A Berry Clever Corpse

by WINTERS, A. R.

  “I’m working on a story.”

  “Will you be sure not to mention my name specifically?”

  Joel’s brows went up. “You don’t want the free publicity?” His voice took on the hollow sound of a professional commentator or news anchor. “According to Kylie Berry, owner and operator of Sarah’s Eatery, Mike Pratt was the victim of a love triangle gone wrong.”

  My eyes went wide. “Was he?” I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he’d been killed because of a romantic relationship. It had never even occurred to me to consider that it could be something other than his heavy-handed and unscrupulous business practices.

  “No, no… at least not that I know of,” Joel said.

  My shoulders sagged. “You got me all excited there.” If he had been killed because of a love triangle, I was pretty sure that Susie wouldn’t have been a part of it. She seemed over the moon for her guy.

  Joel took a bite of his soup. Surprise registered on his face. “This is good!”

  “Thanks!” More warm inner glow and happiness. Joel was as good as Santa at Christmas.

  “This tastes a lot like a soup my mom makes, except that she puts in a lot of sweet onion so that it’s almost more of an onion potato soup than straight potato.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Real good.”

  “I’ll try that next time I make it.”

  “Let me know and I’ll help. I’ll get the recipe from her.”

  Tingles and anticipation filled me. Alone in a kitchen standing close to Joel. Tasting the soup together. Him standing behind me, putting his arms around me to show me the best way to cut an onion.

  “Now, about Mike Pratt,” Joel said, all business again. “What do you know?”

  Strategy time. I wasn’t sure what I should say and what I shouldn’t say. Joel and his very public stories could ruin someone’s life just as much as Brad and his badge could.

  “You first,” I said.

  “Ohhh, that how we going to play this?” Joel asked with a smile that reached his eyes. “You’re investigating again, aren’t you.” It was more of a statement than a question, but then he asked, “Why?”

  “Susie Prescott is a friend of mine. I’m guessing you’ve heard that she’s a suspect?”

  Joel nodded. “From what I’ve heard, she’s the suspect.”

  “Yeah, well, isn’t that the problem? If the police aren’t looking at anyone else, then they won’t find anyone else, but I don’t think she did it.”

  “Don’t think she did it? Or don’t want her to have done it?”

  I pulled my mouth sideways, hating to admit that he was right. “I don’t want her to have done it,” I finally admitted.

  “Is there someone you do want to have done it?”

  “That’s such a terrible question.”

  “I know… But is there?”

  “No, just more of the same. People that I hoped didn’t do it.”

  “And who might some of those people be?”

  Ohhhh, Joel was good. Very, very good. “I see what you did,” I teased.

  Joel shrugged with a smile and ate some more of his soup.

  “What are the suspects that you have in mind for killing Mike?”

  “I’ve been asking around. Turns out Mike wasn’t that popular of a guy. What he did to Susie—jacking up her rent as soon as her business started doing better and locking her into an unfair contract—he’d tried to that before to other people. A bunch of times.”

  “Did he always succeed?”

  “Nope, not always. Some would refuse to sign the contract unless changes were made, so they’d head off the problem at the pass. Others, they’d pay and then move their shop to somewhere else as soon as they could, and at least a few people ruined their own business base so that they were barely making a profit and then convinced him that they weren’t doing so well in the business after all. As long as a person was barely making it, he tended to leave their rent alone.”

  “How did he ever get anyone to rent from him?” I felt bewildered at the blatant abuses the man had wielded.

  Joel shrugged. “Mike could be mean. Most people didn’t want to make an enemy of him, so they’d act like everything was fine and that they’d had a good business relationship with him.”

  “It sounds like the police should have a long list of possible murderers.”

