Death At A Diner: A Culinary Cozy Mystery (A Murder In Milburn Book 1)

by Nancy McGovern

  “You’re so biased against Harvey you’re letting your emotions cloud your mind,” Nora said. “Can’t you see he’s innocent, Sean?”

  “All I see is a love struck little fool who’s letting a few sweet words blind her to reality,” Sean said. “Harvey’s a creep, and you’re letting his superficial charm and promising kisses lead you down a path you will regret. Is that how little you loved Raquel? Is that how easy it was for you to--”

  Nora slapped him then. A brief, hard slap, with barely enough force to hurt, but Sean’s head tilted to the side anyway.

  “I suppose I deserved that,” he admitted, shaking the hair from his face as he raised it to look at her. “Nora, I can’t stand to see you like this. I can’t bear the thought that Harvey could be using you. Can’t you see that? All he wants is for you to give him some information that Raquel had. You might not even know what you know, and it might be vitally important to him.”

  “That’s not who he is,” Nora said. “You just aren’t willing to see him as anything but guilty, because that’ll make it convenient for you. You never have to suspect ill of your father if Harvey turns out to be a creep, right? Everything’s dandy if he does. This is Alan all over again, a witch hunt you want to undertake for reasons of your own.”

  “Alan?” Frustrated, Sean ran a hand through his hair. “What are you talking about?”

  “You hated Alan because he had a fight with some girl,” Nora said. “Or maybe you hated him for a different reason altogether, you just needed an excuse to be--”

  “Who on earth are you talking about?” Sean said.

  “You don’t remember?” Nora sighed. “Well, why would you? Alan studied with us in school. You and your pals treated him so badly that he ran away.”

  She saw renewed color seep into Sean’s face as he remembered. “Alan was a freak,” he said. “My girlfriend said he tried to get fresh with her. I was just a teenage boy but I hated his kind of scum even back then. Yeah, I teased him, but he sure deserved it.”

  “Oh please,” Nora scoffed. “Don’t use lies to make yourself feel better. I almost respected you for a second there, but you aren’t even willing to admit you could have been wrong.”

  “I wasn’t,” Sean said. “If someone comes after a woman I love, I go after them. It’s the first rule in my book.”

  “Don’t lie,” Nora snapped. “Alan would never have done that.”

  “Sure. Defend the creep. That’s not something you do all the time,” Sean said sarcastically.

  “I know he wasn’t,” Nora said. “My father was a psychiatrist, remember? He was treating Alan for depression. Alan was just not interested in girls. Why would he ever--”

  “So he gave your father some sob story about being depressed and you think he was a babe in the woods?” Sean said. “You’re so naïve.”

  “That’s not--”

  “You’re just a terrible judge of men,” Sean said. “Believe me, I know. There was always something about Alan that creeped me out. Just because he was depressed doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t try and force himself on a girl.”

  “Alan was gay,” Nora said. “I know because I overheard my father reviewing his clinical tapes.”

  Sean opened his mouth, then shut it again. The color seemed to drain out of his face.

  “Your girlfriend probably lied to gain sympathy or attention,” Nora said. “You ruined a boy’s life because of it. He ran away because you teased him, Sean.”

  “No. No.” Devastation couldn’t begin to define the regret that colored Sean’s voice.

  “All I ask is that you believe me when I say Harvey’s innocent.”

  “Harvey’s done it,” Sean said, his eyes still flashing with anger. The regret that had been in his voice was now blocked out by stubbornness. “I don’t care what you say about Alan. I may or may not have hurt him and my girlfriend may or may not have lied, but I have proof against Harvey, and sooner or later, I’m going to get him. Just be careful that you don’t get sucked into the vortex, Nora.”

  “What proof?” Nora asked. “He was with me, wasn’t he? All that night.”

  “The perfect alibi, like I said. I believe Harvey conspired with Santino to get rid of Raquel, all because she had proof that he didn’t want to leak out.”

  “Proof?”

