If Fried Chicken Could Fly (3 page)

As Jim and the Cliff-lookalike came through the double front doors, I straightened up. By this time I’d become completely self-involved and had forgotten the reason we’d called the police in the first place.

“Isabelle,” Jim said as he led the way. “We got a call, we think from your gram. Was there a fire, and is there a dead body in the school?”

Cliff-lookalike stayed to Jim’s side and back a step or two.

“Uh-huh. Hi, Jim,” I said as I found my feet and boldly stepped forward. “Who’s your new officer?”

“Oh, this is Cliff Sebastian. Cliff, this is…”

“Isabelle Winston. Hi, Betts,” he said with a half smile. “We went to high school together, Jim.”

“Oh, that seems about right. Cliff’s come back to town. Funny how so many people come back to Broken Rope.”

“Yeah, funny,” I said. “Hi, Cliff.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, B.”

He kept shortening my name, finally reaching the derivation that I’d only allowed him to use. No one else had called me B. And after we broke up, no one dared.

The swinging doors flew open. “Well, there you are. Who
is that yahoo you have answering the phone at your office? Oh, never mind,” Gram said.

“Sorry about that, Miz. We’re here now. You say there’s a body? Where is it?” Jim scratched the side of his bald head.

Gram’s given name was Missouri Anna Winston. Most people called her either Gram or Miz. My dad, her son, called her Miz Winnie and my mother called her Mom. But everyone knew who she was, no matter what name was used. My full name is Isabelle Anna Winston. Someone, though there’s a continuing family argument as to who, called me Betts when I was little, and it stuck.

“Yes, there’s a body. It’s horrible, Jim. That’s why I…oh, hang on. Who’s this?” Gram, though skinny, was strong as the proverbial ox. She pushed Jim aside and looked up at Cliff. “Cliff Sebastian, is that you?”

“Yes, Miz, it is. Good to see you.”

Gram chewed at her bottom lip as she studied Cliff. Then she looked at Jim and then at me and then back at Cliff.

“Well, I’ll be,” she said.

“Miz, there’s a body, right?” Jim said as he scratched his head again.

“Yes, there is.” She gave Cliff one more look and then turned to Jim. “The fire was in the kitchen, but it’s out now. The body is in the back, in the supply room.”

“Let’s go,” Jim said. He led the way out of the reception area and through the swinging doors. Cliff gave me a strained nod and followed Jim.

“Well, what do you think of that, Betts?” Gram said.

“I think we have a dead body in the school and we need to know what happened.”

“No, I meant…”

“I know what you meant. Gram, Cliff and I dated in high school. That might as well have been a hundred years ago. We’re both almost thirty years old and have lived our lives
separately. I’m surprised to see him, but this is his home; in an odd and sometimes cruel twist, people do come back here because for some reason, it seems, some of us just can’t live outside the boundary of strangeness that is Broken Rope. I think…” If I’d continued to vocalize my thoughts, I would have said that I thought I was going to have to figure out how to live in my hometown and avoid someone besides Ophelia Buford who had been my own personal version of Nellie Olsen since I was five years old. Because even though it had been over a decade since Cliff and I had dated, just seeing him made my stomach flutter and my breathing speed up. I would have to find a way to avoid him—a married man, probably a parent—at all costs. I would have said:
Damn.

Gram patted my arm. “Actually, dear, I just wondered what you thought about Cliff working for Jim, that was all. But I see now that we’re going to have some other issues.” Finally, she also disappeared through the swinging doors.

“Damn,” I said. Trailing the rest of the crowd, I pushed through the doors, too.

Gram stopped outside the supply room. She put her hands on her hips and peered down as I stayed back a little. At seventy-eight she was still as skinny and as strong as my parents claimed she’d always been. She said she hadn’t lost any height, but my father says he thinks she used to be a couple inches taller than her current five foot five. She always wore jeans, even in the middle of the southern Missouri hot and humid summers. Her T-shirt and sweatshirt collection had happened by accident. Decades earlier she was given a University of Missouri T-shirt and a Kansas State T-shirt on the same day. She’d promised the gift givers that she’d alternate them even though she was a Missouri
fan through and through. The trend stuck, and she had closets full of tops from colleges and universities throughout the world. Today she wore a blue T-shirt from Drake University. She wore her gray hair short and boyish because “messing with my hair is a pain in the back end and I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

I still remembered when her hair was long, thick, and auburn, just like mine. Apparently we had more in common than our love for cooking and our hair. I didn’t see the resemblance, but my dad says I’m the spitting image of the young Missouri Anna Winston, which is sometimes like being able to time travel into the future. I hoped I lived as long and had as much energy.

“You found him like this, Miz?” Jim asked from the room. I swallowed hard, stepped forward, and peered over her shoulder.

“No, he was covered in stuff. We cleared him off when we saw his hand,” she said.

“Do you know him?”

“Yes, he and I were going to have a late dinner tonight. He’s Everett Morningside, the newest owner of the Jasper.”

“I know who he is. I just wondered if you did. Does he always dress like that?”

“Yes.” I heard sadness in her voice.

“I can’t be sure, but it looked like he was asphyxiated with the plastic bag,” Jim said to Cliff.

“We oughta call Morris and then get to work gathering evidence,” Cliff said.

“I can call Morris,” Gram said.

