“I’m no expert on burns,” I went on, reaching out for the frothing wand, “but I wouldn’t think that—”
Gary grabbed my arm. “Don’t touch anything, Maggy. Something’s wrong.” He pointed to a dark spot on the otherwise spotless counter. “Was that here before?”
I leaned over to look at the fine black powder. “No, what is it?”
He shook his head. “I can’t be sure, but it looks like a scorch mark.”
I looked sideways at him as he continued. “I have the medical examiner on the way. We’ll know more when he gets here.”
I opened my mouth, but Gary kept right on going. “I’ll need to talk to you and Caron, but I’d like to do that without David. You go, and I’ll call you later.”
“Should we drive David home?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I need to get some information from him now.”
“Gary, what do you think—”
“I don’t know what I think yet, Maggy. When I do, I’ll let you know.”
Right. I tossed my last napkin, which I’d twisted into a frayed rope, into the wastebasket. Only two torn sugar packets sullied the spanking new navy blue basket that Patricia had chosen because of how nicely it tucked below the counter.
On the shelves above the basket stood five cream-colored bud vases waiting to be filled with fresh flowers and placed on five perfectly-positioned navy tables. The cream pitcher was there, too, where we wouldn’t forget to fill it and put it on the condiment cart. Which was also navy.
Cinnamon, nutmeg and cocoa shakers were in their place on the cart, next to small baskets of napkins, stir sticks and individual packets of raw sugar and artificial sweeteners.
We had planned carefully for this first day, so everything would be perfect. So there wouldn’t be any surprises.
I sighed, gathered up Caron and headed out the door.
Chapter Two
Of course, we couldn’t just go home. A knot of people stood outside the front door of Uncommon Grounds. The crowd we had prayed for when we planned our opening had arrived. Some for coffee, but most probably drawn by the sirens and flashing lights. And all, unfortunately, standing between us and my car.
Matt was patiently explaining that Uncommon Grounds would be closed until further notice. Rather than achieving his goal of dispersing the crowd, his words only seemed to whet people’s appetite for news. Small towns were small towns, even places like Brookhills that preferred to think of themselves as “exurbs.” Best I could tell, exurbs were where rich people fled when even the suburbs weren’t suburban enough.
I spotted a couple of familiar faces in the crowd. Laurel Birmingham was the Brookhills town clerk. A tall redhead, Laurel would have been termed statuesque in more politically incorrect times. At five-foot ten inches, she had about six inches and thirty pounds on me, all placed pretty much where they belonged. I liked her anyway.
I wasn’t so sure about Laurel’s boss, who stood next to her. Rudy Fischer owned the barbershop on the corner of the mall and had just squared off against Patricia in a fiercely contested battle for the part-time office of town chairman. Rudy, the incumbent, had won by a single vote, resulting in a recount that was scheduled for tomorrow. I supposed with Patricia dead it was a moot point, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
Rudy represented the old guard in Brookhills, the original inhabitants who had built sprawling ranch homes of cedar and fieldstone into the hills. Now, twenty-five years later, trendy, extremely pricey houses were springing up all around the gracefully aging original homes.
Property taxes were skyrocketing, forcing some of the now-retired Brookhillians to sell and move. To make matters worse, there were so few vacant lots left in Brookhills that the old homes often were purchased for the land they stood on and summarily bulldozed to make room for yet another white bread mansion.
I had some sympathy for the old guard. My house—actually my former house, where Ted and I had raised our son, Eric—had been one of the originals. Even after twenty years, the neighbors continued to call it the Bernhard house, after the first owners. The Bernhards were long gone. We were gone too, now.
Ted and I had always shaken our heads over friends who had jumped ship during the rocky times of their marriages. How could they break up their families? We swore we would never do that to Eric.
A man of his word, Ted waited until the day our son went off to college to tell me about Rachel, a twenty-four-year-old dental hygienist working in his office. He was sorry, he said as he patted my arm, but he preferred to spend the rest of his life with her.
But this was no time to speculate on how long, or short, I hoped that life might be. I was feeling desperate to get home. Laurel caught sight of us first.
“Maggy, what is going on? Matt won’t tell us a thing. Is someone hurt?” Laurel was Brookhills’ information pipeline and she required regular feeding.
