Margaritas, Marzipan, and Murder

by Harper Lin

  “He’s not a local,” Mike said.

  I almost burst into tears from relief.

  “Nobody recognizes him. We’re waiting for the ME’s office to get here so we can move the body and check for a wallet.”

  “So he was a tourist?” I asked. My initial reaction of relief quickly shifted to concern as I realized that a vacationer getting shot in our town would be extremely bad for our tourism business. Not that that compared to how awful it would be for whoever he was vacationing with.

  “Depends on whether you consider everyone from out of town to be a tourist. If you do, then yes. If you mean a vacationer, well, I don’t know yet.”

  I looked at Mike curiously.

  “He—” he started, then stopped and seemed to debate how much he wanted to tell me. I knew he thought giving me too much information would get me interested in the case, but I wasn’t going near this one. I was done involving myself in police investigations. Finally, he gave in. “He wasn’t dressed like a vacationer.”

  “No Hawaiian shirt and camera around his neck?” I asked, thinking of the most stereotypical tourist outfit I could. Of course, the last time I’d thought that, I’d been wrong, but it was still an outfit that screamed “Tourist!”

  Mike chuckled. “No. More business casual.”

  Mike was right. Business casual clothes didn’t sound much like what you packed for vacation.

  “Mike!” someone called from somewhere in the direction of the alley.

  “On my way!” Mike yelled back. He turned and looked at me. “Duty calls. Stay out of it, Fran, okay?”

  “Trust me, Mike. I have no interest in this case.”

  He grunted and stalked off around the ambulance. I walked back over to Dawn and Sammy, who were still huddled at the back of the ambulance. Ryan was gone, probably off to wherever Mike was.

  “So you’re not under arrest?” Dawn asked.

  “No. Why would I be?” I retorted.

  “We’re at a crime scene, and a cop wanted to talk to you. Makes sense to me.”

  “It’s not a crime scene,” I said.

  Dawn looked at me with the predictable “are you stupid?” look on her face that she seemed fond of giving me. “Um, the dead body over there would say different,” Dawn said, after apparently deciding that my stupidity wasn’t going to resolve itself.

  “It was a suicide,” Sammy said quietly. I could tell the sight of the body was still bothering her. Not that I could blame her. It was still bothering me, too.

  “Well, whatever. What did ol’ Officer Mike want?” Dawn asked.

  “Nothing important,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Dawn knew about my involvement in the previous cases—it wasn’t like the CBPD had broadcast the news that a civilian was solving their crimes—and I didn’t want to fill her in now if she didn’t.

  “Telling you to stay out of it?” Apparently, Dawn did know.

  “Maybe,” I admitted.

  Dawn laughed, a big, loud laugh. A couple of the officers turned around and gave her the eye. Laughing noisily probably wasn’t the most tactful way to behave in the presence of a dead body.

  “Maybe we should leave,” I suggested.

  “We haven’t seen Mary Ellen,” Sammy said.

  As much as I didn’t want to hang around any longer, Mary Ellen was the only reason we had come there in the first place. Leaving without seeing or talking to her would completely defeat the purpose of having left our comfortable seats on the patio of Fiesta Mexicana.

  “Okay, let’s go find her,” I said.

  “How are we going to do that in all this mess?” Dawn asked, gesturing at the crowd of people, cops, and police cars.

  I knew Mary Ellen had only been an excuse for Dawn to get us to come there, and it annoyed me that she was trying to get out of seeing her now. “We just start looking,” I said.

  “Start with her store,” Sammy said.

  It was so blazingly obvious that I didn’t know how I hadn’t already thought of it. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s go.” I started off through the crowd toward Mary Ellen’s shop, with Sammy and Dawn trailing behind me.

  Sammy hurried to catch up. “Did Mike say who it was?” she asked as quietly as she could in the noisy crowd of people.

  I shook my head. “They don’t know yet. Out-of-towner, they think.”

