A Berry Baffling Businessman

by A. R. Winters

  “I could open a detective agency instead,” I whispered in Sage’s ear, but that didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to make my life about doing work that ruined somebody’s life. I liked making people feel good. I liked showering people with small moments that made their lives happier, if even for a moment.

  Sleep eventually came. When I woke up, the failing light outside my bedroom window let me know that it was past time to get up. It took only a few minutes to ready myself, and then I headed downstairs.

  A wave of aromas as wonderful as when I’d walked into the café that afternoon washed over me.

  “There you are!” Chef John said, all smiles when he spotted me.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling back and doing my best to keep my ill feelings to myself. Overhearing his interview this afternoon had left me feeling a bit sore. More than I cared to admit.

  A knock sounded at the kitchen’s back door. I opened it to discover a young man with thick fuzzy hair that haloed his head. He had a grocery bag in each arm, and they were stuffed to the brim. “You called for a delivery?” he asked.

  I looked from him to Chef John.

  “Yes! Come in,” Chef John directed. “Put them on the center island.”

  The young man did as he was told and then disappeared out the door again. I started to close it, but Chef John said, “There’s more.”

  The young man was in and out, four different trips, before Chef John tipped him well and sent him on his way.

  “Today has been fantastic,” Chef John said. “I ended up working through your whole pantry and cooler. I had to get in extra supplies for tonight’s cooking class. We’re making pizza and garlic knots three ways—fried, stuffed, and artisan.”

  That was smart. The ovens could be fired up and the pizza slid in and out as people got them ready. I had a good number of stovetop burners, but not enough to accommodate an entire cooking class. But despite that thought, my brain froze on the fact that he’d sold out of all my surplus.

  I went to the pantry and looked inside. There were huge sections of empty shelving. It had less than a quarter of the stock it’d had that morning.

  I went to the cooler. It was the same as the pantry. If I didn’t get in more food stuff tonight, I’d have almost nothing to work with tomorrow.

  “How did you manage it?” I asked, in awe. It wasn’t that I’d had an insane amount of supplies, it was more about the variety of what was used up. He would have had to make a couple of dozen different types of dishes to go through it all.

  “I let the customers order whatever they wanted, and then I made it.”

  Just like that. That simple.

  If I’d tried to do that, I would’ve gotten a total of three meals served over the course of the entire day, and that would have been all. Everybody else would have had to leave hungry.

  Chef John had been right. I should have stayed and been his sous chef. It boggled my mind to think of all that I could have learned from him.

  But then I remembered why I’d gone—Zoey. She needed me to see the investigation of Ollie’s murder through to the end. She’d been there for me over and over again, and now I had to be there for her.

  Chef John was a blur of activity as he unpacked the groceries and began assembling individual workstations for those due to attend his cooking class. “Hope you don’t mind. I raised your prices,” he said with a wink, grinning. “It’s all yours. I’m not taking a cut. I got a lot of publicity out of today, publicity that will help me land that cooking show I told you about. As far as I’m concerned, I owe you yet another favor.”

  I went out to the open grill section. Poor Melanie and Sam were sitting shoulder to shoulder at its counter looking utterly exhausted. Behind them, the café was empty.

  “That man’s a machine,” Melanie said. “Thank God we don’t work for him all the time.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should take that as a compliment or not. She was saying that I brought in far, far fewer customers.

  I went to the till and checked the day’s receipt, then coughed as I choked on my own breath. “He charged how much? And people paid it?”

  Sam did something under the counter and then plopped a huge ball of tangled cash on top of it. “They paid more than that. The tips were insane.” Then he hung his head. “I’m definitely going to fail my economics test tomorrow. I didn’t get a chance to study and now I’m too tired to even go home.”

  Melanie gazed at him with a forlorn expression on her face. “I have a paper due. It’s a third of my grade. I was going to do it tonight… Now I’m so tired I can’t even remember what I’d planned to write.”

  So while the money had been good, the benefits had been bad. Very bad. Melanie and Sam had both put their long-term goals in jeopardy tonight, all for the sake of providing for the café’s needs.

  “You guys,” I lamented, and stretched my arms over the counter to wrap them in one gigantic hug. I then pulled some bonus pay for them out of the cash register. “I’ll call you both a cab. Pay for it out of that and pocket the rest.”

  It wouldn’t solve their classroom dilemmas, but it was at least one small way that I could show my appreciation for their hard work.

  When it was time for the cooking class to begin, I was at the kitchen’s back door to greet all the guests. A part of me said that it was Chef John’s class and that he should have the honor, but there was a much louder voice within me that said to heck with that! This was still my café, and I was its ultimate host.

  First to arrive was the trio of ladies whom I’d met during the first cooking class. They were dressed more casually and comfortably than the first night I’d met them, but no less expensive. There were pearls, diamonds, and emeralds, and I was sure that the fashions they chose had been donned by a runway model somewhere.

  Two of the ladies moved deeper into the kitchen to be welcomed by an open-armed Chef John, but the third one—Stella Rockston—stayed behind to talk to me.

