Cookies & Catastrophe

by Beth Byers

  She gasped and then said, “Why would you say that? How do you know about Donna and me?”

  Her hands were shaking and she pressed her lips.

  “We’ve been figuring out pieces of it, and I saw you two. We figured anyone who was arguing with Donna was a likely victim of her B.S. blackmailing.”

  “I didn’t kill Donna,” the girl said. Her hands were shaking. “Do you know what I did?”

  “No, kid,” Zee said. “We don’t know about that.”

  The girl took a shuddering breath and said, “Thank goodness.”

  “Zee,” I said, examining the girls face more closely and said, “She didn’t kill Donna. Did you break into Donna’s house after she died?”

  “It burned down,” the girl said. “The evidence is gone, right? Is it gone? That’s what I figured. Is it not gone?” Her voice was shaking again. “I wasn’t there. I have to watch my sisters in the morning. I didn’t kill her.”

  “You could have left your sisters alone,” Zee said.

  The girl started to cry and she said, “I…I…I didn’t though. I wouldn’t. They are little. They’d have been scared.”

  “She didn’t do it, Zee,” I said, “and we’re scaring her.”

  I crossed to her and knelt down on the steps in front of the girl. “I don’t know what you did or what Donna knew, but we’ll find the evidence of her blackmailing, and we’ll destroy it. All of it,” I swore. “Keep your head. Don’t worry.”

  She started crying in earnest and then looked beyond Zee to the street. “My sisters are coming back.” Her lips trembled as she added, “The got me an ice cream. Look at them. Why do they love me so much? They can’t know what I did.”

  “They won’t,” I promised. I pushed back her hair and looked at her face. “Whatever you did…they don’t have to know, and it doesn’t have to define your life. This is your second chance. This is your reboot. You stand up now, you go to your sisters, and you remember that you’re their idol.”

  She nodded her head at me with her lips shaking. Her blue-grey eyes met mine, and under that paleness, I saw something form inside of her. A resolve. I hoped it would last. I hoped it would see her through.

  “It’s a hard road,” I told her, “being the older sister. You’re the example. From now until forever, they’ll think what did Roxy do?”

  She nodded, biting her lip, and then saying, “Ok. Ok.”

  “You gotta stand tall,” I said.

  “Ok,” she nodded, her lips trembling.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Zee.

  Zee nodded.

  I gave the girl a hug and then I walked to the car.

  “Thanks for the ice cream,” the girls called to me.

  “You come by the diner sometime,” I told them, looking at their sunny, innocent little faces, eating ice cream in the December weather without a care in the world. “I have some cake for you.”

  Their eyes widened and they looked at their sister with sheer joy. The older of them saw Roxy’s tears and she looked at me. I shook my head, forced a smile that didn’t reach my eyes, but she was too young to recognize it, and said, “Boys.”

  She nodded in understanding and with a simple acknowledgement she handed her sister the cup of ice cream she’d brought her, and she said, “It’ll be all right, Roxy.”

  The second I slammed the door to Zee’s car, I said, “I wanna go back to the diner, bake a cake, and curl up with Daisy.”

  “You need to curl up with that man of yours,” Zee said.

  I didn’t answer.

  Chapter 9

  There was a knock on the back of the diner. I looked up from where I was frosting a cake. Daisy was laying down at the entryway between the kitchen and the hallway. Her tail thumped on the ground, and I said, “So…a friendly then?”

  I walked to the back of the diner and looked through the peephole. Simon stood there. I glanced him over, noted the Chinese food bags, and opened the door to the diner.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I had to admit that I felt all messed up inside. Seeing that girl, terrified and broken, it made me angry.

  “I have food,” he said.

  “I have cake,” I said.

  “I was hoping you would,” he told me. He cupped my cheek and leaned in, pressing his forehead against mine. “Zee told me what you said to that girl.”

  “Did she tell you who the girl was?” My protective instincts were flying high.

