by Fiona Grace
A breakdown? Ali thought.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Mr. Mundy said in a desperate, low whisper. His eyes started darting all about him, taking in the staff members as they went about the place tidying up. “I’m ruined.”
His final statement rang in Ali’s ears and she paused. The stench of beer on his hushed breath lingered in her nostrils. The weight of his clammy hand on top of hers made her skin crawl. Every instinct in her was telling her to flee the situation. To get away from this dingy, dark place, and this deranged, wild-eyed man.
But there was more to this story than she understood.
Fighting every instinct inside of her, Ali lowered herself back into her chair. “You’re right. I don’t understand,” she replied. “So how about you explain it to me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Ali wrung her hands nervously in her lap. Across from her Mr. Mundy was looking increasingly shifty and jumpy.
“I’ve been running this place for decades,” he began. “I’ve earned a decent enough wage, nothing fancy, but I never wanted anything fancy. I just wanted a quiet life, with my wife, and our business, with some luxuries, you know? I thought we were on the same page. But over the years, she became greedy and wanted more and more. No amount ever seemed enough for her, and I became a source of growing disappointment to her.”
He angrily glugged down the rest of his beer and thunked the empty glass down onto the table with such ferocity Ali flinched in her seat.
“So then she announces she’s divorcing me,” he continued, a slur becoming more evident in his voice. “Makes it seem all friendly, with an agreement about the final settlement being based on my last thirty-days’ income. And then what happens? THIS review!” He flicked the paper with his hand, giving it a disgusted look. “This glowing review comes out and my profits go through the roof. The surge won’t last from the review, it never does. But on paper, I now look like a very rich man.”
Suddenly, Lavinia Leigh’s premonition came back to Ali’s mind, pertinent to the situation. “What you think will be double, will end up as half.” The more Mr. Mundy makes, the richer he looks, and the more he ultimately has to give up in his divorce proceedings.
But that wasn’t enough of a motive, as far as Ali was concerned, to murder Arlo. The writer surely had no idea about the terms of Mr. Mundy and his wife’s agreement.
As Ali mulled it over in her mind, flicking back and forth between Mr. Mundy being the killer and not, she wondered if perhaps this was a case of misdirected aggression. A shoot the messenger type scenario. When the source of Mr. Mundy’s grief was really his wife, then had Arlo acted as something as a sort of proxy for his pent-up rage and aggression?
Or was the real answer even more far-fetched?
“Wait… you don’t think he wrote a good review purposefully to drive up your business, do you?” Ali asked. It would take a very troubled, paranoid person to think such a thing, but by the looks of the man sitting in front of her, Ali wasn’t about to rule anything out. And the more time Ali spent in his company, the more clear it became to her that he was at least a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
“Oh I KNOW it was,” Mr. Mundy replied, an edge of conspiratorial desperation in his tone. “She’s the CEO of the Herald.”
Ali gasped. “Your wife?” she asked with shock. “Your wife runs the Herald?”
Mr. Mundy flicked through the pages of the paper in front of Ali to a list of staff on the inner front page. And there, signed at the bottom was a signature in loopy cursive and the printed words beneath it: Miranda Mundy, CEO.
Ali couldn’t believe her eyes. All this time she had assumed Sullivan was the person putting all the pressure on the editor-in-chief. But it had been Mrs. Mundy pulling the strings all along? It had been she who’d put all the pressure on the editor to fire the pleasant Timothy Clarke in favor of the nasty Arlo Hudson? But why? It didn’t quite make sense.
Ali looked up from the paper back to Mr. Mundy and frowned. “Are you saying your ex’s position at the Herald gave her the power to influence the success of your business?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Then why didn’t she do it years ago? For good? Why didn’t she get Timothy Clarke to write a good review of your restaurant?”
“She did,” Mr. Mundy replied. “In fact, The Cove’s been reviewed more times than any other place on the boardwalk. The thing is, Timothy Clarke wrote bland, nice reviews. Vanilla. And he specialized in all the hokey seafront restaurants with ocean views and gimmicks.”
