Game of Tarts

by Wendy Meadows

  My voice answers me, bouncing off the walls. The building rings with silence. Something is definitely not right. I tiptoe a little farther toward the counter. “Mr. Freeman! Where are you?”

  I arrive at the counter and hear a telltale gurgling noise coming from the espresso machine. Steam trickles out of the milk frother. While I stand there with every sense strained, a thud of bubbles rises from the hot water urn. Someone has been here in the last few minutes. Someone opened the café and turned on all the equipment to get ready for another day. Where are they now?

  A creepy, crawling prickle of apprehension steals up my spine. I better get out of here before something terrible happens. I’m about to turn away when my eye lands on a mottled pattern down on the floor. I bend over and see a single gator-skin boot sticking into view.

  I charge around the counter in a flurry and drop to my knees next to Scott Freeman. He lies with his head propped against the reach-in cooler under the espresso machine. He wears the same outfit as yesterday, and I see right away he’s not breathing.

  I yank my phone out of my pocket and dial 911. The cops take ages to get there. When the first squad car screeches to a halt in front of the Coffee Canteen, I almost die of relief when David gets out. I meet him at the door, panting for breath. “Oh, thank God you’re here!”

  “What’s going on?” he asks. “The dispatcher said there was a dead body on the premises.”

  I nod fast. “Scott Freeman. He’s not breathing. I found him there when I came in to get a cup of coffee this morning.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone inside.”

  “I wouldn’t have if I had known I would find him dead,” I fire back. “The door was unlocked, and the lights were on. The place looked open except for the Closed sign on the door.”

  He furrows his brow. “That’s odd.”

  “Not as odd as the place being deserted like that. I called out to him, but he didn’t answer. I was just about to leave when I saw his shoes.”

  I conduct him over the body. He checks Scott’s pulse. “He’s cold. He must have been dead long before you found him.”

  “How is that possible?” I ask. “The place is all set up to open for business. Are you telling me he turned on the espresso machine at four o’clock this morning?”

  He looks around at the equipment. “You’re right. That is odd.”

  “What do you think killed him?”

  He crouches next to the body. “I don’t see any signs of foul play. It could have been medical. The forensics team is right behind me. You should go back to your own shop. I’ll be around later today to get your statement.”

  “You’ve already got my statement,” I counter.

  “Then you have no more reason to stick around.” He pulls on a pair of latex gloves. “Just show me what you touched so we know where to find your prints.”

  “I touched the front door, and I bent over the counter like this.” I place both hands on the counter and lean forward.

  “Okay.” He turns his attention to the body. “I’ll see you later.”

  I don’t move. I watch him lift Scott’s jacket lapel with a pen and lay it back down.

  David glances up. “Did you hear me, Margaret? You can’t stay here.”

  “Why not? Can’t I at least watch?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Don’t you have a business to run?”

  I look away. “Yeah, but….”

  “Don’t think you’re gonna get involved in this case like you did last time.” He draws himself up to his full height. I don’t like the look in his eye. “You’re a civilian, Margaret, and the last time you got involved in a murder investigation, you wound up in the hospital with a broken leg.”

  “That won’t happen this time. I promise. Just let me….”

  “How do you know it won’t happen again?” he asks. “I’m warning you. Keep out of this.”

  “So you think it’s a murder?”

  His arms fly out from his sides. “Will you cut that out? We just found the body, and you just heard me say there’s nothing to suggest foul play. Now will you please go back to your shop or wherever it is you’re going to go? There’s no sense sticking your nose into this when we haven’t even informed the poor guy’s widow what happened.”

  Before I can say anything, he grabs my arm and frog-marches me out of the café. He gives me a push onto the walk and shuts the door in my face.

  I stand on the flagstones and watch him through the front windows until the forensic team shoves me out of the way. They stream into the café, and I get shunted aside.

  So he thinks I should keep my nose out of this, does he? So he thinks I’m too weak and air-headed to get involved. I’ll show him.

  6

  Zack scowls at me. “Where do you think you’re going, young lady?”

  I laugh in his face. “You might be able to cow me into submission when it comes to the store, but not this time. I’m going out.”

  He hurries after me to the door and stands aside while I put on my coat. “Are you going out with Detective Graham?”

  I blush to my eyelashes and look down at the carpet. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no, I’m not.”

  “Where are you going, then?”

  I throw back my head and look him square in the eye. “Darling, I’m more than twenty-five years older than you. I was going out on my own before you were born, and I can go out on my own now without explaining my every move to my son. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  “Mom….” he begins, but I shut the door behind me so I don’t hear the rest of whatever he was about to say.

  I stride down the street, more annoyed with myself than with Zack. Him being protective of me is one thing. This trend of him acting like my father has gone too far. I need to stand up for myself more around him.

  I suppose these are just the growing pains of us finding the right way to relate to each other as adults. On the one hand, I’m supporting him. He’s living in my house while I pay all the bills. I give him a job in my store and I tell him what to do.

