A Berry Home Catastrophe

by A. R. Winters

  She had a point. “You think Ellen might have switched out some of his meds?”

  “Could be. I could take pictures of them and look up the pill shapes, colors and all the rest to compare against the drug name later.”

  I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell Zoey that I thought Vic knew more about Ellen than he was saying, but the sound of his feet treading through the dining room cut me off.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing a beer can to each of us. They were cold. Fresh from the fridge, and Zoey didn’t hesitate in cracking hers open and tossing it back for a long chug. The girl was bold.

  Not wanting to look out of place, I opened my can and took a sip. Ah, peer pressure.

  “Vic, is Ellen a jealous woman?” Zoey asked after Vic sat back down.

  “I don’t know. Never gave her anything to get jealous about. Since the day we met, she’s always been the only girl for me.”

  Considering the state of Vic’s home, I was inclined to believe him. Vic and Ellen hadn’t been a “them” for a while now, but it didn’t look like any other woman had spent time in Vic’s home. I couldn’t imagine him bringing a date home when he had photos of his ex all over his living room wall. It wasn’t the best way to convince a future love that you were over your past.

  A giant, flashing, neon sign saying “Duh!” smashed into my forehead. Vic wasn’t over Ellen. Not one little bit.

  It was time to go out on a limb.

  “How long do you think it’ll take for her to come back to you?”

  Vic’s beer can didn’t even make it all the way to his lips. With his bloodshot eyes wide, he lowered the can. “You really think she will?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Other than the fact that she’d tried to leave him multiple times and this was the only time she’d managed to keep him from coming after her. “She’ll cool off. She’ll miss what you had together, and she’ll come home.” I pointed at the photos on the wall near the front door. “All a person has to do is look at those to see just how incredible you two are together. You don’t throw a connection that special away.”

  “You get it!” Vic sat forward, smiling from ear to ear. “We’ve had our rough times, sure, but you work through them.”

  “But she was pretty determined to leave you this last time, wasn’t she?”

  Vic sat back and took another swig of his beer. “Yes, she was,” he said with pride. “But that’s my girl. I got a thick skull, and she did what she had to do to get through to me. That’s how much she cares.”

  Delusional much? He was blindly in love with his abuser. Seemed that Ellen hadn’t shared the same affliction, not if she’d been willing to put him in the hospital with a life-threatening ailment.

  “Mind if I use your bathroom?” Zoey asked, standing.

  “Sure.” Vic twisted to a point behind him. “Down that hall, then take a left. Second door on your right.”

  I watched Zoey go on her private fact-finding mission.

  Vic knew that Ellen had tried to kill him. I was sure of it. But he wasn’t willing to give her up.

  I took a long draw on the beer without thinking about it as my mind looked for weaknesses in his infatuation. I needed something that could work to my advantage.

  My brain felt like a mouse running a maze. If Ellen had tried to kill Vic in order to get away from him, then why did she kill Hank? They hadn’t been together, and we hadn’t been able to uncover any evidence that Hank was anything less than faithful to Samantha. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe this time instead of trying to be rid of a person, Ellen had killed Hank in order to exorcise the pain of her unrequited love? She hadn’t wanted to feel that way anymore.

  But who tried to run us down in the truck?

  My gaze refocused with laser sharpness on Vic. The person in the truck had been someone big, someone with broad shoulders. Vic was big, and his shoulders were huge.

  Whoever had been in the truck had been willing to kill Zoey and me. They’d tried to make us wreck while we were going ninety miles an hour. That speed was plenty fast enough to kill.

  Maybe Vic hadn’t killed Hank, but I was pretty sure he was willing to kill Zoey and me in order to protect Ellen from going to prison for murder. It’d be pretty hard for her to come home to him if she was trapped behind bars. All he wanted was a life with her, and Zoey and I were in his way.

  I did my best to smile like I wasn’t suddenly terrified. “I can’t imagine what’s taking Zoey so long.”

  Vic frowned, tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair and looked in the direction of the bathroom. “The commode’s got a trick flusher. Gotta jiggle it right.”

