Murder Sends a Postcard (A Haunted Souvenir) (2 page)

“How many people do you think you’re feeding, girl?”

ERNIE LOOKED OVER MY SHOULDER AND LET OUT A
long, low whistle. “I take it all back. You
have
been cooking.”

“Of course,” I answered sweetly. “Would you care for an appetizer?” I gestured toward the eggs.

We nibbled on the eggs as we took the rest of the food from the refrigerator, arranged the unmatched bowls on the table, and sat down on an assortment of kitchen chairs.

Most of my apartment had been furnished with bits and pieces from my inventory downstairs. Searching the piney woods of north Florida and south Alabama for vintage furniture, kitchenware, and magazines was one of the best parts of running Southern Treasures. Occasionally I found a piece I couldn’t bear to part with. At least until I found the next piece and had to move something out to make room.

As I expected, we spent the first hour debating the authenticity of a “cold supper.”

“I really don’t know,” I finally admitted. “I have no idea how far back the idea goes. But my mother used to make cold meals when it got too hot to cook.”

Karen admitted she remembered my mom’s cold suppers when we were in high school. “She wasn’t the only one either. Mrs. Freed used to do cold suppers sometimes.”

The mention of Riley’s mother snagged Felipe’s attention. “Which reminds me, where is your
Mr
. Freed tonight?”

“He’s not
my
Mr. Freed,” Karen protested. Her red face contradicted her words as she repeated her earlier explanation, but we didn’t bother to point it out.

“How is the shop doing?” she asked Ernie in an attempt to change the subject. “Are the tourists being good to you?”

“Pretty good,” Ernie answered. “Good thing, too, since we’ve lost several of our best local customers.”

“You mean the Andersons?” I asked, helping myself to another scoop of potato salad.

“Them,” Ernie agreed, “and Lacey Simon. And Jennifer Marshall.” He shook his head. “This bank mess is spilling over the whole town.”

“That reminds me,” I said, remembering my afternoon visitor. “I met the bank auditor, the McKenna woman. She came in the shop this afternoon.”

My three dinner companions all stared at me for a silent moment, then everyone spoke at once.

“What’s she like?”

“How old is she really?”

“How much did she spend?”

The last question made me laugh. Trust Felipe to cut to the heart of the matter.

“I don’t know. I was upstairs fixing dinner when she left, and Julie would have taken care of her.” I answered Felipe’s query first, then I turned to Karen. “At least forty, I’d guess, maybe a little older.” I told them about the careful makeup, the designer suit, and the stiletto heels. “Her haircut probably cost as much as any of us spends on haircuts in a year.”

It was a pretty safe bet. Karen and I both visited the local beauty school a couple times a year, and the guys mostly cut each other’s hair. In fact, Felipe had become a wizard with a pair of scissors.

“But what’s she like?” Ernie repeated his question.

“Smart.” I had only exchanged a few words with Bridget McKenna, but it was the one word that instantly came to mind. “Seems genuinely friendly, but she speaks her mind.”

“That isn’t exactly a news flash,” Ernie said. “Last Merchants’ Association meeting we got an earful from Andrew Marshall. Rumor has it his wife kicked him out, so maybe his views on women are a little skewed, but he was blaming the McKenna woman, and her bank, for everything that’s happened.”

“Marshall was a mess,” Felipe said. “And I think he’d started happy hour a wee bit early, if you know what I mean.”

Ernie nodded, and continued. “He acted like a guy who’s lost everything. Which you would know if you’d been there.”

He delivered the verbal jab with a resigned air. It was a ritual every Thursday, nagging me because I refused to join. But I wasn’t one of the good ol’ boys, and I didn’t want to be.

“Marshall’s already had a couple run-ins with her,” Felipe added. “Said she has a bad temper, real short fuse, and a tongue sharp enough to slice bread.”

“Well, he may have an attitude, too,” Karen said. “After all, Bayvue Estates is the real reason she’s here to begin with. If Marshall hadn’t borrowed so much money from Back Bay for that development, the bank wouldn’t be in trouble.”

I shook my head. “You know it’s more than that, Karen. Back Bay didn’t have to lend that much to him. Or to anybody else. From what I hear, there were a lot of loans that were too big. Besides that, the Andersons treated the place like it was their own private piggy bank.”

Felipe nodded, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands over his stomach. “True that. Felicia Anderson never met an antique she didn’t think she should have. Usually with some story about how it once belonged to old General Anderson, so we should give her a discount because it was really hers to begin with.” He made a rude noise. “She only married into the family a couple years ago, but she acts like she’s been here since plantation days.”

