A Berry Deadly Welcome_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  “Due diligence. Had to do things right so that there wouldn’t be questions about it later.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was kind of sounding like he’d actually been trying to protect me.

  “Word is you’ve been asking questions around town about Rachel.”

  Okay, so that came out of left field.

  “So,” I said, feeling more than a little bit defiant.

  “So you need to stop.”

  “Nope.”

  This time both sides of his mouth quirked up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that the brownies she’d been eating weren’t burnt?” I asked.

  “You are not a member of this investigation.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Meaning… it’s none of your business.”

  Heat flamed my cheeks and my hands balled into fists. “Accused of murder. A café that is circling the drain. And my previously non-existent reputation setting me up to be a modern-day re-telling of Arsenic and Old Lace. None of my business?” I was yelling by the end of what I’d had to say.

  “Stop asking questions about Rachel, Kylie. Let the professionals”—he tapped his chest—“handle this.”

  Chapter 24

  It was the next day, and I was in the grocery store. I’d left Brenda in charge of the café while I checked the deli for anything marked on sale. There was a carrot cake marked down to seventeen dollars. The original price had been twenty-five. All I could do was stand and shake my head. It wasn’t even a very big cake. Best I could figure is that the carrots used in the cake had been grown in gold-laced soil.

  I put the carrot cake back and picked out an assortment of three dozen cookies and a German chocolate cake. It didn’t matter to me that the cake was priced to move and was therefore probably already considered a little old. It wasn’t gonna get much older. Whatever slices didn’t sell at the café today were going to go upstairs to the apartment with me tonight. I figured that I could put one slice under the window leading out to the fire escape. If someone tried to break in, maybe they’d slip on it and make a lot of noise, giving me a chance to escape or hit them with the pointy end of one of my high heel shoes.

  As for the other pieces of cake, I’d call them dinner. I couldn’t wait. I was already dreaming of the great big, tall glass of ice cold milk that I was going to have with it.

  “Oh, hey… sorry,” I said when my food laden daydream let me step right into the path of a man trying to get by me.

  “No problem,” he said with a half turn as he walked on, but that was all it took.

  That profile… That hair… Those shoulders. It was Max! Zoey’s Max! The ghost turned flesh. And he was right here walking around Camden Falls’ grocery store with an arm basket of oranges, nuts, and avocados. I didn’t know what to be more upset about, the fact that the man who had ripped Zoey’s heart out of her chest was walking around Camden Falls like he hadn’t been missing or that his basket of food was so disgustingly healthy that it made me feel guilty about my own dinner plans.

  I turned my buggy the opposite direction and pushed, digging my cell phone out of my purse as I zigzagged through customers. I hit dial and it rang. Then rang. Then rang. Nothing.

  I swore under my breath, reached the end of the aisle and stopped, searching behind me for Max.

  No Max.

  I headed to the next aisle and the next aisle.

  No Max.

  I went to the front of the store. The check-out lanes had a few people in them… but no Max.

  My stomach fell with the feeling of having had a heavy rock dropped in it. I didn’t want to tell Zoey who I’d just seen. I wanted to protect her from hearing that her ghosting ex was back, but knowing Zoey and all of the surveillance access she had, there was a really good chance I wouldn’t have to tell her a thing. There was a really good chance she already knew.

  Chapter 25

  I spent the rest of the day and half the night worrying about Zoey. I tried calling her three more times, and each time I almost left her a message telling her the unthinkable—that Max was back in town—but I couldn’t bring myself to leave that kind of news on her voicemail. I finally gave up and went to sleep, drunk on chocolate cake and ice-cold milk.

  The next day was Saturday, and the walking group was meeting at 9 AM in a small park a couple of blocks over and one road down. I squeezed myself into a pair of skin-tight yoga pants and then covered my cake belly with a tee. After pulling my flaming red locks into a ponytail, I was ready to go.