  Sammy nodded in acknowledgment as we walked to the front of Mary Ellen’s shop. I don’t know what I expected to see, but I was surprised all the lights were off. Logically, it made sense. It was long past closing time, and Mary Ellen wasn’t the type to open just so tourists could come in to buy morbid mementos of the time a body was found in their vacation spot.

  “It’s all closed up,” I said.

  I wondered if maybe Mary Ellen had gone home and didn’t need our moral support at all.

  “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find her with all these people hanging around,” Dawn said. “We could always go back to the restaurant and get our drink on. You guys can come find her tomorrow. Tonight was supposed to be about Sammy, after all.” She bumped her denim-clad hip into Sammy’s.

  Sammy glared at her. “The light’s on in the back,” she said. I leaned toward the front window of the store and realized a light I’d thought was reflected from the street was actually coming from deep inside.

  Dawn looked too. “She’s probably back there with the cops or something.”

  Sammy rolled her eyes at Dawn and walked over to the glass door. She knocked on it rapidly, paused, and then knocked again. I watched the patch of light in the back to see if I could detect any movement.

  Sammy had just raised her hand to knock again when I saw a head peek through the lit doorway. I put my hand on Sammy’s shoulder to get her attention and then pointed to the head. She framed her eyes with her hands and leaned up against the glass.

  “Mary Ellen? Mary Ellen!” she called through the door. “Mary Ellen!”

  The owner of the head moved fully into the doorway. The person was completely backlit, so I couldn’t be sure, but the hair looked an awful lot like Mary Ellen’s.

  “Mary Ellen!” Sammy called again. “It’s me, Sammy! And Dawn and Fran.”

  The person began to move through the store toward us. When she finally reached the front of the store, the light from the street caught her face and her curly blond hair, and I saw it really was Mary Ellen. I breathed a sigh of relief. Even though I knew the body in the alley was a suicide, I was still a little creeped out and uneasy about a shadowy figure approaching us.

  Mary Ellen unlocked the door, and Sammy stepped aside so she could push it open.

  “Ladies, come in,” she said, motioning us to enter.

  Mary Ellen Chapman was older than the three of us, closer to my mother’s age than mine, but still young enough to have been impossibly cool in my youthful eyes. For one thing, she was the only adult in town who had let us call her by her first name when we were children. She’d said if her first name was on the front of her store, there was no sense in the kids calling her “Mrs. Chapman.”

  As an adult, I wondered if it also might have had something to do with her being widowed shortly before she moved to Cape Bay. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of her husband’s death by constantly being addressed by her married name.

  In any case, my mom and the other parents begrudgingly accepted us using her first name, as long as we put a “miss” in front of it. So she was “Miss Mary Ellen” all through my childhood and up until I graduated college, when I casually dropped it despite the glares I received from my mother as a result.

  “Mary Ellen, we heard about the body and—” Sammy started as soon as we got inside.

  “Let’s go in the back,” Mary Ellen interrupted. She locked the door behind us. “Too many strange ears out there.”

  I glanced over my shoulder as we followed her toward the back room, wondering who was out there that she didn’t want overhearing our conversation.

  Chapter 4

&
nbsp; Mary Ellen invited us to sit down at the little table in the back room of her store. The space was bigger and far less crowded than the back room at my café. Shelves lined the wall, full of supplies and extra stock. A computer sat on the desk. Handmade jewelry was scattered across the table next to the desk, surrounded by four chairs.

  “Sorry for the mess,” Mary Ellen said. “I was just sorting through some new pieces one of the local jewelry designers brought in. Can I get you ladies anything?”

  Sammy and I shook our heads. “No, thank you,” we both said.

  “You have any beer?” Dawn asked with a laugh.

  “No, I don’t.” Mary Ellen pulled the last chair out from the table, but Dawn interrupted her before she could sit.

  “Water, then.”

  Mary Ellen stopped mid-sit and pushed herself back up. As soon as she turned to walk to the little refrigerator under her desk, I shot Dawn a glare. She made a face at me. Mary Ellen brought a bottle of water to the table and placed it in front of Dawn. “Anything else I can get you?” she asked.

  “No, this’ll be fine, thanks,” Dawn said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful she hadn’t decided to ask for a snack.