  Joel did a sideways nod. “I don’t know. Most people had already figured out how to manage Mike and their troubles with him were part of the past. They had no reason to go after him.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned my hip into the counter. “But Susie’s problems weren’t sorted yet, were they? She was still in a difficult situation and Mike was the one making it difficult.” Silently, though, I wondered if that were true. She had sorted it out. She’d decided to embrace financial ruin rather than pay him any more. She’d made a choice, had possibly even been at peace with it. But I wondered, had her fiancé been as at peace with it as she had?

  Chapter 7

  With Joel out the door, that left just me and Agatha. She was halfway through her book and on her third cup of coffee. With her reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose and her gold, dangling earrings each swinging a little green gem, she looked somewhere between schoolmarm and chic chick. Amazingly, her pixie cut white hair complimented either look perfectly.

  “Not that I don’t love your company, but what has you hanging out here so long today?”

  Agatha put down her book. “My knitting group will be here soon. I’m enjoying this book so much that I wanted to get some reading in before they came. Not to mention, I’m loving this cake you made.” She pinched off a small bite and popped it in her mouth.

  I leaned to the side and craned my neck, doing my best to see around the back corner spot in the café. The spot I called the Cozy Corner. I smiled. It was empty, which meant that I wasn’t going to need to come up with some elaborate ruse to vacate the space so that the ladies could relax near the fireplace in the overstuffed chairs.

  I loved that Agatha brought her knitting group and also her book club here. More than once I’d seen some of the members of each group come in at times without the others, and rarely were they alone. They almost always brought a friend or a family member. It was word of mouth advertising for the café, and that was the best kind. It was free, passive, and the most trusted by new customers.

  “I do feel for you, dear,” Agatha said.

  “Huh?” I’d been so absorbed with my thoughts of flying dollar bills from all the passive advertising that I was encouraging that I’d stopped paying attention to my actual in-the-flesh customer… and friend.

  “Having to deal with your ex that way… and all his family. You moved all the way across the country to little Camden Falls but he’s still not done with you.”

  “Oh, Agatha,” I laughed. “Dan is sooo done with me. Beyond done with me. I mean, the man all but spit at me as I walked out his door. He burned every bridge I had. He left me with nothing.”

  Agatha looked at me over the rim of her glasses. “Little boys pulling pigtails,” she said in a sing-song voice.

  My jaw dropped. “No, no way. That wasn’t pulling pigtails. That was running over me with a Mack truck and then backing up over me just to make sure he’d done the job right. The way he treated me, that wasn’t because he loved me.”

  “You’re right,” Agatha declared. “It was because he didn’t like losing something he considered his.”

  Well, she had me there. Dan never had liked losing. Not at golf. Not at charades. Not at cards. And certainly not at anything having to do with me.

  “Yeah,” I said with a hand wave, “but that’s all meaningless now. He’s in the past. I’m in the past. Our paths are completely divergent. There’s nothing but space between us. Nothing shared except me seeing his parents from time to time.”

  “His business is going under.”

  They were such simple words, but it was like a bomb went o
ff in my head. Fear shot through my spine, and the words, “Oh my gosh, what will we do!” filled my head. I’d even forgotten to breathe and didn’t notice until my lungs started burning.

  Then I did breathe, and I remembered. The business my ex-husband and I built together was not my business. It was his. My future didn’t depend on it. His did. The relief and the ridiculousness of it all made me giddy, and I started to laugh. I could feel my face going hot and knew that it must be bright red, and my eyes filled with tears.

  “Oh… oh,” I said, swiping under my eye. “That feels so good. So amazing.”

  “It feels amazing that your ex-husband’s business is going under?”

  “Oh, no! No, not that.” I couldn’t stop smiling. “It feels amazing that it has absolutely nothing to do with me. I’m free.”

  Agatha pursed her lips. “Mmmhmm, word is that his father is considering retiring and that Dan might move back from Chicago to take over the family business.”

  My knees buckled and I hit the floor, but I was back on my feet no more than a second later. I did my best to pretend that nothing had happened.

