A Berry Murderous Kitten_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  “Well, he… he was.”

  “Liar,” Zoey said.

  Steph’s face flushed red, and she started to get up.

  “Sit or we go to the police with what we know,” Zoey threatened. A bluff. To my amazement, Steph sat back down, looking as guilty as a toddler who had stolen a cookie out of the cookie jar.

  So there was something that Steph didn’t want the police to know.

  “Why did you kill Cam?” I asked.

  “Are you nuts?” Steph exclaimed. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  It was worth a try.

  “Then who did?” I asked.

  “How the heck should I know?”

  “Do you think it was one of his customers? Maybe someone he pushed too hard?” Zoey asked.

  Steph glanced toward the rest of the restaurant. “No,” she shook her head. “Couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” I asked.

  Steph looked uncertain, then she started talking. “Cam got into a big argument with one of my regulars, Jared.”

  “Short, heavyset with coke-bottle glasses?” I asked.

  Steph narrowed her eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “How we know,” Zoey said, “isn’t as important as that we know.”

  Steph frowned, but she gave us the confirmation we needed. “Yeah, that’s Jared. A lot of things were said during that fight, on both sides, and Jared told Cam—how’d he put it—oh yeah, he told Cam that he’d get rid of him. I’m pretty sure he meant fired, though.” Then to herself she added, “I hope he meant fired.”

  “What about Cam’s girlfriend,” I said, “is she taking his death hard?”

  Steph looked at her watch. When she looked at us again, her lips had thinned and she had seemed to have lost her patience despite the appearance of our leverage over her. “I’ve had about enough of this, but I’ll answer your question anyway because you need to understand that you are barking up the wrong tree. Cam was my employee. Em-ploy-ee. I don’t know if he had a girlfriend or not, and his relationship status was frankly none of my business. I was his employer. Not his keeper, not his watcher, and not his confidant. Now, I’ve told you everything there is to tell, which is more than I had to. It’s time that you both to take your meddling noses and get out of my restaurant.”

  I noticed that she didn’t threaten to call the law on us.

  “Just one more question,” I said, leaning forward. “Where were you when Cam was killed?”

  She looked me square in the eyes, challenging me. “At home. Alone.”

  Chapter 13

  The early winter sun was setting by the time we got back from Bouche. Zoey had driven her car since I was carless. She parked in the lot behind her building, and we walked to the front by way of a side street.

  “I really thought Steph was going to crack there for a second,” I said.

  “We need to figure out what her screws are so that we can twist them. Everybody’s got screws.”

  I wondered what Zoey’s screws were. I imagined a whole host of skeletons dancing in her closet. Then I imagined my own closet. It had a few skeletons, too, but their bones were chalky and some of them had osteoporosis. They weren’t very impressive as far as skeletons go.

  We rounded the corner onto Main Street and stopped in our tracks. Max was in front of Zoey's building with a bouquet of multicolored daisies. I remembered the puppy smelling the daisy on Zoey’s computer screen, and I wondered if they were her favorite flower.

  Sitting at Max’s feet was a large paper bag with a looped carrying handle. Its side read, “Thai Goddess,” a local Thai restaurant.

  “My favorite place,” Zoey said, and it sounded like she was talking to herself more than to me.

  Zoey slowed her pace as she approached Max. I slowed a bit more than she did, dropping behind to give them a sense of privacy.

  Max handed Zoey the flowers. She buried her face in the soft petals and she flashed him a dazzling smile. “These are beautiful. Thank you, Max.”

  He smiled down at her, then brushed his thumb over her cheek in an intimate caress. “They’re not half as beautiful as you. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you, too, Max. A lot.” I was definitely starting to get a third-wheel vibe. “And I can’t believe you picked up dinner.”

  “All your favorites.” The bag was nearly overflowing with takeout containers.

  “Thank you, Max.” She bent and lifted the bag by its handles. “I’ve been wanting to take Kylie to Thai Goddess and hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This is really thoughtful.”

