Cape Bay Cafe Mystery 10 - Punch, Pastries, and Poison

by Harper Lin

  To my surprise, Ephy didn’t shrug this time. “No, that’s dumb. I hate when people say that. Good espresso is good espresso. You could leave that sitting there until tomorrow, and it would still taste good.”

  I fought back a smile. “Well, I think that would be a health code violation, but I see your point.” I picked up the espresso. “And I agree.” I took a quick sip and then slugged the whole thing back. It was every bit as good as I’d expected it to be.

  So now I had a decision to make. Ephy’s personality and look weren’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I set out to find someone new for the café, but her coffee-making skills were top-notch, and I’d hardly have to train her at all. Unless I wanted to try to train her to smile, but I wasn’t sure that would be a successful endeavor.

  I glanced around the café. Sammy was making the rounds with the coffee pot, offering refills and chatting up the regulars. I wished I could ask her opinion, but she’d barely exchanged two words with Ephy. Even if I asked, she’d refuse, saying she hadn’t spent enough time with her to be fair. It was one of Sammy’s best—and occasionally most frustrating—qualities.

  I sighed and leaned back against the counter, folding my arms across my chest while Ephy examined her fingernails and picked at the already chipped polish. “You can’t do that if I hire you,” I snapped.

  She raised her eyes to me, not seeming to be at all put off by my comment or my tone. If anything, she seemed confused. “Do what? Make good coffee?”

  I barely stopped my eyes from rolling. I could easily regret hiring this girl within thirty minutes of her first shift starting. “Pick at your nail polish. In fact, I don’t want you coming in with chipped nail polish at all. Your nails should be bare or have a full coat.”

  She shrugged yet again and shoved her hands in her pockets.

  “And no holes in your clothes. And pull your hair back.”

  One of her shoulders twitched, but that was all.

  I took a deep breath and wondered if I was crazy to even consider hiring her.

  The bell over the café door jingled, and I turned to see a group of twenty or so women pouring in, all clad in matching teal T-shirts emblazoned with Brookline Babes Beach Bonanza across their chests. Sammy looked up from where she was schmoozing with a small group crowded around a smaller table with their laptops. She went wide-eyed. Even without our regular customers, we were going to be slammed for at least the next half hour with that size group. And that was if they got their drinks to go. If they stayed, we’d be packed for at least an hour, maybe more.

  I turned back to Ephy. “Tell you what. You stay here and help us out with this group, and if you do a good job, you’re hired. I’ll pay you either way.”

  For some reason, I expected a little enthusiasm from her about my offer, but all I got was a cool “Sure.” She fished a hair tie out from the stack of cords and bangles on her wrist and pulled back her thick mane of wavy, purple-tinged black hair.

  I caught Sammy’s eye as she hurried around the counter and dropped the coffee pot back on its warmer. “Sammy, this is Ephy. She’s going to help us out with this group.” I turned to Ephy. “Do whatever Sammy says.”

  Ephy nodded from the sink, where she was already washing her hands. Maybe she wouldn’t be so bad after all. The next couple of hours would give me my answer.

  I turned to the first customer, who was already standing at the register, and smiled. “Hi, welcome to Antonia’s. What can I get for you today?”

  She stared up at Sammy’s handwritten menu on the chalkboard hanging behind the counter. “Uhhhh.” She sighed. “I never know what to get. I like the drinks that have all that whipped cream and chocolate sauce and stuff. What’s a macchiato? Is that something I’d like? That’s a fun name! Match-ee-ahh-toe.” She turned around and giggled at the rest of her group.

  I sighed. This was going to be an even better test for Ephy than I thought.

  Chapter 3

  Three days later, I was actually happy that I’d decided to hire Ephy—mostly. She was, as I’d already learned, a wiz at coffee, and she’d surprised me by knowing a thing or two about baking as well. Her first scheduled shift, she’d come in—appropriately dressed and groomed, no less—and spotted a tray of shortbread cookies waiting to go in the oven. She peered at them for long enough that I was about to tell her what they were and maybe even what a cookie was based on the forehead wrinkles that marred her otherwise impeccable complexion. But just as I opened my mouth, she looked up at me.