“It’s a fine situation when the police won’t inform the town chairman,” Rudy muttered, glaring at Matt.
I motioned them over to one side. As we moved, I swear the entire crowd leaned in our direction.
“There’s been an accident,” I whispered. “Patricia was hurt. I really don’t know any more than that.”
I turned to Rudy. “I’m sure Chief Donovan will be reporting to you as soon as he—” I stopped as an unmarked car pulled up, stick-on light flashing. Two men got out.
The man in the passenger seat was Kenneth Williamson, the county medical examiner. The driver of the car was a stranger to me. Probably just under six feet, he had black curly hair and eyes the same dirty gray color as the car he drove. His attitude conveyed authority.
The crowd, still leaning on its collective right foot, suddenly shifted and parted, letting the stranger pass, followed by the doctor. The door closed behind them and all hell broke loose.
“Oh, my God, is she de—” Laurel began.
Rudy started in on Matt, backing him up against the door. “I’m the town chairman, by God, and—”
I didn’t wait around to hear the rest. Signaling Laurel that I would call her later, I rescued Caron from her pastor, Langdon Shepherd, and we made for my blue Dodge Caravan.
Nine years old, simulated wood-grain panels, six cup holders—the minivan was one of the last remnants of my former life as wife, mother and PR executive. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore, but it wasn’t that.
On the other hand, I’d probably be driving the Caravan for ten more years or 200,000 miles—whichever came first—so I should probably shut up about it.
I pulled the van around the corner of the parking lot, out of sight of the crowd, and stopped at the traffic light leading to Civic Drive. As I waited for our presence to trip the signal, I looked over at Caron. “You okay?”
She nodded.
The light changed and I turned left, ignoring the glare of a morning commuter who would now be exactly two and a half minutes late for work because of me. I tried again with Caron. “Should we go to your house? It’s closest.”
She nodded wordlessly and I made another turn, this one down Pleasant Street. I had always thought “Pleasant” seemed too pedestrian a name for a street on which Caron’s house, at a mere forty-five-hundred square feet, was one of the smaller homes.
Bernie, Caron’s husband, was a successful corporate lawyer, and Caron had been an ad copywriter. That’s how I’d met her. We had worked together at First National in the marketing department some twenty years before.
When Caron married Bernie and became pregnant with their oldest, Bernard Jr. (known to everyone, for some reason, as “Nicky”), she decided to stay home. By the time Emma had come along, Caron was happily settled in, as successful at being a full-time wife and mother as she had been a copywriter.
I, on the other hand, had stayed at First National after I married my dentist, Ted, and gave birth to Eric. I scaled back my hours and managed to achieve a fairly good balance between work and home. That didn’t stop me from feeling guilty, though. About work, about home—it didn’t matter. Guilt is as much a part of my Norwegian heritage as the ice Ted swore coursed through my veins. Just because I told him to bite me when he said he didn’t love me anymore. Not that I’m bitter.
I pulled up the driveway and stopped in front of Caron’s big Cape Cod. Toby, a pudgy golden retriever, ran up to greet us and I turned off the engine and sat back. Caron was staring fixedly out the front windshield.
She hadn’t spoken a word since we left the shop, which was very unCaron-like. She normally chattered when she was upset. Now she wouldn’t even look at me.
“Listen, we need to talk about this,” I said. “I know you were close to Patricia—”
She turned toward me and started to say something, but then stopped, putting her hands up to her face. “I can’t,” she mumbled through her fingers, and then started fumbling with the car door. Finally getting it open, she dashed up the sidewalk, Toby at her heels. The front door, when it slammed, nearly took off the dog’s nose.
I climbed out of the van and walked up to the door. Toby and I looked at each other and decided to investigate. I rang the doorbell, and Toby sniffed. No answer to the bell, but the dog seemed to be deriving some pleasure from a wad of chewing gum stuck to the mat.
I left him to his fun and headed back to the van. Inside, I folded my arms on the steering wheel and tried to think. One partner dead, another catatonic. This wasn’t good.
The crunching of tires on the gravel apron of the driveway interrupted my thoughts, what few there were of them. Caron’s husband Bernie was home. He pulled his Navigator up next to me and got out. I watched in my side mirror as he disappeared around the back of my van and then reappeared in my window.