  Maybe he’s trying to compensate by flexing his authority in our personal lives. Neither of us has figured out how to interact without somebody being on top and the other person being on the bottom.

  Well, it’s got to change. I don’t mind talking to him about my relationship with David Graham. Ha! What relationship? There is no relationship. We’re friends. Nothing more. Anyway, even if there was a relationship, I couldn’t let my son tell me what to do or give him veto power over my life. That would end in disaster. I would wind up in the same predicament I was in when I left his father.

  I shudder when I see history repeating itself. I can’t let this happen with Zack. I have to stand up for myself. I have to assert my own will, no matter what. I have to make Zack respect that I’m my own person. If he doesn’t respect me, he’ll have to go. Heaven knows he’s old enough to support himself.

  I walk through town. I bow my head when I see David’s cruiser parked in front of the bakery. I slip past to the houses beyond. On the other side of Rockshield, another neighborhood like my own extends to the highway leading down the coast.

  I see the same houses, some nicer than others. I follow the address I looked up on the internet and come to a large fancy house with morning glories trailing around the porch posts. I pause at the picket fence to study the place. It looks modern enough, but not modern enough to be recently built. It’s been here for a while, along with most of the other houses on this street.

  I let myself into the yard and tap the brass knocker on the door. A woman in a skin-tight beige minidress answers. A cloud darkens her face when she sees me. “Can I help you?”

  I stick out my hand. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Freeman. I’m Margaret Nichols. I own the Nichols’ Candy Store in town. I met your husband yesterday. I just wanted to come over and offer my condolences on your loss. If there’s anything you need, please let me know.”

  She freezes. She glances down
at my hand, but she doesn’t offer to shake it. “You were the one who found him, aren’t you? The police said so.”

  I let my hand drop. “Yes, I was. I went into the Coffee Canteen for a cup of coffee this morning.”

  She throws up her hands and spins away on her stiletto heels. “Oh, well. You might as well come in, then. I’ve had a parade of people in and out of this place all day. One more won’t hurt.”

  She teeters into her house. I steal into the house and wind up in a living room with a high plaster ceiling. All the most expensive furniture decorates the room, along with paintings on the walls in antique, gilded frames.

  Scott’s widow flings herself into an Edwardian armchair. She drapes her slender arms over it with practiced ease. I scan the room in astonishment. “You and Scott have done well for yourselves. I wouldn’t expect an entrepreneur to afford a house like this when he was just starting out.”

  I flash back to Scott’s Rolex and his gator-skin boots. That guy had some serious money, and now I see it on display for the world to see. I wonder if David noticed when he broke the bad news. Mrs. Freeman doesn’t look too distraught about her husband’s death.

  “Scott was not an entrepreneur.” She rolls the word on her tongue in obvious distaste. “He was a franchisee. He opened three franchises of the Coffee Canteen and sold them all at a tidy profit before he moved here.” Her lip curls when she surveys the room. I imagine her looking around Rockshield and not seeing anything that meets her standards. “He never stayed anywhere long enough to lose any money. He worked his tail off morning, noon, and night. Sometimes I didn’t see him for days when he started a new project.”

  “That must have put a strain on your marriage,” I remark.

  “As long as he kept his balance sheet balanced, I didn’t care what he did. As long as he was working all hours, at least he was out of my hair.”

  I can’t listen to this. I sink into the nearest chair with a sigh. “Look, Mrs. Freeman….”

  “Call me Sophie,” she snaps. “You may be the one who found him, but that strapping detective says someone poisoned Scott long before you went into the café.”

  My head shoots up. “Scott was poisoned?”

  “That’s what the cops say. Apparently, they found traces of something in his mouth. They didn’t even have to wait for the autopsy to identify it. They took a swab and one of the lab guys poured some chemical on it to test it, and it came up positive.”

  My heart races in my chest. “Can you remember what poison it was? Did Detective Graham tell you?”

  She points at me. “That’s the one. Detective Graham. He’s a peach, isn’t he?”

  I cringe hearing another woman talk about David like this. I don’t even want to look at this woman and think about him looking at her. She’s everything I’m not—tall, svelte, gorgeous, loaded—man, I’ve got to stop thinking like this or I’ll mess my head up something fierce.

  I pull myself together with an effort. “So did he tell you what poison it was?”

  She cocks her head to examine the ceiling. “He said something about almonds. That’s all I can remember.” She waves her hand. “I didn’t pay much attention, to be honest with you.”

  Almonds? “Was it cyanide?”

  “It might have been. I didn’t really listen to everything he said.”

  My mind goes into a tailspin. So Scott Freeman was poisoned, and David never mentioned it. He would know I would chomp at the bit to find out any detail about this case, and he kept it to himself. He came to the candy store to take my statement exactly the way he said he would, and he kept mum about this little nugget of information.

  So he thinks he can keep me off the case by withholding vital details. Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I never backed down on a challenge yet. I straighten up to face Sophie. “Can you think of anybody who might have wanted your husband dead?”