  “It doesn’t matter who it was,” he said. “She’s just a kid. We don’t know what she did or why she did it. And with kids…there’s every reason it isn’t something worth…my department getting involved.”

  I let my forehead nuzzle into his.

  “This is why I like you,” I said.

  “And you standing up for her and for Zee…that’s why I like you.”

  He kissed me once, just lightly, and then whistled for Daisy, heading out to the dining area. I leaned into the wine cabinet, grabbed a bottle of Simon’s favorite wine, and crossed to him.

  “I’m blue,” I said. “Why do people do things like this? What’s so wrong with just living your life?”

  “Donna’s house was real nice,” Simon said. “On further examination, nicer than it should have been. Someone tampered with the gas line to her oven. She got up, turned it on, and her kitchen exploded.”

  “Oh,” I said. That was bad. But Donna hadn’t just left. Why hadn’t she just left? “I don’t understand how she didn’t get out. I went in and got out. The house was still pretty together. Surely she could have survived.”

  “She fell,” Simon said. “There was an indication of a head wound.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling sick. That was horrible. “Maybe it wasn’t intended murder?”

  There was a bit of a plea in my voice. I didn’t want there to be another intentional murderer in town.

  “I suppose they could have been trying to destroy whatever evidence that Donna had. If your theory about blackmail is true.”

  Simon had taken a couple of plates from the diner kitchen and he put them before us opening up containers of pan-fried noodles, orange chicken, and kung pao chicken. There were potstickers and crab puffs too.

  I played with my food. I wasn’t that hungry. I was just sad. Saddened by all of it. Why did things have to be so stupid?

  “I think the problem is that I can’t imagine killing over the stuff I’ve figured out about people.”

  “That’s what makes you—”

  His voice was cut off by the sound of glass breaking. I screamed and then dove for the ground more out of instinct than anything else. Simon’s body landed on mine. Glass had sprayed across the diner, across the floor, and my cheek was being pressed into it with Simon crouching over the top of me.

  We waited for the sound of something else, but there was nothing. I dared to glance around and caught sight of a brick with a note wrapped around it. Daisy was whining, and I glanced over at her. She was ok. Scared, but ok. I reached out and rubbed her brow and then commanded, “Stay.”

  “I think…” Simon rose and glanced out the window. “There are people gathering. Hopefully, someone saw something.”

  “Look,” I said, but he was going out the door.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  I nodded, only realizing after that he probably didn’t see. But I was distracted by that brick with the note around it. I pulled myself up and crossed to it, glancing behind me. Simon was outside talking to Paige from the boutique and a couple others I didn’t recognize.

  I picked up the brick and pulled the note off of it. There was a line from the grinch song about the empty hole in my heart and then in jagged, red letters, “Stay out of it.”

  Mmmm, I thought. I don’t think so. I set the note and the brick on the table next to our ruined food and then opened the bottle of wine. My hands were shaking from the rush of adrenaline. After I poured myself a glass, I lifted Daisy, took her to the bed in my office, and then started sweeping the
diner.

  It only took Zee fifteen minutes to arrive. Simon had come in long enough to let me know he was going to check some things out.

  He glanced the brick over, shook his head, and said, “This is infuriating.”

  Zee stood next to the open door, with her hands on her hips and said, “Well now…what are we going to do?”

  “Find someone to replace the window,” I replied. “Clean up. Take a few days off probably. Simon said he’d call someone to board up the window.”

  Zee’s frown was intense as she said, “Well now…I don’t like that one bit.”

  “Me either,” I said. I started clearing the tables to re-wipe them down. “This is what I think. We’ve talked to Betty who is too old to hike through the woods up to Donna’s house. We talked to the teen who didn’t kill the woman. Jane knows what we were looking into, but she brought us in. Whoever the killer is…it’s the person who dug through Donna’s house when we were in there. We’ve caught attention. Who else could it be but the person who saw us in Donna’s house?”

