by Emily James
That’s what I had to tell myself, anyway, or I wouldn’t have enough presence of mind left to deal with the fact that three trays of cupcakes lay on the ground around me. And not any three trays. The three trays of specially requested carrot cake cupcakes.
One of the trays had burst open completely. The cupcakes lay scattered on the ground around me like pieces of oversized confetti. One had even landed in a puddle of black goo that looked suspiciously like engine oil. Even though Claire hadn’t specified what flavor most of the cupcakes should be, I was sure dirt with motor oil frosting and pebble sprinkles wouldn’t go over well.
I couldn’t not serve anything from these three trays, though. I wouldn’t have enough cupcakes, and I’d also not have the one flavor Claire said was essential. Two of my trays had landed lid-side down, but at least the lids had stayed on and the cupcakes were still inside.
I flipped them over and popped the top. I couldn’t hold back a groan. The contents of my trays were a mangled mass, most of the icing stuck to the underside of the lid and completely unserveable even if I re-iced them. Since I didn’t have enough ingredients or enough time to make the cream cheese icing and re-ice them, trying to salvage them in their current form wasn’t an option. Claire Cartwright was going to stiff me on my payment for sure.
I covered the two trays, gathered up the third now-empty one, and scurried for my truck.
Somehow I had to create more carrot cake cupcakes out of thin air.
Half an hour later, I power-walked back to the party, paying careful attention to my surroundings so no rogue men ran into me a second time. If I lost the solution I’d come up with, I’d be out of luck.
With the cupcakes and icing already smashed together, I’d peeled the liners off and turned them into cake pops. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had time to allow the chocolate coating to set. Instead, I’d used a can of cold spray to set the cake and chocolate around the stick, and I covered the chocolate in edible glitter to give it a finished look.
They weren’t carrot cake cupcakes, but hopefully I could pass them off to Claire Cartwright as being even better. And hopefully Harold Cartwright didn’t hate white chocolate.
The guests were clustered to the side of where they’d been lined up for food, most of their backs facing my direction as I approached.
A tingle traced down my neck. Unless all the guests moved and ate with military precision and had now gathered to sing Happy Birthday to Harold Cartwright, they shouldn’t have already been finished going through the food line. I knew they weren’t there to watch him cut a cake. I was the one and only dessert.
Fear told me to turn around, go back to my truck, and leave. Fear and I were what the generation after me called frenemies. He often helped keep me safe. He used to warn me about when to try to stay out of Jarrod’s way. He’d helped keep me quiet when I wanted to talk back. I’d probably be dead now if not for him.
But he’d also made me run from a place I’d started to feel comfortable, even though it probably would’ve been better for me to stay. He kept me from having any friendships, always telling me friends would get me or them or both of us killed. He’d cost me more hours of sleep than were healthy for anyone to miss.
And, in this case, he threatened to cost me a job I desperately needed the money from. If Claire Cartwright decided not to pay me, I’d have to cut back to one meal a day.
So this time—at least for the moment—I stuck my metaphorical fingers in my ears and refused to listen to him.
I strode as confidently as I could manage toward my cupcake display. Hungry partygoers had already decimated what I’d set out earlier.
“Do something, Dan,” a voice that sounded like Claire’s said from the direction of the crowd. “Help him.”
Said might’ve been a generous way of describing her words. Her voice was more of a screech. A very panicked screech.
My hands trembled, and I set my cake pops down on the picnic table before I could drop them.
Up close, I could see that the crowd wasn’t just gathered. Some of the adults hugged children close, while others were talking on their cell phones. None of them were smiling.
I inched toward the fringe of the crowd, but there were too many people between me and what was happening for me to see anything. I dropped into a squat instead. It’d be easier to see between legs. I certainly wasn’t going to push any closer, drawing attention to myself and potentially getting trapped in the crowd. All I needed to know was what was happening so I could decide whether to stay or go.
