A Berry Home Catastrophe

by A. R. Winters

  “What?” Dorothy barked.

  “Clever!” I said again, covering. “It’s a new coffee I have in. A custom blend.” Lie after lie after lie. “I’ll get you a cup.” My hand shook as I poured the hot brew, and I was thankful for the saucer catching any escape-artist droplets.

  I slid the cup across the counter to her, and then steeled myself. I was sure that she’d throw the scalding liquid back in my face.

  Dorothy grumbled as she picked up the cup of coffee. “Took long enough. How do you even keep one customer? I can’t believe people are willing to pay for swill.” Then she turned the full force of her gaze on me. “I hope you don’t expect me to pay for it!”

  “No, ma’am. Of course not. No.” Please go away. Please, please go. “You can even keep the cup and saucer. Take it right on out the door with you, or… I mean, you know, wherever you plan to go.” I said the word “go” a little too hard, which earned a new venomous glare from her.

  Dorothy took her cup and moved to the table nearest the café’s door. She sat so that she had full view of both me and it. Just like a gunslinger out of the Old West, she made sure no one could get the jump on her.

  But once she sat down, she stared at me, unblinking, with eyes that bulged aggressively from her head. They looked ready to fall out, and I imagined them doing a splash down into the coffee. I suspected that it was the only way that the brew would come into contact with her body, because as she sat there, eyes locked on me, she didn’t bother to even take one sip.

  “Awww, look,” Zoey said. “Hunky Hank is gone.”

  I turned my attention to the window and was immediately crestfallen. “Awwww,” I said in a sing-song whine. I resisted the urge to kick the cabinet with my toe. I plopped my elbows down on the counter and my chin on my palm. “I was having fun looking at him.”

  I looked back at Dorothy and was relieved to see that her attention had shifted to her cell phone. She stared at it with the same bug-eyed intensity that she’d given me.

  “I wonder what Roberto was doing here,” Agatha said. “He certainly swept Hank away fast enough.”

  Dorothy jumped up from her table so fast and hard that it left it wobbling and her coffee sloshing. “What’s your wifi password?” She blinked frantically as she held her cell phone up even with her head. “What is it? I need it!”

  She was so loud that all the other talking in the café ceased as all the attention in the room zeroed in on her.

  “Aunt Dorothy,” I said, not bothering to correct myself, “the wifi is unrestricted. You don’t need a password.” I genuinely felt concerned for her, because I’d never seen her act this way before. I was used to seeing her insane, sure, but she’d always been insane in a very in-charge sort of way. But now she was being insane in a way that made me think she thought—with possibly some authority—that the world was going to end at any second.

  “I need it anyway,” she demanded, shaking her cell phone at me.

  “Well bless your heart,” Agatha asked. “Is everything okay? Is there someone you’d like us to call?” While her tone was pleasant enough, it had a definite patronizing edge. Then her speech slowed down, and she carefully enunciated each and every word. “Do you need some help?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Dorothy said with outraged indignation.

  “No need to beg, sweetheart,” Agatha said. Her tone grew sweeter by the moment, and I had a feeling that wasn’t a good thing. “We’ll pardon you right out that door.”

  Oh. My. Gosh. Agatha was officially my hero. Where was she when my ex-husband had been feeding me lines about his whereabouts when he was out chasing every skirt that caught his eye? She could have saved me years that I’d dedicated to that no good, lying pile of vermin vomit.

  “Well, I never!” Dorothy said.

  “If you’ve never, now’s the perfect time to start,” Agatha shot back. “Get to steppin’, honey. Get yourself right out that door.”

  Dorothy’s mouth contorted but no sound came out. Her gaze shifted back and forth between me and Agatha, and she was giving me looks like she was expecting me to jump to her defense.

  “I noticed you spilled your coffee when you jumped up, Dorothy. It’d be no trouble for me to pour you a fresh one in a to-go cup,” I said.