Morris Dunsany was the county coroner and medical
examiner. Broken Rope wasn’t the largest town in the county, but with its history of strange deaths and the summer tourist bump in population someone decided that Morris’s office would be best placed here.

Jim said, “We’ll need to get your and Betts’s fingerprints and anyone else who might have been in here.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, we’ll probably need prints from all your students—well, let’s find the time of death and then we’ll see who was in the school at the time. We’ll start there.”

“That’s a pretty big list of people,” Gram said.

“You had classes today and tonight?”

“Yes.”

Jim looked closely at the body. “Okay, well, can you call the night students and get them back here? Give me their contact information, too. I’ll also need your daytime students’ numbers and addresses as quickly as possible.”

“I’ll call the nighters right after I call Morris. I’ll make you a copy of my phone list,” Gram said. I admired her ability to function clearheadedly.

A buzz sounded from a speaker in the office. Someone had just come in the front doors.

“Who would that be?” Jim asked.

“The firemen?” Gram said.

“I’ll come with you.” Jim stood, wincing slightly as he held a hand to his lower back. “Cliff, stay here and make sure the scene isn’t further compromised. I’ll go with Miz to make the calls and see who’s here.”

I was going to go with Jim and Gram, but I stayed put instead and leaned on the doorframe, forcing myself to ignore the dead body. I cleared my throat a couple times,
but Cliff barely looked my direction, his professional focus on Everett. Finally, I said, “Okay, Cliff, I have to know. What are you doing back in Broken Rope? Why are you a police officer? I thought you were an architect.”

He stood but with less effort than Jim. He motioned me out of the doorway and backward into the small hall. He snapped a latex glove over his hand—his left hand that most definitely had a wedding band on the third finger—and then pulled the door closed behind him. Once we were both in the hall, I stepped back farther. The space was small and he seemed to take up too much of it.

“I didn’t like being an architect, Betts. When I was tired of where I was—San Francisco—I just wanted to come home. And I always wanted to be a police officer. Perhaps it was a dream left over from childhood, but it never went away. I decided it was time to live my life the way I wanted to.”

“As opposed to the way someone else wanted?” I asked, prompting him to tell me more.

“I suppose,” was all he said as he looked away.

“How long have you been back in town?”

“Not long. I did my training in Springfield and Jim hired me a week ago. I, uh, hear—well, I see—that you came back home, too.”

“Yeah, the magnetic pull of Broken Rope is too strong to ignore. Actually, it is working out well—other than today, I guess.” I looked at the closed door.

“Good. I always thought you’d make a great attorney, but working with Miz is better, don’t you think?”

“Much better.”

Cliff rubbed an ungloved finger under his nose and looked like he had something else he wanted to say but was
struggling with how to say it. We spent a strained moment staring at each other. It was difficult for me to look away, and I assumed it was just as difficult for him, though it couldn’t have been for the same reasons. Surely, his heart wasn’t pounding as he thought back to our high school days and the time we spent together. Considering the serious and horrible situation, it was ridiculous enough that I was having such an awful reaction; it would be downright disgraceful if he was, too.

Get a grip.

“Betts, come on up front,” Jim said as he appeared in the hall behind me. “Cliff, stay there.”

I broke the stare-down and hurried back through the long building. A dead body and the return of Cliff Sebastian all in one day.

I didn’t know if I could handle all the excitement.

The buzz had announced the fire marshal, a man who’d only recently moved to Broken Rope. Evan Mason had come to town via St. Louis. Apparently a statewide plea for a new Broken Rope fire marshal had gone out after Fred Hutchinson retired six months ago. Evan, having lost the rest of his family in a terrible car accident, took the job to “get a fresh start.” He was quiet but friendly enough when he’d come into the school once before to check one of our natural gas hookups.

After Gram showed him the scene of the fire, she and Jim called the coroner and the five students who’d been recently dismissed.

Before long, the students were back, and the small parking lot out front was full enough to resemble the late-night crowd from the bingo parlor days.

Cliff stayed with Everett’s body and Morris and two EMTs joined them in the back. The five students sat on stools in the kitchen and observed as Evan stood on a ladder and peered into the ceiling. He stopped me as I walked by.

“Ms. Winston,” he said as he looked down. He had a head full of curly blond hair but in the dark of the ceiling space it almost looked like he was wearing a halo.

“Yes?” I said as I looked up.

“You will have to replace these ceiling tiles, but next time something like this happens, you need to call me immediately, even if you think the fire is out. There’s evidence that something sparked up here but then must have died out on its own. If that spark had taken off, the fire could have spread before you knew about it down there. In fact, I’m surprised it didn’t.”

“Oh. Sorry. Of course, we’ll do better next time.” My already nervous stomach turned at our mistake. If we hadn’t found Everett’s body, we probably wouldn’t have called the fire marshal until the next day. Even at that, we might have just tried to clean things up ourselves. We would definitely have to do better next time.

“The damage isn’t bad enough that you need to close down. Just ventilate well and get rid of all the gunk as quickly as possible, okay? If Officer Morrison gathers everything he needs to gather, you should be good to go.” He smiled.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Betts, you need to get fingerprinted,” Gram said, sticking her head through the opening in the swinging doors.

“Excuse me,” I said to Evan. “I’ve got to…”