tyz7412: Seems like you have a lot of ideas about how you’d solve a mystery if you were in a book
mysterybkluv: don’t we all LOL
tyz7412: I wonder if you could actually pull it off
mysterybkluv: it’s just for fun, an opinion—isn’t that why the internet was invented?
CELIA WOKE WITH A start from a very deep sleep. For a moment she wasn’t sure where she was, then she realized the dark shape in front of her was her office desk. She sat up, pulled her phone out of her bag to check the time, and discovered the battery was dead. Luckily, she’d grabbed the extra phone charger before she left the house. She plugged the phone in and then went to the door to listen for the sounds of anyone moving around in the restaurant. All seemed to be quiet. She hoped it was still well before opening time. There were no windows in her office and so she couldn’t gauge the time of day.
She carefully pulled the door open an inch and listened again. Nothing. She opened the door a little farther and stuck her head out. The kitchen was dark.
Celia went into the kitchen and found the clock that hung over the prep area. It said it was only 7:30, so she had plenty of time to wash up as best she could, change, and start getting things ready in the kitchen like it was a normal day.
She went back to the office, changed her clothes, then brushed her teeth and washed her face in the employee bathroom. By the time she was done, she felt semi-normal. She checked her phone. It was at 50 percent and so the cracked screen was displaying notifications again. There were fourteen—fourteen!—messages from Pete.
Her stomach turned over. She didn’t want to talk to Pete, didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She had no more clarity than she’d had the previous day. There were huge gaps in her memory that hadn’t been filled by sleep. But she knew for certain that he meant her harm.
Still, it was better to know what the enemy was thinking. And she wasn’t afraid, she realized. She’d outlasted and outwitted him the night before. Now that she was forewarned, she could do it again. He wasn’t going to medicate her or make her forget more than she already had.
Celia tapped the first message and put the phone to her ear.
“Ceil? It’s Pete. Where are you? I woke up when I heard the car pulling out of the driveway. If you wanted to go for a drive, you should have woken me up and let me know. Call me back. Love you.”
There had been a pause between “call me back” and “love you,” like it was a line in a script he’d nearly forgotten to say.
The next call was about fifteen minutes after the first.
“Ceil? Come on, sweetheart. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you could at least call me back. Unless you forgot your phone. I’m going to check downstairs and see if you did that.”
The next one, a few minutes later: “Didn’t see your phone anywhere, so I’m assuming you have it with you. Even if you’re upset about what happened tonight, you shouldn’t be out on your own. You’re more tired than you realized and it’s not safe for you to drive. Call me back.”
Forgot to say “Love you” that time, Celia thought. Starting to get annoyed that I’m not doing what you want me to do, what you expect me to do.
Ten minutes after that call: “Celia, this is ridiculous. You could be in a ditch somewhere. I can’t believe you’d make me worry like this. Just call me.”
Celia skipped the next several messages, which she assumed were just gradual escalations of the first few, and jumped to the last couple. The time stamp on the second-to-last message was from an hour ago.
“Celia, I don’t know what is going on with you, but if you’re not in the hospital, then we are going to have a very serious discussion about your behavior when you come home.”
A very serious discussion about my behavior? What am I, twelve?
“It’s unbelievably irresponsible of you to just go off in the middle of the night and ignore my calls. What on earth am I supposed to tell Stephanie? Who’s going to get her ready for school?”
Uh, you. You have two hands. Besides, that child is not my child. I don’t know where she came from but she didn’t come from my body.
This was a true fact; she was sure of it. She’d felt no connection to the small person whining for her lunch the day before. Celia thought that if she really were a mother, then she would have felt something, some connection to the child despite her lack of memories. But there was nothing.
“I have a deposition this morning, so I expect to hear from you in the next hour.”
He hung up, and Celia thought, You just keep expecting what you want. You’re not going to get it.
The next message started.
“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done. Women like you always get what they deserve.”
The voice wasn’t Pete’s—or at least, Celia wasn’t sure if it was Pete’s or not. It was deep and distorted, like it had been run through a voice processor. It could have been male or female, young or old. Celia checked the message list and saw that the caller was unknown.
“What’s all this now?” she said to her phone screen.
