Arsenic and Ole

by Jessa Archer

  Thankfully, no one was picketing outside at the moment. There weren’t many customers, though. Just three people in the entire place, and they usually did a brisk business at lunchtime. Dia’s youngest sister was at the register. I could see her mother and the middle daughter in the kitchen, back behind the counter, when I stepped inside. The air was rich with the smells of cinnamon, sugar, and spice. Ben had said the middle sister was the only one of the bunch who seemed to have inherited Silvia’s culinary skills.

  “Hola, Silvia!” Even though she had been in the United States for over twenty years, she was far more comfortable with her native language, and that was fine by me, since I rarely had a chance to practice my Spanish here in Caratoke.

  A smile spread across her round face, and she waved when she spotted me. After a second, however, her hand stopped, and the smile faded. I could tell exactly what was going through her head. She thought I’d stopped in to cancel the catering order. I quickly reassured her that we were looking forward to the taco bar this evening, but I’d forgotten to include guacamole. Could she add it to my order?

  “Sí, sí,” Silvia said, the smile returning to her face. “Gracias. No es un problema!” She said a few words to her daughter, a little too rapidly for me to catch, but it seemed to be something about adding the guacamole to my catering bill. As I was about to leave, Silvia called out for me to wait and then came over, pressing a small bag of warm churros into my hand. “Neighbor bonus,” she said, and asked me to wish Paige a happy birthday.

  When I got to the house, I was surprised to find the place empty, aside from Attila.

  “Guess I’m going to have to eat these churros all by myself,” I said.

  Attila gave me a quick glance, but sugar has never been his weakness. If I’d walked in with sushi, he’d have already been climbing up my leg.

  I took a peek at the backyard and saw that the decorations were almost complete, with lights strung along the deck and hanging from the branches of several trees. The folding tables I’d borrowed were now set up in the yard, with two of them on the deck for serving.

  The usual living room clutter had been put away and Paige had even taken the time to vacuum, which we have to do constantly because Attila is a world-class shedding machine.

  When I took the groceries into the kitchen, I spotted the note on the fridge. Paige and Delaney had driven into Kitty Hawk with Nathan to grab lunch and pick up a helium tank and balloons from the party store. We’d gone back and forth about balloons, with Paige initially saying she wanted them and then deciding they were too juvenile. Nathan or Delaney must have changed her mind.

  My mother appeared on the window seat next to Attila as I began pulling the ingredients for Paige’s birthday cake from the pantry.

  “You’re not using a mix?” she asked a little dubiously.

  “Nope. Delaney brought a recipe with her.” I held up the two sheets of paper.

  Attila stirred just long enough to inch closer to Caroline, using his front paws to knead the spot on the cushion where my mother’s lap appeared to be. It was an odd visual effect, almost as if Caroline were a hologram. I’d gotten used to her being here, used to having brief chats about my day and asking her for tips on navigating the new-to-me world of academia. Caroline hung out with Paige, too, from time to time, but Paige couldn’t see her. That ability seemed to be restricted to me and the cat.

  The fact that our conversations had become part of my routine worried me. Not only because it made me question my sanity a bit, but also because I had the sense that this couldn’t be permanent. In fact, I hoped it wouldn’t be permanent, for her sake. She wasn’t able to stay visible—or audible—for more than a few minutes a day. And everything I’d read online, every single one of the dozens of books I’d purchased on the subject over the past few months, suggested that something was holding her here, keeping her from moving on. I wanted my mother to be at peace. On the other hand, when she finally did move on, I knew it would be like losing her all over again.

  “That recipe looks a bit complicated,” she said, giving the printout a dubious eye. “Are you sure about this?”

  My mother and I had long agreed that while those little tubs of prepared frosting were an abomination, a boxed cake mix was perfectly fine. Someone had simply measured out the ingredients for you. You still had to mix it up and bake the cake. And if you did this mixing and baking at home, it was perfectly legit to call that cake homemade.

