Brownie Points for Murder

by Nicole Ellis

  “Mommy?” Mikey said.

  “What, honey?” I asked, my attention focused on crossing the next side street and navigating up the curb ramp.

  “Is Daddy going to be home tonight to read me Dr. Seuss? Or not?” He stopped walking and looked up at me, his expression so solemn I thought he was going to cry. His full-size Mickey Mouse backpack dwarfed him.

  “Um, maybe.” I wasn’t sure how to answer his question as I didn’t know myself.

  A siren wailed close by and two fire trucks barreled down the main road a block away, heading toward a plume of smoke wafting out of a building near the waterfront.

  “Cool, sirens!” Mikey took off, and I jogged with the stroller to catch up to where he stood at the street corner looking down the hill.

  “Do you see it, Mommy?”

  I did see it. Unfortunately, what I saw was my job offer going up in smoke. The fire was at 148 Sunset Avenue. The bells at the Lutheran church rang the nine o’clock hour, and I reluctantly pulled my gaze away from the construction zone.

  “Let’s go.” I wheeled the stroller around and firmly maneuvered Mikey in the direction of his school. Between the altercation with Mr. Westen and the distraction of the condo fire, we arrived at the Busy Bees cooperative preschool three minutes late. When I saw Nancy Davenport was the parent volunteer for the day, I almost turned around.

  All of the children were gathered on the ABC rug as she read them a story. When we entered the room, Nancy stopped reading and looked at my soiled jeans with disdain. She made a point to glance at her wristwatch before pasting a fake smile on her face and calling to Mikey to join the story circle. He threw his backpack in his cubby and ran eagerly over to the group, the lights on his shoes flashing with every step.

  5

  After dropping Mikey off, I wanted to get a closer look at the fire. When I joined the group watching from the opposite side of the street, flames were shooting out of the rear of the condo building. Community complaints had plagued the project, and I wondered if someone had deliberately set the fire. Firefighters sprayed water at the fire, fighting to gain control of the situation.

  I felt the urge to pinch myself to wake up from what seemed to be a bad dream. The condos weren’t even finished yet. Would they rebuild after the fire? Was this the end of my job offer? Across the street, a Snowton County van drove up and parked in front of the fire engines. A woman and man wearing all black stepped out of the van. When they walked over to the fire chief, I made out the words ‘Coroner’s Office’ printed across their backs. I sucked in my breath.

  Had someone died in the fire? Where was Elliott? I scanned the crowd but didn’t see him. My morning coffee turned to acid in my stomach.

  Oh please, please let it not be Elliott. I still didn’t see him. The condo building may not have been popular, but if the fire had been started on purpose, I couldn’t imagine the arsonist had meant to kill anyone. A restored muscle car roared up to the construction site and parked haphazardly behind the fire trucks.

  To my relief, Elliott jumped out of the car. He ran to the building, where a fireman held him back from entering what had been the entrance to the condo sales office. Heartache was etched across his face as he spoke to the fire chief. For me, the condo project had been a means of testing out a return to working outside the home. For him, the fire represented the devastation of a dream.

  On the drive home after Ella had been pronounced a healthy baby, I devised a brilliant plan to bring Mr. Westen some kind of baked good to take on his fishing trip. A treat would serve as a peace offering for Mikey’s transgression that morning and create favor for us with the fence issue.

  Judging by Ella’s crankiness, I didn’t have much time before she’d need to be fed. I could make cupcakes, but they would take too long to cool and ice. Was there any brownie mix in our pantry? I seemed to recall seeing an old container of frosting in the cupboard.

  No, wait, even better. I remembered the brownies Desi had given me for Adam, who hadn’t been home yet to eat them.

  I glanced in the mirror and saw Ella had fallen back asleep, snoring softly with her head on her chest. I parked in the garage and ran into the house to get the box of brownies from the kitchen. The box sat in the middle of the granite counter with the lid open, displaying a luscious-looking confection of fudge icing and gooey rich brownies studded with M&M’s. Desi’s brownies were famous in our family and extremely popular among customers of her café. They would be perfect to give to Mr. Westen. What man could resist such a treat? And there was always the chance they’d even help soften him enough to rethink his decision to sell the BeansTalk property.