  Agatha’s smile was quirked sideways. It was obvious that she was trying to give all her attention to her book, but I could tell that she was struggling not to look at me with a huge I-told-you-so grin.

  Agatha’s fellow knitters arrived and she found her way to the cozy corner with them. I had to admit. I was feeling sullen. How dare Agatha point out how Dan was probably going to try to turn my life upside down and inside out all over again. I wanted to stand in the corner with my arms crossed and glare at her, but it was time for me to put on my big girl panties. The bearer of bad news didn’t deserve my hostility. She deserved my thanks and my gratitude. Being forewarned was being forearmed, and I was going to knock Dan’s head off if he tried to waltz himself back into my life. I’d moved on. I’d picked myself up, dusted myself off, and had made something of myself.

  Okay, so maybe I hadn’t made something of myself. Maybe I’d fallen into the best deal anyone could imagine with my good ol’ friend nepotism, but still. I’ve had to show up for this opportunity. I’ve had to stretch outside my comfort zone and try to succeed in an area where I have failed my whole life. I now cooked for others and they paid me for the food that I prepared for them. Paid me for it! The thought was enough to make me giggle. Once upon a time it would have made more sense for me to pay others to eat my food, not the other way around.

  No, I’d come a long way and I’d done it without Dan. Whatever he was going through, whatever was falling apart in his life, he’d have to pick up the pieces without me.

  The café’s door chime rang, and I turned just in time to greet Zoey with a big smile. But behind her were three of my building’s business owners—and they were not smiling. At all.

  “Deirdre, Alex, Jacob,” I said in greeting. “Can I get you some coffee? Maybe a piece of cake?” Their dour expressions didn’t alter.

  Deirdre was a dark-skinned goddess somewhere between thirty and sixty years old, Alex was a thirty-something blond-headed man with hair that seemed to keep trying to turn red, and Jacob was something between a bookworm and a psychopath. He just had that indeterminate look about him that made me think he could go either way.

  Deirdre stepped to the front of the trio, and Alex and Jacob flanked her, crossing their arms over their chests. While I’m sure the threat was symbolic and not literal, it was clear that the two men were there as Deirdre’s muscle. That the three of them were there in solidarity didn’t seem to be good enough. They wanted to physically intimidate as well.

  “What’s up?” I asked, address Deirdre since she was clearly their spokesperson.

  “What’s up is that we are losing customers,” Deirdre answered curtly. “Our businesses are cold. Poor Jacob has had half of his customers walk in, stay for two minutes, complain about the temperature and then leave.”

  I glanced at Jacob in anticipation of him saying something to back up this claim, but he merely pursed his lips, squinted his eyes, and gave one silent nod of his head. Jacob owned a medical supply store. They sold everything from compression hoses to the types of beds that were found inside of a hospital, but his equipment was destined for home use.

  When it was clear that Jacob wasn’t going to add anything to Deirdre’s claim, I said, “I’m very sorry to hear about that, Jacob. I—”

  “Alex has lost nearly as many customers,” Deirdre said, cutting me off.

  That Alex was also losing customers really surprised me. He was the owner-operator of an architectural firm. I couldn’t imagine a person going with a different designer on a building structure just because they needed to layer with an extra sweater for a few hours. “I’m really sorry to hear about that, Al—”

  “And I have lost over seventy-five percent of my customers,” Deirdre said, cutting me off again. She had one of those stage voices that carried, and my ears flinched each time she hit a hard consonant.

  “I’m really sorry, Deirdre. I—”

  “SORRY isn’t good enough,” Deirdre said.

  If she cut me off one more ti—

  “Your apologies mean nothing to us. We want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

  I looked to the still silent Alex and Jacob. For people so determined to know what I was going to do about it, they hadn’t said one word. Maybe Deirdre wouldn’t let them. I got the sudden image of her as their queen bee with Alex and Jacob her dutiful drones.

  “I—”

  “We refuse to be treated this way.”