It was a slight exaggeration. Billy Anderson had been a year ahead of Karen and me in school, and he’d married Felicia right out of college. So closer to fifteen years than just a couple.

The Andersons claimed they were descended from Civil War General Richard Anderson, based on evidence no one could confirm, and acted accordingly. To hear them tell it, we were all little more than sharecroppers and squatters on their ancestral estate.

Felipe’s description wasn’t far off. Felicia Anderson might have started out as a Yankee schoolgirl, but she quickly acquired a synthetic Southern drawl and the Andersons’ superior attitude.

It was Karen’s turn to sigh. “Billy’s grandpa would just die to see what Billy’s done to that bank. I remember the old man coming to school and starting us all on savings accounts when we were first-graders. Real proud of all the things he did for the community.”

Karen stood up and waved away the topic of Billy and Felicia Anderson. “Anything else about the bank woman?” she asked as she started gathering the dirty dishes.

I shook my head. “I only talked to her for a couple minutes. She did like Bluebeard, though.”

“Everybody likes Bluebeard.” Felipe laughed. “What’s more important is whether he liked her. He thought for a second, then continued, “Or whether Louis did.”

“Indeed,” Ernie agreed. “What did Louis think?”

“Glory said she was attractive,” Karen called over her shoulder from the counter, where she was stacking dishes. “Of course Louis liked her.”

I laughed. “He is a sucker for a pretty face,” I conceded, “but he still has his standards.”
Was I actually defending the judgment of a ghost?
I guess I was. “She did get a whistle, so he at least approved that much.”

We cleared the table quickly, stashing leftovers in the fridge. Ernie filled the sink with soapy water and washed the plates and silver—someday I’d get a dishwasher!—while I started a pot of coffee. It didn’t matter if it was a hundred degrees out, Felipe would want coffee with his dessert.

I scooped ice cream into bowls and put a plate of cookies in the middle of the table. They looked like messy chocolate blobs, but I knew from my taste testing the night before that they would be good.

Karen eyed the plate, then looked up at me. “Are those what I think they are?”

I nodded.

She grabbed a cookie and took a bite. “I haven’t had one of these in a million years!” she exclaimed around a mouthful of chocolate and oatmeal.

“What are they?” Felipe asked. He gave the brown blob a suspicious look.

“Lunchroom cookies,” Karen and I answered in unison.

“What?”

As hostess, it was my job to explain. “I don’t know what other people call them, although I’m sure they have a real name. We just call them lunchroom cookies because they used to have them in the school lunchroom when we were little kids.”

Felipe didn’t look like he was sold on the idea, but he took a tentative bite, chewing carefully. “Tastes kind of like fudge-coated oatmeal.”

“You’re pretty close,” I agreed. “It’s cocoa, sugar, butter, oatmeal, and peanut butter.”

Felipe snapped his fingers. “Peanut butter! I knew there was something else. Just couldn’t place it.”

“The best part is they don’t take much cooking. Cook the sugar, butter, and cocoa into a syrup, boil it for a minute, mix it with the oatmeal and peanut butter, and drop spoonfuls on waxed paper to cool.”

Karen quizzed me about the recipe, and I fetched the copies I’d made for my guests. We always gave one another our recipes at the end of dinner. Over the years my Thursday notebook had grown fat with things I would cook someday.

“I haven’t been able to come up with a definitive origin for the cookies,” I admitted. “But I do have my own theory of why they were so common in the lunchroom.”

My friends looked at me expectantly, and I explained. “When we were in grade school, there was a commodities program that provided food to the school lunch program. I don’t know a lot about it, but I seem to remember a lot of peanut butter and butter in the cafeteria, and oatmeal. I’m guessing that most of the ingredients came from that program.”

Karen nodded. “Keyhole Bay was definitely a rural school district back then,” she told Felipe and Ernie. “We bused kids in from way out in the country.”

As always, we talked far too late, catching up on the week’s news and eventually circling back to the impending takeover of Back Bay Bank.

“Is it really that bad?” Ernie asked.

Karen nodded. As the lead reporter for WBBY, she took her news-gathering duties seriously, and usually had the inside track on whatever was happening in town. “I think it is,” she said. “They sent down one of their big guns to run the audit, in the middle of the high season. Even at top rates they couldn’t find her a hotel room.”

“Then where is she staying?” I asked. “Pensacola’s got to be worse.”

“In one of the model homes,” Karen answered. She yawned and stretched her arms over her head before standing up. “The bank owns the houses”—she shrugged—“so I guess it makes sense. Got some rental furniture out of one of those discount places over by Eglin, and moved in.” She gathered up the oversized bag she carried with her everywhere. “Early morning tomorrow. I need to be getting home.”