  “But… I thought—” Max started to say.

  “Kylie, mind getting the door?” I opened it. “Do you know how to use chopsticks? Eating Thai food with a fork just isn’t the same. If you don’t know how to use chopsticks, I’ll teach you.”

  “I could use some teaching.” I was feeling as surprised as Max looked. I was going to have dinner with Zoey, and Max was getting left out on the street!

  DID YOU SEE his face?” Zoey laughed. She picked up a shrimp with her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. I tried to duplicate her movements and flipped a shrimp into my hair. Zoey fell over sideways. “You’re killing me!”

  It was good to see her laughing. I was pretty sure that this was the first time I had seen her laugh.

  I picked the shrimp out of my hair with my fingers and popped it in my mouth. We were sitting on a couple of plush pillows on the floor. The food containers were spread out around us, all at an arm’s reach, and a candle named Jasmine Musk was burning nearby.

  Feeling bold, I decided to be nosy. And blunt. “Are you thinking about giving him a second chance?”

  Zoey sighed. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. “I want to. I do. But I’m not ready. I’d be afraid I’d gouge his eyes out in his sleep.” She rolled her head to look at me. “I’d been considering revamping his online identity. Had the whole scenario worked out. He was going to be an orphan who ran away from an orphanage to be raised as a hitman for a gang. I was going to load the system with five to ten arrest warrants.” She looked at the ceiling. “I was aiming for life in prison, but he could have gotten the death penalty in a few states, and I didn’t want that.”

  I paused with a noodle dangling from one chopstick, halfway to my mouth.

  Note to self: never ever truly tick off Zoey.

  I recovered enough to gobble down the noodle, and Zoey sat up and got herself some more Pad Thai. “Enough about me. I want to know about you.”

  I laughed. “You telling me you don’t already know everything? I figured you and that computer of yours could tell me what I dreamt about last night.”

  “If I had to guess, it would be nightmares about balloon payments.”

  A cold chill ran up my spine. Did I owe a balloon payment on the property I’d gotten from my cousin Sarah? I thought that I had at least three years before I had to start making full payments. I thought that the payments were fixed, forever to remain do-able. Suddenly I felt sick—like I might hyperventilate. I really needed to read the fine print of the contract I’d signed!

  Zoey was busy loading her plate up with food and didn’t notice my sudden panic from her off-hand remark. I swallowed my debt-fear down with a spring roll chaser.

  “What I want to know,” Zoey said, “is how weird it is to be stuck in a town where your ex grew up. I mean, all his family is here and yours isn’t.”

  “Do you research everyone?” It was a little unnerving talking to Zoey about myself. I was sure that there were things she knew about me that I hadn’t told her. She was like a DIY version of the CIA.

  “I do,” she said in the same way one might admit to farting in an elevator. “Usually it’s just enough to see if you’re a plaguer.”

  “A what?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. It’s slang I use for my own thoughts. Zombie apocalypse stuff. Um, if I look into someone and I don’t like what I find, the idea is to treat them like the
y’ve got the plague.”

  “Like, stay away from them?”

  “Yeah, everybody’s got a plague of some type. You’ve got your Aunt Dorothy.”

  “Ex,” I added in. The ex was important.

  “Anyone who makes friends with you makes an enemy out of her. She’s one of your plagues.” She shrugged. “One that I can live with.”

  “So if you look into someone and find out they…”

  “Beat their kids,” Zoey said, finishing the sentence for me.

  My brows went up.

  “There’s a few around, no one I’m friends with. I digitally keep an eye on the kids and throw them a bone when I can.”

  I smiled. “You’re their fairy cybermother.”

  Zoey laughed. “Yeah, I like that.”

  “What else do you do?”

  Zoey thought a second. “One of the kids’ dad was driving home from a bar. He didn’t look drunk on the surveillance video, but you can’t always tell. I called in a tip. The guy got nabbed and put on work-release status in prison for six months. By the time the dad got back home, the kid had left for college—which I made sure he got a scholarship for.”

