The Key Lime Crime

by Lucy Burdette

  Miss Gloria waited until she’d passed by and then whispered, “Mark this day on your calendar. She actually saw the bright side of something.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Some food isn’t pretty and does not need to be.

  —Kat Kinsman, “In Praise of Ugly Food,” SeriousEats.com, December 1, 2015

  At six forty-five, Miss Gloria and I trotted out to the parking lot and buzzed over to Oasis on my scooter. The food at this place was yummy, with a far-ranging menu focused on homey Mediterranean food. On the other hand, the ambience was not the least bit fancy. Most of the seating was outdoors under umbrellas with Astroturf underfoot. No white tablecloths, no obsequious waiters saying chef suggests this or that—but from what I’d seen of my mother-in-law so far, she simply didn’t care enough about eating to be bothered by those details.

  I had stopped here yesterday to request a table at the back, a distance from the traffic noise on White Street and the busy takeout business at the bar. A heat lamp was positioned near the table to knock off the chill. My mother, Sam, and Nathan’s mother were already seated. Nathan was missing in action as usual.

  “Hope we’re not late. I was getting a lot of work done and lost track of the time.” I kissed my mother on the cheek and waved across the table at the others. “How was your event? I bet you’re exhausted.”

  “It was a wedding luncheon at the Little White House, so we know the ropes,” said Sam.

  My mother’s company had been hired to cater the biggest event of the year last winter—a Havana/Key West conference that took place at the Harry Truman Little White House. Sadly, the event had been derailed by a series of disasters, including a murder. Still, everyone insisted that my mother had handled everything thrown at her with aplomb—and the food had been to die for. Not literally, of course.

  “The bride was sweet, the family was lovely, and everyone seemed to appreciate what your mother made. As they should,” Sam said, hugging her shoulders, “because every bit of it was delicious.”

  “I was nervous about this,” my mother explained to Nathan’s mom, “because a lot of wealthy Key West people were in attendance. And that’s how I get my business, word of mouth. Not that the people who aren’t wealthy don’t deserve delicious food, but you know what I mean. These people have the money to pay for other parties.” She looked pained as though she’d suddenly realized she’d stepped in some kind of glop and didn’t have a way to shake it off.

  I recognized that she was flustered by Nathan’s mother, too; it wasn’t only me.

  Nathan came hurrying in and took his seat next to me. “Sorry,” he said with a tight smile and no further explanation. “Have we ordered? Unfortunately, I have to go back for a couple of hours after we eat to finish up.”

  “Oh no,” I said, pushing a stray lock of hair off his forehead. Nathan only nodded.

  Sam waved over the waiter, and we ordered a variety of dishes to share for appetizers. “When you get back,” he said to the tall man taking our order, “we’ll be ready with the rest of it.”

  “I love this place,” said Miss Gloria, “the problem being there are so many things that I enjoy that it’s hard to choose just one. And I do want to save room for dessert.”

  “Dessert?” Mrs. Bransford asked. Her voice vibrated with disbelief, maybe even horror.

  I assumed she was picturing the pie I’d eaten before lunch and the other pieces Miss Gloria and I had tested this afternoon. “Anything but key lime pie,” I said with a grin. “They make killer baklava. And I did go to the gym this morning, so I can absorb the extra calories.”

  “And I am an old lady,” said Miss Gloria with an even bigger smile. “Not expected to live forever. So my theory is seize the moment, seize the sugar, seize the love, seize the carbs, seize the cats.” She plucked at her sweat shirt with its Why the hell not? maxim.

  The food came out quickly and we ate falafel, and stuffed grape leaves, and spicy sautéed eggplant, and cold beet soup, and Greek salad, and something resembling spanakopita. I took notes and photos and jotted down snippets of sentences I thought I might use.

  “And what did you ladies do today?” Nathan asked.

  I deferred to his mother, interested to hear how she would describe our day.

  “We met some cats,” she said. “Apparently Gloria does not have enough pets in her life.”