  “I was so shocked when I heard the news,” Stella said. “Having someone murdered right outside your café must be terrible for business.”

  I noticed that she didn’t express any concern for the man who had actually lost his life. “Did you know Oliver?”

  Stella crinkled her nose. “I have a confession.”

  My pulse picked up. This was it. Someone was going to confess to murder—and they weren’t even going to try to kill me first! We were surrounded by people. I wanted to wave at everyone in the room to get their attention so that they could hear the confession, too!

  Stella leaned in, and she mouthed the words as much as she said them. “I only came to the first cooking class because Lara was coming. My boyfriend wanted me to listen in on whatever she had to say.” She straightened up. “Poor Lara.”

  “Poor Lara” were her words, but there was no note of sadness or pity in her voice.

  She’d dropped so much information on me at once. She knew Lara but wasn’t upset by her attempted murder. She’d been asked to spy on Lara. There was something Lara could have said that might have been important to her boyfriend.

  “Stella, who’s your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Bobby Cornish.”

  A cacophony of bells went off in my head.

  “Bobby Cornish as in Robert Cornish?”

  “One and the same!”

  I took a deep breath. “Stella, did you kill Ollie?” Maybe she’d done it for Bobby. It was a step beyond spying on somebody, but who knew how twisted her moral compass was?

  “Nooo,” Stella hissed. “Personally, I liked the man. It’s Bobby who hated him.”

  “Did Bobby kill him?”

  Her beautifully painted lips turned into an upside-down frown as she shook her head no. “I don’t think so, and I thought about it. Did the math. If Bobby did kill Ollie, it wasn’t with his own two hands because he was with me all night long after I left here. But… I felt guilty about what happened to Lara.”

  I leaned in. “Did you try to kill Lar
a?”

  “Nooo! What’s with you thinking I’m murdering people left and right? I’m not that passionate a person. You have to really, really care if you’re going to bother doing something like that.”

  “Then why do you feel guilty about what happened to Lara?”

  Stella sighed. “I don’t know. I just didn’t think she’d be hit so hard by Oliver’s death that she’d want to take her own life.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I shook my head no.

  “The woman liked herself too much.”

  “So you think someone tried to kill her?”

  “Nooo… I’m saying I’m surprised she tried to take her own life.”

  I wanted to ask what had brought Stella to Chef John’s second class. This time, Lara wasn’t here. I suspected that maybe her purpose for coming was to get to talk to me. Instead of wanting to walk away with information, she was trying to plant information—in my head.

  “Was anyone with you and Bobby the night Oliver was killed?” I asked.

  Stella gave me a sly look with a lopsided smile. “Come now. You know a lady doesn’t kiss and tell.”

  I hated myself for asking, but I had to know. “Who was with you?”

  She looked meaningfully past me to Chef John and then back again. I felt my cheeks heat as a host of images flooded my brain.

  Then I realized what she’d done. In one fell swoop, Stella had provided alibis for herself, Robert Cornish, and Chef John.

  But then another thought came to me, and I nearly snapped my fingers. There was no way Daria Cornish would have been a part of their late-night escapades. There was no alibi for her that Stella could pull out of thin air. On top of that, I’d already learned from Sebastian that Daria had been at the place where Ollie had died almost at the same time that Ollie had died.

  Instead of bringing up Daria, I decided to ask Stella something else. “Who do you think killed Oliver?”

  Her brows went up. “See now, I’ve got this theory. I think ol’ Oliver was dying, and according to Bobby, the man could squeeze a dime out of a nickel. I think he killed himself for the life insurance. Sometimes people even add a double indemnity clause so that their life insurance pays out double if they’re killed. Did you ever consider that?”

  I gave her a slow blink while I tried to keep my annoyance in check. “So your theory is that there is no murderer, that instead Oliver Drysdale died by suicide?”

  She shrugged. “It all makes sense to me.”

  I was sure it did. It probably made sense to Bobby Cornish, too.

  “You can go back to your boyfriend and tell him you did your duty,” I told her.

  Her eyes narrowed but she didn’t deny it.

  Good.

  “But I want to know one thing first.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “I want to know what you really think happened. No BS.”

  Her lips thinned like she wasn’t going to answer, but then she nodded her head. “That boy of Oliver’s got a weird effect on Daria.”

  “You know about them?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Does Bobby?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want to have to put up with Bobby’s ranting and raving if he ever found out. I love the man, but he can be as big a drama queen as me. It was easier to not tell him, and I’ve never had a beef with Daria. She’s okay. I’m not that much older than her, but she’s never given me grief about being with her dad.”

  “So what’s the weird effect that Sebastian has on her?”

  “Up until a year and a half ago, that girl was a wild child. Don’t get me wrong. She’s definitely her daddy’s girl. She works hard. Too hard. But she partied even harder. Bobby’s such a stick in the mud he’s usually asleep by nine-thirty every night. But Daria, she could party all the way through the night, come home, take a shower, and leave for work with her dad looking like she’d slept like a baby.”

