The Cheesecake Fake: A Culinary Cozy Mystery Set In Sunny Florida (Slice of Paradise Cozy Mysteries Book 2)

by Nancy McGovern

  “Oh, Steph,” Faith said, giving her a hug. “I’d better go talk to her.”

  “Go on,” said Laura, and she took over the hugging duties.

  Faith placed her notebook and pen on the kitchen counter, breathing slowly out through her mouth. She felt like she could just flip out at any moment and shout at Tara, so she stood still for a moment, trying to regain some composure.

  “Excuse me!” It was full on shouting by then.

  “Yes?” Faith said, coming out of the kitchen with the cheeriest attitude she could muster. She knew her smile was fake but it was the best she could do. “Do you need some help, ma’am?”

  Tara Johnson was dressed to kill, in a rose pink tailored suit, beige patent accessories, and silver jewelry. She stood at the counter, a plate in her hand with a slice of half eaten cheesecake perched on top. “Faith,” she said nastily.

  Faith tried a smile again but it was getting harder and harder. “That’s me.”

  “Your canapés were tackily pretentious and convoluted,” Tara said, “but at least they were palatable. This, on the other hand?” She shoved the plate on the top of the counter. “Sickly sweet. Nauseating.”

  Faith’s greatest wish was to pick the cheesecake up and hurl it in Tara’s sneering face. But of course that wasn’t her style. “Maybe it’s not to everyone’s taste, but our customers enjoy it.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Tara said with a smirk. It was clear what she thought of Faith’s customers - regular folks, grandparents with their grandkids, students coming to study together, young couples on walks through Paradise Point. They clearly weren’t the gourmet upper class set Tara was enamored with, that was made clear enough by her raised eyebrows and turned up lip. “I am sure they also enjoy temporary, unknowledgeable staff with poor control over their emotions.”

  “Maybe inviting you to review the tearoom was a mistake,” Faith said. “It’s obviously not your sort of place.”

  “Perhaps it was a mistake for you,” Tara answered evenly. “I pride myself on being extremely honest and transparent with my valued readership. And there is no way I can, in good conscience, write a positive review of this place. I am sure you understand, don’t you? It’s a moral dilemma.”

  Faith shook her head. “Tara, maybe it’s best if you don’t write a review at all and we forget this ever happened.”

  Tara looked like she’d been slapped in the face. “Wow. Frankly I’m surprised at that kind of attitude. I would have thought you would be grateful for me to come here and spend my valuable time subjecting myself to your… way of doing things.”

  “Frankly, no,” Faith said, keeping her voice low, though it came out in tense little spurts. Thankfully there was a mom with two loud toddlers in the corner, drowning out most of what they were saying. “Of course I’m not grateful you made Stephanie cry, and harangued our customers, and will now go and write a negative review. What planet are you on that you could possibly think I would be grateful for that?”

  Tara stared at her, an amused little tense smile on her face. “Oh, well. I see your true colors coming out now, Faith, behind that plastic smile of yours.”

  “I think maybe you should leave now, Tara,” Faith said.

  “Ooh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Tara giggled, then sat down at one of the tables. “No, Faith, I think you’ll find I don’t let substandard business owners get away with sloppiness. I make it my personal duty to see to it that no subpar eatery is allowed to deceive unsuspecting customers. I’ll sit right here and write your review. Oh, and by the way, since Becky’s gone, I get a double spread for my reviews now. So I can tell all of Paradise just how little you care about offering them good service.”

  Faith stood still, unable to believe what she’d just heard. It felt like a very bad dream. Never had anyone spoken to her in such a way before. It was all so surreal, Faith almost wondered if it wasn’t all a prank. But from watching Tara hammering away on the keys of the laptop she’d just brought out of her patent beige handbag, her nose crinkled up like the place smelled bad, Faith knew it was no joke.

  Faith tried to tell herself that Krystle wouldn’t print it, but was that really the case? Tara would obviously have a meltdown if her piece got rejected. Would Krystle be prepared to anger one of her most prolific and dedicated columnists?

