A Killer Cake

by Jessica Beck

  As Moose started for the kitchen to find Charlie, I walked straight toward Stacy. “Hey there. Long time, no see,” I said.

  “Victoria, what are you doing here?” Stacy asked with a smile as she balanced a tray overloaded with pulled pork barbeque, baked beans, hush puppies, and cole slaw. I followed her to a nearby table, and as she distributed the contents of her tray, she said to me, “I’m surprised to see you during regular working hours. Did you close up your diner just to come see us?”

  “My grandmother’s subbing for me on the job right now,” I said. “Where’s Josephine? She didn’t leave you, did you?”

  “Are you kidding? That woman’s never going to leave this place. She’s just taking time off to recover from a little bit of surgery.”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked with concern. While it was true that the woman and I hadn’t gotten along all that well earlier, I still didn’t wish that kind of problems on her.

  “Don’t worry; it’s nothing serious. If you ask me, she’s milking it for everything it is worth. It’s being all kinds of overblown around here,” she said loudly enough for Charlie to hear her in the back with no problem.

  “How long will she be out of work?” I asked.

  “Two more days,” Stacy replied. “Listen, I’ve got another order up, but after that, I’ve got a few minutes, if you need them.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “Can I bring you anything while you’re waiting?” she asked me with a mischievous grin. “You know that you at least want a sampler plate.”

  I’d had a sampler before just to be agreeable, but I’d fallen in love with the Pit’s offerings with that first bite. “Well, maybe a small one,” I said.

  “I’ll have Charlie fix you right up,” she said.

  I knew that I was going to regret the calories, but what I wouldn’t regret was eating the heavenly food in the first place. The smoke ring alone on the bark of the barbeque was enough to make my mouth water, and I found myself thinking more about the pulled pork than I was about the murder case. By the time Stacy came back, I was ready to eat the countertop in front of me.

  The first bite was every bit as good as I remembered it to be, and the sweet tea was sugary enough to set off alarm bells ringing in my head.

  In other words, it was all perfect.

  “So, was there a reason you and your grandfather stopped by?”

  “We’re looking for someone,” I said after biting a hushpuppy in half and feeling the rich cornmeal explode in my mouth.

  “Anybody in particular?” she asked me as she reached for a pitcher of sweet tea nearby and topped off my glass, even though I’d had only two sips so far.

  “There’s a young woman who lives in town named Loretta Jenkins. She’s evidently staying with her boyfriend, but I don’t know his name, or where to find either one of them.”

  “That’s okay,” Stacy said as an angry expression bloomed on her face. “I know him well enough for both of us. He happens to be my brother, and if you ask me, the two of them deserve each other.”

  MOM’S HOMEMADE CHICKEN POT PIE

  We love this pot pie, and serve it year-round. It’s especially nice when you have leftover chicken, or turkey, for that matter. I used to make my own crusts, and you can still do that if you’d like to, but this is a go-to meal when I don’t feel like going to much fuss. It might be noted that we also enjoy the tang of cranberry sauce with this meal. Don’t worry, the canned variety is just fine. A side of butter beans are the final touch in our household, but feel free to skip them entirely, since there are already plenty of yummy veggies in the pie itself.

  Ingredients

  4 Tablespoons butter, unsalted

  4 Tablespoons flour, all purpose, unbleached

  2 dashes table salt

  2 dashes pepper

  1 ¼ cups milk (2% or 1%)

  mixed vegetables, frozen mix (12 to 19 oz) (We like the blend with corn, peas, carrots, and green beans, but the size depends on your pie dish and how much veggies your family likes)

  1 pie crust, from the frozen section for a quick meal, or made from scratch if you’re feeling adventurous.

  For scratch crusts only:

  1/3 cup lard

  1 cup flour, unbleached all purpose

  1 dash salt

  3-4 Tablespoons water

  Directions

  Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

  Next, in a large pan, melt the butter over low heat. While the butter is melting, defrost the veggies in the microwave, and if you’re using a store-bought crust, let that rest on the counter at room temperature now. When the butter is melted, remove the pan from the heat and add the flour, salt, and pepper, mixing it all together until it’s incorporated. Put the pan back on low heat and cook this flour/butter mixture for 2-3 minutes, stirring repeatedly. Next, add enough milk (3-4 Tablespoons) to the pan to make a smooth mixture. Stir this constantly, still on low heat. When the mixture is smooth, add the rest of the milk and turn the heat to high, stirring constantly. When the first bubble forms, remove your pan from the heat altogether and continue stirring. Add your frozen veggies now, mix them all in thoroughly, and then transfer the mixture into an 8 or 9 inch pie pan. Cover it with a store-bought crust (or the handmade one you made ahead of time), pinching the edges and cutting slits in the top of the crust to let steam escape during the baking process. Gently wash the top with egg white for a shinier crust if desired before it goes into the oven.

  Bake in the 425 degree F oven for 25-35 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown. Take out and serve!

