The Calamity Café

by Gayle Leeson

  I still had checks and envelopes on my mind when I left the print shop and nearly collided with Chris Anne.

  “Oh, goodness! I’m sorry, Chris Anne. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

  “It’s probably my fault. I’m so mad I could spit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I went in there to the bank to get a loan. I want to build onto the house, get me some maternity clothes, buy a few things for the baby . . . stuff like that.”

  I was thinking, Didn’t Pete just come into an inheritance? And money from selling the café? Wouldn’t that money buy you clothes and things you two need for the baby? I didn’t say anything, though. It wasn’t any of my business.

  Chris Anne anchored one bony fist to her hip. “Do you know they had the nerve to tell me that I couldn’t use our house as collateral on a loan?”

  “Your house?” I asked. “I thought you lived in an apartment building in Abingdon.”

  “I’m talking about my house with Pete. Our house.”

  “You and Pete bought a new house?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Pete’s house is now our house.” She held up her left hand and waggled her fingers. “We’re engaged?”

  “True, but that doesn’t make it your house too until Pete either adds you to the deed or the two of you get married.”

  She let out a growl of frustration. “Now you sound just like those bank people! They said I have no right to use Pete’s home as collateral, and they wouldn’t even tell me how much he has in his bank account.”

  “Huh.” That’s the only sound I could manage that wouldn’t let her know that I was absolutely astounded by her incomprehension.

  “I told them Pete was fine with it and told them to call him. They said he’d have to come to the bank in person.” She huffed. “I told them he couldn’t come today because he was out looking at trucks and getting ready to start his business. Don’t they know they’re dealing with a businessman now that could have a big impact on their bank?”

  “I guess not.” I wondered if Pete really was fine with Chris Anne trying to get a loan against his house. Did he even know?

  “Oh well. I’ll see you later, Amy.”

  “See you.”

  As I walked on up the street toward the Winter Garden News office, I marveled at Chris Anne’s actions. Had she honestly thought that since she was Pete’s fiancée, the bank employees would give her information on Pete’s financial accounts? And a loan secured by his house?

  And what about Pete and Stan? Both Pete and Chris Anne had indicated that Pete was considering asking Stan to go into the trucking business with Pete. Yet Stan had stopped by the café looking for work. If Stan was as broke as he said he was, how was he supposed to become a partner in a business? He couldn’t afford to help pay for a truck. Maybe Pete intended to hire Stan as an employee rather than take him on as a partner. Or, it could be that they both thought they’d make so much money once the business got rolling that the truck would practically pay for itself.

  I walked into the office of the Winter Garden News and was happy to see that it hadn’t changed since the last time I’d visited, about nine years ago. I’d gone to have a classified ad put in proclaiming Mom’s age on her birthday: Lordy, lordy, Jenna’s forty! Mom had not been amused.

  Anyway, the walls were still the same flat beige. The globe still stood in the corner, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to the left and right. And the scarred wooden desk stood in front of the office’s only window—a picture window that looked out onto the street.

  Ms. Peggy, who’d run the Winter Garden News for as long as anyone could remember, sat in her huge leather office chair with the wood scroll arms and the nail-head accents.

  “Hello, dear,” said Ms. Peggy in her reedy voice. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I’d like to put in a classified ad to hire a busboy for the Down South Café.”

  I’d also put an ad on Craigslist. But even though not everyone in Winter Garden was computer savvy, everyone read the News. Hopefully, I could get my ad to run for a couple of weeks and have a few applicants by the time I needed to staff the café. Most of the high schoolers on summer break already had jobs, and there weren’t many others beating a path to Winter Garden for its employment opportunities.

  “All right.” Ms. Peggy pushed away from the desk, got up, and handed me a pad of paper and a pen. “Twenty-five words or less, twenty dollars per week. Anything over twenty-five words will be an additional forty cents a word.”

  “Thank you.” As I sat and tried to concentrate on what I wanted to say, I thought about how long Ms. Peggy had been here in Winter Garden. I got up and went to stand by the desk so she could hear me. “Ms. Peggy, have you lived here all your life?”

  “Yep.”

  “My aunt Bess was telling me about a bank robbery that Lou Holman’s dad, Bo, and his brother Grady were supposed to have committed back in the thirties.”

  “Over in North Carolina. I remember. What about it?”

  “Do you believe the Holman brothers did it?”

  “Course I do. Didn’t she?” Ms. Peggy asked.

  “I think she thought they were guilty.”

  “I’d bet you five dollars to ten they did it. Though why they didn’t use that money to get Grady out of hock is beyond me.”

  “Aunt Bess said that Grady disappeared right after the robbery.”

  “Disappeared, my eye,” she said. “Lou killed him.”

  “Lou?”

  “Yeah, Lou. He was furious that Grady had dragged his daddy into something that could cause him to have to rot in prison for the rest of his life, and he killed Grady.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t swear to it on a stack of Bibles or anything, but I’m fairly certain. And so was my father. He’s the one who told me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Lou Holman was a mean man. Why’d you think Lou Lou grew up with such a wicked look and a mouth that didn’t spout nothing but vitriol?”