  “Some of Raquel’s last messages are a letter to the IRS, asking them about land fraud,” Sean said. “An innocent question, yes? Just a query. But couple that with another fact our computer expert found. Her laptop recently had a USB flash drive inserted in it, and she transferred a large chunk of her files into them. That USB is now missing. It was probably in her purse the night she was murdered.”

  “You don’t think…” For the first time, Nora faltered. Could Harvey have killed Raquel to get those files? That couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. Harvey had been so sincere…

  …or maybe, Sean was right. Maybe she had been a fool all along.

  “Harvey’s a scamster, through and through. He’s sure got you hooked.” Sean was ruthless in taking his opening when he saw the doubt in her face. “I have a working theory already, Nora. Santino and Harvey got rid of Harvey’s partner Donald a while ago, and now they got rid of the one person who had information that could put them away in jail. It makes sense why her purse was missing, doesn’t it? It makes sense why her phone was missing too. Perhaps she’d sent texts people didn’t want anyone to see. There was something Raquel had, that Santino and Harvey didn’t want anyone to find out about.”

  “It’s not true,” Nora said. Her voice was a breath. “Please, Sean, please tell me it’s not true.”

  “It’s not you, it’s the court I have to convince of the truth,” Sean said. “They need evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. But you, in your heart of hearts, you know Santino had a hand in her murder, don’t you? You believe it.” His voice was almost triumphant.

  “I need to go,” Nora said, tears blurring her eyes. “I need to go somewhere quiet and just… just think.”

  “You do that, Nora,” Sean said. “You think real carefully about what I said, and think really carefully about anything – anything – Raquel might have told you. If Harvey’s doing his best to get you under his spell, it means you have something, or he suspects you have something, against him.”

  “I’m telling you I can’t… I just can’t see him as the kind of man who would do what you say.”

  “Can’t you?” Sean asked, looking deep into her eyes. “Look at me, and tell me you don’t have the slightest shred of doubt. I’ll drop the case right now.”

  For a moment, their eyes remained locked together, Sean’s blue eyes burning into hers. He was challenging her, but he already knew he’d won. He’d planted a seed in her mind that had blossomed. She no longer knew whether she trusted Harvey.

  Unable to bear it, she turned and ran. She needed to get space, to get free of the glares, the doubt, the poison that seemed to have infected this town she once loved.

  *****

  Chapter 22

  She found herself driving far away, to a place that Raquel had once loved. It had been their hideout in the days when Raquel’s life had been hard, and Nora’s easy, so Nora remembered it as a place of peace. How had Raquel thought of it? Had it been her sanctuary, when life with a new stepmother had robbed her of a home?

  Raquel had always been irrepressibly happy, almost as if the unhappier life made her, the more defiantly happy she would make herself. Their hideout had been a small cave, a few miles walk from the highway. Access to the cave was blocked by boulders almost six feet high, which they would scramble over, often scratching their hands or ripping their jeans. Nora made the walk now, almost feeling as if she was a ghost, and that two young girls were walking the path before her, laughing, chattering, carrying food and an old picnic blanket.

  “There was a time we were whole, and a time we were so close to being whole again,” Nora said aloud, to the girls who faded from her vision. “But now we will nev
er know those times again, you and I.”

  She reached the cave, and it was another punch to her gut, for even though she had not visited it ten years, the cave was as clean as a shrine.

  Raquel must have come here. Even when Nora had gone.

  It was a tiny cave, slightly damp, with a creeper winding around the entrance. But it was clean, with a candle and a box of matches kept on one side. Nora ignored them, and shrank into the darkness, resting her head against the cold stone wall and drawing up her knees around herself.

  She shouldn’t have left Harvey the way she did. She imagined him now, sitting under an oak tree, munching his sandwich while hers grew cold in the paper bag next to him. He had looked at her once before he left her with Sean, and perhaps with that look, he had realized that she would not come, even before she had.

  So she sat there, in the dark, watching the light that flooded the entrance but could not reach her in the back. She watched the light change as the hours passed by, and doing so, wished over and over again that Raquel could be with her. Her head dropped to the tops of her knees, and her hands wrapped themselves around her.

  When she woke up, she was not alone.

