“Like this near riot?”
“That was an accident.” I hoped.
“Hm. You’ll get your citation in the mail. I’ll see what I can do to minimize the damage.”
“Thanks,” I said, glum.
He patted me on the shoulder and walked outside.
Charlene came to stand beside me. “Well, that went well.”
“No, Charlene, it didn’t. Someone could have gotten hurt.” And I was feeling uncomfortably smushed between the rock of Gordon Carmichael and the hard place of Charlene McCree.
Her shoulders sagged. “I didn’t think people would believe it was literally true. Who knew I had such a talent for hoaxes? Did you sweet-talk Gordon out of the citation?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t give me special favors just because we’re dating.”
She lifted a single snowy eyebrow.
“At least not when the entire town knows about it,” I amended. Gordon had been cutting us a lot of slack on our murder investigations.
Hunter edged from the kitchen. “Is it over?”
I looked around the restaurant. We were back to our regular Friday-afternoon capacity, my elderly regulars lined up at the counter and half the tables full. People still massed outside. But they roamed the sidewalk rather than flooding Main Street. “I think so.”
“Cool. ’Cause we’re on the news.” He handed me his phone.
A news anchor filled the small screen. “Mass hysteria strikes a small town amid fears of . . .” She laughed, wind tossing her brown hair. “UFOs?”
I groaned. Not good. So not good.
CHAPTER 20
“You know,” Charlene said, “there’s only one thing left to do now.” On her shoulder, Frederick snored.
I adjusted the CLOSED sign in Pie Town’s glass front door. A few people milled on the darkening sidewalk outside Pie Town, but the crowd of UFOnauts had mostly disbursed.
“I’m not sure calling the TV station will help,” I said, wringing my hands in my apron. “Explaining the situation to the press will only give them more to talk about.” And this wasn’t the sort of publicity I wanted for Pie Town. Though it might put people’s minds at ease about the Invasion of San Nicholas. And yes, I’d begun to think about it in capital letters. I swallowed hard. Maybe calling the station was the right thing to do, even if we did look like greedy idiots.
Something clattered behind us, and I turned.
Hunter bent to retrieve the mop he’d dropped on the checkerboard floor. “I don’t get it,” the teenager said. “What do we need to do now?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Charlene adjusted the cat around the collar of her yellow tunic. “Follow Dorothy.”
He looked at her blankly. “Like in The Wizard of Oz?”
She shook her head sadly and patted his shoulder. “No, son, though I’m gratified you’re familiar with the work.”
“What work?” he asked. “I already finished loading the dishwasher and mopping the kitchen.”
“Never mind,” I said. “And thanks for staying late. You can take off now, if you’re done.”
“Cool.” He dropped the mop again and jogged toward the kitchen. The teen slipped on the wet floor and caught himself by grabbing a pink barstool at the last minute.
“You do realize he tracked footprints across the floor he just mopped?” Charlene asked.
“And he’s boxed us in.” I might make it across the slippery black-and-white tiles, but I didn’t want Charlene to risk her neck. “Come on.” I unlocked the front door and followed Charlene onto the sidewalk.
“What about your purse?” she asked.
“I’ve given it up,” I said, pleased with myself. “I’ve switched to a man’s wallet, which fits inside my back pocket.” I patted the rear of my jeans. My phone was in the other pocket, loose change in the front. My pants were hanging a little low, but it felt great not to lug a purse around.
“Forget your wallet. We need to stake out Dorothy.”
I shivered in my thin Pies Before Guys tee. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“All righty, then,” she said. “I’ll go to Dorothy’s and let you know what I find.”
Gordon’s warning rang in my brain. “Charlene, we already started a near riot today. Maybe we should just call it a night and watch some Stargate.” We were on the final season. Soon we’d have to switch to Stargate Atlantis.
A Prius glided past on the street.
She angled her head, considering the offer. “Nah. I’m going to Dorothy’s.”