I adored Bernie, all bald, five-foot six inches of him. He and Ted had been best friends in college. In fact, Bernie had introduced me to Ted. When Ted and I separated, he took the car and the boat, but I got to keep Caron and Bernie. I figured I came out on top.
Bernie was saying something, so I rolled down my window.“...I stopped by the library lobby to pick up a tax form and Mary told me about Patricia. What happened?”
I didn’t waste time wondering how Mary, the head librarian at the Brookhills Public Library, had heard the news. Like Laurel, Mary knew everyone and everything in town.
“I’m not sure. She was on the floor when we got there.” I frowned. “Caron’s the one who found her. She’s really upset. I’m worried about her.”
Bernie stepped back from the van and looked toward the house. “I’ll go talk to her.” He started up the driveway, hesitated, and turned back. “Had Patricia been sick?”
“Not that I know of. She...”Now I hesitated. “Bernie, she had a burn on her hand. There also was a scorch mark on the metal counter.”
He looked puzzled. “What are you saying, Maggy?”
I didn’t answer.
Then he got it. “Electrocution? You think Patricia was electrocuted? By what? Your coffee machine?” He shook his head. “I find that hard to believe, Maggy. But if it’s true, David Harper has one hell of a lawsuit.”
Spoken like a lawyer. Still shaking his head, Bernie continued up the driveway to the house, apparently choosing the catatonic wife in the house to the lunatic in the driveway. The lesser of two feebles.
I drove home to wait for Gary’s phone call.
My house is up the creek, and I mean that literally. Poplar Creek runs the length of Brookhills, forming the town’s west boundary. Living downstream is fashionable, upstream is unfashionable. And the farther down or up, the more fashionable or unfashionable you get. Got it?
Down, good.
Up, bad.
I was bad.
In fact, the only thing badder, or farther upstream from me in Brookhills, was Christ Christian Church, which I think got special dispensation from God.
But divorce has its privileges, too, and while my tiny ranch wasn’t quite the Bernhard house—which was downstream, naturally—it was all mine, from the blue stucco walls in the living room to the lime green toilet in the bathroom.
As I unlocked the door, I heard Frank thunder across the room to greet me. Or he would have thundered, had there been room enough to pick up speed. As it was, he ran three or four steps’ worth and then plowed blindly into the door, pushing me back into the yard.
Frank belongs to my son. Frank is a sheepdog. Frank is way too big for the house.
Forcing my way back in, I tossed my purse on the bench by the door, scratched Frank hello and headed for the laundry room. There I stripped, dumped my stinky clothes in the washer and started it.
A hot shower was next. It was only when I stood naked and shivering, a stingy stream of lukewarm water trickling down my back, that I remembered I should have turned on the washer after my shower. Not to worry, though, the fill cycle ended before my shower did, sending a last-gasp blast of scalding water through the old pipes just in time to cauterize the goose bumps.
Pulling on a clean “Uncommon Grounds” T-shirt and blue jeans, I returned to the living room feeling, if not quite human, at least fit company for Frank. But then, Frank ate dirt.
I started to flop down on the couch but it was piled high with tax papers. After days of self-inflicted misery, I had admitted defeat yesterday. I needed professional help—tax help. April fifteenth was just two weeks away, and my tax forms were still bare.
Not surprising, I guess. This was the first time I had filed a single return in twenty years. But I’d been sure I could handle it. After all, how hard could it be? Plenty hard, apparently.
So I’d given up and called Mary, who was not only Brookhills’ head librarian but also part-time tax accountant, and pleaded for help. She had read me the riot act about being so late and told me to get my buns over to the library pronto with my papers.
I moved the stacks aside carefully now and sank down on the couch. Frank padded over to rub his 110 pounds against my knees like he was a cat. Itch scratched, he simply leaned there until his paws finally slid out from under him and he landed with a satisfied “harrumph” on my feet. I wiggled my bare toes under his fur.
If I was right, Patricia had been electrocuted by the espresso machine. Problem was, the machine had just been installed—by a professional—last Thursday. All of us, including the L’Cafe sales rep, had watched while the technician installed it, then the rep had demonstrated it for us.