by Cass, Laurie
“Good idea,” I said, and went to hunt down Chris. I found him behind the counter in the marina’s dusty parts shop, sitting in an ancient canvas director’s chair, his feet up on an equally ancient cardboard box. He was deep in a conversation about fishing lures with Rafe Niswander, a mutual friend and neighbor from up the road, and a boat owner who went by the name Skeeter. Whether that was a nickname or his given name I had no idea and had never asked. Some questions are best left unanswered.
Since Skeeter and I were both the same age and were both single, half the marina had been trying to get us together since last summer when he’d first rented a slip. We’d even made a desultory attempt at a date, but there’d been no spark of interest flaring up, no flame of romantic heat, no nothing. We’d ended the evening as we’d begun: friends.
“Hey, Min Tin Tin.” Chris toasted me with a bottle of motor treatment. “What’s doing, girl?”
If I had to make a guess, I’d have said Chris was in his early forties, but he had that whippet-thin body that meant he’d look forty when he was sixty. From his speech patterns, however, you’d think he was twenty.
“Louisa said you were looking for me.” I nodded hellos to Skeeter and Rafe.
“Oh, yeah.” Chris dropped his feet to the concrete floor and half stood to reach for something underneath the counter. “Before I spread any more rumors, I got to find out if they’re true.” He held up the newspaper and stabbed a finger at the article about Stan. “Says here the bookmobile person found old Stan Larabee. Was that you? My money’s on it.”
I stared at the article. Why did Chilson have to have the only newspaper in the area that still ran a weekend edition? Was there really enough news in the county to print a paper six times a week? Once a week would surely be enough.
“Leave her alone, Ballou,” Skeeter said quietly.
Chris stabbed the paper again. “I knew it, I just knew it. Everybody was saying so, right, Rafe?”
“What do you mean, everybody?” I asked.
“You know.” Rafe shrugged. “Everybody.”
I crossed my eyes at him. For a smart man, Rafe could be exceedingly inarticulate when he chose, and outside of his working hours, he typically chose the path of inarticulateness.
“At the bar last night,” Chris said. “Larabee being killed was all anyone talked about. Well, that and who’s going to get all his money.”
Of course Stan’s death was the hot topic. How could it not be? The hometown boy had made good, come home to retire, and was murdered by person or persons unknown. Every occupant of every barstool in town had probably laid claim to knowing Stan and having an opinion on the murder. “Your buddies figure out who killed him?”
Rafe shot me a half grin, but my sarcasm was lost on Chris.
“Could have been a lot of people.” Chris dropped back into the director’s chair. “You better watch out. Killer’s going to be after you, next.”
I snorted. “Really.”
“Well, sure. It’s all over town. Stan was beat up real bad and then shot, right? And you’re the one who found him, so he must have told you who did it before he died. Bound to have.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And does everybody also know why the police haven’t arrested the killer?”
“Well, sure, there’re a couple reasons.” Chris’s feet went back up on the cardboard box. “The guy’s in hiding, for one. I mean, who kills somebody and goes to work the next day? And maybe all Stan gave you was a first name and it’ll take some time to figure out which one it is. Some names are real common, you know.”
“Like ‘Chris’?”
“Nah. There aren’t that many . . . hey! You ain’t saying I killed Stan Larabee. No way are you saying that. He didn’t really say a Chris killed him, did he? Hey, Minnie, don’t walk away like that. You got to tell me!”
Out of sight of Chris, I winked at Rafe and Skeeter. “It’ll take some time to figure it out,” I said, deadpan. “You might want to come up with an alibi.”
“An alibi? For when? Minnie . . . hey, Minnie!”
But I was already out the door.
• • •
The rest of Sunday I spent taking care of the mundane details of life. Balanced the checkbook, hauled a pillowcase full of dirty clothes over to the marina’s coin laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and wiped down the houseboat’s many railings. Eddie followed me around, criticizing my efforts as only a cat is able to do. His unwavering stare clearly meant That’s as clean as you can get it? Please.
