Margaritas, Marzipan, and Murder

by Harper Lin

  “What?” I tried to sound neutral.

  “The one thing Mike told you to do was stay out of it.”

  “I know, but then I started thinking about it…”

  Matt smiled and shook his head. At least he wasn’t annoyed.

  “You’re the one who said things aren’t always what they seem.”

  “It wasn’t a suggestion to go looking.”

  “I know. I just—something about it was bothering me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

  “Maybe that someone killed himself in an alley?”

  “I don’t think he killed himself, remember?”

  Matt rolled his eyes. “So, what then?” he asked. “Dropped dead and managed to make it look like a suicide just to throw off the cops? Or, oh God, you think it was murder, don’t you?”

  I looked away from him, not trying very hard to hide the fact that I did, indeed, think it was murder. The wine was making me feel a little silly.

  “You really can’t leave it alone, can you?”

  I smiled and shrugged.

  “So what was it? What got you thinking?”

  “He had a bag,” I said.

  “A bag? A bag means he didn’t kill himself?”

  “It does when it’s a bag of souvenirs.”

  Matt eyed me. “He had a bag of souvenirs?”

  “Yup. From Mary Ellen’s.” I had seen the bag lying on the pavement next to the sheet-covered body. Its logo had looked familiar, but it wasn’t immediately obvious where it was from. If it had been Mary Ellen’s old logo, the one she’d had when she opened up her shop, I would have recognized it instantly. But she had recently put a new design on her business cards, ads, and bags she put her customers’ purchases in. Her graphic designer niece had created it—clean and modern with Mary Ellen’s initials intertwined in a swirl. It looked good, but I wasn’t used to it yet. That little thing had prickled at the back of my mind. When I finally placed the logo, a red flag waved high in the air.

  “So a bag of souvenirs means he didn’t commit suicide?”

  “Well, yeah. Why would you buy a bag full of souvenirs and then walk straight outside and kill yourself?”

  “Your family would still get the stuff. The police don’t keep it forever.”

  “Well, yeah, but why would you risk…” I thought back to the sight in the alley and lowered my voice before I continued, even though we were the only two people in the house. “Why would you risk getting blood on everything?”

  “There was blood?”

  I hesitated and made a face. “I’m not sure. There was a gun, though. I saw that.” I realized the gun was the other thing bothering me—the violence of it. It wasn’t just the loss of life but how aggressively it had been taken. That someone could do that to another person, or even to themselves, upset me more than the death itself.

  Matt grimaced. I could tell he hadn’t put much thought into the how of the death until that moment. “I guess maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “So you agree? You think it was murder?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said you had a point about the souvenirs.”

  “Thank you.” I sipped my wine.

  “But are you sure there were souvenirs in the bag? Did you actually see them or just the bag?”

  I rested my glass against my lower lip. I wasn’t sure. I only saw the outside of the bag. Anything could have been in that bag. So my theory wasn’t as sound as I’d thought, but the bag from Mary Ellen’s shop was full of—something or other. Souvenirs made the most sense, but that wasn’t the most logical possibility. “I only saw the bag,” I admitted. “But when we saw her, Mary Ellen was acting so strange.”

  “You talked to Mary Ellen?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t tell you that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head in an attempt to gather my thoughts. “I’m all over the place, aren’t I?”

  “It’s okay.” Matt reached out his sock-covered foot and rubbed it against my bare one. “You’ve had a rough night.” He rested his foot on mine. Between him and Latte, my toes were toasty warm.

  “The whole reason we actually went to the scene was to check on Mary Ellen. Sammy thought she might be upset and we should check on her. She was upset, but even more than I expected. She seemed—rattled.”

  Matt didn’t say anything, but I could guess what he was thinking from the look on his face. It made just as much sense for Mary Ellen to be rattled by a suicide as a homicide.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But something about that scene just didn’t feel like a suicide.”

  Matt looked at me, his face twitching slightly as though he wanted to say something but was doing his best to hold back.

  “Go ahead.”

  “As soon as I say this one thing, I’m going to tell you to go with your gut and go talk to Mary Ellen. See if the guy had been in her shop and find out why she seemed so upset about it. But first, I just have to ask: do you really think your instinct on this is more likely to be right? I mean, better than the instinct of a cop who has as much experience as Mike does?” Matt paused to let the question sink in then smiled. “But if you really feel strongly about this, you know, Franny, you should just go.”

  I smiled back at him. I knew he thought I was crazy for even considering that I might have caught onto something the police hadn’t, but beyond a cautious warning or two, he wasn’t going to say anything about it. He tolerated me investigating murders, and I tolerated him spending so much time watching football and baseball.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Mike was trying to keep it quiet. Maybe he was tired and didn’t notice. Maybe I have a sixth sense for these things and should become a detective. Or a private eye. Or a psychic.”

  Matt laughed. “I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink.”

  I looked into my glass. “Nope, still some in there.”

  “Still some in the bottle, too.” Matt reached for the wine bottle and poured the last of it into our glasses.

  “I will take your suggestion, though.”

