A Perilous Cake Pop

by Fiona Grace

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Nate asked, breaking through her anxious ruminations. “That’s the sort of thing friends tell each other.”

  Because I was on a date with another guy, Ali thought, guiltily, but chose not to say aloud.

  “I didn’t really get a chance,” she said. “It all happened so quickly.”

  Nate ran his hands through his golden blond hair. He looked worried for her, and Ali felt terrible to be causing him turmoil, especially since she didn’t know where exactly her heart lay.

  “Shall we go and grab some breakfast?” he said, finally. “It sounds like you have a lot more to fill me in on.”

  Ali shook her head. “No I’m—”

  “—busy right now, I get it. How about lunch?” Nate offered. “Dinner?”

  Ali pressed her lips shut. Was he also trying to get her to agree to a date, or was she just overthinking things because of what had just happened with Seth? He had referred to them as friends before.

  “I’m being pushy again, aren’t I?” Nate said, answering her question before she’d had a chance to say it aloud. “We’re meant to be taking things slow. How about tomorrow?”

  Ali took a deep breath. At least he seemed to understand she wasn’t ready for a relationship. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “But you need to eat, Ali!” he exclaimed. “Let’s just go to The Cove. Nothing fancy. It’ll do you good. Tomorrow at nine. Sound okay?”

  Ali hesitated. But he was right that she’d need to eat, and it would be good to take her mind off things. He also did seem to understand this wasn’t a date or anything romantic, unlike Seth.

  “Fine,” Ali said, relenting. “That sounds good.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Nate asked. He looked surprised that she wasn’t going to just kick back and hang out with him.

  “Where am I going?” Ali echoed, musing aloud on the question.

  In recounting the events of Arlo’s murder to Seth and Nate, it had become abundantly clear to Ali that she was a suspect. She couldn’t help the cops, she couldn’t leave town, and she certainly wasn’t in the mood to relax. So what was there left to do? She wasn’t the type to sit around twiddling her thumbs.

  “I’m going to investigate,” she replied.

  “Ali, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea...” Nate said.

  But Ali shook her head to cut him off. She wasn’t going to let him or anyone talk her out of it.

  “I need to clear my name,” she said, firmly. “People think I did this. The cops think I did this. If I don’t save myself, then no one will.”

  And with that she marched away, determined to find out who killed Arlo Hudson.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ali hurried home and grabbed a notebook off her dresser, then sunk down into the armchair.

  She’d decided to go home because she didn’t want to be anywhere out and about near the boardwalk for fear of overhearing cruel whispers about her. Or running into any more reporters.

  She flicked to a fresh page and began to write down everything she knew about Arlo Hudson.

  New job, boss, and employees.

  Moved house, and states.

  Used to run own website.

  Girlfriend Ophelia.

  The first logical place to look, Ali decided, was his former website. According to Marco, he’d run a competition and gained a reputation in the past for making contestants cry. Perhaps there were other disgruntled vendors he’d abused in his career. Perhaps one had followed him here from Chicago to enact their revenge? Maybe that was why he’d left in the first place—because he’d made too many enemies?

  It may seem like a long shot, but there was nothing else on her list that immediately jumped out at her as obvious. Sure, employees killed their colleagues, but not usually during their first week of a new job. And yes, girlfriends killed their boyfriends, but not usually a couple weeks after moving across state with them. It seemed much more likely from the available information she had about the type of man Arlo was, that he’d made himself an enemy somewhere along the line.

  She grabbed her laptop and went online, quickly finding Arlo’s old website.

  As she browsed the content, she was surprised to see that compared to the horrible review he’d written of Seaside Sweets, his prior work wasn’t actually that bad. He had a bad reputation, but it actually seemed like his reviews hadn’t started all that bad, but had become harsher and more outlandish over time.

  “Perhaps he got meaner as his ego got bigger,” Ali said aloud. “And being head hunted to Willow Bay elevated him to a whole new level of meanness.”