She already had enough on her plate. Was this a threat related to Mrs. Corrigan’s death? Or something else? Had she wronged somebody and wasn’t aware of it? Should she call the police and report the message as a threat, or should she just ignore it? Maybe it was a prank. And what was that bit about “women like you”?
If she had to put money on the identity of the caller, Celia would bet that Lyle had sent that message. He definitely had it in for her, and if he hadn’t actually killed his aunt himself (which Celia strongly suspected), then he seemed pretty convinced that Celia had done it. She wouldn’t put it past him to try to frame her or even just to harass her about it indefinitely.
Celia went into the kitchen, pulled together something resembling breakfast by frying a couple of eggs and toasting yesterday’s stale bread (normally used to make bread crumbs or croutons), and put on a pot of coffee. She didn’t generally drink coffee but she felt like her body and mind needed the boost today.
Food plus the few hours of sleep she’d gotten made a big difference. After drinking half a cup of black coffee, Celia felt more like herself again. She just needed a plan of action to deal with the falling dominoes that appeared to be her life at the moment.
First thing first—she needed to call Pete back. He was a threat to her, but he was also the only criminal lawyer she knew, and if the situation with Mrs. Corrigan’s murder escalated (as it was practically guaranteed to do), she would need Pete to help her out. As long as she didn’t fall asleep around him, or accept any food or drink, she should be okay. Maybe. Probably.
Celia picked up the cracked phone and dialed Pete’s number. She noticed again the general lack of names in her phone’s contact bank. It seemed so weird that she had only a few people listed there. She loved to meet people, loved to talk to them and hang out. At home she—
That thought was cut off when she heard Pete’s voice. “You have reached the voice mail of Peter DeSantis. Please leave a message after the tone.”
DeSantis, huh? So Celia had kept her own name when she got married. She bet that had burned Pete’s ass.
“Hi, Pete, it’s Celia. Sorry to worry you. I just suddenly felt like I was jumping out of my skin and needed to take a drive. I ended up at the restaurant, thinking to do some paperwork, and conked out on my desk. No need to send out a search party. I’ll see you and Stephanie later tonight.”
She paused, contemplated a “love you,” realized she couldn’t fake it, and hung up.
At least that task was out of the way. She’d called him back, done her duty. She still didn’t have any answers about these images she kept having in her head, or why Pete wanted to drug and control her.
Christ, it sounds so goddamned melodramatic. Like the plot of one of those domestic thrillers where the stakes become ever more fantastic with each twist and the wife never seems to know that her husband is actually a secret rapist/pedophile/serial killer despite his shifty behavior.
And yet here she was, somehow in the middle of some weird cross between a domestic thriller and a cozy small-town mystery, like someone started writing a cozy but didn’t know how to do it properly. Or maybe everything felt like a thriller when you were trapped inside it.
Wait a second. That’s it. That’s why this all seems so weird and fake, why people’s conversations are strangely expository. I’m not in my life. I’m in . . .
Her brain trailed off. She was in what, exactly? She wasn’t a fictional character on the page of a bestseller. She was a real person, but a real person whose real life had been pulled out from under her. Was she in some kind of movie? An unwitting participant in a prank show or reality program? Was someone watching her right now?
The idea made her body go still even as her blood pumped faster through her veins. Somebody—many somebodies, in fact—could be watching her at that very moment for their own amusement. Some producer or writer could be somewhere, puppeteering the next scene to up the stakes and keep people watching.
Celia took a deep breath and tried to get her rampaging imagination under control. Her life wasn’t The Truman Show. That couldn’t happen in reality. It was unethical. Somebody couldn’t just decide to grab her and force her to participate in a story.
She had a flash again, a flash of being held down to the floor by strong hands, of somebody laughing and saying nobody would believe her. This was accompanied by the strongest headache she’d had yet, a pain so intense and debilitating that she clutched her head and crouched to the floor, eyes squeezed shut.
Remember, remember, remember, she told herself over waves of pain. Break through, remember.
After several minutes, though, the pain subsided with no discernible change in her lack of memories. She stood, a little unsteady, and started cleaning up the breakfast dishes she’d used. Mindless, repetitive tasks always soothed her, and she realized that she couldn’t force her memories to return. The few recollections she’d had came when she was doing or thinking about something else. She needed to do exactly what she’d done yesterday—play along, act normal (or what passed for normal in this life) until she figured things out.
