A Berry Murderous Kitten_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery Read online

  I looked back at Brad. “The awning over the door keeps the streetlights from reaching that spot.

  Brad took a break from measuring coffee grounds and glanced outside. He nodded. “Could be.” He went back to making the coffee. “Did you see who it was?”

  My heart faltered. “No, oh no. Don’t tell me. Is it somebody I know?” Jack? Agatha? Zoey? It couldn’t be Joel. At least I didn’t think it could be him. He would have seemed like a much bigger roll of carpet.

  Brad finished his work and then took up a spot across from me while the coffee brewed. “The wallet says Cameron Caldwell.”

  “Zoey,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say her name. I hadn’t known I had said it until the sound reached my ears.

  “Zoey?” Brad’s inner policeman was piqued. I wasn’t talking to easy-going Brad now. I was talking to murder-investigator Brad. “What about Zoey? Did you see something?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Brad’s gaze turned cold. I no longer saw the man behind his eyes who wanted to take me out on a date. That man was gone.

  “Zoey didn’t do it.” That’s what I said because that’s what I wanted to believe.

  Brad said nothing. He waited.

  His interrogation technique worked.

  “Cam—I mean Cameron—hit on Zoey twice yesterday. He came into the café and expressed his interest, and then a little while after that he grabbed her in front of the café.”

  “He grabbed her?”

  “He danced with her.”

  “Danced with her?”

  “Yes, grabbed her and danced with her.” I was getting annoyed. Brad had to figure out who had made Cameron dead, and he wasn’t getting annoyed. There was something wrong with me.

  “Then what?”

  I shrugged. “She elbowed him in the face, then she tased him until he peed himself.” I felt guilty for telling Brad about the altercation, but others had seen it too. Someone would eventually tell him. I didn’t mind him knowing; I just didn’t want him making Zoey suspect number one. She didn’t do this. She couldn’t have, not my newest, bestest friend. But there was another part of me that completely believed that Zoey could have done this. She was a miniature Amazonian in three-inch heels.

  Brad’s eyebrows went up. “What happened after that?”

  “Zoey walked away. Cam got up, bumbled around looking disoriented, and then wandered off in a different direction.”

  “Do you know where Zoey went after she walked away?”

  “She had a service call scheduled. Someone needed help with their network.”

  Brad pulled a small notepad out of his shirt pocket and made a note. “What time was this?” I gave him my best guess. “Do you know the name of the client?”

  “No.”

  Brad wrote some more and then looked me square in the eyes. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  I felt as though he were asking me if I’d killed Cam myself. If I was suspected of murder too many times, would they finally assume I was guilty by association? “I didn’t kill him.”

  Brad nodded. “That is good to know.” He shifted his weight. “Kylie, about our date on Friday…”

  “You need to cancel?” Going out on a date with a potential suspect surely must have been a conflict of interest.

  “Postpone.”

  “It’s okay. You can cancel.”

  “Kylie.” His bluer than blue gaze didn’t waver. “Postpone.”

  Chapter 5

  You’re closed down again, huh?” Joel said with his elbows leaning on the bar. I’d left the café’s back door unlocked with a note taped to it. It didn’t mention the murder, but it did say to come on in. Everything considered, the café was having a good turnout for its mid-day rush. There had to be twelve people.

  “Are you serving any food today or just sticking to coffee?”

  “I’ve got a pork roast cooking.”

  “Pork?” Fear flashed in Joel’s eyes, words like trichinosis no doubt invading his thoughts.

  “Brenda left me instructions,” I said. I was trying to reassure him, but he didn’t look comforted in the slightest. “It’s been in the oven since before dawn. Want to go take a look? It should be done soon.”

  We went in back to survey my success. What we found was an oven that hadn’t been turned on and a pork roast that had been sitting out unrefrigerated for close to six hours.

  “Sugar snaps.” I wanted to say worse but didn’t.

  “This will have to be thrown out.”