  Although, maybe she just thought he was meaner now because she was the one he had offended? Things were always far more painful when they were personal. Maybe it just seemed like he was meaner now than he’d been before.

  She decided to check the Willow Bay Herald’s website to compare.

  She perused the website looking for Arlo’s column. When she found the link, she clicked on it.

  To her surprise, Arlo’s review of Seaside Sweets wasn’t actually the first one the Willow Bay Herald had published. Though Ophelia had told her that hers was the first store they’d been to, it appeared that they’d done something of a dry run first.

  Ali’s heart began to race. Could this be the answer? If Arlo had published an offensive review of another vendor in Willow Bay, that meant someone other than her had a motive for murder.

  She quickly scanned the review.

  The Cove restaurant’s dowdy exterior is at odds with its menu. This fresh seafood restaurant is one of the best I’ve ever eaten at. This is a case of don’t judge a book by its cover. While unremarkable to the eyes, the food is remarkable indeed to the taste buds.

  “Huh,” Ali said, slumping back against the couch.

  So Arlo’s first published review had been favorable. Which meant not only did the first vendor have no motive to kill him, he must’ve genuinely hated Ali’s food!

  But no, Ali thought as she mulled it all over in her mind. During the argument, Arlo had admitted he’d faked the terrible review because no one wanted to read nice ones. But then why make the Seaside Sweets review mean when he’d not done the same with this one?

  Curious, Ali looked back at the website, and immediately found her answer. Far from drawing in the thousands of hits and comments of his past website reviews and Ali’s Seaside Sweets review, this first review had barely scraped in a hundred views. There wasn’t even a single comment on it, compared to the thousands Ali’s review had quickly garnered. If the publication had hired him on the assumption a big name would draw in tons of hits, they’d have been sorely disappointed by that first review, and perhaps forced him to change tack. Maybe his original intention in switching jobs was to put the whole mean persona behind him, only to discover no one wanted him to say nice things?

  She cast her mind further back, to his visit to her store. He’d been completely quiet during his taste tests, so she’d had no idea how horrible the review would be when it appeared in publication. But perhaps he’d visited other vendors around the same time as hers and was busy drafting up reviews, ones they would have reason to suspect might end up as scathing as the one he’d written about hers had? Perhaps one of them had preemptively killed him to stop a horrible review from coming out in the future?

  Ali leapt up from the couch, a plan of action forming in her mind. She would start by asking other vendors on the boardwalk if they’d had a visit to their store from Arlo Hudson.

  *

  Ali didn’t bother checking in with Marco and Emilio since she knew they had alibis—Detective Callihan had said as much back at the bakery. So instead, she went to the next food place along, a sushi bar called Bentos. It was the type with a conveyor belt that displayed all the little dishes on sale. The windows were decorated with stickers of cute cartoon pandas and Japanese Sakura blossoms. Ali pushed open the door and went inside.

>   It was fairly busy inside with the early lunch crowd, and fairly noisy too, with the sounds of chatter mixing with the sounds of the sushi chefs in the open-air kitchen in the center of the conveyor belts, as they chopped fish and tossed hissing vegetables in woks. It smelled delicious, of soy sauce and egg noodles, and Ali’s stomach grumbled.

  The waitress on duty approached Ali with a pleasant smile. She had straight dark hair cut into a bob at her chin, and her build was small and slight. She literally looked like the last person who could murder a fully grown man and heave him into a dumpster, but Ali pressed on nonetheless.

  “Good afternoon,” the waitress said, holding out a menu to Ali. “Welcome to Bento’s. Can I get you a table?”

  “Actually, I’m not here to eat,” Ali explained. “I’m a local vendor. I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Oh?” the woman said, looking at Ali with curious brown eyes. She tucked the menu under her arm. “What’s that?”

  “Have you heard of Arlo Hudson?” Ali asked.

  “The food critic?” the woman replied. “Yeah. He died this morning. So shocking.”

