Pumpkin Roll

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “Sadie?”

  Sadie looked at Jane, realizing she’d drifted away from their conversation. “Oh, sorry. I think that’s about it—just Gabrielle and Mr. Forsberk.”

  “You’re sure there isn’t anyone else that should be a person of interest in this case? We may as well dig up all the answers.”

  Sadie looked away, not liking the intent look on Jane’s face or the way it triggered Sadie’s guilt at withholding information. “That’s everyone,” she said, pulling out a cookie sheet to bake the little round cakes on. She hoped Jane wouldn’t keep pushing; her determination to keep what she knew to herself was fragile.

  “I used to date a guy who worked at Radio Shack,” Jane said from the table while Sadie’s back was still toward her. “I bet I could sweet-talk him into digging up some info for me about Mr. Forsberk.”

  “That would be great,” Sadie said, looking over her shoulder to smile at her partner, a smile that had a lot to do with the fact that Jane had stopped tempting Sadie to confess what she knew about Pete. “Your connections are amazing.”

  Jane shrugged, but was obviously pleased at the compliment. “When you’ve dated for so long without finding Mr. Right, you tend to get a pretty good cross section of society.”

  Sadie turned back to her cake rounds, not wanting Jane to see her smile fall at the mention of her dating history. She still hadn’t resolved what was going on between Jane and Shawn, and while it seemed like the least of her worries compared to everything else, her children were never that far down on her list of priorities.

  Jane started making phone calls in the living room while Sadie finished making the cakes. While they baked, she made the filling and obsessed about her son’s possible relationship with Jane.

  The first batch of cakes were just out of the oven when Jane came back into the kitchen, a cocky look on her face. “Well, the bad news is that Brian no longer works for Radio Shack, but he’s engaged, which means he won’t think me calling is some kind of invitation, and he gave me the number of someone else. I got a full job history and exactly why they wouldn’t rehire Mr. Forsberk if he tried to reapply.”

  “They told you all that?” Sadie asked. This woman was magic!

  “I posed as a small electronics company in Concord and knew all the right questions to get around the typical boundaries human resources sets up to protect them from, well, people like me.” She smiled, very pleased with herself while Sadie squirmed. She’d been known to bend a story here and there to get some information, but she avoided outright lying and manipulation. Being in league with someone who didn’t see things the same way she did could get sticky.

  “Anyway,” Jane said when Sadie didn’t comment out loud. “Forsberk worked there for seven years and seemed on track to become an assistant manager in the Quincy store, but then he was fired for voyeurism.”

  “Voyeurism?” Sadie said, putting in the second sheet of cake rounds. “Isn’t that filming someone without their permission?”

  “Without their permission when they have an expectation of privacy. You don’t sign an agreement to be on tape at a department store, but if the camera were in the fitting room, where you expect privacy, it’s over the line.”

  “Do I want to know what he did?”

  “I did,” Jane said as though there wasn’t any question about getting the nitty-gritty details. “The gal on the phone wouldn’t tell me, of course, though she told me too much anyway and I could totally get her fired if I wanted to.” She smirked and Sadie squirmed again. This was why she hadn’t automatically called and asked Jane for help this morning. The woman’s methods made her uncomfortable. Obviously not uncomfortable enough, however, or Sadie wouldn’t be working with her. “But I did a few perfectly detailed Google searches and found the newspaper articles. Apparently, Little Nel had a—”

  “Little Nel?” Sadie asked, looking over her shoulder while she rinsed the last of the dishes.

  “Oh, his first name is Nelson—Nelson Forsberk—but he’s such a dweebie guy that Little Nel fits, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think we need to call him names,” Sadie said. “Nelson or Mr. Forsberk is fine.”

  “O-kay,” Jane said, willing to go along with it but obviously not seeing the point. “Nelson developed a crush on a new female employee and bothered her so much that she requested a transfer to another store. After the transfer, he started coming to her new store, after which time he was written up for harassment. A month later she found a customized micro-camera installed in her home bathroom. She called the police, and they tracked the serial number of the different components of the camera to Nelson’s Radio Shack and directly to a credit card purchase he made shortly after being written up. Radio Shack quietly fired him and likely settled with the girl. It was only made public in regard to an article about the increase in technological means of sexual harassment in the workplace. I’ve got a call in to the reporter who wrote the story but, seriously, you’d think after the whole Boston Strangler thing and the Craigslist Killer situation this town has had to deal with, they would do a better job of warning their citizens about creepy guys filming pretty girls without their consent.”

  “It must have seemed like such a small thing compared to those other stories,” Sadie said, drying her hands on a dish cloth. She leaned against the counter, considering what Jane had discovered. “Mr. Forsberk had all kinds of wires and gadgetry on his kitchen table and told me he likes to rebuild things. Could he have bugged Mrs. Wapple’s house?”