One thing she would do, though, was stay on her guard around everyone. She didn’t know if this was a vast conspiracy or what (that would be a political thriller, and you’re definitely not in one of those) but she didn’t think she could trust any of the people around her. She certainly couldn’t tell anyone that her memories were gone, or that Pete and Jennifer were plotting to drug her, or that she thought maybe she was in a TV show that she hadn’t agreed to star in.
Hmm, if I am in a TV show, then there will be cameras around. The thing is, I don’t want to alert whoever might be watching that I’m onto them.
She needed to figure out a subtle way of searching. Staring around the kitchen was not subtle. It might even clue in whoever was watching.
If anyone is actually watching. And if they are, they might already think you’re onto them by your behavior last night. Pete’s phone calls could have just been performance art, acting the way a husband is supposed to act when his wife leaves the house in the middle of the night.
Celia felt suffocated, like she couldn’t get in enough air. It seemed like every possible decision she made was fraught, that she was an increasingly frantic rat running in a maze.
You’re not a rat, and you’re not stupid. It’s not entirely clear what’s going on, but you’ll figure it out if you take things step by step. Use your logic. If someone wanted to watch you, and they knew you spent most of your time in the kitchen, how would they do that?
Celia assumed the most logical option would be a high camera with a good angle on the whole kitchen. But she didn’t think that kind of camera would be easy to hide. There were more likely buttonhole-type cameras in a few locations, or nanny-cam devices hidden inside other objects.
She went into the storage area, perusing the stacks of shelves, and muttered a few recipe ideas to herself as she did so whoever was watching would think she was just taking stock of her available supplies.
“I can always do a carbonara variation as a special, maybe a pesto pasta salad? I bet that would be nice with tortelloni. I’m sure Katherine will love stuffing the pasta.”
Celia ran her fingers over the cans and jars, hunting for a seam, a hole, anything that would give away a spy. Nothing. She didn’t see anything that looked like a camera, either.
Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe all this stress is making my imagination go wild. Maybe I am just paranoid and exhausted and I did misunderstand or mishear what Pete said last night. Maybe I’m just a terrible wife and mother.
She collected all the things to make a tortelloni pasta salad with pesto, roasted tomatoes and ciliegine. The restaurant still needed to be run, and answers might occur to her while she was cooking. That seemed to be when she was most relaxed and calm, when she felt most at ease with herself.
I must do this in my real life, or have done something like it.
There it was again—the conviction that this wasn’t her real life. Pressure built behind her eyes, not exactly like the pain that had debilitated her a short time before, but a close cousin.
Don’t think about it, don’t look at it directly.
She made the pasta, cut it in sheets, filled and rolled the tortelloni together. Her hands moved automatically and her eyes drifted away from her work.
And she saw it. Her hands froze, just for a second, and she glanced back down at her worktable so she wouldn’t give herself away by staring down the barrel of the camera she’d only just noticed.
Whoever put it there had been smart, had known where she spent most of her time. The camera was looking at her through a hole in the metal canister that held her spoons and spatulas, and that was placed on a shelf that was just below her eyeline. There was a tiny hole in the front of the canister that had no reason to be there unless there was a camera behind it.
She had to check and make sure, make sure that she wasn’t crazy.
“If you try to tell anyone about this, people will just think you’re crazy. Nobody believes what crazy bitches say.”
That voice again, that voice in her head that was so tantalizingly familiar, but she couldn’t pin it down. She’d heard it sometime in the last twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t Pete’s. She was certain of that.
Celia finished twisting a tortelloni together and reached for one of the spoons in the canister.
“Oh, no!” she said, as the canister was knocked over and all the utensils clattered out, spilling over the edge of the shelf. The canister rolled off the shelf and onto her worktable before falling to the floor.
Perfect, she thought, crouching to pick it up. She didn’t even look inside the container. She felt around the interior with her fingers until they snagged on something out of place. Then she made sure the item was facing away from her and peered inside. There was a tiny, round metal item attached to the place where the hole peeked out of the canister.
