That hit seemed to be his undoing. He tried to grunt or gasp, but the air seemed frozen in his lungs. He staggered backward and then bent over with his padded, gloved hands resting on his knees.
“Calling it?” Hannah asked.
The bent man gave a side wave with one hand without bothering to look up. He was too focused on getting his body to breathe again.
Hannah started stripping off her gloves.
Zoey nudged me with her elbow, then looked up at the wall behind and above us. I followed her gaze. There was a black metal arm that protruded out of the wall.
“Camera mount,” Zoey whispered. But there wasn’t any camera. That explained why we didn’t see this room—or any of its activities—on Guy’s surveillance video.
I glanced around the rest of the room and even turned completely around. Right behind me, taped to the wall, was a schedule sheet. It was my turn to nudge Zoey. When she was turned, I pointed at a line on the sheet. The first column read “Hank Harrison.” The second column read “Hannah Delvy.” The third, longer column listed a day and time. It was the morning of Hank’s death, less than two hours prior.
I turned back around and stared wide-eyed at Hannah’s sparring partner from today. She’d beat the ever-living snot out of him. Then I remembered the pre-incision autopsy photos that Brad had shown me of Hank’s body. He’d had bruises all over him. Bruises from sparring with Hannah! No one had jumped him or beaten him with a club. He’d willingly faced off with the person who had left his body looking destroyed.
Hannah’s partner was finally standing mostly upright, and he made his way out of the room. He moved like he hurt. In contrast, Hannah was working through an array of stretches, and she looked as though she wasn’t in an ounce of pain. She didn’t even look winded.
“You two looking to sign up?” Hannah asked when she paused in her stretches. “I don’t usually spar with noobs, but I could help you run through some of the moves while you practice on each other.”
Let someone do to me what she’d just done to that poor guy? What she’d done to Hank? Or even me do that to someone else? No way!
I glanced over at Zoey. She had a maniacal gleam in her eye and an insane person’s smile on her face.
I took a small step away from her.
“We’re psychology students,” I told Hannah. It was best to keep our lie consistent with what we’d told Vic. “We’re writing a paper that seeks to better understand suicide.”
Hannah’s expression was surprised and hurt. She looked like she’d just been slapped.
“I don’t have time for you,” she said when she’d recovered from the shock. “Get out.”
The tact of saying we were students studying Hank’s suicide had struck a chord for her, a discordant one that she couldn’t stand the sound of. Keeping up that lie wasn’t going to get us anywhere with her. She wasn’t going to talk to us.
“Never mind,” she grumbled when neither Zoey nor I moved. “I’ll get out. You two can stay in here and rot.” She headed for the door.
I stepped in her way. Blocking her. My only explanation was that Zoey’s insanity had rubbed off on me. I had to admit, Hannah gave me a look that said she thought I’d lost my mind. I was inclined to agree with her.
I held up my hands. “We aren’t students,” I said. Then over my shoulder to Zoey I said, “Get the door.” I heard it shut behind me.
As for Hannah, she’d gone from looking like I’d lost my mind to looking at me like a threat. Everything about how she stood subtly shifted. Her stance widened. Her knees bent slightly. And she presented one shoulder to me, standing with her chest flush forward. She was ready to fight, or at the very least defend herself.
“We’re investigating Hank’s murder,” I said.
And just like that, Hannah’s defenses fell away. She stood up straighter, the tension left her, and a haunting sadness aged her early-thirties face around her eyes.
“You think he was murdered?” she asked.
I nodded. “We do. My name is Kylie Berry, and I’m the owner of The Berry Home.” Just like with Guy, there was a total lack of recognition when I mentioned my café’s name. I sighed and tried again. “It used to be called Sarah’s Eatery.”
Hannah gasped and took a step away. “Where Hank died. Somebody pushed him. I knew it! Do you know who? Who are your suspects?”
Zoey and I glanced at each other and then looked at Hannah.
