Spooky Pizza Murder

by Patti Benning

  Russell picked her up at the pizzeria just a few minutes after Pete left. She locked the doors behind her and got into the car next to him. He greeted her with a kiss, then pulled out of the parking lot and started toward the White Pine Kitchen.

  “So, what’s the occasion?” she asked, wondering if James had maybe landed a big project.

  “No occasion, it just seemed like a good idea when James mentioned that he and Shannon had a sitter for Andrew, but their other plans fell through. They didn’t want their date night to go to waste.”

  “I can imagine,” she said with a grin. She loved her nephew dearly, but she couldn’t even imagine the amount of work that went in to caring for him full-time. She could easily guess just how much James and Shannon valued their rare nights off.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, but it’s got to wait until we get to the restaurant.”

  “Come on, that’s not fair,” she said. “What is it?”

  He just grinned and mimed zipping his lips shut. Ellie tried to figure out what it might be during the drive. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the case — she was sure of that. Russell would never make her wait for something like that, not with knowing how much the public accusation of murder was affecting her. Still, she couldn’t think of anything else it could be. And why would she have to wait until they got to the restaurant?

  The parking lot was half full when Russell pulled in. It was chilly out, and Ellie zipped her coat as she got out of the vehicle. It was well into October — almost Halloween — and winter wasn’t far off.

  “They should already be here,” Russell murmured as they walked into the warm building. “Ah, there they are.” He waved, and Ellie’s attention was drawn to James, who waved back. He was seated at a table toward the back, not just with Shannon, but also with Joanna and her husband, Steve.

  “Wow,” Ellie said, looking at her husband in admiration. “How on earth did you arrange this? Steve is never available. You must have been planning it for weeks.”

  “Nope,” Russell said with a grin. “It really was just pure luck. It was Shannon’s idea to see if Joanna was free, and it turned out she and Steve both were. I thought this might be just the thing you needed. I know how hard these last two days have been for you.”

  Ellie reached over and grabbed her husband’s hand, giving it a squeeze. No, you really don’t, she thought. She still hadn’t told him about the rotten tomato that had been thrown at the pizzeria, and had left out the worst of the nasty things passersby had said to her. Thankfully, most people didn’t want to risk annoying the person who was in charge of preparing their food, so none of her customers at the pizzeria had been overtly nasty to her. It was a small blessing, though when the rest of the town seemed to hate her.

  This really might be just the thing she needed. The thought of spending the evening with her closest friends, surrounded by people who trusted her and knew she had nothing to do with the murder, almost brought tears to her eyes.

  “Thank you, Russell,” she murmured as they approached the table. “This really is perfect.”

  Chapter Eight

  The White Pine Kitchen was easily the most upscale restaurant in Kittiport. It was probably the nicest restaurant anywhere in easy driving distance along their little stretch of Maine coast. She and Russell made a point to dine there at least once a month; just because they were married didn’t mean they had to give up their date nights. They were both well-known figures in town, and had been regulars at the restaurant for years, which was why at first Ellie worried that she might be a target for some nasty comments from the waitstaff, but thankfully their server didn’t treat her any differently than was usual for the place. Either the restaurant held its employees to a high enough standard that professionalism beat out any desire to be rude to her, or they knew Ellie well enough by now that they didn’t believe the rumors. She hoped it was the second one. Either way, it was a relief for her to be able to just have a normal dining experience.

  She and Russell knew most of the menu by heart, but the Kitchen changed up their seasonal specials regularly, so it was always worth it to take another look.

  When she saw the freshly caught Maine lobster, served with sirloin steak, garlic mashed redskins, and a side of steamed or sautéed fall vegetables, she knew the deal was sealed. It was hard to beat fresh lobster in Maine, and it had been a while since she’d had a good steak.

  The six of them ordered a bottle of wine to start themselves off with, then settled into conversation.

  “I can’t believe everyone could make it out here tonight,” Ellie said. “And on such short notice, too.”

  Shannon nodded. “We’ve only been together like this a handful of times, haven’t we? Who would’ve thought that it would be so difficult for six people to actually find a time when they’re all free? This was a great idea, Russell.”

  “It was all your idea, really, Shannon,” Ellie’s husband pointed out. He closed his menu, having found what he wanted.

  “This is pretty nice,” Joanna agreed. “It’s definitely better than spending my evening at home watching television, which is what Steve and I were going to do.”

  “Hey, I still haven’t caught the rest of the game,” Steve said. It was a good-natured grumble, though, and Ellie thought he looked happy to be there.

  Steve was the one in their little group that she knew the least well. He was Joanna’s husband, and he was often extremely busy with work, even more so than James, and rarely seemed to have time for social events. From what she knew, he was a good man, if a bit distant and maybe prone to just a little bit of arrogance. Still, he got along with the rest of them well enough, and she was happy he was there. She didn’t think the six of them had ever actually gotten dinner at the White Pine Kitchen together before. The last time that all six of them were together had probably been a dinner party at Nonna’s house.

