Lemon Tart

by Josi S. Kilpack

  When the timer dinged at exactly 9:40, Harris wouldn’t let her open the drawer next to the oven to get a set of hot pads. Sadie had to pull her hands into the sleeves of her jacket to keep from burning her fingers as she removed the tart. He also wouldn’t let her find a cooling rack, so she was forced to set the pan on the stovetop, which was not the optimal way to cool baked goods. She kept that information to herself, however.

  It’s perfect, she thought as she set the tart down. The crust underneath the bronzed filling was golden brown, and pride welled in Sadie’s heart to realize how far Anne had come. About the only thing Anne knew how to make when she had moved in was Belgian waffles—an odd item to perfect, but at least it meant she had some basic culinary knowledge. Now she was well on her way to becoming a superior cook. But the worry for her young friend returned as Sadie looked at the steaming confection. No one worked this hard on a lemon tart and treated it like it was any old frozen pie. Something was very wrong.

  She turned to Harris to share her suspicions—but he was looking out the patio door, watching something. Sadie followed his line of vision and froze when she saw the other two officers gathered around something in the field of weeds behind Anne’s house. Harris hurried out the back door and Sadie followed. She was stepping over the threshold when she heard Officer Malloy say, “Tape off the area. I’ll call homicide.”

  Mom’s Lemon Tart

  *Jack’s favorite!

  Crust

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  1⁄3 cup powdered sugar

  Pinch of salt

  1⁄2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter (cut into smaller pieces)

  Preheat oven to 425 degrees. In a food processor or mixer, combine ingredients for crust. Pulse together until a dough starts to form in clumps. Press into tart pan, making sure to cover bottom and sides evenly. Pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork and place in freezer for 10 to 15 minutes.

  Place tart pan on a cookie sheet and bake until crust is a golden-brown color, approximately 12 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool.

  Filling

  5 oz. cream cheese

  1⁄2 cup granulated sugar (Breanna likes an extra 1⁄4 cup sugar in the filling)

  3⁄4 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2 large lemons—DO NOT use concentrated lemon juice)

  2 large eggs

  Zest from one lemon (get zest from lemon before juicing)

  Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees. Mix cream cheese with electric beaters until smooth. Add sugar. Mix until well blended. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each egg. Stop and scrape bowl halfway through. Add the lemon juice and zest and mix until smooth.

  Pour filling into tart crust and bake on cookie sheet for 20 to 30 minutes or until filling is set. Let tart cool on wire cooling rack. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled.

  Use whipped cream as an optional topping. It can be piped on in stars or served on top with each piece. For extra flavor in the whipped cream, add a teaspoon of lemon zest.

  Chapter 2

  Sadie made it to the top of Anne’s back patio stairs before the word “homicide” finally sank in and her feet would go no further. She had forgotten to breathe and when her brain realized it, she took a deep breath that sounded like a vacuum sucking up a tablecloth.

  Officer Malloy was walking toward the house, talking into his speaker-thing, and the sound of her desperate breath caught his attention. He hurried up the steps of the patio, catching her as she fell backward. They landed in a jumbled heap, but he’d kept her from hurting herself.

  “Wha-at, what’s out there?” she mumbled as he straightened himself and helped her up, leading her to a patio chair. She tried to look over her shoulder at the field but he quickly turned the chair so it faced the sliding glass door of the house instead of the backyard. She could barely register what was happening. Homicide? she said in her mind once more. That meant they’d found a body. The chill in the autumn air became decidedly colder and her hands began to shake.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. . . .” Officer Malloy trailed off.

  “Hoffmiller,” she said, choosing to focus on a fall-themed wreath Anne had hung on her kitchen wall—she could see it through the glass of the door.

  “Mrs. Hoffmiller. Is there someone I can call to come and help you back home? A friend? Your husband?”

  “I’m a widow,” she said automatically, her foggy thoughts beginning to clear. There was Ron, her boyfriend, though the term sounded juvenile and besides, they were engaged. But Ron was at a real estate convention in Denver all week—he couldn’t come. She turned and looked at Officer Malloy. “Who’s out there? Is it Anne?” She swallowed the threatening tears. “Trevor?” she squeaked.

  Officer Malloy quickly shook his head. “Not the child,” he said.

  “But Anne? She’s out there? She’s dead?”

  Malloy took a deep breath. “The body will need to be identified for us to be sure.”

  Sadie tried to stand, but Malloy’s hand on her shoulder pushed her back into the chair. “Not you,” he said, sounding more irritated than sympathetic. “Next of kin.”

  The tears started to fall then, but she didn’t even try to brush them away. This was Anne he was talking about—a girl trying to find her way. A friend. A neighbor. A mother. “I don’t know of any kin, certainly no one local. I can identify her as well as anyone else,” she said, her voice shaking as she rubbed the two stones of her mother’s ring on her right hand. The feel of the smoothly cut stones—one diamond and one amethyst, her children’s birthstones—helped her find her center once again and she pushed down the shock. “The sooner you know if it’s her, the sooner you can move forward, right?”

  Malloy hesitated, but finally nodded.

