Irish Stewed (An Ethnic Eats Mystery)

by Kylie Logan

  I strolled over to the rolltop desk. “And you think that’s what he’s going to do this time.”

  “Absolutely. Gus is going to steamroll his way through this case. I just need to make sure that when he does, he doesn’t flatten Owen in the process. You’ll see I’m right. Owen might be a goofball, but he’s not a killer.”

  I wanted to believe him. Not because I had any opinion—good or bad—about Owen Quilligan. As Declan said, I didn’t know the kid. Still, I didn’t like the thought of a young guy like Owen spending the rest of his life in prison. I didn’t like the thought of Jack Lancer being dead, either. Or of finding bodies in restaurants. Dead instead of diners. Not a pretty thought.

  I twitched it away and I’d already started through the doorway that led into the restaurant when Declan stopped me, his hand on my arm. “Don’t you want me to go in there before you?” he asked.

  I laughed. “What do you think’s going to happen, the Lance of Justice’s ghost is going to get me? Or do you think I’m one of those women who will dissolve into tears just looking at the place where the awful deed happened?”

  One corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re not?”

  “I don’t have the time. And I don’t have the disposition. So if you’re waiting for tears, you’re going to wait a long, long while. It doesn’t bother me to think that Jack Lancer died here. I didn’t know him. And I have no real connection with the Terminal, either, so it’s not like I think the murder has somehow affected the ambience.” I didn’t mean to sigh. Honest. But when I glanced around, I couldn’t help myself. “Let’s face it, there’s not much ambience around here to begin with.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” His lips pursed, Declan looked around, too. “It’s a throwback to another era and a time when Hubbard was hopping. You know, before the factories closed and the companies packed up and headed to warmer climates. The place is charming.”

  “Are you looking at what I’m looking at?” Of course he was, and of course he wasn’t going to admit that he saw past the lacy facade to the tiredness beneath. And even if he was, I wasn’t going to stand there and listen. I walked through the lace-curtained doorway and into the restaurant.

  Just like the night before, there were no lights on in there, but this morning with the sun streaming through the windows that looked out at the railroad tracks, Sophie’s Terminal at the Tracks was washed with golden light.

  Sure, in a better, more perfect world (or maybe in a Hallmark Channel movie), the sunlight would have accented the Terminal’s hominess, softening the rough edges of the place and gilding everything from the yellowed lace over the windows to the grainy black-and-white photographs of trains and railroad workers that hung on the walls. It would have made the dust motes that floated in the air into sparkling fairy dust.

  In reality, all the light did was accent the gouges in the old floorboards, the smudges on the old wooden tables, and the fact that the windows needed washing. Badly.

  “I can hang around until George shows up.” Until he spoke up, I hadn’t realized Declan had come to stand right behind me. Which was a funny thing, really, because anytime he was anywhere within five feet of me, I could feel the air heat between us as if tiny sparks of electricity crossed from him to me on invisible wires. “George, he’s your cook,” he added when I didn’t respond to his offer. “Denice and Inez are—”

  “The waitresses. I know.” I spun away from the window. Too bad. Had I stood there a moment longer, I might have seen the freight train coming.

  It rolled by not twenty feet from where I stood, and, startled, I gasped.

  “People love it.” Declan raised his voice to be heard over the rush of the train. “A lot of them come here just to see the trains.”

  Through the wall of windows at the back of the Terminal, I watched car after car streak past, fast enough to send a buzz of vibration through the old floorboards and just slow enough for me to see the brightly colored gang tags that had been painted on the sides of one car after another.

  “Denice and Inez usually get here . . .” Declan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and checked the time. “They’ll be here by seven. Denice is usually first through the door.”

  I turned from the windows and the train smoothly streaking by and headed for the kitchen. “And you’re usually up and going this early, too?”

  He scrubbed a hand across the dusting of whiskers on his chin. “Actually, I haven’t been home. Been dealing with the cops. And Owen, of course. Kid’s got a head as hard as a coconut.”

  I pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. “I can’t imagine there was anything for you to eat at the police station.”

  “There’s a vending machine and, hey, I’m used to Fritos at three in the morning.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at him. “Spend a lot of time in police stations, do you?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  The kitchen was small, but thankfully tidy, and there was a coffeemaker on the stainless steel counter between an oven and a deep fryer. First things first: I got the coffee going, then checked out the walk-in cooler at the far end of the room. “How do you like your eggs?” I called out to Declan.

  “Over easy, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  I got the grill started and found a loaf of bread and popped a couple slices into the toaster.

  “You’re not a vegan?” he asked, watching me crack the eggs. “Organics only? I expected more from a California girl than fried eggs and white toast.”

  “I’m used to cooking whatever my employer wanted to eat.”

  “So what do Hollywood stars eat?”

  I grabbed a spatula and flipped the eggs. “Meghan’s taste in foods depended on her moods. And on what just happened to be the latest food fad. So yeah, we went through a vegan phase, and we went all organic for a while, too. Superfoods, gluten free, Indian. You name it, I’ve cooked it.”

