by J. R. Ripley
“Oh, sorry!” I’d forgotten to fill the wooden slot at the end of the row with paper bags. “Give me a moment and I’ll get you one.” I ran to the storeroom. The bags were in a packet on a metal rack near the floor safe. Running back to the front, I spotted the owner of the diner across the street climbing down from her large white pickup truck. “Moire Leora!”
“So?” Kim glanced toward the window.
Lights, bells, and whistles went off in my head. “Of course,” I muttered. I thrust the packet of bags at Kim. “Take over for me, would you?”
I didn’t give her a chance to answer. I threw on my down jacket and ran across the street, dodging cars and angry, startled drivers as I zigzagged my way to the diner.
“Wait! Amy!” I heard Kim cry. “I don’t even know how to work the register!”
9
It was lunchtime and Ruby’s Diner was practically standing room only. All the sixties-era red vinyl booths along the window were full, and the one table that wasn’t occupied was littered with the remains of somebody’s lunch.
I took a lone swivel stool at the counter between a couple of men, the man on my right in a suit, the man on my left in the gray-and-red pinstriped uniform of a local HVAC company. He said hello. The man in the blue suit ignored me and focused on his Wall Street Journal.
When the waitress, Tiffany LaChance, popped up across from me, I ordered the baby bronto—the full bronto burger’s too much for me, but I did go with the onion rings. Usually I opt for the house salad instead, but stress does things to people. Me? It makes me crave fat, the kind of comfort-inducing fat that you can only get in fried foods, like the delicious greasy grams of fat found in things like French fries and fried donuts. Or in my case, onion rings.
Try as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Matthew Kowalski would wind up dead in my shop. It was probably wrong to think it, but it made me mad to think that the lowlife had really screwed things up for me. Why couldn’t he have died somewhere else? Like Gertie Hammer’s house.
Scarfing another five-hundred-calorie onion ring, I knew I had to solve this murder because it was, among other things, making me gain weight. I shrugged and grabbed another golden ring. I’d burn off all the extra calories on the walk around the lake I’d vowed to take tomorrow. Though at this point, I’d have to lap the darn lake about a hundred times just to break even on today’s lunch.
No matter, the food here was worth breaking any diet or dietary restrictions for. I kept chiding Moire Leora Breeder, the owner, that she should expect Guy Fieri to pop up any day in his flashy red Camaro convertible to do a segment on her and her diner. She said she wasn’t holding her breath. Still, I like to look my best whenever I’m in the place—just in case the camera crew shows up.
Sitting at the counter also gave me a better chance of catching a few minutes with Moire Leora. She’s a hands-on owner, and when it’s busy she can be found doing anything from running the register, cooking on the line, or busing a table. Moire, she’d once told me, means star of the sea and Leora means shining light. Her Scottish and Italian parents had named her well. Considering she’d lost her U.S. Marine husband in a training accident half a dozen years ago, she was remarkably optimistic.
“Thanks, Tiff.” I arched my back and inhaled the savory aroma of prime ground beef and hot fries.
“No problem.” All the diner’s employees, including the owner, wore khaki pants and Kelly green shirts with white name patches, stylishly reminiscent of those worn by old-school gas station attendants. I almost expected Tiff to offer to clean my windshield for me.
I took a look around the bustling and noisy diner. “Is Moire Leora around?”
Tiffany nodded and slid a bottle of ketchup my way. If you’re looking for Heinz or Hunt’s in this diner, keep looking. Moire Leora makes her own, and it’s phenomenal. Folks keep telling her she should go commercial, but she isn’t interested. “Saw her a minute ago.”
She joined me in the search. Tiffany’s a green-eyed buxom blonde a few years my senior. If the guys didn’t come here for the food, they came here because of her. She is very easy on the eyes.
Tiffany used to be married to the man who owns the biggest car lot in town. Now she and her son were living in a small condo in Lakeside Village and she was adding to what I’d heard through the rumor mill was a pittance of a divorce settlement by pulling shifts in the diner. “There she is.” She pointed toward a table in the corner with her ballpoint pen.