  “And now?”

  “Now…” Stella shrugged. “It’s like she’s been domesticated. She stopped doing drugs, stopped drinking like she was trying to get an ulcer, and calmed the heck down.”

  I was confused. “And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?”

  “You’re missing my point.” Stella lowered her voice. “She’d do anything for that boy, Sebastian. Anything. Get me?”

  I got her.

  “Why are you telling me this?” She was selling out the daughter of the man she supposedly loved.

  Her eyes grew sad. “Because while Daria would do anything for Sebastian, Bobby would do anything for her. If she’s going down, it needs to happen before he knows she’s even at risk. If it was Daria, I need for you to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, otherwise I’m afraid that Bobby will come forward and claim to have done it himself—and he didn’t. I know he didn’t. But that daughter of his… she could have.”

  Chapter 24

  I climbed the stairs to my apartment with a sleeping Sage curled in my arms. Her little nose was tucked into the crook of my elbow. I was as tired as she was and wished I had somebody to carry me upstairs the same way.

  I’d taken Chef John’s class, made a taxi trip out to You Name It to buy goods for the pantry and cooler, and then put it all away. I was exhausted. Despite that, my mind was still churning about what Stella had said. She believed that Daria had killed Ollie for Sebastian. On top of that, there had been the odd and aggressive conversation with Sebastian where he’d said that Daria had done what she’d had to do.

  That was two people pointing their fingers at Daria as the guilty culprit. It was true that all their other fingers were pointing back at themselves as they pointed at her, but I couldn’t figure out a motive for either one of them wanting to frame Daria. They both seemed to care about her.

  It was a half hour later when I crawled on top of my floor mattress and pulled the afghan Agatha had made me up over my shoulders. Sage found her perch in the curve of my waist the moment I got settled.

  I took a deep breath and forced my body to relax even as my head ticked through everything we’d learned so far. Then I ran all those thoughts down with a pick hammer and slaughtered them all, one by one, so that I could finally drift off to sleep with a brain that was finally quiet and at peace.

  My body dissolved and became one with the mattress.

  My consciousness floated away into nothingness.

  The side of my building exploded and tiny shards of glass embedded themselves in my side.

  Okay, so it wasn’t tiny shards of glass that embedded themselves in my side. It was Sage’s claws. And while it wasn’t the entire side of my building, it was my windowpane exploding.

  Sadly, that was not the most interesting thing to happen within that particular sixty-second span of time. No, something more interesting came next. A streak of flame flew through the broken window, landed on my floor, and rolled toward my mattress. It was a bottle with a burning rag spilling out its top.

  I jumped up and stumbled backward until I hit the wall. I still had Agatha’s afghan wrapped around me.

  Sage became a blur as she bolted out of the room. I took a step to do the same, but that’s when the bottle exploded. My mattress became an instant ball of fire that mushroomed from the floor to the ceiling.

  I screamed. Then I screamed some more. Then I choked on hot black soot and scrambled out of the room. I was in the kitchen throwing open cabinet doors before I mentally latched onto what I was looking for. As soon as I saw the little red fire extinguisher, I snatched it up and sprinted back to the bedroom. Black smoke was billowing out of the doorway’s top, so I went low. The heat was intense, but it only lasted a moment before the fire extinguisher’s foam put an end to it.

  I was still sitting on the floor, staring in shock at the smoldering remains of my only creature comfort when Sage purred her way back into the bedroom and rubbed her cheek against my thigh. She was curled up a second later, on her way back to sleep
.

  “Seriously?” I said to her. I poked her with my finger, trying to disturb her exodus back into Neverland. She chirped, rolled onto her back and stretched her legs, but she didn’t bother to wake up.

  “I want to be you,” I lamented before getting up. Without ceremony, I toted all of the designer duds that I hadn’t worn since my first week in Camden Falls and piled them on my living room floor. Then I lay down on top of them and pulled Agatha’s afghan back up over my shoulders. I finally relaxed when Sage reclaimed her perch atop my side.

  Someone had just tried to kill me, and they’d failed. I wasn’t going to call the police. They’d kick me out of my own home. They’d also probably get a false confession out of Robert Cornish when the trail led them to his daughter, Daria.

  I wasn’t going to give him the chance.

  Daria was going down.

  Chapter 25

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Zoey asked.

  The soft, incredibly early morning light was shining uninhibited through the broken window, and I was shaken by what I saw. The stark realities of what had happened couldn’t be denied. My mattress was a melted, gutted mess and a radiant ring of char made the size of the fire very clear. Even my ceiling was blackened.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” I said. My answer was lame. We both knew it. One glance at Zoey told me that she hadn’t even been to bed yet. She wore a cream-colored belted silk shift dress that barely traveled past her tush, paired with black stockings. At least she was wearing sneakers, albeit ones with four-inch platform soles.

  “Where’re the cops? The police tape? The forensic kit?”

  I looked at her and shrugged.

  She turned her attention to the room. It was empty other than the remains of the mattress.