A man about my age—mid to late 30s—knelt on the grass next to a prone figure. The cane lying beside them, along with the Velcro-close orthopedic shoes, told me the person on the ground was the guest of honor, Harold Cartwright.
Poor Claire. Poor everyone who’d come to celebrate what was supposed to be a happy milestone. As much as Claire had been a touch unreasonable, I wouldn’t have wished this on her or on the other party-goers.
I climbed to my feet and eased backward.
What were the odds that Harold Cartwright would die at his own birthday party? Theoretically, it was possible. He was a hundred, after all. And maybe I was simply paranoid because I spent most of my time expecting Jarrod to find me. The excitement alone could have caused Harold’s old heart to stop.
But it seemed a bit too coincidental.
Definitely time for me to leave. No one was likely to be interested in food anymore. Anyone who was could get a cupcake for themselves. I’d fulfilled my obligation. I’d provided everything asked, some things I hadn’t been asked for, and I even managed to get carrot cake onto the table. Sort of. I’d quickly put the cake pops out before I left. That way Claire couldn’t short me because I hadn’t provided the full count.
Police and ambulance were likely on their way already, and if anything looked fishy about the way Harold died, there’d be questions. I wasn’t about to appear in a police report for the sake of a man I’d only met today, even if it was only as a witness. Jarrod could access police reports. If he ever figured out my new name, I didn’t want to show up in any database, telling him where to find me.
I turned toward my picnic tables.
A little girl who couldn’t have been more than four or five hunched on the ground next to one of the picnic table benches. Her chest rose and fell with the gaspy motions of someone struggling to breathe, and her cheeks were flushed an unnatural pink. One strap of a backpack hung partly off her shoulder.
This had to be so scary for a child. She might not even understand what was happening. She’d only know it wasn’t good.
My heart tightened in the way that reminded me of someone trying to squeeze juice from an uncooperative orange. When I was a little girl myself and I’d asked my dad why my chest felt that way sometimes, he’d told me it was God squeezing compassion out of my heart for others. I knew now that wasn’t the truth, but the memory made me both want to smile and to cry. I might be a lot better off now if I could still tap into my dad’s wisdom.
At least I knew what he’d say about the little girl. I’d get her a cupcake and reassure her before I left. It put me at risk of the police showing up, but I couldn’t leave her there, scared and alone, while the adults were focused on Harold. No one, no matter their age, should have to be scared and alone.
I hurried over to her, grabbed two different cupcakes, and dropped to one knee beside her. “You know what makes me feel better? A treat.”
My dad couldn’t look down on me from heaven, but if he could, he’d be shaking his head and telling me I shouldn’t be teaching a child to cope with stress using food. But I didn’t know what else to do to calm her down. My experience with children was limited. My baby hadn’t taken a full breath.
She raised her little face to me. Sweat plastered her fine blonde hair to her forehead.
The cupcakes slipped from my hands. Growing up in a home with a religious dad, I’d been raised not to curse, but I really wanted to right now.
She wasn’t flushed and breathin
g hard because she was scared. A rash covered her cheeks, and her breathing had the type of rasp to it that I’d heard when my dad was stung by a wasp. It was the one that said her airways were closing down and soon she wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.
Chapter 3
This family was cursed. Or the zombie apocalypse was starting with them. The farther and faster I could get away from them, the better.
Except now I couldn’t leave. If she were having an allergic reaction, it would have had to happen after Harold Cartwright’s collapse took all the adult attention. Someone would have noticed otherwise. That meant her reaction was a severe one, progressing fast. Even with emergency personnel on the way, they might not get here in time.
If she was having an anaphylactic reaction the way my dad had, we might not even have time to find her parents. Anaphylaxis needed immediate treatment with an epi pen.
I wiped her damp hair back from her forehead. Her skin was warm to the touch. “Do you know if you have allergies to anything, sweetie?”