  “Did he come in here at any point?” Ali asked.

  The woman shook her head of glossy black hair. “No. honestly, if he’d tried, I would’ve throttled him!” She laughed, a musical little tinkle.

  Ali’s eyes widened. “Maybe you shouldn’t make those kinds of jokes… You know, considering everything that’s going on.”

  “Oh right,” the woman replied. “Good call.”

  “So, you weren’t a fan, I take it?” Ali said.

  “Absolutely not,” the woman replied, resolutely. “We petitioned the Willow Bay Herald directly. Asked them not to hire Arlo.”

  “Oh?” Ali asked, interested.

  “Fell on deaf ears, of course,” the woman said.

  Just then the door opened behind and a couple came in. The woman’s attention went from Ali to the customers, and she moved away to attend to them, bringing the menu from out beneath her arm.

  Ali decided to leave. From what she’d heard, the sushi place was already so used to bad press they were unlikely to kill someone over it. Besides, it sounded like they’d taken the peaceful method anyway by petitioning the publication directly.

  Ali headed to the next vendor along, a vegan café. Ali wasn’t even sure if it was worth going inside. Someone who was opposed to killing animals was probably also opposed to killing humans, but you could never be too sure, and so she went in.

  Straight away, Ali could tell this wasn’t the usual vegan café. She’d been expecting white walls and plants and hippy stuff, but this place looked more like a macho sports bar. There were black and white photos of bodybuilders on the wall, and slogans about clean protein sources. The fridges were full of bottles of plant algae smoothies and nut milks ordered by their protein content, and the shelves were packed with big tubs of vegan protein powders and vegan protein snack bars. They even sold weights.

  Ali decided she’d been right to trust her instincts and come inside. There was a vegan niche that wasn’t about animal welfare, but about bodybuilding, and she’d never have known had she not ignored her preconceived assumptions.

  The man behind the counter was also the exact opposite of what Ali pictured a vegan to look like. He was a big burly man with massive muscles and a beard.

  ‘The sort of man who could snap a guy like Arlo like a twig…’ Ali thought as she approached.

  The man looked Ali up and down, slightly bemused by the small blond woman in his very masculine centric café.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  Ali shook her head. “No. I’m a neighbor. I work along the boardwalk.” She chose not to explain she worked in a bakery. He’d probably sneer at her unhealthiness.

  “Okay?” he said, still looking confused. “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to ask you a question. About Arlo Hudson.”

  The man made no attempt to hide his disdain. “That jerk? I called that paper he worked for. Petitioned them directly. We can’t have negative reviews on top of everything Sullivan Raine’s doing. Did you know that stupid Texan wants to bring his grill franchise to the boardwalk? Do you know how many cows get killed for him?” He shook his head, looking disgusted. “The whole fabric of Willow Bay is in peril right now.”

  Ali decided that the vendor, while being very overly concerned and anxious about the changes in their town, would never have risk damaging the boardwalk’s reputation by dumping a body in one of its dumpsters. And he did seem very concerned about the well-being of animals after all, considering his aversion to the steak restaurant and all the beef it produced, so it seemed unlikely he’d kill a human.

  But something else he said really caught her attention, because it was the same thing the woman from Bento’s had said as well.

  “You petitioned the Willow Bay Herald?” Ali asked.

  He nodded. “Yup. I told them to fire him.” He chuckled. “Maybe they decided to go one better and killed him!”

  Ali didn’t find his comment particularly funny, and though he meant it as an off-color joke, Ali wondered if there was a grain of truth to it. At least two vendors had petitioned the Willow Bay Herald about their decision to hire Arlo. What if they’d actually tried to fire him and he’d retaliated violently, and things had gotten out of hand?

  There was only one way to find out. Ali knew exactly where to go next. The offices of the Willow Bay Herald.