  “Besides,” she added. “It might not be her.” Though she knew that was a ridiculous idea. The police had received a tip of some kind and found a body. What were the chances that a completely unrelated murder had taken place behind Anne’s house?

  Murder.

  The very idea made her knees wobble—she was glad she was still sitting. Then again, maybe it wasn’t murder, she thought as she took a breath and followed Malloy down the back steps. Maybe it was some kind of accident. Accidents happened all the time. Why, her friend Gale had a neighbor who’d gone out Christmas morning to set up a new satellite dish. His metal tape measure had crossed the electrical wires leading to his house. Killed him instantly. Though an accidental death would still be tragic, at least it would be less disturbing. Accidents were normal, practically expected. That had to be it. Some kind of accident.

  They met Officer McKesson, who was blocking the body from view. Harris was wrapping a band of yellow tape around the perimeter of the house. Sadie heard a siren in the distance growing closer.

  “She’s going to identify the body,” Malloy said. Officer McKesson hesitated, but after a few moments he moved aside. Sadie closed her eyes, letting Officer Malloy lead her the last few steps. The brittle grass and weeds of the field crunched beneath her feet once they left the back lawn.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  In answer to his question, she opened her eyes.

  Anne’s pale blue eyes stared at nothing, her blonde hair tangled in the weeds, and her mouth hung slightly open as if she were about to say something. Her head was at an unnatural angle to her body and her face and neck were a bluish-purple color. It looked like there was some matted blood in her hairline.

  So it had been murder.

  The thought hit Sadie like a cold bucket of water and she forgot to breathe again. Anne’s arms and legs were sticking out in odd directions and her clothing was torn as if she’d put up quite a fight. Good for her, Sadie thought, wiping at her eyes. Good for her.

  She looked away for a moment to get control of her emotions and noticed Anne’s purse in the weeds not far away, the top of a sippy cup barely visible. Anne was always trying to avoid taking a separate diaper bag by cramming T
revor’s things in her purse. Sadie stared at the cup and thought of the little boy with sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes. If Anne was here, like this, where was Trevor? It was almost too much to think about.

  “Is this Anne Lemmon?” Officer Malloy asked, reminding her that she was supposed to be making an official identification.

  She looked back at Anne’s broken body—one of Anne’s hoop earrings was missing and she wondered if that was important. Sadie sniffed. “Yes, that’s her,” she said, her voice shaking. She leaned down, wanting to straighten out Anne’s head or pull her shirt down so her stomach wasn’t exposed to the autumn air. She was dead, but was it necessary that she look so uncomfortable?

  Officer Malloy pulled her up. “You can’t touch her. We’ll need to take photos and measurements of the crime scene.”

  Sadie nodded and gratefully turned away, though it felt like a betrayal somehow. It made her feel horrible to not want to look at the evidence of how Anne’s life had ended.

  “Can you get home on your own?” Malloy asked as they walked away from the body, toward the driveway.

  Sadie watched the grass bend beneath her shoes. The grass was going dormant and was a muddle of brown and yellow and a few determined green blades.

  “I’m fine,” Sadie lied, numbness taking over.

  “Because this is still considered an active crime scene, we’ll be patrolling the neighborhood and canvassing the area. When you get home, lock your doors and don’t leave. A detective will be coming around to ask you some questions. You might want to call someone to be with you.”

  Sadie stopped and turned to face him. “So I’m just supposed to go home? Do nothing?” How was that possible?

  “I’m sorry,” Officer Malloy said. “That’s all you can do.”

  “I’ll try,” Sadie said under her breath. Doing nothing was not her strong suit.

  “What?” the officer asked.

  “Never mind.”

  Chapter 3

  Sadie went home, locked her doors as instructed, and sat carefully on a kitchen chair as if too much movement might break them both. She stared at nothing as old ghosts moved in to haunt her. Most days she avoided such thoughts, but her defenses were down and the multitude of her losses began compounding.

  She felt her muscles tense as her husband’s face came to her mind. Oh, how she missed him. Neil had died of a massive heart attack nineteen years ago at the age of forty-one—leaving her a widow with two young children to raise. There was a history of heart disease in Neil’s family, but he’d taken such good care of himself and no one had expected he would die so young—certainly not Sadie. Ten years later Sadie’s mother had been killed in a car accident. And then, not quite a year ago, her father, who had lived with her and the children since her mother’s death, had died of colon cancer. At least she’d had time to prepare for Dad’s passing—not that the sting of finding him cold and gray one December morning had been any easier because of the expectation.

  In some ways, the tragic turns of Sadie’s life had aged her—she’d always felt older and wiser than other women of her generation simply due to the fact that she’d had to be centered, self-sufficient, and able to fill multiple roles. However, because of the twists of fate she’d endured, she also understood the fragility of mortality better than most, and she took full advantage of the life she had.

  She knew many women her age who felt they had done their time chained to the kitchen sink and were convinced that other success would make up for the monotony of cooking and cleaning. She also knew women who lived only to take care of the other people in their lives, insulating themselves from the real world by disregarding their own ambitions and giving up their own life for someone else’s.

  Sadie was none of those women.