  “Shortbread, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you use cornstarch in them?”

  “Nope. Just butter, flour, and sugar. It’s really easy, actually—there’s a ratio—”

  She cut me off. “My grandma used cornstarch. It’s the best way to do it. Makes the cookie melt in your mouth. You should try it sometime.” She cast a disdainful look at the cornstarch-free cookies on the tray and walked away towards the espresso machine.

  I went after her out of some combination of self-punishment and curiosity. “So did your grandmother bake a lot?”

  She nodded as she checked over the machine. She used slightly different settings than the ones I liked, but I couldn’t argue with her results. In the couple of hours she’d worked with us after her interview, she’d earned raves from the customers. Not that the teal-shirted Brookline Babes were coffee connoisseurs, but they were pleased with their drinks, and so were the regulars she served.

  “Did you bake with her?” I was trying to be friendly, but I was also trying to figure out if she’d be interested in working on the baking side of things as well.

  “I worked in her shop for a while.”

  “Her shop?”

  She had moved on to sniffing bags of beans. They were pretty airtight, so I didn’t know what she was smelling, but she seemed to have a plan, so I left it alone.

  “Yeah,” she said. “She had a bake shop up in Maine. I helped out until she decided to retire and sold it to some yuppie couple who took all the gluten and sugar out of everything and stopped using ingredients from more than a hundred miles away, which is fine, you know, but it’s not what people go to a bake shop for, especially since they didn’t even sell coffee anymore ‘cause it’s from too far away, just some dandelion tea crap they harvested from a field somewhere because they told the farmer they’d do it for free if they could keep the product. And, I mean, who wouldn’t take that deal, you know? They weeded his freaking field for free so they could get some weeds to make tea out of. And not even, like, actual weed, ‘cause that might be good, but literal weeds from the ground, like the kind that kids make wishes on. Anyway, they’re only open, like, two hours a day now, and there’s only this one guy named Jim who ever comes in to drink their weed juice and eat their mashed-up blueberries and potatoes, because what the hell else grows in Maine? I don’t even know how they stay in business. I think their family gives them money or something.”

  I stood in silence for a minute, digesting the torrent of words that had just poured out of her mouth. It was easily the most I’d heard her say in one go, and I suspected that if I counted up all the words I’d ever heard her say, that speech would have accounted for more than half. Still, I was glad she was showing some passion about something and fascinated that her expression hadn’t so much as flickered the entire time. Her face had remained completely impassive the entire time, and she hadn’t missed a beat in her inspection of the beans.

  “Wow,” I said. “That sounds terrible. I’d hate for something like that to happen to Antonia’s.”

  The Ephy shrug returned. “If they want to ruin a good business, that’s on them. Doesn’t bother me. They paid my grandma well.”

  And that was that. She finally decided on a bag of beans—the first one she’d sniffed, actually—grabbed it, and went over to the espresso machine like we hadn’t just been having a conversation. I had a feeling it was something I’d just have to get used to if I was going to keep her around, which I p
lanned to. Her personality may not have been stellar, but her coffee was, and besides, we needed the help.

  Fortunately, she somehow managed to mostly get along with most of the staff and customers. She was polite but not warm, and she kept her head down and did her job. She showed up close to on time—punctuality was another of her weak spots—didn’t mind staying a few minutes late, and did as she was told. She even got me to try her grandmother’s shortbread recipe, which, I had to admit, was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. So, for the most part, I felt like I made the right call in hiring her.

  Her third day, I even trusted her enough to leave her out front while I went in the back to check our stock levels and see what we needed to reorder. Napkins, probably. It was always napkins.

  I’d been back there for about twenty minutes when Ephy appeared out of thin air beside me, as if she’d teleported. I’d even been facing the door and hadn’t seen or heard her coming until I looked up from my clipboard and saw her standing there stone-faced in front of me. I jumped and dropped my clipboard. “Ephy! You startled me!”

