“They’re saying that there are two women inside the Sweet Tooth,” Bennett shouted over the wind. “Megan and Amelia Flowers. The police are going to question them.”
“Good, that means that they’re alive, but who’s the victim?” Gillian demanded.
James couldn’t make out a word coming from the scanner. All of its garbled noises sounded like voices shouting underwater. He looked out his window at the quiet town. Church services had ended and most folks ate a large midday meal at home and then piddled around their houses crossing jobs off of their honey-do lists, tending to the fall gardens, or taking leisurely strolls. Very few businesses were open on Sunday, but James knew that some people would wander into town for an afternoon treat from the bakery or to pick up fresh bread for supper sandwiches. Whatever happened at the Sweet Tooth would soon be discovered. Perhaps that was why he and his new friends hoped to get there first. It would give each of them something exciting to talk about at work Monday morning.
Barreling down Main Street, the mail truck made record time before it finally slowed to a crawl before the bakery. Three sheriff’s cars with blue lights flashing had parked helter-skelter along the curb, indicating how quickly they had arrived at the scene.
“Nice work, Bennett. We made it in three minutes. It looks like we even beat the ambulance here.” Lindy clapped Bennett on the back. “We’d better park next door, in that back lot behind the stationary store.”
“Good idea,” Bennett agreed, maneuvering the truck into the gravel lot. “Look! There’s Lucy’s Jeep!”
The mail truck groaned to a halt and its four passengers clambered out. Sticking as close as possible to the cement wall on the alley side of the bakery, they crept as stealthily as they could in the direction of the back door. Lindy, who was leading the inquisitive foursome, turned the corner into the bakery’s parking lot and then leapt backward right onto Bennett’s big toe.
“Ow!” he yowled. Lindy clamped a hand hastily across his mouth.
“Sorry,” she whispered, making frantic hand gestures commanding everyone to retreat. “Lucy is standing right outside. She’s talking to one of the deputies. Listen.”
Sure enough, voices floated to their corner of the building. The town’s Sunday afternoon tranquility, defined by a noticeable lack of traffic noise, allowed their eager ears to clearly hear the strained conversation taking place just outside of the bakery’s back door.
“Look, Keith,” Lucy was saying in a pleading tone. “I just want to observe, see if I can learn something. I’ve mentioned that I want to take the deputy’s exam in the future and I—”
“I thought you were joking!” the man laughed maliciously. “Come on, Lucy. You’d never pass the physical. Besides, being a deputy is a man’s job.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucy replied timidly. “There are plenty of women in law enforcement and even in the Armed Forces. If they—”
Keith interrupted her once again, “I’d love to get into a philosophical debate with you, Lucy, but right now I’ve got a dead body to examine and some witnesses to interview.” He paused. “You ever seen a corpse, Lucy?”
“No.”
“What makes you think you can handle seeing one? I mean, most dead bodies are not pretty things. There’s blood and nasty smells and all kinds of bodily fluids involved, if you get my drift. It takes a tough person to look at one. You think you’re tough enough?”
Listening to the deputy’s patronizing tone, James suppressed an urge to come to Lucy’s defense. Why didn’t the jackass just give Lucy a chance? But instead of running to her side, James bit his lip and took a quick peek around the corner of the building in order to get a look at Lucy’s crass coworker.
Keith stood with his hands on his hips and his legs drawn apart in a cowboy-like stance. His red hair glinted in the October sunlight, and even from a distance, James could see that his face was covered so completely with freckles that it was difficult to see the pallid skin underneath. Keith wore mirrored sunglasses that reminded James of the cool cop shows on TV during the 70s, but seemed startlingly out of place in a small Virginia town in the twenty-first century.
“Let me see if I can handle seeing a dead body, Keith. If it upsets me, then I won’t bother thinking about taking the exam.” Lucy’s pleading was pathetic. Her new friends looked at one another, their eyes replete with sympathy.