  Author’s Note:

  Sometimes I like to make smaller one-serving portions using bowls that are oven-safe. These can be festive during the holidays, when I also tend to get a little fancier with the crusts, making lattice patterns or cutting out sections of the dough with small cookie cutters before baking.

  Handmade Crust Directions (optional)

  In a small bowl, work the lard into the flour/salt mixture with a fork until you form pea-sized pellets. Next, sprinkle in water, one tablespoon at a time, and work that into the pastry. Add more water in one teaspoon increments until the mixture pulls away from the side of the bowl and the flour is incorporated into the dough. Be careful not to add too much water too quickly, or you’ll have a gooey mess on your hands. When you’re happy with the results, form the pastry into a ball, flatten it with a rolling pin to ¼ to ½ inch thickness, and then proceed with the directions listed above.

  Chapter 11

  “Don’t you and your brother get along?” I asked Stacy.

  “He’s a bum, a drunk, and an ex-con who uses people and throws them away like they’re soiled paper towels,” she said. “The second he got out of prison, he and Loretta got together, even though I warned her that she was ruining her life. She says she loves him, and she must if she’s willing to put up with what she has for his sake.”

  “Why was he in prison, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I don’t mind a bit. I washed my hands of him well before that happened. Steve gets mean when he’s drinking, and a man was foolish enough to cross him when he had a full load on. Steve beat him up pretty good, and it took three cops to pull him off. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for aggravated assault and a bunch of other charges, and we all kind of got used to the peace and quiet around here. Then they decided that he was a model prisoner, and it wouldn’t hurt to let him out early. He served seventeen months of a nine-year sentence. That’s early, all right. He keeps saying that he’s changed, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Do you happen to know where he is right now?” I asked.

  “He’s at his job; at least he is if he knows what’s good for him. His parole officer will send him back in a heartbeat, all he needs is a reason, and Steve’s too smart to do anything that stupid. At least he has been so far.”

  “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories for you. That seems to be the
only way we talk, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not your fault, Victoria,” Stacy said as her hard expression softened, if only for a moment or two.

  “Trouble does seem to follow me around,” I admitted. “Where does Steve work?”

  “He repairs tires over at Al’s,” Stacy said. After a second, she added softly, “Don’t tell him that I told you where he was, okay?”

  “Stacy, are you afraid of your brother?”

  “You would be, too, if you’d seen the man he beat up,” she said.

  “I promise that I won’t say a word to him about you,” I promised her.

  “I appreciate that.”

  I was about to ask her for directions to Al’s when Moose came out with Charlie. “Stacy, if you’ve got a second, my friend here would like to speak to you.”

  “That’s okay. We’ve already covered it,” I said. I slid a twenty under the plate, as much for the information as the taste of wondrous barbeque. “Keep the change.”

  Stacy didn’t fight me on it, and I had to wonder if she considered it hazard pay for the information that she’d just given me. If that was the case, I was afraid that Moose and I were going to have to have a little chat before we tackled Steve. My grandfather tended to shoot from the hip, and I didn’t want to take a chance on anything happening to him during one of our interviews. We were going to have to tread lightly when we spoke with the ex-con.

  I just hoped that my uncle was up to the challenge of keeping his own temper in check.

  “You’re a hard woman to track down,” I said as we found Loretta in back of the tire place. She was bundled up and sitting in a folding chair reading a magazine, and the woman looked genuinely surprised to see us.

  “How did you know where I’d be?” she asked.

  Before I could answer, Moose said off the cuff, “We were driving by, and I wanted to get a price on some new tires for my truck. It was pure chance that we both saw you back here when we got out.”

  “Well, I don’t sell tires, but they do in there,” she said as she pointed to the front.

  “This is kind of an odd place for you to be hanging out,” Moose said.

  “I’m waiting for my boyfriend.” She glanced at her watch, and then added, “He gets off work in twenty minutes.”

  “How nice for you,” I said. “While we’ve got you here, I was wondering if we could ask you something.”

  “Sure, go on. Ask me anything. I’ve got nothing to hide,” she said as she continued to flip through her magazine.

  “Did you speak to your father yesterday at the celebration before he was murdered?”

  Loretta’s face clouded up. “I told you that I was in town, but I didn’t say anything about being anywhere near the celebration. What makes you think that I spoke to him?”

  “We were going through some photographs earlier, and your face popped up near him in one of them,” I said.

  “Who was showing you pictures of me?” she asked, clearly not happy about this new development. It was obvious that Loretta liked to be in control of whatever situation she was in, and she was quickly losing control of this one.

  “The sheriff had quite a few photographs from the celebration, and he asked us to help him identify several people he didn’t recognize,” I said.

  “You told him who I was, didn’t you?” Her voice was calm as she said it, but somehow, it was one of the scariest things I’d ever heard in my life.

  “Be reasonable, Loretta. We had no choice,” Moose said.

  “I’m sorry that you did that,” Loretta said coldly.

