A Berry Baffling Businessman

by A. R. Winters

  “Sounds like you’re trying to find out whether or not I did it.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, that too.”

  Robert grinned, then laughed. “I like you.”

  I quirked a brow at him. “Does that mean you’ll answer our questions?”

  “I suppose so, but it’s pointless. I’ve already spoken with the police. But if somebody died at one of my facilities, I’d want to get answers, too. I get it.”

  “Where were you the night Oliver died?” Zoey asked again. This time she got an answer.

  “I was asleep. I’m an early riser. Going to bed early has been the base of my routine for years.”

  “Were you alone?” I asked.

  “No, my girlfriend was with me.”

  I let the silence drag out to give him time to add that he was with a third person as well. When no more information came, I asked, “Was there anybody else?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Owner of the café? The one with the cooking lessons?”

  I nodded, then he smiled.

  “Who’d Stella say we were with? She likes the shock value. We weren’t with anyone. She was in bed with a green mud mask on by fifteen after ten. She likes to stay up and read. I go to sleep. We don’t have anyone to corroborate our story, but it was good enough for the police.” He arched a brow. “I’ll assume that it is good enough for you as well.”

  “When we saw Daria really late last night…”—I put on my best poker face and turned to Zoey. “When was it, around two?” She nodded, and I returned my attention to Robert. “Anyway, she seemed pretty concerned about you when we saw her.” Of course, we hadn’t seen Daria last night, but I had gotten the message sent by airmail.

  “Oh? What’d she say?” Robert asked.

  Bingo. He couldn’t provide Daria with an alibi for when my mattress got firebombed.

  “Just that there were a lot of things you had to sort out.” I couldn’t imagine a vaguer answer than that.

  To my surprise, Robert chuckled. “Well, they’ll be her problems to sort out soon enough.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m retiring. My transition out starts next month. It’ll all fall to Daria. She’s young, but she's ready… and so am I. I want to get out while I still have some life in me to enjoy. That, and Stella deserves a husband who isn’t a workaholic.”

  “You’re getting married?”

  “We are.” He didn’t look just happy—he looked satisfied.

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the doors to the ICU opened and who stepped through drove all other thoughts from my head. “Chef John…”

  “Kylie!” he exclaimed, throwing his arms wide.

  I stood and he kissed me on both cheeks. I wondered what he was doing here, and then I remembered his greeting with Lara at the first cooking class. They’d known each other.

  “You’re here to see Lara?” I asked to be sure.

  “The poor girl,” he said. “I wish there was something I could do for her. But! She’s a trooper. How’s that café of yours doing? Did you find the surprise I left you?”

  My brain flipped through a host of images of the café. At least in my mind’s eye, everything looked to be in its rightful place. “Surprise?”

  His smile deepened, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “I’ll take that as a no. Check your walk-in freezer.” I started to ask what it was, but he was backing away and pointing at his watch before I got the chance. “Meeting someone. Let me know if you want the recipe!”

  And then he was gone.

  I frowned. Even from a hospital bed and on death’s door, Lara could capture a man’s imagination and have him chasing her.

  The ICU doors opened again. It was the same nurse who chased me out of the ICU the last time I’d visited. “Mr. Tiggs,” she said, “we need to see you.”

  Larry jumped out of his chair. “Is everything okay?”

  I’d never seen the look of a child’s terror on a grown man’s face before, but he had it. It was clear that Lara was everything to him.

  The nurse must have seen it too, because she took pity on him. “Your sister’s fine,” she said. “But she wants to check out of the hospital.”

  “What? Is she ready? Can she do that?”

  “We’d rather her not. We’d like you to come in here and talk some sense into her.”

  “Sure!”

  Robert stood. “I’d better go. Please send Lara my regards. Tell her that I’m sorry about Oliver.” He handed over the flowers. “Let her know they’re from me.”

  Robert turned and left, and that’s when Larry snapped his fingers. “I should’ve gotten Daria’s phone number from him.”

  “Daria’s?” I said. “What for?”

  “She came by to talk to Lara right after the lawyer was here. Left in a huff. Was hoping we could smooth things over.” He smiled big. “Expatriates have packaging needs, too. We could be their south of the border representative.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest for Lara as an owner of Paperworx?”

  “Oh…” Larry’s face fell blank, confirming for me what everyone else had already said. Larry Tiggs really was an idiot.

  Chapter 27

  “I’ve got a theory,” I said to Zoey once we were back in the car.

  “What’s that?” she asked absentmindedly as she tapped on her phone.

  “I think Daria was under the impression that Sebastian would be inheriting Paperworx.”

  “But instead Lara did.” I had her full attention.

  “Any chance she knew Lara was going to be inheriting before the lawyer’s visit? She could have tried to kill Lara so that the company would go to Sebastian.”

  “And if Daria takes over her father’s company, PaperMore, and gains emotional control over Sebastian, that would essentially give her control of both companies.”

  “Kill one… or two, and romance the other?”

  “Sounds like a solid plan to me.”

  It did to me, too. “What’s next? Find Daria and grill her?” We had yet to corner the woman to get some answers out of her.