I nodded. Moire Leora was sharing a laugh with Mac MacDonald, our town’s laid-back new mayor, and some of his friends. I caught her eye and waved.
Moire Leora headed back my way, swinging a stainless steel coffee carafe. “Hi, Amy.” She held out the carafe and I shook my head. I was sticking with ice water. I had to balance out all those burger and onion ring calories somehow. I know coffee contains no calories, but not the way I drink it. Plenty of cream and too much sugar.
“How are you holding up?” She flopped down on the stool that Mr. Blue Suit had relinquished.
“Okay.” I swirled a fat onion ring around in a puddle of ketchup.
“Really?” She looked bemused. “I don’t think I’d be doing okay if I’d found a dead body here in the diner.”
“You heard, huh?”
Hearing Moire Leora’s laugh was like being doused in warm sunshine. She laid a soft hand on my shoulder. “Honey, everybody in Ruby Lake has heard. The whole county, I expect.” She shook her head. “The whole state maybe.”
I groaned. I could just picture the headlines spreading out across the land: “Birds & Bees or Birds & Bodies? Dead Man Found in Ruby Lake Shop. Shopkeeper Under Suspicion of Murder.”
Strains of the prologue to Little Shop of Horrors ran through my mind. Moire Leora must have been reading my thoughts. She certainly couldn’t have misread my body language: sloping shoulders, sagging chin, sad-sack expression, and skittish eyes.
“I just can’t believe Matt Kowalski, of all people, Matt Kowalski, was murdered in my house.” I bit my lip. “I mean, why was he there in the first place?” I sighed heavily. “And how did he get in?”
“Beats me,” Moire Leora replied.
“I’m sure the back door had been locked. I unlocked it to let Dwayne in.” And with no broken windows or other signs of illicit entry, that left only the front door.
“Dwayne?”
“The deliveryman.” I explained how the truck driver had arrived late with my merchandise for the store and I’d let him in after finding the body and being accosted by Esther Pilaster. “Did you see anybody else?” I asked hopefully. She followed my gaze across the street to Birds & Bees. “You do have a perfect view from here.”
“No.” Moire Leora shook her head. “Sorry. I keep an eye on what’s going on inside more than outside.” Moire Leora looks like a slightly older, slightly plumper version of Jennifer Anniston, with blue eyes and natural blond shoulder-length hair, which was also a little grayer and which she normally kept parted over her left eye. While the actress did commercials for hair color, Moire Leora doesn’t believe in hair dye. At about five-four, she’s a few inches shorter than me.
“Of course.” I stuffed the last onion ring in my mouth and took a swig of water.
“I do remember seeing a few people, couples mostly, taking a stroll, walking their dogs. That sort of thing. Oh, I did see Gertie go by a couple of times.”
“A couple of times?
“Yeah.”
“I wonder why.”
Moire Leora shrugged. “Who knows why Gertie Hammer does any of the things she does? You know how Gertie is.” I grunted as the proprietress continued. “Nobody around here has ever been able to make any sense of her.”
“Tell me about it,” I commiserated. Gertie was pretty much the town grouch. I almost regretted buying the old place from her.
“Oh, and I did see Mac MacDonald.”
I straightened. “The mayor?”
Moire Leora nodded. “Yeah, h
e went to the door, knocked, looked in the windows, then drove off.”
“What was that all about?” I wondered aloud. Could be nothing; then again could be something. I’d never even met the man. I only knew him from his picture when it popped up occasionally in the Ruby Lake Weekender, the town’s local newspaper.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
We both looked around the diner, but Mac MacDonald was gone and the booth the mayor had been occupying was empty.
A shout from the kitchen caught Moire Leora’s ear. “Sorry,” she said, patting my shoulder. “Sounds like I’m needed to put out another fire, literal or otherwise.”
Tiffany slid the check under the rim of my plate. “Anything else, Amy? There’s still some apple-rhubarb pie left.”