“Donovan!” another male voice called out from within the building. “Get your tail in here!”
James saw Keith do a little jump and then hustle inside, leaving the door ajar. Lucy hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then pulled a small notebook from her purse, turned to a fresh sheet of paper, and resolutely followed in her redheaded tormentor’s wake.
“Come on!” Lindy moved forward, tiptoeing up to the back door.
The heavy metal door had been propped open and the sounds of a woman’s hysterical voice could be heard from within. Aside from the view of cooking equipment and the tantalizing smell of freshly baked cookies that curled around the foursome like an alluring, invisible boa, there was nothing to be seen through the back door.
“They must be up front,” Gillian suggested. “We can’t go in, so let’s sneak around to the street side and see if we can peak in the front windows.”
At that moment, the honk of a nearby horn sliced through the stillness.
“Hurry! That could be the paramedics!” cried Bennett as he led the group around the building. “It is! Look!”
The yellow van from Quincy’s Gap Fire & Rescue moved quietly but briskly past them into the bakery’s small parking lot. The driver honked again, but the breathless group was too far away to see why he was making such unnecessary noise.
The first window they reached took up most of the storefront. Megan Flowers always displayed examples of her decorous wedding cakes in that window, along with a sampling of items she would bake during the week. Today, her display shelves had been covered with black and orange crepe paper. Plastic pumpkins were brimming over with miniature banana nut and pumpkin spice muffins. A black plastic cat with glowing purple eyes drew attention to a platter of donuts dripping with white icing and showered with orange sprinkles. Beneath the shadow of a friendly scarecrow, another platter featured Megan’s latest creation: a variety of cookies in the shapes of various monsters. Each cookie looked like it had been slathered with an inch of homemade buttercream. James’s eye was particularly drawn to the Dracula cookies. Each pale-faced vampire had two rivulets of bright ruby icing dripping down from fangs fashioned out of white sprinkles.
“I’ve never seen such a good-looking mummy,” Gillian said, pointing at a cookie.
“Forget him,” Lindy drooled. “I’d take that Frankenstein’s monster cookie any day. Look at all the black sprinkles making up his hair.”
Bennett tried to see beyond the display. Standing on his tiptoes, his view was blocked by a shelf crammed with miniature éclairs swollen with custard.
“James,” Bennett croaked, his mouth dry with longing. “You’re the tallest. See anything?”
James finally drew his focus beyond the display of delicious goodies. Unfortunately, he could only make out the backs of three people as they stood looking down at something. There were two women and one man. From this angle, he couldn’t tell what their eyes were riveted on. He could see Lucy, however, standing off to the side, and it was clear that she was fighting to control her emotions. Her lovely face had turned rather gray and the hand that gripped her notebook was shaking. Someone must have addressed her, for she wordlessly nodded and began writing notes with a tremulous hand.
“I can’t see what they’re looking at. We’re going to have to move to the other window,” James informed the others. “That will mean going right past the front door. It will seem kind of odd if all four of us slink past the door and then stop to stare in the window.”
“Well, the sign still says ‘Open,’ so it won’t be so strange that we’re walking past the bakery,” argued Gillian.
“And from the looks of Lucy’s face, there is definitely something worth seeing in there!”
Crouching as low as they could, the foursome shuffled past the entrance and to the smaller storefront window. The display in this section was mostly an array of breads. Beyond the plump mounds of rye, pumpernickel, egg, and raisin breads, along with baskets brimming over with dill and rosemary rolls, James was able to get a clear view of the three people whose backs he had gazed upon a few seconds ago.
The first was a burly, middle-aged man with an enormous mustache. He appeared to be asking questions of a tall woman wearing a red-and-white striped apron with the words The Sweet Tooth written across it. Her slender arms were folded across her chest in a pose of self-preservation and her eyes were filled with a combination of fear and confusion. Standing next to her, close enough to touch, was a younger, more curvaceous version of the woman wearing the apron. The younger woman had dull blonde hair that fell forward into her eyes as she stared fixedly at the floor. She held a rolled-up magazine in her right hand, tightly enough to cause her knuckles to turn white.