  I was huffing by the time I finished my speed walk from the café to the park, and I slowed down once I had it in sight so that no one would see me struggling to catch my breath. It was one thing to go for a walk. It was something entirely different to look like you needed the exercise of going for a walk.

  Spotting Joel spotting me, I waved and strolled over to where the group was gathered. There was a couple with an eager and alert border collie, a laid-back fellow with a flat faced pug with huge puppy-dog eyes, a silver-haired couple in matching blue tracksuits, and Ned. Ned was cleaned up and out of his grease-stained uniform from the service garage, but I couldn’t say more than that about any improvements. His teeth were still stained a smoker’s yellow, and what little hair he had looked as though it had spent three hours working over a deep fryer just this morning alone. Why Rachel had had an affair with him, I’d never understand.

  “Glad to see everybody,” Joel said, and it had the same effect as calling everyone to attention. All eyes were on him, and he stood like a larger-than-life statue in the center of the group. “This here’s Kylie Berry, and she’ll be joining us this morning.”

  “And there’s coffee and cookies waiting for us at the café—on the house—at the end of the walk,” I quickly chimed in with as much enthusiasm as I could muster without actually breaking into a cheer.

  Everyone around me, minus Joel, looked at each other but not at me. They said nothing to confirm a willingness to go to the café after the walk.

  It was the definition of awkward, but then the pug sneezed and the group took the opportunity to ooh and awww over his sniffles before heading out. Joel tossed me a shoulder shrug as if to say he’d tried and then fell in with the group. I quickly caught up with him.

  “Hey, thanks for inviting me on the walk. I thought about it and you’re right, I need to do more to become a part of the community.”

  “And maybe learning how to cook wouldn’t hurt either.” He gave me a little elbow nudge on my shoulder as if to soften the truth of his words.

  I balanced my palms in front of me, pretending they were scales. “Learn how to cook… Stay out of jail… A girl’s gotta have her priorities.” I had to crane my neck way back to give him a smile and a wink. He rewarded me with a smile back, and just like all the other times he’d smiled, he went from boyishly charming to disarmingly handsome. The transformation left me spellbound every time.

  To save me from embarrassing myself by staring too long into his warm brown eyes, I turned my attention to the group in front of us. “Who should I talk to first?”

  “Hmmm, Adam—the guy with the pug—is the person who introduced Rachel to the group a couple of years ago. You might start with him.”

  “Got it.” I went into power-walk mode, swinging my hips and pumping my arms, to catch up with Adam. His little pug was prancing next to him, making occasional snort-snort sounds that made me want to wrap the little guy in my arms like a baby and use a suction bulb on his sinuses to open them up. “Cute dog!” I exclaimed as an icebreaker.

  “Thanks.” He looked me up and down, assessing me, and then I could see the shift in his eyes. He’d decided to like me. “So you took over Sarah’s Eatery? Dorothy Hibbert has sure had a lot to say about that.”

  I cringed. “She’s my ex-aunt-in-law. I think she has a for-reals crush on my ex-husband and she never considered me good enough.”

  Adam looked at me sharply and I realized what I’d said. I
had just claimed that Dorothy Hibbert, a supposed pillar in the community—or at least a bully—had had a raging crush on her nephew. I immediately wanted to take the words back. That is, until Adam smirked and chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve always thought that one was wound a bit tight. She always seems so sure of how everybody else is so wrong.”

  Instantly I felt as though I’d made a new friend, but now I had to hit the thin shell of our fledgling friendship with an ice pick. “I’m awfully sorry about what happened to Rachel. Joel said that you two had known each other.”

  “Oh yeah, Rach and me were a thing for about a year.” He nodded his head and the focus of his eyes drifted as if remembering.

  “Good times?”

  He did a one-sided shoulder head nod. “Sometimes.” Pause. “Did you know her?”