  I slid a small cookie sheet under the white paper box for stability and gingerly carried the tray out to the car. I drove the short distance down the hill to Mr. Westen’s house.

  Good, the car full of fishing gear was still in the driveway. I parked behind him, cracked the window for Ella, and removed the cookie sheet with the brownies from the passenger seat. The cookie sheet was tacky, but I didn’t trust the box not to break under the weight of Desi’s legendary brownies.

  I carried my offering up the front steps of his house, past a row of red and yellow tulips that appeared to have been planted with a straight-edge ruler, and rang the doorbell. The stone house loomed above me. Massive curtained windows bracketed the door. While I waited, I took in the view behind me. Although we had a nice water view, his house sat on the hill below our house and boasted a gorgeous, unobstructed view of Puget Sound. I could even see the lighthouse blinking over at No Rocks Point across the water.

  Footsteps from within the house came closer, and Mr. Westen yanked open the heavy, ornately carved door. He was dressed for the outdoors, in a long-sleeve green- and red-plaid flannel shirt stretched tightly over a small belly and tucked into khaki work pants.

  “Oh, it’s you.” He frowned at me through his heavy tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. “What do you want?”

  I forced myself to smile and held out the cookie sheet. “I brought these for your trip. They’ll go great with all the fish you’ll catch. I also wanted to apologize for my son running the stroller off the sidewalk and into your garden.”

  “Humph,” he said. He eyed the brownies and appeared to be trying to decide whether to throw them at me or take them back into his lair. As I’d hoped, no man could resist Desi’s brownies. He slid the box off of the cookie sheet, the bottom bowing ominously, and retreated into his house, shutting the door in my face.

  I stood there for a moment with my mouth open and the cookie sheet still raised in offering. Did he really just slam the door on me, without even so much as a

  ‘thank you’? He was even more of a jerk than I’d thought.

  Fuming as I walked back to the van, I forced myself to stay calm, rather than going back to give him a piece of my mind.

  When we got to the school for pickup, Mikey’s teacher pulled me aside.

  “Jill, I’m concerned about Mikey. He got into a pushing fight with another little boy today.”

  “What happened? Why was Mikey fighting?”

  “I wasn’t present when it happened, but another teacher told me he had been bragging to a friend about his dad, the superhero. After Mikey told him his dad was gone all the time fighting crime, the other boy called him a liar and Mikey pushed him off his chair.” Her gray hair bobbed around her chin as she completed her rendition. She pursed her glossy pink lips, gazing up at me expectantly.

  Sheesh. A superhero? Adam spent most of his time sitting at a desk, researching his current legal case. The kid had quite the imagination.

  “Thanks for telling me. I’ll talk with him about it tonight.” It was hard for me to have Adam travel so much for work, but it must be even worse for Mikey, who wouldn’t understand the reason behind his father’s frequent absences.

  That night, Mikey, Ella, and I ate alone. I tucked Mikey into bed and read to him from the big blue volume of Dr. Seuss stories, but I could tell my rendition wasn’t u
p to par with Adam’s storytelling. Something had to give before he concocted more theories about why his dad wasn’t home.

  It wasn’t only Mikey who missed Adam. It had been over a month since I’d had dinner with him, and our last couple’s date had been months before Ella’s birth. I didn’t know how much longer any of us could take his long work hours.

  After brushing my teeth, I checked on the kids and found them both sound asleep. I made myself a cup of tea, turned on the television in the living room, and flipped to the local news. They were showing earlier footage of the Ericksville condo fire and declaring it a suspected arson. I leaned toward the TV to see and hear better without waking up the kids. As the reporter droned on and on about the fire damage, I began to severely doubt I’d still have a job at the condo project.

  The fire was top of mind, and the first thing I did when Adam got home late that night was to talk to him about it.