“That’s Sheriff Huckabee talking to Megan Flowers and her daughter, Amelia,” Lindy whispered before James had a chance to ask who he was looking at.
Though he didn’t know Megan or Amelia, James remembered Huckabee. He had been a deputy when James was in high school and had often been visible at athletic events at the school. Sometimes the crowds could get a little rowdy at football games and the presence of a few deputies helped keep things in order. James remembered Huckabee because of the unique name and also due to the fact that the man closely resembled a walrus.
Finally, James leaned forward until his nose was a millimeter from pressing against the window glass and looked down toward the floor. A paramedic, wearing a yellow jumpsuit, turned his body in order to retrieve an instrument from his case. In the moments that it took for him to search his bag, James had an unobstructed glimpse of the vision that had caused Lucy’s hands to tremble. It took his mind several long seconds to register what he saw.
It was the body of a man, one that James had just seen two days ago at Dolly’s. He recognized the worn letter jacket immediately, as well as the unkempt hair and the wide, muscular shoulders. Brinkley Myers had collapsed onto his stomach with his head turned toward the window. His open eyes were glazed over and his nose and mouth were covered with fresh, bright blood. Tiny droplets still leaked from his left nostril, slowly, like a dripping tap. All around his face and head an unbelievable pool of crimson had formed, widening into an ellipse that markedly contrasted with the black-and-white-checkered linoleum.
“I couldn’t stop the bleeding!” Megan shouted, loud enough for them all to hear. She held up a collection of blood-soaked dishtowels. “I tried! I tried!”
Beside her, Amelia’s face crumpled and she began to cry.
James could see little else on the floor except for the inordinate amount of blood, and then he spied what looked like a shattered cell phone near Amelia’s foot.
“That’s Brinkley Myers,” Lindy whispered, peering between loaves of pumpernickel and marble rye. “And he’s definitely dead.”
“But from what?” asked Gillian after exhaling loudly. “I’ve never seen so much blood.”
“Looks like it all came from somewhere on his head. There’s no blood near his chest or legs.” Bennett clucked his tongue in sympathy. “Point of fact, it sure seems like he had a nosebleed that just wouldn’t quit.”
The others remained silent as they confirmed Bennett’s theory by casting their eyes once more on Brinkley’s inert form.
“What’s that in his right hand?” James asked, unable to get an unhindered view over the shoulders of the paramedic.
“Dunno,” answered Bennett. “Can you see, Lindy? Hurry, they’re going to move him.”
Lindy let out a deep sigh. “I see it! Of course I know what that is. It’s one of Megan’s famous cookies; a ‘chocolate chipped and dipped.’ Those cookies are so—” The rest of her statement was cut short by the sudden appearance of Sheriff Huckabee’s face in the window. He did not look at all pleased to see four faces pressed up against the window glass. Waving them off with a brusque flick of his hand, Huckabee drew the green shades over the bakery windows and then turned the store sign to “Closed.”
James stepped back and gazed at his open-mouthed companions. “Guess the show’s over,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve just seen my first dead body and I feel kind of weird.”
“Yeah, me too,” Bennett muttered quietly. They all stood on the sidewalk in motionless silence.
“Let’s go back to my place and have some coffee,” Lindy offered. “I feel kind of strange, too. It would be nice to have some company right about now.”
Everyone nodded in agreement and walked back to the mail truck like a row of automatons. James’s mind was buzzing with all that it had just absorbed.
“Fine time for us to start a diet,” Gillian laughed awkwardly as Bennett started the engine. “In a few days we’re all going to wish we had one of those cookies.”
Lindy cast an uneasy glance at Gillian. “That’s the stress . . . making you talk like that.” Lindy held onto Gillian’s arm and released a sigh. “You know, I never liked that Brinkley Myers,” she stated glumly, “but at least his last meal was a good one.”