  As if following her train of thoughts, Shannon looked over at Ellie. “How is your grandmother doing? It’s been a while since we’ve seen her. I know she was asking James about Andrew a couple days ago, so we’ll probably go visit her soon.”

  “She’s doing well,” Ellie said. “Really well, honestly. She had a bit of a cold last week, but it cleared up quickly. For someone her age, she is very healthy. I can only hope that I’ll be as lucky when I’m her age.”

  “Well, at least you know you’ve got the genetics for it,” Russell said. “She really is doing quite well.”

  Ellie smiled, then fell silent, feeling a flutter of worry. It was true that Nonna was unusually healthy for her age, but Ellie knew well enough that wouldn’t last forever. There would come a point in time when Nonna would no longer be able to live on her own – even with the added measure of the intercom system and her and Russell living right next door. When that happened, she and Russell would, of course, be more than happy to have Nonna live with them, but with both of them gone most of the day, even that might not be ideal. She didn’t know if she wanted to see her grandmother in a nursing home. She knew that there were a few very nice ones in the state, but even so, she didn’t think her grandmother would enjoy having that much of her freedom taken away. With a sigh, she pushed the thoughts out of her head. She would think about it, yes, but later. Right now, she wanted to focus on the dinner.

  They all gave their orders to the waitress and chatted a bit more while they waited for their food. Once it came, they fell silent again as they started eating. Ellie was glad that she had ordered what she had. The steak was cooked perfectly, the lobster was delicious, and it was a good change of pace from the pizza and Chinese take-out that she and Russell lived off during their busiest weeks.

  “Hey, Ellie?” Joanna said. When Ellie looked up at her, her friend jerked her head to the side and lowered her voice. “Isn’t that the woman from the taco cart? The wife of the guy who died?”

  Ellie turned, and so did Russell. She saw a beautiful woman about her own age sitting at a table for two a little way away from t
hem. She was seated with a man and was laughing, her hand on top of his.

  “It is her. Rosa… Nelson.” It took her a moment to remember the woman’s last name. “She’s on a date?”

  “It sure looks like that,” Joanna said. Russell nodded his agreement, watching them with interest.

  “Now, this is an interesting turn of events,” he said softly. “It looks like I’ve got a call to make to Liam later. I knew that Rosa was looked at as a potential suspect – in these sorts of cases, the wife almost always is – but he seemed convinced that she didn’t have anything to do with it. However, if she has been having an affair…”

  Ellie nodded, clutching her hand more tightly around her fork. “That might give her motive for murder. And, seeing the way that Tim treated everyone else, I cannot imagine that their marriage was great.”

  “Good eye, Joanna,” Russell said. He turned his attention back to his meal, probably not wanting to stare at the couple blatantly for too long. Ellie kept casting glances their way. The more she watched, the more certain she was that Rosa was on a date. The other woman was obviously flirting, and she and the man were very touchy with each other. She didn’t recognize man in the slightest. He looked like he was younger than Rosa, maybe by as much as a decade. He was good looking, but not quite what she would call handsome, and seemed to be in a good mood.

  He seemed just as interested in Rosa as she was in him, and something about the way they interacted made Ellie think that they had known each other for a while.

  “Oh!” Joanna said suddenly, sitting up straighter and dropping her fork on her plate. “I almost forgot. Ethan, the guy who was working for Tim Nelson? He dropped off an application at Hot Diggity Dawg the day before Tim was killed.”

  Everyone at the table stared at her. “You should’ve brought this up sooner,” Russell said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Joanna shot him a look that was almost a glare. “Well, considering that he handed the application in to Clara and I was busy the entire next day at the festival, and I wasn’t exactly going through the applications yesterday, you know, the day after the murder, I didn’t see it until this afternoon. I was going to call the sheriff’s department tomorrow morning, but I thought I might as well mention it here, too.”

  Russell nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like I was attacking you. It’s just, that’s huge. If he was planning on leaving his place of employment, it might show that he had prior knowledge of what was going to happen to Tim.”

  “Or just that he hated his job,” Ellie pointed out. “Though, yeah, I do agree that it’s suspicious.”

  She took another bite of her food, chewing slowly as she considered. Tim had treated Ethan horribly. She’d seen it herself, and she didn’t doubt that his treatment had been a regular occurrence. Ethan had taken a break from the taco stand shortly before Tim had turned up dead. It all seemed to fit together. She bit her lip. Could it really be as simple as that? She didn’t want to get her hopes up too high, but for the first time in the past couple of days, she started to think that maybe all of this would be over soon.