  She woke up to darkness, and at first, had no memory of where she was. But she knew, as soon as she woke, that she was not alone.

  There was no sound to tell her so, and her eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, but a primitive sense about the space around her made her feel trapped.

  When her eyes adjusted, she saw a body - a man with broad shoulders, in the same pose as her, though he sat by the opening of the cave. His knees were drawn up to his chest, and his arms wrapped around himself as his body heaved in mute sobs.

  Frozen, she wondered what to do. She had told no one where she was and yet someone had found her. Ice dripped in her stomach at the thought that it might be the same man who had harmed Raquel. Nora reached for her purse, though it made a poor weapon, and as loudly as possible, called out.

  The sobbing man froze, and his head raised up. He had clearly not realized she was even here.

  “Who are you?” she called again.

  “I wish I knew,” he said, and lowered his head to sob again. “I thought I knew. And then my life twisted itself and shattered, and Raquel’s gone and nothing else matters.”

  “Jeremy?” Nora said. “Jeremy, is that you?”

  “It’s me,” he said. “You and I are the only ones who ever loved her, Nora. We’re the only ones she ever showed this cave to.”

  Nora raised herself and walked over to Jeremy. He didn’t move, his body still blocking the entrance of the cave. Nora put a hand on his head and ruffled his hair slightly. “It’s all right to be sad,” she said. “You loved her once, a long time ago.”

  “I love her still,” Jeremy said. “Her absence, our breakup, the fact that time has passed, the fact that I’m married and will be a father – none of it ever made any difference to my love for her. I couldn’t stop loving her, Nora. No matter how hard I try.”

  “Yet you’re the one who broke up with her,” Nora said. “You never even told her why. It was only a high school romance, I know, but she was heartbroken about it. I don’t think she ever got rid of that necklace you’d given her, the one with half a heart on it.”

  “Like this?” he asked, and raised a necklace. The pendant hung off a black thread, spinning slightly. A heart, broken in half. “My half. It has her name on it, still.”

  Nora didn’t know what to say. “You shouldn’t talk like this. What would Ashley think?”

  “Ashley?” Jeremy laughed. “She knows I loved Raquel. God knows I’m a poor excuse of a husband to her. I’m fond of her, but I don’t love her, not the way I loved Raquel. Ashley and I are only together right now because she’s pregnant. I was going to leave her three months ago because I couldn’t keep up the charade of being married to someone I didn’t love anymore. Now, I guess I can never leave her. I can’t bear the thought that a child of mine would grow up without me.” He shook his head. “We were fools in high school, spinning dreams without realizing the kind of compromises we’d have to negotiate with our lives.”

  “You’re married to a good woman and about to have a child,” Nora said. “For goodness’ sake, don’t throw your life away on regretting what can never be.”

  “It could have been,” Jeremy said. “What if I’d broken up with Ashley a year ago? What if I’d gone and talked to Raquel? Persuaded her to give us another chance?”

  “You had your chance in high school. You lost it when you broke up with her,” Nora said. “If you loved her so much you should have stuck by her.”

  “I didn’t break up with her, Nora. Raquel was the one who cheated on me in high school,” Jeremy said. “I broke up with her because of it.”

  “That’s… what?” Nora shook her head. “That’s impossible, Jeremy. She loved you too much.”

  “Sure, she did. But it was a confusing time for her, wasn’t it? Full of pain, what with her home breaking.”

  “I was her best friend,” Nora said. “There was nothing she wouldn’t have told me. She was crazily in love with you back then, Jeremy. She wanted to marry you, to be with you forever.”

  “Then why didn’t she?” Jeremy asked, his sobs growing fierce. “Why did she leave me the way she did, with no chance of ever coming back? Why did she cheat on me?”

  “She didn’t,” Nora said, shaken. “You left her without ever telling her why, and she was too proud to ask. So she moved on, even though part of her always blamed you for destroying her innocent belief in love.”

  Jeremy glared at her. “She may have told you that, but in reality she cheated on me. I would never have broken up with her if she hadn’t. I know she did. Sean told me so, and Sean would never have lied.”