  “What did they do?” a burly young man asked as he came out of one of the nearby garage bay doors. He was wearing a gray and red Al’s uniform, and from the roughly executed tattoos on his arms, it wasn’t tough to guess that this was Steve, the ex-convict Stacy had told me about. He was handsome in a disheveled kind of way, and he held a greasy rag in one hand and a tire iron in the other.

  “We were just talking,” I said.

  “About what?” he asked, getting between us and Loretta.

  “These are the people I told you about who are investigating my dad’s murder. Guess what? They told the police who I was,” she said.

  “That wasn’t the brightest thing to do,” Steve said as he frowned. “You both should have kept your noses out of this.”

  Moose stood his ground, refusing to back down one step. “Let’s not forget that your girlfriend came to us for help in the first place. She asked us to find out who killed Roy Thompson, and we can’t do that without the police. Think about it. If we didn’t tell them who she was, they would have found out on their own, and they wouldn’t have been happy about it. By telling them first, we stay in their good graces, and that gives us access to more information so we can figure out who killed Loretta’s father.”

  “What you should be worried about is staying in my good graces,” Steve said, not buying my grandfather’s argument.

  I was proud to see that Moose didn’t even flinch. “That’s where you’ve got it wrong. We want to know the truth; to be honest with you, we don’t care who murdered Roy Thompson as long as we find out who did it. Our cake was used as a murder weapon, and we’re not about to let the killer get away with that. At least you know what our rationale is. Has it been your experience in the past that the police have such lofty motives?”

  He spat on the ground. “The cops just want an easy answer. They don’t care if it’s the right one or not.”

  “So then we’re agreed. We’ll keep helping Loretta, but only if she is willing to cooperate.”

  The man frowned, clearly wondering how things had reversed so quickly, and I marveled yet again just how charming my grandfather could be when he set his mind to it.

  “Yeah, I guess that just makes sense,” Steve said.

  “Hey, don’t let them off the hook that fast, okay? They were asking me if I killed Roy when you came out,” Loretta protested.

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said. “We just need to know if you spoke to him yesterday before he was murdered. If you did, perhaps he told you something that might help us, or maybe you noticed him talking to someone. That’s information we could use, too.”

  “I never said a word to the man in my life, and that’s the honest truth,” Loretta said as she broke eye contact with me. It was usually a pretty good indication that someone was lying to me, but this wasn’t the best time to call her on it.

  “What about the pictures we saw? You were standing pretty close to him in the one the police showed us,” I told her.

  Loretta looked pained to admit it when she said, “I lost my nerve at the last second, okay? He had that blasted cake in his hands, and I was three feet away from him. If I’d had any idea that it was poisoned, I would have knocked it to the ground right then, but who knows? It might have already been too late to do him any good.”

  “What do you mean?” Moose asked.

  “There was a bite already missing from it when I first saw him,” she said.

  “Think hard for a second, Loretta. Was that before he sat down, or after?” I asked.

  “It had to be before,” she said after a moment. “He was still walking around when I almost got my nerve up to approach him.” She looked as though she was ready to cry at any second by the admission, and really, who could blame her? She’d waited too long to meet her real father, and that hesitation had killed any chance she might have had to have a relationship with him.

  “It’s okay,” Steve said in a surprisingly gentle voice as he moved closer to Loretta. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I should have talked to him when I had the chance,” she said, her voice faltering a little as she said it. “Now I’ll never be able to introduce myself to him as his daughter.”

  “Is that all you need to know?” Steve asked as he looked at my grandfather. “Can’t you see that you’re upsetting her?”

  “We’re truly sorry for that,” Moose said, “but these questions need to b
e asked, if not by us, then by the police.”

  “Will you tell them that she didn’t do it? And if you do, what chance is there that they’ll believe you? This is tearing her up.” The hard man had gone soft around his girlfriend, and he was doing what he could to protect her.

  “It would be best if she told them that herself,” Moose said. “The sheriff’s looking for her, and the harder he has to search, the worse it’s going to be for everybody when he finally finds her.”

  “What do you suggest I do?” Loretta asked.

  “If it were me, I’d go straight to the police station in Jasper Fork and let him interview me there. As a matter of fact, I’ve been the center of one of his investigations before, and that’s exactly what I did,” I said.

  Steve seemed to look at me with new respect. “He actually accused you of murder?”

  “Not formally, but then again, I didn’t hide from him.”

  Steve appeared to consider that, and then he turned to Loretta. “I’m going to take off early. We need to go see this guy so we can get him off your back.”

  “I’m not going to the cops,” Loretta said fiercely. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “I’m on yours; you shouldn’t even have to ask,” Steve said. “Do you think I like this any better than you do? I’m sorry, but it sounds like this is the best choice we’ve got.”

  “I’ve got all those traffic and parking tickets,” Loretta protested. “He’s going to arrest me for them if I walk into the station no matter what.”

  “Can you do anything about that?” Steve asked me calmly. “It would really help if we could work that out beforehand. If this guy gives us his word that he won’t arrest Loretta for those tickets, can we believe him?”

  “You can. If he goes back on his word, you can take it up with me.”

  Steve thought about that, and then he said, “Go ahead, then. Call him.”