  “Zoey, that’s amazing!”

  She shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “We all try to help where we can.” She played around with her food, then got us back on topic. “So spill. What about you? You living here, your ex’s folks and all the rest. He’s got his old high school buddies who are still here. Aren’t you curious about any of them?”

  “Naw. Well, I haven’t thought about his friends being here. It is a little weird having his parents nearby. I always did like Dan’s parents, not that I saw them much since we lived in Chicago and them here. They could be a bit pushy, but it came from a nice place. They wanted grandbabies.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Someday. I guess I would have had them already, but Dan knew that I’d be off work from the company if that happened, and he always wanted to push for that next rung up the ladder before we started a family.”

  “It’s not doing well,” Zoey said, midway through gobbling up some noodles.

  “What’s not doing well?”

  “Your company—I mean your ex’s company. It’s not doing well.”

  This was news to me. I’d made a conscious choice to leave him and the life we once had, so I hadn’t kept tabs. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the company not doing well. I’d poured years of my life into nurturing it into what it had become—a multimillion dollar company that had kept us comfortable with a mid-six-figure salary for Dan. I hadn’t been officially on the books with a salary. Dan had said that it would be an unnecessary financial drain on the company. Dan had said a lot of things. Dan had been a jerk… and I’d been foolish and naive.

  “He’ll figure it out,” I said. Then, needing to change the topic, I asked, “What about you and Max? Do you know what you’ll do?”

  Zoey nodded. “Take my time. A lot of time. I fell so hard and so fast for him the first time around. Maybe things can work out. Maybe. But I won’t rush it, and I won’t let him rush it. There’s no picking up where we left off.” We ate in silence for a while. “I miss him. I miss the way he made me feel.”

  “How was that?”

  “Accepted. One hundred percent. He accepted me, all of me, never tried to change anything about me.”

  “Wow.” I put down my chopsticks. “Wow.” I had to say it again. I was only now getting a sense of how much I had changed into someone else over the years to please Dan. That Max had liked Zoey just as she was made me like him a little bit more, or at the very least dislike him less.

  I got a thought. It was a simple one, but it felt important. “You and me tomorrow. I’ll take off from work after lunch and we’ll spend the day together doing girly stuff. Whatever you want. A de-stress pampering day.”

  Zoey smiled. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. A girls’ day out.”

  “Oh! I know the perfect wild goose chase to send Max on while we’re out so that he’ll leave us alone.” Her smile turned wicked. “He had a doctor’s appointment recently. Time for him to hear back that some of the lab results will require more exploratory measures.”

  Yep, never tick Zoey off.

  Chapter 14

  They’re doing what?” One of the last people I’d expected to be hearing from at eight-thirty in the morning was Maryann, my ex’s mother.

  “Suzette over at the health inspector’s office called me last night. She knows that you’re our daughter-in-law”—I stopped myself from correcting her, ex-daughter-in-law—“and she knows that you took over the café. After the complaint came in, she called me as soon as she could. I don’t have your cell phone number, dear, or I would have called you last night. The best I could think to do was to call the café phone number this morning.”

  “So they’re doing a surprise inspection?” I bent over and lightly banged my forehead against the counter. “Do you know when they’re coming?”

  “Suzette wasn’t sure. It’s whenever the inspector, Jeffrey Brenston, gets around to it. She thought maybe today or tomorrow.”

  I straightened up, accepting the inevitable. Maybe someone had called and complained about Sage being given run of the restaurant. I’d keep her upstairs in the apartment until after the inspection. “Any idea who complained?”

  “She didn’t know, hun. I’m sorry.”

  I felt more than a little humbled by Dan’s mother looking out for me. “You’ve always been good to me, Maryann. Thank you.”

  “No, no… you call me Mom. Nothing has changed. You are still our girl even if you and Dan are having a spat.”

