Plum Deadly (18 page)

“Well I never!” Aunt Clara said from the window between the kitchen and the eating area. “That’s an unusual reaction. I thought you were the wronged party.”

Maggie shrugged, still angry about his betrayal. Why had he acted like he didn’t know what he’d written in his own paper? Just how stupid and gullible did he think she was?

She went to wipe off tables and mop invisible coffee stains on the floor. Anything to keep herself busy.

The pace picked up shortly after that, not giving her much time to think about what Ryan had done. She was at one of the small tables by the windows, pen and order pad in hand, when she saw her next customer—Mark Beck.

“I got a table today,” he proclaimed proudly with a big smile.

“The better to spy on us?”

He looked as puzzled as Ryan had. She sighed. Was she never going to meet another person who didn’t have some kind of personal agenda against her?

“What?” He fumbled with his tie, so apparent in his guilt it was comical. “Spy on you? I don’t know what you mean.”

She looked him in the eye. She was obviously a bad judge of character. She used to think she was good at seeing through people. Not anymore.

Not only had she thought he was attractive, she’d trusted him too. “I saw you in the back of Albert Mann’s car last night at my aunt’s house. You’re working for him, aren’t you?”

“He’s a client at my firm, yes. I don’t know what you’re thinking, Maggie. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you or your aunt.”

“This place has been my aunt’s livelihood for more than forty years. Closing it down would hurt her and me. How do you explain your part in that?”

“That’s relative, isn’t it? Mr. Mann is offering a very nice price for this place.” He glanced around the crowded pie shop. “Especially considering it’s a little worn and in need of repair. He only wants the property. She could never get what he’s offering if she sold the pie shop as is. She’s fortunate to have this offer. You must realize that.”

“I agreed with what you’re saying for a while. Now I know that Aunt Clara doesn’t want to sell. What part of that don’t you and your boss get?”

He leaned closer to her and whispered, “Help me get this set up for Mr. Mann and I’ll give you a piece of the pie, as it were.” He grinned at his own joke.

“How does coming in here almost every day fit into Mann buying this place?”

“I’m like an advance scout. I estimate price and policy for him. I help him make deals.”

“Then you need to go back to him and tell him we aren’t selling—not for the price he’s offering or any other price. That’s it. You don’t have to eat any more pie or bother coming in here again.”

Mark stumbled to his feet and picked up his briefcase. “There’s no reason to be hostile. I’ve tried to keep this on a friendly level. Mr. Mann doesn’t like to leave any bad feelings behind when he closes a deal. I’m telling you right now, Maggie, that he’s going to get this property. It’s worth a lot of money to him since it’s so close to the hospital. You might as well face it and help your aunt accept the inevitable.”

“You are the most—” She huffed in frustration. “Just get out.”

“Maggie, you’re not seeing the whole picture.”

“As a matter of fact, I do see the whole picture. Get out or I’ll call the police. They like to hang around me too right now. I’m sure I could get someone here quickly.”

He shrugged his shoulders in his expensive blue suit and left the pie shop.

Maggie had to take a moment to calm herself in the kitchen.

Aunt Clara was busy taking pies out of the oven and
didn’t notice her standing there taking deep breaths for a few minutes. “Is something wrong? Angry customer?”

Maggie finally explained about Mark. “I asked him to leave. He didn’t even try to deny it. I can’t believe he could be right under our noses and we didn’t see it.”

“How could we? Albert Mann is such a snake. I guess he hires snakes to work for him. You can’t tell by looking at people what they’re like, honey. Sometimes we find things out the hard way.”

Maggie agreed and hugged her aunt. “At least we know. I guess that will have to do for now, until the next spy shows up.”

Aunt Clara agreed and returned to her baking. After a few minutes, Maggie went back out front and refilled everyone’s coffee and tea. Two people ordered whole pies to go. She boxed up the two Bountiful Blueberry pies and rang them up with the rest of the customers’ orders.

She’d just finished when the power went off. The whole pie shop went dark around her.

What now?

B
usiness had to
come first.

The customers finished their pies and Maggie took cash or IOUs from them because the cash register wouldn’t work without power. Aunt Clara still had several pies left. Once those were gone, they would have to close—the oven ran on electricity too.

The food in the refrigerator would be all right for a while. Maggie called the electric company and told them the pie shop had an outage. They promised to come as soon as possible.

She went next door to Spin and Go. Everything there was fine. Saul said they hadn’t even had a flicker in their power. He went outside with Maggie behind the shops to look at the individual power meters.

“Here’s your problem.” He pointed to some wires going to the meter. “They’ve been cut. This has to be vandalism. No other way it could happen. I was an electrician for a while in my life. Nothing wears out like this.”

Maggie agreed with him as she looked at the sliced wires. Saul took a picture of the damage with his cell phone camera and said he’d send her a copy for her, the police, and the insurance company.

The power company employee who came to assess the situation agreed that it was vandalism. “You people have had a lot of problems over here, dead bodies and all. No wonder something like this happens.”

He was kind of grumpy about being there. There was a lot of heavy breathing and melodramatic rolling of his eyes. He must have moved the ball cap on his head a dozen times while he spoke.

If someone had purposefully cut the wires to the pie shop, she wasn’t surprised. Her guess would be Mark. He was probably angry that she’d recognized him from the car last night. He was no doubt still trying to accomplish his mission—shutting down the pie shop.

It was hard to imagine him in his expensive suit standing in water puddles around garbage cans, but it was too much of a coincidence. If she could get her hands on him right now, she wouldn’t be as polite as she had been earlier.

The pie shop was empty when she went back inside. She
consoled herself by thinking they would have been slow by this time of day anyway. It would’ve been much worse to have lost power first thing in the morning while they were baking and setting up for the rest of the day.