  At fifty-six it was hard to accept that she was officially considered a senior citizen—she certainly didn’t feel old—and she went to great pains to not look or act old either. Life was as much an adventure as it had always been, and she spoiled herself whenever she felt like it. She loved learning new things and relished her relationships. She’d been the one left behind enough to know that life doesn’t last forever, so she made the best of every day she had.

  Perhaps she should be used to loss by now, or the joy she found in life would have made up for the heartache, but that wasn’t the case at all. Making the most of her life never filled in the voids left from losing the people she cared about. But neither did she expect it to.

  Poor Anne, Sadie thought as her fingers felt across the nubby top of her ring. It was so wrong that just after deciding to change her life, to make a real future for Trevor, she was gone.

  Sadie’s eyes shifted to focus on a watercolor Trevor had painted for her a few weeks earlier and her fingers stilled on her ring. The blue and red of the picture seemed to be a mocking tribute to life. She could still see how his face had lit up when he’d given it to her—a true treasure in his toddler mind. She put her arms on the kitchen table and laid her head against them as she began to cry. She wished Ron were there, and yet if he was, she’d be embarrassed to break down like this. It was probably better he was away so she could sort out her thoughts and emotions in private.

  Only a few minutes passed before she ran out of tears. Sarah Diane Hoffmiller was not the kind of woman to give in to sorrow. She’d learned early on that it didn’t do any good and today she had apples to sauce.

  Still wiping at her eyes, Sadie stood and restarted the CD player. Grateful she had something to keep her hands and her mind busy, she traded her jacket for her candy-stripe apron and headed for the apples she’d left to simmer earlier. They were certainly done by now. Neil’s mother had taught her many things, including how to make homemade applesauce. Sadie’s own mother cooked out of duty, not joy, but Neil’s mother was an amazing cook who not only blessed her family with the best meals two hands could make, but also had fun doing it. Her mother-in-law’s gift had become a legacy Neil and Sadie shared, which Sadie then passed on to her own children after he died. There were few things that compared to the joy of cooking a delicious dish and sharing it with the people in her life. It was therefore a relief to know the apples wouldn’t sauce themselves and that, for a moment at least, she could lose herself in the task.

  A knock at the door startled her some time later, and she looked up from the pan of boiled apples she was in the process of mashing. The Paul Simon CD that had kept her company all morning had started over again and her favorite song was playing. It bothered her that someone was interrupting her—and then she thought about what had happened to Anne. And she was irritated about a little interruption?

  As she approached the door, she heard what sounded like arguing, but as soon as she began pulling the door open the voices stopped. Two men stood on the doorstep and it didn’t take Sadie long to determine they were the detectives Officer Malloy had told her would stop by—the badges they both held out gave it away.

  “Please come in,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She hadn’t replaced her headband and tried to smooth her hair a bit as the two men followed her into the living room and sat on the couch in front of the big picture window. She smoothed her apron as well, her hands resting on her rather substantial hips and reminding her that no amount of pressing was going to iron them out. Oh, well, she’d spent thirty years trying to make peace with her figure, now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. At least she didn’t have any mascara smudges to worry about since she hadn’t even thought about makeup today.

  “You’re a Paul Simon fan?” the older of the two detectives asked when she went over and turned off the CD.

  “Love him,” Sadie said with a smile, pleasantly surprised by the comment and grateful for the distraction. “I think he’s one of the most underappreciated musicians of our time. However, I don’t hold with his antiwar beliefs.” She liked to make that clear. If nothing else, Sadie was a patriot.

  “Same for me, on both counts.” He smiled slightly, and she noted that s
he liked the look of him—a broad forehead and a clean-shaven face that didn’t look old enough to match his silver-white hair. Late fifties she guessed, leading her to assume he must be like Jack—prematurely gray. She actually thought gray looked very nice on older men, and on a few women as well; however, she couldn’t imagine being comfortable with it herself. Then again, she might simply like the pampering that came with getting her hair and nails done once a month. Either way, she wasn’t about to find out just how gray her own hair really was. She’d been coloring it for almost fifteen years and preferred being a brunette.

  Sadie sat in the chair across from the two men on the couch, curling her feet underneath her and trying to decide what to do with her hands. She was tempted to wrap her arms around herself in search of comfort, but then decided on clasping them in her lap instead. The pleasant air faded as the severity of the situation set in. Was it cold in here or was it just her? She looked longingly into the kitchen.

  The men didn’t look like the detectives on TV. The one who had recognized Paul Simon was dressed in jeans and wore a black turtleneck under a buff-colored jacket. His badge was clipped to his belt. The other detective didn’t look any older than the police officers at Anne’s house, his blond hair not yet faded with age or wintertime, blue eyes, and one of those dime-sized beard things in the center of his chin. Sadie hated those silly beards. Men should either have a full beard—like Ron—or none at all; none of this spotty facial hair that was such the rage. Yet, even with the stupid beard-thing, he could have fit right in on a beach somewhere, except he was dressed in a dark blue suit—tie and all. The formal attire and hard line of his jaw gave him a severe look that made his partner seem even warmer by comparison.