A Waffle Death, page 5
“Oh, Dave. How are you?” Erin searched his face for any sign of distress. He would have had to talk to Terry or someone else in the police department after Erin discovered the body the day before, and Erin already knew from Naomi that he was the one who had neglected to lock up after closing. Or he had remembered to lock up and someone had come along and picked the lock.
But the lights had been on, and Erin assumed he would have turned the lights off when he closed up, and a burglar would not want to turn them on and draw attention to the store.
Dave’s expression was serious, but he didn’t look too upset about whatever had transpired during his interview with the police. And he was in the bakery, after all. He had not left town or crawled under his covers to hide for the next week. His clothes were neatly pressed as usual. A good sign that he was taking care of himself and had not, at least, slept in his clothes or been up all night.
“Um… I’m okay, I guess.” Dave swallowed and shook his head. “I can’t believe that all of this really happened. It seems like it should be the plot of some TV movie, not my real life.”
“Or maybe you’re dreaming or someone is pulling a prank on you?” Erin suggested.
He laughed and nodded. “Yeah, exactly; how did you know?”
“Been there,” Erin assured him. Had she ever. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the mug. Even with all of the unusual deaths she had dealt with in the past couple of years, it was still a shock. She was better at dealing with it than she had been. Things had been bad there for a while, but she was learning to adjust and be more resilient.
For poor Dave, this was probably the first time he’d had to deal with an unexpected death. At least he hadn’t had to see the body. Everything might feel slightly unreal for him because he hadn’t actually seen it, but it was better that way. Better than having to deal with nightmares about what he had seen.
“I guess you have,” Dave admitted. He had moved to town shortly before Erin, so he would have heard about everything she had been involved with while she’d lived in Bald Eagle Falls. He should have known not to take a job so close to her bakery. Things happened around Erin.
“I guess you’ve talked to Terry by now. Or one of the others.”
“Yeah.” Dave’s voice was low. He glanced at Vic, unsure about talking in front of her.
Vic raised her brows. She turned toward the kitchen. “There’s the timer; I’d better take care of the next batch of cookies.” She stepped through the doorway into the kitchen and out of sight. Dave took another step toward Erin, looking intently into the display case as if he were one of the children in the Kid’s Club trying to pick out the best cookie. Erin leaned forward on the edge of the display case on the other side so that they were close together and Dave could talk to her quietly without worrying that anyone else might overhear him.
“I can’t believe this all happened,” Dave said. “And I’m so sorry… Naomi said I must have left the door open, but I’m sure I didn’t. I would never have put you through something like this on purpose. I’m so sorry.”
“I know you didn’t set it up,” Erin assured him, laughing at the ridiculousness of the thought. “If you had known what was going to happen, you would have done anything you could to prevent it.”
He nodded, giving a heavy exhale in his relief. “Yeah. That’s right. I would never have allowed something like this to happen.” His shoulders were hunched and he tried to relax into a less tense posture. “I’m just afraid that you won’t be able to come to The Book Nook anymore. Because of what happened there.”
“Well… I’ve still been able to come to my own bakery, and things have happened here too. I’ll be fine, Dave. I might not ever go down to the stock room again, but I don’t exactly need to. Naomi can get me whatever I need. And if she ever needs someone to go down there to help her rearrange boxes or something… well, she can find someone else.”
They both laughed awkwardly. Erin was doing her best to put Dave at ease, but wasn’t sure it was helping.
The door opened, the bell jingling loudly, and Dave and Erin both jumped. Dave whirled around to see who it was and looked stricken when he saw his boss standing there.
“Dave,” Naomi said, impatience in her tone.
“I was just returning Miss Price’s platters,” Dave protested. Then he looked down at his empty hands. He looked at Erin as if he might have already given her the platters. But he hadn’t had anything in his hands when he entered the bakery. “That is, I…”
Naomi held up the trays. “These platters?”
“Uh…” A red flush was creeping up Dave’s tanned neck. Erin felt bad for him, wishing there was something she could do about his embarrassment. But the more she focused on it, the worse it would be. “I guess… I forgot them. I don’t know where my head is today.”
Naomi nodded. She swept her long hair away from her face with her forearm, then strode forward to place the platters on the top of the display case. “Thank you, as always, for putting together such a nice treat for the book club.”
Erin nodded. “Always glad to help. Is there a theme for the next meeting?”
“I think maybe we’re going to do a back-to-school theme. Talk about young adult books, explore the genre a bit, make some suggestions for books they might want to read to better understand what kids these days have to deal with at school and at home.”
“Hmm.” Erin thought about what she could bake with a back-to-school theme. She didn’t want to do cliched items that were found in school lunches. Jell-O cups. Twinkies. That was too depressing. “How about ‘an apple for the teacher’? I can put together some apple tarts and bars.”
“That would be wonderful! You always have such great ideas.”