  “No,” I told her. “I’m actually not at all sure about it. That’s why there’s a backup mix in the pantry, just in case this goes badly. But Delaney swears it’s the best cake her uncle makes. And looking at the prices on his website, I’d need to mortgage the house to buy it from one of his stores.”

  Delaney’s uncle had hit it big a few years back with a chain of upscale bakeries, most of them specializing in cupcakes. Foster’s Patisserie expanded so quickly that Delaney’s mom and dad—an advertising executive and a lawyer, respectively—had decided to leave LA and move to New York in order to help him run the business.

  Caroline was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You probably shouldn’t antagonize her, you know.”

  “Delaney?”

  “No, silly. Rebecca Whitley. The woman actually does play golf with the mayor’s wife. She’s friends with several people on the HOA board, as well. If she takes a mind, she can complicate your life. Travis’s, too, since the mayor is his boss. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.”

  “Do you seriously expect me to believe that you’d have backed down if she threatened to wreck your granddaughter’s birthday party?” I laughed. “You’d have slashed her tires.”

  “I would not have slashed her tires,” she protested, and then gave a grudging shrug of admission. “Although I might have let the air out of them. And I’d probably have bought another bag of crabgrass seed to toss onto her lawn.”

  “Another bag?” When she didn’t respond with anything other than a sly smile, I said, “You’d think being in a new relationship would have mellowed the woman out a bit. But you’re definitely right about her ruining people’s lives.”

  I gave her a quick recap of Mrs. Whitley’s feud with the Gonzalez family as I sifted the dry ingredients into the mixing bowl. “And now, I have to decide how to deal with the fact that I have a bunch of teens coming over tonight, and we’re serving tacos from a place that at least some of the parents are going to believe poisoned a dog. Whether they think it was intentional or not won’t matter…a restaurant that accidentally serves up rat poison is going to be viewed as almost equally bad. Even though I don’t believe for one second that it’s true, you know there will be at least a few people who do believe it.”

  “You should order pizza. Not instead of the tacos,” she added in response to my expression. “In addition to them. So that they’ll have an option. But yes. This is exactly what I meant when I said not to cross her.” She sighed. “Dia is probably right, too. I didn’t know the girl was seeing Andrew, but his mother would not have approved of that relationship. And the fact that La Costera received a clean record from the health department won’t make her back down, because she never admits she’s wrong about anything. Whitley is a chaos agent, and she’s just not happy unless she’s making trouble for somebody. She would drive that family out of business and never think twice about it. We’ve already lost one veterinarian to her nonsense. The poor girl had the nerve to suggest that Leo might benefit from fewer people-food treats. She’d only been in practice for a few years, and all it took was a whisper campaign and a few nasty online reviews for Whitley to convince people that the vet was incompetent. Not everyone believed it, of course, but just enough that she could see the writing on the wall. She packed up and moved back to Richmond. I had to take Attila to the vet in Kitty Hawk for his next checkup, until someone bought out the practice. I don’t know if his predecessor gave him a word of advice or if someone else informed him, but Becky Whitley sings this new vet’s praise
s, so I’m sure that he just nods quietly and agrees with everything she tells…him…”

  The visual and audio always seem to fade out in tandem when Caroline disappears unintentionally, which I was sure was the case this time. She’d been pretty fired up about Whitley’s treatment of the Gonzalezes and Attila’s former veterinarian. It seemed easier for her to maintain a physical presence when she was relaxed.

  Ordering pizza as a second option wasn’t a bad idea, though. Her body and voice might fade in and out, but her mind was definitely still all there.

  Three layers of chocolate cake were cooling on the rack when Paige and the others arrived around three. By the time they finished inflating the balloons, I had the layers stacked with raspberry filling in the middle and was swirling the last of the chocolate ganache onto the assembled cake. Nathan reached stealthily across the counter and swiped a bit from the bottom of the cake.

  I swatted at him with the dish towel. “Hands off my ganache, young man! You can have the bowl when I’m done.”