  When he got up and headed off down the hall, I almost cried out for him to stop. Panic and guilt flooded through me. I’d just thrown Zoey under the bus!

  I grabbed my phone out of my pocket with shaky hands. Swiping it to life, I tapped in a message to Brad. “At Vic’s. In danger… maybe.” Then I felt guilty again when I hit send. I’d feel like an idiot if I’d figured out the situation all wrong. But, at least I’d be alive.

  In response to my attempt at texting Brad, my phone flashed: Failure to send.

  “No!” I hissed. The phone had only one bar and it was flashing in and out.

  I leaned to the side and peered down the hallway where Vic had disappeared. The coast was clear, and I couldn’t hear him. Of course, maybe he didn’t want me to hear him. Maybe he was in the bathroom with his hands wrapped around Zoey’s neck, crushing it and killing her, all while I sat on my duff doing nothing!

  I jumped up, but then bounced on the balls of my feet, rooted to my spot.

  What do I do? Vic had Hulk Hogan muscles. If I went into the bathroom to save Zoey, he’d swat me off like a fly. He’d finish killing her, then he’d turn around and do the same to me.

  I strained my ears to hear something, anything, but heard nothing. No fighting. No struggle. Maybe Zoey was already dead.

  I had to get a message out to Brad, and I had to find a weapon. If Zoey was anything, she was a survivor. She couldn’t be dead, and that meant I had time to come up with a way she and I could both walk out of this place alive.

  I practically tiptoed my way through the dining room into the kitchen. I moved swiftly to the window at the kitchen sink and held my phone up. My one bar stabilized. I hit resend on my text message to Brad, then added: “Hurry!”

  I didn’t have time to add an address. Brad would have to figure it out for himself. What I needed now was a weapon.

  I looked around. A couple of cast iron skillets hung from the wall. There wouldn’t be a lot of muscle protecting Vic’s head. I could bash in his skull.

  There was the magnet strip full of knives, too. But if I wasn’t good with a knife when cooking, then I certainly wouldn’t be any good with a knife during a fight. He’d have it out of my hand in two seconds, and he’d use it to slit my throat.

  But there were the glass jars set out on the counter. They looked half-full of a homemade brownie mix, but they could still be broken over Vic’s head. Laid out next to the jars were the lids. They were each labeled with a strip of tape with a person’s name handwritten on it: “Michael. Chet. Lisa. Vivian. Frank. Angela.”

  I took a closer look. A brownie recipe was printed out and all of the dry ingredients in the recipe were laid out on the counter. There was flour, brown sugar, chocolate chips, salt, cocoa, rat poison, baking powder…

  My brain halted and refused to move forward. I let it back up a step. Chocolate chips, salt, cocoa… rat poison. The canister was open, and a dusty measuring spoon lay next to it.

  Vic was making brownie mix to give to people with the added bonus of poison. He was poisoning people. Not Ellen. It was Vic!

  “You shouldn’t have come in here.” Vic’s voice was a low rumble behind me. I turned to face him, and he put his beer can down on the counter next to him. He was between me and the way out of the kitchen. My only hope was if I could bust through the window in a desperate leap like R
in Tin Tin. Except Rin Tin Tin always did heroic feats to save others. I’d only be trying to save myself.

  “Where’s Zoey? What did you do to her?”

  “This is your fault. Not mine.”

  “If you’ve hurt her—”

  “You’ll what? You’ll hit me?” He took a step closer. It was like watching a brick wall move. “Go ahead. Hit me. I’ll give you the first shot for free. Won’t even try to stop you, but after that…”

  I was going to pee myself. Why hadn’t I grabbed one of those cast iron skillets?

  “Why’d you kill Hank?”

  “He was a distraction that Ellen didn’t need. Her focus should be on me, not some pretty boy too self-absorbed to see past the end of his nose. She needs a better man than that. A stronger man than that.”

  “You…”

  “That’s right.”

  Moving slowly so as not to trigger Vic into moving fast, I inched my way over to where the cast iron skillets hung. Without taking my eyes off of him, I lifted the larger skillet down from the nail it hung from. I instantly realized that I should have gotten the smaller one instead. I wouldn’t be able to wield it with one hand. It was too heavy. That meant if I didn’t have both hands free, the skillet would be useless to me.

