Chapter 9
“There, that should do it,” Maddy said as we finished mopping the floor in the dining room of the Slice the next morning. We’d come in early to set things right again, but I had my doubts that anyone would even show up after there’d been a murder there so recently. We’d done everything we could to cleanse the memory of it away, and if scrubbing the place down counted for anything, we should be set. I knew that wasn’t the case, though, so for good measure, we mixed the tables up so much that even I couldn’t pick the one out where Maddy and I had found the murdered chef. The police, for whatever reason, had taken only the chair he’d been pinned to, but that was just as well as far as I was concerned.
I didn’t need any reminders, myself. My sister and I had decided to change the layout of the dining room dramatically so nothing occupied the space where the murder table had been, and I wasn’t sure that I was all that fond of the new arrangement. In general, I wasn’t all that big a fan of changing anything that Joe and I had so carefully created, but then I realized that it was silly trying to keep things the same as they’d always been. This place was an ongoing business venture, not a shrine to the past.
Maddy stood back and looked at the results. “I like it. It’s quirky,” she said.
I took in the new arrangement and asked, “What exactly makes it quirky in your mind?”
“It’s something you have to be able to recognize on your own without explanation,” Maddy said a little condescendingly.
“You don’t know either, do you?” I asked with a smile.
“I don’t have a clue,” she said with a laugh. “It just seemed like the thing to say,” she added, matching my grin.
As I studied the dining room one last time, I realized that I was as satisfied with the arrangement as I was going to be. It was time to get back to work—not cleaning, but getting ready to serve pizza and sandwiches to whoever was brave enough to come in after what had happened the day before. “Are we ready to go ahead and start our prep work in the kitchen? I doubt that we’re going to be overrun with customers. As a matter of fact, I’m not entirely sure that anyone’s going to show up at all.”
Maddy shook her head. “Eleanor, never underestimate the taste of the general population. Unless I miss my guess, we’re going to be jammed; trust me. Is Greg coming in early?”
I thought about the work schedule I’d posted a few days ago, and then nodded. “He’ll be here when we open, so we’ve got that covered, just in case.”
Maddy nodded. “That’s good, because we’re going to need him. We should make extra dough, too.”
My sister was convinced that there would be a mad rush of diners, but I had some serious doubts about that myself. But honestly, what would it hurt to indulge her? “I still think you’re probably wrong, but if I make a double batch of dough, I can freeze it along with the dough I made yesterday morning before ... you know. It wouldn’t hurt to have some extra put back, just in case, so I’ll make enough fresh dough this morning to give us a good supply. How are the veggies?”
That was Maddy’s area of responsibility, telling me when we needed to order more, and how much. “We should be set. We’ve got a delivery coming tomorrow, but if we run out, I can always go to the store and get whatever we need to hold us over.”
“Then let’s get busy.”
As my sister and I worked in back, Maddy prepping the veggie toppings and me creating the dough that would soon become crust, we chatted about a great many things, but the topic we discussed most of all was, unsurprisingly, who we thought might have killed Chef Benet.
“The first question is,” I said as I started setting out my ingredients, “why would anyone want to kill him?”
“You actually met the guy, right?” Maddy asked as she cut up fresh green peppers. “Hang on, I know you did, because I saw you arguing with him myself.”
I had to give her that. Benet hadn’t been the nicest man I’d ever met. “Granted, he wasn’t very pleasant, but I have to believe someone had a better reason to kill him than just because his personality was a little grating.”
“Well, why do people commit murder, anyway?” Maddy asked. “There are only two reasons that I can think of off the top of my head—love and greed, right?”
“That’s a little too simplistic for my taste,” I said as I started measuring out the ingredients for the dough.
She finished cutting the green peppers and started on the mushrooms. “Hey, I’m willing to listen if you’ve got anything better to add to the conversation. Go ahead, be more specific.”
I thought about it for a few seconds, and then said, “His murder could have been related to his business, his family, or his love life.”
“Who exactly does that broad list leave out?” she asked. “You’re adding more people to the list, not subtracting from it.”
“Hey, I never said this was going to be easy,” I said as I flipped the mixer on and raised my voice so that Maddy could hear me over the motor. “No matter how we look at it, his wife has to be our first suspect. After all, you’d have to believe that she had the most to gain from his death, especially if there’s insurance, which I’m betting there is. I wonder how much Benet made with his TV show and his books.”
