A Berry Murderous Kitten: A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 2)

by A. R. Winters

  “I just wanted you to know that I’m here now,” Max continued. “Anything that Zoey needs, I’m going to be there for her, even if she’s not ready to forgive me yet.”

  It was sounding like Max had been sipping some of Maryann’s optimism juice. I wasn’t sure that Zoey was going to forgive him—ever. “Max—” I started to say something to temper his hopes, to keep him realistic in his expectations. I didn’t want him making assumptions about Zoey’s affections. She didn’t need that from him. But he cut me off.

  “I know that you’re a good friend and that you want the best for her, and that’s why I know that you’ll step aside so that I can be the one she leans on.”

  Wait. What?

  He went on. “I’ve interviewed several criminal lawyers, and I’ve found the one who can make sure that our girl gets to keep her freedom. A lot of expenses ahead, but I can take care of that for her.”

  And I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure how he knew that I couldn’t, but I could feel it in my bones. He knew what a precarious situation I was in with the café and all the rest. I was barely staying afloat. Today’s outing was going to be a huge and painfully expensive splurge for me. There was no way that I could help Zoey with legal fees. If Max could help her as much as he said, maybe I was doing a disservice to her by getting in their way of a reconciliation.

  Hold up. That wasn’t right. I felt like palming my forehead. What was I thinking? Zoey hadn’t been arrested, and she didn’t have any legal fees. Furthermore, she wasn’t going to have any legal fees. We were going to solve the crime and catch the killer. Yes, so I’d been sipping on Maryann’s optimism juice after all, but Zoey was going to be fine. While it was true she was a person of interest, I had been too. That had turned out okay, and so would this.

  “Your offer’s real nice, Max, but Zoey won’t be needing a lawyer.”

  Max looked stunned. “Why not?”

  “Because she’s innocent.”

  Max smirked. “My little firecracker has a vicious temper. I’m sure that it won’t take much digging for the police to figure that out.”

  I didn’t smirk. “I don’t know… you’re still alive. She doesn’t seem overly vicious to me.”

  His smug look fell away. He took a sip of his coffee, no doubt composing his comeback. When he hit me with it, I felt the jab. “Just like Rachel Summers is alive?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “I know that’s what you keep saying. It’s what everybody says… well, it’s what most people say. There are those who have their doubts.”

  “What’s that got to do with Zoey?”

  “What it has to do with her is that you are interfering with my ability to take care of my girl. She needs help that she can’t get from you. She needs a professional. She brutally beat a man and now that man is dead.”

  “Brutally? I saw Cam get up and walk away.” Stumble… walk. Potayto… potahto. It all added up to the same thing. “Zoey had nothing to do with Cam’s death.”

  “And how would you know?” Max challenged.

  I leaned forward with both hands flat on the counter. “Because I watched him die.”

  The color drained out of Max’s face. “Y-you did kill Rachel Summers, and now you’ve killed Cam. Kylie, this is serious. The police think that Zoey did it.” He grabbed one of my hands. “If you care about her at all, you have to turn yourself in.”

  I jerked my hand away. This conversation had not gone the direction I had hoped. “I didn’t kill Cam,” I hissed under my breath. “I didn’t. Zoey didn’t. And we are this close to figuring out who the killer is.” I held up my hand up with my thumb and forefinger close together.

  Max stood and picked up his coffee, preparing to move to his usual table on the far side of the café. “You’re hurting Zoey by getting in the way of me taking care of her. These antics of yours might have worked once to get you off the hook for murder, but you’re leading my girl down a path that could get her hurt. She deserves better than that, Kylie. A lot better. And that’s what I’m offering. Don’t be selfish. This is the rest of her life we’re talking about, not some idiotic game. Be smart about this, Kylie, and let me take care of my girl.”