She gasped again. “You think that I’m a suspect? How? Why? I wasn’t with him at that café.”
“Hank died very soon after leaving this gym,” I said. “We’re just exploring all the possibilities.”
It was like Hannah could read between the lines. She took another step back. “No, nooo. You think that one of us did it. You think that one of us killed Hank.”
“We think that there’s a strong possibility.” What else was there to say? She had us. She wasn’t buying any of our lies, or even our half-truths.
“I didn’t kill Hank,” she said, her voice going higher. It was filled more with panic than conviction.
I twisted to look behind me at the sign-in sheet taped to the wall. She followed the incrimination that I was throwing at her.
“No, nooo,” she said and pushed past us. She stood in front of the sheet and ran her finger up its length, stopping at a variety of places. “Look. I sparred with Hank here. And here. And here!” She flipped through the pages, showing us more and more times that Hank had gone up against her.
I hated to say it, but her proof of past sessions was a good defense that she didn’t kill him. Despite what we’d just seen and despite all of the bruising on Hank’s body, if she didn’t kill him when they’d sparred together all of those previous times, then why would that last time be any different?
But it had been different…
Hank’s drink had most likely been spiked with poison, and he’d willingly fed himself each and every dose. He’d killed himself. He just hadn’t known he was doing it.
I turned to face Hannah. “That proves nothing,” I said. I wasn’t ready to concede defeat. I needed to push her. I needed her to tell us what we didn’t know, whatever that was, because I was sure she knew something.
“Then you’re an idiot,” Hannah shot back. She’d gotten pushed into a corner, and now she was going on the attack. “And you have no authority in this matter. Where are your badges? Where are your credentials?”
Yep, she had us there.
I blew out a deep breath and held up my hands. I was hoping that she’d follow suit on my efforts to calm myself and do the same herself. Her shoulders stayed high and tight, though, and her hands were balled into fists.
“We don’t have any credentials,” I finally admitted. “But we will figure out the truth about what happened to Hank. You don’t know this yet, but there’s a bunch of police in the men’s locker room right now. You know, the one just across from the women’s locker room…” I let the insinuated implication hang in the air. “They’re there because we called them. What they’re doing is evaluating the possible method through which Hank was killed.”
Grief filled Hannah’s eyes as she looked in the direction of where the police would be, as if looking through walls. Her shoulders eased as all the fight seemed to leave her. She shrugged. “So then why do you think it was me?”
Really? We’d already figured out that Andy wasn’t the fool he pretended to be. Surely Hannah couldn’t be overlooking the obvious.
“Hannah,” I said, “you could have killed him as easily as anyone else at this gym.” In fact, if Hank did die from poison, then the odds were in favor of Hannah being Hank’s killer more than Vic. Poison was traditionally known as a woman’s murder weapon.
Hannah had access to the locker room. The doors to the men’s and women’s locker rooms were right next to each other. Hank’s locker combination was scratched into the back of his padlock. It would have been easy for her to sneak in, spike Hank’s nutrition supplement and get b
ack out without anyone noticing. She had all kinds of opportunity to pull that off.
It was true that we still didn’t know what type of poison was used. But no matter what it was, there was a chance that Hannah had easy access to it.
She could have easily been Hank’s killer. She was still very much on the hook for his death, and I wasn’t hearing anything coming out of her mouth to make us think otherwise. We didn’t yet have a reason that she would have wanted to kill him—or a reason she would have wanted to keep him alive.
“But I wouldn’t have,” she whined. Even with her superhero ability to kick butt, I was liking Hannah less and less.
“But why, Hannah? Why wouldn’t you have killed him?”
“Because I didn’t want to!” She threw her arms up in exasperation with me.
“But why didn’t you want to?” I pushed. On one hand, the “I didn’t want to” answer was a very good one. The problem was that it gave us nothing to verify.
Hannah looked at me like I’d grown two heads. Then the whiny little girl persona she’d adopted melted away to leave the butt-kicking superhero once more in her place.