“I don’t know about that,” Maddy said, “but I have to wonder if the woman is even physically capable of killing him that way. Do you honestly believe that Patrice is strong enough to drive a knife clear through the man? I wouldn’t think that it would be easy. It would have to take someone really strong.”
“Or really motivated,” I added. “I keep my knives sharp, but not that sharp. Still, if Patrice thought that her husband was cheating on her, she’d have incentive, at least in her own mind.”
Maddy nodded as she moved the cut mushrooms into the covered bowl where they’d stay in the refrigerator until we were ready for them. “So, she tops our list, but we’re not going to stop there, are we? We can’t forget Oliver and Jessie. They each had their own reasons to want to see the man dead.”
I nodded as I turned the mixer off. The silence that followed was a nice change of pace from the mixer’s powerful motor. Had it actually been getting louder lately, or was it just my imagination? I dreaded the thought, and the expense, of replacing the floor unit, but I’d have to find a way to do it somehow if the motor ever died. Mixing as much dough as I needed every day by hand would be a nightmare. I’d find the money, one way or another, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. “It’s true that Benet treated his assistant like dirt, but Oliver wasn’t going to be around much longer. He hinted that if he didn’t get his big break soon, he was going to quit anyway, so why kill his boss?”
Maddy said, “Maybe he thought that the only way he’d ever get on the air was by taking Benet off himself.”
I just shrugged. “Oliver knew that he wasn’t going to get his own show, no matter what happened, remember? On the other hand, if Jessie had died instead of Benet, Oliver would be at the top of my list. Jessie spanked him pretty thoroughly, didn’t she?”
“She did. Then what would her motive be to kill Benet? He was her bread and butter at the network,” Maddy said.
“We can’t forget the fact that he was leaving,” I noted. “She could have easily been mad enough to kill him.”
“Agreed,” Maddy answered. “That leaves us with the odd ‘family business’ clue we got from Oliver, and Patrice’s conviction that Benet was having an affair. A scorned mistress can be just as dangerous as a neglected wife.”
I pulled the beater out and covered the mixer so the dough could raise, and then said, “So, we’ve got two more suspects. The only problem is that we don’t know who they are.”
“Or have any way to find out,” Maddy added. “But besides those few minor difficulties, it’s going to be a piece of cake.”
“Hey, give us a little credit, Sis. We’ve done it before,” I said, reminding her of some of our past exploits.
“Not without a little help from our friends and loved ones,” Maddy said. “You can’t exactly call up your buddy Art Young at the moment, can you?”
“Not unless it’s an emergency,” I said reluctantly. “It sounds as though he’s got problems of his own.”
“I don’t even want to think about what they might be,” she said as she shivered a little, though the kitchen was plenty warm enough.
I knew that my sister was not Art’s biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination, so I decided not to add anything to that particular conversation. “At least we still have David and Bob.”
Maddy frowned for a second, and then she took a particularly vicious slice at a poor defenseless onion she’d been chopping. “I’d rather not ask Bob at the moment, if that’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine by me,” I said. “Honestly, the more I think about it, I’m not exactly sure what we could ask them to do to help out, anyway. Why don’t we keep digging on our own before we start bringing other folks into it. For now, we should both just focus on what we do best.”
“Get married?” Maddy asked with a smile. “Between the two of us, we’ve done it five times.”
I shook my head, though I smiled a little. “That may be true, but I’m responsible for just one of those trips down the aisle.”
“I know, I’m the romantic of the family,” Maddy said. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait until you catch up.”
I rolled my eyes, but just a little. “You’re in for a long wait, then.”
“That’s something I could live with, no problem at all. Okay, if you weren’t talking about getting married again, what did you have in mind that the two of us are supposedly so good at?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of selling some pizza and subs,” I said.
“You know what? I like your idea better,” Maddy said.
“Have you honestly had your fill of holy matrimony?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light. Maddy usually joked about her four trips down the aisle, but lately she hadn’t made any self-deprecating cracks about it, and this was the first time she’d opened up in ages.
“There are too many factors that are out of my control, and too few I can change myself. The short answer? I’d have to say, who knows?”
It was an odd response that I wasn’t at all certain I wanted to dig any deeper into. Maddy and I had our differences from time to time, as nearly all sisters did, but in the end we were there for each other when it counted. It was okay if I didn’t know every opinion she held, and I was fairly certain she felt the same way about me. If she did decide to talk about what was troubling her, I’d be there, ready to listen. And honestly, it was just about the only thing I knew that I could do these days.
