A Berry Deadly Welcome: A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 1)

by A. R. Winters

  Wearing a big, overly eager smile, I rushed the food out to where the customer was sitting at the grill bar. Wiping my hands on my food-stained apron, I waited with high anticipation for him to take a bite.

  Eyeing me with what looked like a mixture of annoyance and uncertainty, he picked up the hoagie and took a big bite. All of the egg salad poured out the bun's butt end and sloshed all over the potato chips. With his mouth still stuffed with egg-less bread, the customer picked up a potato chip, and I watch in mortification as the chip slowly drooped, completely soggy.

  Without saying a word, he slid off the bar stool, threw down a single dollar bill, and walked out.

  I watched him go, then I said a bad word. I won't say which one, but Jack heard it and he chuckled. He was wearing another expensive-looking suit. His mocha-colored skin was stubble-free and his dark eyes laughed with amusement.

  "You've been shoved right into the deep end of the pool," he said. He shook his head. "If only you could swim." A bowl of vegetable soup was sitting in front of him. It had been for fifteen minutes, but it didn't look as though it was any more empty than the moment I'd put it in front of him.

  I darted forward. "I need a life preserver. I need a new chef. Roberto quit."

  With his chin down, he looked at me from under his brows. "Your ex in-laws live around these parts, don't they." It came out as a statement instead of a question.

  I nodded. Small as it is, it was a big enough town. There were other places for them to eat. I figured we'd be civil about it and simply avoid each other like every other well-adjusted adult.

  "Last night was Wednesday." He didn't say any more, yet he looked at me as if he'd said a lot.

  I was lost. "Um, and today's Thursday..." I really wasn't trying to be cheeky or anything. I simply wasn't connecting the dots he was seeing in his own head.

  "Is your aunt-in-law Dorothy Hibbert?"

  "My ex-aunt-in-law," I said, filled with trepidation as to where this was going.

  "My cousin told me she was at church service last night, and she had a whooole lot to say about you."

  Oh no.

  "But the biggest thing she stressed was that you were bad—a bad wife, a bad influence, and a bad person. The way I heard it she all but claimed you were a witch and that no food you made should be trusted."

  "I didn't make the soup," I blurted. I wasn't sure why I said it, but I knew I didn't want Jack to leave. I needed a friend, and seemed to me that he was trying to be a friend.

  He smiled but was polite enough not to say anything about it, but he did continue on with his story. "She told everybody that they shouldn't eat here, they shouldn't work here, and that if they knew somebody that did work here that they would be doing God's work to make them quit.

  My mouth fell open. "That b—" I stopped myself at b.

  "Mmhmm," Jack agreed with me. "I think you're going to have trouble finding another chef. Roberto used to date Dorothy and I heard he's still carrying a torch for her. Between the two of them..."

  I filled in the rest. I was up a creek without a paddle in sight. My eyes tracked Sam jogging past on his way to get someone a refill on their drink. My only wait staff here today. I was starting to understand. Not only had my ex tried to destroy me, but now his family was going to take their turn.

  Chapter 7

  I had survived another day of ownership of Sarah's Eatery, and with the chime of the kitchen stove's timer to wake me up, I was staring down the barrel of my third day. My body ached and my feet throbbed. I wanted to cry. As the day had moved into evening and I'd been the only person there to cook and serve people, customer after customer had gotten up and walked out. I'd lost count after number twenty-two. Finally, a group of high school-aged kids had come in laughing and looking at me as if I was some walking joke. It didn't take me long to figure out that they'd heard from someone how bad things had gotten at the café and had come down for the show. I think that one of the snot-nosed jerks had even recorded me on his smartphone.

  Groaning, I rolled myself off of my sheetless mattress and onto the floor before pushing up to a standing position. I showered slower. I dressed slower. And when I went downstairs, I trudged into the kitchen with as much energy as a toddler six hours past nap time.

  "Good morning!" It was Brenda's blessed voice. I stifled a sob, so happy that she hadn't abandoned me too.

  "Brenda, how late can you work today?"