  If I could bottle her optimism, well… I figured a lot more people would be climbing Mt. Everest and freezing to death. Her way of looking at mine and Dan’s relationship had very, very little to do with reality. We were divorced, and because of the prenup I’d signed as a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old, I had been left destitute when we split up. Between that and learning that Dan had more affairs than I had fingers and toes, our “spat” was terminal. Our relationship was as dead as Cam, and that was pretty dead.

  “Thank you, Mom.”

  “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “That’s so much better.”

  We said our goodbyes and hung up.

  “You saying I should stop eating here?” Brad asked as he took a bite of omelet. “This here’s almost edible.” He took another big bite. Edible or not, it didn’t seem to be slowing him down. He was smiling. “You got somebody back there helping you?” His smile fell. “You got Joel back there helping you?” He half stood up from his stool, craning as he leaned forward in an effort to catch a glimpse of whoever might be in the kitchen.

  It was all I could do not to laugh. I’d thought that Brad and Joel were kidding around at first about having a rivalry over me, but I wasn’t sure that Brad had gotten the note about it all being a joke. He seemed to be taking it pretty seriously. Problem was I had the feeling he was more concerned about making sure that Joel didn’t get the girl more than he was interested in getting the girl for himself.

  “Oh, it’s Brenda,” Brad said, sitting back down. “No wonder the omelet’s so good.” It had gone from barely edible to “so good.”

  “I made the omelet, thank you very much. As for Brenda, she’s prepping a couple of trays of lasagna for lunch.”

  “No Oops Board today?”

  “Nope. Full price.”

  “I’ll have to see what one of the guys’ wives packed them for lunch. No Oops Board and eating here loses all the fun. You giving up on your culinary adventures?”

  “Just for today. Me and Zoey—” Open mouth, insert foot. Brad’s whole visage darkened.

  “What about you and Zoey?” He shook his fork at me. “I told you to stay away from her.”

  And after having spent more time with Zoey, I now had a better appreciation of why he had warned me off. Zoey was sweet and nice but with Freddie Krueger sensibilities. There were parts o
f her personality with flashing “Go” signs where everyone one else had huge blockades.

  “Funny, I don’t recall waving my right to think for myself. You going to start picking out my clothes for me next?”

  Brad took another bite of eggs and then started poking his fork in my direction again. “It wouldn’t hurt. I’ve seen what you wear.”

  “What’s wrong with what I wear?” He was treading on thin ice now.

  “This ain’t Chicago, missy. This here’s Kentucky. If you’re going to live here and want to be accepted as one of us, you need to start dressing more like the locals. Then, and only then, will you have a chance at being accepted as one of us… you know, in ten or fifteen years.”

  I laughed, and he smiled.

  Brad was gone by the time Max walked in the door. Lanky, cute, and hardworking Sam had made it into work, and he was serving what few customers we had while I looked up checklists to help me prepare for the health inspector’s not-so-surprise surprise inspection. But when I saw Max, I stopped what I was doing and got him a cup of coffee at the grill’s bar. It felt less weird for him to sit there this morning that it had yesterday. I guessed that I was getting used to him.

  “How was the Thai?” Max asked, taking his first sip of coffee. He might have meant it as a mild jab, but I chose not to take it as one.

  “It was really, really good! I can see why it’s Zoey’s favorite place.” Saying that didn’t even make me feel jealous. It would be too much like comparing apples and oranges.

  “You’re a good friend to her. I’m glad she has you. I know it couldn’t have been easy. Running this place, it takes a lot. Taking care of your friends on top of everything else…” He shook his head. “It’s a lot to juggle.”

  I thought about the upcoming surprise inspection and wondered if I should cancel my day out with Zoey, but I pushed the thought from my mind. Max was right. It was a lot to juggle, but Zoey was worth it. All of my new friends were worth it. They’d supported me when they didn’t even know me, and I was not about to be a fair-weather friend to the person who had stood by me the most.