We left it at that, and before I knew it, it was time to open our doors and see if the public awaited, or if Maddy, Greg, and I were going to have the chance to catch up on our cleaning.
In the end, I just hoped that someone besides Greg Hatcher showed up.
Half an hour later, Maddy came back to my busy kitchen with another three orders. We’d had a crowd from the very start, to my amazement. I had to give my sister credit. She hadn’t said one “I told you so”; at least not yet. “And you were afraid folks would stay away because of the murder,” she said.
“I’ve got to say, I have to wonder about their motives,” I replied as I started on another thin-crust pizza.
She looked at me oddly. “Who cares? They’re spending money, and we missed an entire day of sales yesterday, don’t forget that,” Maddy said as she plated a pizza for me and cut it into slices to prepare it for a customer.
“Don’t tell me you’re worried about the bottom line now,” I said. That was just too much to take in.
“Hey, I draw a paycheck here, too, remember? I care about the Slice doing well enough to keep a roof over my head and keep me fed.”
“Don’t worry. I can’t imagine that either one of us is going to miss any meals,” I said as I finished the pizza I’d been working on and slid it onto the conveyor. It was at times like these that I loved the convenience of the conveyor oven Joe and I had purchased when we’d decided to open A Slice of Delight. The pizzas went in as a combination of raw dough, sauce, uncooked toppings, and shredded cheese, and they came out transformed into pies full of bubbling goodness, the crust baked, the sauce heated, the toppings cooked, and the cheese melted into a delicious covering for it all. The best part about it, at least in my mind, was that once something got on the conveyor, it didn’t need any more attention from me until it was time to plate and serve.
As I started on the next pizza, Maddy grabbed the finished one she’d just cut and left again.
Greg came into the kitchen a second later waving more orders at me. “Wow, I didn’t know that many folks in Timber Ridge even liked our pizza.”
As I took two more orders from him, I asked, “What’s not to like?”
“I agree, trust me, but if someone else asks to sit at the table of death, I’m going to go ballistic.” Greg lowered his voice and then asked, “Just out of curiosity, since you moved things around, I couldn’t find it. Where exactly is it?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Maddy and I had mixed things up so much that we didn’t know ourselves, which was exactly the way I wanted it. “Are people really that ghoulish?”
Greg just laughed. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard today. I had four customers offer to pay me something extra for my trouble if they could get the right table. I was pretty tempted to take money from all of them, and then put them wherever I wanted to.”
It sounded so much like Greg’s sense of humor that I was worried that he’d done exactly that. “You didn’t though, right?”
“Eleanor, I said I was tempted, not that I’d actually do it.” He paused, and after a momentary grin, he added, “You’ve got to admit it, though, it would be hilarious.”
“I guess it might be, under different circumstances,” I said, “But don’t give in to the temptation.” Almost as an afterthought, I said, “And don’t tell Maddy what’s going on, either. Who knows what she might do.”
“Might do about what?” my sister asked as she came back in with a bin of dirty plates, glasses, tableware, and serving pans. Our staff was so close to the bone that we all took turns bussing tables whenever they needed it.
“I was a little worried how you might treat people who asked you if they could sit at the killer table,” I said.
“You’re too late to be concerned about that. I’ve already had three different parties ask me if they could sit there,” Maddy said nonchalantly.
“What did you do about it?” I asked.
She looked at me as though I’d gotten amnesia for a second. “Eleanor, after we mopped and rearranged the dining room, how could either one of us possibly know for sure?”
I smiled and sighed a little from relief. “So, that’s what you told them?”
She grinned at me. “Of course not. I told them they all had it. Who knows? I might have even been right once.”
My worst fears were coming true right before my eyes. I asked, “You didn’t charge them for the privilege, did you?”
Maddy looked as though the idea hadn’t even occurred to her. She turned quickly to Greg and asked, “Why is my sister asking me that, Greg; is that what you did? If you did, that’s absolutely brilliant. I must say, I’m impressed.”
“I was tempted, but I didn’t do it,” Greg admitted.
“Excellent,” Maddy responded with a wicked grin. “We can have a race, and whoever generates the most extra cash gets to keep it instead of putting it in our communal tip jar. How does that sound?”
I had to stop this before it got even worse. I wasn’t sure how that might be, but when it came to this kind of stunt, my sister was a full-fledged genius. “I don’t want either one of you doing that,” I said.
“Is that my boss talking, or is it coming from my sister?” Maddy asked.