Felipe and Ernie were on their feet, too. Ernie carried the ice cream bowls to the sink, but I waved him away. “You’ve done enough already,” I said. “I can take care of the rest of this.”

I walked them downstairs and said good night, carefully locking the door behind them and arming the alarm system. I’d become a fanatic about the alarm in the last year.

I checked on Bluebeard, giving him a shredded-wheat biscuit for a treat. He nibbled the biscuit, then dropped the rest of it in his dish and hopped onto my arm. Bumping against my chin, he asked “Coffee?”

I shook my head. “You know the answer,” I said, stroking his head. He leaned into me, as though the show of affection would change my mind.

I petted him for another minute or two, but I was already yawning, and it was time to go to bed.

I urged Bluebeard back into his cage, gave him a few seeds to assuage my guilt over the coffee, and made sure he was settled down for the night.

Through the wide front window I could see the lights still on across the street in Beach Books.

I made a quick mental calculation of the leftovers in the refrigerator. There were a
lot
of leftovers, I realized. I’d wanted to be sure I had enough of everything, but because I’d made so many dishes, I had ended up with a refrigerator full of food.

I picked up the phone and dialed Jake’s cell number.

“Hi,” I said when he answered. “You hungry?”

FIVE MINUTES AFTER I HUNG UP, THE LIGHTS WENT
out in Beach Books, and two minutes after that, Jake was at the front door.

I let him in, and Bluebeard squawked a greeting. Jake, understanding his duties as guest, went directly to the parrot to say hello.

“He’s already had his biscuit,” I warned Jake as he reached in his pocket. Jake often carried treats for the cantankerous bird.

“Not a @#%^$%#% biscuit,” Bluebeard shot back, fixing me with a beady stare.

“Language!” I cautioned. Bluebeard could swear like, well, like a pirate, and I hadn’t had much luck breaking him of his lifelong habit.

He muttered for a minute, the words indistinguishable but the tone crystal clear, then turned back to Jake. “Pretty boy,” he cooed and quickly exited his cage.

Jake looked at me, his glance quizzical. I shook my head in resignation. The two of them had started ganging up on me lately, and I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

Privately I was pleased with the turn of events. Bluebeard—and Uncle Louis—were the only blood family I had left, if you didn’t count my annoying cousin Peter and his parents, which I usually didn’t.

Whether Jake and I were actually a couple was still up for debate, but neither of us was seeing anyone else. So the apparent approval of my great-uncle, even when it came via his spokesbird, was treasured.

I watched Jake pull out a small plastic bag of plump green grapes and put them in Bluebeard’s dish. He was rewarded with a quick head butt and another cooed “Pretty boy” before Bluebeard hopped over to the dish and greedily consumed the grapes.

When he had devoured his second treat, Bluebeard went back into his large cage and settled on his perch for the night. I left the door open, which we both preferred, but I draped the cage with a blanket to block the streetlights coming through the big front windows.

“’Night,” I whispered.

Bluebeard murmured something soft and indistinct, already on his way to parrot dreamland. I wondered if parrots dreamed. And if Bluebeard didn’t dream, did Uncle Louis? I still had no idea what the rules were for ghosts, and Uncle Louis had done very little to enlighten me. Mostly he flirted with customers and swore a lot.

Having given Bluebeard his due, Jake turned his attention back to me, giving me a hug and a quick kiss. As we climbed the stairs to my apartment, I told him about dinner and asked him what he’d like to eat.

“How am I supposed to choose? It all sounds good!”

I gestured to the table. “Sit down, I’ll fix you a plate.”

Jake protested, but I shook my head. “I had plenty of help with cleanup, and you were stuck working. I’ll get it.”

“It’s not like I was that stuck,” he said. But he settled for getting himself some silverware before he sat and watched me put samples of several salads on a plate. I put the plate on the table, along with a tall glass of sweet tea for each of us.

While Jake ate, making appreciative noises with each bite, I filled him in on everything I’d learned over dinner.

He shook his head at my description of Felicia Anderson. “Fifteen years, and she’s still a Yankee?” He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender that was marred by the potato salad that fell off his fork and plopped back onto his plate. “There’s no hope for me then, is there?”

“Probably not,” I agreed. “But you’re at least a Westerner, not a true Yankee.” Though Jake’s background was still a bit sketchy, I knew he’d grown up on the West Coast. “Felicia’s from somewhere in Connecticut, and even Mark Twain said people from there were Yankees.”

“Two points,” Jake said, “for a literary reference. Very good.”

