Cappuccinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse

by Harper Lin

  He led me to a wall full of hot pink cell phone cases decorated with flowers and hearts and glitter. They made me gag a little. I was a thirty-four-year-old woman, not a twelve-year-old girl.

  “See, aren’t these more your style?” he asked.

  I smiled tightly. “Yeah, they’re much cheerier.” At least that was true.

  We looked through the cases for a few minutes, him explaining the relative merits of each of them to me. Like the phones, the cases weren’t the top of the line, and I knew they wouldn’t do much to protect my phone from drops and spills as he said they would. I eventually picked out a case with a large-scale floral print that I could claim vaguely reminded me of a Pucci print. As we went over to the register, I started to worry that I’d dealt with Chris’s slime and the ugly phone cases without finding a way to work Mr. Cardosi into the conversation.

  Chris insisted on putting the new case on my phone for me. “I can get rid of this old one for you,” he said, pulling it across the counter toward himself.

  I had paid a pretty penny for that case, and I didn’t doubt for a second that he would try to resell it online. “Oh no, I’ll keep it. You know, in case I break this one somehow.” I giggled for good measure. “I’m such a klutz sometimes!”

  “Customer’s always right,” he said, not really sounding like he meant it.

  I took my bag with the new case’s packaging in it and turned toward the door. The barbershop was directly in my line of sight, and I saw how to bring Mr. Cardosi up. “Oh!” I said, turning back around.

  Chris was right in my face, and he didn’t seem to have noticed that I had started speaking. “So, Francesca, since you’re new in town, maybe I could take you out sometime and show you around. You know, show you the good places to eat, the best place to get a cup of coffee, where the movie theatre is…”

  As if I didn’t know the best place to get a cup of coffee. “Um, I don’t know.” He was uncomfortably close, and I stepped backward. “You know, I’m still just getting settled here and—”

  He moved in closer again. “That’s exactly why you should let me take you out. I can help you get acquainted with the town!”

  “Um, I don’t—I don’t—” I glanced out the front window at the barbershop. Distraction would be my technique. “Hey, isn’t that the shop where the barber who just died worked?”

  Chris looked across the street. I used the opportunity to step away again.

  “Yeah, that’s the place.” He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “He was just a grouchy old man. I mean, I’m not saying he had it coming, but as angry as that man was, I’m not surprised he pissed someone off enough to murder him.”

  That was a nauseating statement, especially since Chris was laughing as he said it, but the fact that he knew Mr. Cardosi had been murdered meant that I really needed to ask some more questions.

  “He was murdered?” I gasped.

  “Oh yeah, you didn’t hear?” He sounded excited. “It’s all over town. But I guess since you’re new here…”

  “Do they know who did it?”

  “No, not yet,” he said. “But it could be anybody. Seriously, dude was angry. He was always yelling about something or other. I’d see him outside his store screaming at his customers, telling them to never come back. Now me, I want to make my customers feel special so they want to come back.” He gave me a slimy smile, as if he needed to make it more clear that he was coming on to me. When I didn’t react, he went back to talking about Mr. Cardosi.

  “He came in here once, like a month ago, to buy a phone. The one he had was so old, it still had an antenna. I mean, come on, the thing was from, like, the nineties! Anyway, he was in here looking at the new touch screens, and forget apps, he couldn’t even make a phone call with one! He kept asking where the keypad was and how he was supposed to dial anybody. It made him so angry, but it was so funny! He just kept poking at it, and every time he’d get close to getting it to do what he wanted, he’d end up hitting the home button or the power button or the volume, then he’d freak out even more. Dude finally just threw the phone on the counter and stormed out. ‘I’m taking my business elsewhere!’” Chris said in an impression of Mr. Cardosi.

  That was the second Mr. Cardosi impression I’d heard that morning, and I preferred Matty’s. Matty’s was affectionate. Chris’s was just… rude.

  “I laughed about it for days!” he added.

