Plum Deadly (3 page)

“What do you mean you did this to me?” Her voice was suddenly raspy. She cleared her throat.

He ate a piece of pie, coughed, and gulped some coffee. He seemed to be having some difficulty swallowing. She chalked that up to anxiety.

“You were falsely accused,” he finally explained. “I know now that you didn’t embezzle that money. The person who accused you—let’s just say he’s higher up on the food chain—he’s the one who took the money.”

“Who is that, Lou?”

He ate more pie. “You know, this stuff is really good. You always said you couldn’t boil water.”

Maggie was through stalling. “I want to know who did this to me.”

“Don’t worry. Trust me. I’m gonna do right by you. I’m going to hold a press conference, right here in . . .”

“Durham,” she supplied when he looked blank. “Can’t you tell me now? What will that mean? Will the bank hire me back?”

“Oh, you’ll get your job back,” he promised, finishing his pie and coffee. “You and I stand together, there’s no telling what we can do. There’s no reason for you to suffer like
this
anymore. You were meant for better.”

His voice had started getting louder as he’d finished. Maggie was sure everyone in the shop had heard that last bit. She knew grandstanding when she heard it. Lou wanted the credit for rooting out the real embezzler. That was fine with her.

She was a little embarrassed by what he’d said. Yes, she felt she was capable of more, but Pie in the Sky wasn’t exactly the dregs of the earth and she certainly wasn’t suffering—except at his hand.

Maggie excused herself and went to get more coffee for Lou and everyone else. Her rude student was packing up his charts and getting ready to leave. The members of the book club looked at her curiously. She ignored them.

Fortunately, Aunt Clara had been in the kitchen and hadn’t heard any of it.

“More pie?” she asked Lou before she sat back down.

“No, thanks.” He slurped the rest of his coffee, choked again, then smiled at her. He looked a little pale as he put a fifty-dollar bill on the table. “Be here tomorrow morning, ten a.m. sharp. We’ll expose what really happened at the bank. Once the media has the information, we’ll both be in the clear, Maggie. We’ll both be safe.”

Safe? She thought about his choice of words. It seemed an odd way to put it.

She watched him walk out of the pie shop, wishing he’d told her who’d framed her before he told the rest of the world.

What if he had a heart attack, God forbid, and the information was lost with him? Even though she had the recording of what he’d said in her hand, she wasn’t sure if that was enough without the person’s name to back it up.

Higher up on the food chain, huh?

Maggie tried to think which of Lou’s bosses that could be. She couldn’t imagine any of those people wanting to pin this on her—she barely knew them. She’d always supposed she was beneath their notice.

Apparently not.

How could someone just randomly pick me to take the fall for this?
she wondered as she cleaned off tables and put plates,
cups, and silverware into the now-compliant dishwasher.
Why me?

It was going to be a long wait for the press conference.

She wasn’t sure what to wear. All of her good clothes were gone. She only had a few pairs of jeans and some Pie in the Sky T-shirts. She hadn’t had her nails or hair done since she got here. Her face was a mess—no facials.

Putting all of that aside, she mopped coffee from the tile floor in the empty pie shop. It was four, and they were open another two hours. This was going to be one of the slow days. Time was going to drag if she didn’t find something to do.

She checked her last email. It was only spam. Nothing yet from Claudia.

Full of energy and excitement—
cautionary
excitement—she tackled cleaning everything she could reach in the front of the shop.

With Uncle Fred gone, Aunt Clara hadn’t been able to keep up with all the dust and grime tracked in every day by hundreds of feet. Waitresses came and went like the pies consumed there. They didn’t care about the pie shop.

The tables were cracked and scarred in many places, the blue chairs the same. The tile floor was chipped and dreary in a way that couldn’t be cleaned. The counter needed replacing along with the pie stands and refrigerated glass cases.

Maggie scrubbed everything, from the ceiling fan that barely turned to the window ledges that needed painting. She even wiped down the old blue-and-white Hot Pie Now neon sign that flashed wearily in the window.

Exhausted, Maggie hauled the trash to the back door and put away the mop and bucket. She looked at the clock in the kitchen—it was barely five fifteen.

“You’re full of energy today,” Aunt Clara remarked. “Maybe now would be a good time for you to make your first piecrust.”

Maggie accepted the inevitable. Aunt Clara wanted to pass on the family recipe. This might be the last chance she had to learn it. “Sure. Let me put this trash out in the Dumpster and we’ll make some pie.”

“You’re going to be fabulous at it.”

The back door to the shop was stuck. No matter how hard Maggie pushed, it wouldn’t open. “I’m going outside to check this,” she told her aunt. “I’ll be right back.”

All the little shops in the plaza kept their trash in the back for easy pickup on the same day. There was plenty of it built up already even though trash day was two days away.

Maggie threw her bag of trash into the Dumpster and rounded the corner to see if a bag of someone else’s trash was blocking the back door. She stopped once she saw what the problem was.

Lou Goldberg was lying across the back step. His eyes were open as though he were staring at the blue sky.

Except Lou would never see another blue sky again.

A
unt Clara and
Maggie sat inside the pie shop and talked quietly about what had happened while the police looked at the crime scene.

Maggie explained about Lou, who he was and why he was there. Aunt Clara sighed and shook her head, muttering about ill omens and other bad things. Her words filled Maggie with more dread than the idea of trying to make piecrust.

One of the first officers on the scene introduced them to a middle-aged, hard-faced man. Detective Frank Waters was
wearing a cheap brown suit and never cracked a smile. He explained that Lou was dead—cause yet unknown.

“Mr. Goldberg’s body will be taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office at which time we will find out exactly what happened to him,” he told Aunt Clara and Maggie.

“That’s terrible,” Aunt Clara said. “Poor man.”

