The Cakes of Wrath (A Piece of Cake Mystery)

by Brady, Jacklyn

  Miss Frankie isn’t one to leave bad feelings unresolved, so I expected her to come after me and insist that we talk. When an hour passed, and there was no sign of her, it was clear she wasn’t going to come, and that spoke more strongly about how she felt than anything else could have. Well, so what if she was angry with me—I was angry with her, too, so I guess we were even. Maybe I owed her an apology for flying off the handle, but I still couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to bring Edie’s parents to town.

  Eventually, I called a cab to take me home. I expected Miss Frankie to stop me from leaving, but she didn’t even make an appearance as I limped back down the stairs and out the door. I knew the ball was in my court now, both in my relationship with Miss Frankie and the battle over Edie’s right to live her own life. The trouble was, I didn’t know which play to make, or how to run it once I made up my mind. I only knew I didn’t have much time to waste.

  Twenty-nine

  First things first. The moment the cab driver dropped me at home, I took off that dreadful pink jogging suit and changed into a pair of sweatpants, a strapless bra with a front closure that I could actually fasten without hurting my shoulder too much, and a soft cotton shirt that buttoned down the front. Getting dressed was a chore but I felt more human once I was wearing my own clothes. That led me to try brushing my hair, which proved to be more problematic. I gave up after a few minutes, secured the tangled mess with a clip, and called it good enough.

  I still didn’t know what I was going to do about Miss Frankie, but I couldn’t just sit back and let Edie get blindsided by her parents. I had to tell her they were in town, but I didn’t know how to do that without making her angry. I decided I could use some advice, so I turned to the wisest person I know—my aunt Yolanda. To my dismay, the call went straight to voice mail. I left a message and hung up but by that time all the exertion had wiped me out. I put the phone on the nightstand so I could hear it if it rang, and lay back on the bed. It was only noon, so I figured Edie would still be at work for at least five more hours—I thought Miss Frankie would wait for me to apologize before contacting Edie herself, which meant that I could close my eyes for a few minutes and still have plenty of time to talk with Edie today. I just needed five minutes. Maybe ten. Then I’d go to Zydeco and start cleaning up the mess Miss Frankie had created.

  I woke up sometime later to the sound of someone banging on my door. Late afternoon shadows bathed my bedroom, which meant I’d been asleep for hours. I was so groggy, I completely forgot about my shoulder until I sat up. When I did, I remembered my injury in a hurry. Cradling my arm to keep my shoulder from moving again, I began the laborious process of making my way down the stairs.

  The banging sounded so insistent, I figured Detective Winslow must have tracked me down. I just knew there would be hell to pay for leaving the hospital before he got there.

  Bang, bang, bang! “Rita? Are you in there?”

  I recognized Edie’s voice and I was both relieved and worried at the same time. Relieved because it wasn’t Winslow—yet. Worried because this had to mean I was too late. Miss Frankie had gotten to her first, and now she was here to . . . to do what?

  Quit?

  Probably.

  I rubbed my face and tried to clear my head. Maybe I could talk her out of doing something rash, but if I hoped to do that, I’d need to think. My brain felt as if it was misfiring badly.

  Bang, bang, bang! “Rita! Come on. Open the door!”

  I pulled in a calming breath and took the last four steps as quickly as I dared. I flipped the locks and opened the door to Edie. She stood on the porch, her eyes wild and her face so pinched with emotion the resemblance to her mother hit me between the eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Edie brushed past me into the house, looked around for something, and then lunged for the switch on the wall. The lights came on and she turned to get a good look at me. “I’ve been worried sick. We’ve been calling you for hours. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  I was still muddled, so I had trouble following her. “You . . . Wait. What?”

  “I was up half the night waiting to hear something from the hospital,” she said. “Nobody there would tell me anything. And then this morning, Ox said Miss Frankie had taken you to her house.” She put a large baking dish covered with foil on the coffee table and then shooed me toward the couch, talking a mile a minute while she helped me sit and put my feet up. “We figured everything was okay, but when Ox called Miss Frankie’s to talk to you, she said you weren’t there. What the hell are you doing here by yourself?”