  She sucked in a breath about the same as someone might if you asked them if they could jump the distance between two sides of a volcano.

  "Mmmm, I think I could stay as late as 10:15 this morning."

  "Is there anything you could make that I could... uh, heat up in the microwave when it was time to serve it?"

  Her eyes studied her eyebrows from one side to the other while she contemplated my question. "Spaghetti," she finally said with a curt nod.

  "Could you make—" I didn't know how much to ask for. "Could you make enough to feed people for the rest of the day?"

  "Oh! Hmmm, enough for three-hundred and fifty to five-hundred servings..."

  I almost choked at her estimate. I was lucky if I'd had fifty paying customers yesterday, but I guess that spread over fifteen hours of service, that many meals wasn't that much. "You think you could make enough for, uh... a hundred?" I'd err on the side of optimism. People would eat Brenda's spaghetti, the day would go a lot smoother, and I'd have twice as many paying customers!

  "Sure! I can do that." Brenda beamed.

  This morning it was me throwing my arms around Brenda to give her a huge hug. She took it in stride, giving me a warm hug right back.

  But luck was not with me, at least not that morning. From the time that we opened to the time that Brenda left at 10:15, the only customer who came in was Zoey. I tried to make her coffee—twice—but on the third attempt she came around to my side of the grill bar's counter and brewed it herself.

  On the counter, she had a couple of books. One was How to Know if He's a Jerk, and the other was How to Move on After Being Ghosted.

  Just like on the day Sarah left, Zoey looked as though she were on the verge of tears, and I realized that maybe it wasn't Sarah leaving that had made her so sad after all. For some odd, perverse reason, that made me happy. Somewhere inside my twisted brain, her not being so completely torn up by Sarah leaving meant that maybe she had room within her to like me.

  We sat together in silence as she read her books and I studied Sarah’s Eatery’s menu. This was the first time I’d really sat down and looked at it. If I were going into a restaurant to order food, I would have felt completely comfortable and confident about what each dish was, but at being faced with having to make each dish, I was completely lost.

  At 11 AM, Sam showed up, and as he'd promised me before taking off from work yesterday, he brought in his laptop so that I could use it to post an online ad for a new chef. Seven or eight people trickled in and out over the lunch rush, and Sam heated up the spaghetti in the microwave himself, his tall, lanky form moving from place to place silently and efficiently. I was thrilled when someone asked for a piece of cake until I realized we didn't have any to serve them.

  In between serving the customers, Sam helped me set up an ad on Craigslist and on some local online classifieds. The allowed word count on some of the sites was limited, so we kept it short on all of them.

  Wanted: Chef

  Experience and passion required.

  Attention to detail.

  Attention to excellence.

  Available for long shifts.

  Start Date: Immediate.

  We listed the café's phone number.

  Again, as soon as possible, Sam was getting a raise.

  When the lunch "rush" had ended and the afternoon slump had become a thing of the past, I drifted into an evening of absolutely no customers.

  I checked how much spaghetti was left, and it was enough to drown myself in if I chose to. Instead, though, I filled up a huge bowl, locked the caf�
�'s front door three hours early, turned off the café lights to show that we were closed, and I headed upstairs to my apartment.

  Tonight I was a different kind of tired. My feet didn't ache, but fatigue had settled into my bones. I felt soul tired. I felt like maybe life had finally won, and I should just give up.

  I searched the pantry until I found a bottle of wine. One way or another, I was going to sleep well tonight.

  I woke up with a headache.

  Okay, so maybe I woke up with a hangover, but I marched my way into the same routine. Shower. Dress. Head downstairs to meet Brenda.

  No Brenda.

  "No!" I stamped my foot, then I took a deep breath. "Okay, don't freak out. Maybe she takes weekends off."

  I got to work. There was still plenty of pasta and spaghetti sauce that I could throw on a plate and heat up in a microwave. In fact, I fixed myself a plate and had it for breakfast before throwing myself into making a cake from scratch. I don't know why, but it had been downright embarrassing when the lunch customer yesterday had asked for cake and I hadn't had any to give him. So, I'd make a cake. I knew it couldn't be that hard. Some flour. Some eggs. Milk. Maybe even some chocolate chips. Who didn't like chocolate chips?