  He was still laughing about it. I knew Mr. Cardosi’s fits could be comical, but it seemed wrong to laugh about it now that he was dead. Even if I would have considered going out with Chris before, which I wouldn’t have, I really wouldn’t now. Chris’s diatribe had put a bad taste in my mouth, but it had given me the tidbit that Mr. Cardosi had been looking for a new, more modern phone. Maybe that was something useful.

  “Well, that’s certainly interesting,” I said tersely. I was more than ready to get out of there. I looked at my phone briefly. “Oh, look at the time! I really need to get going!” I made for the door.

  “What about that date?” Chris asked as I hurried past him.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work out,” I said, nearly out the door.

  “But why not?” Chris called.

  “Oh, just, um…” I glanced around the street. “You’re not really my type.” I took off down the sidewalk.

  Chapter 9

  I hurried down the sidewalk and turned the corner at the end of the block. I didn’t know if Chris was watching me walk away—I wasn’t about to turn around and look back—but if he was, I wanted to be out of his view as soon as possible. I paused just around the corner to see if I could hear footsteps following me. I couldn’t, but I didn’t know how likely it was that I would actually be able to hear someone behind me. People always could in the movies, but this was real life, not the latest blockbuster thriller.

  I walked for a few more blocks, turning at every corner just in case someone was tailing me. I figured if I was going to investigate Mr. Cardosi’s death, I may as well have fun with it. When I arrived at one of the town parks, I made my way to a bench and sat down to text Matty. I assumed he was at work, but I thought I could go ahead and see if he wanted to get together that evening to discuss the case a little more.

  I leaned back against the bench to relax while I waited for his response. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to respond quickly or not, or if I even merited an immediate response in his book. I gazed around the park. It was one of those cute old parks with a collection of concrete chess tables. My grandfather used to take me there when I was growing up to play chess, but he’d made me practice at home for a long time before he’d let me go to the park and play with his buddies. A scattering of older men were at the chess tables, paired up in competition. A few of them seemed especially serious about it, hitting their chess timers between each move, but most of them were playing more leisurely, seemingly more interested in debating world events than in defeating their opponents.

  Hardly a minute later, my phone buzzed. I was pleasantly surprised that Matty had gotten back to me so quickly. He agreed to have a late dinner with me that night after I closed the café. That reminded me I needed to get to work soon. I glanced at the time. I still had a little while. I considered lingering in the park for a while, but then it occurred to me that I also wanted to talk to Mrs. Collins and see if she had any other clues. If I left right away, I could make it back to my neighborhood to talk to her for a little while and still make it to work on time. I might be just a little late, but Sammy would forgive me.

  I stood and headed to my street. It wasn’t a long walk if you knew the back way. It was counterintuitive, but if I walked through the back of the park, went down the set of stairs in the side of the hill, and took the path around the little pond, I’d pop out just two streets down from my house. I moved quickly, waving at a few of the chess players I recognized as I passed. In no time at all, I was at Mrs. Collins’s door.

  She
didn’t have a bell, so I used the heavy, ornate door knocker. There was no answer for quite a while, and I couldn’t hear any movement inside the house despite practically putting my ear right up against the door. I was just about to knock again when the door swung open.

  Mrs. Collins stood there, her hair done up just so, her lips painted red, her blouse and slacks immaculately pressed. She would have fit in with the finest New York socialites, but that seemed typical of the older generation—they always wanted to look nice, even if they would just be sitting around the house all day. Sometimes I wished my generation had the same attitude, even if I did enjoy being comfortable. She made me feel woefully underdressed, despite the designer labels inside my jeans and black T-shirt. I might have fit in in a New York City office, but I would have looked positively slovenly next to the residents in the Cape Bay retirement home.

  “Well, hello, Francesca dear!” Mrs. Collins said warmly, taking my hand in both of hers. “I’ve just put the kettle on if you’d like to come in for a cup of tea. I’m sorry, I don’t keep coffee in the house—I know that’s what you’d prefer.”

  I wondered if putting the kettle on for whoever was at the door was what had taken her so long to answer. I smiled at her warmly. “I’d love that, Mrs. Collins!”