Erin smiled. She enjoyed the creativity of finding a food that would fit with the book that the book club was reading or the theme they were discussing. Sometimes she would pick a food that a character in the book had eaten, something traditional from their culture, or something historically accurate. It was fun. “I enjoy doing it.”
“Well, you should. You do such a good job of it.”
They both looked at each other for a minute, unsure what to say. There was a big pink elephant in the room.
“So… are you okay?” Erin asked. “With everything that happened over there? You’ve probably had police all over the place all night and interviews and everything…”
Naomi nodded. “It’s been pretty crazy. I’ve never been at the center of a murder investigation before. It’s… kind of surreal. Like it’s happening to someone else. I’ve only ever seen this kind of thing on TV before.”
“I was just talking to Dave about that. How it seems so unreal. Your brain tries to rationalize it.”
“Yeah. Because if it’s real…” Naomi shuddered. “It’s just too much. How do you go on if it was all real?”
“You find a way.”
“I hope so. But…” Naomi squared her shoulders. “Luckily, I wasn’t there when it happened. That could have been me. I could have been killed. Or been the one to find the body. It was only dumb luck that I wasn’t there. My own mistake.”
Erin raised her brows, not understanding. “What do you mean?”
“I had to go into the city to see my lawyer. Just for some business stuff, nothing to be concerned about,” Naomi waved away any questions about legal trouble she might be in. “But I got the date and time of the appointment wrong. The meeting isn’t until next week, but I wrote it down wrong, and I ended up being away when all of this happened. I was in shock when I got the call from Terry Piper, I’ll tell you!”
“I’ll bet,” Erin agreed. “That was lucky. I’m glad you weren’t there. That you didn’t get hurt.”
“Yes, me too. Though I’ll bet you wish that it was someone else who found him.”
Erin wasn’t sure what to say about that. It was true that she didn’t want to stumble across any more dead bodies. She hated the anxiety and nightmares as well as the reputation she got from always being the one who seemed to be magically drawn toward the bodies of the dead. But she wouldn’t wish that on Naomi either. Erin had been through enough that she could hold it at a bit of a distance. Though it was a shock to her system, she was sure that it would have been much harder on Naomi if she had been the one to find the dead body. She might have gone into hysterics. It might have changed her forever. She might have been sick and depressed and traumatized for weeks, months, or even longer.
But she hadn’t had to go through that because Erin had been there and found the body instead. As much as she didn’t enjoy that part of life in Bald Eagle Falls, she didn’t wish it on someone else.
“It’s hard,” she admitted. “But it does get easier. You get more… not used to it, exactly but find ways to handle it better. Usually. I’ve had my problems.”
“Well, thank you for finding this one for me.” She started to turn toward the door. “Except, maybe neither of us was supposed to find it. If you hadn’t been there exactly when you were, you would have missed it. It would have been gone.”
“Oh… I guess so.” Erin hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. She’d had a half-formed belief that the body had disappeared because she had found it and called the police, and that if she hadn’t been there, it would have just lain there until it was discovered during the ordinary course of events. But that wasn’t necessarily true. The body hadn’t disappeared because she had seen it. And if she hadn’t seen it, no one would have been the wiser. No one would know that someone had died in the basement of The Book Nook.
CHAPTER 9
Erin had only been booked for the opening shift at Auntie Clem’s Bakery and had given herself the afternoon off to work on other things. She could have stayed at the bakery to do the books, which she was getting a little behind on, but she didn’t really want to stay there. She wanted to be home where she could relax and maybe catch a nap to make up for the poor sleep she’d had the night before. She might even be able to catch Terry napping, if he had finally decided to take a break from the case and catch some shut eye. Either way, she knew she needed to rest for a while and get recharged.
Terry was not home, but had left a sticky note on the fridge indicating that he had been home while she’d been on her morning shift, had caught a few hours of sleep and had a bite to eat, and had headed out again. Heading off all of the questions she would ask him to make sure he was taking care of himself. Erin read the note through again, folded it in half, and threw it in the garbage.
She made herself a sandwich. She needed to follow Terry’s example and take care of herself too. Though she was already doing that by coming home to rest instead of staying at the bakery to do her accounting or pitch in on the next shift because she couldn’t keep her fingers out of the pie. Her employees were fully capable of looking after the regular shifts without her there to supervise them all the time.
She sat on the couch to read—which she knew she shouldn’t do because she would get crumbs on it, and then complain later about certain people eating in front of the TV and getting crumbs on the furniture. But she would be sure to clean up after herself so that wouldn’t happen. She wanted to be somewhere comfortable to eat and read through her email on her tablet.
Erin yawned, rubbed her eyes, and put down the half sandwich that remained, scrolling through the emails to look for anything important. But she knew that what she was looking for wasn’t in her inbox anymore. It was in the trash. And she wasn’t looking for it; she was trying to avoid it, pretending to herself that she wasn’t looking for it, but just scrolling for anything new.
