Cole descended the stairs that led from his apartment directly down to the attached indoor garage. He stepped lightly , not wanting to wake his elderly friend and landlady at the early hour. Halfway down the steps, however, he knew she was up already. He could smell the sweet, hickory scent of bacon and heard the faint sizzle and pop of it cooking on the stove through the heavy landing door.
“Cole?” she called from the kitchen. “Do you have time for breakfast?”
The landing led into the kitchen and he pushed open the door to find Alvina Newhouse standing at the stove in a plain yellow housedress. He went and gave her a gentle hug from behind.
“Guten morgen, Frau Newhouse.” Cole said good morning in the tongue she spoke in her youth, handed down from the days when her great, great, great grandfather was building an empire around the beer recipes they brought with them from Bavaria in the mid-1800s. “Would I ever say no to your pancakes, Frau?”
She turned to face him and did an abbreviated curtsey in deference to her eighty-six-year-old knees. “Danke schoen,” she thanked him, smiling. “Even at this early hour, you can be a charmer.” She was a little plump, but her full face was filled with even more kindness than wrinkles, and the soft, white hair that framed it reminded him of a halo.
He took a chair at the heavy oak table and she scraped three pan-sized cakes onto his plate from a black cast iron skillet.
“Are you trying to fatten me up?” he said, slathering on butter and pouring syrup over the pancakes ‘til it flooded down the sides.
She made a clucking sound with her tongue and waved the spatula in front of him. “I’m hoping if I put some meat on your bones that I can finally marry you off. I could let my hair down a little if you weren’t hanging around trying to watch over me all the time.” She arched her eyebrows and smiled.
He finished his pancakes and half a pound of bacon within ten minutes and then allowed himself to share a moment drinking strong black coffee with Frau Newhouse. They didn’t see much of each other during the week, but they ate dinner together nearly every Sunday evening. They rotated the cooking, but neither saw it as a chore. The Sundays were a ritual that started naturally, not long after he moved into the upper floor of her expansive house. The “castle mansion” as locals called it was built in 1891 of red brick and sandstone. It had been on the National Historic Register for more than forty years. Almost ten thousand square feet, it cost her family patriarch, August “Captain” Newhouse, one hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars to build. In today’s dollars, that sum would be closer to seventeen million.
Cole moved in eleven years ago, within a month of his wife’s departure for the brighter lights of New York. Frau Newhouse had been looking for live-in protection after a break-in had scared her deeply, and Cole wanted to get away from the condo that he had shared with Janet. Everything about the modern apartment they had shared began to haunt him, reverberating silently but overwhelmingly that he had failed at his marriage.
“What do you think about, Cole?” Frau startled him.
“I was thinking about the day ahead. I’ve got a lot to do,” he admitted.
She pointed to the front page of the newspaper that sat in the middle of the table. “Are you working on this case?” Her right index finger hovered directly over another story about the killing of Dr. Charles Smith.
He nodded. “I am.”
“I don’t think that doctor was a good man by any means, but he should not have been shot like that, like an animal. You need to find the person who killed him and put him in jail.”
“Why, I couldn’t have said it any better myself,” Cole smiled.
“Ya. But be careful. This could get stickier than the syrup you have on your cheek,” she said, rubbing it away with her rag.