  “Well, I figured it had something to do with her upbringing.”

  “Then you figured right. That little ol’ girl never could do anything good enough to suit her daddy. And still, she worshipped the ground he walked on. It was a crying shame.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, honey, what’s done is done. Can’t fix it now.” She nodded toward the paper, which I hadn’t even begun writing on. “You got that ad ready?”

  * * *

  After I got back home, I went into the fancy room, lay down on the sofa, and called Ryan.

  “Hi,” I said when he’d answered. “I was wondering if you’ve had any new leads on the Lou Lou Holman case.”

  “I haven’t, but we’re fully investigating the leads we have. Is there anything new that has come to light on your end?”

  “Not about this case, but maybe about one that happened around the time the lockbox was hidden in the office wall.” I told Ryan about my visit with Ms. Peggy and what she’d told me about Lou Holman killing Grady.

  “That’s certainly possible. Of course, she has no proof, and it wouldn’t matter if she did, since Lou Holman has been dead for more than sixty years.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just wondered if Lou had known about the money hidden in the wall of his office. If so, isn’t it possible that he told someone about the money? Or that he maybe left a note?”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  “Let’s say Lou did leave a note in case something happened to him. He’d want his family to have the money, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  I huffed.

  “Okay, probably,” Ryan conceded.

  “So the note gets lost for all this time, and then someone finds it and wants Lou Lou to cough up the money,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Doesn’t it stand to reason that if her father had left a note, Lou Lou would be the most likely person to have found it?”

  “Yeah, but what if she wasn’t? What if someone else found the note and wanted that money? That could be the motive behind Lou Lou’s death. Isn’t that possible?”

  “It is possible.”

  “So if Lou Lou didn’t find it . . .” I gulped. And then I swallowed again because my throat had become thick and dry. “Pete?”

  “I’ll look into it,” Ryan said.

  “Do you really think Pete could’ve had something to do with his mother’s death?” I asked.

  “He has always been a suspect. We typically look the hardest at the person with the most to gain from the victim’s death. In this case, it was the victim’s son.”

  “Wow.”

  “You had to have known we were looking at Pete.”

  “I did, but in my mind, the possibility was too unlikely to honestly consider. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why don’t we discuss happy things? How are the renovations going?”

  I began telling Ryan about what we’d got done so far. But in my mind, I was still ruminating over the idea that Pete could’ve killed his own mother.

  Chapter 17

  I decided it might be good for me to get out of Winter Garden for a little while. I could do some shopping, pick up some dinner . . . If it wasn’t too late when I started back home, I could see if Mom and Aunt Bess wanted me to pick up something for them too.

  Tucking a couple of foldable totes into my purse, I got into the Bug and backed out of the driveway. It was sunny, and since I had my hair in a ponytail, I put down my windows. The breeze not only felt good, it smelled like freshly mown grass. I turned on the radio and was delighted to hear Don Henley singing to me about the boys of summer.

  On the way out of town, I drove by the mobile home Stan rented from Lou Lou . . . or Pete, I guessed, now. The roof had been patched in places using mismatched shingles. Hadn’t Stan asked Pete for money to completely replace the roof? Maybe whoever he’d hired hadn’t got around to doing it yet, and Stan had just put the other shingles over the holes until the new roof was put on. It looked pretty bad. I hoped the roofer would get around to Stan’s home soon.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at clothes, shoes, makeup, purses, linens, baking pans, and picnic tables with umbrellas—I made a mental note to ask Roger about what type of tables we planned to get for the patio. Fortunately for my wallet, I bought nothing.

  Before heading back to Winter Garden, I called the big house. Aunt Bess answered.

  “Hi, Aunt Bess. It’s Amy. I was wondering if you and Mom would like me to swing by a drive-through and get us some burgers and fries for dinner.”

  “You’re going to buy us some cheeseburgers and French fries when you could make better-tasting ones right here yourself?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m not cooking this evening. So when I get my food, do you want me to pick y’all up something too?”

  “Well, yeah. I’d appreciate that, and I imagine your mother and Jackie would too.”

  “I didn’t realize Jackie was there,” I said. “I’ll get dinner for everybody and be there in about twenty minutes.”

  Mom had set the table by the time I got there with our bags of burgers and fries.

  “The drinks are still in the car,” I said, putting the bags on the dining room table.

  “I’ll grab them,” said Jackie.

  Aunt Bess instructed Mom to “light up the candles, since we’re eating all fancy.”

  Whether it was out of spite or not, Mom lit the white taper candles. When Jackie returned with the drink tray, she passed out the drinks. We put our burgers and fries on the good china plates and used the linen napkins rather than the paper ones that came with the food.

  Mom gave me a little smirk behind Aunt Bess’s back, making me think that the fancy table had been an act of spite since Aunt Bess had disparaged my bringing us fast food for dinner. Mom was probably of the same mind as I was—it sure beat having to cook this evening.

  “What have you done today?” Mom asked me.

  I told her about tearing up linoleum all morning and then shopping this afternoon. “I didn’t buy anything, but I feel that it did me good to have a change of scenery for a while.”