  Nathan obediently parked himself at the kitchen counter, eyeing my progress like a puppy begging for treats. A few minutes later, I pushed the mostly empty bowl toward him and Paige. Delaney wrinkled her nose and opted for one of the beaters instead, noting that she didn’t want to swap germs. That was clearly a moot point with my daughter and Nathan. While they had tactfully avoided any overt PDA in my presence, I was under no illusions.

  “What exactly is ganache?” Nathan asked. “It tastes like frosting.”

  “It is frosting,” Paige said, licking her finger. “Just not the sickly sweet kind.”

  “Well, it’s like frosting if you whip it,” Delaney added. “If you don’t, it’s more like a fudgy glaze. We sell this one cupcake that has a coffee ganache filling—the fudgy kind—in the center and whipped dark chocolate ganache on top. It’s absolutely decadent.”

  Paige seemed a bit subdued for some reason. She’d left most of the frosting for Nathan, which wasn’t like her. Most of the time they’d be laughing as she elbowed him out of the way to get the last little smidgen. It might have simply been anxiety about the party. Paige has always been a bit like me in the fact that she’s not exactly a social butterfly. We’d only been in Caratoke for a few months, and she’d actually been a little nervous about having a party at all. She’d suggested all of us just going out to dinner and a movie but had changed her mind once we were sure Delaney would be coming down from New York.

  Nathan had an appointment to mow someone’s lawn, so once the bowl was thoroughly cleaned out, he headed out. I waited until he was gone and then said to Paige, “You seem a little quiet. You’re not worried about my conversation with the Wicked Witch of Windward Court this morning, are you? Because I’m not worried. I plan to go into the backyard and crank the volume up to eleven just to tick her off.” I gave Paige a grin, then licked the last of the ganache off my beater.

  “It’s not Mrs. Whitley,” Paige said. “It’s just…”

  “Emily’s coming,” Delaney chimed in. “Even though Paige didn’t invite her. Caden told Paige he was bringing Lacey, but then Lacey decided to go out of town with her parents, so Emily offered to take her place, even though we all know she’d never in a million years date Caden, and she’s only doing this to annoy Paige so she can spend the entire party flirting with Nathan.”

  Delaney is clearly better acquainted with the cast of characters at Caratoke High than I am, even though she’s never met any of these people aside from Nathan. The name Caden was vaguely familiar, though. I thought maybe he was one of Nathan’s basketball teammates, but I hadn’t met him. I hadn’t met Emily either, but I knew that she and her circle of friends had done their best to make Paige miserable. Emily had apparently had designs on Nathan before we moved here.

  “It’s only partly about Emily,” Paige said. “It’s also that there are going to be a lot of people, and…I’m kind of wishing I’d kept it smaller.”

  Delaney sighed. “It’s your sixteenth birthday! That’s as close as a Caucasian girl can get to a quinceañera. If you don’t celebrate this milestone properly, you will absolutely regret it, quite possibly for the rest of your life. It has to be a party you’ll remember.”

  Paige gave her the side eye. “You just want me to have a big party because you had to celebrate your sixteenth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s.”

  “We actually wound up at a regular pizza place, but it was a close call,” Delaney said, and then turned to me to explain. “I hadn’t met a single person in Brooklyn, aside from family, when my birthday rolled around. My oldest cousin is like nine. They were all lobbying for celebrating with the Pizza Rat, but I put my foot down. Pizza, okay. But no robot rats singing to me. So yes. I cheerfully acknowledge that I want to live vicariously through my best friend’s fabulous sixteenth birthday party.”

  “Fine,” Paige told her. “You win. I will have a fabulous sixteenth birthday party.”

  Given Paige’s mood, I was a bit loathe to mention the whole issue with La Costera and the taco bar, but she needed to know. “The Gonzalez girl…Marisa, right? Is she coming tonight?”

  “Marisol,” Paige said. “And yes. She said she was coming. Why?”

