Early the next morning, Ash and I arrived at the Round Table at the same time, me walking up to the downtown diner from the marina, him getting out of his SUV, which he’d driven from the sheriff’s office, all of two blocks away. I might have made fun of him for this, but he looked exhausted. The only problem working the night shift, he’d said, was that he couldn’t sleep during the day. I was proud of him for stepping up to volunteer, but was starting to be concerned about the toll it was taking on his mental state, not to mention his body.
His shoulders were rounded with fatigue, and his handsome, square-jawed face, typically ruddy with health and good cheer, was an odd shade of gray. But when he caught sight of me, he straightened up, smiled, and held the glass door open for me. “Ms. Minnie,” he said, bowing and waving me in.
“That reminds me of something I’ve always wanted to ask,” I said. We walked past the PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF sign and slid into our regular booth.
The round table after which the restaurant had been named decades ago was in the back. It was also empty, as it usually was on Sunday mornings until the churchgoers started filing in. Monday through Saturday, however, it was the unofficial official table for a geezerly group of men, a group certain they had the answers to the world’s problems.
I avoided that table as much as possible. They thought I was a youngster who needed much instruction, particularly from them, and this made me so cranky that, whenever they snared me in a conversation, I could almost feel the smoke coming out of my ears.
Ash knew all this, and for my protection and theirs, he’d suggested meeting for a Sunday breakfast instead of Saturday.
The menus were sitting upright on the table behind the basket of jams and jellies. Ash pointed in their direction. “Going to walk on the wild side and have something new?”
“Maybe next week. But let’s get back to the question I’ve always wanted to ask.”
“You’re not going to make me think, are you? Because I’m pretty sure my brain went to sleep when I clocked out.”
“I can drive you home, you know.”
“No, I’ll be fine.” He smiled. “Back to your question. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“You two are up bright and early.” Sabrina, the restaurant’s forever waitress, put down two water glasses. “Coffee coming up for Minnie. How about you, Ash?”
“Decaf,” he said sadly.
“Working night shift again?” She took an order pad from her apron and pulled a pen from her graying bun of hair. “Then you’ll want the oatmeal with dried cherries and walnuts. Single biscuit on the side with gravy?” He nodded and she wrote. “The usual for you, Minnie?”
I almost said yes. “No. Let’s try something different. Your pick.”
“Oatmeal pancakes with cherry pecan sausages for Miss Minnie.” She slid the pad back into her pocket. “Back in a jiffy with the coffees.”
“That’s it,” I said, tipping my head after the retreating Sabrina. “My question. When does a woman stop getting called ‘miss’ and turn into a ‘ma’am’? Is it when she starts getting gray hair? Is it when she starts paying more attention to comfort than fashion? Is it when she has children? Grandchildren? Where’s the line?”
He laughed, showing the dimples in his cheeks. “You’re making this more complicated than it is.”
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done so and undoubtedly wouldn’t be the last. “Explain, please.”
“What really matters,” he said, “is the age of the people involved. If the woman is older than you, she’s a ma’am. If she’s younger than you, she’s a miss.”
“That’s it?”
He nodded.
“That’s pretty simple.” I thought of a possible complication. “Are you sure that’s a universal truth? I mean, maybe that’s just the Wolverson Theory.”
“Nope,” he said. “Guys talk about this stuff all the time. It’s a national consensus.”
I laughed. “Nice try.” Although the image I got of a bunch of cops huddled together in the back corner of a break room, raising their hands and vowing to accept the etiquette of addressing women was a good one, I was old enough to know that men talking about such a thing was more far-fetched than Eddie learning how to say thank you.
Sabrina approached with two steaming mugs. “Here you go,” she said, setting down the mugs. “Your breakfasts are next in line so it won’t be long.”
“How’s Bill these days?” I asked.
For once, the back corner booth was empty of her husband, Bill D’Arcy. He was a newcomer to Chilson, having moved north less than two years ago, and was what you’d kindly call taciturn. Bill spent most of his day hunched over his laptop moving stocks and bonds around the world and making more money than I would have dreamed possible.
He’d established himself as a regular at the Round Table soon after he moved north, and in addition to becoming the love of Sabrina’s life, after his car hit the outside wall of the restaurant, he confessed that he had early-onset macular degeneration.
Sabrina glanced at Bill’s normal seat. “The treatments are doing okay. He’s still losing his sight, but it’s slowed down. Or so the doctors say.”
The muscles in her face shifted and I could tell she was struggling not to cry. Just as I was starting to reach out to touch her hand, to give what comfort I could, she said, “Of course, there’s a bonus to it.” She grinned. “He won’t see me getting old and fat.” Smirking, she slapped her hips with the palms of her hands and headed back to the kitchen.
