Key Lime Die: A Key West Culinary Cozy - Book 2

by Summer Prescott

  Juan appeared in the doorway. “Should I call the police or something?” he asked his brother uncertainly, having recovered from his encounter with the irate woman.

  “No Juan, this poor woman is just feeling desperate because her business is going under.” He arched an arrogant eyebrow at Marilyn, “it’s probably best just to pity her.”

  Marilyn astonished at the weasel’s audacity. With her free hand she grabbed a stack of papers that were sitting on his desk and threw them in the air. She then turned to Juan, who had observed her childish act and stood just inside the office with his mouth hanging open. “Don’t worry I was just leaving.”

  She walked around him and out of the office, then remembered the pie in her hand. She put it on a counter in the kitchen and opened the lid. Taking one of the forks that she’d brought with her out of her back pocket, she handed it to a beautiful young baker, who was blonde, with delicate features.

  “You’re Silvia,” Marilyn appraised the little homewrecker. She was making an educated guess as to the woman’s identity, based upon Cynthia’s description and the fact that she had met the other two girls already.

  “Well Silvia, now you can put a face to the name of the woman whose business you’re helping to destroy every time you concede to your…boss’s foul play. As a fellow baker I know you’ll understand why I insist that you try my pie. You can tell me honestly if you find it mediocre or if you notice its incredible resemblance to the new pie on your menu.”

  Silvia said nothing. There was something about the look in the young woman’s eyes that was beginning to make Marilyn feel slightly foolish.

  “I’m sorry,” Silvia put up her hand to signify that she would not be induced to eat one bite of the pie. “I don’t even know you,” she sniffed, looking at Marilyn as though she was a cockroach crawling about on one of the immaculate counters.

  “I’m Marilyn Hayes and my business is what inspired your best seller,” she snapped, out of patience with Joseph, his staff and the entire situation.

  Silvia nodded slightly as if she were beginning to understand something, but crossed her arms defiantly, looking at the fork that Marilyn was holding as though it might bite her.

  “Fine,” Marilyn said, placing the fork on the counter next to the pie. “You are a disgrace to the art and craft of baking. I really don’t know how you sleep at night.”

  She walked back to the front of the store where a line of customers stood gaping, having heard the unpleasant exchange. The twitch in her eye changed from the left side to the right, and she held her head high as she made her dignified exit.

  Deciding not to stop at her own shop, she headed straight home instead, where she could actually lie down and finally get some rest. The more she thought about what she had just done, the more upset she became that she hadn’t heeded her daughter’s advice. She should have just gone home like Tiara had suggested. She’d fought long and hard to build a reputation of honesty, integrity and dignity, and had potentially decimated it in one ill-planned confrontation.

  Chapter 7

  As tired as she was, Marilyn actually didn’t fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Instead, her exhaustion was negated by a powerful combination of adrenalin and agitation which kept her awake and made her even more irritable. After forty-five minutes of trying to keep her eyes closed and quiet her racing mind, she decided to just get up and make herself some coffee instead.

  Exhaling a long sigh, she sunk down onto a lounger, coffee in hand, temporarily savoring the thought that, on the bright side, if her business went under she would have much more time to lounge and drink coffee. Once she’d stopped drinking coffee for the morning she could easily switch to wine…

  “What am I going to do?” Marilyn whispered, gazing into her half-empty mug, utterly defeated.

  What was she going to do? If she really wanted to strike back at Joseph, her irrationally tired brain reasoned, she would need some sort of idea. She drained her coffee and went to the kitchen for a refill. Looking at an empty pie tin on her counter planted the seeds of an idea, and she accidently slopped some of her hot drink out of the mug.

  A pie - of course! She would make Joseph one of her famous pies and he wouldn’t be able to help himself, he’d have to try it. No one could resist the creamy, dreamy lusciousness of her artisan pies. Her hyperactive exhausted mind soon became obsessed with the details of her plot for revenge, the lack of sleep effectively removing any semblance of common sense.