“Can you tell me why Mr. Goldberg was here?” He scrutinized them. “I’m sure he didn’t come all this way for the pie.”

Maggie wasn’t sure exactly how forthcoming she should be with the detective. Maybe Lou had that heart attack she’d been worried about.

Maybe it was something else.

After all, Lou had been talking about ratting on another man for embezzlement. If Lou had mentioned his plans to that man—well—that could have created a situation.

“Ms. Grady?” Detective Waters snapped his fingers to get Maggie’s attention. “Do you remember serving this man in the pie shop or not?”

“Yes,” she carefully answered. “He was here. He ate Dangerously Damson pie and drank coffee.”

“Dangerously Damson, huh?” He smirked as he wrote in his notebook. “Did he seem sick or anything? Anything unusual happen?”

“No,” Maggie said. “Nothing unusual.”

“You should tell him about why your friend was here, Maggie,” Aunt Clara said with a sweet smile.

“Yes, Maggie,” the detective mimicked. “Why don’t you tell me about your friend?”

Thanks, Aunt Clara.

“He wasn’t exactly my friend,” she started to explain. “Well, he was until he fired me six weeks ago.”

No! That sounded bad.

“Why were you fired, Ms. Grady?” the detective asked.

“It was all a big mistake.” Aunt Clara wandered in to help. “The bank she worked for thought she’d stolen money from them, but of course, that wasn’t true. Maggie isn’t a thief. Are you, sweetheart?”

Maggie sighed. Heavily. “No, Aunt Clara.”

Between the two of them, she’d probably be in jail by tonight.

“How much money?” the detective asked.

“About three million,” Maggie admitted, feeling trapped.

He looked up from his notebook. “Dollars?”

“Yes. But Aunt Clara is right. It isn’t true. In fact, that’s why Lou was here, to tell me who really took the money.”

“And that was?” Detective Waters prompted, his chewed-up pencil poised for her answer.

“He didn’t say,” Maggie replied. “He told me he’d arranged a press conference for tomorrow. He said the real thief is a big name at the bank.”

“No clue who it was?” Detective Waters nodded as he wrote.

“No.” Maggie bit her lip. This sounded terrible—possibly worse than the first time she’d heard it. “I recorded our conversation on my phone.”

“Really?” His eyes narrowed. “Was that for your protection because you knew people would be asking questions later when he was found dead?”

“It was for
my
protection. But not for that reason.” She
fumbled around in her pocket trying to get her cell phone out. Her thrift store jeans were about a half size too small. It made the pockets tight. On the other hand, the jeans made her look about five pounds smaller.

Maggie finally produced the phone with a flourish. Detective Waters took it from her, put it into a plastic bag, and sealed it.

“Hey! That’s my phone.”

“Not now. Now it’s evidence.” He got up from the table. “I’ll check your story out and get back with you. In the meantime, don’t take any long vacations. I might have a few more questions after I explore some other angles.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Aunt Clara told him. “She used to go on wonderful vacations all around the world—Paris, London, Rome—but not now. The bank took everything. She was very angry. She’s handled it well. Such a pity.”

Detective Waters nodded. “Good thing. Look, I hate to do this, but your pie shop is going to have to be closed for a few days until crime scene has a chance to go over everything. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Oh dear.” Aunt Clara looked worried. “My piecrust will go bad.”

“We’ll get it done as soon as we can,” he promised. “If there’s nothing wrong, you should be back up and running pretty quickly.”

“Thanks.” Maggie held Aunt Clara’s trembling hand. “I get the phone back too, right?”

Detective Waters didn’t reply. The police officer who’d introduced him watched as they got their belongings together—
after he’d searched their purses. Maggie was able to take her laptop home with her. Aunt Clara had bought it for her, used, so she could look for work.

Before they knew it, Maggie and Aunt Clara were out on the sidewalk while the police were in the pie shop. The door was locked behind them and covered with crime scene tape. The police had even confiscated their shop keys.

Maggie put her arm around her aunt. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. Once the detective gives us the go-ahead, we’ll come right back and open up again.”

She wasn’t feeling as optimistic as she sounded, but it wouldn’t do any good for Aunt Clara to worry about it.

They walked away from Pie in the Sky past the Spin and Go Laundromat. Saul Weissman, the owner there, offered his condolences. He was a short, round man with gray hair and glasses.

Maggie was sure he had a crush on Aunt Clara from the way he acted—always protective and eager to please. But if her aunt had any feelings for him besides friendship, she’d never confessed them to her niece.

“This is awful,” he said. “How can they come in and close you down this way? Of course, you didn’t have anything to do with this tragedy, Clara. We can’t choose our
family
.”

“It’s a misunderstanding, Mr. Weissman,” Maggie explained, trying to keep her temper under control. “It will all be cleared up in a few days.”

He didn’t look convinced.

Raji Singh joined them from the Bombay Grill, one of the other shops in the plaza. “No, Saul is right.” His dark face was stricken and worried above his bright red shirt. “It
only makes a stronger case for Mann Development to come in and take our shops away.”

“No one is taking anyone’s shop away,” Saul said in a decisive way. “Clara is just in the middle of this. Once it gets sorted out, we’ll be fine.”

“I hope so,” Raji said. “I truly hope so. My wife and I are very happy here so close to the campus. We don’t want to leave.”

Aunt Clara looked up with tears in her eyes. “This is the first time Pie in the Sky has been closed for more than a holiday. I didn’t even close for Fred’s death.”

Maggie ignored the two men and hugged her aunt. “Let’s go home. Everything’s going to be fine.”

• • •

T
he house Maggie
had grown up in was an older, two-story red brick a short walk away from the pie shop. The brick had mellowed in the hot Carolina sun to a pinkish color. The once white shutters and door had faded to gray with the years.