Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 01 - Death by Chocolate

by Sally Berneathy

  Well, this morning wasn’t any worse than that day, but it wasn’t much better, either

  I had only myself to blame for this setback. I should have sent him packing last night.

  But I’d been a total idiot. I hadn’t even asked where Ms. Huffy was. I guess I’d sort of hoped his visit meant they’d already split.

  Considering his apology to me, his admission that he’d made a mistake, and the number of missed calls on his cell phone, maybe they had. Or maybe she’d gone to visit her sick mother for the night and he’d seized the opportunity and she’d returned home early.

  It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t take him back even if he came crawling and begging my forgiveness. Oh, I’d like to see him crawl and beg, of course. So I could kick him in the teeth. Okay, truth…so I could kick him in the testicles. So I could put on my cowboy boots with the pointed, steel-reinforced toe and kick him in the balls.

  But I’d never take him back under any circumstances.

  I was absolutely positive about that.

  Well, almost absolutely positive.

  The cat—King Henry, I’d called him, and that seemed to fit—came over to rub against my leg.

  “Thanks, buddy. I appreciate the reassurance.”

  He purred and rubbed some more.

  “Forget it,” I admonished him. “I’m not a cat person and even if I were, you belong to somebody else. Unlike some people I could name, I don’t mess with other people’s husbands or cats. We’re going to find your owner right now.”

  This would make a good Sunday project, get me out of the house, and keep me occupied so I wouldn’t think how empty this place had become now that Rick had appeared then left again. I’d sort of promised my mother I’d come by that afternoon, but that was pre-Rick. I just didn’t feel up to facing my parents for a few days.

  Mom was disappointed but very understanding when I called to cancel. She’s always disappointed but very understanding when I’m undependable and irresponsible because she knows I’m an undependable, irresponsible person. She tells me really often just so neither of us will forget it.

  I didn’t mention Rick during our phone conversation, and neither did she. They were pretty upset about the divorce, and even though they never said, I knew they thought the problem was my tendency to be undependable and irresponsible.

  This is not to say that they had ever approved of the marriage. They’d adamantly opposed it even though they’d been as taken in by his charm as I was, but they’d wanted me to follow in dad’s footsteps and go to law school. I was just as determined not to go to law school as I was to marry Rick.

  When I announced that I’d left him, however, they decided to become retroactively in favor of the marriage.

  I think maybe I did something to please my parents when I was nine years old, but they could have been pretending that time.

  After talking to my mother, I lifted Henry onto my shoulder and went to the house on the other side of me from Paula’s. Though the blinds were still drawn, I knew Fred Sommers would be up. Fred’s a computer nerd and old movie buff who lives alone with one bedroom allocated for him to sleep in, one for his computer and all the peripheral equipment that he uses in his work—and I’m not real sure what that work is—and the third for his collection of old movies. At this hour of the morning, he would be in the computer room. In the evenings, he visits his movies. Fred keeps a rigid schedule.

  We met when Rick and I first bought the house next door. Fred and I bonded immediately, and he and Rick hated each other on sight. A good reference for Fred.

  I rang the doorbell and waited on Fred’s perpetually clean porch with King Henry draped over my shoulder.

  Fred’s house was at least as old if not older than mine, but his looked new. He kept everything in pristine order, including his lawn. His bushes wouldn’t dare grow an irregular leaf, and he always had lots of colorful flowers that never had a single dead or wilted bloom in sight. Either Fred snipped them in the middle of the night or the blossoms in his yard responded to his obsessive nature and didn’t die like ordinary blossoms. When their life span was over, they immediately crumbled into dust and settled invisibly into the ground.

  My yard gave him fits. I came home in the middle of the day one time shortly after I moved in and caught him mowing it. I pretended not to notice, then took him a pan of brownies the next day, and our friendship was cemented in chocolate.

  I rang the doorbell a second time and was beginning to wonder if Fred was busy destroying the evidence of midnight blossom raids when he finally opened the door.

  Probably in his mid-forties, Fred was tall and lanky with white hair immaculately cut and styled. He wore wire-framed glasses that always looked perfectly clear, no smudges or lint like normal people get on their glasses.

  “Hi, Lin,” he greeted, eyeing King Henry askance. “The animal activists will probably be in favor of your using the live animal instead of just the fur, but you could run into problems in the coat room.”

  “You know everything that goes on around here. Who does this belong to?” I held out the cat.

  “I’ve never seen him before, but he seems to think he belongs to you. I’m making chicken salad for lunch if you’d like to lose the fur and come back in an hour.”

  It gave me a much-needed boost that Fred wanted me to come for lunch. He believed politeness shouldn’t involve doing anything he didn’t want to do, so when he asked me over, I knew he really wanted to see me.

  “Thanks. I’d like that.”

  Back at home I dragged a couple of still-packed boxes up from the basement. Yes, I know I should have been completely unpacked by that time, but unpacking everything was like an admission that I was here permanently, and some insane part of me—the same part that made love to Rick last night—wasn’t quite ready to do that.