  No idea what to do, Faith stood at the counter for a moment. Then a totally new thought popped into her head. It was crazy, for sure, but just about as crazy as the situation was. Would Tara have killed Becky, just so that she’d get a larger column? As soon as Faith had thought it, she knew it was too ridiculous to be true, but she couldn’t quite put it out of her mind. Clearly Tara was more than a little eccentric, and not in a good way.

  “I’m just writing now about how poor your complaints management system is,” Tara said. “The way business owner Faith Franklin handled my concerns made me feel invalidated and unimportant to her or the business. I feel like the most unvalued customer that ever lived. Just like I felt unvalued when Bessie Franklin turned down my invitation of a review visit. This is a family business, for sure. A family that thrives on rudeness and disrespect.”

  “Ugh!” Faith couldn’t take it anymore, especially as Tara was trying to sully Grandma Bessie’s good name, and she threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “Please leave, Tara. I don’t want you here.”

  Tara shrugged with a smile, obviously glad to have rattled Faith. “Free country.” Just then Laura and Stephanie came back into the tearoom through the kitchen. “Oh, hello,” Tara said sunnily upon seeing Stephanie. “Finished our tantrum, have we?”

  Stephanie burst into tears over again and fled back into the kitchen. Laura followed.

  “That’s it!” Faith hollered. “Out!” Every single customer looked up from their plates, but Faith held firm. “Come on, Tara, out you go.”

  Tara packed up her laptop and gave all the customers a syrupy smile. “I do apologize on Faith’s behalf, for embarrassing herself. I am also sorry about the overly sweetened cheesecake.”

  “Out, now,” Faith repeated.

  Tara took her time to walk leisurely out of the tearoom. “You’ll catch the review in next week’s paper. Oh, oops.” She took out her smartphone and snapped a picture of Faith’s furious expression. “I can just imagine the caption now. The welcoming, friendly owner of this ramshackle tearoom, Faith Franklin.”

  Faith felt like she was going to explode. She stood at the doorway, her feet planted firmly and her hands on her hips as she watched Tara leave. She didn’t move until Tara had disappeared between the tropical foliage either side of the walkway.

  Once Tara was gone, it was like a weight was instantly lifted. She let out a deep breath, expressing all that energy. Then she turned to her customers. “I am really sorry about that, everyone.”

  “Don’t you worry, dear,” an elderly lady said. “Anyone could see she’s a trouble maker.”

  Murmurs of agreement went around the tearoom, and Faith felt comforted and safe. Like she was at home, with her people. She grinned. “Cupcakes on the house?”

  *****

  Chapter 11

  After Tara’s toxic departure, Faith had had a much better afternoon. Stephanie had cheered up and even stayed on for a little while, eating her own slice of cheesecake and proclaiming how delicious it was. “Overly sweet?” she said scornfully, when Faith had asked her, concerned. “That woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”

  So by the time Faith was on her way to Dr. Asante’s veterinary practice, she felt much better. Instead of calling Nathan – who’d taken the van to the garden center to pick up some supplies – she’d decided to walk. She’d also decided not to take Nimbus or Cirrus along – after all, he’d said he wanted to talk so there was no need for any pretense. She did miss them, though. Laura had said she’d pop in and feed them a tin of sardines as soon as she got back from the tearoom, so at least they’d be happy with that. Besides, Faith didn’t anticipate she’d b
e too long with Dr. Asante.

  Faith swung her arms as she walked along, the cool evening breeze sweeping across her bare arms and legs and cooling her down nicely. In fact, Faith felt better than she had in a while, and she even smiled and said, “Hello,” to the people she saw walking down the street. In Paradise Point that was the norm, but in the town of Paradise itself it wasn’t quite the done thing. She got a couple of funny looks, but other than that she was pleased when people greeted her back, their faces opening with friendliness.

  The only thing she was worried about was whether Dr. Asante would still be there. But when she approached the clinic she was glad to see a light on in back. The front waiting room was all locked up and in darkness, so the receptionist had definitely gone home. But it looked like Dr. Asante was in back, seeing to or waiting for patients. So that was a good sign.

