Blackberry Crumble

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “The atomizer?”

  Keith shook his head. “The whole business.”

  Sadie was unable to hide her surprise. “The whole business?” she repeated. May had said Jim’s dream was to have his children run the business together. He’d worked so hard to recover after the split that it was hard to believe he would suddenly want to sell. But Karri had seen financial documents on the table when Keith and Jim had had lunch.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Hugh was racking up debts faster than Jim could pay them off,” Keith said, leaning back in the chair and folding his thick arms over his thick chest. He was dressed in a powder-blue dress shirt with a buff-colored linen jacket.

  “Like last time?” Sadie said.

  Keith nodded. “I told Jim back then that if he simply stepped in and saved Hugh from the mess he’d made that it would happen again. And I was right. Hugh is in more trouble than ever this time. And not just with a company credit card he fished out of his dad’s wallet. He’s got bookies calling the office. And someone tried to run him off the road a few days before Jim made the lunch date. Whatever Hugh’s gotten himself into is big.”

  “Big enough that Jim was willing to sell S&S to pay off Hugh’s debts?”

  “Hugh’s an addict, and just like a drug, gambling requires more and more to get the same high. Here Jim had worked his whole life to become who he was—a brilliant engineer on the cutting edge of our industry—and Hugh was flushing it away on basketball and poker games.”

  “That’s where the profits from the new atomizer were going,” Sadie said, gluing together the pieces of information she’d spent the last two days gleaning. The company was finally having success, and Hugh was getting sicker because of it.

  “Jim was out of fight,” Keith said. “His daughter was dying, his son was drowning in debts and addiction, and he was calling uncle. He believed if he sold the business, he could pay off Hugh’s debts and get him into a treatment program as his very last attempt to save Hugh from himself. He said he wanted to retire—maybe go to Ohio to be with May after Jolene passed away—but he knew he couldn’t trust Hugh with the company. Selling it was his only option.”

  Poor Jim, Sadie thought. For an instant, she pictured him laying in bed, overwhelmed with the trials of his children and coming up with this plan. Sadie wished she could have met Jim Sanderson. He seemed like a very good man. “Were you interested in buying?”

  Keith looked down, and Sadie sensed that he wasn’t proud of his answer. He uncrossed his arms and lined up the silverware on the table. “I was very interested,” he said. His tone, however, was flat.

  “But?”

  His glance flickered to hers before returning to the silverware. He made a minute adjustment so that the handles were perfectly parallel. He looked like Shawn when Shawn knew he’d done something wrong. “But I wanted Jim to sweat it out a little bit.” He dropped his hands into his lap.

  Sadie shook her head slightly. His old friend had come to him in desperate circumstances, but Keith’s pride had made him hold out. Now Jim was dead. Sadie didn’t need to say anything to rub it in.

  Keith continued. “I harangued him on how he’d handled Hugh all these years and how this was exactly what he deserved. I said he should have forced Hugh to get his act together back when we were in business together. I said that I wasn’t interested in inheriting whatever reputation Hugh had given the company and that I couldn’t see any reason why his problem should be mine.”

  “How very kind of you,” Sadie said, unable to help herself. She braced herself, but he just looked at her with sad eyes.

  “Indeed,” he said. “How very kind of me.” He paused for a breath. “I told him I’d think about it and then I met with my attorney. We started working on how to facilitate the purchase. It was bad timing for me—I had Jepson on the hook, and they were proving to be a bunch of nervous Nellies—but I wanted S&S and, though I’m sure it’s hard to believe, I wanted to help Jim.”

  “You just wanted him to know you held all the cards. No pun intended.”

  “When you’ve played politics as long as I have, it’s a hard habit to break. When Jim died, I felt horrible.” He shook his head. “I really think that we could have been friends again. I was going to offer him a consulting position with the company so that he’d be able to keep his hand in the industry and make a little money. I’m slowing down too, and I really hoped that we could put everything behind us.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’d want to take up golf. We never got to that point.” There was nothing insincere about the regret in his voice. He had lost a dear friend twice: first, ten years ago because of Hugh, and now because of his own stubbornness.

  “So you contacted his kids after he was gone in order to fulfill Jim’s wishes,” Sadie said. She placed her clasped hands on the table and leaned forward slightly. There were still many unredeemable qualities about this man, but she was sympathetic for his regret—a regret he had no way to remedy.

  “Hugh can’t run that business,” Keith said. “He’s got a good head for the mechanics—he probably could have been an engineer himself if he’d had the discipline to go to school—but he’ll run that company into the ground within the year on his own. After Jim died, I felt I owed it to him to at least try to buy the company, but he’d told me his kids had no idea he was meeting with me. I knew they’d probably think I was a liar if I tried to convince them of Jim’s interest in selling out, but I hoped that maybe they would sell without me having to tell them Jim had given up.”

  “And Hugh’s the only one who responded.”