Not crazy, she thought in triumph. Not crazy, not crazy, not crazy.
She picked up all the utensils and carefully placed the canister back on the shelf with the pinhole facing away from her. She hoped like hell that whoever was spying on her was really pissed.
Her euphoria faded quickly. She was right that someone was watching her, but she still didn’t know who or why. And there were probably more cameras in the kitchen that she hadn’t found yet.
I’ll find them all, she thought. Whoever is doing this, if it’s Pete or someone else, I’ll find out. I’m smart and I’m capable and I’m not going to let some asshole run me over.
Celia felt, she realized, more like her real self than she had at any other time in the past day. She wasn’t some simpering miss. She was always strong, always looked after herself. She didn’t put up with anyone’s nonsense.
“That Italian temper,” someone had said, and they were laughing when they said it, like her anger was a little child’s tantrum, like what she felt wasn’t real.
Who is that? she wondered again. That voice in her head was connected to the mess she was in now. If only she could remember.
There was a knock at the back door. She stared at the door like it was a portal to hell. Anyone could be on the other side of it. It could be Pete, or Lyle Corrigan, or the ghost of the horrible woman who’d been unceremoniously killed and dumped in the trash the night before.
“It’s Frank, Celia,” a voice said.
She didn’t know who Frank was, but he seemed friendly. He seemed to know her, and to assume that he was expected.
You can’t hide in the kitchen forever with all the doors locked. You have to be brave and take chances if you want answers. Besides, it can’t be that everyone in this town is out to get you.
“Unless maybe they are,” Celia murmured to herself as she unlocked the back door and threw it open.
A short, skinny middle-aged man with dark hair and dark eyes stood outside in the early-morning sunshine, grinning at her. He had a cart with several loaves of bread in small pallets.
“Good morning. Was going to just drop your order outside as usual but I saw your car in the lot. Getting an early start today?” He bustled past her and into the kitchen and began unloading the plastic pallets by the storage shelves.
Celia forced a smile that she hoped appeared semi-sincere. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep and the only possible solution was to make pasta salad.”
“Heard about the ruckus last night with Mrs. Corrigan,” he said, giving her a sympathetic glance. “That would affect anyone’s sleep.”
“It wasn’t conducive to peaceful rest, no,” Celia said. “How’d you hear that bit of news so early in the morning?”
Frank gave her a sideways look. “You know Janet is on the overnight emergency dispatch. She told me as soon as she came home this morning.”
Celia didn’t know if Janet was his wife or girlfriend or daughter or roommate, and she certainly didn’t know that the woman was a dispatcher. She gave herself a little thunk on the head with the heel of her hand and feigned stupidity.
“Of course, sorry. Like I said, not much sleep.”
“I bet you have a lot of business today,” he said, straightening up as he finished unloading the last pallet. “Half the town is going to be in here gawking, beyond thrilled to be near the site of a murder.”
Celia shook her head. “That’s macabre.”
He shrugged. “Haven’t had a murder in this town for thirty-five years. Some rubbernecking is to be expected. Got my empties?”
“Over there,” Celia said, pointing at the stack of empty bread pallets in the corner.
Frank loaded up his cart, said goodbye, and went out whistling.
Really? A whistler? For real? Celia didn’t think she’d ever heard anybody whistle a tune except in movies. It added to the feeling of unreality, the sense that everything around her was staged.
She shut the door behind Frank and finished prepping the pasta salad. By the time she made the pesto, boiled the tortelloni, roasted the tomatoes and tossed everything together, Katherine had arrived. Katherine appeared almost indecently excited.
“I heard!” she said, pulling off her jacket and hanging it on the rack. “Someone killed that crazy old woman last night, and Lyle Corrigan thinks it was you.”
“How did you hear about it already?” Celia asked.
“I had to go to the grocery this morning and everyone in there was talking about it. Don’t stress about it. You know how people are in this town.”
“I really don’t want people thinking I’m a murderer, even casually,” Celia said.
“The only one who really thinks that is Lyle. He’s an idiot, so I don’t think he counts,” Katherine said, pulling on her apron.
“I think it counts if he can convince the police chief that it was me,” Celia said, and then she wondered, Is this the ultimate goal? To set me up as a murderer, to see me locked away? But why?