  I grimaced and told her what I’d learned this morning.

  “Rat poison?” Paige exclaimed.

  “Ben said that’s what the vet thought it was. Poison of some sort, at any rate. The health department cleared them, but between Mrs. Whitley picketing and Alicia Brown’s story in the Clarion—well, the business has really taken a hard hit.”

  “But…that’s not fair!” Paige said. “La Costera is the best Mexican place in town.”

  “They should sue,” said Delaney, with all the authority of a lawyer’s kid. “That sounds like a solid defamation case, between the picketing and the comments to the newspaper.”

  “They’re considering it, which is probably why Whitley had the police over there this morning. She claims the Gonzalezes are threatening her. Anyway, I didn’t cancel the order—”

  “Good!” Paige said adamantly. “You definitely shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t cancel,” I repeated, “but I am going to have some pizzas delivered as well. The question is whether you want to put out both or have me just put the taco stuff in the fridge and serve the pizza. If Marisol wasn’t coming, I’d suggest the latter, because I can imagine some of the parents getting upset. I’m sure there will be at least a few people at the party who know about the situation. I mean, we’ll be eating tacos every meal for a week if I don’t serve them, but hey…I like tacos.”

  Paige shook her head. “We can’t do that. With Marisol coming, she’s going to know if we switch to pizza. And I’d hate for her to think we trust that awful Mrs. Whitley over her family. But…we could have been planning both pizzas and tacos all along, right? I never said we were only having tacos.”

  “And maybe if there are two different options,” Delaney said, “people will be less likely to talk about it. If they’re worried, they’ll just avoid the tacos.”

  I thought that was a bit optimistic. People always talk. But it was still the best possible solution under the circumstances.

  The girls headed upstairs to get ready, but Paige turned back when she reached the landing. “Can you order from that Pizza Pete’s place?” she asked.

  “I… guess? But we both thought their crust was awful.”

  She grinned. “It is. And that means anyone who believes old lady Whitley and is too afraid to eat the tacos from La Costera will be stuck with cardboard crust.”

  “Excellent idea,” I said. “Pizza Pete’s it is.”

  Chapter Six

  A white SUV rolled into the driveway exactly on schedule at six forty-five. On previous occasions, when I’d seen the vehicle in the neighborhood or in the parking lot of the restaurant, there had been a La Costera Catering sign on top, but they’d apparently taken it down. I expected to see Dia emerge from behind the wheel, but it was her father.
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br />   Bill Gonzalez was remarkably fit for a man in his forties who spent every day in a restaurant with chips and churros within easy reach. He gave me a wave, and then went around to open the back. He and his youngest daughter, Marisol, each grabbed a large aluminum tray.

  “Professor Alden!” he said as they approached the door. “Where should we set this up?”

  “Please, just call me Tig. We’ve got a table ready out on the deck.”

  Marisol gave me a shy smile as I stepped back to let them enter. They went to work carrying in trays of taco fillings, shells, chips, and the various toppings, and within a few minutes, the two of them had the hot stuff warming over little tins of sterno and the cold stuff over ice. Gallons of iced tea and lemonade were placed on the other table, along with plastic cups. Something seemed a bit off, but it took me a minute to figure out what it was. Paige and I had gotten takeout from La Costera on quite a few occasions. The cups usually had the restaurant logo imprinted on them—a sun rising over the ocean, except the sun was actually a taco shell. But the cups Marisol was stacking on the table were plain red Solo cups. Maybe they’d run out of the branded stuff?

  The last thing Gonzalez carried in was three large foil containers, which he placed on the kitchen counter. “We have covers on the food outside. These are chips and taco shells. Just put the oven on low, and they should stay warm until you’re ready to eat. Marisol can keep the toppings filled and—”

  I shook my head, smiling. “I’ll take care of that,” I told him as Paige and Delaney joined us in the kitchen. “Marisol is here as Paige’s guest. She can relax and have fun with her friends.”