  I fantasized about the customers giving me a standing ovation, whistling and hollering in celebration of my cake.

  I just hadn't found the thing I was good at yet. That was all. And for all I knew, this cake could become my masterpiece...

  It turned out hard enough and flat enough that it could have been used in a discus throw.

  So, maybe cakes weren't my thing. That was okay. I'd keep looking.

  "I'm here!" I heard someone call out and rushed out of the kitchen just in time to see Melanie rushing to put on her apron. Her reddish-brown hair fell in large curls around her heart-shaped face. “I’m sorry I'm late."

  It was 11 AM. I hadn't had a customer all day, but Melanie showing up made me happier than a party of ten walking in through the door.

  "You didn't quit!"

  Melanie's face registered shock. "No, ma'am. I'm sorry I'm late. Please don't fire me."

  A nervous giggled snuck its way out of me at the absurdity of me firing one of my last two wait staff. "I hadn't seen you in a couple of days. I thought maybe you'd quit."

  "But I wasn't scheduled until today." She sounded scared, as though still worried that I would fire her.

  "How late are you scheduled to work to today?"

  "Five."

  "Want to work 'til closing?"

  Her face lit up. "Sure! I could use the extra hours."

  "You scheduled for tomorrow?"

  "No, ma'am."

  "Want to work it too? You can work as many hours as you want."

  She sucked in a happy breath and grinned from ear to ear. "Thank you, ma'am!"

  "Call me Kylie."

  "Yes, ma'am... Kylie."

  "Go ahead and get to work." Given that she knew what her job was immeasurably better than I did, I wasn't about to tell her what to do. I smiled as I watched her disappear into the stock room.

  The door's chime pulled my attention back toward the front door.

  "Dorothy!" I hissed. If I could have grown venomous fangs, I would have.

  "Well!" Dorothy's voice boomed, filling up the very empty café. "Isn't this a sight?" Her smile was mean and her eyes were evil. "I told everybody to stay away from you," she said, sauntering in with an exaggerated hip wag. "Your cooking kills. I told them that. Let them know that you put Dan in the hospital three times."

  Dan... Dorothy worshipped the ground he walked on. If she hadn't been his aunt, I was pretty sure that she would have tried to date him.

  "Two of those times had been from take-out food," I countered. "And the third time, the doctor said that Dan had an ulcer. It wasn't food poisoning!"

  "That's not how I heard it, and that's not how I'm tellin' it."

  I wanted to rip her smug smile off her face.

  Dorothy crossed her arms over her chest, and her smile fell away to an ugly scowl that creased both sides of her mouth down to her chin. "You had no business coming here, and it's time for you to go. You're going to ruin this place just like you almost drove Dan's business into the ground."

  I gaped at her, not believing what I was hearing.

  She tsked and shook her head. "If it hadn't been for that saint of a man always fixing your mistakes behind your back."

  Nausea rolled in my stomach and threatened to crawl its way up my neck. "Get out." I pointed at the door behind her. If she didn't leave, I was going to throw her out with my own two hands.

  "You never made Dan a decent meal in the eleven years you were married to him. You can't cook, and your food is a danger to the public. I've already told the police. I've warned everyone. Take your failure of a life somewhere else, Kylie. Get out of Camden Falls before you kill someone."

  I was so mad I couldn't see straight, let alone think of a comeback. By the time I remembered to breathe, she was already out the door and walking down the sidewalk with a big cheery smile on her face.

  I've prided myself in not hating people, but I hated her. I wished I could make her a seven-course meal and make her eat every bit of it just to watch her rush to the hospital afterward to get her stomach pumped.

  "I can cook," I seethed. But I couldn't cook. I was terrible at it. Awful. "I will learn how to cook!" My pride surged at the honesty in that declaration.

  The café phone rang, and I answered. "Sarah's Eatery."