Charlene and I walked past the comic shop, its windows filled with superheroes. We rounded the corner.
“We don’t even know where Dorothy lives.” I rubbed my arms. It wasn’t exactly cold, but the evening wasn’t warm either, a breeze nipping in from the Pacific.
“Sure I do. Doran got me the address.”
Doran did what? “And what’s with this I stuff?” I thought we’d gotten past this. “I apologized. We agreed we’d work together. We’re a team, aren’t we?”
“Well, since someone’s letting her boyfriend tell her what to do when someone’s not running around trying to make her brother happy, and someone’s refusing to interrogate Dorothy, I figured I’d go by myself.”
“Gordon’s not telling me what to do.” Okay, maybe he had on occasion. But he was a cop, and his requests hadn’t exactly been out of bounds.
“And Doran?”
We turned the corner into the brick alley.
“Of course, I want to get along with him,” I said, “and he’s leaving soon.”
“You can’t make everyone happy,” she said gently. “You’re a kind woman, Val. But it’s time to stand in your power.” She punched her fist in the air.
“Stand in my power? Have you been watching those self-help videos on YouTube again? Charlene, we’ve talked about this. You just wind up watching Marla’s channel—”
“She’s starting a cooking show, Val. Next thing you know, she’ll be giving away Pie Town secrets.”
“She doesn’t know any. You’ve kept the secret ingredient for your piecrust under lock and key.”
“Well, I don’t trust her. She’s always lurking. And speaking of which, are you coming to Dorothy’s or not?”
Since this was going to end in disaster with or without me, I agreed. And since Charlene wouldn’t tell me Dorothy’s address, she drove.
We roared through San Nicholas, depositing Frederick at Charlene’s house, stopping at the mini-mart for snacks, and using the bathroom at the mini-mart. Finally, we crossed the One and hurtled west, toward the Pacific.
On two wheels, we screeched through a sleepy fishing village. Charlene slowed as we neared a collection of ramshackle townhomes near the private airport, tucked beneath a low hill. Fog crept beneath the golf-ball-shaped radar tower on its crest and blanketed the green hill.
A white cat darted in front of our bumper. Charlene slammed on her brakes, whipping me forward.
I flung up my right arm, and my elbow banged the windshield. “Ow.”
The cat scampered over a collection of fishing nets draped across a faded wooden fence.
“Strange,” she said. “That cat looked just like Frederick.”
“Hm.” I suspected Frederick led a secret, more exciting life when he wasn’t pretending to be deaf and narcoleptic. But he’d have to have kitty superpowers to have beaten us here. “Which one is Dorothy’s?”
“Number three, the one at the end, on the right.”
I squinted at the two-story’s peeling paint. “I thought Dorothy was set with her alimony, but this isn’t super impressive.” My tiny house was in better shape. But mine was smaller. Lots smaller. Though I had an ocean view.
“We’re a block from the water,” Charlene said. “These go for over a million. Who can afford paint after the mortgage and property taxes?”
“Dollars?” I squeaked. “A million dollars? For a town house?�
��
“It’s Silicon Valley real estate. Everyone wants to live here. Few can afford the price tag.”
Like Doran.
I slouched in my seat. If it hadn’t been for Charlene’s tiny house, I’d probably still be sleeping in my office.
“Stop pouting and take this.” She reached behind her seat and handed me a scratchy, gray wool blanket. “Doran might be leaving the area, but he’s not leaving your life. If he didn’t want a relationship with you, he wouldn’t have stuck around as long as he has.”
I draped the blanket around my shoulders. “I know, you’re right.” But I was still disappointed he was going. Maybe I’d expected too much?
She leaned across me and pulled a bag of cheesy puffs from the glove compartment. “Your problem is you’ve got abandonment issues.” A crumpled sheet of goldenrod paper fell from the glove compartment to my feet.
