A Slice of Murder

by Chris Cavender

  “I’d say Miss Marple,” I said.

  “I adore Agatha Christie,” she said with a smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Even though it wasn’t meant as one?” I asked.

  “These days, I take them where I can get them.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a summons from the dining room. “Are you two going to stand there chatting all day, or am I getting that Coke?”

  “Coming right up,” I said as I turned to Maddy. “Will you be joining us?”

  “Try to stop me,” she said as she followed close on my heels.

  I gave Sheila the drink, which she downed in a few gulps. “Refill?”

  Maddy rolled her eyes, but I reached for the glass. “I’ll be right back.”

  Thirty seconds later I was back with the topped-off Coke and found Maddy and Sheila in earnest conversation.

  “I wasn’t gone that long,” I said. “What are you two talking about?”

  “I was just saying it’s a shame we don’t know more about Richard’s life. It’s going to be hard knowing where to start looking if we’re going to have any chance of solving his murder,” Maddy replied.

  I couldn’t tell if Maddy was trying to be clever or not, but as long as we were recruiting Sheila to our cause, whatever she was doing was all right with me.

  “I want you to know how much I appreciate you changing your mind about me so quickly,” I told Sheila.

  Maddy shot a warning glare at me, which I’d grown skilled at ignoring.

  “When I’m wrong, I’m the first to admit it,” Sheila said as she let out an indelicate belch. “Sorry, I haven’t been able to force myself to eat since I got the news.”

  “When did you find out?” I asked.

  “The police chief came around this morning.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it was barely past one. At least she’d missed breakfast on account of the bad news.

  Maddy cut me off from saying anything else by stepping into the void with a rather direct question. “Should we go look at Richard’s house now?”

  “We’re still open for business here, remember?” I asked.

  “I don’t think Timber Ridge is going to miss us for a few hours, do you? Rita didn’t even bother showing up.”

  In my foggy state, I’d forgotten that one of my other employees had failed to make even a token appearance. “You didn’t talk to her, did you?”

  She shook her head. “Did you check the answering machine in your office?”

  “When have I had time?” I asked. “I’ll be right back.” Before I could duck into my small office in the kitchen, I said, “Don’t you two go anywhere.”

  “I’d be more inclined to stay if I had some dessert,” Sheila confessed.

  “Sorry, we’re out of brownies, and the cheesecake hasn’t been delivered yet,” I said.

  “That’s a shame,” Sheila said as she started to stand.

  Maddy frowned, then said, “I suppose I could pop over to Paul’s and get you something.”

  Sheila shook her head. “I don’t expect you to ask a friend to feed me.”

  I said, “Paul isn’t a friend. Well, he is, but he runs Paul’s Pastries. It’s just down that way,” I said as I pointed toward the obelisk. “And Maddy wouldn’t mind going at all, would you?”

  She made a face at me as she said, “I’d be delighted.”

  “I’ll keep Sheila company while you’re gone,” I said.

  “I don’t mean to be a burden,” Sheila said.

  “Good,” Maddy said at the same time I said, “Nonsense. No trouble at all.”

  Maddy left, albeit reluctantly, and I settled back into my chair.

  Sheila said, “I won’t steal anything. You can go check your messages, it’s all right.”

  “Are you sure? It’ll just take a second.”

  “Go on. I’ll wait.”

  I hurried back to my office, a small space I’d carved out of a former closet, and saw that there were several messages on the machine. I punched PLAY and heard my employee calling to check in. Rita said that she’d come by before opening time and had failed to get into the pizzeria, much as I had myself, since Maddy and I had the only two keys. She had assumed we were closed, given the circumstances, and I could hardly blame her. Maddy’s theory that we should stay open had been a good one to show the community that I wasn’t afraid to show my face, but unfortunately, it appeared that Rita was afraid to show hers. The last part of her message was that it was all for the best anyway. She was quitting, and she told me that I could send her last check to her dad’s house.

  The messages were still playing when Maddy came back, clutching a bag from Paul’s.

  “Where’d she go?”

  “She’s not out there anymore?” I asked as I hit the pause button on the answering machine.

  “No, she’s gone,” Maddy said. “All you had to do was keep her company, and yet she managed to walk right out of the pizzeria.”

  “I couldn’t keep her here against her will,” I said. “She promised me she’d stay.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “There are a couple of options. We could try to find her, or we could keep the pizzeria open and look for her later,” I said.

  “I vote you stay here and work while I go out looking for her,” Maddy said.

  “I’m sorry, were you under the impression that you got a vote? This is a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy.”

  “Okay, great leader, then what do we do?”

  “I’m not sure. Rita just quit,” I said as I pointed to the answering machine.

  Maddy shook her head. “We’re better off without her, if she’s too afraid to show up for work.”

  I decided not to tell my sister that she’d tried, or had at least claimed to have made the effort.

  I heard the front door chime and said, “I need to see if we have a customer, or if Sheila’s decided to come back.”

  “Wait for me,” Maddy said as she followed me back out front.

  I’d been hoping Sheila had changed her mind about bolting and had returned. Second best would have been an actual customer, willing to cross the unseen boundary and actually come into the shop and eat. Instead, it was my last choice, our very own chief of police.