  Zee glanced over at me, taking a tray and cleaning off all of the things on each table, so we could wipe down the entirety of the dining room. We worked together in silence as we finished sweeping the floor and wiping the diner down.

  “Too bad the food is ruined,” Zee said. “It smells good.”

  “My stress cake isn’t ruined,” I said. The two of us went into the kitchen, pausing to let Daisy out, and then cut slices of cake. We both ended up hopping onto the counters.

  “You do make a good cake,” Zee said as she took a second bite. “If we narrow our list down to women based off of who could climb that trail to the house and who…”

  “The problem,” I cut in, “Is that Donna could have been blackmailing any number of people. We are chasing down people on the basis that we’ve figured out their secrets or that they have them. Maybe other people are better liars.”

  Zee shrugged and then said, “What else can we do?”

  I didn’t know. I just felt like we were treading water. Even if Simon figured out what happened with the window or had a lead that would help us narrow things down—I didn’t think that he would tell us anything. Not until the murderer was caught. He was a cop and couldn’t just let us trample through his cases. And, he was protective and I knew he felt the need to protect and serve a lot more intently when it came to Zee, Jane, Mattie…and me. Which made me think things about if Simon and I were moving too fast, or was it just me who was moving too fast? We’d only known each other for a few months. Such a short amount of time that Jane’s husband had been fishing and crabbing in Alaska the entire time.

  “Am I a whiner to just want to run my business and spend time with my friends and not be involved in this?”

  “Jane was a fool to pay blackmail all this time. Each year that passes makes it all the more unjustifiable. We’re idiots for helping her avoid telling the truth,” Zee said.

  “We can’t make her choices for her,” I said with a sigh. I licked the frosting off of my fork, and there was a knock at the back of the diner.

  Our gazes met. The front door was open, the window was gone—there was no reason to go around the back.

  “You better hope there isn’t flaming trash back there,” Zee said casually taking another bite of cake.

  I hopped down from the counter and crossed to the back of the diner. When I looked through the peephole, there wasn’t anyone there.

  I looked behind me, wondering if I should open the door and there was Zee’s mocking gaze. With a huff, I yanked the door open and paused. There wasn’t flaming trash, but there was a box. I leaned down and lifted it up, bringing it inside.

  Zee wasn’t there, she’d hurried to the front of the shop and was looking out.

  “You looking for someone who left this?”

  “Not that it’ll do all that much good,” she said meanly. “People can just walk down the alley to the next block over and…what the…?”

  I had lifted the box and found a book and a series of file folders that looked an awful lot like the ones Jenny kept in the office. I frowned as I stared down and then looked over to Zee and said, “We’re stupid.”

  “What are you talking about? Paige is gone. She has a sign on her door.”

  “She never does that,” I said.

  I took the box and crossed to the dining room to look out. The little boutique door was just visible from the diner, and you could see the sign on the door. We couldn’t read it, of course, because it was too far away, but I’d looked over at the diner often enough to know that sign wasn’t normally there and the closed sign was clicked off.

  I flipped through the files in the box and found Jane’s. Inside of it was a picture of much younger Jane and a man I didn’t know. Now that I’d seen the picture, it was obvious that J.J. was this man’s son. J.J. had a wide dash of Jane in him, so if you weren’t looking for the resemblance, you might not see it. Behind the picture was an official-looking report. I skimmed it long enough to verify that it was Jane’s DNA report and then passed it to Zee.

  I rose, went into my office, and unlocked the closet. I grabbed a random file, brought it out, and showed Zee. The file folders and handwriting were the same.

  Zee’s head cocked as she compared the two, her eyes narrowed, and she said in a low, nasty voice, “Jenny is lucky she moved to Florida.”

  I ran my fingers over the file folders with their minute variations, looked up, and said, “Hey look.”

  Paige, the boutique owner, was walking down the street so casually it was ridiculous.

