Éclair and Present Danger, page 8
“Kitties love tuna. And the leftover soupy part of vanilla ice cream.”
With expert hands, she cracked each of the trio of eggs against the side of the bowl and watched as the yolk slid down the inner edge. “I suppose I could give that a try—later. Doing it now might seem like she’s being rewarded for her misbehavior earlier.”
Bridget stopped rubbing Lovey’s neck. “Misbehavior?”
Winnie wrapped her fingers around the mixing spoon once again and pointed it at Lovey. “Do you want to tell Aunty Bridget what you did today? Or should I?” The cat turned her head and her attention toward the bird’s eye view of Serenity Lane she favored. “Okay, fine. I’ll tell her.”
With her free hand, Winnie poured in the oil and the milk and began to mix. “Lovey, here, decided to cross the street, run around the back of Bart’s house, and wiggle her way through a gap in the basement screen.”
“And?”
“Mr. Nelson came over and managed to coax her back outside.”
Bridget folded her thinning arms against her chest and cast a knowing smile at first Lovey, and then Winnie. “You should have called Master Sergeant Hottie.”
She stopped mixing and stared at the woman. “You are as bad as Renee, do you know that?”
“We just want to see you happy, dear.”
“I am happy, Bridget. It’s just been a stressful few weeks with the pending demise of the bakery and then thinking I might be getting a reprieve by way of Gertie’s will.” She returned to the liquid mixture and the next handful of ingredients still to be added. When everything was in, she mixed again. “But things are looking up now.”
“It does certainly seem as if this new business idea has given you a lift. And I’m glad about that. I truly am. But you’re young. You should be out dating instead of spending your evenings sitting on the front porch with old fogies like Parker and me.”
“I love my time with you. I always have.” She added the dry ingredients to the second bowl and swapped her spoon for the electric hand mixer. Slowly, she moved the bowl in a circle with one hand while holding the beaters steady with the other. “Why should I waste my time on something that’s probably not going to go anywhere?”
“Because it could.”
Winnie looked down at the creamy mixture taking shape in the bowl and tried to think of something clever to say in response. But there was nothing. Bridget was right. She had the drive for a career down pat. It was just the rest of her life that seemed rather rudderless.
“Can we talk about something else for a little while?” Winnie powered off the mixer and set it to the side. A peek over her shoulder confirmed that the oven had, indeed, reached the proper baking temperature.
“Such as?”
“Whether Bart had decided to sell the house prior to his death.” She poured the mixture into the prepared pan and then popped it into the oven. When the timer was set, she turned back to face her neighbor. “Maybe being there, without Ethel, had simply become too much for him.”
Bridget returned to the window, pushed the simple sheer curtain to the side, and looked across the street, her back to Winnie. “There is no way Bart would have sold that house. Just think about all those pictures he had around his living room—pictures highlighting nearly fifty years spent loving Ethel. Think about the case on the fireplace mantel that held his beloved coin. Think about all of the parties they had in that house along the way, all the milestones that were celebrated there.”
“Pictures and coins are portable, Bridget. They could have just as easily been displayed around a condominium or an apartment in an assisted living facility. And as for the memories, they were in his heart and his head.” She carried the empty bowls, measuring tools, and mixing spoons over to the sink. Normally, she’d wash them right away if for no other reason than to ensure they were at the ready for her next baking whim. But today, she left them and wandered over to the window and Bridget. “Ethel’s death really took its toll on him, Bridget. You know that. Maybe he’d realized it, too, and decided it was time to make a change.”
The curtain fell back into place as Bridget turned to face Winnie. “Bart wouldn’t have sold. I’m as sure of that as I am that Parker is a certifiable pain in the neck.”
She ignored the woman’s slap at Mr. Nelson and stayed on point. “Why? He was painfully lonely in that house without Ethel. Maybe he just didn’t want to be there all by himself anymore. Ethel was quite a lively personality. Having her there one minute and gone the next would be tough. Especially for someone who’d doted on her the way Bart did.”