  Mary Ellen sat down and spread her hands out on the table. She took a slow, deep breath as she stared blankly at a point somewhere in the middle of the table.

  “How are you?” Sammy asked.

  Mary Ellen turned her head toward Sammy, looking startled, as though she’d already forgotten we were there. “What was that, Sammy? Did you say something?”

  “I asked how you’re doing. You know, because of…” Sammy waved her hand in the direction of the alley.

  Mary Ellen took a deep breath. “I’m fine. Certainly better than the fellow out there. I just…” She sighed heavily and shook her head, not bothering to finish the sentence.

  Sammy reached out and took one of Mary Ellen’s hands. Mary Ellen grasped it tightly. Her big blue eyes were tearful, and I thought she might erupt in sobs at any second. Not that I could blame her, given the circumstances.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary Ellen said. “It’s just so hard to believe. Someone killed—so close—just steps away.” She brought her other hand to her mouth and held it there for a second.

  “Mary Ellen—” Sammy started, then stopped while she waited for Mary Ellen to look at her. “Mary Ellen, it wasn’t murder. He killed himself.”

  Mary Ellen looked at Sammy with confusion in her eyes. She opened her mouth a couple of times as though she wanted to say something, but each time, she stopped herself, looking more confused than before. Finally, she managed to put a sentence together. “Is that what the police said?”

  Sammy nodded. “There didn’t seem to be any doubt.”

  Mary Ellen’s eyes drifted away from Sammy’s face. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but she seemed troubled.

  “Will you be all right alone here tonight?” Sammy asked. I was impressed by her compassion for Mary Ellen. It had been a deeply upsetting night, which was supposed to have been a celebration of Sammy’s freedom. The way she put all that aside and concerned herself with only Mary Ellen’s well-being made me proud to be her friend.

  Mary Ellen’s eyes widened, and she glanced out through the darkened store to the brightly lit street beyond. Her apartment was upstairs from the store.

  All the shops on Main Street had apartments on the second floor, except the few that had been converted for another purpose—a studio for one of the local artisans, extra sales floor space for a downstairs shop, and a whole separate store.

  When my grandparents had first moved to Cape Bay, they’d lived in the apartment above the café while they waited for children to come along. Mary Ellen had lived in the apartment above her own shop since she’d arrived in town twenty-five or so years earlier. Whatever was going on outside was impossible to ignore while she was sleeping—or trying to sleep—upstairs.

  “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” Sammy offered.

  “No, tonight’s supposed to be about you,” I said. “Mary Ellen, I’ll stay with you if you don’t want to be alone.”

  “Fran, you have Latte to worry about. I’ll stay,” Sammy replied, referring to my beloved café-au-lait–colored Berger Picard dog. He was a stray I’d adopted a couple of months earlier after he found me in the park.

  “He’s with Matt,” I said. “He can keep Latte overnight.”

  “It’s fine—”

  “Ladies!” Mary Ellen interrupted, stopping Sammy and me from debating the matter any further. I noticed Dawn hadn’t jumped in at all. “Ladies, I am a grown woman, and I have been living on my own for twenty-five years. I certainly don’t need one of you to stay here and babysit me just because there are a few police cars outside. And you said yourself, Sammy, there’s no murderer on the loose that I need protecting from.” She must have realized she was still clasping Sammy’s hand because she dropped it quickly.

  “Mary Ellen, really, I don’t mind—” Sammy started.

  “Any of us would be happy—” I said at the same time as Sammy.

  Dawn made a face, which I was glad Mary Ellen hadn’t seemed to see.

  “Girls, I will be fine!” Mary Ellen said, emphasizing the word girls and, with it, how much younger than her we were.

  Sammy gave me an imploring look, and I shrugged in response. If Mary Ellen didn’t want us, we wouldn’t be able to convince her otherwise.

  “If you’re sure…” Sammy said cautiously.

  “I’m sure. I appreciate you all coming by to check on me, but I’ll be fine on my own tonight. The doors all have locks, and besides, I have a feeling the police will be out there for half the night anyway.” She nodded toward the street.