  Matt wrinkled his forehead, apparently having forgotten what he’d just said. I wondered if the wine was hitting him, too.

  “To talk to Mary Ellen,” I clarified. “I’ll go by her shop tomorrow before I go to work and see if I can find anything out.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Matt stifled a yawn.

  I looked at the cuckoo clock, which had belonged to Matt’s mother and had hung in the same spot for as long as I could remember. Over the summer, Matt, like me, had moved back into the house where he’d grown up, and neither of us had redecorated. Not that the clock would move even if Matt did redecorate—his mom had died when we were kids, and I knew the clock was a special memento of her, which told me it was almost two in the morning.

  “I better get going. You had to work today. You must be exhausted.”

  Matt stifled another yawn. “I’m fine. We can keep talking.” He looked pitiful and adorable. The lids of his big brown eyes were heavy, and his dark hair was every bit as messy as I would have expected since he was going on twenty hours of awake time.

  “No, I think I’m all talked out.”

  “You sure? I don’t mind.”

  “I believe you, but I think you might fall asleep on me if I try to keep you up much longer.”

  “Me? No. I’m really okay.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the couch.

  I pulled my foot out from where it was still tucked under his and kicked him.

  “Ow!” he cried, popping his head back up.

  “Walk me home.” I wiggled my toes until Latte moved off my other foot. I stood up, stretched, then downed what was left of my wine. Matt finished off his glass and handed it to me. I took them to the kitchen, rinsed them out, and left them in the sink. Matt was barely pulling himself up off the couch as I put my shoes back on and started for the door.

  “Hold up.” He slowly got to his feet. “I’m co
ming.” He shuffled over to the door, where he had a pair of slippers, and slid them on over his socks.

  I looked at him in his warm-up pants, T-shirt, socks, and slippers, and shook my head. “You look like an old man.”

  “It’s this street. This is how I see everybody dressed when they go out to get their papers in the morning, and I start to think this is how everyone dresses.”

  “In that case, you’re missing your robe.”

  “You’re right.” He made a move for the bedroom.

  “No!” I grabbed his arm to hold him in place, and he grinned at me. I knew he was just messing with me, but I also knew he wouldn’t hesitate to actually wear the robe to walk me home. Then he could tease me about the time he walked me home in a robe after I said he looked like an old man, probably for the rest of my life.

  Matt hooked Latte’s leash to his collar. The leash was just a formality. Neither of us was likely to actually hold onto it. Only one house stood between Matt’s and mine, and Latte knew the way home. Matt and I could stand on our respective front steps, and Latte would run between us if we told him to.

  The three of us stepped outside. Matt didn’t lock his door because it was Cape Bay, and our neighbors thought it was strange the two of us locked our doors when we went to work each day. Except, apparently, for murder, Cape Bay was a safe town.

  Looking out at the street, I remembered how anxious I’d been walking to Matt’s. The shadows were every bit as creepy right then as they had been before. Matt slipped his hand into mine, and we cut across our neighbor’s lawn just as we’d done as kids. We had always said there was no sense in going all the way to the sidewalk when we could save a few steps. Our parents had disagreed, but the Williams family who lived in the house in between us never seemed to mind. So as long as our parents weren’t looking, we would beeline across the grass.

  Mr. and Mrs. Williams—I never could bring myself to call them by their first names, even though they’d assured me it was fine—still lived in the house, though I hadn’t seen much of them since my return to Cape Bay. I’d seen even less of their son, Chase, though he came into the café from time to time.

  He always seemed to come in when we were completely slammed, and I couldn’t steal away to talk to him for even a few minutes. The best I could manage was a fond hello, a “What can I get you?” and a “Here you go!” He was a couple of years younger than I was, so he’d never been much of a playmate, but he was still someone I thought of with fondness when I looked back on my school years. I’d known one of his older sisters a little better because she was only a year older than me, but I hadn’t so much as laid eyes on either her or her older sister since I left for college. They both had moved away, one to Boston and one to San Francisco. I would have to ask Chase or his mom how they were doing the next time I saw one of them.

  We reached my front door, and I unlocked it then reached inside to flip on the light. Matt held my hand as Latte trotted over behind the big oak in the yard to take care of business.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right tonight?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yup, I’m sure.” A little tightening in my abdomen made me wonder if he was fishing for me to invite him inside, but then I remembered how he’d almost fallen asleep on the sofa just five minutes earlier and decided he was just asking because he was a nice guy. Besides, if that’s what he wanted, he could have asked me to stay instead of walking me home.

  In any case, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that. I wasn’t looking for any more emotional turmoil. Even though Matt was taking me to Italy with the money he’d made from the sale of his previous house, we had agreed to take things slow. We’d been friends for a long time, and neither of us wanted to mess up our friendship by getting too serious too fast.

  “Okay, well, lock your doors, and don’t worry about waking me up if you get scared and want to call me. I can be down here in about ten seconds, and if I run really fast, my robe will fly out behind me, and you’ll feel like Superman is coming to your rescue.”

  “Yeah, well, you might want to trade those slippers for some sneakers unless you’re actually planning on going flying through the air. Those things don’t look like they have much traction.”