  “She never walks like that,” I said.

  “Especially when that boutique is supposed to be open,” Zee agreed.

  We both watched her like vultures as she stopped and smelled a flower. Given that it was December, it wasn’t like that was a June rose.

  “Geez,” Zee muttered when Paige waved at someone across the street and then moseyed up to her shop.

  “We should call Jane,” I said to Zee. “Then we can be done.”

  “You’re really going to just…let go…of whoever threatened you and broke the window of the diner? Let alone Paige…what does she have to do with this?

  “What does she have to do with it? You’d think she was the one who was being blackmailed given what was in Jenny’s file.”

  Zee stared as the ‘Open’ sign turned back on and then she said, “You know…Donna came here a lot when Jenny owned it. They’d talk together. Almost every day she went over to the boutique.”

  I pictured the shop in my mind, suddenly remembering…the perfume bottles that were on the cabinet in the corner of Paige’s boutique. They were gorgeous and I’d looked at them a few times before remembering I was living in a tiny rental. But, I’d seen them somewhere else…I’d seen them on Donna’s vanity. They’d been dingy from smoke, but still lovely.

  “She’s involved somehow,” I said. “But…”

  But why would Donna have all those bottles? She wasn’t the type of woman who’d buy things from a person she was blackmailing. From what I knew of her, I didn’t think she was the type of woman who’d miss a chance to blackmail someone either. Did she go over and flip through the shop and just take what she had wanted?

  “I think Paige is a victim too.”

  “She’s strong enough to have climbed that trail,” Zee said. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d be faster than Mattie though.”

  I stared towards the boutique thinking and wondering. Just what had been happening over there? “Paige has arthritis. She told me around Thanksgiving. She has a lot of pain in her shoulders and wrists. I carried boxes for her.”

  “So?”

  “So you use your arms to chuck a brick through a window. I don’t think that Paige was the one who broke the window. I like her.”

  “Then why did she bring us that stuff? I liked Jenny, but I find I’m not surprised that she was involved.”

  I glanced at Zee and around the diner. The window w
as out, Simon hadn’t come back, the person who was going to board up the windows hadn’t shown up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave the diner unattended, but I wanted to talk to Paige.

  “That’s a good question,” I said. I closed the blinds, took the box of blackmailing proof, and walked to my office. I put the box in the closet, locked it, and then locked the office door as well. I walked back into the eating area, where Zee had stayed behind and said, “Well. Let’s find out.”

  Chapter 10

  “It’s amazing that you can open a door as if it’s a personal attack,” I hissed to Zee.

  Paige walked out from her back room at the sound of the bell, saw us, and paled. Her mouth gaped a moment, and then she stuttered out, “H-h-hello. You two Christmas shopping?”

  Her lips were trembling a little as were her hands. I glanced to the corner where the perfume bottles were set up and I said, “How did you end up with all of Donna’s blackmail evidence?”

  “I…don’t know what you mean,” Paige said lamely. She glanced frantically around the store.

  Zee snorted meanly and I smacked her lightly.

  “Paige,” I said gently, the good cop to Zee’s bad cop, “What’s going on?”

  A tear rolled down her cheek and she blustered, “I didn’t kill Donna.”

  “No one is saying you did,” I said as gently, crossing to her and wrapping my arm around her shoulder. “But you know something.”

  “I…I…don’t know who did it.” Her speech was both rushed and stuttering like a car that was attempting to rumble to a halt but couldn’t quite manage it.

  “You didn’t see who broke our window?” I crossed to the perfume bottles as Paige was stuttering over that question.

  She finally answered, “No…no…no. Of course, I didn’t. If I had, I’d have told you.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I figured that Simon would be by sooner or later. I didn’t think she’d done it, so I wasn’t going to push that when I had so many other things to push with her.

  I picked up a perfume bottle, showed it to Paige, and asked, “Did she just take them? Come in, pick one out, add it to her bag in front of you?”