  Faith swung her leg over the low chain fence so she could get quickly to the back entrance, near to where the light was on. Then she hurried across to the back door, wondering what it was he was going to show her.

  She came up to the back door, which was paneled with glass and showed the way onto a short hallway. What she didn’t expect was a sudden neigh-h-h-h! Faith almost jumped out of her skin. That was one loud horse! Then there was some kicking, like hooves being struck against the ground. Faith, hearing her heart race, looked around. A little way further back was an enclosure not visible from the front entrance, and that was where the horse’s neigh had come from. She knew that Dr. Asante kept some smaller animals on site, like cats and dogs. But horses? She’d had no idea.

  Laughing at how scared she had been, Faith looked around the doorway for a bell, but there wasn’t one. Then she tried to push the door instead. It opened right away, to her surprise. But once she was in the hallway there were three doors, one to her front, one left and one right, and she had no idea where any of them led to. On closer inspection, she saw the door on the right was marked Medical Supplies and Drugs: Authorized Access Only.

  “Dr. Asante?” she called out.

  No answer.

  She tried the door to her right first, but it wouldn’t budge. Figures, she thought, since the room was full of drugs.

  Then she tried the door in front of her. It led onto the darkened waiting room, which somehow looked creepy. She quickly shut it again.

  Finally she tried the door on her left.

  Faith gasped, her whole body jolting with shock.

  Dr. Asante was lying dead on the floor, a syringe next to his body.

  *****

  “Miss Franklin,” Deputy Sheriff Valdez said stiffly. “It seems strange that every time I encounter a body, you seem to have something to do with it.”

  Seeing the body of Dr. Asante had rattled Faith to her core, even more than seeing Becky, for some reason. “Deputy, I know we don’t see eye to eye, but you have to listen to me. I really think Dr. Asante knew who it was and they killed him.”

  Valdez’s eyebrows shot up. “I would think it more likely that he killed himself under the weight of the guilt, Miss Franklin. There were no signs of a scuffle or fight.”

  That idea winded Faith like a punch to the gut. “Oh.”

  “So perhaps you were right about the girl Miss Harris being pushed off the boat,” he said. “But we can’t always get everything right, not even the Miss Franklins among us.”

  Faith sunk down to the chair in the clinic’s waiting room. “Did you find her next of kin in the end?”

  “I’m rather busy doing other things,” he said curtly. “That is not my job. Other people in the department are looking into it.”

  Faith took that as a no.

  The Deputy got back to looking through papers on the receptionist desk, while a team including a coroner investigated the horrific scene Faith had stumbled upon in the other room.

  “I don’t know,” Faith said aloud, more to herself than to him. “I mean, maybe he killed Becky, then killed himself, but… I don’t know. When he rang me, he said he had something to show me, and sounded pretty frantic about it. He said he’d meet me tomorrow morning at the tearoom.”

  The Deputy did not even look up from the papers. “Perhaps it was a ruse to lead you to your death.”

  “But why? If he killed Becky, he must have done it for the cat, but why would—”

  “Cat?” Deputy Valdez said sharply. “What cat?”

  Faith explained what she had found on YouFlip, and how she suspected it could potentially be Dr. Asante’s motive. Once she was done, she didn’t get so much as a thank you.

  “You may leave now, Miss Franklin,” the Deputy said. “We will contact you if we need any further information.”

  Faith would have normally turned and left, but her heart felt hot with feeling. “Do you really think Dr. Asante did it?” And as soon as she said that, she knew what her own feeling was. No. “I mean, why would he arrange to meet with me tomorrow morning, then kill himself tonight? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Everything makes sense when you study it for long enough,” the Deputy said, then walked away without another word.

  Faith ran out into the cool air of the evening. The sun had set, and the streets of Paradise were eerily quiet. There was no way she wanted to walk, but she wasn’t going to hang around waiting for Nathan or Laura to drive the Chevy over, either. Instead, she broke out in a run, and soon found tears falling down her face. The sky was blackening by the moment, and since the night was clear, star after star after star shone down upon her.