  Miss Gloria laughed. “I’ll explain it all to you later,” she said, patting my husband’s arm.

  “Anyway, we also went on a kamikaze tour of Key West bakeries.” Mrs. Bransford widened her eyes. “Your wife has an article due soon, so we were obligated to taste key lime pies until we were green in the face.”

  More laughter.

  “Those two went to the shop where the owner was killed,” said Miss Gloria. “But I didn’t get to hear what anyone said about her. Not that you can trust what people say after someone has been murdered. They’re not going to say she got what she deserved. Not in public, anyway.”

  But I could see Nathan’s expression hardening. He looked directly at me. “I hope you weren’t investigating. I really hope you weren’t.”

  Ulp. “Claudette Parker and her shop are an important part of the bakery/pastry scene in town right now. Or they were, anyway.” I heaved a sigh as that awful porch scene flashed into my mind unbidden. “I couldn’t very well skip that stop entirely. My sense was that she was pushing baking to a new level, like throwing a big rock into our small bakery pond.” I was babbling, but I really did not want to have a fight with Nathan here at this dinner table. In fact, I despised fighting with him any time at all, but especially in public.

  “What’s happening in town?” Sam asked Nathan. “With all our catering events this week, it feels like our heads are buried in fish dip and deviled eggs and crudités. Though why everyone insists on crudités when they are always left over—” He shook his head mournfully. “We hate to waste good vegetables. And the conundrum is that guests don’t eat many of them, but hosts want to offer them.”

  “Crazy, as you’d expect,” Nathan said. “I am in charge of scheduling security this week,” he explained to his mother. “We expect seventy thousand additional people on the island for New Year’s Eve, most of them jammed onto Duval Street. I had every hole in our lineup plugged last week with imported talent from Miami. Yesterday, cancellations started pouring in, so I’m reduced to begging our local guys to take double shifts and to negotiating with the sheriff’s department, too. You can imagine how well that’s going.”

  “Tell us the truth,” said my mother to Nathan’s, “did you always know that Nathan would become a police officer? With my Hayley, she was always interested in what was happening in the kitchen. When her grandmother baked, she stood on a stool beside the counter and stirred the batter or decorated cakes. And she used to write little books with recipes and stories in them. Even before she knew how to write, she was pretending she did and drawing pictures of dinner. So her becoming a food critic doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “Honestly, I was hoping he’d grow out of it,” said Nathan’s mother with a rueful smile. “When he was three or four, he insisted on having a uniform. His favorite babysitter sewed it for him. And he would hardly take it off to sleep or bathe. We had to have another one made so we could wash one. He had a little sheriff’s star and a belt with a plastic gun in the holster.”

  By now, instead of looking fondly at her offspring as my mother had when she described me as a child, Mrs. Bransford had a grim set to her mouth.

  “His father and grandfather were in the police business, so I suppose it was inevitable. Even though we gave him every kind of lesson you can imagine—art, music, and many sports that of course he excelled at. I kept hoping he’d find another passion. But here we are. Policing in paradise.” She added a smile that I imagined was supposed to soften the hard edges of her remarks.

  Nathan rolled his eyes. “Can we please move on to another subject?”

  “Isn’t it funny
how our babies become their own little people very early on?” my mother asked.

  “Whether we like it or not, I suppose,” said Nathan’s mother.

  Miss Gloria and my mother began coaxing Mrs. Bransford for more stories about Nathan as a boy. “He won’t share anything like that, and he claims he doesn’t have pictures of himself as a baby,” said my mom.

  “He was cute,” Mrs. Bransford said. “Curly hair, and always those green eyes. And I admit, when he had that little police uniform on, I wanted to eat him up.”

  I felt the same way about him these days, but I suppressed the impulse to overshare. He’d never forgive me. But I couldn’t stop grinning and gave his thigh a little squeeze.