  She would insure that the pie that she to delivered to her arch rival would be the worst thing he’d ever put in his mouth, giving him his own “bitter pill” to swallow, since he seemed to delight in tormenting her and trying to take away her livelihood and passion.

  She got out a bowl and started experimenting with noxious ingredients right away. She felt like a kid in a candy store, gleefully anticipating Joseph’s reaction, and having no clear concept of the immaturity of her actions. She mixed and poured, smelling things as she went, and finding perverse pleasure in the ever-increasing foulness of the mixture.

  Three hours later she finally put the finishing touches on the perfect “perfectly awful” pie that she planned to take to Joseph. Now with the pie actually created she would have to decide what to do with it. She wrote a cute little notecard telling the horrible man that she’d like him to accept the pie as a peace offering, put the pie in one of her special pie boxes and put the note on top of it.

  Even if she did nothing with the dreadful pie, which would most likely be the case once her rationality returned, it made her feel better to know that something vile that exemplified her feelings about Joseph Hernandez, was here in her kitchen. In fact, the more that she thought about the time and ingredients that she had just wasted, she felt a twinge of embarrassment at her juvenile behavior. As her caffeine and adrenalin high began to ebb, Marilyn’s exhaustion overwhelmed her once again, and she decided to attempt to get some sleep.

  The beyond-tired woman woke up hours later from a bad dream, in which she’d been a chicken, and almost all of the people in her life were farmers trying to throw her into a boiling pot. The intense grogginess caused by a night without sleep, and followed by a mid-afternoon nap, left her with eyes that couldn’t open all the way, a sullied a sense of direction even in her own home and a loss of balance that felt on par with a night of heavy drinking. Her plan, at the moment, was to stay awake for a few more hours, so that she’d be able to go to sleep for a full night’s rest, allowing her to be fresh and ready to go back to the shop in the morning.

  Marilyn walked into her kitchen for a large glass of water and a couple of tablets to tackle her throbbing headache and noticed that something didn’t seem quite right. When she surveyed the kitchen, still trying to shake the cobwebs from her brain, she remembered what it was, and went right for her phone to call Tiara.

  “Hey Mom, are you feeling better?” her daughter asked, sounding concerned.

  “Where are you right now?” Marilyn demanded without even bothering to answer the question.

  “I finished everything up at the shop so I decided to head out to a beach party with Jess and Stacy. I came over to borrow your turquoise and pink sweater, hope you don’t mind,” the young woman replied, puzzled at her mother’s tone.

  “What happened to the pie?” Marilyn asked, closing her eyes and taking in a deep, slow breath.

  “Jess and Stacey helped me drive them all over the island. We sold them at half price to seven different restaurants. It may not help much but at least it covers the cost of the ingredients.”

  “That’s great honey, thank you for that, but I meant what happened to the pie that was in my kitchen, on the counter?” Marilyn had a sinking feeling in her midsection.

  “Oh, I thought that was so nice of you—a really classy gesture. Way to go Mom, I’m proud of you,” Tiara praised her mother, who was feeling rather faint at the moment.

  “So, you have the pie?” she asked hopefully, fearing the worst.
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  “Nope, I delivered it for you,” she could almost hear the smile in her daughter’s voice.

  “Oh,” Marilyn said, panicking a bit. She hadn’t realized until just that moment that she’d never actually planned on going through with her immature idea for revenge. As much as she wanted him to eat something that tasted horrendous, she fully realized that such an action was beneath her and would ultimately only provoke her enemy profoundly.

  “Joseph’s shop was closed up for the night but there was still a light on, so I knocked and gave him the pie when he answered the door. Who knows, maybe if we continue to act like mature adults, even in the face of his treachery, he’ll feel bad about his behavior and will follow our rational example,” Tiara said, her voice filled with hope and optimism.

  “That’s a good thought honey, thanks for helping out.” Marilyn didn’t have the heart to tell her daughter what had really just happened. She hoped against hope that Joseph wouldn’t actually touch the pie, that maybe he’d just read the note, have a moment of smug satisfaction, and dump the horrible thing in the trash.