  “I—”

  “We have rights as your tenants and our next action will be to seek legal counsel.”

  “I—”

  “If you do not addr—”

  “Would you like some hot cocoa?” I blurted, interrupting Deirdre.

  “W—”

  “I’m about to make it fresh.”

  “Tha—”

  “Please,” I motioned to the counter. “Take a seat.”

  “Th—”

  “Now.” Deirdre and her cronies had worn out my last nerve. Thankfully, I didn’t need to push the point any harder. They looked at each other. I saw a few of their imaginary chips fall off their shoulders. Then, they took seats at the grill’s counter.

  I didn’t have any hot cocoa made yet, so I went with coffee instead and gave Deirdre, Alex and Jacob each a big slice of chocolate cake. I waited for them all to take a bite. I watched the magic of chocolate soothe their features. Then, I said, “I’m sorry about the heat in your businesses. And I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to afford to supply you with space heaters to stave off the cold. I have a local company working on the replacement of the building’s boiler right now, and according to their latest progress report, they are on schedule. Heat should be returning to the building in another week.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Alex said, speaking for the first time, “but we want to know what you’re going to do to offset our losses.”

  They were going to hit me up for money. Money I didn’t have. I broke out in the flush of a cold sweat. This was a shakedown.

  Deirdre put her fork down onto the cake’s plate with a clank. “We want a fifteen percent discount on our rent for the next three months to make up for the losses incurred by your failure to maintain the minimum level of comfort within the building.”

  Soooo many things went through my head. None of them were nice. Then the image of Mike’s prone and strangled body being wheeled out of his office filled my mind. I wasn’t afraid of Deirdre, Alex or Jacob killing me. I wasn’t even afraid of them trying to kneecap me in some abandoned dark alley. I wasn’t even afraid that they’d drag their keys down the side of my car—if I had a car. But what I was afraid of was becoming like Mike.

  Petty. Tight. Abusive.

  I did not want to be the landlord that Mike had been. I did not want to be the type of person he had been. I wanted to be someone much, much different.

  “Twenty perce
nt off,” I said, and watched their slow, satisfied smiles grow, “for one month and one month only.”

  “That is unacceptable!” Deidre snapped.

  “Twenty-five percent, and that’s my final offer,” I said. “If this conversation continues, I will withdraw the offer.”

  Without saying a word, Deirdre looked at Alex. They nodded. Then she looked at Jacob. Another duo-nod.

  Then, with a big toothy smile, Deirdre extended a hand to me to shake. I took it. “It’s a deal,” she said.

  The trio got up from their stools and headed for the door. That’s when I heard a voice that was not Deirdre’s and was not Alex’s. It was Jacob. “And you guys thought we wouldn’t get anything,” he said, only to be hush hissed by Deirdre. Reaching the door, as if to cover for Jacob’s comment, she turned, smiled and waved when she reached the door. She looked like a beauty pageant winner waving a float.

  Then they were gone. I stared after them. Zoey sidled up next to me to look at the now vacant door with me.

  “You got played,” she said.

  “I want to investigate Mike’s murder.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Think Susie did it?” I asked.

  “Could my answer stop you from investigating?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Then, yes. I think she did it.”

  Chapter 8

  Telling Susie that we were going to investigate Mike Pratt’s murder was out of the question. She’d already told me her feelings on the matter: she wanted me to stay out of it. Yet doing the opposite somehow felt right. But one way or another, no matter what outcome, Zoey and I were going to find out what happened.

  “Come on,” I said. “Help me figure out how to make some hot cocoa.”

  Zoey and I headed into the kitchen. Zoey used her phone to look up hot cocoa recipes, and we chose one together. Zoey then navigated me through making the recipe. She had to stop me from substituting salt for sugar. Twice. With it done, I went rogue and added tiny marshmallows. I loved tiny marshmallows in hot cocoa. Nothing said home more to me than that.