Bridget gestured toward the living room and, at Winnie’s nod, walked over to a chair and sat. “Late last week, I was on the way home from a meeting at the paper when I saw Bart sitting on his front porch. I waved and mentioned the vitamin C I’d stopped to buy at the pharmacy—I’d woken with a horrible cold that morning, dear—but he didn’t respond.”
“Okay . . .” Winnie perched on the front edge of the couch opposite from Bridget and waited for the woman to continue, the anguish in her friend’s eyes impossible to miss.
“Well, you know how I am, Winnie. I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I couldn’t just assume he was sleeping or simply preoccupied with his thoughts. I had to get to the bottom of why he hadn’t waved back at me.” Bridget picked at a nonexistent piece of lint on her flowered skirt and then leaned her head back against the chair. “What I ended up doing, though, was interrupting a rather pleasant memory of a trip he and Ethel had taken after Mark had moved out on his own. There Bart was, sitting on his rocker, smiling and laughing in a way I hadn’t seen him do since it became apparent Ethel wasn’t going to pull through.”
“That sounds lovely,” Winnie said. “But I don’t understand what that has to do with your absolute conviction Bart hadn’t decided to sell . . .”
“When I stepped onto his porch and he still seemed completely unaware of my presence, I clapped my hands.” The woman closed her eyes as if the image accompanying her words had become too painful. “Bart’s smile disappeared, his laughter stopped, and the utter sadness that crept over his face left me wishing for a sweater to combat the chill I felt to my very core. I apologized, of course, but it was too late. My need to be noticed and acknowledged had snapped Bart back into reality.”
“You couldn’t have known, Bridget.”
Slowly, Bridget’s lashes parted to reveal a regret that seemed far bigger than the situation deserved. “Bart said something that made me realize what I’d done, and so I asked him to tell me about the trip, hoping desperately that revisiting the moment again would bring his happiness back. But it didn’t work. He was sharing the memory rather than experiencing the memory the way he had been when I clapped.
“It was like . . . it was like I’d taken Ethel from him all over again.”
Something about the way Bridget’s voice cracked made Winnie stand, bypass the coffee table between them, and crouch down beside the woman. Reaching up, she took Bridget’s wrinkled hand in hers and caressed it gently with her thumb. “Bridget, don’t.”
“That’s when Bart told me that Ethel was still with him—in the living room where they watched television each night, in the kitchen where they sat across the table from each other, and in their bed where he’d held her as she fell asleep for virtually all of their nearly fifty years together. He told me that when his grief became so great, he would go into one of those spaces and simply feel her.” Bridget flipped her hand inside Winnie’s gentle grasp and squeezed. “That’s why I’m absolutely certain that those flyers you saw yesterday had nothing to do with Bart. And why I’m absolutely certain that he knew nothing about them, either.”
Once again, Mark Reilly was back in the forefront of Winnie’s thoughts . . .
“Okay,” she said as her thoughts moved ahead into the processing stage. “Then how could Mark have honestly thought he could put the place up for sale without Bart’s say-so? I mean, what was he going to do when the place sold? Say, ‘Oh, by the way, Dad, a moving truck is coming to deliver the next family, so you gotta go’?”
But even as she lost the male-sounding mimic to her voice, she knew it was a silly thing to say. After all, if Bart were dead when the sale happened, there would be nothing to say, no cajoling to be done. Mark could simply put the place up for sale, sign on the dotted line, and pocket the money.
Then again, anyone with a brain in their head knew Bart was old. His health had been declining even before Ethel’s death. So why not just wait? Why jump the gun?
Winnie stood but remained beside Bridget’s chair, one question after the other firing from between her lips. “Do we know for certain that the house was to go to Mark upon Bart’s death? And if it was, is the printing of a few flyers really enough proof? Do we take this to the police?”
Bridget’s head parted company with the back of the chair as she, too, struggled to her feet. “Part of me thinks yes, and part of me thinks no.”