  Dorothy clenched her jaw and screamed with her teeth bared and clamped together.

  I was honestly worried about her. She’d always disliked me, had always been hateful to me, and had tried more than once to ruin me, but I’d never seen her act so unhinged without a specific objective in mind. That objective was usually trying to convince others to hate me too, but this time her tantrum-like ire didn’t seem to have a specific goal… even though her scream did have my customers fidgeting nervously in their seats. I saw a few reach for their things in preparation for leaving. Dorothy’s out-of-control behavior was hurting my business, and that meant she had to go.

  “Aunt Dorothy,” I said, hoping that calling her “aunt” would soothe her ego, “I do think it’s best if you left.” I coughed, trying to expel some of my discomfort at kicking her out. “Please don’t make me have to call the… uh, police.”

  Dorothy’s mouth snapped shut. She turned and snatched her purse off of the floor, crammed it under her arm and marched out the café’s front door.

  Zoey, Agatha, and I, plus half the café’s customers, watched her go.

  Dorothy looked at her phone again, then turned to march up the sidewalk. She reached the very edge of the café’s windows, then turned back toward the café and made an incredibly unladylike gesture—as a body careened face first into the sidewalk right behind her.

  3

  The café erupted in screams from about half of the current patrons—the half who had been riveted by Dorothy’s over-the-top antics and who had done their best to watch her until she’d almost gotten out of sight.

  The non-screaming portion of the café reacted in a variety of ways. Some simply looked around. Some threw themselves under their tables. A few reached for handguns in conceal-carry holsters or in their bags.

  I was glad to see that Zoey and Agatha weren’t packing, but then again, they were close enough to the café’s front windows to know that there wasn’t a need. At least not an immediate need.

  Outside, standing mere inches away from where the man had fallen, Aunt Dorothy jumped at what I can only assume was a strong gust of wind followed by a terrible and wet thud. So many things happened all at once. Her arms flailed, she pivoted to see what was behind her, and her body tipped off balance.

  “Ohhhh!” I shouted as I watched her fall face first and land on the back of the body.

  Zoey had climbed on top of her barstool and was standing in a crouched position, presumably to get a better view. Agatha was up and moving toward the door, and I decided to take a shortcut from behind the grill’s counter by climbing over it.

  “You’re going to kill yourself standing up there on those shoes,” I admonished Zoey. She was wearing see-through lace-up shoes with five-inch rainbow-colored platform soles. I had to admit that they were the perfect addition to her belted white tunic dress.

  I raised my hands in offer of assistance. She took them then jumped down from where she stood atop the barstool’s seat, a feat that practically gave me a heart attack.

  “How do you not break an ankle?” Prior to working sixteen-hour days at the café, I’d been known to have a penchant for wearing teeter-tottering stiletto heels. I loved how they made my legs look, but my feet weren’t having any of it and I had to give them up.

  A crowd was already gathering outside the café by the time we got out there. Zoey and I pushed through to the front, and then I stopped cold. Knowing someone had plummeted to their death was one thing. Seeing the aftermath was something else altogether. I didn’t bother to step forward to take a pulse. The view didn’t leave any doubt at all about the person’s death. Terrible and awful, it couldn’t be real…

  “It’s Hank,” I whispered.

 
; How could someone we’d been talking to less than ten minutes ago already be dead? I wanted to nudge him with the toe of my sneaker so that he’d quit faking and get up. Everyone would have a nice laugh about it, and life could return to normal.

  He simply could not be dead. He couldn’t.

  “How?” Zoey asked.

  I understood what Zoey was asking. She wasn’t asking how it could be Hank. She was asking how he had come to be lying on the pavement like a skydiver whose parachute didn’t open.

  We both turned around and followed with our eyes the path that his body would have fallen. It took us up the side of the building—my building. The enormous windows of my apartment were closed, but that didn’t seem to matter because he had landed in a spot that went beyond where my apartment ended. Hank was technically lying in front of the shop next door, one of the three tenant stores housed in a building that was the length of a city block. He hadn’t come from my apartment.