Mark wasn’t as observant a scout for Albert Mann as he might think. Maggie was glad of it. She hoped he’d lose his job with Mann Development. It would serve him right.

“I’ve been working on this list of customers.” Aunt Clara was sitting at one of the tables in front, ignoring the lack of light. “It’s very difficult. I don’t think any of these people would have wanted to kill your friend. I’ve known most of them for years. This has to be a mistake. Maybe I’m wrong about your friend’s death being anything but a way to silence him.”

“I know it’s hard.” Maggie sat down with her. “And it may not have been anyone here who gave Lou that poison. I hope not. After what happened with Ryan, and now Mark, I don’t think we can really trust anyone.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “I remember seeing Mark here for a long time. I can’t believe he’s working for Albert Mann, trying to shut me down. What is the world coming to?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Clara. I’m sorry this happened.”

Aunt Clara patted her hand. “It’s nothing to do with you, Maggie. Even if your friend’s death is all about the theft from the bank, you’re a victim of that too. You did nothing wrong. Sometimes we simply become targets for another person’s greed, as I am with the pie shop.”

Maggie wanted to agree with her. She felt like the wronged party in all of this. Still, she couldn’t deny she’d
brought all her baggage to Aunt Clara. She was grateful her aunt didn’t see it that way. She wished she could see the brighter side that kept her aunt so positive.

“Look, Maggie.” Aunt Clara pointed toward the door. “There’s Ryan. I think that may be his father with him. He’s a very distinguished-looking gentleman, isn’t he?”

Maggie jumped to her feet and ran for the pie shop door. She’d left it open in case there were any cash-paying customers who might not mind eating in the dark.

Before she could get there and lock it, Ryan was already walking in.

“Is something wrong with the shop?” he asked.

“Yes.” Maggie kept her hand on the door. “We’re closed. You can leave now.”

“We think that nasty so-in-so cut our power lines,” Aunt Clara blurted out. “Maggie thinks it was that lawyer, Mark Beck, who was in the car with Albert Mann last night when they came to our house. That man will do anything to get this property.”

“Why didn’t you tell me he came to see you?” Ryan asked Maggie.

“I tried to call you last night and tell you. Frank walked us home from the pie shop. He took care of the problem. You were too busy libeling me in your newspaper to answer your phone. Please leave.”

Ryan grabbed his father’s arm and dragged him into the pie shop beside him. “Tell her the truth, Dad.”

Garrett Summerour bowed his head. “I admit that I touched up Ryan’s story without consulting him. He was emotionally involved and couldn’t do his job. Reporters can’t
be objective if they have feelings for their subject. What he wrote was soft on you. I’m sorry.”

Aunt Clara marched up to him. “Shame on you! The
Durham Weekly
is the only paper I read anymore because I trust what you tell me. How can I ever trust you again after this?”

Garrett stared at her. “I didn’t lie about anything. I didn’t say what happened in that weak voice that Ryan had adopted writing about your niece. I’m sorry if that distresses you. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“Distresses us?” Maggie demanded. “Your article was worse than any other paper, and that’s saying a lot. You went overboard trying to take away the humanity behind the story. I gave Ryan certain information he wouldn’t have had if he hadn’t said I could trust him not to do exactly what you did.”

“Sometimes a reporter’s job is difficult. We’re responsible for saying things other people might not want to say,” Garrett replied. “People get hurt once in a while. That’s not our problem. I was telling the story in an objective way. I used your notes on the story in the best way possible.”

“That was beyond objective,” Ryan added. “If you don’t print a retraction and my original piece,
tomorrow,
I’m gone. Do you understand? I’ll find a job somewhere else.”

“You know I can’t keep the paper running, son. Not anymore,” Garrett said. “The
Weekly
would fold. All the work your mother and I put into the paper would be lost. You promised you’d keep it going. You can’t let us down because we disagree about this piece.”

“You promised not to do something like this, even if we
disagreed. You said the paper was mine to run as I saw fit. This isn’t the first time you’ve run roughshod over my articles, but it’s the most important time. So here’s my ultimatum—either you stop looking over my shoulder and swear never to rewrite what goes to the printer, or the paper is dead.”

“This isn’t easy for me,” Garrett said. “I have strong opinions.”

“I don’t care, Dad. This is it. You and I have had squabbles about this kind of thing before, but not to this extent.”

“All right.” Garrett glared at his son. “It won’t happen again. I’ll pay for a retraction and a new paper to come out tomorrow, even though it will cost me a fortune. Does that satisfy everyone?”

Maggie’s heart was suddenly feeling very light again knowing that Ryan hadn’t fed her story to the wild beasts after all. Not light enough to let Garrett go without an apology from him, though.

Aunt Clara beat her to it. “I think my niece deserves an apology. Come to think of it, so does Pie in the Sky. You’re lucky I have good customers. The way you make the shop sound in the paper, people shouldn’t eat here because it’s in such bad condition.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lowder,” Garrett said. “And I’m sorry, Maggie. I misunderstood the situation. Murder sells papers, you know. I was only trying to help Ryan out.”

Both women accepted his apology, and as if the pie shop did too, the lights suddenly came back on.

They were cheering when the grumpy electric technician came in through the back door. “I just got done talking to
my boss. You all are gonna have to pay to have the lines repaired. Sorry. It’s our new policy when it comes to vandalism.”

He presented Aunt Clara with a bill. “You don’t have to pay it right now. It will be on your next electric bill. Have a nice day.”

Aunt Clara’s eyes opened wide when she saw the amount due. “Highway robbery! If you want to write about something that will get people’s attention, write about this.” She showed the bill to Garrett, who agreed it was ridiculous.