“If you think you can do better, go ahead,” I told him.
He sat down and licked his chest.
I popped my cleaning rag in his direction, but he didn’t flinch. “Why is it that I clean the whole place and get nothing but grief, but the only chore you have is cleaning yourself and if I comment on that, I get ignored?”
Since the answer to that was obvious—I’m a cat—I didn’t expect a response. And that’s exactly what I got.
I made the standard Sunday call to my mom and dad, stumbling a little over Mom’s question of “Did anything fun and exciting happen to you this week?” but recovered quickly enough that she didn’t sound suspicious when I said the guy who’d donated the money for the bookmobile was dead.
“Oh, Minerva, I’m so sorry. Did you send a note to his wife? He was elderly, as I recall. Cancer, was it? So many people get cancer these days—it’s all this plastic, I just know it. The other day I was reading about this woman who—”
From long experience, I knew the only way to get a word in edgewise was to interrupt. “It wasn’t cancer, Mom.”
“It wasn’t? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” The word “murder” hovered on my lips, but I brushed it away because I knew what would happen if I said it out loud. Mom would say, “Minerva Joy, are you sure you’re all right?” and escalate rapidly to “You’re not fine, I can hear it in your voice. Bob? Get the luggage, we’re driving up to Chilson right now.”
After they got here, it would take me days to reassure my mother that, yes, I was fine, that, no, I didn’t need therapy, and that I wasn’t going to fall on their necks weeping with anxiety and sorrow and loss and beg to be taken home with them for an extended stay.
So I didn’t say that Stan had been murdered. I dealt with the guilt by vowing that I’d tell Dad all about it. And I would. One of these days.
“Just because he didn’t have cancer,” Mom said now, “is no reason not to stay away from pesticides. Speaking of toxic chemicals, how is Kristen doing with getting organic pork?”
The conversation stayed permanently diverted. The call came to a close with Mom’s typical “I worry about you, honey. Are you eating enough vegetables? And are you still writing the notes? Please tell me you are.”
I reassured her on both counts. As soon as we said good-bye, I made a quick call to Aunt Frances and asked her not to tell her sister-in-law and her brother, aka my dad, anything about the end of Friday’s bookmobile trip. Since Aunt Frances had known my mother longer than I had, it didn’t take much persuading.
Somehow, it was inevitable that Kristen would call when I was on the phone. I picked up her message: “Sorry I didn’t call earlier, had to take a fast trip down to Traverse to test a new cheese. Stop by tonight, okay? See ya!”
I stowed my cell phone in my purse, patted a sleeping Eddie on the head, scrawled a note on the whiteboard, and headed out.
• • •
The name of Kristen’s restaurant, Three Seasons, was a direct result of her vow to specialize in serving locally grown foods. When she was working up her business plan, she decided to draw up sample menus from each season. Spring was full of greens, asparagus, lamb, and fish. Summer ranged from cherries to corn to peaches to tomatoes to pork and fish. Fall was apples and squash and potatoes, beef, and fish. It was when she started work on the winter menus that she ran into problems.
“I can’t serve frozen vegetables!” She’d thrown her arms in the air, making her tall self e
ven taller. “What am I going to do?”
We’d been at the sideboard in Aunt Frances’s dining room, our backs to a winterscape of white lawns and naked trees, our fronts facing Kristen’s pages and pages of spread-out scribbles. “Shut down in the winter,” I said. “Go somewhere warm. You don’t like snow that much, anyway.”
“What?” She’d put her hands to her sleek hair. “I can’t do that! How can I be closed four months out of the year?”
“Okay, close after New Year’s, open on April Fools’ Day.”
“How can I be closed three months of the year?”
“Who’s going to eat there in February?” I’d asked. “Besides me and Aunt Frances, I mean. The snowbirds are all gone after the holidays and we’re too far from most of the ski resorts to be a destination.”
“I can’t be closed three months of the year,” she’d said, but it was almost a question.