  Chapter 8

  It was another beautifully balmy day on the island when Marilyn ventured from her bungalow on Sunday morning. Fortunately, Tiara would be opening the shop, because her mother had some unfinished business to take care of. She’d spent most of the night tossing and turning restlessly in her bed, haunted by a remorseful heart. She should never have let things get so out of hand. Joseph Hernandez was no prize of a man, but she was more than ashamed to have let herself sink to his level.

  Marilyn tried to think of the right words to say. She’d tried earlier to practice a full apology to the mirror, but couldn’t seem to get past a simple, “Joseph, I would like to apologize…” Her major problem was that every time she pictured the wretched man in her mind, the impulse to give him another one of her “special recipe” pies gripped her with a vengeance. She knew she had responded to his actions inappropriately, but she was still furious with him for trying to destroy the business that she’d worked so hard to build.

  Maybe a simple “I’m sorry” would be enough. If it hadn’t been opened she could take back the pie and leave. She held on to the hope that he’d probably thrown the whole thing away. She would definitely be suspicious enough to never eat a pie made at his establishment if she knew that it had been made “just for her.” Hopefully, after Joseph had seen her paper-throwing tantrum, he’d have the common sense to be equally suspicious of her “peace offering.”

  “Ugh,” she said aloud, on her walk to Joseph’s Piece of the Pie. “I really don’t want to do this,” she mused, just picturing the smug look of satisfaction with which her apology would be received.

  As she passed by her beloved SubLime Sweets, she peeked through the large front windows, moving quickly enough that she wouldn’t be noticed and saw Tiara with a streak of pastry flour on her forehead. Her lovely daughter looked far more like a hired model who was on the set of a movie, pretending to bake, rather than the actual nose-to-the-grindstone responsible young woman that she was.

  Marilyn looked longingly at the door to her shop and lingered in front of it for a few minutes, trying to rationalize delaying her apology. What harm would it do if she waited a few more hours to talk to Joseph? She could go after lunch, or even just write a note. Maybe an email would suffice? She could just say that she had accidentally used expired ingredients, so that he shouldn’t eat the pie. That would be far easier to manage than a face-to-face apology to the man who seemed to take particular joy in her distress.

  Tiara glanced up catching her mother, standing in front of the door, staring at the sidewalk, quite obviously lost in thought. Marilyn made a face, remembering her ridiculous behavior from the day before, then continued to trudge reluctantly to Joseph’s store to face the music. She had suffered throughout the night and all this morning, and refused to allow herself to back out of doing what was right, whether it was difficult or not. She was an adult, and, like it or not, it was high time she started acting like one.

  Walking more and more slowly as she neared Joseph’s shop, Marilyn realized that she’d been so caught up in her thoughts, that she hadn’t noticed the swarm of police cars surrounding the establishment. She’d heard no sirens, here or in the distance, and hoped that the lack of urgency meant that whatever was going on at Joseph’s Piece of the Pie wasn’t too serious.

  Walking the rest of the way warily, trying to see what was going on, she noticed the familiar handsome face, strong shoulders, and instantly arresting presence of Detective Bernard Cortland, whom she’d come to know when he was investigating a murder that happened in her shop, standing out among the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. She picked up her pace a bit, weaving her way through the clusters of people to see what she could find out.

  As Marilyn approached the scene, she’d made a quick mental list of the most likely causes of an early morning visit by the police. First on her list was a kitchen fire, but there were no fire trucks, so she could scratch that possibility off. A gas leak would be second on the list, or perhaps a break in. It could’ve been an injury caused by knife accident, those were known to happen in every kitchen, but there was no ambulance, so that didn’t really make sense.

  “Bernard, what happened?” she asked, tapping the mountain of a man on the shoulder.