  “His father gave him a toy walkie-talkie, and wherever we went, he’d make calls to an imaginary dispatcher describing the problem and stating what kind of backup he needed.”

  “Nothing has changed at all!” Miss Gloria crowed.

  Nathan had flushed red with embarrassment, but I could sense him lightening up and enjoying the teasing too. “It’s been such fun being the butt of your jokes, but I have to go back to work.” He stood up and leaned over to give me a kiss. “Hopefully, I won’t be too late. Mother, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m hoping to have more time to spend with my favorite girls.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The soup course was a clear lemony broth dotted with parsley and scrolls of spring onion. It filled the air with a sunny fragrance, and I thought the cook was a genius to make such a dish on so dark a day.

  —Barbara O’Neal, The Art of Inheriting Secrets

  As soon as we got out of the car and started down the finger of the dock, I could see that something was wrong at our houseboat. The fairy lights were no longer strung in loops from the rafters—they were hanging down willy-nilly, almost as if a storm had blown through. But the night was clear and Oasis was only a half mile away, so that hadn’t happened. One of the large pots of tropical plants on our front deck had been tipped onto its side. There was something smeared on the windows, though we were too far away to tell what it was. My mind skipped to the pets, and I felt a literal body blow as I absorbed the invasion into our space, terrified and furious all at once.

  Miss Gloria started to run toward the boat. I ran after her, grabbed her arm, and yelped, “Wait! Don’t go down there. We don’t know what’s happening in that houseboat. Whoever did this might still be inside.”

  We returned to the parking lot, holding hands as we passed our boat next door, which was dark, of course, because the electric work was not yet completed. Huddled in the light of the laundry building, I dialed the police. Then I texted Nathan for good measure.

  Stay put, he texted back. Will be there shortly. Do not get on the boat. Get in Miss Gloria’s car and lock all the doors.

  We did as he’d told us, pressed close together on the front seat. “Can you text Mrs. Dubisson?” my roommate asked. “I forgot to bring my phone. See if she noticed anyone she didn’t know on our dock? But tell her to stay home and lock up until we give the all clear.”

  “Good idea,” I said, and quickly shot her and my friend Connie and our next-door neighbors a message, warning them to stay safely put.

  Two police cars with sirens blaring and lights flashing arrived minutes later. We rolled down the windows of the car to introduce ourselves and explain what had happened.

  “Wait here while we go take a look,” one of the police officers said. They set off down the dock’s finger, guns drawn, their flashlights aimed into every dark nook where a bad guy might be waiting.

  “I hate that this happened,” I said, tapping my fingers furiously on the steering wheel. “There are too many damn people on this island. It’s like rats in a cage and people turn mean.”

  “Maybe it was only kids, party people looking for fun, and things got out of hand,” Miss Gloria said. “They probably had one too many beers and didn’t mean to cause this damage.”

  “Maybe,” I said, marveling at how she could be gracious and optimistic even under these circumstances. Especially considering that twice since I’d known her, she’d been attacked on this very dock. And seriously hurt. I shook my head, not wanting to think about what might have happened if we’d been at home. On the other hand, maybe the lights and the flickering TV screen and the smell of supper cooking would have deterred them.

  Maybe, I thought, it was homeless types, looking for cash or expensive jewelry. Though why they would expect to find such a thing on a modest houseboat was beyond me. More likely it was druggies who had become angry and destructive after finding nothing worth selling. I sure hoped it wasn’t something more personal.

  I strained to see what was happening—whether I might spot the cats hunkered down safely outside. A faint woof emerged from the boat.

  “Ziggy!” Miss Gloria exclaimed. “I hope all the guys are all right.”

  I grabbed her hand and squeezed. Another police vehicle careened into the parking lot, this time Nathan’s SUV. He rapped on our window, holding a hand up as he went running past our car. “Stay where you are,” he hollered, drawing his gun as he ran.

  We heard a shout from one of the first cops. “All clear!”