  “Some guy’s here to see you?”

  I bent down and grabbed the clipboard. “Who is it?”

  She shrugged.

  I took a deep breath. If I was going to keep her, I’d just have to accept that I would periodically have to explain to her how I wanted her to behave in situations where someone else would have already known. Ephy either didn’t know or didn’t care, and I’d just have to accept and correct that. “Next time, ask their name before you come back to get me, okay?”

  She shrugged, and I had no idea whether she would do it or not.

  I jotted down the number of napkins I thought we needed to order—never enough, even when I ordered twice as many—and laid the clipboard on the desk on my way out into the café. The first man I laid eyes on was my old friend Mike Stanton, who was just walking through the door. Instinctively, I went straight for the coffee pot, dumped it, and started a new batch. “One minute,” I mouthed in his direction. Mike always ordered the same thing—a large black coffee to go—so I’d gotten in the habit of starting a fresh pot as soon as I saw him. With as much coffee as he drank, the man would have single-handedly kept us in business if he paid for any of it, but police officers and firefighters had eaten for free at our coffee shop since my grandparents’ days, and Mike was the lead—and only—detective in the Cape Bay police department. Luckily, he kept his orders simple, so his coffee habit didn’t bankrupt me either.

  “Why’d you do that?” Ephy asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Dump the coffee pot? I just made that, like, five minutes ago?”

  “Oh!” It was so ingrained, I’d barely realized I’d done it. “For Mike.” I nodded in his direction.

  She made a vaguely scowling face that I took to mean she disapproved of me pouring out the coffee she’d just made—or that she understood what I was saying. It was hard to tell either way with her.

  “Who am I looking for?” I asked.

  “That guy.”

  I followed her outstretched finger across the room to a man studying one of the paintings on the wall. It was part of a new program I was testing out where local artists could display their work for customers to see and even buy at the end of the mini-exhibit. No one had said they wanted to purchase anything so far, but the seascapes had only been up for a day.

  I grinned at the sight of the familiar figure. Since he was focused on the painting of a lobster boat heading out to sea at sunrise, I went ahead and grabbed a to-go cup, filled it to the brim with the piping-hot, freshly brewed coffee, snapped a lid on it, and made my way around the counter towards Mike. I handed him the cup wordlessly. He took it, nodded, and poured what must have been a quarter of it straight down his throat. I had no idea how he did it. If I tried doing that, my throat would be so scalded, I wouldn’t be able to swallow for a week. But he did it several times a day. He must have built up a tolerance. Throat calluses or something.

  As Mike headed for the door, I snuck up behind the man at the painting and wrapped my arms around his waist.

  Chapter 4

  Matt jumped sky-high. “Who—wha—?” He spun around with his hands up like he was getting ready to fight, but he exhaled as soon as his eyes landed on me. “Sheesh, Franny! You scared the crap out of me.”

  I giggled, even though everyone in the whole café had their eyes on us now. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were so engrossed in the painting.”

  His brow furrowed as his eyes moved around the café. “What painting?”

  “The one you were looking at when I walked up?” When he still looked confused, I took his shoulders and turned him back around to face the painting.

  He looked at it like he’d never seen it, even though he’d been staring at it moments before. “Oh. That’s cool. When did you get it?”

  I sighed. “We put it up yesterday as part of the exhibition.” I waved my hand around at all the other paintings of the beach and the ocean that adorned the walls.

  “Oh, right. Sorry, I forgot about that.” He raked his fingers through his thick, dark hair, making it adorably tousled.

  Obviously, I needed to promote the art display more if my own boyfriend hadn’t remembered, or even noticed the art hanging right in front of his face. “Everything okay?” I asked, noticing the worry line creasing the space between his eyebrows.