  “Very briefly. Actually, I hired her. She was going to work at the café.” I didn’t mention that I’d hired her as a chef given that she didn’t know how to cook. I really had to rethink some of my business decisions regarding the café. In retrospect, hiring her was like I was begging the universe to let me fail. “She died before she ever started working. It really left me feeling like there’s this big question mark where she was. I was all set to get to know her, and then she was taken away.” I was avoiding saying the word “murdered” in case news had traveled about me being prime suspect number one.

  “Didn’t you bake the brownies she was eating when she died?”

  Sugar snaps! “Maybe not those exact brownies…” The conversation lagged, and when I spoke again, I made sure to bring it back to Rachel and not what might have killed her, that is to say… me. “Were you two pretty serious?”

  “Mmm, more fun than serious. Well, fun some of the times. She’d run a bit hot and cold on me. We were on and off for the better part of a year. By the time it ended, I was honestly already over the whole thing.” He added quickly, “I am sorry she died, though.”

  I think that he might have been the first person to have said so.

  “Was Rachel close with anyone else in the walking group?”

  Adam didn’t need a second to ponder. He answered right away. “She and Jerry walked together a lot.”

  I scanned the group, wondering which one Jerry was. It wasn’t lost on me that Rachel was being connected with yet another man and not a woman. There was a definite trend to her ways.

  “Jerry and Michelle, his wife, have the border collie.”

  I instantly had a sinking feeling. Jerry was handsome and unavailable, the latter making him exactly Rachel’s type. I watched as the fluffy-haired black and white dog pranced around the couple. He wasn’t on a leash but he stayed near his human parents anyway. They clearly doted on him, and he on them.

  Jerry pulled a ball out of his pocket and threw it into a house’s unfenced yard. The dog went full tilt running after it, and Michelle met the dog on her knees and with open arms when he brought the ball back. She then got to her feet and bent over the dog while it spun in circles, overjoyed with the one-on-one attention.

  Jerry continued to walk as Michelle ran past, he blond curls bouncing as she ran. She was waving the ball over her head as the dog did hind-legged pogo hops to chase after her.

  I quickened my pace and slid into position next to Jerry. Glancing up at him, I realized he really was very handsome. He was car-salesman handsome. He had a bright smile and an easy charisma that would make him the center of the universe at any party.

  “Hi, that’s a beautiful dog you have.” Since the line had worked so well with Adam, I decided to use it again with Jerry.

  “Thanks.” He gave me a not-unfriendly smile, but he didn’t say anything more. It was going to be up to me to build some momentum into our conversation.

  “Have you had him long?”

  “My wife already had him when we first got together about four years back.”

  “You two haven’t been married long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” he said, this time with a thinness to his lips.

  “Marriage is a lot of work.”

  “Yep.”

  “I guess someone like Rachel has a way of making it even harder.”

  Jerry shot me a look, and his jaw was clenched tight.

  “How long were you two having an affair?” It was a shot in the dark, and I held my breath waiting to see if it would hit.

  “That was a long time ago.” The words were said so low, almost under his breath, that I barely heard them. “My wife and I are in a good place now, and it’s none of your business, so why don’t you leave it alone?”

  But I couldn’t leave it alone. Someone had wanted Rachel dead, and I needed to know who. “How long were you together? When did it end?”

  “I told you it’s none of your business.” His voice was low in an exaggerated way, and he barely moved his lips. He didn’t want anyone to overhear. He didn’t want his wife to overhear, and his wife was near. I had him at a disadvantage, leverage to keep him talking to me.

  “I need to know,” I pushed.

  Jerry sighed, then looked at me and then to his wife. She was still playing with their dog.

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “She knows.” His voice was resigned. “Rachel and me, it was a mistake. Michelle and I are working it out. Going to therapy. We’re doing okay now.”

  “How long’s it been since things ended?”

  “About eight months.”

  “How long were you and Rachel together?”

  “Close to a year.”

  “Why’d it end?”

  “Michelle found out.”

  Ouch. “And she didn’t leave you?”

  Jerry shook his head, his gaze soft as he watched his wife. “She gave me a second chance. I should have never cheated. Rachel was just so…” He sighed heavily.