  Keith shook his head slowly, still holding Sadie’s eyes. “Jolene’s husband, Gary, called last week.”

  “But Gary doesn’t get ownership.”

  “I know, and the last thing Jim wanted was for Gary to have any part in anything, but with Jolene so sick, Gary said he was negotiating on her behalf.”

  Sadie thought back to the living trust that had stipulated that Gary was to get nothing. But Jolene was still his wife, and she was ill. Gary saw himself as a savvy negotiator; no doubt he thought he could convince Jolene to sell. No doubt he was right; Jolene fairly worshipped him. Suddenly, something Keith had said earlier in their conversation came to mind.

  “You said Jolene was dying,” Sadie said, remembering how Jolene had said she was getting better. “Did Jim tell you that?”

  Keith nodded. “Leena had beat the cancer her first time around.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “But Jim said Jolene wasn’t going to be as lucky. I made the comment at lunch that treatments had made so much progress since Leena, but Jim had little hope. Jolene wanted to take an Alaskan cruise with her husband and son before she died. I don’t know if you know Gary Tracey, but the man is a financial nightmare. They’ve never had two nickels to rub together. If not for Jim helping them out all these years while Gary played with his stupid get-rich-quick ideas, they’d have nothing.”

  “But Jim didn’t have the money, did he?” Sadie said. “To pay for that cruise.”

  “Jolene asked for a loan, an advance on her inheritance, and it was when Jim started looking into his options that he realized Hugh had maxed out their line of credit with the bank and run up two more credit cards, not to mention his own personal lines of credit. Jolene was pretty upset when he told her he couldn’t do it. I don’t think he told her why, but he said it had been a few days and she still wasn’t talking to him, which was more than he could stand.”

  “He was awfully open with you at that lunch,” Sadie said after a thoughtful silence stretched between them for a few seconds. A slight ticking had begun in the back of her head, and she glanced at the notes she’d written down. An equation was formulating, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “I guess that surprises me, what with how things had been between you two.”

  “Even with all the issues between us, I knew his history better than most people. For good and bad, Jim loved his children, and they were destroying him.”

&nb
sp; “Jolene didn’t get cancer on purpose.” Sadie defended, not sure what he meant by his comment. “I’m sure his inability to help was wrapped up in his own grief.” The ticking in her head continued.

  Keith shook his head. “Probably, but he was losing her all the same, and it felt like he was losing her twice as much to have her angry with him.”

  Losing her, Sadie repeated. Losing her . . . All of a sudden, the locks clicked into place in Sadie’s mind. She sat up straight and felt a rush of heat tingle up her spine, causing her to shudder.

  “What?” Keith asked, watching her closely.

  Sadie opened her mouth to let it all tumble out, but stopped herself as May’s face came to mind from last night. “Him?” she’d said. “You turned to him?” That had been in reference to Richard, but Sadie had no doubt she would feel the same way about Keith.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, putting her notebook away and fumbling for her keys. She wished there was time to get her blackberry crumble put in a to-go box, but time was of the essence. “I need to go.” She looked up, realizing she owed him something for what he’d given her, even though the discovery she’d made had her stomach in knots. “Thank you, Mr. Kelly. I hope you know how helpful you’ve been. You did right by Jim in the end, and I’ll be sure his family knows it.”

  She stood up, but stopped when he put a hand on her arm. His expression tightened. “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to May.”

  “May? Is that who you work for?” The words came out like a hiss. “She’s the one who thinks I would hurt Jim?”

  Sadie pulled back on her arm, but Keith’s grip simply tightened. “Mr. Kelly,” she said calmly. “You need to let go of my arm.”

  “If I’d known you were working for May, I wouldn’t have said any of those things.” His grip was getting tighter. Sadie could break the hold with a simple twist-and-pull move—first lesson in self-defense—but she was interested in what he had to say. “That’s why Richard was helping you? To help her?” He growled low in his throat, and all the compassion and regret he’d shown disappeared. Sadie wondered which persona was the real Keith. “That boy has less sense than a bucket of rocks.”

  “He loves her,” Sadie said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

  Keith narrowed his eyes. “He’d have never reached his potential if I hadn’t gotten him away from her. Look at her family, look at the way her father gave up everything to clean up behind his children. There is no way to make a man of yourself when you attach yourself to people who will pull you down.”

  Sadie had had enough. She twisted and pulled her arm toward her, breaking his grasp and stepping back so she was out of reach. “Mr. Kelly, you’re a brilliant businessman and have done well for yourself, but you’ve missed out on a lot of the good things in life. Jim Sanderson’s heart may have been too soft to reach his potential in the business world, but he died as a generous man and that counts for something.”

  She turned and left the restaurant, her whole body tingling in fear that he would follow her, demanding an altercation, but she made it to her car unscathed. The breeze had turned to a wind, blowing her hair into pure chaos in the process.

