I’d never met this Mr. Pratt, but I was hating him. He was sounding more and more like a great big bully.
“What will you do?” I asked. Susie was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“I could kill him,” she said. “That would get me out of the contract.”
I was too stunned for words, and I knew that I was wearing my aghast surprise on my face. It took Susie a moment to notice, but when she did, she laughed. “Oh, hun,” she said, reaching a hand across to squeeze mine. “It was a bad joke. I’m sorry.”
Zoey chose that moment to come out of the kitchen, mammoth-sized sandwich on a plate with chips, covered with plastic wrap. I knew she’d bring the plate back and I wasn’t going to charge her for a sandwich she made herself, but she put a twenty on the counter for her coffee and sandwich anyway. A hefty over-payment.
“What’s wrong?” Zoey asked, looking between the two of us.
“I’m plotting my landlord’s murder,” Susie said. “I figured I’d be in good company.” She winked at Zoey.
“But we didn’t do anything,” I said. “We were innocent.”
“And that’s just what I’ll say, too!”
Zoey dug out a chip from under the plastic wrap and crunched down on it. “You gonna disappear the body or leave it out for everyone to find?”
“Hey! Come on you two,” I complained. “I can’t go through this again. Did you know that some old lady let me cut in front of her at the grocery store? I thought she was just being nice, then she whispered to me that she’d like for me to kill her husband, said she could make it worth my while.”
That had Susie’s and Zoey’s attention.
“What did you say?” Susie asked, her expression rapt.
“I didn’t say anything! I just nervously giggled and then pretended she didn’t exist. She bumped me with her buggy three times trying to get me to turn back around, but I wouldn’t. I refused.”
Susie and Zoey broke out laughing, but I was failing to see the humor. I did not appreciate my growing reputation as the murder queen of Camden Falls.
“I don’t understand why people keep killing each other. I mean, can’t people just learn to get along?”
The front door of my café burst open and the Wicked Witch of the West flew in on her broom. Yes, she had an actual broom today. Her sudden appearance was the universe’s way of trying to make me take back my words—that I couldn’t understand why people kept killing each other—but I refused to do it. The universe could suck it. No backsies.
“Hey, Aunt—I mean, uh… Dorothy, where’d you get that?” She was my ex-aunt-in-law. Unlike my ex-husband, I hadn’t been able to shed her from my life after the divorce. In fact, her hatred of me had amplified to the gleeful hate of a zealot.
In her hand was a short decorative broom, the type you’d hang on a wall. It was made of twigs with a rich red-brown bark that had been tied together with twine, and it was heavily scented with cinnamon. It smelled really nice.
Ex-Aunt Dorothy waved the broom, sending perfumed air wafting over me, and barked her commandment of the day. “Stay away from him, you harlot!”
“Stay away from who?” How could she have known about my non-date with Brad? Or, was it my non-date with Joel that had her upset?
Bruce and Maryann Hibbert, my ex’s parents, burst through the door behind Dorothy and flanked her. “Isn’t it such good news?” Maryann asked as she did her best to wrangle the broom out of Dorothy’s hand. “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?” My heart was afraid to beat. Bruce and Maryann had quickly become the harbingers of doom since I’d moved to town, and they always delivered their terrible news with huge, toothy smiles on their faces. The worst was that they weren’t even malicious smiles. They were genuinely the happy, enthusiastic smiles of people who had never given me any reason to doubt that they cared about me.
“Dan’s going to be in town!” Bruce said.
“And he’d sure love to see his gal,” Maryann added with a conspiratorial grin.
Dan was my ex. I suddenly wondered if we could make Mr. Pratt’s grave a double grave and add Dan’s body to it. I could see the three of us—Susie, Zoey and me—out in the woods in the middle of the night, digging a hole, nice and deep. I hadn’t moved halfway across the country to be troubled with a man who had done his best to ruin me. I’d been left with nothing in the divorce, and then he’d destroyed my reputation and had made me un-hirable. If it hadn’t been for my cousin Sarah, I had no doubt that I would still be dependent on the kindness of others for the bare basics of survival.