  “Brenda’s going to kill me.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  I smiled at him weakly. Brenda was a saint. It didn’t matter if she knew about the roast. I knew she wasn’t ready to give up on me. I was amazed by how many people continued to come to the café even though ordering food was a little like playing at a roulette table: you never knew what would come your way.

  “Any ideas what I could feed people?”

  “Show me your walk-in cooler.” I did. Joel crossed his arms over his wide, powerful chest and surveyed the pickings. “You got plans for this bacon?”

  “No.”

  “Can you boil some eggs?”

  “I think so.”

  “You got a menu board other than your Oops board?”

  I didn’t. Getting one hadn’t even occurred to me. The printed menus that Sarah had used became useless the second she’d left. I couldn’t make a single dish on them. “I could cross the oops out.”

  “Good. Go do that. Write on it ‘Wilted Salad with Warm Bacon Vinaigrette.’”

  Something about the sound of that as a lunch offering made me happier than a kid on Christmas. Reaching up to grab Joel’s collar, I pulled him down and planted a kiss on his cheek. He blushed, which made me happier still.

  With Joel dressed in a too-small apron, he performed duties as chef and I as his sous chef. Together we filled fifteen requests for the meal, given that more people had managed to find their way into the café.

  It was AMAZING! Pure and simple. It was my best day in the café yet. So what if the day started with a dead body shoved up against the front door… Doesn’t matter. Best day ever.

  That was until I started hearing the gossip circulating while I served the food. The things people said as I went from table to table changed, but the topic remained the same.

  “…always been a little strange. That make-up of hers.” They were talking about Zoey. Her adventures in eye makeup were legendary.

  “…heard she grabbed him while he was walking past and kneed him right where it hurts.”

  “…hope she gets away with it. Cam was a jerk.”

  “…she got so possessive of her fiancé that he had to go into hiding.”

  “I thought he went missing, as in the buried-somewhere-out-in-the-woods kinda missing. I thought everybody knew she’d killed him. That happened months ago.”

  My ears started burning. Each person seemed to have something worse to say than the last. I struggled not to up-end more than one salad plate over a customer’s head. If I did that, though, people would stop talking. If they stopped talking, I’d stop learning. And if I stopped learning, I might not be able to help Zoey when she needed it most.

  “…Cam can rot in hell,” one guy said. “He grabbed my little sister and shoved his tongue down her throat. If that Asian chick killed him, I’m shaking her hand. I wanted to rip his tongue out but my mom made me promise not to, said it would mess up my scholarship.”

  “…why didn’t he get fired? He was a terrible waiter. Always rude. I stopped going there. Refused. I’d rather come here, even with the bad… Oh, hey Kylie. How’s it going?”

  I smiled blandly, put the food on the table and moved on.

  “…think Patty knows? We should call her and tell her. He was such a jerk to her. I don’t even think she’ll be sad.”

  “Oh, yeah. She dumped him months ago.”

  “I thought he dumped her.”

  “Doesn’t
matter now. He’s dead and she can tell it anyway she wants.”

  “…he badgered poor Tim until he just gave in.”

  “Heard Cam made Tim cry. Tim wasn’t ready to sell.”

  “I would have burned the place down before selling to that S.O.B.”

  The comments flowed at every table. Zoey and Cam were all anybody could talk about. Back and forth. Some talked about Zoey, others about Cam. Nobody had anything good to say about anyone, except for the guy who wanted to shake Zoey’s hand for, you know, being a murderer.

  I retreated to the kitchen and packed a huge to-go container as a take-out lunch for Joel. He’d worked through his break and then some. I put in the salad we’d made together with extra bacon crumbles. I added store-bought cookies and a slice of chess pie that Brenda had made the day before.

  He left, and that was the end of my lunch rush.

  Agatha was at the grill’s counter when I came back out from the kitchen. She was sipping a cup of coffee she’d helped herself to. She always managed to look queenly.

