If Fried Chicken Could Fly

by Paige Shelton

  “Procedure, I guess,” I said.

  “Procedure my foot,” she said, and then disappeared back through the swinging doors.

  The fake cops she mentioned were the ones who dressed like sheriffs and law enforcement officers from the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the summer and with all the other actors/characters, they would walk up and down the boardwalks of Broken Rope, their spurs jingling, and good-naturedly tip their hats, gently pretend to harass the tourists, and stage fake gunfights. My brother had been a pretend sheriff six years earlier, the summer he was twenty-one, but they took his badge and fake gun after he got drunk one night and scared a family from Boston out of their wits. He interrupted their dinner, pulled his plastic gun, and told them they were being arrested for having such a sexy daughter. Yes, his methods for attempting to get a date had proved to be a bad moment for all of us.

  The good news was that the family from Boston didn’t push the real police to press charges. The young lovely thing in question also slapped him, which was entertaining to a number of women. Even with his poorly thought-out behavior Teddy was too attractive for his own good, and he left an angry trail of broken hearts in his wake.

  They’re here, I said to myself as I saw a real police car pull up in front of the school, well illuminated by the building’s outside floodlight above the front door. It was just one of the many changes Gram had made to the building.

  When she bought it, she had the inside completely gutted and rebuilt to accommodate the cooking school, so if there’d ever been a pew or a bingo card in sight, they were long gone now. When Gram’s second husband (my grandfather was her first husband) died from injuries sustained from falling down a well, she was left with lots of money. For a long time she hadn’t done a thing with it, saying that she’d know how to spend it when the time was right.

  The time had been “right” shortly after my brother’s fake sheriff incident and my escape from law school (our parents had been particularly challenged by their children that summer); as she drove by the abandoned building one day, she decided immediately that she would build a cooking school. “Hell,” she’d said, “everybody, dead or alive in this town, wants me to cook for them anyway. Might as well get paid to show them how to do it. Plus,” she added to my parents, “it’ll give Betts something to do.”

  I hadn’t protested. In fact, I was thrilled with the idea. For a brief time I was humiliated at my poor life choices and my return to Broken Rope with my tail between my legs, but Gram was my favorite person in the universe and I loved to cook, and someday I might almost be as good as she was. It seemed mostly perfect.

  Until today at least. With a body in our cleaning supply room, I experienced a fleeting thought that we might need an attorney, and if I’d stayed in law school I’d be pretty experienced by now. Also, if I’d stayed, there might not be a cooking school, so therefore no supply room and finally, no dead body.

  I devoted a few minutes every day to beating myself up and second-guessing my decisions. It was a hard habit to break.

  But the assessment of my present situation was rudely interrupted by a ghost from one of my past situations. The two police officers who got out of the car were familiar, which wasn’t too unusual. Broken Rope was small enough that I knew pretty much everyone or recognized some feature about them that hinted at which family they came from.

  One of the officers was Jim Morrison, like the singer, but not really. This Jim Morrison had looked the same for the last ten years: bald, big-shouldered, and somewhat soft around the middle. He was approaching fifty and wore Clark Kent glasses, but his wife once told me he never did manage the transformation into someone Superman-like, though he was a good guy.

  It was the other officer who was the ghost—if not literally, certainly figuratively. Cliff Sebastian was my first love. We’d known each other all our lives, dated when we were at Broken Rope High School, and then ended the relationship when we both went to different colleges. I’d dated since then, but I’d never cared for anyone as much as I had Cliff. In fact, there were times, when I felt like being extradramatic, that I was certain he’d ruined me for anyone else. Though we lost contact over the years, my family continually snuck in updates about him: “Pass the beans, Betts. Oh, did you hear that Cliff Sebastian finished architecture school and is moving to San Francisco?” Or “Would you run to the store and get me some milk, Betts? Oh, and did you hear that Cliff Sebastian still isn’t married?” Or “Betts, brace yourself, Cliff Sebastian is getting married to a medical school student.” That last one was sprung on me about ten minutes after I made it home with the new title of Law School Dropout.

  No one had ever snuck in, “Oh, and did you hear that Cliff Sebastian is now a Broken Rope police officer?” That seemed like a pretty big update, so either my family was slipping or they didn’t want me to know that Cliff was back in town. With a wife. And probably some kids. It wasn’t that I minded him having a family so much—I just didn’t want to have to be around it, and I really didn’t want to have to be nice to it…them.

  But hang on. Something didn’t fit. Something was wrong. I stepped closer to the window and rested my forehead against it as I stared hard. Cliff Sebastian was a successful architect in San Francisco. He was married to a woman who must be a physician by now who surely wouldn’t have the sort of career in Broken Rope that she’d have in San Francisco.

  Maybe it really wasn’t him. Even with the bright building light, it was dark outside. But why did the person, dressed like a real and modern police officer, who was walking toward the cooking school front doors, look so much like him?