“Bruce, Maryann, I love you guys, but Dan and me are done. I’m with Aun—I mean, I’m with Dorothy on this one. I’m going to stay away from him. I adore you guys, but… he was not good to me.”
The joy in Bruce and Maryann’s expressions fell away, leaving their faces long and forlorn, but the self-righteous, malicious glee in Dorothy’s expression grew. I was tempted to say that I’d have dinner with them and Dan just to spite her, but stopped short of promising to do something akin to emotional suicide.
“I’ll make your favorite just in case you change your mind,” Maryann said. “Pot roast with extra onions.”
That was Dan’s favorite. It had always been his favorite. But through the years, his parents had attached everything they knew about Dan to me as if we were one person with one personality. “That’s very sweet of you, Maryann. Thank you.”
With each taking an arm, Dan’s parents marched Dorothy out of the café, and I laid my forehead on the counter.
“You know,” Susie said with a twinkle in her eye, “there was one thing that Dan was awfully good at. A visit might not be such a bad idea.”
My head snapped up. “Not you too. Out. Out… Go on with you. I’ll be sure to send Dan your way if he starts sniffing around.”
Susie got up and headed for the door. “Don’t you dare,” she laughed. “My sweetie’s heard the stories about us from high school. Dan shows up and you’ll have me in all kinds of trouble. He’s all yours.” With a wink, she was out the door, not giving me a chance for a snappy comeback of my own.
“Think he’s flying or driving in from Chicago?” Zoey asked. “If he’s flying, I can put on the no-fly list, get him arrested with a cavity search.”
“I love you.” Once again, Zoey had proven herself to be the best friend ever.
Chapter 2
I tried not to yawn as Brenda and I stood bent over, studying the cake I’d just finished baking. It was a mocha chocolate bundt cake sprinkled with a light dusting of powdered sugar. It looked amazing, but it had three siblings sitting next to it that hadn’t fared as well. One had turned to crumbs, one had the consistency of rubber, and the third was incredibly dense and somehow managed to weigh three times the others.
Looking at the cake that had turned out well, I felt incredibly proud. The sense of accomplishment was enormous. It was right up there with achieving world peace. For the cake’s mocha component, I’d even used the fancy new coffee Brad had gotten me to order. I’d almost put the coffee’s ground, raw beans into the batter, but thankfully Brenda had stopped me and explained that the coffee had to be brewed first.
Brenda was my morning angel, and I’d inherited her from my cousin Sarah. She was short with jet black hair that fell past her shoulders, and was soft in a very grandmotherly, huggable way. She’d never been anything but kind to me, and I adored her. I’d been in the kitchen since five AM trying to make the perfect cake, and she’d been right here with me since five-thirty. It was now ten-thirty.
“That looks gorgeous, darlin’,” she said with a pat on my shoulder. She groaned and stretched as she straightened up. “You’re comin’ along. Making real progress with your skills.”
“Thanks, Brenda.” Her words of praise would keep me happy for the next two hours at least. “What do you think I should do with the others?”
“What do you plan to do with this one?” she asked, pointing to the one cake that had
turned out well.
“Susie’s having some trouble with her landlord, and I was going to go talk to him and see if I could smooth things out.” That was only the iceberg’s tip of the truth. What I actually planned to do was go over to Mr. Pratt’s office with Zoey and blackmail him into sticking with the terms of Susie’s original contract. Zoey had spent Saturday and Sunday using her ninja-like computer skills to dig up some juicy dirt on Mr. Pratt. Turns out that Mr. Pratt had done a few things that the IRS would be very interested to learn about.
The cake was a token gift to try to take the edge off the message. I would prefer not to make an outright enemy of Mr. Pratt. My ex-Aunt Dorothy did a very nice job of filling my enemy quota all on her own.
“You could take the other cakes to the local food pantry or take ‘em over to the homeless shelter. Some of the folks there might have teeth good enough to handle gnawin’ their way through them cakes.”