  But it didn’t look like he’d come from the shop next door either. All of their second floor windows—identical to those in my apartment—were also closed.

  My eyes raised higher, past my makeshift canvas sign covering Sarah’s Eatery with The Berry Home, all the way up to the roof. I could see Zoey looking at the same spot from out of the corner of my eye.

  “Think he was pushed?” she asked.

  “How would he have managed to get up there?” I didn’t know how to get up there, and I was the one who owned the building—well, technically the bank owned it, but it was my name on the papers now. It was yet another reminder of how much I had to learn about my own property.

  I really didn’t want to think about the implications of yet another person’s death being tied to my café. Even if Hank did die by falling off of the roof over the café’s neighboring business, it wouldn’t matter to the townspeople of Camden Falls. To them, the curse of me and my café would have snuffed out yet another life.

  Dorothy was standing on the other side of Hank, her face pale as she stared down at him. A woman was next to her with her arms around Dorothy’s shoulders, and she was talking, but I wasn’t sure if Dorothy was listening. She looked like she was in shock. Her purse hung limply in her hands, and its contents were scattered across the sidewalk from when she fell.

  Dorothy’s cell phone vibrated against the hard concrete a small ways from her left foot. It seemed to be the jolt she needed to break her out of her catatonic state.

  Suddenly and frantically, she fell to her knees. Her hands darted every which way to collect her belongings and shove them back in her purse. When she was done, she stood, turned and pushed her way through the crowd, and the sight of her back made me queasy. Dorothy’s back was covered with tiny droplets of blood spatter from head to toe.

  A large, strong hand closed on my arm and I was pulled backward with a yank. Zoey was still staring at my building’s roof and didn’t notice. I was getting ready to turn, grab, and do a knee hike right into my assailant’s gonads when a wall of chest I had once been very familiar with stopped me in my tracks.

  I looked up. “Dan?”

  My day could not get any worse.

  4

  “Dan! What are you doing here?” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Dan Hibbert, my ex-husband, was supposed to be in Chicago. It’s where I left him after he told all of our friends and business associates that I was a conniving, thieving, underhanded and untrustworthy snake in the grass. He’d taken everything in the divorce because of a foolish prenup I signed at eighteen, and he was the last person on earth that I wanted to see.

  And yet… seeing him made my palms tingle with the need to lay them on his great big glorious chest. He was like a magnet who pulled me in every time he got near.

  I would get a melon baller and scoop my attraction to Dan out of my brain if I could. It had made me blind to his philandering, and possibly it’s what fooled me into believing that he had been my best friend. The biggest betrayal of all.

  “I need to see you,” Dan said. Even though his brow was pinched with worry, the man looked as good as he ever had. His body was trim and solid, and he wore dark gray slacks, stylish leather loafers, and a long-sleeve peach button-up shirt. His brown hair had a little bit more gray at his temples, but other than that, he looked the same as when we’d been married.

  As for me, I was wearing jeans that really should have made a trip to the laundromat before being worn again, a simple cotton T, and sneakers that bore more than one grease stain. My flame-red hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail, and I barely had any makeup on at all. A constellation of freckles that traveled from one cheek, over the bridge of my nose, and over the other cheek were there for all to see. I hadn’t bothered to try to cover them up, as I had done when in Chicago.

  “Dan, I don’t need to see you.” I turned to walk away but instead found my feet with a complete lack of traction as I was lifted into the air. A second later I was lying over my ex-husband’s shoulder and he was carrying me through the crowd.

  The door of the café chimed as he pushed his way in and finally set my feet back on the floor. As soon as I was freed, I grabbed his nose with my thumb and forefinger, pinched absolutely as hard as I could, and then viciously slapped my hand away with my other hand.

  “Kylie!” Dan yelped as he grabbed his nose. “That hurt!”