  “So you’ll fit right in here.” Declan grabbed a menu from a nearby stack and flipped it open. “Burgers and fries. Fried bologna. Swiss steak. Rice pudding. I happen to love Sophie’s rice pudding, by the way, so if there’s ever any left over, I’ll be happy to take it off your hands.” He slapped the menu closed and returned it to the pile so he could take a plate from me with three perfectly cooked eggs on it, and when he did, he breathed in deep and whispered a few words I couldn’t hear under his breath. “Thank you,” he added.

  “No problem.” I dished up the eggs I’d scrambled on the other side of the grill for myself and leaned back against the counter to eat. “So why did you come back here this morning?” I asked him.

  He’d just taken a bite of toast and he chewed and swallowed before he answered. “You don’t believe in being neighborly?”

  Okay, I take it back. That really wasn’t an answer.

  I polished off a couple more bites of eggs. “You want to have a look around.”

  “There could be something the cops missed.”

  “Something that will prove Owen didn’t do it.”

  He sopped up egg yolk with a piece of toast. “He didn’t. And so if you’d just let me look things over . . .”

  I finished my eggs, then took his plate and mine, and set them in the sink. “Be my guest,” I told him. “While you’re at it, maybe you’ll be able to figure out what Jack Lancer was doing here last night.”

  “It is kind of freaky, isn’t it?” I poured coffee and, mug in hand, Declan led the way out of the kitchen. Together, we stepped into the restaurant and walked over to the table where I’d found the Lance of Justice’s body less than twelve hours earlier.

  According to the phone call Sophie had gotten from Gus Oberlin before she went in for her surgery, the cops had stayed at the restaurant until the wee hours of the morning, checking every nook and cranny, dusting for prints, and generally leaving the basement, the back door, and the area around where Jack Lancer had spent his final moments a mess. They were done with the crime scene phase of the investigatio
n, Gus told her. There wasn’t much left to do except get a confession out of Owen and move on.

  I set my coffee on a nearby table so I could prop my fists on my hips and look at the trails of fingerprinting dust some careless technician had left on the floor, the tables, and the nearby chairs. “We’ll need to clean.”

  Declan wasn’t listening. With a look, he asked which table Jack was sitting at, and when I pointed, he cocked his head and did a slow circumnavigation of the table. “Facedown or faceup?” he asked me.

  It didn’t take long for me to catch on to what he was talking about. Some things—like corpses—are hard to forget. “Facedown. On the table. On his arm.” I put my forearm to my forehead to demonstrate.

  “Blood?”

  “Not much.” I didn’t add thank goodness because then Declan would think I really was one of those women who dissolve into tears, when actually I was thinking more blood would have meant getting a professional cleaning crew in there. I closed my eyes and pictured the scene the way I’d discovered it the night before. “The blood had trickled down the back of his neck,” I said, demonstrating the path with one finger against my own neck. “It soaked into his shirt collar.”

  Declan steepled his fingers and tapped his top lip, his gaze moving from the table to the nearby windows that looked out at the street and the Irish store.

  “Not the smartest place to kill somebody,” he said.

  “Because someone could have seen something.” I nodded. “You were in your store. Did you notice anything?”

  “We were closed for the day, and I was back in the office doing paperwork. Even if somebody came to the restaurant—and they obviously did—there’s no way I could have seen anything.”

  “But you knew when Sophie and I got here.”

  It wasn’t my imagination—his shoulders did get rigid. “I did,” he admitted. “But only because I happened to go up to the cash register to check on the day’s receipts and I saw the lights turn on.”

  It was certainly an explanation. And a mighty convenient one at that. I told myself not to forget it and said, “There were no lights on when we got here. Which means Jack Lancer was here in the dark.”

  “In the dark. With a killer.” Declan gave this some thought. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  “It does if Jack and whoever he was with didn’t want to be noticed. But why here?” As if it might actually help me make sense of the situation, I looked all around, but there was nothing in the faded decor that explained why a TV reporter would break into the Terminal in the middle of the night. “Why did you think Owen might be here?” I asked Declan. “I mean, besides the fact that he’s a troublemaker. Why here?”

  Declan walked along the front of the restaurant. Here, there were three tables in front of the windows that met the wall of the waiting area. There were another two tables against that wall and two more across from them. The one nearest to where I stood was where I’d found Jack. Just like in the larger part of the restaurant, there were more posters on the walls here, more photographs, and an old railway timetable that had been matted and framed. When Declan got as far as the waiting room wall, he swung around and came back the other way.

  “The last place I saw Owen yesterday—I mean, before I saw him being led away in handcuffs—was at Kitty’s,” he said. “That was around six in the evening. He’d spent the day with me over at the shop unloading a truck and helping me check in some new inventory. He was supposed to leave my place, stop and say good night to Kitty, then go to my parents’ for dinner, and when he didn’t show up, my mother called. She was not a happy camper. She’d made salmon because she knows it’s Owen’s favorite and she said the meal was time-sensitive and that’s why she was worried, but I knew the real reason she called. She knew Owen not showing up meant he was in some kind of trouble. He’s that kind of kid. I walked down the street and didn’t see any sign of him in any of the other shops. Honestly, I thought he might be out boosting cars. Or doing some serious underage drinking. When I saw you and Sophie come into the Terminal, I wondered if you’d gotten a call about a break-in and I figured it was worth checking to see what was up.”

