be honest, I’ve made her stop talking about you. Otherwise, it would be Stew this, Stew that.” This seemed to alleviate his concern. “Hey, did you hear about the pirate?”
“Wink mentioned him this morning when she came in for eggs. He was dead, but then there was no body?”
“Something like that. When Will and I returned to the shipwreck with the sheriff, the body was gone. Did the pirate ever come into the store?”
Stewart’s eyes squinted at the ceiling, and she could practically hear his brain rifling through his memories. “Can’t say as he ever did.”
“What about you, Horatio? You ever see him come in here?”
The cook shook his head before dabbing at his forehead with a rag. “I have not seen him in the kitchen, no.”
“Fair point.” The cook only left the kitchen for breaks, so she supposed he wouldn’t know the general fare that patronized Grandma’s Kitchen.
The air was filled with soft Italian
curses as drops of scalding oil from the fryer splashed his skin. Stewart’s dimples disappeared beneath wrinkles of concern, looking at the cook.
“He’s fine.” Ella made a dismissive motion with her hand. “He does this all day.”
“…buono a nulla…marcire All 'inferno…”
“See?” Ella grinned broadly. “He’s fine. He’s talking about the weather.” He wasn’t.
“Senza valore—”
“How do you suppose the pirate ate, then?” Ella wondered aloud, cutting off what was sure to be a long Italian tirade from Horatio. “Do you think he bought directly from the greenhouses?”
“Maybe wherever he was holed up had its own garden,” Stew suggested.
“Perhaps. Side question, how’s it possible to disappear in such a confined space?”
“Keystone’s not that small. Plenty of empty houses and stretches of land. Then there are the woods.”
“True. But are there really parts of the forest unexplored?”
Stew and Horatio exchanged a glance.
“What?”
The store owner’s voice came out guarded. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Not too many people venture in. Back before the jumping, there were rumors it was haunted. It started back when I was a boy.”
“That long ago,” she teased.
He smiled. “Then, there were the wild animals to contend with. After the town began jumping, I think most folks grew wary after we discovered Vikings living in there. They’d gotten stranded a few jumps back, and no one knew.”
“Leif and Erik. Well, now just Leif, but he alone is reason enough to be cautious of a hike into the forest, I suppose. I guess it would be easy for some people to wander over the border on that side and none of us would be the wiser.”
It was one of the few times Ella wished the town’s technology wasn’t stuck in the 50s because trail cameras would sure be useful to stick around the perimeter of the town. Also, she still missed television.
After a few more minutes of idle chatting while Ella finished her food, Stew left, and the rest of the day flew by until she left early at 3:00. The puzzle over how the pirate procured sustenance and where he lived still tumbled around in her head when she went for a long, overdue run.