  “Hey, did you hear about the fire at the new condo project downtown? Mikey and I saw the smoke on our way to preschool.” I shivered and walked over to the sink to refill my tea cup from the hot water dispenser. “I can’t believe someone died in the fire. What an awful way to die.”

  “I read about it while on the train. The news said they haven’t identified the body, but it’s most likely some homeless person who fell asleep in the empty building. They don’t seem to have any suspects in the arson yet. Not much of a shock considering how much opposition there was to the construction.” Adam filled the Keurig with water and inserted a caffeinated coffee K-Cup. “Sounds like you guys had a pretty packed day today.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s where the excitement ended. The rest of the day was pretty boring.” I started to unload the dishwasher and absentmindedly twirled a wooden spoon around my fingers like a baton before placing it in the blue ceramic crock on the counter. With Adam’s travel schedule, I hadn’t told him yet about Elliott’s job offer. “I was thinking about going back to work. I need some adult interaction other than the overbearing moms at Mikey’s school.”

  “What were you thinking of? Going back to your old job? Or something part-time?”

  “I don’t know yet. I put out some feelers with friends, but I haven’t made any decisions yet.” Shoot, I’d been so wrapped up in getting the kids to bed that I’d forgotten to call Gena back. It was too late to call her now. I’d have to try to get ahold of her tomorrow. “Actually, speaking of the condo fire, the builder asked me to work on some marketing materials for them.”

  Adam spun around on his bar stool to face me. “What? You’re going to work for the guy who is singlehandedly ruining Ericksville? You know that building will destroy the downtown.”

  I knew the condos weren’t popular, but his response stunned me. “He’s a nice guy, and he has plans for community use of the ground floor of the building. He truly wants to improve the downtown area,” I said. “It would be part-time, so I’d still have time with the kids. Adam, I need something more. I need to have something that is for me and not for everyone else.”

  “It’s your choice.” Adam sighed. “But I would worry about your safety there with the arsonist on the loose.”

  “Eventually I’m going to go back to work. And I have a job offer now.” Well, I hoped I still had a job offer after the fire. I wanted the decision to return to work to be on my terms, not a unilateral decision made by Adam. His vehement opposition to the condo building did make me wonder if I’d made the right decision to support the construction project.

  “Do you think this is the right time? I mean, Mikey’s already getting upset about not having me around. If you’re not here, it will be ten times worse. And I thought you were going to help out at the Boathouse,” Adam said.

  “When will be the right time? I was supposed to take a three-month maternity leave after having Mikey, and that didn’t happen, and then we had Ella.” I drank deeply from my now cool mug of chamomile tea to calm myself. “Look, I don’t even know if I want to go back to work full-time right now, I just want to know what options are available.”

  “Okay, that sounds fair. But can you wait a few more weeks until things settle down at my job? We can revisit this then.”

  Wah! Wah! Ella’s cries blared through the baby monitor on the end table.

  “I’ll get her and then I have to work some more before bed.” Adam grabbed his cup of coffee and headed upstairs toward our daughter’s room. At the foot of the stairs, he turned to me and said, “Honey, don’t worry about the job situation—yours or mine. Everything will work out, it always does.”

  I wasn’t so sure he was right. Tonight’s conversation had gone the same route as others, with Adam promising to find time to discuss the issue sometime in the nebulous future. I wasn’t able to get a feel for whether he wanted me to go back to work or not, which added to my own confusion and indecision about being a stay-at-home mom. I finished unloading the dishwasher and turned out the lights before going upstairs myself.

  Ella’s cries woke me up from a fretful sleep. I rolled over to see the alarm clock. Two o’clock in the morning. Tomorrow I would be a sleep-deprived zombie. Adam snored softly next to me. I got out of bed, threw on my robe and slippers, and retrieved Ella from her crib before she woke him or Mikey up.