  Chapter Nine

  The dinner gave Ellie and Russell a lot to talk about on their way home. Russell wasn’t working on the case directly, but there was nothing stopping him from calling Liam and telling him what they had heard from Joanna and what they had seen at the White Pine Kitchen. Liam promised to look into it, but didn’t tell Russell anything more than that.

  “This is frustrating,” Russell said as he ended the call and put his phone down on the car’s dashboard. “I hate not being able to work on this myself. We are going to prove that you’re innocent, Ellie, I promise.”

  “I know,” Ellie said. She was telling the truth. She really did believe Russell and Liam would be able to prove her innocence. She had a feeling that the only thing keeping her from being charged with something right now was simply the fact that the two of them were standing up for her. She didn’t know exactly what Mrs. Garcia had told Liam when he took her aside to question her on her accusation, but with her fingerprints on the knife, she was surprised she hadn’t been arrested yet.

  “Which one of them do you think did it?” she asked. “The wife or the employee?”

  Russell shrugged. “Well, we don’t really know for a fact that either of them did. I would put my money on the employee, though. The way that you described the interaction between him and his boss, followed by the fact that he left his post shortly before Tim was killed, and the fact that he had already turned in an application at the hotdog shop, it all just lines up a bit too perfectly. I believe in coincidences, of course, but three coincidences lined up like that? All of them pointing toward him having motive to kill Tim and being prepared to move directly to a new job once he had done it? Well, it just seems like it would be a stretch to ignore all of that evidence, even if it is circumstantial.”

  “Yeah.” Ellie fell silent for a moment. Logically, she knew that all the evidence pointed toward Ethan. She wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he had done it. Still, something about Rosa rubbed her the wrong way. Not that the woman had ever been anything but nice to her, but just the way that she had been flirting with that man.

  “I still think it could’ve been the wife,” she said at last. “I can’t imagine that Tim treated her any better than he treated Ethan. And the way she was with that guy tonight… Well, her husband died just a few days ago. If she loved him at all, if they had any sort of friendly relationship with each other at all, I don’t think she would’ve been going out on a date with another man, and giggling and flirting like she was, just a few days after his death. It’s one thing to want out of a bad marriage. It’s another to be laughing with another man two days after your husband died.”

  “Would she have had the time to do it, though? I know she was running the taco cart when his body was found.”

  Ellie nodded. “Tim left Ethan on his own to set up the taco cart. I don’t know exactly where he went, but he was probably walking around the festival. He didn’t come back to the cart at all that morning. I know that Rosa and her mother were there for a while before Rosa took over at the taco cart. Rosa could’ve easily slipped away and killed him before taking over from Ethan. It would have been easy for her to go into the haunted house with him.”

  Russell shook his head. “I don’t know everything about this case, but I do know that

  Tim went into the haunted house alone. The man who was manning the doorway remembers that much, even though he wasn’t paying the best of attention to who else went in.”

  Ellie sighed. “Well, she still could have known he was going to go in there and gone in first or followed him in. Does the haunted house employee remember letting her in at all?”

  Russell shook his head. “I don’t know, Ellie. Liam finished questioning him after I was already off the case. It’s also possible that whoever killed him just went in one of the emergency exits. They weren’t locked or alarmed.”

  Ellie sighed. “I guess you’re right. I really hope Liam starts making some more progress on this case, though, especially with what we learned tonight. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”

  Russell shot her a look. “Has something more been happening than you’ve been letting on, Ellie?” he asked.

  She looked away, biting her lip. Not telling him about the rotten fruit and the jeers and threats from the townsfolk was one thing, but lying to him? She couldn’t do that.

  “Someone threw a tomato at the pizzeria yesterday,” she said. “It splattered all over the window. When I went out to see what it was, someone in a car told me to get out of this town and accused me of being a murderer, then drove away too quickly for me to catch their license plate. Nothing else like that has happened, but business at the pizzeria has been slow. Slower than I’ve ever seen it before. Most of the people who do come in won’t even look me in the eye. I went to the grocery store, and it was pretty much even between the people who woul
dn’t look me in the eye and the ones who said something nasty. It’s just been tough. Rose’s parents don’t even want her to come into work. Her next shift is scheduled for Thursday and she said she would be able to come in for that, but I’m not so sure. If this doesn’t blow over… I don’t know, I just feel like I’m losing everything, Russell.”

  “You’re not losing me, Ellie,” her husband said. “Or Shannon or James, or Joanna or Steve, or your grandmother. We believe you, and I’m sure more people do too.”

  She took a deep breath. “I know. You’re right about that.”

  “Tell me next time something happens, all right?” he asked. “Someone defacing your restaurant and shouting at you from a car… that’s the sort of thing I want to know about, Ellie.”