  But Ali had barely made it ten paces when her attention was drawn to a glum looking woman sitting on one of the wooden boardwalk benches—more specifically her long black hair with purple streaks. It was Ophelia.

  Ali’s heart lurched for her. She must be in the most unbearable pain at the loss of her boyfriend.

  Ali hated to see anyone in pain but was torn over approaching her. If Ophelia had heard the rumors, she might think Ali was Arlo’s killer. But she looked so forlorn that Ali simply couldn’t hold herself back.

  And so with great caution, she approached.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Ophelia?” she asked tentatively.

  The woman raised her eyes. “Oh. Ali,” she said. She offered a wane smile. “How are you?”

  Ali decided she’d made the right call coming over here and took Ophelia’s question as an invitation.

  “How am I?” she repeated softly, sitting herself on the bench beside the grieving woman. “How are you?”

  Ophelia turned her face out toward the ocean, in a wistful, contemplative expression. “I’m coping, I guess.” She turned back to face Ali. “You saw him, didn’t you?”

  The memory flashed back into Ali’s memory, and she nodded slowly, anxious about where the conversation might be about to go.

  “Did he look at peace?” Ophelia asked.

  The question took her off guard. “I—I guess,” Ali stammered. “He looked like he was sleeping.”

  Ophelia looked out to sea again and nodded. “He was a troubled soul.”

  Ali’s stomach sank. That was the exact term her mother used to describe her father, to explain his disappearance from her life. Your father was a troubled soul…

  “In what way?” Ali asked, curious not just to know more about the man who’d bullied her then turned up dead in her dumpster, but to speak to someone who might have insight into the mind of her father.

  “He had a lot of inner demons,” Ophelia replied. “That’s why he lashed out, you know? He’d attack people before they had the chance to attack him. It was just a shield. A protection.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ali said, gently. “That must’ve been hard on you.”

  “It was,” Ophelia said. “People hated us, wherever we went. Someone even slashed our tires!” She started nervously ringing her hands in her lap. “In a small way, I’m sort of glad he’s gone. He found life hard. Loving him was hard.” She turned her eyes to Ali, with a sad, pleading look in them. “Does that make me a terrible person for saying it?”
>
  Without the dark, heavy makeup, she looked almost fragile. Her expressions seemed so lost and desperate that Ali took a pause to make sure her words were adequate. The last thing she wanted to do was compound a grieving woman’s pain by saying something clumsy.

  “Grief affects us all differently,” she said carefully, channeling Delaney who was always a source of constant wisdom and compassion. “And in different ways at different times. I don’t think it’s wrong to feel relief to know someone you love who was in pain is no longer suffering. And I don’t think it’s wrong to feel better that you’ve been relieved of that burden.”

  A small, sad smile flickered across Ophelia’s face. “Thanks, Ali,” she said. “That’s actually really comforting.”

  Ali nodded, relieved she’d said the right thing. “Do you have any people here to support you? I know you said you only just moved, and I’d hate for you to be dealing with all this alone.”

  “I have family flying in tonight,” Ophelia said. She seemed to brighten at the thought. Then, out of nowhere, she became really animated. “I just thought of something I need to ask you!”

  Ali blinked, a little taken aback by the sudden change in Ophelia’s mood. She’d gone from bereft to suddenly enthusiastic in a way that was jarring, and disconcerting. Ali tried to remember her own words about grief affecting people in different ways, but it still felt a little peculiar to her.

  “What’s that?” she asked, growing slightly cautious.

  “I wanted to ask you if you cater for events?” Ophelia asked. “You know like big gatherings or whatever.”

  She looked downright eager now, and it took Ali a moment to get her mind out of supportive mode and into business-woman mode.

  “I haven’t yet,” she said. “But there’s no reason why I can’t, schedule permitting. Why do you ask?”

  “No particular reason,” Ophelia said dismissively, sounding decidedly avoidant. “But say someone wanted you to bake one-hundred and fifty cupcakes. For an event. Would you be able to do it?”