  I opened the car door and hopped out. Several of the neighbors had begun to gather on the dock just off our boat. Miss Gloria and I joined them.

  “What in the world is going on?” asked Connie’s husband, Ray.

  “You can come in now,” Nathan said, emerging from the living room onto our deck. “We’d like you to look around to see if anything is missing. But don’t touch.”

  “We know that much,” Miss Gloria said, managing an impish grin.

  He turned back to the neighbors. “We’ll have some officers checking to be sure there’s no one left on this dock who doesn’t belong. So remain here for a few minutes? We’ll also be touching base to ask a few questions about what you might have seen or heard.”

  We went into the cabin, stepping carefully over a smattering of broken glass and what looked like ketchup on the kitchen floor. I paused to peer at the junk smeared on the front windows—goopy and creamy and pale yellow.

  It resembled the piece of key lime pie I had selected for Miss Gloria from Key West Cakes earlier today. The whipped cream and the key lime filling ran down the glass and pooled on the floor; the plastic container had been cast on the heart-shaped rag rug in the kitchen.

  “Maybe you could get a fingerprint from that,” I said to Nathan, trying to be brave. “At least I’d already tasted that one.”

  Nobody laughed.

  A little farther into the house, a drawer of silverware and linens outside my bedroom door had been yanked out and dumped on the floor. Clothing had been pulled out of my closet and the bedclothes were rumpled. But as far as I could see, nothing was missing. Even my computer still sat on the small desk in my room. And my grandmother’s pearls were there too, tucked into the lingerie drawer.

  Miss Gloria yelped and I dashed into her room, Nathan right behind me, and following him two uniformed cops. She was kneeling in front of her closet, where Ziggy quivered in a small brown heap. He leaped out and flung himself into Nathan’s arms and began licking his chin, wriggling with the joy of the reunion. Miss Gloria giggled, the policemen laughed, and even Nathan had to smile. Hearing a pair of outraged meows, she hurried down the short hallway to the back deck, where both of the cats were crouched, peering through the screen door. She swung open the door, clucking to them in reassurance. They crept inside.

  When we returned to the front deck, Nathan looked at each of us in turn. “Any idea what this is about? Did you see anyone lurking in the parking lot earlier before you left for the restaurant?”

  “No and no,” I said. “We saw Mrs. Renhart walking Schnootie on our way to the car.”

  “She noticed the streetlight was out,” said Miss Gloria, pointing to the lamppost. “And then she went on down to the parking lot with the dog, and we drove to the restaurant.”

  “No cars y
ou didn’t recognize? People who didn’t seem to belong?”

  “We weren’t paying attention to anything but the time,” I said, perching on the edge of a lounge chair. “It was such a busy day.” I always felt like I was letting him down when I didn’t notice details. I was trying to get better at this, because I knew it helped with both of our jobs. But busy lives led to busy minds that didn’t leave a lot of space to spare for cataloging observations. Especially if you were running late and not expecting trouble.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “I want to do some checking around. Go ahead and straighten things up as soon as the officer is finished taking photos.”

  When the young cop left, we began to tackle the mess, replacing the silver and linens in the drawer, straightening the bed, and rehanging my clothing.

  “This is such a bummer,” Miss Gloria said. “We had everything cleaned up around here. It’s never looked so good, right? Ever since Nathan sprung the news that his mother was coming, you’ve been on a tear.”

  “True enough.” I tried to keep the tremble out of my voice so she wouldn’t worry about how rattled I felt. When things were in reasonable order, we took a break and stood out on the deck, watching the cops go door to door. Our little haven, our safety zone, had been breached. I took a seat in the rocking chair, thinking the motion might soothe me.

  When Nathan finally returned, his jaw was clenched tight. He looked worried and angry. “Nobody saw anything. Mrs. Renhart thinks maybe someone broke the streetlight on purpose, and the glass around the filament is smashed, so that makes some sense. If someone was planning to break in later, darkness would help.” He paused, green eyes boring into me. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to marry you.”