A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery Read online

  A Berry Cunning Conman

  A.R. Winters

  A Berry Cunning Conman

  Copyright 2018 by A.R. Winters

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

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  Chapter 1

  “See, you cut it like this.” Joel held a clove of garlic between the tips of his giant fingers as he cut it into paper thin wafers. His hands were so big that his fingertips eclipsed the garlic, and I couldn’t understand how he was managing to cut the small clove without slicing his fingers. “You try, Kylie.”

  That was me, Kylie Berry, owner-slash-operator of Sarah’s Eatery. Why my café was called Sarah’s and not Kylie’s was a funny—or not so funny—story, one that involved me returning from the brink of destitution after an eye-opening and life-altering divorce. Turned out my husband of eleven years had defined marriage as sleeping with every woman he fancied. I’d defined it as fidelity, loyalty and mutual respect. As you can imagine, we were unable to find common ground on the matter.

  After that, it was the age-old story of girl leaves boy, boy destroys girl’s reputation, and boy leaves girl penniless thanks to a prenup the girl should have never ever signed.

  Thankfully, while I was falling out of love, my cousin had been Sarah falling into love, and that’s how I ended up owning Sarah’s Eatery. She moved away to be with her fiancé and sold me her café—along with the entire city-block-sized building that it was in. It was how I went from being one-half of a power couple in Chicago to being a small business owner in the sleepy little town of Camden Falls in southeastern Kentucky—even though I didn’t know how to manage an eatery and couldn’t cook (no, really… not at all). But here I was, head chef, chief dishwasher, solitary procurer, planner, accountant, and all the other jobs that happen in an eatery.

  Of course I had help. Some help. There were my waiter and waitress, Sam and Melanie, my newly hired sometimes-baker Patty, and Brenda. But we’ll get to Brenda, and then we’ll cry into a bowl of my terrible cooking.

  Joel stepped back from the stainless steel countertop, and I stepped in front of him. He then moved in close behind and reached around to the counter in front of me. I felt instantly encased within his six-foot-five wall of strength. It took all my willpower not to lean back against him.

  Joel was close to my age, owned one of the two local newspapers, and was built like a defensive lineman with a little bit of off-season padding. He had shoulders as wide as a door and the ability to pick up small cars. Today he was wearing jeans and a loose fitting t-shirt, but the rims of his short sleeves weren’t loose. They were tight as they struggled to stretch around biceps that resembled a football that had been shoved in under his skin. It was the first time I’d ever seen Joel’s bicep. We were on the tail end of winter, and I’d only ever seen him wearing a coat or a long flannel shirt. But now that I’d seen his bicep, I was mesmerized by it. It was all I could do not to poke at it with my finger in awe and curiosity.

  “Be careful not to cut yourself,” Joel said, his voice tickling deliciously at all my senses.

  Giving myself over to focusing on the task at hand, I sighed as I picked up the sharp paring knife that Joel had left on the cutting board. I did my best to duplicate his work, but instead of getting wafer-thin cuts, I got misshapen wedges. “I’ll never get this right.” Joel had made it look so easy.

  I heard Zoey’s stool squeak from where she sat in the corner of the café’s kitchen. She was literally munching on popcorn while watching Joel’s attempt to teach me how to make aglio e olio. It was a pasta dish that I’d never heard of before this morning, and if a person had asked me to make it before now, I would have said “bless you” and handed them a tissue.

  “Isn’t Brenda usually here on Monday mornings?” Zoey asked between popcorn crunches.

  I frowned at the mention of Brenda, worried. She’d been indispensable to me. “She texted this morning. Her mom—or rather her grandmother who raised her—isn’t doing well.” I twisted at the waist and leaned so that I could see past Joel’s massive bicep. It wasn’t human. It couldn’t be. It had to be some alien experiment at making a super human. “She’s not sure when she’ll be back.” And I didn’t know what I was going to do without her. She knew so much more about cooking than I did. She was the fuel that kept my café going.

  “That why you’re getting this Ghost cooking lesson?” Zoey asked. She threw a piece of popcorn into the air and lunged after it with her mouth.

  As always, her honey-tinted skin was flawless. Not as always, her almond shaped eyes looked as if they had been enveloped in a peacock’s colorful tail. She’d even painted her usually black eyebrows a vivid blue. Yet somehow rather than distracting from her natural beauty, the unique makeup made her all the more lovely. Completing the look, she had her thick raven hair was pulled into a messy up-do, and she wore a soft pink, free-flowing cotton A-line dress with faux combat boots that sported three inch soles and five inch heels.

  Zoey was in her early twenties, a tech genius, and was my sidekick in crime. Literally. Or rather I should say, Zoey was my sidekick in anti-crime. She’d saved me from a life behind bars when I was accused of a murder I didn’t commit, and then I’d returned the favor by doing the same for her. Funny how some things could become a habit fast… if you could call solving three murders a habit.

  “Ghost?” I asked, not understanding what Joel’s impromptu cooking lesson had to do with the supernatural.