She shoved me fiercely on one side: it was a shove that used the strength of her whole body plus her upper body weight, and she knocked me out of her path. She was out the door before I even managed to untangle myself from Zoey’s arms.
“Temper,” Zoey said.
“Mmhmm, killer temper,” I agreed.
The murmured sound of officials at work reached my ears. The police weren’t isolating themselves to the men’s locker room anymore.
“Time to go,” I said. “Think there’s a back door we could sneak out of without being spotted?”
I hadn’t seen one. I wondered if an emergency door could be tucked behind one of the wall mats. I was pretty sure the building would have to have a fire escape exit somewhere in order to be up to code.
“Maybe down the third hallway,” Zoey offered.
Bingo.
Zoey and I snatched up our shoes without bothering to put them on. No one was paying attention to the hallway we were in, and we were able to reach the mouth of it.
I peeked around the corner, and then stifled a gasp. Detective Gregson was talking to Andy. Gregson had his back to us, but Andy spotted us. That we were trying not to be seen was obvious from the way we were skulking around.
Andy narrowed his eyes and his lips tightened.
Oh, no! Here it comes! The jerk was going to give us up. I’d spend the next forty-eight hours in lockup while Detective Gregson did his best to get the County Attorney behind whatever trumped up charge Gregson could think up.
Andy turned the back of his shoulder to the hallway and with a long arm in the direction of the gym’s reception area. Detective Gregson turned all of his back on us to look that way, too!
The kid came through! I owed him a huge apology. I could make him a cake! A great big layer cake with fluffy cream filling between each thin layer. I could just see it, ten layers tall. Beautiful and glorious.
Then I remembered who I was. My imaginary cake turned into a pudding tower and melted right in front of my imaginary eyes.
Pancakes! I could get Jonathan to make him a great big stack of pancakes.
Apology saved!
Zoey and I slipped out of the hallway and did a wall-hugging run-walk to the next hallway down. Sure enough, a red neon exit sign marked the way to freedom.
16
By the time I made it back to the café, I felt like I’d just pulled off a majestic caper and had left Inspector Clouseau clueless in my wake.
“Oh, thank goodness! I gotta go, boss,” Jonathan said as soon as I stepped into the kitchen. He was already whipping his apron off. “We had a rush at lunch. They cleaned us plum out of all the chicken pies and I made herbed new potatoes to go with them. They sold out, too. I hadn’t gotten started on fixin’ anything for supper yet ‘cause of all the pots and pans left over to be washed up.”
I was a terrible, terrible person. I’d taken Jonathan for granted, and now he was running away from me like any sane person would! I’d been gone much longer than I’d meant to. I’d never imagined that the café would get busy at lunch. It rarely ever did.
A thought floated into my head at the same time a dark cloud of gloominess settled in overhead. The café had done so well while I was gone because I hadn’t been here. I hadn’t been the one cooking. Jonathan had, and the heavenly aroma of his cooking had pulled customer after customer inside until he’d had nothing left to serve them.
I knew that was a thought that should have made me happy. We’d had a lucrative lunch session! The café had come out ahead on the financial ledger of life. It was a feat to be celebrated. But I just wanted to mope my way over to the far corner, plop down on the floor, and pull little Sage into my lap for some unconditional love with a side order of purring.
“Are you coming back?” I asked in one of the tiniest, most hopeless voices I’d ever heard come out of my mouth.
“Oh, yeah, boss! I’ll be here bright and early tomorrow morning. I just can’t be here now. I… well, um, I… I just gotta go, boss. I’m real sorry about this.”
Jonathan was leaving, and he didn’t want to tell me why. I’d been working him on an insane schedule. Probably more than sixty hours a week. He’d never complained. Not once. He’d always just been here. An endless well of happy energy. He’d only been a part of my café family for a short time, but I’d come to rely on him so much!