Homeless shelter… That struck a nerve. Things had been so dire for me prior to leaving Chicago that I’d been living in a women’s shelter. Donating the cakes to the local homeless shelter sounded both like a great idea and a cruel one. I hoped they would forgive my terrible first attempts at making the cake!
Brenda headed on her way to do grandmotherly things and my full wait staff—college students Melanie and Sam—made it in. Zoey showed up soon after, and with a Brenda-made lasagna and a simple tossed salad available to serve to customers, I left the café in Melanie and Sam’s capable hands and Zoey and I loaded up her car with all four cakes and headed out.
“Think Susie will get mad if we interfere?” I asked Zoey once we were on our way.
“If we save her from getting jacked around by her landlord, I think she’ll throw us a party.”
I thought about my own situation and the looming cost of replacing the boiler. True to his word, Lou Sizemore’s office had drafted a payment plan. I’d be able to pay the amount due each month, but it would leave almost nothing extra. The café was still not operating in the black, and I was going to run out of money to cover operating costs if I didn’t turn its cash flow around.
If I closed the café, that would mean I’d have to fire Melanie and Sam. It would also mean losing the connection with the community that I was slowly building. I hadn’t realized it while I was married, but Dan had purposely isolated me from both family and friends so that when we’d gotten divorced, I’d been left with no one. My whole life had been him and the business we’d built together. Now, without him, I was finally at a place in my life where I had people outside of family who mattered to me—and I mattered to them, too. If I lost the café, I was sure that I’d lose the community of friendship that I was on my way to building. I’d be alone again… and I didn’t want to be alone. Not like that.
Raising rent on my building’s storefronts had crossed my mind. It had crossed it about thirty thousand times over the weekend. I wouldn’t be able to do it right away, but a couple of shops had leases that would soon be up for renewal. But then I thought about Susie and how much she was struggling to make it, and I thought about Mr. Pratt’s willingness to gouge her for every dime he could squeeze out of her. I didn’t want to be a Mr. Pratt, and I didn’t want the community to see me that way. I would probably raise the rent on the leases scheduled for renewal, but the increases would be based on fair business practices. What those fair businesses practices would be, I didn’t have a clue. It was yet another thing to ask Jack, the bank owner, about.
Zoey pulled up in front of Mr. Pratt’s house fifteen minutes later. He’d converted his garage to a home office, and I’d been told that was where he did all of his business. The neighborhood was nice, and his house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. There were tall, mature trees all around, and his house was bordered by a small park.
“You want to do the blackmailing or should I?” Zoey asked. Her eyeliner had taken a turn from Viking warrior princess toward Marilyn Manson. She was wearing black lace-up hiker boots that had been jacked up with four-inch platform soles with a loose-fitting dress made snug with a very wide wrap-around cloth belt. The dress itself had a slit up both thighs and showed off her fishnet stockings. She hadn’t bothered with a coat.
In contrast I was wearing jeans and a plain, tucked-in T under a red, three-quarter length coat, and I was pretty sure I still had some smudges of chocolate on my T.
“I’m thinking that the news of his impending blackmail might be taken more seriously if it came from you,” I said.
“Cool.” Her full lips quirked into a crooked smile. “Blackmailing someone is on my bucket list anyway.”
Win-win. I liked those.
We got out of her car, and I retrieve the one good cake from the back seat. Then we started up the gently inclined driveway that led to his garage office door.
“You don’t wanna do that.”
We stopped and looked around for the owner of the voice. I didn’t see anyone at first, but then Zoey pointed in the direction of the park. There was a huge oak tree right at the edge of Mike’s property where the park began. Underneath it stood a man.
“What?” I asked, unsure of what I’d heard.
“You don’t wanna do that. You don’t wanna go in there,” the man said. He had the body of a skeleton with skin stretched over it. His cheekbones were sharp, and his skin had a slightly pale yellow pallor. He was dressed in what looked like army surplus clothes that hung from his skinny frame.
“Why not?” I asked.