  “You know… Ghost,” Zoey said. She looked at me as though that should have answered my question, but it didn’t. She finally gave in with more clarity. “You know… Patrick Swayze. Demi Moore. Pottery wheel.”

  The scene of the two lovers from the movie Ghost flashed in my mind and brought a flush of heat to my cheeks. Suddenly, the wall of man that stood all around me was all that I could think about. “Do… Is… um… Do I hear the water boiling?” I stammered.

  Joel’s deep, rich voice chuckled above me, and I wanted to melt. Then, “Oh! It is.” He stepped away, and I instantly missed him.

  Uh oh… Not a good sign. This was not the time to get doe-eyed over a man. I had the café to keep afloat, one that I barely had a clue about how to run. If it went under, I’d go under. I’d been homeless before my cousin had sold the café to me for nothing down. And besides that, the mark on my finger where my wedding ring used to be had barely had a chance to fade away.

  No. Definitely not. I did not need a man…

  “You back here?” Brad’s
voice called.

  And I most certainly did not need two men…

  Brad appeared in the kitchen doorway a half-second later. Brad was several years younger than me. He was dressed in crisp, sleek uniform blues. On his shoulder was the insignia of the Kentucky State Police, and on his belt was a gun. He wasn’t as tall as Joel… Nobody was. And he wasn’t as strong as Joel—again, nobody was. But he was put together oh-so-well. He was poetry in motion. When he crossed a room, the room ceased to exist. He smiled, and you forgot to breathe… or at least I did.

  The man made me weak in the knees.

  “Oh,” Brad said, his voice falling flat. “Joel…”

  “Hey, Brad,” Joel said nonchalantly, but as he turned his back on Brad, I saw the corners of his mouth quirk up. He knew exactly what he was doing by not responding in kind to Brad’s irksome mood at finding Joel and me together. It was a very guy thing to do. I’d seen my ex-husband do it a few times. He’d explained it this way: being friendly to a guy who wanted to throttle you had a way of making that guy want to throttle you all the worse. It was passive aggression as a fine art.

  “So, Kylie,” Brad said, standing his ground in the doorway with his arms crossed and his feet planted shoulder-width apart. “How about that date?”

  “What?” I hadn’t seen that coming, and I shot a worried glance in Joel’s direction. It wasn’t that I owed Joel anything. For that matter, I didn’t owe Brad anything either. But both men had taken turns asking me out and something had always come up—or been left dead—that had gotten in the way of any date plans actually coming to fruition. Now to my horror and unending embarrassment, Brad was doing his best to stake his claim of me right in front of Joel.

  I glanced at Zoey. Her eyes were wide with anticipation, she was leaning forward eagerly, and she was scarfing down popcorn so fast that it looked like she thought it would spontaneously combust and go up in a puff of smoke at any second. She was loving this.

  “Yeah, I’m calling in my raincheck. I want my date.” It was Brad who now wore a smirk and Joel who was scowling.

  I liked Brad—that is, when I wasn’t wanting to put my hands around his neck and strangle him. He had a way of challenging me and sometimes thought he could boss me around. But he also had a way of showing up every day and supporting with his actions much more than his words. He’d eaten every awful plate of food I’d put in front of him from the first day I’d taken over the café. And I do mean awful. The things that poor man had eaten… but he kept coming back. It was for that reason that I didn’t read him the riot act about his cave-man antics, claiming he was cashing in a raincheck for his date. Okay, so we had planned several dates we hadn’t been able to go on, dates interrupted by somebody dying and me possibly being a cold blooded killer.

  Hey, nobody’s perfect.

  “Brad, that’s very sweet,” I said, starting into a delivery line designed to let the guy off easy. I wanted to go out on a date with Brad, but I didn’t want it to happen this way. Problem was, Brad saw the letdown coming from a mile away.

  “No, no. I don’t want sweet. I want a date. You and me, sans the jolly green giant over there.”

  That got Joel’s full attention, and he turned his back on the stove. “I—” he began, but the chime of his cell phone cut his words short. He dug his phone out of his pocket, brought it to life and at the same time started in on Brad again. “You—” But he didn’t get any further than he had before. Instead, he stared at the screen of his phone and then he looked at me. “Kylie, I gotta go.”

  “You gotta go?” My brain flashed with the images of all the ingredients that had been laid out on the kitchen counter. “But—”

  “It’ll be okay. You can do this,” he said, shoving his phone back in his pocket. “I have faith in you.”

  Anger started to well up inside of me as I wondered what other platitudes he’d throw my way, but it was Brad’s chuckle that tossed gasoline on my anger and turned into a flash rage.

  “You’ll be okay… with all of this,” Brad laughed, mocking Joel. “Has he met you?”

  “Out,” I ordered.

  “Wha?” Brad looked shocked.

  “Mind if I go out the back door, Kylie?” Joel asked while pulling on his coat.

  “Out!” I pseudo-yelled. I wasn’t so far gone that I wanted to alert my customers out on the café floor that another murder was about to take place.