  She was probably right. Mike and his team did seem to be taking their time.

  “Would you like us to stay a while, or should we go?” Sammy asked.

  “Don’t ruin your night’s fun for me,” Mary Ellen said. “It sounds like you were having a bit of a girls’ night. Is it your birthday, Sammy?”

  “No—”

  “We were celebrating her breakup with her loser boyfriend,” Dawn said, finally finding something in the conversation she cared about.

  “Jared?” Mary Ellen asked, looking surprised. “The two of you had been together for quite a while, hadn’t you?”

  “Ten years,” Sammy said.

  “Ten years too long!” Dawn interjected.

  “And this is cause for celebration?” Mary Ellen asked.

  “I guess,” Sammy said at the same moment Dawn exclaimed, “Yes!”

  “We wanted to show Sammy our support,” I said to Mary Ellen. “And take her out to have some fun and get her mind off things.”

  “Well, don’t let me stop you from going out and enjoying yourselves,” Mary Ellen said.

  “You heard the lady.” Dawn stood up. “I can hear the margaritas calling me.”

  “We’re not going back for more margaritas,” Sammy said. “Well, I’m not, anyway. You’re welcome to.”

  “Then what do you want to do? Go out to the bar? Go back to your place and make our own drinks? Find a movie with some hot shirtless guys we can watch?”

  “I don’t care what you do. I’m staying here with Mary Ellen if I can convince her to let me. Otherwise, I’m going home—by myself—and going to bed. I’ve had enough celebrating for tonight.”

  Dawn looked annoyed as she sat back down in her chair.

  “Mary Ellen,” Sammy said, looking over at her, “since you wouldn’t be getting in the way of any celebrating, would you like us—me—to stay a while or go?”

  Mary Ellen looked between us as if trying to decide whether she wanted any of our company. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d asked us to go just for fear of Dawn staying. “Well, if you really want to stay, I could use some help getting this jewelry sorted and tagged for sale.”

  “I’d be happy to help out,” Sammy said.

  “If you don’t mind, I
’ll stay, too,” I said. “It’ll give me a chance to look all this stuff over and figure out what I’m coming back to buy.”

  I recognized the jewelry on the counter as the work of Marti Bowman. She mostly worked with silver, making delicate filigree pieces I’d loved for years. My mother had made it a tradition to buy me a piece or two for every Christmas and birthday. Between those pieces and the ones I’d inherited after my mother’s death, I had a fairly sizeable collection. That made me even more eager to see all her newest pieces.

  Dawn withered and sank lower in her chair.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Sammy said to her.

  Dawn shrugged, and I silently wished for her to go. “I’ll stay,” she said. “I like Marti Bowman’s stuff. It’ll be cool to look through it.”

  I was surprised. I had been almost certain she wouldn’t want to stay. But then I realized that if she was Sammy’s best friend, they had to have something in common. Sammy was quiet and mostly a homebody, while Dawn was one of the most boisterous people I’d ever met, and she went out every chance she got. But they had to meet in the middle somewhere, and apparently tonight, that was the back room of Mary Ellen’s shop.

  Mary Ellen spread the jewelry out so we could reach it easily and dropped a pile of tags in the middle of the table with a price list. She explained briefly what she needed us to do, and the four of us settled in to get the jewelry ready for sale. As my grandmother would say, “Many hands make light work.” It turned out to be surprisingly fun. We laughed and chatted as we sorted and tagged the pieces. Even Dawn perked up and seemed to enjoy herself, despite the lack of slushy, citrusy alcohol.

  It took a little over an hour to finish everything Mary Ellen needed done.

  “Thank you, ladies!” she said as we stood in the back room, getting ready to leave. “This would have taken me a week if I had to do it on my own. I’ll set up the display in the morning. I know Marti will be happy it’s out there so quickly.”

  “We’re happy to help.” Sammy smiled.

  “I appreciate you giving up your girls’ night out to do it.” Mary Ellen leaned over to hug Sammy.