  I got a clean cloth and wiped down the counter near where she sat. “Agatha, did you know Cam?”

  She did a one-sided shoulder shrug. “Knew of him more than knew him.”

  “Was he a nice guy?”

  “He used to act nice, but there always seemed to be a motive behind everything he did. He was a waiter at Bouche. Used to be that if he waited on you, he was the picture of charm. It was always about the tip. If you saw him out and about, he’d fake a smile if he couldn’t avoid you or sometimes he’d ignore a person like they weren’t even there. I can’t swear to it, but I’d heard rumors that if you had tipped him badly in the past that he’d spit in your food from then on out.”

  I grimaced. The thought of eating anything Cam had spit in made my stomach curdle. “You said he used to act nice. Did he stop?”

  Agatha’s brows lifted halfway up her forehead. “Oh, did he ever.”

  When she lifted her brows, her forehead didn’t even wrinkle. I didn’t know whether to hate her or beg for a gene transplant. I wasn’t even thirty and I was already seeing little crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes. She had none.

  She rested her chin atop curled fingers. “He became a nightmare. Most people in town have stopped going to Bouche. I usually call ahead and make sure he’s not working.”

  “All because of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did they stay in business?”

  “Bouche is right off the interstate and in the direction of the Camden Falls National Park, so the restaurant catches a lot of tourist business.”

  This wasn’t making sense to me. If my waiter or waitress—either two of them—were driving away business the way Cam did, I’d fire them.

  “Was he nice to the tourists?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, that must have meant that he wasn’t making as much as he used to in tips. Had he come into some money?”

  “I don’t think so. Word is that he just negotiated with Tim Hubert to buy him out of Allegro Takeaway Coffee, and I don’t think Cam paid him very much. I’ve known Tim a long time. We even used to date. Tim refused to say much about it, but I got the impression that he wasn’t happy about selling and that he’d gotten less than he’d planned to get out of the business. He’d always planned to sell eventually, when he was ready to retire.”

  “He’d thought it was worth more?”

  “He knew it was worth more, but Cam started trolling his business online several months back. He made up hundreds of fake reviews saying the most awful things, but Tim could never prove it. Cam’s trolling drove away the tourist so that Tim was barely breaking even. Then, when Cam offered to buy it, Tim was tired. He caved.” Agatha’s lips were pressed together and she shook her head. “I’d have hired someone to beat that boy with a baseball bat.”

  Or hire someone to strangle him? But why leave the body in front of my café? Maybe Tim was trying to undermine my business and bolster his own at the same time. I didn’t get many tourists, though. I was too far from the interstate. And I wasn’t a coffee shop. I did sell more coffee than food, but that was on account of my being a terrible cook.

  I needed some coffee. Maybe with some whiskey splashed in it. Trying to think all this through was giving me a headache. Why did people need to keep dying around me? There were perfectly good places to die all over town. Maybe I’d start collecting the fingerprints of everyone who came into the café. If I did that, maybe people wouldn’t be so quick to kill others while pointing their murderous little fingers at me.

  Chapter 6

  Zoey walked in. Everybody in the café stopped talking. I didn’t think I had her fingerprints, but I was sure I could get them.

  “Want some coffee?” I asked as she sat at the grill’s bar next to Agatha.

  “Did you make it?”

  “Joel made it after he got done making lunch.” That got a smile out of her.

  “I’ll have some coffee. Any lunch left?”

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “Nope. Joel’s a good cook.”

  I remembered the night that Brad showed up in my apartment with carton after carton of eggs. He was a good cook, too. It was because of him that I was able to boil eggs for the lunch.

  I poured Zoey a cup of coffee, set out the chilled cream dispenser and cubes of sugar, and then went into the back kitchen to make Zoey a salad. Most of the fixings were already prepped. I warmed the bacon vinaigrette, sliced an already boiled egg, heated up the gently sautéed red onion, and put everything together the same way that Joel had.