  “Sorry, Kylie!” Joel called over his shoulder as he jogged for the kitchen’s back door at the same time that Brad said, “Yes, ma’am,” and disappeared out of the kitchen and back into the café.

  I looked over at Zoey. She was still flipping fluffy pieces of popcorn into her mouth, watching the show. She only stopped when my look turned into a glare. She smiled. “You got this! You can do this!”

  I pointed toward the door. “Out…”

  Chapter 2

  “Okay, I can do this,” I said to myself, parroting the not so helpful people I’d thrown out of my kitchen.

  “Garlic in the oil. Check.” The slices were happily bubbling in a frying pan on the stove.

  “Pasta in water. Check.” I was standing in front of a huge pot. I couldn’t see over its top rim without getting on my tip-toes. Inside it was salted water with an oil slick on top plus long strands of pasta. Next to the stove was a minute timer, and I was standing at the ready, waiting for it to go off.

  I bounced on my toes. I looked at the timer. I listened to the water bubble.

  “I’m doing this right, right?” I asked my kitten Sage, who sat curled up in a corner off to the side.

  Ding!

  Go time! I reached for the oversized pot then jerked my hands away. The unprotected handles were too hot. Turning in a circle twice, I spotted the oven mitts and lunged for them. When cooking, timing was everything. I had to get this right.

  Back at the stove, I hefted the enormous pot off the stove with a grunt and then did a pregnant shuffle to the deep, stainless steel sink. Resting the side of the pot against the edge of the sink, I tipped it forward and dumped its contents into the biggest colander I’d ever seen. The milky, starchy water of the pasta drained away, and then I spritzed the remaining pasta with a splash of fresh water.

  I smelled something, something not right.

  “The garlic!” I rushed back to the stove. The once pale slices of garlic were a dark caramel color with blackened edges. I turned the flame beneath the pan down, but the garlic continued to darken.

  “Oh! Water!” I was supposed to dump some of the hot water from pasta into the pan to stop the cook of the garlic faster, but I had drained all the water away. Running, I filled a cup up with water out of the faucet and hurried back to the frying pan where I all but tossed the cold contents in.

  A pillar of flame leaped into the air.

  I screamed and nearly fell over backward. Diving for the collection of lids that were hanging off of a ceiling rack, I grabbed the largest one and threw it over the flaming pan. The fire went out.

  “There. Handled it.” I felt downright giddy with accomplishment. I looked over at Sage. Her previously half-lidded eyes were now wide open. “And I mean flambé, right? Flambé? That’s fancy stuff. Nothing wrong with flambé.”

  I inched closer to the once-flaming pan and gingerly removed the lid that had snuffed out the flame. Nothing happened. No fireball. No sound of fire engine sirens in the distance. Just a pan of garlic, oil and water.

  “This can’t be right,” I said to Sage. “It’s a soupy, oily mess.” It reminded me of a bottle of unshaken Italian dressing with the oil separated out from all the other ingredients. But the recipe wasn’t finished yet. The oily, soupy mess still had to be added to the pasta.

  I transferred the pasta to a bowl big enough to double as a sled for sliding down snowy hills. I poured the oil, water and now blackened garlic over the top of the pasta. The water drained down to the bottom of the bowl while the garlic stayed on top, and the oil made everything glisten.

  I
looked over at my other ingredients, and hung my head in defeat. “Pepper flakes!” I’d forgotten to add the pepper flakes to the pan after adding the water.

  But then I lifted my head as new hope sparked within me. “Wait a minute…” I wagged a finger at Sage. “People put pepper on their food all the time without cooking it first.”

  I grabbed up the small bowl of red pepper flakes that had been pre-measured. This was going to be okay, even if only by sheer determination of will.

  Taking a deep breath and squaring my stance with a confidence I was willing to fake until it became truth, I sprinkled the entire contents of the bowl over the pasta. Then I added the heaping mound of freshly grated parmesan cheese and minced parsley. Next, I mixed, just like I would a huge salad with a couple of giant tongs.

  “All right… all right,” I said, surveying my work and nodding my head. Genuine hope was beginning to creep its way back into my synapses. The pasta looked like less of a mess.

  I pulled out a single strand of pasta, wound it around my finger and popped it in my mouth.

  “Oh… Oh… No.” Bitter, salty, scalding heat flooded my mouth. I ran to the sink and spit it out. “Sage, I can’t serve that!”

  But I had hungry customers. People were waiting.

  I paced the kitchen floor, wringing my hands. I’d had to deal with days without Brenda before, but we’d always made plans. She’d made spaghetti and meatballs or lasagna. She’d prepped casseroles that I’d been able to slide into a hot oven and forget.

  While well-meaning, I was sure, Joel’s recommendation that I make aglio e olio was an epic fail. Usually when taking on a new dish, I’d practice it before being faced with serving it to anyone. I’d practice it a lot! But instead, Joel had guided me in making a monstrous amount of a pasta dish that was an epic fail. It wasn’t only an issue of having nothing to serve to my waiting customers. There was also the issue of the cost of the ingredients. High quality olive oil and parmesan cheese were not cheap.