“Why the no?” Winnie asked. “I mean, it seems pretty likely to me on account of what we know about the flyers and Bart’s disinterest in leaving his home anytime soon.”
“I don’t know. Call it a nagging feeling.”
Winnie meandered her way back to the couch but didn’t sit, her thoughts far too jumbled not to keep walking, keep processing. On one hand, it seemed to make perfect sense to go to the Silver Lake Police Department and at least share their suspicion, but, on the other hand, what did she know? She baked desserts for a living—or did . . .
And will again!
She rounded the back of the couch and headed toward the kitchen, the timer on her oven beginning its final second-by-second countdown.
Concentrate on the Dessert Squad, dummy . . .
Leave the police work to the police . . .
“Besides, we can’t forget what Parker said about Sissy and Ava,” Bridget reminded.
Winnie stilled her mitted hand on the oven door and waited for the official beep. “You mean about Sissy telling Ava to trample Bart’s flower bed on the day I found his body?”
“It seems to me that woman had to be mighty confident Bart wasn’t going to come tearing out of the house screaming at her precious angel again.”
When the cake pan was safely in the center of the cooling rack, Winnie removed the oven mitt from her hand and hung it on the magnetized hook on the side of the refrigerator. “The kid lost a tooth, Bridget. Do you really think that’s worthy of murdering someone? I mean at least with Mark you can see how his actions might have been propelled by greed. A house like Bart’s, on a street like Serenity Lane, could potentially go for some nice money. A lost tooth can’t compete with that. Not even close.”
Bridget wandered back into the kitchen, stopped in front of the cooling cake, and sniffed. “I could take offense over the way you seem oblivious to my career, dear, but I won’t. Simply see that I get a piece of this marvelous creation when it’s ready, and I’ll overlook it.”
“What are you talking about? I—I read your column.”
The woman’s left eyebrow shot upward.
“What?” Winnie protested. “I do.”
The right eyebrow rose in solidarity with the left.
“M-most of the time,” she whispered.
Bridget crossed her arms, only to uncross them in favor of drumming the fingers of her right hand atop the counter. “What’s the last column of mine you remember reading?”
She searched her memory bank but came up empty. Unless—
“You wrote about Greg Stevens. You called him Master Sergeant Hottie!”
Thank you, Renee . . .
Bridget’s eyes narrowed on her face.
Uh-oh.
“Did I call him that in the body of my column, dear?”
She swallowed. Could she claim a sudden urge to use the restroom and call Renee for help?
“That’s what I thought.” Bridget shuffled over to the top of the staircase that would take her past Mr. Nelson’s door and out into the late afternoon sunshine. But when she reached the exit, she turned and made a beeline back to the window and the cat licking herself on its sill. Lovey retracted her tongue from her hind leg, looked up at Bridget, and began to purr. “This pageant Ava was supposed to be in this weekend wasn’t just about winning a sash and wearing a cute little crown for photographers, Winnie. It was about much more than that.”
“Oh?”
“There were rumors that a talent scout was to be in attendance as a favor to a judge he’d known since college.”
She made a mental note to read Bridget’s column on a weekly basis and then forced herself to focus on what the woman was saying.
“Sissy was absolutely convinced this talent scout was going to take one look at Ava and sign her for commercials, soap operas, prime-time television, movies, you name it.”
“I would imagine most of the moms associated with this pageant probably believed the same thing, Bridget.”
“True. But how many of those moms had the foresight to contact the man ahead of time to tell him about their daughter?” Bridget’s hand moved around to Lovey’s chin. “And how many of them were actually contacted by that same scout two weeks ago for additional pictures and a résumé?”
She started to lean against the refrigerator but stopped as the woman’s words took hold. “Seriously? He really contacted Sissy for pictures and a résumé?”