  “Owen must have still been hanging around when Sophie and I got here.” This was a no-brainer, but I mentioned it anyway. Talking through the scenario helped me keep it straight in my head. “Otherwise the cops wouldn’t have found him hiding out back.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And Owen admits he was here for the copper?”

  Declan made a face. “Owen doesn’t admit anything. But he doesn’t deny it, either.”

  “Did he happen to say if he ever came inside the building?”

  “He said he might have taken a look around. His words exactly, ‘I might have taken a look around.’”

  It was all I needed to hear. I started back to the kitchen.

  When I found the door that led into the basement, Declan was right behind me. There was an old umbrella stand in front of the door and I tried to lift it and realized that it weighed a ton. Together, Declan and I dragged it to one side and scrambled down the steps.

  According to the historical marker sign out front, the Terminal was built in 1889 and my guess is that nobody had bothered to update—or for that matter, clean—the basement since. It was a big, rectangular room built from huge sandstone blocks that held in the cold and the moisture.

  I shivered and hugged my arms around myself and the leopard-print top I’d worn that day with black pants.

  There were narrow windows at ground level and shelving along every one of those walls. The shelves were mostly empty and there were boxes and discarded restaurant equipment here and there on the floor. Most of it looked as if it had spent the better part of my lifetime right where we found it. I skirted a coffee urn and a piece of copper tubing that had been dropped nearby and made my way over to the deeper shadows along the far wall. Just as I suspected there would be, there was a stairway there, and at the top of it, a door that led to the outside. The window in the center of the door was broken.

  “That’s got to be how he got in,” Declan said. “And don’t think Gus didn’t notice it. I’m sure they took pictures, and see”—he pointed to smudges on the wall—“they dusted for prints down here, too. Owen doesn’t have the brains God gave a goat. He’d never think to wear gloves. I have no doubt some of those prints belong to him. With that bit of information, Gus will have no problem making a case for Owen leaving here, going upstairs, and killing Jack.”

  “Really?” I looked at him long and hard and when that didn’t work, I pointed back toward the stairway where we’d come down. “You think he really broke into the basement, started taking the copper, left it where he dropped it, then broke into the back door upstairs so that he could kill Jack Lancer? That seems awfully complicated.”

  “Like I said, Owen’s not the brightest bulb in the box. Maybe he just came up the basement steps and—”

  “Did you see that old umbrella stand in front of the door that leads down to the basement from the kitchen? No way Owen opened the door from this side with that thing in front of it.”

  “Unless he put it back when he was done.”

  “From this side of the door?”

  “You’re right.” Declan pulled out his phone and headed back to the stairway. Upstairs, he slid the umbrella stand back where we’d found it and took a few photos.

  “You’ll sign an affidavit, right? I mean, if Gus asks. You’ll say that the umbrella stand was—”

  “Right there. Right where you just put it. Yes, of course. When we came in, that’s exactly where it was.”

  “Great!” He sent the pictures he’d just taken over to Gus Oberlin and while he was at it, I strolled back into the restaurant.

  The first thing I did was swipe a doily off the closest shelf where it shared space with a doll dressed in Victorian clothing.

  Too many knickknacks and too little ambience, and a menu that if what Declan had read to me about burgers and ri
ce pudding meant anything, lacked not only imagination but any food actually worth eating.

  And none of it mattered, I reminded myself, dropping into the nearest chair.

  Because I was staying until Sophie was better and then I was gone.

  Where?

  I had no idea, but I knew it wasn’t going to be Hubbard, Ohio.

  Or the Terminal at the Tracks.

  As far as I could see, the restaurant was as terminal as its most famous customer.

  Chapter 6

  When I heard a sharp rap on the front door, I hurried through the restaurant and into the waiting area.

  Face pressed to the glass.

  Beady blue eyes.

  Scrunched-up nose.

  I might not know local news, but I’d recognize Kim Kline anywhere.

  Apparently, so would Declan.

  Though I hadn’t realized he’d followed me, he reached around me, yanked open the door, and barked, “Ms. Inwood has no comment.”

  Really?

  I wedged myself between Declan, the door, and Kim, who had retreated and was toeing the line between the front walk and the restaurant. “I can tell her that myself,” I grumbled, before I turned to the reporter and said, “Ms. Inwood has no comment.”

  “But—”

  Whatever she was going to say, I cut off Kim when I shut the door.

  “I don’t need a keeper,” I said, and I marched through the waiting area and back into the restaurant. If Declan and I were going to go at it, the last thing I needed was a media audience. I made sure we were far from the front windows before I turned to him. “I can take care of myself. Which means I could have told her myself that I had nothing to say.”

  “You did tell her, and you handled it well.” How Declan could stand there and smile when my blood pressure was about to shoot through the roof was a mystery to me. “I forgot you had the whole Hollywood thing going for you. Apparently, you’ve stared down the paparazzi a time or two.”