  “Well, come on in, dearie!” She stepped aside for me.

  Like her, her house was impressively tidy and pulled together. “Neat as a pin,” my grandmother would have said.

  Mrs. Collins shut the door and shuffled past me down the hall. “If you don’t mind, we’ll sit in the kitchen. It’s difficult for me to carry the tea set into the sitting room anymore.”

  “Of course!” I said politely.

  We walked down the hall and into the brightly lit kitchen.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?” I asked.

  “No, no, dear, it’ll just be a minute,” she replied.

  She certainly was fond of calling me “dear.” As I sat at the table, it occurred to me that she hadn’t yet inquired as to the reason for my visit. She must have just been so happy to have a visitor that she didn’t care about the reason for their arrival. I watched her move around the kitchen, gathering tea cups and sugar and tea bags. She arranged it all neatly on a silver tea tray even though we would just be sitting at the table. When the kettle whistled, she added it to the tray and shuffled over to the table, dismissing my continued offers of assistance. She carefully poured tea for each of us and took a sip before speaking.

  “So, Francesca, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  I decided to plead a need for commiseration. I sighed deeply. “Well, Mrs. Collins, you know, Mr. Cardosi’s death has just been weighing on me. I know you said on the day he…” I paused for effect. “The day he passed away that you’d spent a lot of time with him, so I felt like you, of all people, would be able to chat with me about him.”

  “Oh yes, dear. So sad, isn’t it? And him so young yet.”

  I hadn’t really thought of Mr. Cardosi as young, but I supposed if you were pushing eighty, as Mrs. Collins was, Mr. Cardosi’s late sixties did seem rather youthful.

  I nodded. “You were close to him?” Chris the Cell Phone Guy had shared freely after just a simple question, and I hoped that technique would work similarly well with Mrs. Collins.

  “I was! That’s why it’s been so hard for me. You know, so many of my friends are passing now. Your mother, then Gino Cardosi. And death comes in threes, you know. I just keep waiting for who will be next.” She shook her head sadly.

  I looked at her sympathetically. I wished she hadn’t mentioned my mother, but I supposed it had been a bad couple of months for our block, and she was entitled to be sad about it too.

  As I’d hoped, she continued talking after a brief pause. “You know, lately, I’d been going over in the evenings to help Gino practice courting a lady.” The shock must have shown on my face because Mrs. Collins rushed to continue. “Oh no, no, no, dear. He wasn’t courting me. It was someone else—he wouldn’t tell me who. But he hadn’t dated anyone since his Carolina—that was Matteo’s mother—passed away twenty-five years ago, and he was dreadfully out of practice. We just went over basic things—pulling a chair out for a lady, helping her with her coat, how to not make a mess of himself when eating spaghetti Bolognese. I helped him pick out some outfits to wear out to dinner with her that made him look like the respectable businessman he was.”

  I got the feeling from the way Mrs. Collins was talking that she wished she really had been the one Mr. Cardosi was courting—if he was actually courting anyone at all. I reminded myself of Mrs. Collins’s tendency to exaggerate and Matty’s confidence that his dad was largely a loner. It seemed entirely possible that Mrs. Collins had invited herself over to Mr. Cardosi’s with the intention of making him over as a suitor for herself, or some other watered-down version of what she had told me. But then something she said caught my attention.

  “Apparently the lady he was seeing, despite being a more mature woman like myself, was quite technological. She wanted to be able to—oh, what is it you young people call that? When you type to each other on your phones?”

  “Text?” I prompted.

  “Yes! Text! Apparently she wanted to be able to text messages to Gino, but his cell phone didn’t do that, and he wanted to get a new one that would let him do that. He went to that awful place across from his barbershop, but the young man who works there was quite rude to him. Gino didn’t buy anything.”

  So maybe there was something to Mrs. Collins’s story after all. I glanced at the clock on the wall and realized I needed to get to the coffee shop. I swallowed the rest of my tea. “Mrs. Collins, I’ve had such a lovely time with you, but I need to get to work. Thank you for the tea.” I rose from my chair so she wouldn’t be able to delay me by starting more stories.