  Edie was concerned about me? That must mean she didn’t know about her parents . . . but was that good or bad? At least she wasn’t angry—yet. But now I had to tell her, and that wasn’t going to be easy.

  My heart started beating faster and my throat grew tight and dry. “You’re here to check up on me?”

  “Of course.” She plumped a pillow and wedged it carefully behind my shoulder. “How’s that? Does that feel all right?”

  I nodded. “I’m really okay,” I said. “I should have called. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you should have.” She picked up the baking dish and turned toward the kitchen. “Don’t move. I brought dinner. And just so you know, I’m staying the night.” My confusion must have been evident because she waved toward the front door and explained, “My bag is out in the car. I’ll get it after we eat.”

  “You don’t have to stay with me,” I said automatically.

  She gave me her mother’s face again. “You are not staying alone. It’s either me or Ox and Isabeau. Or Sparkle. They all offered to come over—if you don’t want me, I’ll call one of them.”

  I held up both hands as far as I could without wincing. “Okay, okay. I give. There’s no need to call anyone else.”

  She gave me a satisfied smile and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving behind a whiff of something from inside that dish that I couldn’t identify. I thought about following her into the kitchen, but two things stopped me. One, I was surprisingly comfortable where I was, and two, a few minutes alone would buy me time to think.

  Edie rattled around in the kitchen for a while and then reappeared with a plate containing a lump of overcooked meat, a mound of greens, and another of rice riddled with flecks of green onion. “It’s not much,” she said as she handed me the plate. “But it’s what I had on hand.”

  “You cooked?”

  She gave me a stern look. “Don’t laugh. I’m trying to eat healthy for the baby.”

  And this was how she did it? Interesting. She went back to the kitchen and I got busy trying to figure out what she was serving me. Edie and I met at pastry school, but baking was not her forte. Apparently, cooking wasn’t either. I picked at the meat and decided it must be pork, extremely well done. The fried rice was easy to figure out, but the greens gave me a bit more trouble. The leaves were flat and dull, so I ruled out kale. I took a sniff and crossed spinach and beet greens off the list. That left collard or mustard greens as possibilities.

  I’m not a big fan of bitter greens, even when they’re prepared well, but I can eat them if they’re done up right like they are at Rubio’s. These were not. I just knew I’d have trouble choking down the limp pile of dull leaves on my plate, but I didn’t want to offend Edie before I told her about her parents. I’d just have to take one for the team.

  While I was giving myself a pep talk, Edie came back from the kitchen with her plate so I did my best to look enthusiastic about the meal in front of me. “This is really nice of you,” I said, forking up a bite of the meat. “How did things go at work today?”

  “Everything went fine,” Edie said as she settled into a chair facing the couch. “What did the doctor tell you?”

  “A few bruises,” I said. “Nothing serious. I’ll be back to normal in a couple of days.” I chewed. And chewed. And chewed that dry, tasteless piece of pork. If Edie was still speaking to me after tonight, ma
ybe I’d offer to give her some cooking lessons—for the baby’s sake.

  “I didn’t get a chance to ask you last night. Did you notice anybody in the alley when you came back?”

  Edie looked at me strangely as she ate some rice. “But you did ask. You don’t remember?”

  “It’s kind of a blur,” I admitted. “What was your answer?”

  “I’ve thought and thought about it, but I didn’t see anybody at all. You don’t have any idea who did this to you?”

  “Oh, I have an idea,” I said. “I just don’t have any proof. I’m pretty sure it was Scotty Justus.”

  Edie stopped chewing. “Why would he hit you?”

  “I think he killed Destiny. He knows I suspect him and he’s trying to shut me up.”

  “Why would he kill his own daughter?”

  “I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” I admitted. “I know that he was fed up with her drug use and I know their relationship was strained.” But even I had to admit that as motives go, those were weak. “Maybe he didn’t want her to turn in her drug dealer,” I said. And then a new thought occurred to me. “Maybe he was supplying her with drugs. He was a shrimper for a long time. Maybe that was just a cover for drug running. Anyway, tomorrow I want to talk to everybody I can. Someone must have seen Scotty last night.”