  While waiting for Ella’s bottle to heat in a mug of hot water, I rocked her gently against me. Through the kitchen windows, I noticed a light on in Mr. Westen’s living room. Someone moved around inside the otherwise dark house. Had he decided not to go on his fishing trip? It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d stayed to keep an eye on his yard to save it from being invaded by marauding kids and dogs. Or worse, had he remained in town after hearing about Desi’s petition to save the BeansTalk building?

  The microwave timer beeped, and I pulled the bottle out of the water, sitting down with Ella in the comfortable brown leather recliner in the living room. I popped out the foot rest and sank into the chair’s embrace. She sucked the bottle down and promptly fell asleep. I kissed her crop of silky red hair that matched my own and inhaled the intoxicating scent of baby shampoo, thinking back to her birth. Had it really been six months already? Time went by so fast.

  It seemed like yesterday when Adam and I had first seen this house, but I’d been five months pregnant with Mikey at the time. We’d been house hunting for a few months for a good family home, and Adam had wanted to move out of Seattle and back to his hometown of Ericksville, where his parents and sister’s family still lived. The Craftsman-inspired house with a partial view of Puget Sound had appealed to both of us immediately, and we’d made an offer on the spot. It wasn’t until later that we’d found out the land had once been part of the large Westen estate and came with a crotchety old man for an immediate neighbor. I’d never understood why Mr. Westen had sold the land if he hated having neighbors.

  The moon’s soft glow on the wall and the hum of the refrigerator had almost lulled me to sleep when a car’s engine revved up the hill, waking Ella. In a half-asleep daze, I danced around the living room until she finally fell back to sleep. As I passed through the kitchen on the way to the stairs, I glanced out the window at Mr. Westen’s house, but the light was now off.

  I lowered Ella into her white wooden crib and turned off the pink dancing ballerina nightlight. She turned in her sleep and made a little cry before sticking her thumb in her mouth. I turned on the soothing ocean sound on her Sleep Sheep in case another car passed by. At night, cars on our side street were rare, but I didn’t want to risk her waking up again.

  Before I returned to bed, I poked my head into Mikey’s room to check on him. He lay curled up in the lower bunk in his room, hugging a stuffed monkey against his chest with a Disney Pixar Cars comforter tucked tightly around his small form. He looked so young and innocent, and I paused for a moment to watch him sleep. When I left his doorway, I made a silent promise to get him to school on time the next day and to find a way to make peace with Nancy Davenport and the other preschool PTA Queen Bees.

  6
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  I woke the kids up early the next morning, but after a preschooler temper tantrum and an emergency baby bath made necessary by a messy diaper, we didn’t have much time to spare. Mikey clung to me and begged me to cross to the other side of the street before we passed Mr. Westen’s house.

  When we came abreast of his house, I didn’t see a car parked in the driveway and I assumed he’d left early in the morning for his fishing trip. Miraculously, after speed-walking down the hill, we made it to Mikey’s preschool seven minutes early. I was tying Goldie’s leash to a bike rack next to the door when Brenda Watkins tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Hi, Jill. It seems like it’s been so long since I last saw you.” One of Brenda’s twin three-year-old girls tugged at her well-manicured hand, but she just patted her daughter’s head. “I’ve been so busy with the real estate market turning around this spring, but we should get together for coffee sometime soon.”

  “Sure, I’d like that. How about after preschool drop-off sometime next week? We can walk over to the BeansTalk Café together. Wait, let me check my calendar. I think I have preschool helper duty next week.” I pulled up the calendar on my phone. “Nope, we’re good. That’s next month. This week, I’m supposed to be in on Thursday to help with the latest bake sale planning. I missed last month’s PTA meeting and somehow got assigned to help. With the tuition we’re paying here and the endless fundraisers, I don’t see how another bake sale can possibly be needed.”

  “Ugh, don’t you just hate that? I swear stay-at-home moms have nothing better to do than sit around and discuss ways to make other moms’ lives miserable,” Brenda said. The wind blew a lock of ebony-colored hair into her eyes, and she pushed it firmly back into place behind her ear, which sparkled with a large diamond stud earring.