  If it was Cliff, he hadn’t changed over the years as much as he’d just slightly expanded. He still had stick-straight brownish hair, though it was shorter than it had been in high school. He was still tall, but instead of thin, he was trim, his shoulders wide, his stomach flat, his legs long and muscled, and Lord help me, his face still dotted with a dimple on his right cheek. He used to be adorable, and now he was just plain old handsome. I lifted my forehead from the glass and then dropped it again, not hard but hard enough.

  As Jim and the Cliff-lookalike came through the double front doors, I straightened up. By this time I’d become completely self-involved and had forgotten the reason we’d called the police in the first place.

  “Isabelle,” Jim said as he led the way. “We got a call, we think from your gram. Was there a fire, and is there a dead body in the school?”

  Cliff-lookalike stayed to Jim’s side and back a step or two.

  “Uh-huh. Hi, Jim,” I said as I found my feet and boldly stepped forward. “Who’s your new officer?”

  “Oh, this is Cliff Sebastian. Cliff, this is…”

  “Isabelle Winston. Hi, Betts,” he said with a half smile. “We went to high school together, Jim.”

  “Oh, that seems about right. Cliff’s come back to town. Funny how so many people come back to Broken Rope.”

  “Yeah, funny,” I said. “Hi, Cliff.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, B.”

  He kept shortening my name, finally reaching the derivation that I’d only allowed him to use. No one else had called me B. And after we broke up, no one dared.

  The swinging doors flew open. “Well, there you are. Who is that yahoo you have answering the phone at your office? Oh, never mind,” Gram said.

  “Sorry about that, Miz. We’re here now. You say there’s a body? Where is it?” Jim scratched the side of his bald head.

  Gram’s given name was Missouri Anna Winston. Most people called her either Gram or Miz. My dad, her son, called her Miz Winnie and my mother called her Mom. But everyone knew who she was, no matter what name was used. My full name is Isabelle Anna Winston. Someone, though there’s a continuing family argument as to who, called me Betts when I was little, and it stuck.

  “Yes, there’s a body. It’s horrible, Jim. That’s why I…oh, hang on. Who’s this?” Gram, though skinny, was strong as the proverbial ox. She pushed Jim a
side and looked up at Cliff. “Cliff Sebastian, is that you?”

  “Yes, Miz, it is. Good to see you.”

  Gram chewed at her bottom lip as she studied Cliff. Then she looked at Jim and then at me and then back at Cliff.

  “Well, I’ll be,” she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Miz, there’s a body, right?” Jim said as he scratched his head again.

  “Yes, there is.” She gave Cliff one more look and then turned to Jim. “The fire was in the kitchen, but it’s out now. The body is in the back, in the supply room.”

  “Let’s go,” Jim said. He led the way out of the reception area and through the swinging doors. Cliff gave me a strained nod and followed Jim.

  “Well, what do you think of that, Betts?” Gram said.

  “I think we have a dead body in the school and we need to know what happened.”

  “No, I meant…”

  “I know what you meant. Gram, Cliff and I dated in high school. That might as well have been a hundred years ago. We’re both almost thirty years old and have lived our lives separately. I’m surprised to see him, but this is his home; in an odd and sometimes cruel twist, people do come back here because for some reason, it seems, some of us just can’t live outside the boundary of strangeness that is Broken Rope. I think…” If I’d continued to vocalize my thoughts, I would have said that I thought I was going to have to figure out how to live in my hometown and avoid someone besides Ophelia Buford who had been my own personal version of Nellie Olsen since I was five years old. Because even though it had been over a decade since Cliff and I had dated, just seeing him made my stomach flutter and my breathing speed up. I would have to find a way to avoid him—a married man, probably a parent—at all costs. I would have said: Damn.

  Gram patted my arm. “Actually, dear, I just wondered what you thought about Cliff working for Jim, that was all. But I see now that we’re going to have some other issues.” Finally, she also disappeared through the swinging doors.

  “Damn,” I said. Trailing the rest of the crowd, I pushed through the doors, too.

  Gram stopped outside the supply room. She put her hands on her hips and peered down as I stayed back a little. At seventy-eight she was still as skinny and as strong as my parents claimed she’d always been. She said she hadn’t lost any height, but my father says he thinks she used to be a couple inches taller than her current five foot five. She always wore jeans, even in the middle of the southern Missouri hot and humid summers. Her T-shirt and sweatshirt collection had happened by accident. Decades earlier she was given a University of Missouri T-shirt and a Kansas State T-shirt on the same day. She’d promised the gift givers that she’d alternate them even though she was a Missouri fan through and through. The trend stuck, and she had closets full of tops from colleges and universities throughout the world. Today she wore a blue T-shirt from Drake University. She wore her gray hair short and boyish because “messing with my hair is a pain in the back end and I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

  I still remembered when her hair was long, thick, and auburn, just like mine. Apparently we had more in common than our love for cooking and our hair. I didn’t see the resemblance, but my dad says I’m the spitting image of the young Missouri Anna Winston, which is sometimes like being able to time travel into the future. I hoped I lived as long and had as much energy.

  “You found him like this, Miz?” Jim asked from the room. I swallowed hard, stepped forward, and peered over her shoulder.

  “No, he was covered in stuff. We cleared him off when we saw his hand,” she said.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yes, he and I were going to have a late dinner tonight. He’s Everett Morningside, the newest owner of the Jasper.”