Coffee at Lindy’s had not lasted long. All four of the supper club members found that they needed some time alone to digest the fact that a young man had suddenly died. True, he was a distasteful young man, but one belonging to the Quincy’s Gap community nonetheless.
Monday at work, James busied himself researching acceptable foods for a low-carb diet plan. He grew quickly confused between the definition of low carbs, good carbs, useless carbs, and the overall abundance of nutritional phrases even mentioning the term “carbohydrates.” James decided to pursue the good carbs, good fats approach as at least the adjectives put a more positive spin on the mountain of depravity he and his new friends were about to climb.
After skimming through several books, James realized that he had already exceeded his daily allowance of carbohydrates by having a bagel for breakfast. True, he had skipped his regular layer of cream cheese and had used a generous measure of strawberry jam instead, but he had innocently added on even more bad carbs cleverly disguised as sugar.
“How can they expect anyone to lose weight with all of these conflicting menus? This book says no fruit, this book says only berries, and this one says eat all fruit!” James snapped a weight loss book shut and stared at the cover. A shirtless man with washboard abs and a pair of biceps that looked like they were actually concealed cannonballs had a veined forearm around the trim waist of a busty and toothy blonde who gazed up at her bronzed diet-mate with a look of rapture.
In order to keep his fingers occupied during his lunch break (so that they would not be tempted to buy a package of cheese puffs from the lobby snack machine), James surfed the Internet. He was able to achieve a tenuous idea of the types of foods the supper club should be eating. Energized, he was busily typing up a shopping list and a list of acceptable snacks when Lucy arrived.
Francis and Scott had already left for the day. James seemed so preoccupied with his typing on the computer that the twins simply disappeared after softly calling, “Until tomorrow, Professor!”
James should have realized that his workday had officially come to an end, but he only grunted in reply as he consulted yet another website created for hopeful dieters. Even when Mrs. Waxman, the part-time librarian in charge of the evening shift, arrived and began to assist a group of boisterous high school students at the reference desk, James remained absorbed with his task.
“Hello, Lucy,” Mrs. Waxman whispered. “Haven’t seen you in here for a few weeks. What true crime books are you reading these days?”
Mrs. Waxman had taught eighth grade English at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School for so many years no
w that no one could remember who had occupied the position before she moved to town. She had taught both Lucy and James and remembered the names of every one of her students as well as the reading habits of each library patron within a three-county radius.
“Hi, Mrs. Waxman,” Lucy smiled. “I’m still working on that Ann Rule paperback.”
“I bet you finished those M. C. Beaton novels, though,” Mrs. Waxman chuckled. “I think you have a thing for that fictional detective.”
“Hamish Macbeth?” Lucy shrugged. “He is a dog lover, but he’s too tall and skinny for me. Plus, I’m not really attracted to redheads.”
“My . . . aren’t we fussy?” Mrs. Waxman clicked her tongue in disapproval. “How old are you now, Lucy?” she asked wickedly.
Lucy flushed. She knew where this conversation was headed and she did not want to admit that she was thirty-five and had never even come close to walking down the aisle. Not even as a bridesmaid. “Actually, I’m not here for books, Mrs. Waxman. I’m here to see . . . ah . . . Professor Henry.”
“James is in his office.” Mrs. Waxman called everyone by his or her first name, regardless of title or occupation. Dr. Morris, the town vet, was still Emily, and Reverend Beasley of the First Baptist Church was and always would be Mike Jr. “He’s doing something on the computer. Go on back.”
Lucy tapped lightly on the door separating James’s tiny office from the shelving area behind the circulation desk. James jumped up in surprise and put his hand over his racing heart. “You startled me.”
“Sorry.” Lucy offered a shy grin, pointing at the wad of papers James clutched in his hand. “Is the diet starting to make you a little tense?” she teased.
Carbs & Cadavers Page 5