If he had to go, I couldn’t fault him. And I wouldn’t disgrace myself by demanding to know why. I trusted him. He’d earned that.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” I said, feeling more than a little humbled. It shook me to realize how fast the foundation of my café’s slowly growing success could be shaken to rubble. If whatever it was that was taking Jonathan away decided to keep him for good, there would be no easy bouncing back for me.
On top of that, I’d really, really miss the ol’ hippie. He’d become a part of my heart.
Jonathan headed past me for the door, but as he moved past I tackled him in a giant hug. I don’t think I’d ever hugged him before. He was all bone and lean muscle. Maybe I should make him a cake! Forget anxious little Andy from the gym.
The sound of Jonathan’s chuckle reached my ear where it was pressed against his chest. He gave me a warm hug and pat. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I promise.”
And that was good enough for me. If Jonathan was promising something, then he would come through. I released him from my hug. I couldn’t stop my cheeks from going red from the truth of what the hug had been about. It had been my way to keep him from leaving.
No fear of abandonment here!
“Oh! Oh! Take some of Patty’s cookies with you.”
Jonathan’s face fell. “All the baked ones sold out.” Then he smiled. “But there’s more batter in the cooler!” That was my Jonathan. The man was a silver lining around any gray cloud. He winked at me. “I’ll get some in the morning, boss.” Then he was gone. I hadn’t been able to think up an excuse fast enough to make him stay longer.
Sage arched and rubbed her side against my leg.
“It’s just you and me again, kid. Think you can stand it?”
She answered with a couple of clipped, chirpy meows that to me said she liked my company just fine.
And just like that, I was smiling again.
I clapped my hands and rubbed my palms together. “All right, Sage. Let’s see what I can tackle on my own.”
I went to the cooler. It was full of fresh produce, all kinds of stuff best served right after it gets done cooking.
I went to the pantry. “Rice… Beans…” Beans would take too long. I had to come up with something that would be ready by dinner. “Pasta!”
I could go with my tried and true pasta, meatballs, and red sauce. Or I could face down my arch nemesis.
Aglio e olio.
Spaghetti, fresh garlic, parmesan, salt and oil. So simple, yet it’
s beat me every time.
“I can do this. I will do this!” I hoped my pep talk would make a difference, but I had my doubts.
I looked up the recipe on my phone and read it all the way through. I then looked it up on five other websites and read those, too.
I looked at Sage as she chased an imaginary butterfly. “I can do this,” I told her, and this time I believed it a little more myself.
I got to work. I was careful to refer back to the recipe I’d opted to follow step-by-step. I got water boiling. I heated a skillet with oil. I added oil to the pasta water to help keep the pasta from sticking. I dropped the uncooked pasta into the water. I stirred. I peeled some garlic, sliced it and dropped it in the pan. I gave it a stir. I checked the pasta. It was almost done. I placed a colander in the sink. I duck-walked the heavy pot of boiling pasta over to the sink, and then I noticed the smell of burning garlic.
“Nooo,” I whimpered as I hefted the heavy pot up to the sink’s lip. I’d have to hurry if I was going to salvage the garlic.
“I’ll see you rot behind bars!” a man’s voice bellowed so loud that his words bounced off the walls of the kitchen.
I screamed and twirled toward the sound. The pot slipped from my hands. Near boiling, oily water and gobs of spaghetti went everywhere. My feet slipped, and I went down flat on my back. It took a half second for my skin to register how hot the water was as it soaked through my clothes. I screeched instead of screamed this time and did a slip-slide jungle climb up the side of the sink while my feet went every which way beneath me. I finally got high enough to roll myself head and shoulder first into the industrial-sized stainless steel sink. With my butt sitting in the colander, I turned the cold water on full blast and screamed for my third—and hopefully—final time.
Spaghetti stuck to my clothes and hung from my hair. My feet were up in the air, and I was trying to hold my tush up a little so that my more padded parts didn’t get permanently wedged into the colander. Ice cold water cascaded over my shoulders, chest and dripped off my back.
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 10