  As she pulled out of the parking lot, she finger-combed her hair into place and thought back to the last thing she’d said about Jim having died a generous man. Had he died because his generosity had run out? Sadie hoped not, but there was too much for her to ignore. She was glad she’d had a few bites of her blackberry crumble to help her through the next half hour.

  How would she tell May that her brother and sister had the strongest reasons to want their father dead?

  Blackberry Crumble

  6 cups fresh or frozen blackberries (or any kind of frozen berry)

  2 tablespoons flour

  3 tablespoons sugar

  1⁄2 cup butter

  1⁄2 cup flour

  1⁄2 cup rolled oats

  1⁄2 cup brown sugar

  1⁄2 teaspoon nutmeg

  1⁄2 teaspoon cinnamon

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix berries, 2 tablespoons flour, and 3 tablespoons sugar together in large bowl. Spread in an 8x8 pan. In a mixing bowl, combine remaining ingredients; adjust spices to taste. Use a pastry cutter to cut ingredients together until pea-sized crumbles form. Sprinkle over the top of the berry mixture. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes or until crumb topping is browned. Let cool slightly. Serve warm topped with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, if desired. Serves 6.

  Note: Karri recommends adding a little lemon zest to the topping. Sounds delicious!

  Chapter 43

  Sadie had driven about half a mile when her phone rang. Scanning for cops as she waited for a light, she pulled her phone out of her purse, her entire chest tight with anticipation. When she saw it was Jack calling, she put on her right blinker and answered it. “Hang on just a minute,” she said. “I need to pull over.”

  She set the phone down, glad no members of law enforcement had seen her breaking the law again, and turned right when the light changed. She pulled into the parking lot of a pharmacy and shifted into park.

  “Sorry about that,” Sadie said. “It’s against the law to talk on your cell phone while driving.”

  “Is everything okay?” Jack asked.

  “Well,” Sadie started, trying to decide what she should or could say. “Everything is . . . complicated.” She looked at the clock and felt anxiety rush through her—she needed to talk to May. “Did you find him?”

  “Believe it or not, I did—well, we did.”

  “We?” Sadie asked.

  “You’re not dating this guy, are you?”

  Sadie let out a breath. “No, Jack, I’m not dating him.” She was dating Pete—well, maybe.

  “So who is he?”

  “Just tell me what you found out, please. I’m in a hurry.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jack said. “In a nutshell, the guy’s a crook. He’s got at least seven judgments against him. Most of them have to do with leases he didn’t pay and things like that, but he sure knows how to play the system. He’s used about six different names—Tracey Gary; G. Tracey; TG Gary—they’re all versions of his name but have allowed him to get away with an awful lot of stuff. He served nine months in jail a few years ago for fraud.”

  “I knew it,” Sadie said.

  “So, will you tell me who he is now?”

  “Oh, he’s just some guy who wants me to mortgage my house and invest it in one of his schemes.”

  Jack was silent. “If you’re not happy with the investments I’ve—”

  “No, no,” Sadie said. “I also think he might have been involved in the death of his father-in-law. Knowing he has a history of being a deadbeat shores up that theory.”

  “You’re investigating another murder?” Jack asked. “That’s why you’re in Oregon?”

  “Well, kind of,” Sadie said, squirming. “Anyway, I better go.”

  “Does Pete know you’re up there?”

  “Yes,” Sadie said, feeling the mood drop. “He knows.”

  “And he’s not happy about it, is he?”

  “Not particularly.” Sadie shifted into reverse. “Can we talk later? I really do need to go.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  Sadie groaned. She was the older sibling and hated it when he played big brother. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “I’ll call you later.” She turned off the phone in the middle of his protest and dropped it in her purse as she pulled out of the parking space. Gary was an ex-con who hadn’t learned his lesson and obviously didn’t care who he hurt with his scams. It fit perfectly with what she’d deduced at the restaurant: if Jolene had died before Jim Sanderson, Gary would have inherited nothing. Jolene’s portion would have gone directly to his son—Jim’s only living grandchild.

  Sadie pulled back into traffic but continued reviewing things in her mind and playing devil’s advocate with the details. Hugh was up to his ears in deb
ts he couldn’t pay. That could be a motive for murder, except that Jim was trying to sell the company to pay off those debts. But Hugh didn’t know that. With Jim gone, his estate was caught up in being settled according to the terms of the trust. The children had already received some money: May could afford to pay Sadie, Hugh hadn’t been beaten by thugs, and Jolene and Gary had booked that long-awaited cruise. But Keith made it sound like Hugh’s debts were immense. The first disbursement maxed out at $10,000. That wasn’t enough to get Hugh out of trouble?

  The rock in her stomach was getting heavier, and she took a breath, hoping it would help her find the strength to do what she had to do. She wished she had all the answers, that she had access to the personal files so she could look for proof of whatever investment Jim had made with Gary. She was all but certain that was why he’d been cut out of the will. Maybe that was why Gary went to jail? If only all the information were wrapped up with a bow and complete.