  “Jus so… ?”

  He grimaced. “Insistent. She made the grass look greener, if you know what I mean. She convinced me that I was disposable to Michelle… or that it didn’t really matter. I don’t know. Her reasoning always seemed to change. I think it boiled down to that she seemed fun and… Michelle had become less fun. It’s like you said, marriage is work. I got tired of the work. I missed the play, and Rachel was a chance to play.”

  His honesty was like a hand reaching into my stomach and twisting everything around. I thought about Dan, my ex, and how he’d had his many, many, many playmates. I thought of all the times I’d wanted us to recapture the fun of our relationship by escaping for a long weekend away from the business or family. He’d always chide me and tell me I was being selfish.

  Then I thought about Michelle’s choice to forgive Jerry. Could she really have forgiven him? By the time the layers of lies had been stripped away to reveal the truth, I had been beyond done with Dan. Of course, Dan had had no intentions of changing. Maybe that was the difference between Dan and Jerry. Jerry had realized that the most important person to him was Michelle. To Dan, I was a cog in the machine of his life, nothing more.

  “We’re trying to have a baby.” Jerry’s words cut through my thoughts and they centered me like almost nothing else could.

  “A baby?”

  “Mmhmm,” he said with a little grin pulling at his lips. His eyes had softened again, and he looked happy.

  Maybe Michelle had forgiven him. He saw a future with her that extended beyond what either one of them could achieve alone.

  “Did Rachel ever try to get back together with you after you ended things?”

  That got his attention. “Yeah, a bunch of times. But I was done. The further away from her I got, the more I realized how much she’d twisted my thinking.” He looked at me. “Make no mistake, what I did was wrong and the only person I can blame at the end of the day is me, but… she got in my head. Once I got her out, I wanted her to stay out.”

  “And Michelle, did she ever have anything to say to Rachel?”

  “Michelle’s a good woman, bet
ter than I deserve. She just wanted to move forward. We had some issues to work out, stuff that didn’t even have anything to do with Rachel. ‘Rachel was a symptom,’ that’s what Michelle says.” He shrugged. “Like I said, she’s better than me. She wasn’t looking forward to being friends with Rachel, but she didn’t kill her either.” He looked at me, pointedly. “She didn’t bake those brownies.”

  Chapter 26

  I dropped back in the group to walk next to Joel. I needed to lick my wounds a little bit after Jerry’s brownies comment. Seeing the belief in his eyes that I had killed Rachel had unnerved me to my core. But could I blame him? Even I thought that I was a terrible cook. When the police had brought that box of rat poison out from the pantry, I’d thought that I’d mixed up the ingredients and had killed her. It wasn’t until I’d heard Veronica say the brownies were perfectly cooked—not burnt—that I’d known that someone else had been involved in Rachel’s demise. It hadn’t been me.

  “Not going so well?” Joel asked. His hands were shoved deep into his pants pockets and he lumbered along with one step to my two.

  “It’s going great.” I said it, and I meant it. I was learning so much, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like the slimy stuff a person finds under a rock they’ve pulled out of a pond. “I need to talk to Michelle next.”

  We walked a little in quiet before Joel spoke again. “What you waitin’ for?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that. Facing Jerry’s infidelity—and their saved marriage—made me feel like a lesser creature in comparison to his perfect wife, Michelle. She’d fought to save her marriage. I’d given up and had run away. That couldn’t be how it had happened. It couldn’t be all there was to it, yet they were together and I was facing life’s struggles alone.

  Life sucked.

  So says the woman who owns a whole city block. That was a bit of an exaggeration, but my inner me had made its point. I had no business feeling sorry for myself.

  “Wish me luck. I’m going in.” I picked up my pace as I heard Joel softly call good luck after me. I walked by Ned and ignored his wink. I brushed past Jerry and ignored his glare. The silver-haired super duo was out in front, but between me and them was Michelle.