I wondered whether, if and when the time came, I’d be able to joke about health issues with my future spouse. This led, in a natural way, to picturing Ash and me thirty years from now. But I couldn’t get the image in my head. Not at all.
“Who would have guessed,” Ash said.
“Guessed what?” I wrapped my hands around the ceramic mug, soaking in the warmth, and abandoned my previous line of thought.
“That they seem to be making progress on macular degeneration,” he said. “Twenty years ago, when my grandmother got it, they said there was nothing to be done, that she was going to go blind in a year and that she should make adjustments accordingly.”
I took a long sip of coffee. I’d once heard an interview with a woman who had, for various bizarre reasons, suffered a long bout of temporary but complete deafness, and when she’d recovered from that, had endured a time of temporary but complete blindness. Of the two, she’d said, deafness had been far harder to manage. She’d sounded sincere, a down-to-her bones sincere, but I’d found it hard to believe. After all, if you were deaf, you could still read. There was Braille, sure, and audio books and surely friends and family would read to me if I went blind, but if the ability to wander through the library and pick up a random book ceased, I was afraid I’d be cranky the rest of my life.
“Either one would be hard,” I murmured.
Ash frowned. “Either one what? Either eye? Grannie had it in both.”
Explaining the pathways my thoughts had taken in those two seconds would have been a pointless conversation that might have ended in him learning a bit too much about how my brain worked, so I said, “It’s great they’re making progress with the disease.” Saying that vague, but true, statement reminded me of another topic. “Speaking of progress, is there anything new with the death of Dale Lacombe?”
Ash glanced at his watch. “Twelve minutes.”
“For what?”
He grinned. “For you to ask me about Lacombe. Hal was wrong; he said it would be less than five.”
“Oh, funny hah hah.” I said it sarcastically, but eked out a smile. Detective Hal Inwood and I had met numerous times for a variety of reasons. At first he’d done his best to pat me on the head and tell me to let the grown-ups do their jobs, but eventually he’d come around to realize that I had a brain that could, on occasion, be useful to him and to the sheriff’s office.
“And you know perfectly well I can’t talk about an active investigation.” Ash unrolled the paper napkin wrapped around his silverware. “Not sure why you’re wasting your time asking.”
“But this is different,” I said, doing the same unrolling thing. “You must be able to tell me something. I was there, remember?”
“Nice try.” He spread the napkin across his lap. “Let’s talk about the biking route we’re going to take next time I get a day off.”
“Leese is a mess.” The napkin in my hand crunched up into a ball. “She’s worried that you’re going to arrest her and there’s no way she could have killed her father.”
“Oh?” Ash’s expression went still. “Why do you say that? Were you with her the day before?”
“Well, no. She couldn’t have done it, that’s all.”
Ash looked at me.
“I know, I know,” I said, sighing. “Given the right circumstances, practically everyone can kill. All I’m saying is that Leese wasn’t in those kind of circumstances. That these weren’t them.” A sentence that almost made sense.
“Breakfast for two, hot and hardy.” Sabrina put our plates on top of the paper place mats. “Can I get you two anything else?”
Ash and I both pushed our mugs toward her.
“Birds of a feather.” Sabrina laughed. “Be right back.”
She went to fetch the coffeepots and we looked at each other. I half shrugged an apology, because I really shouldn’t have asked him to divulge anything about the investigation, and we started eating.
But the pancakes tasted a little flat, and the sausage sat in my stomach like an uncomfortable rock. The cause, I was sure, wasn’t the kitchen.
After I waved good-bye to Ash in the diner’s parking lot, I considered the rest of the day.
It was early enough to go home and crawl back into bed with Eddie for a nap and still wake up before the hour hand on the clock came around to double digits, but now that I was up and nicely caffeinated, I was wide awake.
I could do essentially the same thing, but stay awake and read the next book on my To Be Read pile, but that was my plan for the afternoon. Not that I had a problem reading all morning and all afternoon—I’d done it before and would do it again, happily and with no guilt whatsoever—but I was feeling the need for some human companionship.
Kristen would still be in bed, and I was going to see her in a few hours anyway. I could stop by Rafe’s house, but now that it was October, it was bow season and he’d be sitting up in a tree until noon. I toyed with the idea of using the key he hid on a nail underneath the back porch. I could let myself in and . . . and do what? Move his minimalist furniture around? Find his current set of plans and red mark it with suggested changes?
It was tempting, and if Eric Apney, my nearest boat neighbor and a new friend of Rafe’s, was still around, I might have gone ahead, but practical jokes weren’t much fun by yourself, and Eric had pulled his boat out of the water a couple of weeks ago.