Orange Blossom got up from his spot on the easy chair, yawned widely and stretched, then jumped up on the couch beside Erin and curled up against her leg. He didn’t even show any interest in the half sandwich, though he might have been trying to lull Erin into believing that he wasn’t going to go after the people food the first opportunity he got.
“Hi, sweetie,” Erin greeted him, and scratched his ears and neck. “You’re very cuddly today.”
He purred. Erin closed her eyes, enjoying his warmth against her leg and the rumbling purr that made her feel at home.
She looked at her email again. She couldn’t help herself. She clicked on the email trash and scrolled down. She should empty the trash. That was what it was there for, after all. A place to put things that you never wanted to see again. To destroy them forever.
But there she was, scrolling down and skimming for the familiar string of characters.
She missed it the first time. She could feel that she had gone down too far and scrolled back up more slowly, eyes fixed on the screen. And there it was.
Meet me at Canyon Park Wednesday afternoon at 2:00
She knew better than to do it. She had said that she never wanted to see him again, and that hadn’t changed. She really didn’t want to see him again. Or talk to him, or respond to his emails. She had assumed that if she never responded, he would eventually give up.
That was what the foster moms and dads had always said about bullies, wasn’t it? Just ignore them and they will eventually go away.
But it never worked that way. At least, it hadn’t for Erin. Maybe she was just a target, like Reg had told her. She looked too vulnerable, acted too tentative, and people thought that meant they could take advantage of her. If she were tougher, if she showed people that she wasn’t the type of girl who could be pushed around, they would respect her.
But that had never worked either.
She wasn’t going to the park. There wasn’t any point because she knew he wouldn’t be there. It was a pointless gesture and would just prove that she had never managed to get him completely out of her life, no matter how far away she had moved.
Instead, Erin would lie down and have a nap, get caught back up on the sleep she had been short on the night before. She would take care of herself and get the rest and relaxation that she needed so that she would be able to bounce back from her gruesome find quickly and move on with her life. She didn’t need to dwell on it. Life went on despite damaging and traumatic experiences. If she’d learned anything in life, it was that.
But she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep when she lay down in her bed. As much as she wanted to, it just wasn’t going to happen. Her mind was going like a hamster wheel. Between replaying the discovery of the murdered man in the basement of The Book Nook and the email requesting her presence, there was no quieting it. The hamster was determined to keep running, even if he wasn’t actually getting anywhere. What made them keep running, anyway?
Erin tried for twenty minutes, and probably tossed and turned at least twenty times in the process. She couldn’t stop twitching, let alone lie in the same position for more than thirty seconds at a time. She looked like some jumped-up meth freak.
She decided to go for a walk. That would help to calm her down. A walk in the woods was always calming and refreshing. It was the hottest part of the day, in the hottest part of the Tennessee summer, but the woods were shady and it was time she got acclimatized to the weather conditions in Tennessee. She was never going back to Maine.
Vic wasn’t home yet, or Erin would have invited Vic and her fluffy white dog, Nilla, to go along with her. The dog’s need to sniff every leaf and tree trunk along the way would keep them moving slowly, even if she felt like she always needed to be productive and keep things moving as quickly as possible. With her tai chi practice, she was learning just to breathe and let the rest of the world flow around her. A person needed more than productivity. She needed rest and meditation as well.
Erin began to walk. The woods behind the house were quiet, as they always were. A buffer between Erin and the rest of the world. Her own little piece of paradise. Bugs buzzed and whirred, but the rest of the animals were quiet, resting during the heat of the day just as she had planned to.
In a few minutes, she was passing Adele’s cabin. Adele, a practicing witch, was Erin’s gamekeeper, keeping trespassers out of the woods where they could harm others or themselves. And then sue her because she had allowed it to happen. She liked to sit and visit with Adele, who sometimes seemed wise beyond her years. But Erin wasn’t going to knock on her door in the afternoon. Adele was usually up late at night to perform her gamekeeper duties or religious rituals, so she would probably be asleep in the afternoon. Maybe on the way back to the house, it would be late enough to see if she were up and around.
Erin had looked up the address of Canyon Park. Just in case she ever wanted to go there someday. Through online satellite and street-level photography, Erin could see that it was a small park, out of the way, without any playground equipment for the children. A little place to enjoy nature, maybe have a picnic, maybe take dogs for a walk, but there wasn’t really anything to do there.
Which was probably why there was no one there now. And likely why her email correspondent had picked such an isolated spot in the first place. With nobody around to eavesdrop, he could talk to her about whatever he wanted to talk about, and no one would overhear, and he could persuade Erin to his way of thinking. The secluded location provided a perfect opportunity for the two of them to talk without interruption.
But she knew he wasn’t going to be there. That would be impossible.
CHAPTER 10
Erin suppressed a shudder. Goosebumps popped up all over her arms, and she rubbed them as if she were cold, despite the oppressive heat. Her shirt was nearly drenched with sweat, and she wished she hadn’t walked so far from home and was back there so she could shower and change without having to walk all the way back.