  Chapter 15

  I stewed for hours, long after Max had already left. His words echoed in my head. I couldn’t get them to shut up. I couldn’t be hurting Zoey by trying to help her. That certainly wasn’t my intent. Of course, the road to you-know-where was paved with just that—lots and lots of good intentions.

  When Melanie, my other wait staff, arrived, I left all service activities to her and Sam and focused on cleaning and anything else I could do to prepare for the upcoming inspection. I considered canceling my hair appointment, and I considered canceling on Zoey. But doing either one of those things felt wrong. So instead I opted to soldier on. I’d put one foot in front of the other and then I’d do it again and again. But that might have been Maryann’s optimism juice talking. Regardless, I was moving forward. There wasn’t anything else to do.

  TWO HOURS LATER I was opening the door of the little salon on Brunt Street that Max had told me about. It was called Susie’s Clip & Dye. I stepped in to find it empty, something I would have never seen in Chicago. There were three barber chairs and three chairs positioned around a low coffee table, set up as a waiting area. The place was clean and smelled of patchouli with the hint of ammonia. There was no one around.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “Be right there!” a woman’s voice floated out from a room at the back. She appeared a moment later. She had silky brown hair with warm gold highlights in a messy updo, and she wore rectangular librarian glasses halfway down her nose. She was a very attractive late-thirtysomething. She was dressed in capri pants and sandals despite the wintry weather outside, and she had on a black peasant blouse with white polka dots, pulled off her shoulders. “Well, hi there,” she said with a thick accent. “I’m Susie. Are you Kylie?”

  I started to say yes but stumbled on the word when the woman stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes got wide and she stared.

  “I had nothing to do with Rachel Summers’ death, I swear.”

  “Ohhh myyyy gosh! You’re Kylie! Dan’s Kylie!”

  This was worse than her thinking I’d killed Rachel. “You know Dan?”

  She closed the distance between us, led me by the arm, and sat me in the nearest barber’s chair. “Did I know him?” she laughed. “Dan and I were the ‘it’ couple all through high school. When we broke up our senior year, child, even the teachers were crying.” She ran her fingers through my hair from the bottom up as she talked. “Honey, is this natural? You don’t dye this, do you? It’s some of the prettiest red hair I’ve ever seen. Seeing you in all those pictures, I always figured it was colored.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Facebook. Dan and me got back in touch with each other about five or six years ago.”

  I couldn’t stop myself, and I craned around in my seat. “You slept with him?” If she said yes, so help me, she was getting the Zoey treatment.

  “Oh no, honey. Well… we flirted a little, but you can’t do too much cheating over the computer.”

  I sat back in my chair. My head was spinning, and I felt the stab of Dan’s betrayal all over again.

  “Look at that little picture right there stuck into the side of my mirror,” Susie said. There was a new note in her voice. Affection. It hadn’t been there when she’d been talking about Dan, and the stabbing pain eased to a resentful ache.

  I looked where Susie had told me to. There, staring back at me, was the image of a man who looked like a cross between Grizzly Adams and George Clooney. He had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen.

  “That’s my honey,” Susie said, her voice full of adoration.

  “So you and Dan didn’t, uh, reconnect the old-fashioned way?”

  Susie laughed. “Lord, no. It was fun to see how he was doin’ and what he was up to, but that was as far as it went. We’d reminis
ce about the old times sometimes, but I like today better.”

  I felt myself relax. Susie’s hands running through my hair helped a lot. If she kept that up, I’d be lulled into falling asleep.

  “You will look fabulous in before and after pictures. I can tell you haven’t been trimmed in a while. You still up for it? Everything’s on the house if you are.”

  And those were the magic words. “I’m in!” I wondered if I might walk out bald if she decided to exact some secret revenge on me for marrying Dan, but getting a nice cut and highlights was worth the risk. There was no telling how long it would be before I could afford to pay for the service myself.