  Matt slid his foot back and forth across the surface of the step. “You may be right. I’ll put my sneakers by the door. Or maybe I’ll just run over barefoot. Isn’t that supposed to be good for your knees or something?”

  “I don’t think it matters that much when you’re running a couple hundred feet across grass.”

  “Then I’ll just pick whichever’s fastest.”

  I smiled. “You do that.”

  Latte ran past me into the house. I heard him lapping up his water in the kitchen, then he came back, nudged my hand, and went to stand on the stairs leading up to my bedroom.

  “Looks like somebody’s ready for bed,” I said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t tired!”

  “I never said that. I said I would stay up and talk to you if you wanted. That just means I’m a good boyfriend, not that I’m not tired.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Matt pulled me toward him. “Goodnight, Franny.” He kissed me softly.

  “’Night, Matty.” I smiled.

  He leaned around me and looked at Latte on the stairs. “Goodnight, my furry friend.”

  Latte blew out his breath and licked away some droplets of water that were clinging to his nose.

  “I’ll take that as a goodnight.” He pulled me in for another quick kiss then released my hand and stepped off the front step. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you.” I turned and went inside, locking the door behind me. I knew Matt wouldn’t leave until he knew I was safely inside with the metaphorical hatches battened down.

  I patted my leg as I stepped past Latte on the stairs, beckoning him to follow me. He trotted after me obediently. In my bedroom, he jumped onto my bed and flailed around, trying to get the quilt arranged to his liking. He stopped, and I thought he had everything the way he wanted it, but then he flailed again, rolled over, and flailed some more before he finally calmed down and rested his head on the spare pillow. The bed was a mess, but at least he was comfortable.

  I changed my clothes, lay down, and turned out the light. Latte floundered around until his body was pressed against mine. I reached out to pet him, and he snuggled into me. In a few minutes, his slow, steady breathing told me he had fallen asleep. I tried to close my eyes, but they seemed determined to pop back open. Despite the ridiculously late hour and all the wine I’d drunk, my mind raced, and sleep eluded me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what was in the bag lying beside the dead man and whether it would convince me more or less his death wasn’t a suicide.

  Chapter 7

  Latte nudged me awake far earlier than I would have liked given my late bedtime, but as soon as I was awake, there was no going back. The small part of my mind that had actually woken up went straight back to the dead man in the alley.

  I pulled myself from bed. Latte perched on the edge of it, his eyes trained on me, watching and waiting for me to make a move toward the stairs. I could practically hear his little doggie thoughts: “Food. Food. Food. Food. Food. Food. Food. Food.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face a few times, reached back, and pulled the elastic out of my hair. The thick mass of dark waves fell down my back. I glanced in the mirror over the dresser. I hadn’t realized how long my hair had gotten. I’d have to find time to get it cut. I didn’t even know where to go. There was a salon down the street from my café. It had been there for about ten years, but I’d been in New York all that time and didn’t know if it was any good. I’d have to ask Sammy about it.

  I gave my scalp a quick massage and then pulled my hair back into a tight chignon. I changed into a T-shirt and a pair of flared yoga pants suitable for taking Latte on his morning walk and headed downstairs. Latte seemed to teleport from the be
d to his bowl in the kitchen. He sat eagerly with one paw in the air, looking ready to explode with excitement. I scooped his food from the container in the pantry and refilled his water bowl as he practically inhaled the kibble.

  When he was finished, he ran to the front door, picked up his leash, and resumed his “I can hardly wait” stance. I made him wait until my coffee was ready, not out of cruelty but because he probably wouldn’t want me passing out halfway through our walk.

  When my coffee was ready and safely poured into my travel mug, I grabbed his tennis ball and headed out. I was tempted to deviate from our normal path along the tree-lined residential streets and head to Main Street just to see if there was any activity in the alley next to Mary Ellen’s, but Latte was a creature of habit, and he guided me to the left instead of the right. Just as well. I’d be seeing the alley later when I went to talk to Mary Ellen anyway.

  My mind wandered as we walked. My thoughts predictably went straight to the body in the alley. Who was he? How had he died? Was it murder or suicide? Whichever one it was, why was the body right in the middle of the alley? Wouldn’t it make more sense to hide in a corner somewhere? Why kill yourself, or someone else, practically out in the open where anybody walking by could have seen? Why didn’t anybody see? Or did someone?

  I found myself walking faster, leading Latte instead of letting him walk ahead of me like I normally did. We were almost past the park when I felt a tug at the leash and realized he had stopped to stare longingly at the fenced-in expanse of grass that served as the rec league playing fields and dog park.

  Miraculously, at this hour on a beautiful weekend morning, the fields were empty. I wondered whether it was an oversight or a mix-up in scheduling. Or maybe there was a reason unknown to single, childless women like me why there were absolutely no sports being played on the fields on this particular Saturday morning.

  But it didn’t really matter why the fields were empty, just that they were. As distracted as I was by the body, and as anxious as I was to go talk to Mary Ellen about it, I couldn’t say no when Latte looked at me with those sad puppy dog eyes.