  “What do you want, Kevin?”

  “Is that how you greet everyone who walks in here?” He looked around the empty room, then added, “If it is, I’m guessing that might be one of the reasons the place is deserted.”

  “Sorry, I’m a little on edge right now. But honestly, unless you’re going to place an order, you might as well turn around and go. My attorney has instructed me not to talk to you unless he’s right beside me.”

  Kevin looked around. “Funny, I don’t see him here now.”

  “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” I turned to my sister and said, “You take care of him. I’ve got work to do.”

  I headed back toward my office when Kevin said, “I’m not here on official business. Eleanor, could I talk to you a second as a father and not as the chief of police?”

  I turned back to look at him, and there was a somber expression on his face. This wasn’t going to be pleasant. Kevin’s son, Josh, worked for me three nights a week, and it had been a bone of contention between us from the start.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “I think I already know. You’re not going to let your son work here anymore.”

  His frown deepened, but instead of letting him answer, I lit into him. “Kevin Hurley, you’ve known me over twenty years. Do you honestly think I’d do anything to hurt your son? I’m a big fan of Josh’s, though I can’t say the same thing about his dad at the moment.”

  “How you feel about me doesn’t matter,” he said. “Eleanor, be reasonable. He’s all my wife and I have in this world that means anything to us, and I’m not going to let him be painted with the same brush folks around town are using on you. I’ve told him he has to quit.”
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  “What did he say to that?”

  Kevin shrugged. “That doesn’t concern you. I’m just saying, if he shows up anyway, I want you to send him home.”

  “Shouldn’t Josh be the one deciding this?”

  Kevin looked like he was ready to explode, but he managed to rein in his temper. After a few seconds, he said, “You don’t have kids. No matter what you think of me, consider him. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “I need to think about it. Is that it?”

  “For now,” he said.

  “Then consider your message delivered.”

  I heard Maddy gasp slightly, but I didn’t dare look at her. My gaze was locked on Kevin. After ten seconds, he nodded, then left the shop without another word.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Maddy asked. “I thought for a minute there he was going to shoot you.”

  “No, Kevin would never do that,” I said, shaking from the confrontation. I was like that, calm in the actual battle, but full of nerves afterward. I guess it was the best order for things to happen, come to think of it.

  Maddy asked, “What makes you so sure? I saw the fire in his eyes.”

  “Too much paperwork,” I said as I gathered up Sheila’s dirty dishes. “Where do you suppose she ran off to?”

  “I have no idea, especially with a free dessert on its way.”

  I looked at the bag, then asked, “What did you get?”

  “Paul had just finished icing freshly baked brownies when I walked in, so I got two of them.”

  “Perfect. I’ll take mine now.”

  Maddy held the bag away from me. “Not so fast. I didn’t think you could bring yourself to eat anything.”

  “What can I say? Sheila was a good influence on me. My appetite’s suddenly returned.”

  “Okay,” Maddy said reluctantly. “I guess I can share, but I get first pick.”

  “I can live with that,” I said.

  The brownie, just like everything else Paul made, was delicious. It was a huge square, and I doubted I’d be able to finish it, but much to my surprise, I managed just fine. I regretted the calories, but only for a split second. After all, there were times of stress that demanded I spoil myself a little, and if being openly regarded as a murderer wasn’t one of them, I didn’t want to come face-to-face with what might rank as worse.

  “Now that you’ve gorged on sweets, what do we do?” Maddy asked.

  “I can see you didn’t have any trouble with yours, either,” I said.

  “That’s beside the point,” she said as she wadded up the wrapper of her own late, great brownie. “You know me—I have a high metabolism.”

  “And I’ve got a sweet tooth the size of the Smoky Mountains,” I said. “It’s great having an excuse to give in once in a while, isn’t it?”

  “Be that as it may,” Maddy said, “we can’t just sit here and wait for the killer to fall into our laps.”

  “You’re right,” I said as I looked around the empty pizzeria. “There’s no sense staying open if no one comes in. Let’s make a sign for the door. Then we can head into town and see what we can find out about Richard Olsen.”

  “Shouldn’t we look for his sister first?” Maddy asked as she wiped down the table we’d been using.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start looking, would you?”

  “We could try Richard’s house,” Maddy said.

  I thought about it and quickly decided that it was as good a plan as any. “Okay, then that’s what we should do.”

  Maddy smiled. “Do you mean the great and powerful Oz is actually taking one of my suggestions now?”

  “When it makes sense, I do,” I said as I scrawled out a note on the inside of a new pizza box. I couldn’t think of what to write, so I just put, “Back later,” and held it out for her inspection.

  Maddy read it, and as I taped the cardboard to the glass, she said, “You’ve got the heart of a poet, Sis.”

  “Hey, it gets the point across, doesn’t it? Now, are you going to stand there criticizing my signage skills, or are we going to do something a little more productive?”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  I turned off the lights and locked the front door, something I hated doing during our usual working hours. But if I wanted to stay open on a long-term basis, I was going to have to forgo some cash flow temporarily, no matter what my late husband might have thought about it. I hoped he would have understood, but since he’d never been accused of murder himself, I couldn’t be positive. Sometimes my dear husband could have tunnel vision when it came to the bottom line. I’d seen it as my job to give him some perspective from time to time.