Bridget stopped petting Lovey to nod. “He did. From what Sissy told me when it first happened, this guy thought Ava would be perfect for a commercial he was helping to cast for this coming week. In New York. He was to meet Sissy and Ava after the pageant to sign the papers and, potentially, take them back to New York with him that very night.”
“So why couldn’t that still happen?”
“It was a toothpaste commercial, dear. Teeth are rather essential, don’t you think?”
Chapter 11
“What about a dessert for someone who’s fit to be tied and needs a treat to calm them down?”
Winnie looked up from the notepad in front of her and smiled at Mr. Nelson across the porch table. “I’m listening . . .”
“You could call it Fit To Be Tied.” Mr. Nelson dug his knife into the margarine container, slathered the butter substitute onto his second of three croissants, and then pointed at Winnie’s list. “Or maybe Hopping Mad.”
“Those are good, Mr. Nelson, but I’m trying to incorporate the problem my dessert will solve with the actual name of the dessert. Like, Don’t-Be-Blue Berry Pie for someone who is feeling sad.” She set down her pen long enough to take a sip of coffee and then returned to her notes and the slowly growing list of items for the Dessert Squad’s menu.
The man took a bite of his croissant and then popped a blueberry into his mouth from the bowl Winnie had placed in the center of the table. “People get mad, too, Winnie.”
“I know that, Mr. Nelson. And it’s certainly a problem worthy of a dessert rescue, but I need to equate it with a specific—”
“Heck, we saw plenty of examples of that with Bart these last few weeks,” he said, helping himself to an entire handful of blueberries.
He tried to sound removed, as if it was just another morning on the porch, but Winnie knew her friend was still shaken by what had happened across the street. “The police will figure out what happened to him, Mr. Nelson.”
“If Bart were twenty-five, instead of eighty-five, I could believe that. But I don’t think getting to the bottom of a crime against us old folks carries the same urgency as, say, that bad stretch of road on the north side of town where all those accidents keep happening.”
“Bart was suffocated,” she reminded him. “They can’t ignore that.”
“Maybe they can’t. But they can control where it falls on the priority list.” Mr. Nelson returned to his butter knife and the last of his croissants. “I suspect the person who did this is right under our noses.”
“Then we’ll figure this out, Mr. Nelson. With or without the police.”
His hand trembled ever so slightly as he placed the knife back on the table and brought the croissant to his mouth. “And if we do,” he said, winking, “that lazy, good-for-nothing Chief Rankin will be seeing red.”
Seeing red . . .
Seeing red—
“That’s it!” She tightened her grip on her pen and added another dessert to her menu. “Mr. Nelson, you did it!”
He stopped chewing and tapped his hearing aids. “I didn’t hide anything.”
The momentary confusion born on his words quickly gave way to understanding. “You did it, Mr. Nelson. Did it.”
“Oh.” The man leaned across his now-empty plate. “Did what?”
“You just came up with my next dessert—Seeing Red Velvet Cake.”
Mr. Nelson smiled triumphantly. “My parents always used to tell me I was one smart cookie.”
Smart cookie . . .
One smart cookie . . .
“One Smart Cookie!” She returned to her list again as her mind raced ahead to the various choices that could be placed in parentheses on the menu—chocolate chip, double chocolate fudge, butterscotch, et cetera. “A perfect choice for a really good report card or some other school-related milestone . . . Mr. Nelson, these are awesome. Thank you!”
* * *
With the help of her index finger, Winnie ticked off the boxes she’d opened in relation to the shipping order in her opposite hand.
Yup. She’d unpacked them all.
Then again, if she had, why was one of them moving?
Painfully aware of the lack of sleep she’d been getting, Winnie rubbed her eyes. When the box continued to move, she rubbed them again.
She was about to rub them a third time when her backside began to vibrate. Sliding her hand into her pocket, she pulled out her phone, checked the caller ID screen, and held the device to her ear. “Hey, Renee.”
“Whatcha doing?”
“Right now? I’m staring at a box I could swear I unpacked, yet it’s—it’s—” She stopped, swallowed. “Moving.”