  He exhaled slowly and ran his fingers through his hair again. “Yeah. Work’s just been wearing me out lately. That McClusky project has been a nightmare.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating. His latest project at work had been keeping him there into the wee hours for weeks now. I’d barely seen him for more than a couple hours at a time and only on the weekends—and we only lived two houses apart. Even when we had scraped out time to spend together, it had mostly been him dozing off on the couch while some sporting event I wasn’t interested in played on the TV. I hadn’t had the heart to wake him up or make him do anything more strenuous than moving a burger from the plate on his lap up to his mouth. Seeing him during daylight hours—on a weekday, no less!—felt positively luxurious at this point.

  “So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” I snaked my arm back around his waist and snuggled myself into his chest.

  He pulled me toward him and brushed his lips against the top of my head—more demonstrative than I, with my New England reserve, could usually stand in public, but I felt like I hadn’t seen him in ages and couldn’t get enough of his touch. “I thought I’d come by and see my girl. And pick up a gallon or so of coffee.”

  I looked up at him questioningly.

  He gave me a tired smile. “They’re having the quarterly birthday party at the office, and I couldn’t get anything done, so I figured I’d work from home for the afternoon. I’ll pass out the second my butt hits the couch if I don’t have a barrel of caffeine to keep me going. You don’t have any IV bags you could load up for me, do you?”

  I laughed softly, even though it hurt my heart to hear him sound so exhausted. “No, but I can definitely load up a couple of boxes of coffee for you.”

  He nodded wearily and kissed the top of my head again. “That would be great, Franny. Thank you.”

  Reluctantly, I let him go and walked back around the counter to where Ephy stood looking at me with an expression that seemed to be a cross between disgust and bewilderment. “We need to make up a box of coffee,” I said. “Do you know how to do that yet?”

  She raised one pierced eyebrow, turned around to where the flattened boxes were stored, and pulled one out. I took that as a yes.

  Sure enough, she quickly had the box assembled, filled, and sitting on the counter next to where Matt was leaning, looking dazed. “I take it this guy doesn’t pay either?”

  “Not today.”

  He actually did pay occasionally, mostly when he insisted on it. He’d remind me that I’d be out of business in a week if I fed everyone for free, which was an exaggeration but basically true. I sti
ll felt silly taking his money, though. It wasn’t as though his free coffee alone would bankrupt the café. Just between Sammy and me, we drank as much free coffee in a day as he did in a week. But it wasn’t worth arguing about, so I didn’t. And, in any case, he was too lost in his thoughts today to think about it.

  I grabbed the coffee box off the counter. “Did you drive over?”

  Matt nodded as he tried to gently extract the box from my grasp. “Yeah, came straight from work. Give me that.”

  I pulled the box away. “No, I have it. I’ll carry it out to the car for you.”

  “I think I can handle it, Franny.”

  “It’s good customer service! Customer service is what keeps people coming in.”

  He looked down at me with one eyebrow raised and held his hand out.

  “If I give it to you, I have no reason to walk you out to your car,” I confessed, batting my eyes at him a little bit.

  The corner of his lips twitched up. “You being my girlfriend who loves me isn’t enough of a reason?”

  I sighed and handed him the box. I never could resist that look.

  “Ephy, I’m going to walk Matt out.” I grabbed a bag and reached into the pastry case for a couple of cookies to send with Matt.

  “Yeah, I caught that,” she said in a monotone.

  As soon as the door swung closed between us, Matt glanced over at me out of the corner of his eye. “Ephy, huh? Interesting name.”

  “She’s an interesting girl.”

  Matt looked at me like he could tell there was more to the story. We’d seen each other so little lately that I’d only managed to tell him that I’d hired Ephy and nothing at all about how quirky she was.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I muttered.

  I noticed with dismay that Matt’s car was parked on the street almost right outside the café. Normally, it wouldn’t have mattered, but today it meant that all of the kisses I’d been hoping to steal would be in full view of all my customers. It wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for when I followed him outside. I told myself I’d just have to wait until I closed up for the night and hope he wasn’t still engrossed in work or so tired he’d already fallen asleep.