  Distinctly, she had the feeling that Dr. Asante was urging her to solve the case, just the same in death as he had been in life. The feeling washed over her as she slowed her run to look up at the stars. She didn’t know if she was losing her mind with all the emotion of the day, or if Dr. Asante genuinely was somehow communicating with her. Or even if it was her subconscious telling her that he was innocent, or communicating her urge to carry on. She didn’t know what it was giving her the message, or where it was really coming from. Find out the truth. That was all she ‘heard’, though it wasn’t in sound, just in a feeling that reverberated all through her.

  “I will,” was all she could whisper back into the sky, feeling weird but being too far gone, through emotion and tiredness, to care.

  For that evening though, she knew exactly what she was going to do – close her apartment door to the world and bask in her blissfully safe bubble. Cirrus, Nimbus, cupcakes, her teal baking set, her Opal Templeton recipe book, and some old school Celine Dion. She knew it was to be a huge day of baking the next day – they were baking up some samples to take over to Danica and Graeme – so she’d get an early night, too, curling up with a hot cocoa and her two purring kitties, and then drifting off into dreamland.

  *****

  The next morning, Nathan came over to Slice of Paradise to have a look at their plants. Every so often he came around to cut back any stray tendrils of bougainvillea, to remove weeds, and to make sure the gardens were blooming like the tropical paradise they’d all envisaged. In truth, he came over a little too often – to see Faith, she knew – and they ended up eating cake and drinking lemonade together on the veranda when business lulled. Those snatched moments on the veranda, looking out over their gardens and feeling the whispering breeze carried in from the ocean, were among her favorites ever.

  “So I got a column with Krystle,” he said, then sipped on his lemonade. He pushed his dark auburn wavy-tangly hair back, which made his deep dark eyes stand out more. Faith loved when he did that. “I asked questions like I said I would, but she didn’t give much away.”

  Faith was sure smart, kind, driven Krystle had nothing to do with Becky’s murder, but it would be good to rule her out all the same. “What did you ask?”

  “How long Becky had been there. Which was a few months. If they got on. She said not really.”

  “Really?” Faith asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s murder motive material. Krystle just said that after Tara, Becky was
the most demanding writer on staff. She wasn’t that good at what she did, and everything she wrote needed heavy editing or something. Plus she kept whining that she wasn’t getting paid.”

  Faith nodded, breaking off a little piece from the slice of strawberry shortcake she had on a floral patterned plate next to her. She and Laura had burned up the kitchen all morning making the samples for the Triggs, and they were all boxed up and ready to go. Faith would take them in the van, while Laura would stay and look after Slice of Paradise.

  “So basically,” Faith said. “If it was Krystle, she’d have been doing it because she didn’t want Becky to write her column anymore. That definitely isn’t a strong enough motive, especially for a well-balanced woman with a good marriage, a job she loves and two teen sons who seem to be doing well in school.”

  “Exactly,” Nathan said. “Although some people are just plain old psychos who enjoy killing for fun. I guess we shouldn’t rule that out.”

  “Krystle?” Faith said witheringly.

  Nathan grinned. “Look, I’m not saying she’s Hannibal Lector.”

  Faith smiled back. “Model suburban wife, secret serial killer. I can see the special on some trashy TV channel right now.”

  “Oh, my mom likes those things,” Nathan said. “My dad and me go play ball out the back then. I can’t stand it. And those ones where they go creeping around some mansion in the dark with a ghostometer.”

  Faith laughed. “Oh, those ones are funny. My mom wouldn’t even let me put that stuff on in the house. Documentaries, movies and Friends, that’s what I grew up on.”

  “Me too, pretty much. And a hefty dose of cartoons every Saturday morning.”

  Faith looked over the bright tropical garden, feeling happy. “What do you think little Nathan would think of you if he saw you now?”

  Right off the bat he said, “Oh, he’d probably think I was a major loser. Not out there fighting crime with a cape on my back. No superpowers? Lame.”