  “I know who he is. I just wondered if you did. Does he always dress like that?”

  “Yes.” I heard sadness in her voice.

  “I can’t be sure, but it looked like he was asphyxiated with the plastic bag,” Jim said to Cliff.

  “We oughta call Morris and then get to work gathering evidence,” Cliff said.

  “I can call Morris,” Gram said.

  Morris Dunsany was the county coroner and medical examiner. Broken Rope wasn’t the largest town in the county, but with its history of strange deaths and the summer tourist bump in population someone decided that Morris’s office would be best placed here.

  Jim said, “We’ll need to get your and Betts’s fingerprints and anyone else who might have been in here.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, we’ll probably need prints from all your students—well, let’s find the time of death and then we’ll see who was in the school at the time. We’ll start there.”

  “That’s a pretty big list of people,” Gram said.

  “You had classes today and tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  Jim looked closely at the body. “Okay, well, can you call the night students and get them back here? Give me their contact information, too. I’ll also need your daytime students’ numbers and addresses as quickly as possible.”

  “I’ll call the nighters right after I call Morris. I’ll make you a copy of my phone list,” Gram said. I admired her ability to function clearheadedly.

  A buzz sounded from a speaker in the office. Someone had just come in the front doors.

  “Who would that be?” Jim asked.

  “The firemen?” Gram said.

  “I’ll come with you.” Jim stood, wincing slightly as he held a hand to his lower back. “Cliff, stay here and make sure the scene isn’t further compromised. I’ll go with Miz to make the calls and see who’s here.”

  I was going to go with Jim and Gram, but I stayed put instead and leaned on the doorframe, forcing myself to ignore the dead body. I cleared my throat a couple times, but Cliff barely looked my direction, his professional focus on Everett. Finally, I said, “Okay, Cliff, I have to know. What are you doing back in Broken Rope? Why are you a police officer? I thought you were an architect.”

  He stood but with less effort than Jim. He motioned me out of the doorway and backward into the small hall. He snapped a latex glove over his hand—his left hand that most definitely had a wedding band on the third finger—and then pulled the door closed behind him. Once we were both in the hall, I stepped back farther. The space was small and he seemed to take up too much of it.

  “I didn’t like being an architect, Betts. When I was tired of where I was—San Francisco—I just wanted to come home. And I always wanted to be a police officer. Perhaps it was a dream left over from childhood, but it never went away. I decided it was time to live my life the way I wanted to.”

  “As opposed to the way someone else wanted?” I asked, prompting him to tell me more.

  “I suppose,” was all he said as he looked away.

  “How long have you been back in town?”

  “Not long. I did my training in Springfield and Jim hired me a week ago. I, uh, hear—well, I see—that you came back home, too.”

  “Yeah, the magnetic pull of Broken Rope is too strong to ignore. Actually, it is working out well—other than today, I guess.” I looked at the closed door.

  “Good. I always thought you’d make a great attorney, but working with Miz is better, don’t you think?”

  “Much better.”

  Cliff rubbed an ungloved finger under his nose and looked like he had something else he wanted to say but was struggling with how to say it. We spent a strained moment staring at each other. It was difficult for me to look away, and I assumed it was just as difficult for him, though it couldn’t have been for the same reasons. Surely, his heart wasn’t pounding as he thought back to our high school days and the time we spent together. Considering the serious and horrible situation, it was ridiculous enough that I was having such an awful reaction; it would be downright disgraceful if he was, too.

  Get a grip.

  “Betts, come on up front,” Jim said as he appeared in the hall behind me. “Cliff, stay there.”


  I broke the stare-down and hurried back through the long building. A dead body and the return of Cliff Sebastian all in one day.

  I didn’t know if I could handle all the excitement.

  CHAPTER 3

  The buzz had announced the fire marshal, a man who’d only recently moved to Broken Rope. Evan Mason had come to town via St. Louis. Apparently a statewide plea for a new Broken Rope fire marshal had gone out after Fred Hutchinson retired six months ago. Evan, having lost the rest of his family in a terrible car accident, took the job to “get a fresh start.” He was quiet but friendly enough when he’d come into the school once before to check one of our natural gas hookups.

  After Gram showed him the scene of the fire, she and Jim called the coroner and the five students who’d been recently dismissed.

  Before long, the students were back, and the small parking lot out front was full enough to resemble the late-night crowd from the bingo parlor days.

  Cliff stayed with Everett’s body and Morris and two EMTs joined them in the back. The five students sat on stools in the kitchen and observed as Evan stood on a ladder and peered into the ceiling. He stopped me as I walked by.

  “Ms. Winston,” he said as he looked down. He had a head full of curly blond hair but in the dark of the ceiling space it almost looked like he was wearing a halo.

  “Yes?” I said as I looked up.

  “You will have to replace these ceiling tiles, but next time something like this happens, you need to call me immediately, even if you think the fire is out. There’s evidence that something sparked up here but then must have died out on its own. If that spark had taken off, the fire could have spread before you knew about it down there. In fact, I’m surprised it didn’t.”