I bent to pick it up—the flyer from the poetry reading. The odd symbol seemed to wink at me from the corner of the page. “I do not.”
She brandished a traffic-cone-orange puff. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.” I stuffed the flyer in the rear pocket of my jeans. “I’m not hungry.”
She crunched a puff, scattering orange dust. “It’s understandable, what with your father taking off and that realtor leaving you at the altar.”
I braced my elbow on the Jeep’s open window, my head in my hand. “I wasn’t left at the altar.”
“Figure of speech. It was their loss, not yours. You own a pie shop. What man in his right mind wouldn’t want that package?”
Their loss or not, I’d actually dodged a bullet with my ex-fiancé. Because we’d broken up, I’d found someone better. As to my father . . . I sighed. That was more complicated. But I believed he’d been trying to do the right thing, in his own wrongheaded way.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Though you could stand to lose a pound or three.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be offering me late-night snacks. And my weight is perfectly healthy for my height.” I blew out a breath. Change the subject. “Did you notice Brittany in Pie Town today?”
“The ex-TA? No. What was she doing there?”
“Not buying pie.” I frowned. The restaurant had been a madhouse. But I was pretty sure I’d remember if she’d come to the register. Why had she come? To see the UFO chaos? Or for something else?
I sniffed. An acrid scent drifted on the cooling air. “Do you smell something?”
“All I smell is fish and cheesy puffs. They’re one hundred percent chemical. It’s what makes them taste so good.”
My stomach twisted. “No, it smells like smoke.” But not from a fireplace or barbecue.
A plume of smoke, gray against the black sky, rose from behind Dorothy’s town house.
“There,” I said, pointing. “Do you see it?” I scrambled from the Jeep.
“Let’s find out what’s what,” Charlene said.
We jogged across the street, the blanket flapping around my knees. A low, gated fence blocked the side yard of Dorothy’s townhome.
We hurried along it, toward the rear of the townhouse.
Dorothy stood over a firepit, the flames weirdly lighting her stony face. She tossed a file folder into the pit and poked it with a stick.
Charlene grabbed my shoulder and yanked me downward, behind the fence. She winced, her knees hitting the earth. “Oooh,” she muttered, “that’s going to hurt in the morning. What’s she doing now?”
My insides like Jell-O, I peeked over the fence. “Same thing she was doing before, throwing papers into the fire.”
“Suspicious.”
I tugged the blanket tighter and leaned my back against the slatted fence. “There’s nothing illegal about burning papers.” Unless it was a Spare the Air day.
“We need to see those papers.”
“Sure,” I whispered, sarcastic. “You cause a diversion, and I’ll go get them.”
“I’m on it.” She grunted, unmoving. “Well, help me up.”
“I was joking about the diversion.”
“A suspect in a murder investigation is burning documents. It’s evidence.”
“It’s interfering in a police investigation,” I said.
“What are you two doing?” Dorothy stared down at us, her elbows braced on the fence.
CHAPTER 21
I sprang to my feet and helped Charlene to stand. The blanket slithered off one shoulder. “Um, hi.”
Moonlit tentacles of fog stretched down the hill toward the row of townhomes. I adjusted the itchy blanket.
“What are you supposed to be? Zorro?” Dorothy’s eyes narrowed. “And are you going to answer me? What are you doing here?” A gust of wind tossed the professor’s blond ringlets, coiling from beneath a navy knit cap.
“We were in the neighborhood and saw smoke coming from your yard,” I said, sticking as close to the truth as possible. “We decided to see what was going on before calling the fire department.”
“And that involved hiding behind my fence,” she said flatly.
“What’s in the firepit?” Charlene chirped.
Dorothy glanced over her shoulder at the rising flames. “Michael’s works in progress. His wish was that they be burned after he died.”
She had access to Starke’s papers? So soon after his death? How? My lips thinned. I struggled to think of a way to probe politely.
“Are you his executor?” Charlene turned up the collar of her yellow tunic.