Ali side-eyed the ocean-themed decor and the gaudy, brightly lit tropical fish tank, but decided not to call him up on it.
“He didn’t have the words in him to convince tourists to diverge from the boardwalk and come out this way,” Mr. Mundy continued. “And the locals weren’t exactly going to pay any attention to him, either. Every review fell flat.”
Ali thought it through. Timothy had spent thirty years at the Herald playing it safe with his reviews. He’d pandered to the tastes of the tourists, rather than the locals. No one local was paying attention to anything he wrote anymore, and the out of towners certainly weren’t interested in a place like The Cove.
“So your wife hired someone new?” Ali queried.
“Right. Miranda pushed for Arlo Hudson because he was famous. I’d never heard of him. I stupidly thought there was a chance she was doing it for us, for our marriage and our business.” He shook his head, bitterly. “There was so much fanfare around him getting hired, I really had high hopes.”
Ali thought back to her own first encounter with Arlo. Marco had certainly seemed very enthralled by the famous critic from Chicago. The Italian twins were usually a good barometer for what the rest of the town’s vendors thought on an issue too. So if they were paying attention, so were others. Arlo’s review was most definitely going to be widely read.
“You didn’t know about his reputation?” Ali asked. “How he was considered so savage he made people cry?”
Mr. Mundy shook his head. “I had no idea. After he came to the restaurant for his taste test, I naturally looked him up afterwards and discovered his colorful career. I challenged Miranda over it. Asked what she was up to. Had she pushed for him to be hired so he would trash the restaurant? That’s when she showed me the papers.”
“The papers?” Ali queried.
“The agreement her lawyer had drawn up,” he added, bitterly. “That’s how I found out she wanted a divorce.”
Ali felt her stomach drop. What a cruel, callous way to tell your husband you wanted a divorce.
“It was blackmail,” he replied. “As far as I’m concerned. Her and her conniving new lawyer boyfriend cooked it up together. Sign this, or I get Arlo to write a bad review and ruin you. Who thinks to read the small print in a situation like that?”
Ali grimaced. The picture was becoming clearer and clearer. He’d been tricked into signing papers, thinking he was saving his business. But somewhere along the line, the opposite had happened.
“What was in the small print?” she asked.
The restaurateur sighed heavily. “The agreement basically meant that said my alimony to her would be proportional to the last few weeks of the profit here. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was distraught. I’d just learned my wife was leaving me for a lawyer half her age. It didn’t seem that bad. But then they used Arlo’s notoriety to drive UP the sales at this place because everyone would be reading that first review.”
“That’s why the second one was more positive than the first,” Ali said, gasping with understanding. “The first didn’t make as much of an impact on profits as they wanted.”
“Exactly. The first one had had next to no hits online, no comments, no interest. They had to make the review in the paper even more glowing to get people to pay attention. And it worked. My revenue went up tenfold overnight.”
Ali was astonished. The devious plan concocted between Miranda Mundy and her boy-toy lawyer had worked perfectly
. The Cove’s profits had soared off the back of Arlo’s review, and now the ruthless pair were taking Mr. Mundy to the cleaners.
“I’m going to lose everything,” the restaurateur continued, his voice now an agonized wail. “The most money I’ve ever made, and yet I’m going bust! The irony! Thirty years of work gone in one week!”
No wonder he was so disheveled looking, Ali thought. Why he was sunken-eyed, with half his shirt buttons undone. He’d not suddenly lost his wife to another man; he’d lost his business. His entire world had been ripped out from beneath him.
But there was one thing Ali still didn’t know. Had he killed Arlo?
It seemed to her that the critic was just a pawn used in the game of trickery played by Miranda the CEO and her lover. So why enact violent revenge on Arlo, rather than the two people who’d actually ruined him?
Ali needed to find out what had happened. She knew the motive, and she could guess at the means—the tie he kept nervously fiddling with. But why? When had the opportunity presented itself? How?