  “Well, I’m sure someone did,” Edie said. “He’s there every day. What you need is to find somebody who saw him coming after you with a weapon.” She put her fork on her plate and shook her head slowly. “What you really need is to step back and let the police do their job. I mean, it’s obvious that you’re making someone nervous. If you keep digging, they’ll strike again and you might not be able to walk away next time.”

  She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t thought of myself, but hearing it still sent a shiver of apprehension up my spine. “I’d be happy to step back if the police would actually do their jobs,” I said. “Detective Winslow is apparently trying to pin Destiny’s murder on me. If I want to keep myself out of prison, I can’t wait for someone else to look into it.”

  Edie rolled her eyes. “You won’t go to prison, and you can’t undo dead.”

  “You don’t know I won’t be arrested,” I said. “You haven’t seen how Detective Winslow acts. I don’t have an alibi, and I can’t prove that I didn’t wig out and kill Destiny.”

  “He can’t prove you did,” Edie reasoned. “Please don’t keep putting yourself in danger. It’s freaky enough just knowing that someone dangerous is on the loose.”

  “I’ll be as careful as I can,” I promised, “but I can’t just sit around and wait. What time did the attack happen anyway? I’m a little fuzzy on some of the details.”

  She let out a resigned sigh. “We left Zydeco at around seven, so if you factor in the time it took us to walk there and our . . . conversation, I’d say maybe seven fifteen.”

  “Who was still at work then? Second Chances would have been open, right? And the Chopper Shop.”

  “The drugstore and EZ Shipping are both open until nine,” Edie said. “And I saw lights at the Feathered Peacock. Zora must have had a late class going on.” She pulled a small notebook from her bag and started making a list. “To give to the police,” she said.

  Over the next few minutes, we came up with half a dozen other possible witnesses, including Felix and Lorena from the market on the corner, anyone working at Paolo’s Pizza, and the crew at Rubio’s Ribs. It would take weeks to work through the list in my spare time. I’d just have to focus on the likeliest witnesses first.

  I’d toyed with my food while we talked, but once the list was complete, I had a hard time hiding my lack of enthusiasm. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one.

  Edie ate another bite of rice and made a face. “This is horrible, isn’t it?”

  I laughed. “It’s a valiant effort.”

  “My poor baby is doomed,” she said, setting her plate on the coffee table. “I’ve been reading all this literature about what to feed it, what I’m supposed to eat while I’m pregnant, and what I’m supposed to avoid. No caffeine, limit the fish, watch out for mercury. No deli meats, no soft cheeses, no smoked seafood . . . And that’s just for now. After the baby’s born, there are a million things to remember, and I can’t even cook one edible dinner. I can’t feed the baby cake for every meal.” She buried her face in her hands and wailed, “What am I doing, Rita? Am I making a mistake?”

  This was so unlike the Edie I’d known since pastry school, I didn’t know what to think. Even if I’d been able to think clearly, I was in way over my head. I wasn’t qualified to give the kind of advice she wanted, so I decided to start with what I knew. “Cooking isn’t that hard,” I said. “It’s definitely something we can work on.”

  She picked up a lump of green with her fork and shook it at me. “This was supposed to be simple, and I ruined it.”

  “It just takes practice,” I told her. “Relax. You don’t have to be a superwoman. There’s no rule that says you have to make everything your baby eats from scratch.”

  “Oh, yes there is,” she cried. “There are rules about everything! About breastfeeding and what kind of diapers to use and what kind of wipes are bad for the baby. Then there are bottles and car seats, and pacifiers, and . . . Really, Rita, what am I doing?”

  “Right now, I’d say you’re panicking, but try not to do that,” I said gently. “You still have almost four months to go. There’s time. And you’re going to be a good mother, Edie. I’m sure there’s a lot to figure out, but you’ll get there. If anybody can wade through all the rules and make sense of them, you can.”