  I glanced around the café. It had completely cleared out, so Dan and I were alone. Outside, all eyes were focused on Hank’s fallen body. No one would notice me beating the ever-living snot out of my extremely misguided ex.

  “You better start talking or I’m going to rip an ear off next,” I warned.

  “Okay, okay!” Dan said, holding his palms up in front of him. “But let’s sit. Please.”

  “No, not until you tell me what this is about.”

  Dan’s powerful shoulders slumped. “Kylie, I need your help.”

  The man looked defeated. All of his usual bravado was gone. And dagnabbit, I felt the big guy’s desperation pull at my heartstrings.

  I sighed, and it was my turn for my shoulders to sag. “Okay, Dan. Let’s sit.” I led him to a table next to the window with the best view of what was going on outside. Several police cruisers had shown up, and the police were making people back away from the scene. Brad—one of my two suitors—was among them.

  “Okay,” I said, “tell me what it is that you need help with.” I already knew the answer. So many people had already told me about the trouble that Dan’s HVAC company was in. We had built it together from the ground up. It hurt me to know that a business I had poured so much of myself into was now in terrible decline, but Dan had taken that part of my life away from me. It felt rude, like salt rubbed in an open wound, that he would now be asking me to help save it.

  Dan reached into his back pocket and pulled out his checkbook. He then retrieved a pen—one I’d given him as a Christmas present—out of his shirt pocket. Without a word of explanation, he opened the checkbook and started writing a check. When he got done, he tore it down its perforated edge and slid it face down across the table to me.

  “It’s a retainer,” he said, “to cover your consultation fee.”

  I blinked. I didn’t have a consultation fee.

  I turned the check over, and I blinked again. Then I smiled. “This will do.” The check wasn’t enough to make me rich, and it wouldn’t make up for the complete absence of alimony awarded to me through our divorce or the loss of unpaid years that I’d devoted to building our, I mean, his company. But it was enough to afford a new sign for my café. Although the café’s name had been legally changed to The Berry Home, I didn’t yet have the funds to change the original sign. Dan’s “consultation fee” changed that.

  Without looking at Dan, I folded the check and slipped it into my back pocket. I then put my elbows on the table, steepled my hands and laced my fingers together, and looked Dan squarely in the eyes. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hibbert?” I had my pride, and playing the role of his aide stung, but I’
d be smiling once the consultation was done and I was getting a brand-new sign for my café.

  My café. Not Dan’s. Not anyone else’s. Mine.

  My smile grew.

  Dan frowned and sat back in his seat. “You’re looking at me strange. Stop that.”

  “Tick tock, Dan. Your payment buys only a finite amount of my time.” And I would decide how long that time was.

  Dan nodded, a look of resigned defeat coming over him again. “Kye, the company’s in trouble.”

  Even though I’d known it was coming, it still hit me hard. The news sat heavy on me like a rock in my gut.

  “What’s going on? Why’s it in trouble?” I asked.

  “Well, first it was the schedule. Employees started missing appointments. Orders weren’t placed on time, and that meant jobs weren’t getting completed by their deadline. I had to hire an office manager!”

  The look on his face told me that he was looking for sympathy for having to hire someone to do a job—that and so much more—that I’d done, unpaid, for years. A job he’d pushed me out of when I left him.

  I felt no sympathy whatsoever. Quite the opposite, actually.

  I stared at him without smiling, without nodding, without doing anything.

  “Do you know how much it costs to hire an office manager?” he continued to complain.

  Oh, he was reaching. He was trying to attain that moment when I would tell him, “You poor baby! How awful of them!” It wasn’t going to happen.

  “Then the office managers were inept. I had to fire three of them before I found one who had a clue!”

  Translation: he hired on the cheap. He got inexperienced, untalented, non-self-starting office managers who didn’t care about the job or the success of the company.

  He slouched in his chair and folded those football player arms over his chest, looking positively sullen. “You wouldn’t believe how much my most recent office manager is costing me. At least they have a clue.”