  She sighed and put everything back on the tea tray. “Well, I do appreciate you coming, dear. You know you’re welcome here any time. Watching you grow up was always such a joy. You know, Mr. Collins and I were never able to have children, so having you across the street was almost like having one of our own grandchildren there.”

  I stopped and looked at her. I had never known that she felt that way. I gave her a hug. “Thank you, Mrs. Collins. That’s so sweet of you.” When I pulled away, I thought I saw tears in her eyes. After being home for over a month, I was finally realizing how deep my roots ran in this town.

  “Well, dear, it’s the truth.”

  I smiled and noticed the tea tray on the table. “Let me carry that over to the sink for you.” I put the rest of the dishes on the tray and carried it to the counter so she wouldn’t have to. I gave her one more hug and hurried off to the café.

  Chapter 10

  “Have fun at the beach?” Sammy asked as I walked into the backroom of the café. Her normally pale face was flushed bright red from working over steaming coffee all morning.

  I smiled. “Yeah, it was nice! I got to get my feet wet, dig my toes in the sand, relax a little. I took off when the tourists started coming in.”

  It was a common sentiment in seaside towns: tourists leave the beach when the tide starts coming in; locals leave when the tourists start coming in. It wasn’t that we didn’t like the tourists—we really did. It was fun getting to meet new people all the time, and the boon to the local economy was great. By the end of the summer, though, we were ready to turn back into the sleepy town we were the other nine months of the year.

  “I’m surprised there were any tourists left to go out to the beach—it seemed like they were all here,” Sammy said.

  “So it’s been busy!”

  Sammy turned from the dishes she was scrubbing, and I noticed her normally loose wisps of hair were plastered to her face. “Busy is an understatement.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at her deadpan delivery. I took my apron off its hook and dropped it over my head. I poked my head out into the café as I tied the apron’s sash behind my back. Becky was w
iping down the counter, her red curls a little extra frizzy from the heat and humidity. Several people were scattered among the tables and chairs, but it looked as if the rush had mostly died down.

  “I can take care of that if you want to get out of here,” I said, gesturing at Sammy’s dishes.

  “That’s okay. I’m almost done.” Sammy wasn’t the type to leave a job unfinished, even if someone was offering to take it over for her.

  I grabbed a rag and went out to the front to wipe down tables and straighten up. I could always find something to fiddle around with, whether it was cleaning things or moving things around or preparing food. Sammy finished the dishes and went home, and Amanda, another of our teenage part-timers, came in to relieve Becky. The afternoon just got slower. By mid-afternoon, we had taken care of everything that needed to be done and we didn’t have a single customer, so I let Amanda go home after she promised to come back if things picked up and I needed her.

  I stood behind the counter, glancing around the empty café. Days like this always made me nervous. They were few and far between, but they always made me worry that business was slowing down overall and soon we’d have to close. I knew it was ridiculous, especially as busy as Sammy said it had been during the morning, but I worried all the same.

  I went in the back to get the notebook and pens I’d purchased and took them back to the front. I leaned over the counter and wrote down everything I’d learned that morning—everything I’d talked about with slimy Chris and old Mrs. Collins. I included my impressions about my conversations with each of them. I wanted to remember what I’d thought in the moment about Mrs. Collins’s possible exaggerations and Chris’s obnoxious offensiveness. With the small size of the notebook, I quickly filled up each page and found myself wishing I’d gotten a bigger notebook, even if it was somewhat less portable.

  I finished my notes just as the late afternoon “rush” got started. Apparently everyone who was going to come in that day had come during the morning because, while I had to hustle, I never got to the point where I had to call Amanda back in. It quickly slowed back down, and I was left with a few pairs of customers lingering over their drinks. I felt a little bit guilty that things had been so hectic for Sammy but so easy for me. After the last of the customers left, I wiped everything down again and waited for closing time.