“Please,” I said, patting my bloated stomach, “don’t even tempt me.” Moire Leora’s pastry chef adds a dash of fresh ground cinnamon to the filling, which gives the pies that extra something that I find practically irresistible. I was about to give in to temptation when I noticed Tiffany’s eyes were a little red around the edges. “Everything okay with you, Tiff?”
She forced a small smile. “Oh sure.”
“How’s Jimmy?” Jimmy is her eleven-year-old son.
“He’s good.” Her sigh seemed to say otherwise.
I arched my brow and waited her out.
“It’s Robert,” she confessed a moment later. Robert is her ex. “He’s been giving me a hard time.”
I furrowed my brow. “What sort of a hard time?”
She shrugged. “Calling, following me.” Her eyes jumped to the window. “Watching me.”
“Watching you?”
Tiffany nodded. “Just yesterday I caught him spying on me from across the street.”
I threw some money down on the counter and told her to keep the change. “Why would he be doing that?”
“Because he thinks I’m seeing another man,” she whispered. The HVAC man lifted from his stool and headed for the door.
“Are you?” I asked. “Wait”—I held up my hand—“it’s none of his business or mine if you are. After all, didn’t Robert leave you?”
She pursed her lips. “Uh-huh.”
For a woman nearly half his age and barely legal to boot, as I remembered.
“If you catch him stalking you again, call the police.”
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “He is Jimmy’s dad, after all. I don’t want to make trouble.”
I don’t know, it seemed to me that Robert LaChance was the one making all the trouble. But I didn’t want to get involved in any family squabble, especially when it wasn’t even my family. That could only lead to trouble—I’d taken sides in such disputes in the past and it had always backfired.
There’s nothing worse than taking sides and then having the two sides reconcile and end up hating you for what one previously thought was helpful advice and that they’ve now jointly decided was unwelcome interference.
Do I sound sensitive? You bet I’m sensitive.
Besides, I had troubles of my own. Like figuring out who wanted Matt Kowalski dead and why they chose to do it in Birds & Bees, before I OD’d on onion rings.
10
“We need to talk.” I locked the front door and turned over the Closed sign. It was after six, and while I expected to stay open evenings once tourist season kicked in, this time of year the streets were fairly deserted once the sun went down. Most businesses, except places like the diner and other establishments offering food or souvenirs, closed by five these days, and that meant dwindling traffic. Even some of the more touristy shops closed early through the winter and only began extending their hours once school was out.
Not to mention it was raining cats and dogs. I expected the only shoppers on the streets to be umbrella- and galoshes-seekers.
“Sure,” chirped Kim. “About what?” She looked completely worn-out. Kim’s last job had been working as a Realtor. I guess working on her feet all day in a wild bird supply store had proven to be a little more taxing than she’d anticipated.
“About Matt Kowalski.” I looked Kim in the eye. She’s my best friend, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask her the hard questions.
A heartfelt sigh spilled over Kim’s lips. “Buy a girl a drink first?”
I agreed and Kim followed me upstairs to the apartment I shared with Mom.
“Do we have to talk about this?” Kim had slumped into the dark green easy chair, balancing a glass of cabernet in one hand while I folded my legs under me on the brown leather sofa. Both pieces had been fixtures in my parents’ house for as long as I could remember. Now they’d come to rest here in the top-floor apartment along with my mother and me. I didn’t mind at all. There was a certain comfort in having them with us. The sagging chair cushion was a constant and pleasant reminder of my father.
I took a long sip and nodded. “You knew we’d have to sooner or later.” Mom was in her bedroom with the door closed, probably resting. Mom’s been diagnosed with adult onset muscular dystrophy—myotonic muscular dystrophy 1, or MMD1, to be precise. It seems to be only affecting her distal extremities, mostly her legs, but her hands a little too. The specialist over in Raleigh said this might be as bad as it gets. We could only hope.