  “Nope. We go shopping.” She held up her phone. On it was a listing for an estate sale.

  “Wow…” I took her phone and stared at the ad. The house in the picture was a huge, old mansion that had to be at least six thousand square feet. The ad included pictures of the belongings that were being auctioned. I read some of the descriptions. “There’s no way I could afford any of this. The dining table is solid cherry. The bed frame is solid maple. Oh… There’s a floor lamp I might be able to afford.” I took a closer look. “Nope. It’s a fifty-year-old Tiffany lamp. No way could I get that.”

  Zoey started the car. “I know a guy.”

  “You know a guy?”

  She shrugged. “I know a couple of guys. We’ll go to the mattress store first, get you a new one.”

  “A new one! A cheap one costs five hundred dollars. A really cheap one!”

  “I know a guy.”

  Just as promised, Zoey knew a couple of guys—and a couple of more. It didn’t feel right spending so much time away from the investigation into Ollie’s murder, but by the end of the day, I was standing in my apartment watching a small army of movers carry one item after another up my tight flight of stairs and into my apartment. I’d been able to get an extraordinarily nice mattress at a steal—leaving me sweating bullets that my analogy was literal and not figurative. And the auction had been mind-blowing. Zoey apparently had called in some favors. We walked through the whole place with her pointing a finger and asking, “Do you like this? Do you like that?” Everything that I’d said yes to was now finding a new home within my home. The cost had been doable, even for me.

  My home… It really was my home.

  I’d never had a “my” home before. It had always been “our” home.

  There was something exhilarating about it. It felt like flying without a net. For the first time in over a year, I’d be going to bed in a bed�
��an actual bed—one all my own! It wasn’t a shelter bed and it wasn’t a worn-out mattress that my cousin left behind on the floor. It was a bona fide, genuine bed.

  “You even got the window fixed,” I said to Zoey. She tried to shrug it off, but a small smile pulled at her lips.

  The ring of char was gone from the floor, but a ring of soot remained on the ceiling.

  “A reminder,” Zoey said as I looked up at it. “It represents all the harm you save others from.”

  I stared at her. “I don’t help anyone. The people I’m helping have already died.”

  She gave me an odd look. “That’s not true.” She looked up, and I looked with her. The soot on the ceiling had a very dark center and tendrils of overlapping smudges stretching off in every direction. “You save all the people who surrounded the person who died. You save the rest… not necessarily from death, but you do save them from never knowing. Not knowing is the worst.”

  She gave me a hug, and then turned around and left.

  That night, I crawled into bed and stared up at the ceiling. I could almost make out the image of Ollie’s face in the center. One by one, I picked out spots in the circle around him to be the people he’d left behind. The people who had been his life.

  Sebastian and the rest of his children.

  Lara and Larry.

  Even Robert and Daria.

  Imaginary strings stretched between each person, connecting them. Everyone had something to do with everyone else, but I was missing something. I just had to figure out what.

  Chapter 28

  The next morning, I woke up already smiling. It wasn’t even light out yet, but birds were singing and my heart was happy. I was in a bed! I stretched and wiggled beneath my new sheets and downy comforter, and then curled up, hugging Agatha’s afghan to my chest.

  Sage jumped up onto the bed and chirped and purred her happiness as well before climbing on top of me and using my head as her personal kneading ball. I squealed when she stuck her little wet nose in my ear and purred as loud as a jackhammer.

  It took me fifteen whole minutes to talk myself into getting out of bed. The pillow top mattress was like sleeping on a cloud! Looking over at my bedroom window, I considered installing bars over it. No way was someone turning this mattress into their own personal bonfire.

  “Come on, Sage,” I said and forced myself to get up.

  It felt odd moving through my place now that it had so much new furniture in it. My apartment had felt as big as an empty football field before. It was still plenty roomy, but it was going to take time getting used to no longer being surrounded by floor plus floor with a side of floor. But while it was taking me a little while to adjust, Sage was acting as though things were as they had always been. She was perched atop the little console table next to the front door waiting on me. I offered her my shoulder and she hopped on and we went down the stairs to the café together.

  I’d been in the kitchen no more than half an hour when Jonathan showed up.

  “Hey, boss! Want me to prep the grill area?”

  “Definitely.” He was infinitely better on the grill than I was. Okay, he was infinitely better in the entire kitchen than I was, but I could mop a mean floor! But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t enough to do for both of us.

  “I’ll start the prep for lunch,” I said, and got to work making the soup of the day, a creamy chicken with wild rice. I also prepped five medium-sized pans of lasagna. They could be stagger cooked throughout the day so that there would always be some hot, fresh, and ready. Then I washed and cut vegetables for a quick as-needed throw-together salad and made a Greek Goddess dressing from scratch. I tried to make some artisan ciabatta rolls that could be used for making sandwiches, but the cooked dough turned out more like a flat clay discus than anything anyone would want to sink their teeth into. So I went with store-bought sourdough bread instead and roast beef that I’d gotten at the deli.