I thought about walking over to Holly’s house. Or to Josh’s. Or to any number of other friends. Or up to the Lakeview Medical Care Facility, where I knew a number of elderly folks through the new outreach program I’d been developing at the library, but it wasn’t even nine o’clock—a little early on a Sunday morning for a drop-in visit.
I grinned into the morning air and started walking. Because there was one place where I’d always be welcome any time of the day or night and that was suddenly the place I wanted to be.
• • •
“Minnie!” Aunt Frances wrapped me up in a big hug. “I didn’t expect to see you this morning. If I’d known, I would have laid another plate.”
“Top of the morning.” Otto, who’d stood when I’d walked into the boardinghouse’s big kitchen, smiled at me. “Have you been out walking? You have a nice rosy tint to your cheeks.”
“Had breakfast with Ash at the Round Table,” I said. “But I will take some coffee . . . No, you sit. I’ll get it.” I waved them both back into their chairs and opened the mug cupboard. “What’s new with you two?”
The silence that followed felt heavy. I turned and looked back at them just in time to see a long, communicative glance be exchanged.
“What’s the matter?” A sudden fear jumped into my skin. Aunt Frances and Otto were both in their mid-sixties, which didn’t seem nearly as old as it used to be, but it was also an age where things could start to go seriously wrong.
“Nothing’s the matter,” Otto said. “We were just making some decisions, that’s all.”
Silent relief sang in my ears. “Oh? About what?” I poured my coffee and sat at the round table that filled one corner of the kitchen.
“The wedding.”
“About time,” I said, nodding. “I can’t believe you haven’t tied the knot yet.”
“No need to rush into these things,” Aunt Frances said.
“If you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it right,” Otto murmured.
I squinted. “There’s a right way?”
“In any given circumstance, yes,” my aunt said. “And we’ve concluded that what’s right for us is for me to move into Otto’s house after we get married.”
“The wedding is set for April,” her fiancé said.
“In Bermuda,” Aunt Frances said.
I’d been turning my head from one to the other, like a spectator at a tennis match, but I stopped and stared at my aunt. “Bermuda?”
“I’ve always wanted to go,” she said.
“You have?”
“For years and years.” She looked at Otto with so much love that I could almost see it in the air.
“A destination wedding.” The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like an excellent idea. I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of her moving out of the boardinghouse, but I’d think about that later. “I like it. I like it a lot.”
“Good. And now it’s time to get to church,” Aunt Frances said, pushing back her chair. “Would you like to come along?”
I blinked. Church? For years, the only times my aunt and I had attended church was Christmas Eve and Easter, if we were in town. I glanced at Otto, who must have been the reason behind this change.
He smiled at me, and I felt a rush of affection for this man who was making my aunt so happy. After all, sometimes change could be good. Sometimes even very good. I pushed away my concerns about the future of the boardinghouse and smiled back.
“Sure,” I said. “That sounds nice.”
• • •
That evening, Leese whooped with delight. “It’s the blond bomber!” She threw her arms around a grinning Kristen. “As skinny as ever and I bet just as sassy.”
Kristen hugged her back. “Sassier every day, just ask my staff. And I hear you could have been partner at that multi-name law firm downstate. Nicely done.”
The two former competitors slapped each other on the back one more time, then the three of us pulled around stools to sit at one of the stainless steel counters in the Three Seasons kitchen. Out in the dining room, we heard the distant grumble of the vacuum cleaner being run by Kristen’s maintenance guy.
It was a standard part of Sunday evenings for me to stop by Kristen’s restaurant for dessert, and though we’d never expanded beyond the two of us, that didn’t mean we couldn’t. I’d called Kristen in the afternoon, asking if she objected to me bringing along a visitor.
“Male or female?” she’d asked.
“Female.”
“Is she fun?”
“Do you seriously think I’d bring someone who wasn’t?”
She’d acknowledged my point and readily agreed. Now, I watched the two of them catch up on fifteen years of life events.
“Could have made partner,” Leese said, nodding acceptance at the glass of red wine Kristen held out, “but that would have meant having to, you know, work downstate. I was tired of all the traffic and the lights and the noise.”
It was a familiar story for people who’d been raised in the north country. Young people often headed downstate to Grand Rapids or the Detroit area to find jobs and to get away from a place where everyone knew—and expected to know—everyone else’s business. After a few years of expressway rush hours and half-hour waits in line at the grocery store, many yearned to return, but only a fortunate few were able to do so.
I looked at two of those lucky ones, reached for my wine, and kept listening.