Kim frowned and I spotted a tear at the corner of her left eye. “It’s just been so long, you know?” I nodded. “You wouldn’t think it would hurt this much.” She swatted away the tear, finished her glass of wine, and poured a refill. She held the bottle out to me and topped off my glass as well.
We both knew the story. Her high school sweetheart, Tommy Regan, had been the passenger in an automobile that Matt Kowalski had been driving and smashed headfirst into a utility pole. Matt survived with injuries; Tommy died of his. Both boys had been seventeen and, while most folks agreed Matt must have been drinking, a sobriety test had never been performed and Matt had never been charged with a crime.
Not everybody was happy with that decision. Not Kim and not Tommy’s family. The Regans had sold their home and moved away within a year of the accident, unable to live so close to the accident or Matt Kowalski.
“Can you think of anybody who’d want Matt dead?”
Kim smiled grimly. “Besides me?”
“I know you didn’t kill him.”
She shrugged. “There were times I wanted to.”
“Do you ever hear from Tommy’s parents?”
Kim shook her head. “Last I heard they’d retired to wherever they were from in Ohio.” She tapped the side of her glass. “Matt’s mother is still around though.”
I perked up. “Oh?” It might be worth having a talk with her. “Maybe she can tell me what Matt might have been doing at my place.”
Kim shrugged again. “Maybe.”
I decided to change the subject. Kim was looking more morose by the minute. “What can you tell me about Mac MacDonald?”
“Mac?” Kim set her glass on the coffee table between us. “Nothing special. Why?”
I explained how Moire Leora had seen the mayor outside Birds & Bees the night of the murder. “You used to work for him in his real estate office. Can you think of any reason he might have been coming here?”
Kim pursed her lips.
I kept on. “I mean, I know he wasn’t coming to see me. I don’t even know the man.”
“He’s a politician now.” Kim leaned back and rubbed her bare toes. “You know how it is. Maybe he came to wish you luck and drum up your support for some initiative or something. Maybe he was looking for a campaign donation.”
“Maybe.” I gave the suggestion some thought. He’d just recently been elected. But like most politicians, he was probably looking to fill the reelection-campaign war chest already. Though if he wanted money, he was in for a long and ultimately futile wait. “If he knew you were my partner, he might have been coming to see you.” I shook my head. “But you were out of town.”
Kim’s eyes jumped. “Well . . .”
I leaned forwar
d and set my empty glass next to hers. “Well?” I waited expectantly.
Kim opened her mouth to speak, but the sound we heard was the rattling of the apartment door. “Now what?” I grumbled. I pulled open the door. “Esther.” The old woman stood in the doorway wrapped in a yellowed shawl and a long black woolen skirt. She looked up her cragged nose at me. “What do you want?”
“There’s a lot of banging downstairs.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“So you decided to do some banging of your own?”
She tilted her head to the side. “The banging is Chief Kennedy banging on your front door wanting to be let in, smart aleck.” Esther the Pester turned on her orthopedic heels. “If I was you, I’d let him in before he breaks down your door.”
My heart skipped a beat. I slipped on my shoes and headed down the back stairs to open the front door. “What is it now, Jerry?” I was in no mood for formalities.
Jerry’s visor hung low over his brow and rivulets of rainwater spattered the tops of his black leather shoes. “I’m going to have to ask you to come down to the station and answer a few questions.”
I puffed out my chest. “Are you kidding? Now?” I started to close the door. He stuck his toe against the door. “Can’t this wait till tomorrow? Besides, I’ve told you everything I know.”
But Jerry wasn’t even looking at me. I swiveled my head to see just what the guy was looking at.
Kim stood several steps behind.
And she looked like a rabbit caught in a trap.
11
“I got here as soon as I could.” Derek Harlan laid a firm hand on Imy shoulder.
Some comfort. I hadn’t even wanted him to come at all. In fact, I’d pleaded with Mom not to call him last night. If anything, I’d said, call his dad, Ben. But Mom had informed me that Ben was out of town and unavailable. And when she’d heard that the police had requested Kim come down to the station for questioning, she’d insisted we do something. That something was Derek.