  Jane looked adequately horrified by the idea, which Sadie found gratifying since Jane’s unemotional attitude often made Sadie uncomfortable. “Why? He had the hots for the woman he worked with, but Mrs. Wapple doesn’t seem like his type. Did the police find anything?”

  “No,” Sadie said. “At least not that I’m aware of. I’m just brainstorming. I don’t know why he’d bug her house. He wanted nothing to do with her. But his dog did die two weeks before she was attacked, so there could still be a connection.”

  “Well, if he thinks she’s a witch, maybe he was trying to find proof?”

  Sadie frowned. “Maybe,” she said, but that seemed so . . . trite. “Why would he need proof she’s a witch? Who would he need to prove it to? There has to be another motive.”

  “Or he’s just crazy. Crazy people don’t need motives.”

  “But they have them,” Sadie corrected her. “In their own minds there’s a reason why they do the things they do, even if those reasons make no sense to us. Judging from Mr. Forsberk’s overall attitude toward Mrs. Wapple, I can only come up with revenge as a reason why he would be involved with her at all, which—”

  “Which plays right into the possibility that he’s the one who attacked Mrs. Wapple,” Jane finished the sentence for her.

  Whoopie Pies

  1 box devil’s food cake mix*

  1 (3.4-ounce) box instant chocolate pudding

  ½ cup vegetable oil

  3 eggs

  ¾ cup water

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients together with an electric mixer until smooth and thick—at least 2 minutes. Drop six large spoonfuls of batter onto silicone mat-lined, parchment-lined, or well-greased cookie sheets. Use the back of a spoon if necessary to flatten slightly so that each pie is no more than three-fourths of an inch tall. Bake for 11 minutes, or until cake springs back when lightly touched. Cool on pan 2 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Let cool completely before assembling pies.

  Store leftovers in refrigerator. Freeze individually wrapped cakes in wax paper.

  Makes 8 to 10 pies.

  *Can substitute any other type of cake mix, but if so, change pudding flavor to vanilla or another, more suitable, flavor.

  Filling Choices*

  Buttercream

  1 cup butter

  4 cups powdered sugar

  2 egg whites

  ½ teaspoon vanilla

  4 tablespoons flour

  4 tablespoons m
ilk

  Cream butter and powdered sugar together. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix until fluffy. Add flour and milk and mix until well blended. Use additional flour or milk to get the correct consistency—a thick but airy frosting. Layer filling between two cakes, bottoms together.

  Marshmallow (Shawn prefers this one)

  ¾ cup Crisco shortening (do not use butter Crisco)

  ¾ cup powdered sugar

  2 teaspoons vanilla

  1 (7- to 8-ounce) jar Marshmallow Fluff

  Beat shortening and powdered sugar together until smooth. Add vanilla and Marshmallow Fluff. Mix until well blended.

  *Can add ½ teaspoon of a flavored extract to filling: mint, lemon, strawberry, orange, etc.

  Chapter 27

  Sadie nodded. “Exactly. And he was outside last night, hiding from the police.”

  “They say perps like to return to the scene of the crime; it reminds them of how powerful they were.”

  “I’ve heard that too. Law & Order talked about that all the time.”

  “And maybe he’s the one who’s been trying to scare you guys away, and when you saw him, he was trying to make his way back to his house without being seen.”

  Sadie rolled that over in her mind before shaking her head. “I timed it, and it took me only seven seconds to slam both doors and make it to the sidewalk. He could have made it back home with plenty of time to spare before the police showed up. Besides, the whole open-every-cabinet-and-drawer-thing happened while I was talking to him.”

  “He could be in league with someone,” Jane suggested.

  “I don’t buy that either,” Sadie said. “One unhinged person trying to scare me away is one thing, but two? Besides, he strikes me as a loner.”

  Mr. Forsberk was hiding something, though, and someone had lured Sadie across the street and into the strange setup where she found Mrs. Wapple. As a stranger to the neighborhood, she would make a perfect scapegoat if he chose his attack to coincide with Sadie’s trip. And he had the perfect vantage point. But she couldn’t get around the fact that she’d been talking to him during the time someone had come into Heather and Jared’s house that morning.

  “You gotta share your stream of consciousness with me,” Jane said. “I’m working on my powers of telepathy, but they aren’t finely tuned enough for everyday use just yet.”

  “Sorry,” Sadie said, giving her an apologetic smile. “I was just thinking that if I separate the two parts of this situation into strange stuff and Mrs. Wapple’s attack, Mr. Forsberk fits in better with the attack. Think about it—if he was determined to get revenge, maybe he could have used me as a scapegoat, making me a relevant suspect in her attack to keep any attention off of himself. It seems rather . . . overdone, but plausible.”

  “Keep in mind the only motive we know about is the dead dog—there could be more to it.”