  I dumped the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. So much for my clean house. Well, I’d always known it wouldn’t last. I noticed, among other things, a rusty iron skillet, antique ice tongs, a chipped marble bookend, an old iron…all sorts of weapons I could have used earlier to scare Rick. Or to hurt him. Yeah, that clean house business was definitely overrated.

  I got a knife from the kitchen—another nice weapon—and cut up the boxes then located a red magic marker and printed Henry’s description and my phone number on half a dozen cardboard signs to put up around the neighborhood.

  First stop was across the street to the house catty-cornered to mine and directly opposite Paula’s. The place had been vacant for over two months. The owner lived in Florida, so the odds were minimal that I’d get in trouble for using the tree in the front yard as a sign post. The chain link fence had, years ago, been totally consumed by a hedge about four feet high in front and back. A huge oak tree stood just on the other side in one corner. A perfect place to put my first sign.

  I peered over the hedge and noticed with some satisfaction that the lawn was in worse shape than mine. Maybe I should follow this example and put up some kind of a fence around my house to hide the clover and dandelions.

  Nah. Why deprive my neighbors of the opportunity to feel superior?

  Stretching on tiptoe and leaning over the hedge, I held one of my barely legible signs as high as I could reach up the trunk of the big oak, positioned a nail, drew back my hammer, smashed my thumb, and dropped the nail and hammer on the other side of the hedge.

  Bending double with the pain, I clutched my thumb with my uninjured hand and ran through my entire vocabulary of swear words. Finally the pain subsided to a throbbing agony rather than a piercing agony, and I realized I might as well deal with it and get on with things. There wasn’t anybody around to offer sympathy.

  That empty, lonely feeling washed over me again, and I considered sitting on the curb, sucking my sore thumb and feeling sorry for myself.

  Instead, I decided to retrieve my hammer and hang that damned sign, then go home and make some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies to take to Fred’s house. Chocolat
e was the next best thing to sympathy. Or was sympathy the next best thing to chocolate?

  I approached the gate tentatively. Last spring the elderly couple who’d lived there for fifty years had both died within a two month period and left it to their son in Florida who had professed himself unwilling to sell his childhood home but also unwilling to sink a lot of money into repairs. For a long time the parents hadn’t been able to keep it up the way they should, and it hadn’t improved since their death. The hedge and the gate had made a lot of progress toward uniting inextricably. I finally managed to get it open, breaking off a few twigs and leaves in the process.

  I walked toward the tree a little tentatively, unsure what might be lurking in the ankle-high grass. As I neared the corner, I spotted my hammer in an area where the grass was pressed down as if a large animal had been sleeping there. Could be the big, friendly black dog who roamed the neighborhood. I’d always assumed he belonged to somebody, but maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he just slept around.

  As I bent down to retrieve my hammer, I caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke from the grass. I might be a little uncertain as to where that dog lived, but I was relatively certain he didn’t smoke.

  Nevertheless, I knew I was right about the smell. I’ve never been a smoker. At the age of fourteen, my cousin Carolyn and I bought a pack, each took a couple of puffs and immediately regretted that we’d wasted money on something that didn’t taste good when we could have bought chocolate. Consequently, I’m pretty sensitive to the smell, and there was no doubt in my mind that somebody had recently emptied an ashtray or two in that spot even though I didn’t see any butts.

  So what? I asked myself.

  I picked up the hammer and straightened.

  Probably teenagers.

  But we didn’t have any teenagers in the immediate area.

  Visiting teenagers, then.

  Yeah, right, like any self-respecting, rebellious teenager would voluntarily hang out in Pleasant Grove.

  I wasn’t sure why, but this whole thing gave me kind of a creepy feeling.

  I told myself I was only being paranoid after the scene with the cops at Paula’s house, but I’ve been known to lie to myself before…like all those months I told myself I believed Rick.

  I pushed the grass aside with the toe of one sneaker and looked for cigarette butts.

  I didn’t see anything. Either I was imagining the smell or the ashes had sifted through the grass and somebody had very tidily cleaned up every butt.

  Tidy teenagers? I was pretty sure that was an oxymoron.

  Then I spotted a bit of white. I squatted for a closer look. It was a portion of a filter that had been crushed into pieces. The tidy smoker must have found the other parts but missed this one. It was still white. We’d had rain on Wednesday, so this was fresh.

  So what? I asked myself again, aware of how absurd this whole thing was. I definitely needed to get a life if a bit of cigarette butt could fascinate me that way.

  I started to rise, then noticed a sort of tunnel through the hedge. The leaves had been clipped. This was not a natural phenomenon. Someone had deliberately created a tunnel that was bigger on this side and narrower as it went through a hole in the chain link fence then out to the other side. From that other side, it wouldn’t be noticeable at all, though it gave anyone sitting on the grass and smoking cigarettes a perfect view of Paula’s house.

  Chapter Four

  An hour and a half later I was sitting in Fred’s breakfast nook at his table with the glass top that never seemed to get dirty or smudged, overlooking his back yard where the trees didn’t drop leaves and the birds never pooped.