  She bursts into loud laughter—too loud if you ask me. She brays like a mule. Her voice doesn’t sound like the laugh of a bereaved widow. She bares all her perfect white teeth, but her eyes don’t light up with mirth the way a person’s eyes should light up when they hear something hilarious. Her laughter gives me the creeps.

  “I can think of hundreds of people who wanted him dead, including me. Oh, you don’t have to get all shocked about it. He had a magnificent life insurance policy. I’ll never lack for anything. I’ll get more income now than when he was alive, and now that he’s dead, I won’t have to listen to him complain about the employees or the competition or the accounts or any of that. I won’t have him waking me up at three in the morning with his temper that the biscotti wasn’t fresh or the City Council contaminated the water supply or whatever it was. I can live my life in peace with Scott’s money.”

  I gape at her in mute horror. How can anybody sit here and say these things about a dead man? Scott worked the last years of his life like a dog to give her a good life, and for what? Now she’s riding off into the sunset with his money, and she doesn’t even care that he’s dead.

  She’s a heartless fiend, but sitting across from her, I get the sense she’s not a murderer. She’s too shallow and self-centered even for that. Scott might have been a lousy husband, but he was still Sophie’s meal ticket, her goose that laid the golden eggs. She wouldn’t have destroyed that. She was probably too wrapped up in the possibility of getting even more out of him.

  I gather my resolve to persist. “I don’t suppose it’s likely any of his old employees could have followed him here to kill him.”

  “I don’t see why they would have. He left them all very well off. He made a point of it. He promoted everyone and gave them raises before he sold the cafés. He said it never paid to stiff your employees. He treated them like kings, and they loved him for it. They were all very sorry to see him go.”

  “I can’t say the same for the people of this town,” I remark. “Did you know he made a few people angry, moving in the way he did?”

  “That’s their problem,” she countered. “Business is business. If he took someone’s customers, that only means they weren’t good enough to keep them in the first place. It serves them right.”

  “Well, he obviously made someone mad enough to kill him. I’d say that’s not very good business.”

  She rolls her eyes and looks away. “Do we really have to go through this? I went through all this with the police. What do you care about a dead guy, anyway?”

  “Let’s just say I’m naturally curious. I found Scott’s body, and now that I know he was murdered, I want to find out who did it.”

  She wags her finger at me. “Well, if you find out, you let me know. I want to know who did it, too.”

  I stiffen. “You do?”

  “Of course. I might be a spineless gold-digger, but I’m not a monster. I cared about Scott, even if I did fall out of love with him years ago. I want to know who killed him. I want the son of a gun brought to justice.”

  I blink at her in wonder. I never would have pegged her for the caring type. She hides it under acres of granite. I snap out of my trance. “Well, if I find anything, I’ll let you know. I’m sure the police wouldn’t like a civilian sticking their nose into their murder investigation.”

  “You never know. A second pair of eyes on the case can’t hurt.” Her eyes pop open. “Hey, I just had a brilliant idea. You could work on the case for me. You could be like my private eye, just like in the TV shows. That would be great.”

  I blush. Thank goodness David isn’t around to hear this. He would have a conniption fit. “I don’t know about that. I’m just an interested party. I’m not really a detective, and I’m sure the investigating officer wouldn’t be happy with me interfering.” Boy, am I sure about that! I would catch flack for the rest of my life if I went along with this.

  Sophie’s not taking no for an answer, though. “Don’t pay any attention to them. They’re just a bunch of flat-footed desk-jockeys. You’re on the case, so who do you think are the prime suspects?”
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  I scratch the back of my neck. As reluctant as I am to let her infect me with her enthusiasm, I like the idea of investigating this case independently from David—not to say behind his back. I could never do that.

  “Well, Scott didn’t have any friends around this town. A lot of the local business owners are mad at him for stealing their customers.”

  “What about that new bakery on the other end of town?” she asks.

  I start in alarm at the mention of Alan Harris. I didn’t want to bring up his name right away, even if he did say a lot of nasty things about Scott. “What about him?”

  “Whoever opened that bakery just moved into town and set up shop,” Sophie points out. “He stole business from the café that was already here. I don’t see anybody poisoning him to drive him out of business.”

  I examine her in a new light. She might be a gold-digger, but she’s not as stupid as I first imagined. She’s full of surprises, this woman. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. He would have taken business from the Happy-Go-Lucky Café. No one made a stink about that, but Scott did some other things to bother people. His construction vehicles were always blocking his neighbor’s shop and causing a lot of noise and congestion. It’s not enough to get a man killed, but it sure ruffled a few feathers.”

  “I can see I’ve got the right person on the job. You follow up all your leads, or whatever it is you do in detective work.”

  My cheeks burn. “Just so you know, I’m not a detective. I’m a candy store owner. Whatever you do, don’t let the police hear you calling me a detective or I could get in big trouble.”

  She shrugs and gets to her feet. “You’re not a member of the police, but you can still be a detective. You’re a…. what do you call it? You’re a private investigator. Yeah, that’s what you are.”

  I don’t know how to answer that. When she puts it like that, it sounds right, even when I know I shouldn’t get involved in this case.