“But it’s all about family,” I continued. “Who your family is, who you’re related to, how long you’ve lived here.”

Families in Keyhole Bay measured their residence in generations, not years. I knew people whose families had lived in the area for more than two centuries. Family history was a popular topic of conversation, always had been. Which meant I knew hours’ worth of stories about families like the Andersons.

“Felicia will always be a Yankee in the eyes of the old families around here.” I shrugged. “You will, too—not that it matters to me.”

I grinned at him. “Think you can live with that?”

Jake returned my grin. “I guess I can manage,” he said. He scraped up the last bite of coleslaw. “Do I get dessert, since I ate all my dinner?” he asked with mock innocence. He already knew there were cookies and homemade peach ice cream, and I knew he had a sweet tooth.

I snagged another cookie for myself when I brought Jake his dessert. He looked askance at the cookies, and I had to explain their history.

“I don’t think they’re exactly traditional,” I admitted. “But I loved them when I was a kid.”

While Jake finished dessert, I tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.

“You’re tired,” he said. “I need to get out of here and let you get some sleep.”

I didn’t argue. We weren’t at the staying-over stage, still far from it, and I wasn’t in any hurry to get there.

I let Jake out the front door, and watched as he loped across the deserted street to the front door of his shop before I trudged back upstairs and fell into bed.

• • •

IT WAS NEARLY CLOSING TIME ON FRIDAY WHEN
Bridget McKenna came back in the shop. She went straight to Bluebeard’s perch and said hello, even remembering to use his name.

A few minutes later, after making a circuit of the shop, inspecting the handmade quilts and thumbing through the vintage magazines, she came to the counter with a couple postcards and a garish T-shirt in a size small. “I should have packed some weekend clothes,” she said, handing me the T-shirt. “Usually I plan better than this.”

“You travel a lot?” I asked, ringing up her purchases.

She nodded. “It used to be long-term assignments, but over the last few months it’s been every other week, with a week at home in between. This time”—she paused to dig in her wallet for a credit card—“it’s going to take a little longer than expected, so I’m stuck here over the weekend.”

I took the postcards and turned them over to scan the price codes. “I’d swear I bought postcards when I was in here yesterday,” she said. “But when I got home, they were nowhere to be found.”

I vaguely remembered seeing her standing at the spinner rack the afternoon before when I had gone upstairs to fix dinner. I thought she’d had postcards in her hand, though I couldn’t be sure.

It might not be our mistake, but I bought the cards by the hundreds, and they didn’t cost a lot. Call it a gesture of goodwill, I could afford to give away a few postcards.

“These are on me,” I said as I slipped the postcards into a small bag. “You want to put these in your purse?”

She took the small bag and slid it into a side pocket of her purse.

“Thank you,” she said. “If I find the others, I will be sure to return them to you.”

“Not necessary. Consider it a gift,” I said as I handed her the large bag with the T-shirt.

She glanced around, as though making sure there weren’t any other customers in the store. “So what’s to do on the weekends around here?”

“Depends on what you like,” I replied. “Boat tours, museums, beaches if you can stand the crowds.” I ignored the shudder that passed through me at the thought and added, “Lots of scuba diving in the Gulf.

“You have a car, right?”

She nodded.

“Biloxi’s just a couple hours west, if you want a casino. Another hour or so to New Orleans, a couple more and you’re in Cajun country, if you want to do some driving. There are some lovely places in southern Louisiana: bayous, plantations, there’s even a couple places that have sternwheeler cruises. And there’s always a festival or something.”

She thought for a moment, then asked, “Where would you go?”

“Biloxi, I guess, because I haven’t been there in a while,” I answered. “I usually go over a couple times a year with friends. Catch a show, gamble a little, maybe stay over one night. But mostly I can’t be gone longer than a day,” I said, glancing around the shop.

I also couldn’t afford to gamble if I wanted to continue saving for my secret goal: to buy out my annoying cousin Peter. Which reminded me he had called the day before. My mother would be scandalized that I was ignoring the social obligation of returning his call, but my mother hadn’t had to deal with Peter the way I did.

“One more question. Where around here is good for dinner? I’ve been living on takeout all week.”

I shook my head. “Wish I had a good answer to that one. There are a couple great places, but everything’s packed on a Friday night in the summer.”

She sighed. “Guess it’s another evening of fish and chips, or burgers. I am so not ready to fight crowds.” She glanced around again. “Besides, I know I’m not exactly welcome around here.”

The ghost of a grin played around her mouth. “Not like that’s anything new.”

I don’t know what possessed me, but before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “If you don’t mind leftovers, I’ve got plenty to share.”