“Why not? Lots of restaurants around here are closed in winter.” I ran roughshod over the objections she was starting to think up. “Interview the people you want to hire and tell them right off what you’re thinking. If they shy away, well, maybe you’ll have to stay open to keep your core staff. Why not at least try? But this way you’ll only need to come up with menus from three seasons.”
By then she was starting to think about it. “Three seasons,” she’d said. “I can do three, easy.”
Thus the restaurant’s name was born. The location, after weeks of searching for a perfect place that I was convinced existed only in Kristen’s head, was locked in when a rambling bed-and-breakfast that had once been a family cottage went on the market. “Cottage” being a loose term, since in this case it referred to a mammoth five-thousand-square-foot structure.
Kristen’s bank had kicked loose the loan when she barged into the bank president’s office and served him chicken piccata, asparagus with morel mushrooms, and an apple tart. Four months later the restaurant opened to great acclaim.
This Sunday evening, I walked in through the back door, simultaneously greeting and staying out of the way of the sous chef. I nodded at various staff members and wound my way through the pantry to Kristen’s office, where she was working away at her computer.
“Hey.” I sat in the chair opposite her desk. Now that the time had come to tell her all about Friday, I didn’t know how to begin. “How’s the new chef working out? He’s been here two or three weeks now, right?”
Kristen kept clicking keyboard keys. “Why can’t I get a steady supply of strawberries? It’s June, for crying out loud.” She ranted on about her supplier, calling dire threats upon his head, his children’s heads, and his children’s children’s heads.
When she took a breath before making a new threat, I asked again. “New chef?”
She squinted at the computer, then pushed herself away from it. “The jury is still out, but I think he’ll be fine.”
“How was the cheese?” I asked. “Wasn’t that why you went down to Traverse City?”
Sighing, she shook her head. “Why is it so hard to find exactly what I want?”
I’d been Kristen’s personal search engine for years due to her need to use both hands while cooking, but this wasn’t a question that took any research. “Because you’re a prima donna restaurateur who is so persnickety that you can’t be satisfied with anything less than the absolute best?”
She considered my question. “Sure, that could be it.”
“Or it could be that you’re a persnickety grouch who won’t be satisfied with anything, even if it is the best.”
This, too, she considered. Then she grinned. “Nah. I don’t see it.”
“And I don’t see why anyone would want to run a restaurant.”
“No?” Still smiling, she picked up her phone. “Hey, Harvey, bring me a couple of specials.” She shut down her laptop and crossed her arms. “Before we eat, I want to clear up one or two small points. And get that puzzled look off your face. You know what I’m talking about.”
I hung my head. “Yes, I do, and I don’t know what came over me, but I promise never to eat processed cheese ever again.”
She smothered a laugh. “Do it one more time and I’ll feed you goat cheese for a month.” A real look of terror must have shown on my face because she laughed outright, then said, “Small points. Are we or are we not best friends?”
“We are.” Kristen had grown up in Chilson and I’d been a regular summer visitor as soon as I’d been old enough to be put on a bus headed north. Since my mom’s job as a guide at Dearborn’s Greenfield Village was busiest in the summer, it hadn’t taken much whining to get sent up to Aunt Frances. Kristen and I had discovered each other at the city beach the summer I’d turned twelve and we’d been friends ever since.
“Okay, then.” She leaned back and draped her long legs over the corner of her garage sale desk. “Do we or do we not share all the important events in our lives?”
“No.”
She sat up a little, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“You never did tell me about what happened between you and Danny Stevens behind the high school gym.”
“And I never will. Larger point. Are you planning to tell me about finding Stan Larabee before hell freezes over, or after? You’ve been here five minutes already, Minnie. Start talking.”
“I . . . don’t know how.” There were no words, no way to express what I needed to say, nothing that would help, nothing that would change what had happened, nothing that would change the pictures in my head. Oh, Stan . . .
“Minnie,” she said gently. “Talk to me.”