Her frustration was reaching its boiling point, and she didn’t know how she could find any answers. She just needed to keep acting normal-ish until a solution presented itself.
“So, are you going to do some poking around? Find out who really did it?” Katherine asked.
Celia frowned. “Why would I do that? It’s not my job. Besides, I don’t think it’s smart to potentially piss off a murderer.”
“I just thought if you were worried about the police messing everything up,” Katherine said. “It seemed like the sort of thing you would do. You’re always talking about those true-crime mystery podcasts you listen to. You’re always saying you could do a better job of solving them than the real police.”
Mystery podcasts? I don’t listen to mystery podcasts. I don’t like true crime. I think it’s gross. It’s almost like Katherine—and everyone else around me—is trying to imprint some new personality on me, someone who runs for fun and watches crappy TV and likes true crime. Someone who is fundamentally not like me.
“Let’s not worry about Mrs. Corrigan’s murder right now,” Celia said firmly. “When Frank dropped off the bread, he said that the restaurant will probably be busy today, so we have a lot of prep to do.”
“Or it will be completely empty,” Katherine said. “If people think you’re a murderer and decide to stay away in case you go crazy and come charging out of the kitchen with a knife.”
Celia gave Katherine a sideways glance. “Do you think that’s likely?”
“People staying away or you turning into Michael Myers?”
“I sincerely hope that if you were worried about the latter, you would not be working in this kitchen with me,” Celia said.
“I like to live on the edge.”
Celia laughed, and the sound startled her. She’d been under so much stress that she’d forgotten how to laugh, how to feel joy even for a moment. It felt good.
The work of the restaurant distracted and soothed her for the next couple of hours. Celia and Katherine made pasta and soup, sliced bread and simmered sauce. The servers came in for the lunch shift and Celia went out front to open the blinds and flip the sign to “Open.”
There were already a dozen people standing on the sidewalk, ready to come in. As soon as Celia raised the blinds on the front window, several of them waved at her eagerly.
“Oh no,” Celia said, turning away after a half-hearted wave in response. “Tia, will you come up here to unlock the door—after I go back into the kitchen?”
Tia, who’d been filling the salt and pepper shakers, came to stand next to Celia. “The gawkers have arrived. I’m going to make a ton of money in tips today.”
“No matter what they ask, don’t come into the back to get me. If they ask for the chef, I’ll send Katherine out.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to work,” Tia said. “They could just ask for you outright.”
“I’m busy,” Celia said firmly. There were only so many things she could deal with at the moment, and she wasn’t up to a bunch of lookie-loos asking her intrusive questions.
Celia ducked back into the kitchen, feeling a little guilty that she was leaving it up to the servers to run interference for her.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw that it was Pete. She considered letting it go to voice mail but then decided to just take the call and get it over with. She waved at Katherine and went into her office, closing the door for some privacy.
“Hello?”
“I see you’ve decided to pick up your phone.” His voice was icy, disapproving.
“I explained what happened,” Celia said. She was not going to apologize, even though that was clearly what he expected.
Men always wanted women to apologize, even for things that weren’t their fault.
“Are you going to apologize for being a snotty little bitch?”
The voice—the memory—in her head drowned out what Pete said next. For the millionth time, Celia felt sure she’d heard that voice sometime recently. She just couldn’t remember.
“. . . completely inappropriate. Stephanie was crying this morning, and everything was completely disorganized because you weren’t at home. Your job is to take care of your child and the household.”
“What is this, the nineteen forties?” Celia said. “I’m not your little housewife, Pete. I think you’re old enough to make a sandwich and put it in a lunchbox and wave at your daughter as she runs to the bus.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that you’ve always taken care of those things.”
“You know, I don’t think I have,” Celia said.
There was a moment of silence, and then Pete said, very slowly, “You don’t think you have what?”
“I don’t think I have always taken care of that little girl. And the reason I don’t think that is because I don’t think I’m actually your wife, and that kid is not my daughter.”
“Fuck!” The word seemed to explode out of Pete unbidden.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Bye, Pete,” Celia said.
“Wait, Celia—”
She hung up before he could say another word.