  Swallowing down the frog that was doing its best to crawl its way up my throat, I used both hands to heft the enormous skillet by its handle. I held it up next to my shoulder like a baseball bat. Touching its cold surface made my flesh want to retract from it because I was absolutely positive that Vic would be beating me to death with the thing in less than sixty seconds.

  I widened my stance, Babe Ruth-style. “You said I could get in the first hit and that you wouldn’t try to stop me…”

  Vic grinned. “I like you.” But then his smile slipped into a disdainful sneer. He picked up his beer, took another swig, and then like a pitcher from the mound, he hurled it at my head.

  I screamed like a girl. That’s right, like a big ol’ girl, ‘cause that’s what I was.

  I’d like to say that I went into Zoey-esque badass mode and used the frying pan to slam a beer can home run right into Vic’s head, but that’s not what happened. What did happen was that the beer can slammed into my forehead. My head snapped back, my grip on the frying pan slipped, and the mammoth-sized thing fell on my foot.

  My eyes nearly popped out of my head, and I screamed all the way up from my belly button.

  Vic lunged at me with a hand poised to slap over my mouth. I guess he didn’t need his neighbors telling the cops later that they’d heard a ruckus. But I didn’t care about his neighbors. I cared about the pulverized bones in my foot and the fact that Vic would probably bury me and Zoey under a rosebush in his backyard. At least I’d be in good company. If I had to be left in an unmarked grave, Zoey was the girl I’d like to be left there with.

  Okay, I hadn’t meant to just wish Zoey dead…

  I tried to dodge Vic’s hand by twisting my face out of reach, but he fish-hooked my mouth with his finger. That’s when I bit, and I bit hard.

  Vic screamed. My teeth ground down on his finger’s middle knuckle. It didn’t feel like flesh and bone. It felt like more. It felt like flesh and bone and cartilage… and something was giving way. My teeth were getting closer together.

  Vic’s free fist punched me in the temple, but then it was his turn to scream like a girl, a big ol’ girl. The pitch of his voice went up two octaves, because I didn’t pass out when he punched me. My head jerked, my jaw tightened, and I didn’t let go of his finger. Instead I was pretty sure I felt tendons tear.

  His efforts to break loose from me went into overdrive. He grabbed my throat and squeezed with his thumb digging against my windpipe. I couldn’t help it. I gagged, and when I did I let go of the one piece of leverage I had over him—his finger.

  Another shot to my temple with his damaged hand had me going to the floor. He tried to maintain his hold on my neck, but thankfully I slipped free. I landed on my side, pulled my knee up and rammed the heel of my foot at the side of his knee.

  My foot slipped past him without doing any damage, and I felt my last hope of surviving slip out of my reach.

  “I’m going to enjoy this,” he growled.

  I did my best to shrink away into the floor, and I pulled the huge cast iron skillet over my chest for protection. My rational brain told me that I was handing the thing over for him to use against me, but that didn’t stop my body from putting anything it could between him and me.

  He bent and reached with his mangled finger in the lead.

  I punted at his hand with a quick jab from the back of the skillet. It connected, and his poor finger bent in a direction that had my eyes bugging out and me screaming for him.

  Vic stared in shocked disbelief at his hand. He didn’t scream. In fact, he didn’t breathe. His face turned purple, and his veins bulged from his neck. Then his eyes locked on mine and he lunged, but he missed. He missed bad. His forehead slammed into the counter. His hand flew up, his mangled finger hit the underside, and then he fell over backward on the floor. Passed out cold, which was good because his damaged finger was sticking up at a ninety-degree angle to the rest of his hand. I was pretty sure he didn’t want to be awake for that.

  I sat hyperventilating, working up the courage to go check on Zoey. If she wasn’t okay, I was going to come back and give Vic a full set of backward-saluting fingers.

  “Vic,” Zoey called from the other room. “Sorry. Couldn’t get your toilet to flush.”

  I was on my feet and throwing myself into Zoey’s arms the second she came around the corner of the kitchen. “You’re alive!”