If she was, indeed, sitting in front of Arlo’s killer, she had to get him to confess. Mr. Mundy was clearly suffering greatly from the burden of his secret and in desperate need to offload. He seemed entirely unaware of the theory Ali was piecing together in her mind, and Ali wanted to keep it that way. She needed him to talk, to spill all the beans and drop that final piece of the puzzle into place. Only then would she truly catch him out and solve the crime.
“You must’ve been pretty mad at Arlo,” Ali said. “Once you realized what the outcome of his review was.”
Mr. Mundy looked forlornly into his empty beer glass. Then he waved his hand over his head, clicking his fingers impatiently for the waiting staff. The girl who’d served Ali the pink champagne was the only person left. She shot him a glance of disdain — presumably because of the amount of beer he was sinking — before relenting and heading off to the bar to fetch him another drink.
“I was mad alright,” he muttered.
Mad enough to take his anger out on him? To kill him? To choke him to death with the very tie he was wearing now? The questions burned in Ali’s mind, and she had to hold herself back from blurting them out. She had to keep up the rapport with him. Make him think they were on the same team.
“I was mad about my review, too,” she offered. “I bumped into Arlo in the street the next day and let him have it. I really laid into him. I think I would’ve hit him if I’d gotten the chance. If you ask me…” She lowered her voice. “...whoever killed him did us a favor.”
Her stomach immediately flipped as the lie came from her mouth. It made her cringe to even say it, but she simply had to pretend she was on his side if she wanted to get him to confess.
“You do?” the man asked, evidently wary.
“I do.”
He looked at her, searching her eyes.
Swallowing her cringe, Ali reached across the table and rested her hand on top of his. “I’d go as far as to say the man who killed Arlo is a hero.”
A look of dawning came over the man’s face as he finally picked up on the not so subtle clues Ali was giving him.
“You don’t mean that,” he said. “You’re just joking.”
“I’m not,” Ali pressed. “Who knows how many businesses he would have ruined if some vigilante hero hadn’t swooped in to save the day?”
“What if that person was...me?” he said, in a low, hopeful voice.
Ali’s pulse quickened. This was it. She’d gotten him right where she needed him. If there was any time to pull off one of her fake personas, it was now. This was the role of her lifetime.
Ignoring the feeling of bile inching up her gullet, Ali leaned forward, rested her chin on her fist, and gazed at the man with admiration. “If it was you? I think I’d very much enjoy hearing exactly how you did it. All the gory details. Nothing spared.”
He gulped. “Where’s my drink?” he said, looking about him awkwardly. “I’m parched.”
“Your waitress went to get it,” she told him. “Why don’t you tell me everything quickly before she gets back.”
He tugged his collar. “It just happened. Like with you, when you saw him and let rip. When he came in here for dinner, it was like an out of body experience. Something took me over. I invited him back to the kitchen and out into the alleyway… one thing led to another.”
Ali’s heart skipped a beat. That was it. That was surely enough of a confession to get this guy locked up? Time to get the backup.
She reached down to her lap for her cell phone, ready to type in the 911 code to send to Delaney. But her hand hit the fabric of her dress. She scrambled around, searching for her cell, only to suddenly remember with complete horror that she’d put it away! Back when she’d thought she was wrong about her theory, she’d closed the app and slid the phone back in her purse. Not only had none of the confession been recorded, but she was completely helpless.
Her heart began to race. Now what? She’d just aligned herself with this murderer, and had no way out of it. She had to think on her feet.
“And your ex?” she asked, grasping to keep the conversation going while she formulated a plan B. “Miranda? Are you planning on getting revenge on her any time soon? Seems like she wronged you the most out of anyone.”
His eyes went round. “Planning? No. What happened with Arlo was a mistake.” He shook his head. “I have no desire to kill anyone ever again. Even if it did feel good.”
Suddenly, there came a loud clatter from behind. Ali flinched in her seat, and the man sprang back from her, to reveal standing just a little way behind in the gloom of the restaurant, was the waitress. At her feet lay a silver serving platter, a broken glass, and a pool of frothy beer. On her face was plastered a look of absolute horror.