  "You lookin' for a cook?"

  Yes! I was still going to learn how to cook, but that didn't mean I knew how to cook today, and it didn't mean I could do everything on my own.

  "How soon can you be here for an interview?"

  Chapter 8

  The next week and a half went by in a blur. The first of the month came and went, and my tenants—let me say that again, my tenants—lined up to pay me in cash or by check. I wrote them receipts on napkins.

  Then it was off to the bank. I opened an account, deposited all of the checks and pocketed the cash. After that, I grabbed an Uber to Walmart and bought a laptop for under $250. I'd seen a few customers using Wi-Fi in the café, so I knew I was good there.

  I had yet to pay any of my staff, but that was happening as soon as I saw each and every one of them. That is to say, all three of them.

  I closed the café every night, completely ignoring the times that were listed on the door, and went upstairs, put on my pajamas and then practiced making dinner for myself. I'd set off the fire alarm eight times, made myself sick enough to vomit three times, and had made a not-terrible grilled cheese once.

  During the day, Brenda had been cooking enough food to feed any customers who might show up. She'd made spaghetti and meatballs. Spaghetti and meat sauce. Baked spaghetti. And then, finally, breaded and deep fried spaghetti squares. I will never admit to how many times the spaghetti was re-purposed and reused between the various meals, but when Brad, the police officer, came in for a meal for the fifth day in a row, he very politely asked for a to-go cup of soda instead of ordering a meal when he saw the fried spaghetti squares written in my messy scrawl on a menu chalk board.

  As for finding a chef, I'd interviewed every single person who had called to ask for an interview. I even let an entitled, unexperienced seventeen-year-old high schooler reschedule his interview three times and still listened to what he had to say with an open mind. Yet, somehow, I still thought that he was a better pick than the ego-maniac Italian who told me in no uncertain terms that if he were to accept the job as chef that I would not be allowed inside the kitchen while he was working. Neither would any female wait staff. I took a hard pass on him. It didn't even matter that he could cook. This was my place, my rules, and I was not going to let another man walk into my life and tell me what to do.

  After the Italian guy was a local lady who had worked as a cook at the high school for twenty-five years. She might have been a nice person once, but from the way she lo
oked me up and down with her pinched face, sat as far away from me as she could and kept her arms folded across her chest, I had a pretty good idea that we weren't going to work out.

  Now I sat in front of another candidate. The café was completely empty except for the two of us, and the bracing, aromatic scent of burnt brownies filled the air. My latest attempt at culinary greatness. I’d even made them from scratch (because I’d run out of brownie mix).

  Rachel Summers was about my age. She was slender with high cheekbones, had shoulder-length, light brown hair with strong blonde highlights, a deep, golden tan, and had the tiniest of gaps between her two front teeth. She spoke to me in a way that made me feel as though we'd been friends for the past fifteen years.

  She was eager. She was here. She wanted the job.

  She couldn't cook. Yet.

  I hired her.

  "Thank you so much for taking a chance on me," Rachel said as she stood.

  I stood as well and accepted her hand to shake. "We can give it a couple of weeks, take things slow, and give your skills a chance to grow." She had to be better than me. Had to be.

  "You won't regret this," she said as she followed me to the grill counter.

  "I have high hopes." I picked up the brownies intending to throw them in the trash. The smell of burnt chocolate was right up there with the smell of cigarettes.

  "Oh!" she said, darting out an arm to stop me. "If... if you don't want those, I'd love to take them."

  Brown noser. Check.

  I knew that it wasn't necessarily a good quality in a person, but I'd never been considered important enough to be brown nosed to before, and I decided in a flash to enjoy the idolatry while it lasted. Yet my conscience had my hands hanging onto those brownies instead of just handing them over.

  "Are you sure you want these? I'd be afraid you'd break a tooth on them." I said it with a laugh, but I really was worried that she could break a tooth. What if she fed them to some unsuspecting kids or someone super elderly? Could I be charged with child abuse or elder abuse just because she got the brownies from me?