  “I bet it did,” Jackie said. “I’ve been taking ‘before’ pictures of the café as well as photos of the progress we’re making. I’m looking forward to seeing the café once all the work is done.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take?” Mom asked.

  “Roger told me it would take a month at the outset, but it seems to be going quicker than I thought it would. How about you, Jackie?”

  “Yeah, I think that with us working too, Roger has had help he wasn’t originally counting on.”

  Aunt Bess scoffed. “So you and Amy are doing the work of a whole crew of men?”

  “No, Granny. But Amy is paying any of the café staff who wanted to help with the renovations to work.”

  “Yeah. Homer’s even working for us,” I said. “The only bad thing is that we’ve now lost Aaron as our busboy.”

  “What?” Jackie asked.

  “He’s found that he really enjoys construction work. He’s going to work with Roger.”

  “That’s good for Aaron and Roger, but what’re we gonna do?” Jackie popped a fry into her mouth.

  “I put an ad in the Winter Garden News before I came home after lunch. I put it on Craigslist too. Come to think of it, I’m not sure how many of our waitresses will be back either. There are only two who agreed to help renovate.”

  Jackie waved her hand dismissively. “We’ll be fine.”

  Aunt Bess finished off her cheeseburger. “That was awfully tasty. We ought to do this more often.”

  * * *

  When I went home, I got out my laptop. Ever since Roger had found the lockbox with the money hidden in the wall, I’d been curious about the bank robbery and the Holman brothers. So I did an Internet search for Bo Holman, Winter Garden, Virginia. As expected, there were genealogy sites with references to Bo’s death, his marriage to Lou’s mother, things like that. I hadn’t expected the fount of information Ryan had been able to uncover, but I’d hoped for a little more than this.

  Not getting my hopes up, I opened a new tab and typed Grady Holman, Winter Garden, Virginia into the search engine. Nothing. I went back to the results page for Bo Holman and found that he had a brother named Grady Walter Holman.

  Thinking maybe Grady had started going by his middle name in an effort to remain hidden, I did a search for Walter Holman. The first thing that popped up was an obituary from 1984.

  Walter Holman, 88, originally of Winter Garden, Virginia, died today at his home near Boone, North Carolina. Mr. Holman was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Millicent, and is survived by his daughters, Anna and Sadie; son, Philip; and numerous grandchildren. A beloved member of the community, Mr. Holman . . .

  I merely scanned the rest of the listing. Could this really have been Lou Lou’s great-uncle Grady? Had he just walked away from Winter Garden and made a new life for himself?

  I did a search for Philip Holman. As the only boy, I figured he’d be the easiest to find, because it was less likely he might have changed his last name. There was a phone number for a Philip Holman living in Knoxville, Tennessee.

  I grabbed my phone and punched in Mr. Holman’s number. As soon as this man answered, I could tell he was too young to be Grady’s son. Still, I soldiered on.

  “Hello, Mr. Holman. My name is Amy Flowers, and I live in Winter Garden, Virginia. I’m calling to ask if your father was Grady or Walter Holman, who was also originally from this area.”

  “No. My dad was from here in Tennessee.”

  I thanked him for his time and called two other rela
tively local Philip Holmans. Both times, I struck out.

  I put Anna Holman’s name into the search engine. I found an Anna Holman Carter who lived in Boone and was sixty-nine years old.

  Fingers crossed, I punched in Anna Carter’s phone number. When she answered, I introduced myself and asked if her father was Grady or Walter Holman, originally of Winter Garden, Virginia.

  “Yes, he was. He hated the name ‘Grady’ and went by ‘Walter.’ Why? What’s this about?”

  “Well, I’ve got a crazy story to tell you.”

  Ms. Carter laughed. “Daddy was full of crazy stories. Let’s hear yours.”

  I told Ms. Carter about my buying the café from Lou Lou Holman, leaving out the part where I’d found the woman murdered in her office. “When we renovated the café, we found a lockbox hidden in the wall. Inside we found a little money.” I didn’t want to tell this woman we’d found twenty thousand dollars in the box. After all, Ryan had asked for my discretion.

  “Oh, heavens!”

  “We turned the lockbox over to the police because we didn’t know what else to do with it. My aunt remembered hearing rumors of Bo and Grady Holman robbing a bank in North Carolina. It was never proven, of course,” I added quickly, “and no money was ever recovered, but no one here in Winter Garden could seem to figure out what had happened to Grady. Frankly, I think many people were afraid that either his brother or his nephew had done him in.”

  Ms. Carter chuckled. “Our family heard all about that bank robbery growing up. You see, the bank there in Winter Garden was about to foreclose on Daddy’s farm. His brother Bo offered to take him to a bank here in North Carolina to see if they’d give Daddy a loan. Daddy didn’t realize Bo intended to rob the bank until Bo handed him a ski mask and a pistol.”

  “Poor Grady . . . or Walter!”

  “Well, I don’t know if it was ‘poor Walter’ or not. He went along with the plan. Course, if you’d ever met Daddy, you’d have seen he was one of the most easygoing men in the world.”

  Given Aunt Bess’s description of Grady, he must’ve really changed his ways after moving to North Carolina.