  She sighed heavily and sank down in the chair, kicking her feet out in front of her and staring at the small mound of her stomach. “Thanks, but what if I go into labor early? Sure, I’m usually good with rules and things, but in this case I’m not so sure I agree with you. I’m really starting to wonder if I can do this on my own.”

  I sat forward a little too quickly and pain tore up my shoulder again. I did my best to ignore it. I didn’t want Edie to start worrying about me again. She had troubles enough of her own. “Are you really having second thoughts about the baby, or are you just having a bad day?”

  She shook her head slowly. Maybe even a little uncertainly. “I don’t think so. I want the baby, but I’m scared out of my mind. What if I screw it up? What if I . . . I don’t know. What if I do something wrong?”

  “Is that what you’re worried about? That you might make a mistake?”

  “A mistake? No. A million of them? Yes.” She sighed again and looked up at the ceiling. “I mean, it’s not like I’m bringing home a houseplant. We’re talking about a human being here. I could ruin its life.”

  Clearly, she was freaking out. Maybe I was just being a coward, but I couldn’t justify adding another problem to her list right then. I scratched “Tell Edie about her parents” off my mental list of things to do and rescheduled it for later. Like tomorrow morning.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess you could ruin the baby’s life, but I don’t think you will.”

  She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Oh. Okay. That makes me feel so much better.”

  “Hey, I’m doing my best here,” I said with a laugh. “Remember, this is all new to me, too.” I put my plate on the coffee table and said, “You’ll feel better if you eat—but not this. Let’s order in. I’ll buy. What sounds good?”

  Edie rolled her head across the back of her chair. “I don’t know. What can I eat that won’t stunt the baby’s growth? Ooh! I know! Pizza!” She produced an industrial-sized bottle of antacid tablets from her bag. “I would kill for a slice of extra cheese, pineapple, and green olives.”

  “Weird. You can get that combination on your half. I’ll have pepperoni.” I felt around for my phone and realized I’d left it upstairs. “Do you have your cell handy? Mine’s in my bedroom.”

  She nodded and pulled her phone out of her pocket, but she checked the screen before she handed it ov
er, and that tight, bitter expression she’d inherited from her mother was back. “You have got to be kidding me. My mother hasn’t spoken to me in three months. Now she’s calling every hour on the hour. She called half a dozen times this afternoon and here’s another missed call from her. What is she up to?”

  Uh-oh. The warm fuzzies evaporated and I sat up a little straighter. “Um . . . Edie?”

  She looked up from the phone and I saw anger suddenly morph into worry. “You don’t think there’s some kind of emergency, do you? Like maybe something’s happened to my dad or my sister?”

  “I—no.” I stumbled over my words, stopped, and tried to pull myself together. “Tell Edie about her parents” zipped right back to the top of my list. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong. As a matter of fact, I think she’s calling about something else entirely.”

  Confusion clouded her eyes. “Like what?”

  “They, uh . . . Well the thing is, they’re here.” I held up a hand to stop the tirade I knew was coming. “Miss Frankie invited them. When I woke up this morning, they were already at her house. I had no idea.”

  “They’re here? In New Orleans?”

  “Yes, but don’t be angry. I mean, of course you’re angry. You have every right to be angry. I told Miss Frankie a million times not to get involved, but you know how she is.”

  “So they’re here?”

  I nodded miserably. “They want to have dinner with you tomorrow night. Miss Frankie asked me to set it up, but I refused to get in the middle.”

  Edie blinked a couple of times and then dashed a tear away with a fingertip. “They came? Are you serious?”

  I was about to say something else, but her reaction stunned me into silence. All I could do was nod.

  “You saw them?”

  “I did.”

  Edie stood and walked in a tight circle, tucking a lock of her straight, dark hair behind one ear in a nervous gesture I knew only too well. “How did they seem?”

  “I don’t know. Fine, I guess.”

  She stopped walking and gave me a “Duh!” look. “Mad? Sad? Ready to apologize? What did they say?”