A large silence dropped down between us. I watched it expand and grow to fill all the space in the room, to take up all the air. I was starting to struggle for breath when the office door opened and Harvey, the sous chef, bustled in with a plate in each hand.
“Ladies,” he said. Behind him rushed a waiter carrying a small table. The table went down next to me. The waiter, who’d had a white tablecloth over one arm, flung it out and over the table. Out of one apron pocket came linen napkins; out of the other came flatware. He backed away and Harvey set the plates on the table gently, turning the entrée so it would be closest to the edge of the table. He whisked a small vase of flowers out of his back pocket and centered it on the tablecloth. “Is there anything else I can get you?” He looked expectant.
“No, thanks. That’s it.” After hovering a moment, Harvey shuffled out, and Kristen pushed her rolling chair back from her desk and came around to a stop in front of the other plate.
I’d already bellied up to the table. “That guy is so in love with you he can hardly see straight.” I stuck my fork into the lightly browned lake trout.
“Huh. Does that explain why he dropped a tray of dinner rolls the other night?”
I stuffed my mouth full. “Oh, man, do you know how good this is?”
“It’s my creation, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but . . .” I waved my empty fork in the air before I plunged it once again into the entrée. “But you get jaded, eating this kind of stuff every day. It’s only people like me, who only get to eat like this on rare occasions, who can truly appreciate it.”
“It wouldn’t be rare if you’d let me feed you more often.”
“Let’s not go there,” I said.
“You can eat here every day for free. Twice a day. Three times, if we had breakfast.” She put her arms flat on the table and looked at me hard. “I know how much I owe you, don’t think I don’t.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said in a low voice.
“Yes, I do.” Kristen banged the table with her fist, making the flatware bounce and the plates rattle. “You’re the only one who believed in me. My parents didn’t, my former fiancé didn’t, and for sure my former evil corporate employer thought I was nuts. Only you believed. Not only that, but you did all the research on—”
I cut her off. “You don’t owe me a thing. You’re my friend. That’s what friends do.”<
br />
“There are friends and there are friends.” She sat back. “But since you obviously don’t want the fun of an argument, I’ll say you don’t owe me anything, either. Except for one thing.”
I picked up my fork again. At age twelve, she’d welcomed a downstate stranger into her life and had never once turned her back on me. She was wrong. I owed her far more than I could ever repay. “Okay, one.”
“Tell me what happened with Stan Larabee. Tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I’ll never ask you about it again.”
“Never?”
“Well, I’ll try not to ask you about it again.” She smiled the half smile that always made me giggle. “And this isn’t idle curiosity—it’s simple clarification of what the grapevine has already told me.”
“Which is . . . ?”
She flittered her fingers. “Oh, the usual. Stan had been beaten up something horrible, half the bones in his body were broken, one of his kidneys had been removed, and he wrote the name of his killer on the floor in his own blood, but when you were trying to save him, you stepped on the blood and messed up the writing.”
“The grapevine is batting zero.”
Something in my voice must have given away the emotions I was trying to hold in, because Kristen moved to my side and put a hand on my shoulder. “Was it bad?” she asked gently.
“I really don’t . . .”
Don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to think about it, don’t want to see Stan’s limp body again, don’t want it to have happened. What I wanted was Stan to be alive. I just wanted him back.
“Oh, Minnie.” Kristen’s arms went all the way around me, and it was there, in the comfort of my best friend’s embrace, that the tears came.
• • •
“Bawled my eyes out,” I told Eddie. “Cried like a little kid who’d dropped her ice-cream cone in the dirt. And before you ask, yes, that happened to me once. Chocolate soft-serve. It was a harsh lesson. Would you like to hear about it?”
Eddie’s eyes remained closed.
“I didn’t think so.”
We were cozied up in bed, me sitting up with my arms around my legs, Eddie lying like a meat loaf in the middle of the comforter. If he’d brought a tape measure to bed, I don’t think he could have centered himself more accurately.