“Nuts.” The word wheezed out. “Daddy says I always have to ask if things have nuts or touched nuts, even if I don’t see any.”
Nuts were a common enough allergy, but there shouldn’t have been anything with nuts in it at Harold Cartwright’s party. He was allergic as well, hence why I’d had to leave the nuts out of the carrot cake cupcakes.
I glanced back over my shoulder to where Harold lay. Maybe someone really had wanted to take out a hundred-year-old man. Either that or the other food vendor had a weird recipe for making hamburgers and hot dogs that included peanut butter.
That sounded crazy even to me, and gross, but the little girl did have ketchup residue at the corners of her mouth. She’d eaten either a hamburger or a hotdog not that long ago.
“Do you have special medicine that you’re supposed to take? It probably looks like a little tube—the size of a marker.”
I moved my fingers apart to show her how big it would be.
She nodded, but she couldn’t seem to get anything more out.
If she were my little girl, I wouldn’t have kept the epi pen in my purse or anywhere that she might be without it. I’d make her carry it with her.
I stripped off the pink backpack she wore. My hands shook so hard I almost couldn’t get ahold of the zipper above the unicorn’s head.
I rummaged through the main pouch, but it didn’t hold an epi pen.
Of course not. It’d be too easy to fall out there.
I wrenched open a smaller side pouch. An epi pen lay inside.
The girl slouched against me now. I couldn’t tell if she were breathing or not.
Blue to the sky, orange to the thigh was the mantra my dad and I learned when he first found out he was allergic to wasps and needed to carry an epi pen.
It was a myth that an epi pen couldn’t be used through clothes, but I did need to be able to insert the needle at a 90-degree angle into her thigh and hold it there for ten seconds. I laid her on the ground.
“This might pinch, but you have to stay super still for me.”
Hopefully she wasn’t panicking so much that she couldn’t obey. I popped the safety cap and pinned her leg down with my hip just in case.
“Hey!” a woman’s voice yelled. “What are you doing?”
I stuck the girl with the pen and pressed until I felt the click. Then counted in my head.
“Get away from her!”
The woman was rushing toward me now, followed by a few others. My whole body screamed for me to run, but I couldn’t let go. And I couldn’t answer them. I didn’t want to risk losing count in my head.
The woman’s glance dropped to the pen, and her expression shifted, her eyes growing large. She pressed her hands to her mouth.
I hit the ten count and released my hold on the girl.
Hopefully, I’d been quick enough. With severe allergic reactions, the sooner you administered the epi pen, the more likely you were to stop the reaction.
“That’s Janie, isn’t it?” another woman said. “Dan’s Janie.”
Dan was the name of the man Claire called for to help Harold Cartwright, presumably because he had some medical training. No wonder no one noticed Janie’s allergic reaction. Her dad was otherwise occupied, and for whatever reason, her mom wasn’t around. Or her mom might be helping her dad.
None of which really mattered. An adrenaline crash often left my thoughts scattered to the wind, and I could feel it happening to me now. I’d been on an adrenaline rollercoaster most of today, and it was fading from my body again, leaving me feeling like there wasn’t anything left inside but air. What I wanted to do was crawl into a corner and sleep it off. What I needed to do was make sure Janie would be alright and then get out of here.
And the practicalities of life had always had to take precedence over what I wanted.
I shifted and leaned closer to Janie’s face. Her eyes were closed and wet tracks down her cheeks told me she’d been crying, but her breathing had eased somewhat. “You’ll start to feel better now, and I’ll make sure someone lets your daddy know. Okay?”
She nodded.
At least she was still conscious. That was a good sign.
I held out the hand clutching the epi pen and someone took it from me. “You need to call another ambulance for her. She may need a second dose, and sometimes there can be a weird, delayed reaction again a couple of hours later.”
At least that’s what they’d told us for my dad. The more severe the initial reaction, the more likely it was that someone would have a secondary reaction a few hours later, even without additional exposure to the allergen. Because he’d had other pre-existing conditions, they’d actually kept my dad in the hospital overnight.