“Yes,” she said. “Are you satisfied?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think.” Charlene shrugged. “The cops aren’t going to be happy you’re burning the evidence.”
“It’s unfinished poetry,” she said. “Not evidence.”
“I don’t suppose you have the poems he read on the night of his death?” I asked. “Or a play?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Why?”
“There’s a theory that one of the poems might have a bearing on his death,” I said, then winced. My response had popped out automatically. But that was probably more information than I should be giving a subject. Good thing I wasn’t the police . . . who didn’t believe that theory anyway. “Not because of plagiarism, but because it’s about a true crime.”
On the other side of the picket fence, Dorothy took a step back, and her ankle turned on a stone. The professor wobbled and straightened. “I . . .” She swallowed. “That’s an interesting theory. But I wasn’t there that night. I don’t know what he read.”
“The poem was called ‘Death in a Parking Lot,’” I said. “And I can’t remember the name of the other.” I’d been daydreaming about pie. “But it ended with the words die, die, die.”
“Ah, yes.” One corner of her mouth curled with derision. “The poem about driving with the farmworker. I don’t see how that can have any bearing on his death.”
“The farmworker?” I asked, excited. There were farmworkers in San Nicholas. Could it have happened here? “Then you have it?”
She looked toward the column of smoke rising above the firepit. “Not anymore.”
“But you said you were burning only his works in progress,” Charlene said.
“That was a work in progress. He liked reading them aloud to test them out, see what the audience’s reaction was. The readings were a part of the process.”
“What was it about?” I asked. “Can you remember?”
“Michael’s car broke down, and he hitched a ride with a farmworker. It was a vignette of sorts, heavy with imagery about the starkness of the road and the brutality of life. But nothing happened that could possibly have . . . I mean, the ride took place last June in the Central Valley. It was nothing.”
“What was he doing in farm country?” Charlene asked.
She shrugged. “How should I know? Wine tasting’s my bet. That area might not have the glamour of Napa, but it’s got excellent reds.”
“If that were true,” I said, “he wouldn’t have gone alone, wo
uld he?”
“Probably not,” she said. “Why?”
“Was there any mention in the poem of another passenger, like a date, hitching a ride too?”
She stiffened. “No, but he could have edited the other passenger out for effect. Poetry is a sort of heightened reality.”
Nonchalantly, I tossed one end of the blanket over my shoulder. Why the reaction? Was she jealous? Or was it something else?
“Would he and a date have climbed into a stranger’s car?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Dorothy frowned. “I suppose it would depend on the stranger.”
“Well,” I said, “if you see any more copies of that poem—”
“I’ll burn them,” she said, “as Michael requested.”
I sighed. Hopefully Abril would come through with the missing poetry. “Right.” And I would let Gordon know that Dorothy was having a bonfire. He might not be convinced of our half-baked poem theory, but who knew what was in the professor’s firepit?
Dorothy folded her arms. “Is that all?”
“No.” I pulled Abril’s goldenrod flyer from the back pocket of my jeans. Unfolding it, I handed it to her and pointed to the symbol in the bottom corner. “What’s this?”
One corner of her mouth lifted. “Ah. So that’s how he filled the seats.”
“He who?” I asked.
“Michael.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What does the symbol mean?”
“Did you attend the college’s production of The Secret Society?” Dorothy asked.
“I did,” Charlene said. “It was pretty weird.”
“It was meant to be unsettling,” she said. “It was an interactive performance, with audience participation. The actors had to be prepared to use improvisation.”
“What does that have to do with the symbol?” I asked, studying her closely.
“To prepare for their performance, the actors created and worked their own secret society. They held meetings, created passwords and secret handshakes, the works. You know.”
I really didn’t. “And this symbol is for the society?”
She handed me the flyer. “So secret, we didn’t include the symbol on the program for our performance of The Secret Society. It was for cast members only.”
Pies Before Guys Page 17