“That depends,” I answered. “Honestly, it’s probably a little bit of both.” That approach was not going to work, and I knew it. “Please?” I added softly as I looked at her. “Would you do it for me?”
“You don’t have to worry, Eleanor. Greg and I will behave ourselves,” Maddy said. I was on edge, both from the murder and the reaction I was getting from my customer base, and my sister must have sensed something in my stress level to agree so quickly. Sure, folks had come out to the Slice, but I had to wonder what their motives really were. While it might not mean much to Maddy or Greg, it was very important to me.
I needed to lighten the mood. I couldn’t have my staff picking up on my somber mood. I flipped my towel at them and said, “Go on, you two, shoo. You both need to get back to work.”
Maddy grinned, then offered me a salute on her way out. Greg joined right in with one of his own as the two of them faded away back into the dining room, and I finally found my own smile again. I loved it when we could all lighten the mood a little, but I hoped Maddy hadn’t taken Greg’s idea to heart. Knowing her, it sounded exactly like something she would do if the mood struck her. In warning her not to do it, I was afraid I might have just given her another idea she could exploit, not so much for profit, but for her own personal entertainment.
I was still grumbling about the idea that many of our customers were at the Slice because of the murder, and not because of our offerings, when Bob Lemon came back into the kitchen. The attorney, and Maddy’s boyfriend, was smiling as he came in, and I had to wonder what had made his day so happy.
“Maddy should be up front waiting on tables, Bob,” I said absently as I finished another sub and put it on the conveyor.
“I know. I saw her when I came in,” he said, still grinning at me as though he was some kind of goofy kid.
I was overworked, and I really didn’t have time for any foolishness at the moment. “Is there something I can do for you, Bob?” I asked.
“Don’t worry; you don’t have to stop working, but I wanted to show you something if you’ve got a second,” Bob said as he reached into his pocket.
“Okay, but make it quick,” I replied, wiping my hands on the towel I always kept nearby while I worked in the kitchen. I hadn’t meant to snap at him, but I didn’t feel like apologizing at the moment. Besides, if my abrupt tone had bothered him, I was certain that he would have said something about it.
“That’s okay. I can see that you’re busy. Don’t worry about it. It can wait,” Bob said, clearly deflated by my behavior. So he’d picked up on my mood after all.
I stopped what I was doing and said as sincerely as I could manage, “I’m sorry. It’s been a bad couple of days around here, but that’s no excuse for me to take it out on you. What’s up?”
“Do you really have the time?” Bob asked.
“I do,” I said, hoping that whatever he had to show me wouldn’t upset my world any more than it already was.
“Look at this,” he said as he brought a ring box from his suit pocket. As he opened it, he said proudly, “I’m going to ask your sister to marry me as soon as you two take your afternoon break.”
I looked at the engagement ring—a huge, beautiful diamond mounted on an intricate gold band—and then studied Bob. “Are you absolutely positive that you want to do that today?”
He sighed. “Why wouldn’t I? I love her, and I know in my heart that she loves me.”
How could I say something without shattering his feelings? Maybe I could talk him out of proposing before he actually got down on one knee. “She’s been married four times; you know that, right?”
Bob snapped the box shut and put it in his pocket. “Eleanor, why do I have the feeling that you’re not all that excited about the idea? Is it because you’re afraid she’ll quit working here for you once we’re married?”
“What? Of course not. Why would she do that?”
“You’re teasing, right? The real question is, why wouldn’t she?” Bob asked, clearly confused by my question. “I can more than take care of her. Maddy won’t ever have to work again once we’re married.”
“She doesn’t have to work now,” I said, not really sure if it were true or not. I didn’t know much about my sister’s finances, but I knew that at least one of her husbands had been rich. She might be living on what I could pay her, or she might have enough money in her checking account to buy the place outright if she wanted. “I’d like to think that she likes being here. I know I love having her in my life every day.”
“I’m sorry,” Bob said as he ran a hand through his hair. “This was a mistake. This didn’t go anything at all like the way I’d planned.”
“And that’s my fault how, exactly?” I asked. I might have been lashing out a little now, but he was talking about taking my sister away from me. Okay, I knew how irrational that sounded even as the words popped into my head, but it was how I felt.
Bob didn’t say anything as he left the kitchen rather abruptly, and I wished I would have forgotten about trying to spare his feelings and instead shared the conversation I’d had with Maddy about marriage. But it was too late. If he asked her to marry him, I had a feeling that my sister would hurt his feelings a lot more than I just had.