  “We meet again,” a voice came from behind Bernard. Marilyn cringed to see the ever-suspicious gaze of Detective Angus McNabe, a special investigator from Miami.

  “What brings you here?” her question was polite, but her smile was brittle. The detective had suspected Tiara of the murder that had been committed several months ago, by a new baker in her shop, and had been on Marilyn’s list of “least favorite” people ever since.

  “I might ask you the same thing. I was told that you made a special trip over here yesterday, and that it was a rather unpleasant experience for all involved,” he quirked an eyebrow at her with curiosity and disapproval.

  Marilyn couldn’t bring herself to look at either of the men, sure that they’d heard an unfairly biased version of the truth regarding her tantrum in Joseph’s office, which almost certainly didn’t cast her in a very positive light.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you some questions, Ms. Hayes,” McNabe continued, eyes narrowed.

  Marilyn could feel the blood drain from her face. “Questions? Why? What’s going on?”

  “Joseph Hernandez was found dead this morning,” Bernard answered gravely.

  Chapter 9

  “Dead?” Marilyn was suddenly unsteady on her feet. “But, how? What did he die of?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Anaphylaxis. He ate something last night and had a severe allergic reaction,” Investigator McNabe made the explanation sound accusatory.

  “Oh, how awful!” she exclaimed, feeling rather faint.

  “Do you recognize this?” the Investigator held up a pink notecard with Marilyn’s finely looped handwriting on it.

  “Of course I recognize it…why?” Marilyn looked to Bernard then back to McNabe. “What does my notecard have to do with anything?” she was mystified.

  “It would seem that Mr. Hernandez’s reaction was to a combination of ingredients in the pie that you made for him,” McNabe informed her.

  Marilyn blanched, feeling weak and nauseated, and felt her heart pounding a mile a minute. How could this have happened? She looked with dismay and utter shock at the note she’d written only yesterday.

  “Oh no, how could this happen?” tears filled her eyes. “I killed Joseph Hernandez,” she whispered in a shaky voice, bordering on hysteria. Marilyn swayed unsteadily, then fell into a dead faint, swimming up to consciousness only a few minutes later and seeing Bernard Cortland’s face hovering, concerned, over her own.

  “I’m so sorry,” Marilyn murmured, clearly in shock.

  “Let me help you sit up,” the detective directed. “Are you feeling okay?” He asked, gingerly guiding her
to a sitting position. “Do you need medical attention?” Marilyn slowly shook her head from side to side, too numb to reply.

  “Marilyn, I want you to listen to me carefully, this is important, okay?” he asked, still examining her closely. She nodded. “Do you remember what you just told Detective McNabe?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled, and her heart raced again, as she remembered the reason that she had fainted in the first place. She looked around wildly, suddenly overwhelmed by the flashing lights, crowds of people, and the enormity of her situation.

  “Okay,” Cortland nodded and sighed.

  “So, why is Detective McNabe here?” she asked.

  “That’s not something that I’m able to discuss with you,” Bernard replied.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Marilyn sighed, speaking more to herself than to the detective.

  “McNabe is questioning the employees right now. My suggestion would be to head home and wait until he contacts you,” Cortland advised.

  Marilyn looked in the front window of the shop and saw the detective seated at one of the tables talking with Rude Rachel, and Silvia, the pretty blonde who had refused to taste her pie, waited, looking uncomfortable, at a table nearby. She frowned and spoke slowly, remembering.

  “Cynthia Hernandez came to see me a little while ago, and something about the way that she spoke of Silvia made me think that she and Joseph might be having an affair,” she offered, thinking that the information might be helpful.

  “I’ll be interviewing Cynthia this afternoon,” the detective replied, giving nothing away.

  “I would imagine that both Rachel and Silvia are saying some pretty terrible things about me, we haven’t exactly had pleasant interactions with each other,” Marilyn sighed and laid her head in her palm, remembering the spat that she’d had with Rachel when she went to her house to talk to her mother, and the scathing look that she’d received from Silvia when she’d tried to force her pie upon the young baker.