  “What?” Angry beyond belief, Nora grabbed at him. “What exactly did Sean tell you?”

  “That he’d seen Raquel and another boy together when I was out of town.”

  “Not true. Not possible. Sean lied. He had to have lied,” Nora said. “Oh my god, why didn’t you ever confront Raquel? If the two of you had just talked you could have--”

  “I was too proud,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted revenge on her. So I just went and started dating another girl.”

  Nora shook her head, unwilling to believe anyone could be so idiotic,though she remembered high school, and how dramatic Raquel and her group of friends had been. Yes, it was possible, she thought, to treat life as if it were a movie, but eventually the consequences of being dramatic caught up with you.

  “It’s done now, isn’t it?” Nora said. “You need to move on.”

  “So do you,” Jeremy said caustically. “You’ve got a diner needs opening. Coming here to cry about Raquel isn’t going to do you any good, but here you are. We’re pulled here by a grief that’s bigger than the rest of our life. Sure the other things in life can be measured and weighted and given a dollar value to. We’ll pick up those pieces and live with them eventually. But right now, all I want is to be alone in a dark cave where I once kissed Raquel and cry my heart out that I can’t do that anymore.”

  Nora nodded, the last tear she would shed falling from her eye. She wiped it, and said, “Then I’ll leave you to it. Be alone, and recover, and go back to those who are giving you a chance, while that chance still exists. You and I, we still have a chance, me with my diner and you with Ashley. Raquel would want us to take it.”

  Jeremy nodded and scooted aside to let her pass.

  “Just one thing,” Nora said. “This boy Raquel was supposed to have cheated on you with. Did Sean ever tell you who it was?”

  “Sure. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t believe she kissed him at first, until Sean told me it was at a party and Raquel was drunk. He was a complete creep, that guy, and I was secretly glad when he vanished from town.”

  “Who was it?” Nora asked, though she already knew.

  “The guy I took great pleasure in teasing. Alan.�
��

  *****

  Chapter 23

  Mrs. Mullally laid out dinner, and Nora ate silently, her mind still reliving the entire day. Maynard tugged at the hem of her jeans, his tail wagging furiously as he tried to attract her attention.

  “You look poised to shatter,” Mrs. Mullally said, her lips thinning with displeasure. “Are you all right, my dear?” Concern shone from her face.

  “I’m all right, Mrs. Mullally,” Nora said.

  She pondered how easily the lie fell from her lips and wondered how many around the world were repeating the same lie over dinner tables. “I’m all right,” said to children, to parents, to loving spouses–all because you couldn’t bear to speak the truth. That you weren’t all right.

  Was Jeremy sitting across from Ashley right now, eating dinner, listening to her talk about her pregnancy or her job or the defective washing machine–and all along, saying I’m all right when the only thing that could save him was admitting to her he was not?

  What a waste, Nora thought. What a waste of a life, to be married to someone you did not love, and how tragic, for Ashley, to love someone who did not love her. Did she know? In public, Jeremy had reacted to Raquel’s death as he would to the death of a stranger. Nora even remembered how annoyed she had been when they came to visit her at Mrs. Mullally’s. She’d deliberately taunted Jeremy, reminded him that he had once dated Raquel, little knowing the wild grief he was hiding from them all.

  He hid it so well. So well that even his wife, the woman who lived and slept and woke with him, did not suspect.

  Who else was hiding their true feelings about the murder this way? Nora wondered. Someone. Someone who had hated Raquel, hated her for a long time, was now pretending to be sad while exalting inside.

  There was Stanley, who had the most to gain. A man who was capable of bending others to his will, to the extent that he had convinced a large group to leave their homes, leave their families, leave all their possessions. How easy would it be for him to convince someone to kill? She had seen him firsthand, as in a few words he convinced his “flock” to go from curious to hostile towards her. Had he done it the same way? Convince someone that Raquel was cruel, or evil, or a threat to their way of life? Had he simply said that his word must be done, and convinced a follower to sneak out of the cult’s compound and kill Raquel?