  It wasn’t until I was searching through the pantry for pickle spears and store-bought horseradish sauce that I remembered what Chef John had said about leaving me a surprise in the walk-in freezer. That was all the push I needed to abandon my search for sour veggies.

  A minute later I was walking out of the freezer, my arms loaded with a huge casserole dish full of one of the most delectable desserts I’d ever seen. I sat it down on the counter next to both of the others I’d already carried out.

  “Whatcha got, boss?” Jonathan asked on his way to the walk-in cooler. He picked up the hand-written tab decorating the top of the nearest dish. “Chocolate-bourbon-butterscotch Icebox Cake?”

  My mouth was watering.

  I picked up the tab on the next dessert. “Blueberry-Lemon Icebox Cake.”

  He got the tab on the last dessert. “Cappuccino Icebox Cake.”

  I whimpered and leaned on my hands against the counter. “Chef John’s killing me,” I lamented. I desperately wanted to keep the desserts for myself.

  “You know, I bet these desserts are no good,” Jonathan said.

  “What?” There was no way I’d heard him right.

  “Oh, yeah! These big chefs, they get cocky. Think all their stuff is amazing when it’s terrible.” He paused. “We need to taste test them. Quality control. It’s for the customers’ sake.”

  I liked the way his brain worked. “For the customer… I think you're on to something.”

  Jonathan grabbed plates and forks, and I got work cutting two small servings out of each dessert. Taking a bite out of the blueberry-lemon, my eyes rolled back into my head. It was better than good. It was incredible. When I took a bite of the cappuccino, I groaned and leaned against the counter for support.

  “I don’t get it,” I said around a mouthful of food. “I use the same base ingredients he does. The same flour, milk, butter, and sugar. How can everything he does taste so much better than anything I do?”

  Jonathan took a bite of the chocolate-bourbon-butterscotch. “You know, people have gone to jail for pushing stuff less addictive than this.”

  I took a bite. Jonathan was right.

  He headed back out to the grill with his plates of dessert, and I pulled out my cell phone and texted Chef John. “The desserts are amazing!”

  I put my phone away just as it vibrated with an incoming message. “Want to know how to make them?”

  “YES!” I typed back.

  “On my way,” Chef John replied.

  I had all the morning’s prep dishes washed and the food stored away by the time Chef John showed up. He greeted me with a kiss to both cheeks, then donned an apron and rolled up his sleeves. He walked me through how to make the blueberry-lemon icebox cake with great patience and great care. It was far simpler to make than I’d imagined. Then he started us on the chocolate-bourbon-butterscotch icebox cake.

  I took a combination of video and pictures on my phone and made notes as we went in hopes that I would be able to reproduce the dish again later after my walking encyclopedia of culinary delights returned to his everyday life.

  “What am I going to do when you’re gone?” I said. “I know that we haven’t worked together that much and that you haven’t been here that long, but I’ve learned so much from you anyway.” I wasn’t sure that had translated into me being a better cook, but I at least was getting better at recognizing what I was doing wrong.

  “I’ve been thinking about that—well, not that specifically—but I’ve been thinking about here. This café. I sent the TV reporter’s footage to my agent. They showed it to a focus group of random people, and the segment tested through the roof. They loved seeing me here, in this place. They said they could relate. It all but has my new cooking show locked in with the network. They’ve gone from talking about a local show to a national one.”

  “That’s great!” Chef John had been working so hard to build his own personal brand in order to make the leap to celebrity chef. I was glad that my little café could be some small part of his success.

  “That’s why I wa
nt to buy it.”

  “Come again?”

  “It… this… here.” He made a sweep of his hand all around us. “I want to buy it from you. How much do you want for it? I’ll write you a check.”

  A nervous giggle escaped me, then I looked around. This place had become my home and the people of Camden Falls had become my family. “No, I—”

  “You can think about it?” he finished for me. “Really, what would you be giving up? Cooking isn’t playing to your strengths, Kylie. You’re a talented woman—at other things. Let me have this place.”

  “Oh… I…” I looked at the kitchen where I’d experienced some of the greatest highs and lows of my life.

  “No more dead bodies under your dumpsters,” Chef John teased, which earned him more nervous laughter from me. He must have seen how torn I was, because he changed the subject to something I was immeasurably more comfortable with. “Tell me how the investigation is going.”

  “Oh, right… I’m missing something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m overlooking something. I can feel it. There are so many people it could have been. It could have been Daria, Sebastian, or Larry. It could have even been Robert Cornish. But it doesn’t feel right. It has to be Lara. She has to be at the center of all of this, but she’s sitting in a hospital bed trying not to die. I just don’t get how that fits in with all of this. And she’d seemed so happy when I saw her and Oliver together. I’d been convinced, and I had not wanted to be convinced! She’s an underhanded, conniving snake in the grass who doesn’t care how many women’s husbands she sleeps with to get what she wants!”

  My diatribe ended, and the kitchen seemed uncomfortable quiet.

  “Sleeping with women’s husbands?” Chef John finally said.

  I deflated. “My husband. She slept with my husband. Ex-husband. She said they’d… they’d… almost run away together.” A tear slipped free from my eye.