  At the moment, I would have traded having his arms around me for ten seconds for everything I owned in the world.

  I glanced back at the pizzeria as we walked out onto the wide swath of brick in front of it. We’d picked up the building’s lease on the plaza after it had housed an unsuccessful clothier named The Blue Note. The owner, obsessed with the color blue, had gone so far as to paint most of the brick facade a shade darker than the deepest sky, though she’d adorned the architectural trim with a lovely off-white that somehow worked well. Joe and I had priced the job of having the paint removed, but the process was such a delicate one, given the age of the bricks, that we knew we’d never be able to afford to have it done. That had led to us playing with dozens of names for our business, from The Blue Pizza to A Pizza of an Entirely Different Color, but we finally decided to ignore the blue instead of incorporating it into our name. A Slice of Delight was our original name when we couldn’t come up with anything we liked better, and somehow it just stuck.

  As we walked down the steps between the buildings—the same steps that I’d raced up a couple of hours earlier—Maddy must have sensed my concern for shutting down. “Closing is the best thing we can do until we figure this out. You know that, don’t you?”

  “This isn’t going to become a habit,” I said. “We’ve got today to dig around, but tonight we reopen, even if it’s just the two of us.”

  “I’m still not delivering any pizzas,” she said defiantly. “Who knows what we’ll find the next time we do it.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to,” I said. “If none of our staff shows up, I’ll do it myself, if it comes to that.”

  “That’s what you get for hiring high school and college kids,” Maddy said.

  “It’s all I can afford,” I said as I shrugged. “They’re happy for the work and I’m thrilled I don’t have to charge twenty-dollar-minimum orders. It’s the only way we can afford to stay open.”

  “I know. It’s just that sometimes working with these kids makes me feel so old.”

  It was a rare admission for my sister, so I said, “There’s no way you’re ever going to be old. You’ve got too much spirit. Sometimes I wish I had some of yours.”

  “Are you kidding me? You’ve got a lot more guts than I do.”

  I looked at her as we walked to the back parking lot, where our cars were waiting for us. “How do you figure that?”

  “You married a man you barely knew, and on your wedding day you bought a run-down house that no one else in town saw any potential in. The two of you defied all odds and renovated it without even coming close to divorce, so what do you do after that? You open up a pizza parlor, of all things. I’d say those were all bold moves, and you still managed to stay in love all along the way.”

  I smiled at her. “When you put it that way, it sounds like I am pretty adventurous. It just seemed so normal the way Joe proposed it all. I had the confidence that he could do anything he set his mind to, and he never let me down.”

  “I won’t, either,” she said. “We’ll find out what happened. Don’t worry.”

  “Are you kidding me? Worry’s about all I’ve got right now. If you take that away from me, I’d be lost.”

  She laughed. “Then we’ll worry together. Now, who’s going to drive, you or me?”

  “Let’s take my Subaru
,” I said. “I need gas anyway, so we might as well fill up the tank on the way to Richard’s.”

  We stopped at the Ezee Fill, and as I was pumping my gas, a car pulled up behind me. There were two other pumps open. Why didn’t they just pull around and take one of those, instead of lingering behind me?

  I glanced back to point that fact out when I saw who was in the car.

  As she got out, I tried my best not to throw the pump to the ground and drive away.

  Instead, I bit my lower lip as she approached.

  “I’m almost done, Joanna,” I called out as I cut the pump off.

  “Go on and fill it,” Joanna Grant said. “I need to talk to you.”

  Joanna was a thin, older woman who darted around people like a hummingbird looking for nectar, and I tried to avoid her whenever I could. In her seventies, she could still manage to stir up more trouble than a marauding gang of monkeys armed with paintball guns.

  “Sorry, we’re running behind,” I said as I secured the gas cap. Now all I had to do was print out the receipt, and we’d be gone. I hit the print button, only nothing came out. The blasted thing was out of paper, which meant that I had to go inside to retrieve a receipt. I thought about abandoning it, but the bookkeeper inside me wouldn’t allow it. I had to have receipts for everything, from donuts to automobiles, a personality quirk that I would have given anything to abandon at the moment.

  “I’ll walk in with you,” Joanna said. “So, you’re closing the pizzeria. It’s probably for the best. What are you going to do now?”

  How in the world did she know we’d shut the doors? Had she followed us here after reading the sign? “Madeline and I are running a few errands,” I said as I cursed the employee whose job it was to keep the receipt paper filled.

  She waved a quick hand in the air. “I mean in the long term. I understand you’ve hired Bob Lemon. He’s very good. Who knows? You might even get out while you’re still a young woman.” She studied me for a moment, then said, “Well, relatively young.”

  The impact of her words spun me around to face her. “Joanna, I didn’t kill Richard Olsen. I’m not going to jail, and I’m not closing the pizzeria. I’m simply taking a few hours off to run a few errands.”