  Sadie nodded and told Jane about the mail theft while she finished moving the first batch of cakes from the pan to the cooling rack. They would need to cool for at least another half hour before she assembled them. Not that she was in any hurry since she didn’t plan to go over to Mr. Forsberk’s until five o’clock tonight, but then she didn’t want to be here when Heather got home either. She sat down on the chair opposite Jane and rested her hands on the tabletop. The second pan of cakes had about six minutes left on the timer.

  “And the other part?” Jane asked. “The strange stuff?”

  Sadie frowned but only shrugged her shoulders. She had no explanation for that since it couldn’t be Mr. Forsberk.

  “I know you don’t want to believe it was a ghost, but what if it was? You asked last night why a ghost would choose you and Pete. Well, why not you and Pete? You’re worried about Mrs. Wapple, and Mr. Forsberk is up to something, right? So what if there is a spirit specifically focused on keeping you involved?”

  Sadie could feel her brow furrow as she looked at the tabletop despite Jane staring at her. The idea wriggled around in her head, but could she really even consider that? She was fifty-seven years old and had never heard of earthbound spirits until last night. To just believe in something that went against everything Sadie had ever believed before now seemed irresponsible, and yet Jane was so intent. She hadn’t come right out and said it, but it was obvious that she believed it was ghosts. Or, she was at least willing to consider it a viable possibility, whereas Sadie just couldn’t take it seriously.

  “Do you think the reporter who wrote about the voyeurism is going to call you back?” Sadie asked, determined to change the subject.

  Jane nodded. “Oh, yeah,” she said with her trademark arrogance. “When someone follows up on your stories, you’re always hoping to get another tidbit that will resurrect the thing. It’s good journalism to call me back and see what I know. And the guy’s got a good reputation—I always check—so I’ll be hearing from him. I guarantee it.”

  “Do you think we could track down the girl Mr. Forsberk was bothering?” Sadie asked. “Maybe she would have some details about him that would better prepare us for when we meet with him later.”

  Jane nodded. “Possible,” she said. “I think it would just take a stop into the Quincy store. All this went down just a year ago, so I bet there’s someone there who would know where she was transferred to. And one of those interviewees I wanted to talk to today for my article is down in Milton, so it wouldn’t be hard for me to do both.”

  Sadie nodded, relieved that they had given up talking about phantoms and were making a concrete plan of action. “Great. Why don’t you work on Mr. Forsberk, and I’ll get the landlord info from Shawn so I can learn more about Mrs. Wapple’s history.” This was always the hard part for Sadie. Only one of these lines would likely pan out, which meant a lot of their efforts would be wasted, and yet without knowing which line had the big fish on the end of it, there was really no choice but to cast them all.

  All? She questioned herself. Was she really going to explore them all? Or was she picking and choosing by leaving Pete out? Ugh! Pete didn’t do anything—why couldn’t she let it go?

  Jane twisted her arm so she could look at her watch, which was hidden between the two dozen black plastic bracelets on her wrist. “It’s almost eleven. What if we plan to meet up at one? A friend of mine told me about a great little place called Wonder Spice here in JP. It’s Thai. Do you like Thai?”

  “I like everything,” Sadie said. “And that sounds like a good timeline.”

  “If I have time, I’ll try to get to the hospital and take a little peek at our witch—see how she’s doing and if the sister’s been around. We don’t want to lose sight of the sister amid our new information.”

  “Oh, right,” Sadie said. “We can’t rule her out just yet, but I don’t know if it’s safe for you to go to the hospital either. People saw you at the police station; they think you’re my daughter.”

  “They didn’t pay any attention to me,” Jane said, chuckling slightly. “They didn’t even ask for my ID to prove who I was. Plus, I’ve got my wig.”

  “Wig?”

  “It’s a perfectly boring, shoulder-length, mousy brown thing that makes me look like the proverbial soccer mom.”

  Sadie looked at Jane’s bright purple fingernails and the shirt she was wearing, all black except for the yellow Ms. Pac-Man and red words that said “Man Eater.”

  “Not to mention my journalistic wiles, which are secondary only to my feminine ones.” She batted her eyelashes. “Don’t worry, I know how to do this kind of thing, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think there was something to be learned that made it worthwhile.”

  Sadie nodded, albeit reluctantly. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll meet up at one o’clock and compare notes. I might end up with some leads after I talk to the landlord, so this will give me time to follow up on them.”

  “Good,” Jane said, slapping the table. “I think you and me make a killer team, Sadie.”

  Sadie smiled even though she didn’t like Jane’s use of the word killer. �
��Let’s hope so.”

  Sadie gathered the ingredients for the filling—buttercream since Heather didn’t have any marshmallow creme—and pulled out the second pan of cakes from the oven while Jane used the restroom. She’d just started mixing the filling when Jane returned.