  We talked as she got to work. She took pictures from all four sides. Then she mixed up a color concoction and swabbed select strands of hair before wrapping them in tinfoil. She offered me a soda while we waited for the timer to go off on the highlights and fed me peanut butter and cheese crackers. How such a simple thing could taste so good, I didn’t know, but it got me wondering if I could work them into a dish to serve at the café. Sooner or later I’d need to work up a signature dish that the café—and I—would be known for. Getting known for something you do well was important. Reputation was the best kind of advertising there was, at least if that reputation was good. Right now I had a reputation of serving food that you might or might not be able to stomach eating. I did think that the Oops board was gaining a fan base, though. People were starting to come in just for the curiosity of it.

  “You took over Sarah’s Eatery, didn’t you?” Susie asked.

  “Uh huh.” I tried not to crumble cheese cracker on my shirt as I stuffed my face.

  “Was it hard? I mean, him ending the marriage like that, was it hard?” Her face was twisted up in sympathy.

  I choked and coughed on the cracker and had to grab my drink. “He broke up with me?” I finally managed to splutter. I could barely believe my ears.

  “Well that’s how he’s tellin’ it, all over Facebook. Is that not what happened?”

  “No!” That egotistical maniac.

  “He’s been vague on the details, but he’s been sayin’ you were mentally unstable, that you went on wild spending sprees spending tens of thousands on a whim, and that at the end he had feared for his life.”

  “The man could bench press me! What was he feeling afraid about? Did he think I would tickle him to death?”

  She looked embarrassed. “He said something about waking up to you standing over him with a pair of scissors.”

  Heat flushed my face. I didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that I was as red as a beet. “I needed him to cut the tag off a new dress.” Great… I’d just confirmed two of his complaints—fear of death by sheers and out of control spending. Neither incident was being portrayed accurately. He was taking our past and distorting it to suit his purposes. “Let me ask you: why did you two split up?”

  “He slept with the cheerleading squad and two of the teachers. That boy gave me gonorrhea. I wouldn’t have found out if it hadn’t been for that. We’d popped each other’s cherries, so I know it hadn’t started with either one of us. Then he tried to tell me he caught it from a toilet seat. I told him I wanted to know just what he’d been doin’ with that toilet seat.”

  A fine example of how history repeats itself. “Well, I don’t know of any teachers this time, but I do think that there might have been a whole cheerleading squad.”

  “So he hasn’t changed a bit then. Still whorin’ around. I’m sorry, honey. You came along almost ten years after he and I had split up. I’d hoped he’d gotten done with sewing his oats. I hate that he did ya that way.”

  I thought for a moment. Susie was a potential fountain of information about someone I had thought I’d known well but hadn’t. Time to dip my toes. “Was he greedy back then?”

  “Ohhh, he was tight with a dollar. God help him if anybody knew it, though. It was real, real important to him that everybody thought he was generous.”

  So, Dan was basically the same person he’d been in high school, albeit maybe a little smoother at hiding it. “When I started seeing him for who he was, I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind to it all. Made me wonder what was wrong with me to have missed it.”

  Susie patted my hand. “You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve heard those words come out of the mouths of other women about their own Dans. Honey, you are not alone.”

  The timer went off. Susie rinsed my hair and gave me a scalp massage that nearly had me purring. Then it was on to the trim. When it was all done, I looked like a new me, and I felt like I had a new friend. I’d like to think that I ran into Dan’s high school sweetheart because it was a small world, but truth was that it was a small town. The coincidence of Max sending me here blew my mind.

  I stood and posed for the after part of the before and after photos. My smile was big, and my inner confidence was high. Yet a thought I couldn’t put my finger on was niggling at the insides of my head. I was pretty sure that it had something to do with Zoey’s newly corporeal ex-boyfriend, but I didn’t know what. “Do you know Max, um”—I snapped my fingers, trying to remember—“Max Jones?” I asked as I turned for a side shot.