  I took a bite of his chicken salad on homemade bread, savoring the delicate flavors. If I could persuade Fred to come to work at Death by Chocolate, we’d all be rich, but he prefers to sit in front of that computer screen all day and do whatever it is he does.

  “This bread is wonderful,” I told him.

  He studied the uneaten portion of his own sandwich and scowled. “The crust’s not crisp enough.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “My oven temperature must be inaccurate.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Maybe.”

  He spoke the last word with as much dignity and solemnity as he’d voiced his criticism of his bread.

  I laughed and Fred smiled.

  I knew that Fred knew Rick had spent the night even though my driveway was on the other side of my house with several trees in between and Fred hadn’t opened his blinds until after Rick left. The man knew everything that went on. I’ve accused him of having a periscope leading from his computer up his chimney as well as bugs in every house in the neighborhood that feed into his computer. He acts surprised every time I bring it up, claiming he lives in his own little world and sometimes doesn’t even know what the weather’s like outside.

  Yeah, right, and Rick just happened to have that jar of instant coffee in his briefcase.

  However, I really didn’t want to think about Rick at that moment, and Fred would never bring it up if I didn’t. So I chose another topic.

  “Cops came to visit Paula this morning,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Now how could you possibly know that if you don’t have a periscope?” I demanded.

  “You just told me.”

  “You nodded, indicating you already knew.”

  “I nodded as a polite acknowledgement that I’m listening to what you’re saying.”

  I lifted a skeptical eyebrow. Sometimes I’m not positive when he’s teasing, but I never let him know that. As I finished my sandwich, savoring every crumb, I told him about the cops’ visit.

  “I’ve always wondered why any woman would want to color her blond hair brown,” he said when I finished.

  “You noticed that, too? She didn’t have any references when she moved in. Rick didn’t want to accept her application to rent the house, but I insisted. I think she had an abusive husband, and she’s hiding from him. What do you think?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Is that a nod of agreement or just a polite nod to show you heard me?”

  “It’s a contemplative nod. I’m considering the possibility. She is pretty obsessive about keeping to herself, and she’s extremely protective of the kid. Would you like more tea?”

  “Yes, please.”

  While Fred poured tea, I peeled the plastic wrap off the plate of still-warm peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I’d brought over.

  “Well,” he said, selecting the most evenly rounded cookie on the plate, “I guess it’s none of our business. If Paula wants us to know what her problem is, she’ll tell us.”

  “Unless she’s too scared to make a rational decision. She may need our help.” I told him about the hole through the hedge and the cigarette butt. “Have you noticed any activity over there? Anybody skulking around?”

  For several moments he gazed out the window, then finally shook his head. “I don’t think the police would be watching her through a hole in the hedge. That’s not really their style.”

  “I know that, but it might be her ex-husband or somebody he’s hired to find her. Her unlisted phone number is listed somewhere or that Lester Mackey wouldn’t have it on a piece of paper in his apartment.”

  “Have you told her about this suspected stake-out site?”

  “Not yet. She’s already terrified. I don’t want to make it worse until I know for sure there’s something to worry about.”

  “Okay, so we forget about it until we know for sure there’s something to worry about.”

  “That’s just like a man! Don’t call the fire department until the house is burning.”

  “I think that’s standard procedure, yes.”

  “Okay, that analogy didn’t come out quite right, but you know what I meant. Why don’t you run a check on your computer, see what you can find out about Paula?”

  “Because that would be invading her privacy.”

 
; “It’s for her own good.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You don’t know it isn’t. She could be in danger. The fire could already be smoldering under the roof and any minute it’s going to burst into flames and then it’ll be too late.”

  He didn’t answer. I hate it when he does that. If he’d keep arguing, I might have a chance of convincing him.

  I took another cookie, more chocolate to inspire me to figure out what to do next.

  “Okay, I’ll run a check on her,” he suddenly agreed, much to my surprise, “if you’ll promise not to do anything else.”

  “What else? What could I possibly do?”

  “I’m not going to answer that. I don’t want to give you any ideas. Do you have Paula’s social security number and date of birth?”

  “Sure, in my computer records at home.”

  “Call me with it and I’ll see what I can find, but I’m not promising anything.”

  “Thank you.” I pushed my chair back, stood and planted a kiss on his cheek, partly because I knew it would make him blush and partly because I really was grateful to him for being my friend.

  When I walked in the front door of my house, King Henry rose regally from my recliner, stretched, rubbed against my legs, then ambled over to reach up and pat the door handle.

  “You’re right. It’s time for you to go home. We had a nice visit, but you know what they say about cats and visitors.” I didn’t have a clue what “they” said about cats and visitors, but I was pretty sure he’d know. He had a wise, all-knowing air about him.

  I opened the door, and he went out, moving gracefully and casually across the porch.

  And suddenly I didn’t want him to leave.

  That was silly. Maybe I should get a dog, I thought, something little and fuzzy that would greet me at the door and be so thrilled to see me, he’d pee all over the rug then run in circles tracking it all through the house…and then maybe that house wouldn’t feel so empty.