  She hugged me, then got me to let her go. She pointed at the floor. “Did you do that?”

  “Uh… Not all of it.” It would have been nice to take credit, but it was more like Vic had done it to himself while I had tried desperately not to die.

  Police sirens echoed from outside.

  “Brad is going to be so mad at you.” Zoey grinned, her eyes twinkling.

  That he was… Oh, well.

  28

  “Kylie Berry of The Berry Home has done it again. When faced with the unthinkable, she’s uncovered the truth that others prefer to keep hidden.” Sitting at the grill’s bar, Brad continued to read Sunday’s edition of The Camden Falls Herald article written by Joel. It was one of the rare days that I got the chance to see Brad in plainclothes instead of his police uniform. He looked good in a gray cotton T and faded jeans. His shirtsleeves pulled snug on his biceps and his jeans looked as though they had been crafted just for him.

  I didn’t know whether or not to be happy or upset about the article. Joel had written it without asking my consent, but it publicly cleared both me and my café of any responsibility in Hank’s death. On one hand, it broadcast to the whole town that yet another person had died here, but on the other hand that wasn’t exactly new information for most. So overall, I guessed that an article absolving me and the café of any wrongdoing was better than the rumor mill filling in the blanks with speculation and gossip.

  “I can’t believe he was planning on poisoning his coworkers who hadn’t gotten laid off from work,” I said. That was why Vic had set jars out with people’s names written on labels. He’d planned to give the poisoned homemade brownie mix as gifts. “There was no way he wouldn’t have gotten caught after that. Everything would have been traced back to him.”

  “But if it hadn’t been for you figuring things out before then, a lot more people would have gotten hurt. Maybe even killed.” Brad folded his newspaper and shifted his attention to me. His gaze focused off center from my eyes, and I knew that he was looking at the bruise that lingered from where Vic had slugged me. He reached across the counter and brush my hair behind my ear.

  Brad’s smile was gentle and his eyes kind. He was cool about it now, but he’d been ready to rip Vic’s head off when he’d burst through the door of Vic’s house. “He never stood a chance against you, did he?”r />
  He was giving me all the credit, but it was the police who would be sending Vic away to prison for a very long time. They did a thorough search of Vic’s place and found everything. Poison. Notes about Hank’s gym schedule. Even the pickup he’d used to try to run Zoey and me off the road.

  Brad’s touch and the way he looked at me was so tender that I didn’t know what to say. Needing to fill the silence, I blurted out, “How’s Sam?”

  Brad’s hand fell away from my face, and his expression saddened. “She’s struggling. Survivor’s guilt. She’s considering giving the money Hank left her away to charity, but I’m trying to talk her into keeping it. He wanted her to have it, to go live her life. I think that’s what she should do.”

  “She have plans?”

  He nodded. “She’s going to take Hank’s ashes on a sailboat trip. They’d talked about taking a long vacation at sea. She’s considering doing it for them both.”

  Brad’s sister sounded like a woman I wanted to know better someday. I hoped I’d get the chance.

  “How about you? Anything new or different in your life?” His eyes had a knowing look and his lips were pulled in a lopsided grin. “One less complication maybe?”

  “Maybe…” I was pretty sure I knew where this was going. “Dan went back to Chicago.”

  Brad’s smile was big and toothy. He looked more than a little pleased with himself. “All in a day’s work.”

  I had to laugh at his cheeky, over-the-top reaction to the news.

  Tricking Dan into getting a DUI hadn’t been the most ethical maneuver by Brad and Joel, but it sure was appreciated by me. He’d left town without so much as bugging me for more help with his failing company.

  A part of me felt bad about not helping Dan out more than I had, but I was finally willing to accept and embrace that Dan was a big boy. He didn’t need me solving his problems, even if I was pretty sure he’d flop on his face when trying to solve them himself. No matter how foreign the idea felt, Dan’s drama was no longer a burden I had to carry.

  The café’s front doorbell chimed as Zoey came in. She was wearing huge sunglasses, a white spaghetti strap sundress with black polka dots, and combat boots. She sat on the stool next to Brad and grunted. I’d gotten good at early morning Zoey speak, though.