  “Kind of muscular fella? Looks like he played college football or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah! He came in for a trim a couple of days back. This whole before and after thing was actually his idea. He said he knew how hard it was for a small business to generate buzz and recommended using local people—people others living here could relate to—as the subjects in a before and after campaign. Well, I thought the idea was brilliant. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it myself.”

  A cold chill ran up my spine. Max the Manipulator had struck again… but why? Had he known about mine and Susie’s shared history?

  “Susie, are you very active on Facebook?”

  “Oh yeah! It’s been the best way for me to get the word out there about my shop. Anytime I’m running a special, that’s where I announce it.”

  “And where are you planning on displaying my before and after photos?”

  “On there, Facebook. Oh, and I’ve got a Twitter account, and Instagram’s done good for me, too.”

  My stomach dropped. “And are you friends with Dan on Facebook? Does he follow you on Twitter and Instagram?”

  “Not sure about Twitter and Instagram, but we are friends on Facebook.”

  I wanted to put my head between my knees and hyperventilate. I’d tried to separate myself from everything-Dan, and here I was posing for beauty pictures that he was going to see. The narcissistic fathead would think I’d done it all because of him. Because I missed him.

  I was going to be sick.

  But there was more to this. I knew there was. “The others on Facebook, how many of them know about your history with Dan?”

  Susie guffawed. “Only eight to nine hundred of them. I’m tellin’ ya, we were the ‘it’ couple Everybody knew we were together, everyone from our high school days.”

  “Is Max friends with you on Facebook?”

  “Mmmm, don’t think so.”

  I knew that didn’t mean much. I’d watched the movie Catfish. Max could have a fake account. He could be on there as anybody, snooping to figuring out how to mess with me, distract me.

  A blinding flash of light went off inside my head, incinerating all other thoughts. “The health inspector!”

  “What?”

  “That… that… piece of…useless…” I stammered, fighting to find words through my rage. I took a deep breath. “Turns out Dan’s got competition for the number one conniving dirtbag of the year.” Max had set me up to meet Susie. And he’d called the health inspector, I was certain. He wanted me preoccupied and out of the picture so that he could have Zoey’s undivided attention without her handy dandy backup nearby. He wanted to isolate Zoey from the other people in her life who would support her. I knew this tune. Dan had played it for years. If I wanted to spend time with other people,
if I got a friend, I was being selfish. Self-centered. Neglecting him.

  By the time we split up, I literally had had no one but him in my life. And when I didn’t have him anymore, I had nothing. He’d seen to that. I wouldn’t let Max do Zoey the same way.

  His wooing strategies were about to backfire. Zoey was going to hear about this, and my guess was that Max was going to be on the receiving end of her famous temper after all.

  Chapter 16

  Zoey pulled up to the curb of Susie’s Clip & Dye, and I piled myself into the passenger side. I felt flustered, but I didn’t want to dump all my new discoveries on Zoey all at once. Some things were better eased into.

  “Lemme see,” Zoey said, and I pivoted in the seat, turning this way and that, so that she could see the new do. After doing the color and cut, Susie had given me a blowout. I looked ready to star in a music video. “Nice.”

  “At least she was able to get some good before and after shots. My hair had been way past due for some TLC.”

  “It had been looking pretty ratty, but you hid it well.” Zoey put the car into drive, and I snapped my seat buckle into place around me. “I was able to dig up some info on Jared, the guy who Cam had had a big fight with at Bouche. He drives a blue Toyota four-door with a dent in the front fender. Works at the crayon factory. Isn’t married. And lives in Wilmington Heights.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s a little subdivision, or part of one. The builders ran out of money before they finished it, so it’s mostly a bunch of winding roads with sectioned off housing lots but with only a few houses built here and there. Plus a bunch of partially built homes. Looks a little like a house graveyard.”

  We went by the factory first. It was a sixteen-hour type of place, running two shifts back to back. Zoey drove up and down the rows of parked cars. No blue Toyota with a dent in the front fender.