  I eyeballed the dish. It looked pretty good, but not the same as when Joel did it. I was pretty sure that I got the vinaigrette too warm and wilted the lettuce too much.

  I took it out to Zoey and slid it over. I held my breath as she took her first bite, then let it out when she took her second bite. She liked what I’d made well enough to eat it, and that was a win in my book.

  The café door opened. The front door. The door with all the crime scene tape. It was Brad.

  The silence that had pervaded the café a moment ago turned into a host of whispers.

  Brad approached the grill’s bar, but he didn’t even look at me. Not even once. His eyes were on Zoey, but Zoey ignored him. She ate her salad.

  That salad was making me proud.

  “Zoey,” Brad said.

  “Brad,” Zoey said around a mouthful of food.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Start talking.” Zoey still hadn’t taken her eyes off of her salad.

  Brad shot me a look, one that said he needed privacy.

  “Agatha, I’ve noticed that you know how to make a mean fire back there in the fireplace. Mind showing me how?”

  “Sure.” Agatha’s eyes swiveled to Zoey as she slipped off her stool. She gave Zoey a supportive rub on the back before we turned to make our way back to the café’s cozy corner. When we got there, we didn’t talk about the fireplace. We watched Zoey and Brad. Pensively. I could tell that Agatha was hating this as much as me.

  “Think she’ll be okay?” I asked.

  “She’s a tough one.”

  I glanced around us. Just like Agatha and me, all eyes were on Zoey and Brad. They were both regulars at the café. They had both stood by me. They’d seen me through terrible cooking, the suspicion of murder, and a list of screw ups too long to name. Now they were at odds with each other. It was hard to watch, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  Brad said something.

  Zoey shook her head.

  Brad stepped closer and said something more.

  Zoey shook her head.

  Brad stepped back, put on his hat, and then to my amazement Zoey slid off her stool and followed him out of the café. This time, Brad used the back door like everybody else.

  Zoey’s abandoned salad was only half eaten, and the sight of it made me want to cry. It wasn’t fair. Life gets good for a second, or at least
good enough, then everything changes.

  I liked it better when I was under suspicion for murder. I didn’t feel so helpless.

  Chapter 7

  The customers trickled down to nothing earlier than usual, and I locked the backdoor at five-thirty with a sign listing what time I’d open in the morning.

  Sage and I headed upstairs to the apartment, and I made us a dinner of canned chicken and frozen peas thawed in the microwave. Sage ignored her peas.

  It had been a long time since I’d been done for the night this early in the evening, and I was determined to enjoy it. I ran a bubble bath using natural dishwashing soap for the bubbles. I climbed in, sank under the bubbles, put a washcloth over my eyes and drifted off.

  In my half-awake dreams, ponies chased cowboys, rabbits laid carrot-flavored eggs, and I was in a food competition but I couldn’t remember how to make cereal and milk. I couldn’t figure out which one was supposed to go into the bowl first.

  The jostle of my bath water brought me out of my half-slumber. “Sage, stop. You’ll fall in.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  My eyes flew open, and I tore the washcloth off my face. “Zoey!” I closed my eyes, blew out a relieved breath and sank lower under the bubbles. Then one eye popped back open. “How’d you get in here?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah.” First Brad waltzed in, in the middle of the night. Now Zoey was sitting on the edge of my tub.

  Zoey shrugged. “I called your cell phone. You didn’t answer.”

  “That’s because I’m in the tub!” That, plus the fact that I was pretty sure that my cell phone was still downstairs somewhere in the café.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place.” Zoey’s lips quirked up.

  I frowned. Now she was just messing with me.

  “It’s very minimalist,” Zoey continued, her smile getting bigger.

  “It’s called being broke.” The apartment was almost completely empty. I slept on a mattress laid on the floor. It didn’t even have sheets.

  “Yeah, but you’re the richest broke person I’ve ever met.”