“You…” she stammered. “You killed Arlo?”
The restaurant man’s mouth opened. He looked stunned, like he had been ripped out of the hypnotic trance Ali had gotten him in and had now crash landed back in reality.
“I’m calling the police!” the waitress cried, and without wasting a second, she bolted for the kitchen.
“Police?” Mr. Mundy shouted. Suddenly, he was up on his feet too, swaying drunkenly. He went barreling after her.
Was he going to hurt her? Ali thought, panicking. To dispose of the witness?
“No!” she cried, jumping up.
But she got tangled in the chair leg. As she struggled to free herself, she watched the waitress disappear through the steel swing doors into the kitchen, with Mr. Mundy right on her tail.
Finally, Ali extracted herself and went off after them. But this time it was her heels that caused her problems, and she wobbled unsteadily and ungainly to the kitchen doors.
At last she reached them, and she burst inside to the kitchen, to find that it was completely silent. She squinted to survey the scene--an industrial kitchen not dissimilar from her own at the bakery. Steel counters. Tiled floors. Pots and pans hanging from the railings.
Suddenly, movement caught Ali’s attention, and her head darted to face it. There, on the wall, dangling from its chord, hung the telephone.
Ali gulped. The waitress had clearly reached it. But where was she now?
“Hello?” Ali heard a voice buzz through it. “Hello? Emergency services. Is anyone there?”
Ali rushed forward and grabbed the phone. “We need the police,” she whispered, as her eyes continued to scan the empty kitchen. “To The Cove restaurant in Willow Bay.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
But before Ali got a chance to reply, a sudden blast of cold air hit her. She looked over to see the back door standing wide open, swinging in the breeze. Through it she could see an alleyway shrouded in darkness.
The words Mr. Mundy had told her about how he’d killed Arlo replayed in her mind. Was it happening again? Was history repeating?
Certain they’d gone that way, Ali whispered a final parting
word in the phone—”murder”—then dropped it and raced out after them.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
The temperature had dropped, and Ali shivered in her fancy date night dress as she rushed along the dark, desolate alleyway. The paving slabs were covered in grime and rotten food, and shards of broken glass. Ali’s heels clicked against the paving slabs, but she could hear no other footsteps. Where had Mr. Mundy and the terrified waitress he was pursuing gone?
Ali passed along the row of dumpsters and recycling bins. Big black trash sacks lay in piles beside them. She spotted a bunch of overgrown vegetation ahead and realized with surprise that the path continued on beyond it. The overgrowth was actually blocking the path, making it appear to be a dead end, but actually, the path veered sharply to the left in a right angle.
It was the only way the pair could’ve gone, so Ali took it. She pushed past the hedges, hearing a sharp rip as her dress caught on the spindly branches and tore. Pointy twigs clawed at her bare flesh, scratching her as she passed through. The waitress must be in such a state of desperation to plow straight through this mass of vegetation.
Ali emerged round the other side and gasped as she discovered, with shock and surprise, The Cove’s back alleyway connected to her back alleyway! She could hardly believe it. She’d seen the overgrown vegetation from the other vantage point and simply assumed the alleyway stopped there in a dead end. She’d had no reason to go this far along it, since their shared dumpsters were directly behind her kitchen. She’d assumed only she, Marco, and Emilio had access to the pathway but now it became clear to her how Arlo had ended up in her dumpster. She and Mr. Mundy had a direct back path connecting their stores, one that was so thoroughly concealed even the cops had failed to spot it.
With her heart pounding in her chest, Ali glanced about her furtively. There was no sign of either the waitress or the killer pursuing her. She looked over at the ten-foot-high fence behind Marco’s pizzeria’s garden, and the dumpsters in a row lined against it. Was she already too late? Was the waitress already lying dead inside the very same dumpster she’d discovered Arlo in? Was Mr. Mundy hiding behind it waiting to pounce on her too, to eliminate all the witnesses to his terrible deed?