“You couldn’t talk them into opening a branch up here?” Kristen poured her own glass and pushed the cork back into the bottle.
Leese sipped her wine, made appreciative noises, then shrugged. “If I’d tried hard enough, maybe. But I was tired of the office politics and the quest for billable hours. I went to law school so I could help folks, not to make a huge pile of money.”
“Hear, hear!” Kristen toasted Leese. “I wish you good luck and a small pile of money. And if anyone asks me for a lawyer recommendation, I’ll send them your way.”
“She specializes in elder law,” I said.
“And cottage law,” Leese added. “It’s like estate planning with a twist.”
Kristen grinned. “You’re in the right place, my friend. Half the talk I overhear in this restaurant is about how the kids and grandkids will be able to afford the property taxes on the family cottage. Get me some business cards and in the spring I’ll start handing them out like dinner mints.”
I read Leese’s slightly puzzled look and explained. “The name of Kristen’s restaurant is also a descriptor of when she’s open. Three seasons.”
“You’re closed in the winter?”
“Hate snow,” Kristen said. “Always have. In a few weeks, maybe less, I’ll skedaddle down to Key West. During the week I spend a lot of time in a hammock inspecting the insides of my eyelids, and on the weekends I tend bar for a friend.”
“Sounds like a good plan.” Leese smiled. “How long have you had this place?”
“Going on four years.”
“Have you been in the restaurant business since high school?”
I kept my gaze firmly on the shiny countertop, wondering what version of the story Kristen would tell this time.
“Nope.” My best friend hesitated, then said, “After I got a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, I got my doctorate. Then I spent a miserable couple of years working for a big pharmaceutical company. I came home one Christmas and spent the whole time whining about my job. Someone got tired of hearing me complain and said if I didn’t want to be unhappy the rest of my life I should think about doing something else.”
At the end of the sentence, Kristen kicked me.
I kicked right back. My recollection of that conversation wasn’t the same as hers, but whatever.
“Less than a year later, I’d opened this place,” she said, spreading her arms wide. “I work my tail off spring through fall, then bask in the sun most of the winter.”
For once, she’d mostly told the truth. The only thing she’d left out was the intensive and exhaustive training she’d embarked on before opening her own place and the brilliant way she’d convinced the bank’s loan manager to sign off on the commercial loan—by bringing him lunch.
The two chatted for a few minutes about former softball teammates: about who moved away, who was still around, who had kids, and who didn’t. Then Kristen asked, “What about your family? Is your dad still—”
This time I kicked her a lot harder.
She slapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry,” she said through her fingers, her blue eyes wide with regret. “I forgot, I just totally forgot.”
Leese half smiled. “I’d forgotten, too, for a few minutes, so don’t feel guilty, Kristen. It’s not a good look on you.”
“But I am sorry for being so stupid.”
“This wasn’t nearly as stupid as you were in that tournament when your team played Traverse City St. Francis.”
Kristen sighed. “I still dream about that game. How could I have been that dumb?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure there will come a time when you’re even more stupid. Just have patience.”
“What would I do without you to prop me up?” She shook her head in fake wonderment.
Leese smiled, looking at us. “You two act more like sisters than just friends. It reminds me of my . . .” Her words trailed off.
“Of your stepsister?” I asked gently. “Your stepbrother?”
“The police are questioning Brad and Mia.” Leese pushed her empty wineglass away and shook her head at Kristen’s gesture toward the bottle. “They’re talking to my stepmother, Carmen.”
“But they must know you didn’t have anything to do with your father’s death,” I said.
Leese’s sturdy shoulders had slumped. “It’s not their answers so much as the questions.”
“What do you mean?” Kristen asked.
“It’s not Brad or Carmen I’m worried about,” Leese said. “It’s Mia. She’s been doing fine for years, but something like this . . .” She shook her head. “Bad enough that our father is dead, that would be hard enough for her to deal with. But having him dead like this? And for the police to put me in jail for a day, and then to grill her as if she had something to do with his death?”
I exchanged a questioning glance with Kristen, then phrased my next question as tactfully as I could. “Mia has had issues?”
“It was when she was in high school,” Leese said. “My baby sister was diagnosed with anorexia.” She looked at us, tears glistening in her eyes. “She was hospitalized and she . . . almost died.”
Not knowing what to say, I reached out and took her hand between mine.
“Something like this,” Leese whispered. “It could send her backward. It could kill her.”
Kristen stood, came around the back of Leese’s stool, and hugged her from behind. And we stayed like that, saying volumes without saying a word, for a long time.
Finally, I broke the silence. “We’ll figure this out,” I whispered to Leese. “I promise.”