Then I heard the sirens. Lots of sirens. And they were coming our way.
Chapter 3
Zoey and I stood at the edge of the parking lot with our new four best friends, Derek, Winnie, Patty, and Manny. Derek had been the man who had warned us against going in Mean Mike’s office. That’s what Derek, Patty, Winnie, and Manny called Mr. Pratt—Mean Mike. I guessed the name said it all. Except I was a little confused because they all seemed to use his name fondly.
Together, we watched a covered body bag get rolled out of Mr. Pratt’s office. Inside of it rested Mean Mike himself.
“He had one of them big shredders,” Winnie said, holding her arms three feet apart and then waving her hand four feet in the air. She was somewhere in her 30s to 50s, though I couldn’t tell where exactly. Her face was weathered with deep lines feathering off from her lips, but her hands were as pretty and smooth as a hand model’s. Her eyes had a slightly rheumy look, though. She looked as though she had grabbed life with both hands to ride it hard and had gotten a bit used up in the process. “He was always shredding. No loose scraps of paper in his whole office. Everything, he’d shred.”
Patty sniffed back some tears. “I told him not to be wearing that long scarf of his while he shredded. Never would listen.”
“What happened? Do you know?” I asked.
“It was me who found him,” Derek said. “Cold is coming, and Mean Mike said he’d have us some of them silvery survival blankets, the ones that look like tin foil, and some duct tape so that we could weatherproof our house.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the direction of his “house.”
I twisted around to see it. It was a standalone cinderblock public bathroom with his and hers sides. The roof was lifted several inches above the cinderblock walls, allowing air to freely flow in and out of the structure.
“How do you stay warm in there?” I asked, and was answered by Patty’s sneeze.
“It ain’t easy,” she said. She was bundled in what looked like a surplus wool blanket. Her nose was red and raw from a cold it looked like she’d been fighting for a while.
These people were homeless, in the middle of winter, and their benefactor had just been wheeled away in an ambulance that didn’t bother to use its sirens as it left. There was no longer any hurry. The emergency was passed because the person in jeopardy was dead.
“How’d he die?” I asked Derek.
“The shredder got ‘em. That fancy scarf of his was wrapped around his neck and both ends of it was pulled
into the shredder. When I went in his office, the shredder was making all kinds of noise and it was laying on top of Mean Mike. His face was shoved right up against the mouth of the thing.”
“Was he breathing?” Zoey asked.
“Naw, he was gone. Been gone. He was blue, his eyes bugged out and bleeding, and his tongue was swollen and sticking out,” Derek said.
“His eyes were bleeding?” I tried not to shiver at the image.
“Not bleeding bleeding,” Derek said. “Like, bleeding inside. Red spots. The man was gone. I used his phone to call 911 then left. Didn’t touch nothin’.”
I kept thinking about the blankets Mr. Pratt had promised them and the more intense cold that was on its way.
“Why do you call him ‘Mean Mike?’” Zoey asked.
“Cause he was always yellin’,” Winnie said. “I didn’t think he’d die this way. I thought he’d have himself a stroke. He’d get so mad. We could hear him all the way out here.”
“Did you hear him today?” I asked.
“Not today,” Manny said, slurring his words a little.
If they could hear him yelling when he was mad, I wondered why nobody heard him yelling when he was getting strangled. But wrap something tight around my neck and squeeze, I wouldn’t be yelling very loudly either. “Who would he yell at?”
Derek shrugged. “Anybody. Everybody. Himself.”
“He never yelled at me,” Patty said with pride in her voice.
“Me neither,” Winnie said. “He never yelled at us, but he sure yelled at everyone else.”
“Did he yell at anyone today?” Zoey asked.
Derek shrugged. “Kinda like asking if the wind blowed. Of course it blowed.”
“Did you see anyone come to his office today?” I asked.
Nobody answered right away. They all looked at each other or somewhere else entirely.
“We don’t know nothin’,” Derek said. “We’re just trying to live our lives.”
A Berry Clever Corpse Page 2