It’d turned out they’d been right, and it’d also turned out that it didn’t matter. The second attack put too much stress on his already-weak heart.
The woman who’d originally hollered at me knelt down next to Janie on her other side, and I climbed to my feet. My body felt like it was running on a pre-programmed sequence as I unloaded the cake pops from my tray. It was probably silly bothering to put them out, but I had to fulfill my obligation.
“Was that the cupcake lady?” a man asked as I walked away. “I think Janie’d have died if she hadn’t acted fast the way she did.”
There was no way the people who’d rushed over would forget what had happened. By saving Janie, I’d gone from a server—who most people wouldn’t recognize if they passed them on the street the next day—to a quasi-hero.
I wasn’t a hero. I’d simply done what needed to be done. And it was going to cost me. They’d tell the story of what had happened.
It might or might not get me more business. It would definitely get me too much attention.
As soon as Claire Cartwright paid me, I needed to consider leaving town.
***
Two days later, as I was setting up my food truck on a side street near the downtown, I dropped the consider and changed my stance to I need to leave town.
I’d figured out that this street was the perfect spot to catch lunch traffic. Food trucks weren’t allowed to park for longer than 30 minutes in the limited downtown street parking in Lakeshore, and competition for those spaces was fierce. When I’d walked the area to check it out, I’d seen two vendors come to blows because one felt the other had taken his regular spot.
It didn’t matter how much money could be made from those spots. I wasn’t about to get into a fight, verbal or otherwise, for them. Plus, most people didn’t want to buy a cupcake as their only lunch. I didn’t think I could make 30 minutes financially viable.
But, other than the food trucks, the downtown was mostly businesses and shops. The restaurants frequented by the people working there tended to be a couple streets over. It took me a few days of watching the traffic patterns, but I’d spotted a location on a side street that the majority of the foot traffic passed by on their way to lunch. Since cupcakes were more of a dessert thing, that
also meant they passed by me on their way back, and I’d already developed a contingent of regulars who picked up a cupcake for the afternoon slump.
My cell phone rang as I was pushing open the front flap, signifying I was open for business.
I locked the flap into place and swiped my finger across the screen to answer. “How Sweet It Is Cupcake Truck. Isabel speaking.”
“Are you the cupcake truck that catered the hundredth birthday party for Harold Cartwright?” a man’s voice asked.
I doubted Claire had recommended me to anyone. This morning’s paper had an article about the tragic death of Harold Cartwright at his own hundredth birthday party. Claire would still be grieving. If she were in charge of Harold’s estate, she’d also be making funeral plans, arranging for the reading of the will, sorting through his belongings, and trying to organize all the government paperwork.
Even if she had the chance to recommend me, being the cupcake truck who catered the party where Harold Cartwright died was hardly a glowing recommendation that would make people want to hire me, unless they were hiring me to cater the luncheon for a funeral.
It seemed more likely that whoever was calling was another reporter, wanting some eyewitness quotes to go along with his follow-up story. The original article hadn’t explicitly said so, but the wording implied that there would be an investigation to determine whether Harold had died of natural causes or not. Reporters tended to milk any hint of foul play and scandal for all it was worth.
I couldn’t risk offending an actual potential client, though. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Alan Brooksbank. I’m a reporter for the Lakeshore Daily. I do have the right food truck, don’t I?”
He’d admitted to being a reporter awfully easily. I’d half expected him to give me his name but pretend he was a potential client or to give me an entirely fake name in case I would recognize his from the paper. Maybe my response had tipped him to the fact that I wasn’t going to be fooled by either of those ploys.
Since he’d been forthright with me, I’d be forthright with him. “I was one of the trucks catering the event, yes, but I didn’t see anything. Even if I had, I think families should be left alone with their grief without the media causing rampant speculation about what might have happened.”
