Hot Dish Heaven: A Murder Mystery With Recipes (10 page)

“No, not really. And don’t call me Shirley.” He smirked as he raised his cup.

“Seriously, don’t you feel stifled here? Don’t you want to be … stimulated?”

Deputy Ryden almost choked on his coffee. “Why? What did you have in mind?”

I gasped.
Oh, my God, did I just say that?
Being a redhead, I blush easily, and, at that moment, I was positive my face was as red as a baboon’s ass. I felt like one too. “I meant stimulated professionally.”

“Oh.” He feigned disappointment. “As I said, we get an interesting case now and then.”

I dropped my chin and peered at the index card in front of me. It was a recipe for “regular” Jell-O salad. I made an effort to read through it, anything to avoid thinking about what I’d just said. But I couldn’t stay focused—and only partly because no one can maintain interest in Jell-O for more than a few seconds.

W
hy didn’t you ask the deputy about Samantha Berg right away?
It was yet another voice from inside my head.

Because, I thought I’d first put the guy at ease with some idle chit-chat.

But if you would have asked about Samantha Berg right off the bat, you wouldn’t have humiliated yourself.

That’s probably true, but I wanted to engage in a little small talk before broaching the subject of murder.

Well, I think small talk’s overrated.

And I think that falls in the category of “information you should have shared earlier.”

Why? You wouldn’t have listened anyway. You never do.

Huh? What’s that?

“Deputy Ryden,” I said, tired of arguing with myself, “were you working up here when Samantha Berg went missing?”

The deputy blinked, apparently thrown by my directness. “How did you hear about that?”

“Margie told me.”

“Oh.” He used another roll to mop tomato sauce from his plate. “Margie likes to talk.” He bit the roll in half.

“Well, did you know her?”
Stay focused
.
And whatever you do, don’t flirt!

“Yeah.” The deputy answered around the food in his mouth. “I knew her.”

“And you worked the case?”

“The FBI led the murder investigation.”

“But you were assigned to it too, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.” He spoke cautiously, as if concerned about where the conversation was headed.

“And you local cops handled the missing person’s case, right?”

He shoved the rest of the roll in his mouth. “The FBI only got involved after her body was recovered.”

His face then took on the look of someone with something important on his mind. But when it became clear he wasn’t going to share it with me, I plowed ahead. “So how long was she missing?”

He stuck another forkful of food in his mouth. With his cheeks stuffed, he could only mumble, “A couple months.”

“She was gone a couple of months, and you couldn’t find her?”

He swallowed hard and frowned.

“Sorry,” I uttered. “Sometimes I’m not very tactful.”

He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. “You just don’t understand. We didn’t start looking for her right away.”

“Why not? Didn’t she have worried family?”

“Nope. Contrary to what you said earlier, people don’t always have ties to the little towns they live in. Samantha, for instance, had no connection at all to Kennedy. She just moved here from North Dakota about a dozen years ago.”

“How come?”

He shrugged. “She told some folks she was hiding from an abusive boyfriend. Others heard she was starting over after her husband walked out when their kid got sick.”

I scooted forward, not sure I’d heard right over the chorus of laughter coming from the women in the booth behind me. “She had a kid?”

“Uh-huh. He was twelve or so when they arrived. He’s now grown and long gone.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“Asthma or something. Nothing serious.”

“So?” I said, urging him to continue.

“So, her stories didn’t check out.” He shifted in his seat, and the vinyl rustled beneath him. “There was a boyfriend but no record of violence. And her husband divorced her but not without fighting for custody of the kid. He said she only wanted the boy for the child support.”

“Sounds like she had trouble telling the truth.”

“You could say that.” His delivery was flat, void of inflection. He definitely wanted to drop the subject, but I wasn’t ready to let it go. Don’t forget, this was my story—my career—we were talking about.

My conscience immediately slapped me alongside the head.
It’s not always all about you, Emme. You’re not the center of the universe, you know. In this case, there was a dead woman too. You may want to keep that in mind
.

Appropriately chastised, I stated more self-righteously than I had any right to, “Even if she was a liar, Samantha Berg deserved to have her murder solved.”

The deputy set his fork on his plate. “No one said otherwise. But it’s hard to get people, even good people, to tell what they know about a crime they view as a community service.”

“She was disliked that much?”

He rubbed his hands down the sides of his face. “She wasn’t very nice. You might say her moral compass was broken.”

“But she must have had some good traits. Everybody does.”

“You really think so?”

“Don’t you?”

He again shuffled in his seat, and for a second time, the vinyl responded with a groan. I suspected he wanted to do the same. But instead, he chose to speak. “I guess it’s possible that everyone’s born good, but shit happens. And while that makes some folks wiser, it turns others into assholes.”

“And Samantha Berg was one of the latter?”

“Her kid wouldn’t even come back to claim her body. What does that tell you?”

I had no answer.

“It doesn’t matter anyhow.” The deputy’s eyes flickered at his near-empty plate. “Even if the kid had been around—or had cared at all—we wouldn’t have started our investigation any sooner than we did.”

“Why not?”

He stabbed his final forkful of Pizza Hot Dish. “Samantha took off all the time, sometimes for a week or more.”

“Without telling anyone?”

“Yep, even when her kid was young.”

“Really?” What kind of mother would do that? I pictured my own mom. She’d spent almost all her free time with me and my dad. She called us the three musketeers. She never would have left me voluntarily.

“That’s why we didn’t think much about her being gone at first.” His words yanked me back from thoughts best left buried with my parents. “Then by the time we began our search, evidence was scarce.”

“But you must have found some clues.”

Even as that sentence tripped over my tongue, I knew it sounded incredulous—so incredulous it prompted the deputy to serve up another frown and me another apology. “Sorry, like I said, I’m not very tactful. That’s probably why I cover food, not people.”

“Exactly, you cover food, so why the interest in Samantha? She wasn’t a chef.”

I vacillated. While a part of me wanted to share my story idea, another was convinced I should hold my tongue since it wasn’t an offical assignment. In the end, part two won out. “I’m merely fascinated by the case. And since Margie’s too busy right now to talk to me about cooking—”

“You’re killing time with me.”

“Something like that,” I fudged. “Now humor me. Tell me what you know.”

“Well, that’s not much.” His eyes softened like dollops of chocolate pudding. “And I’d much rather talk about you.” His voice had turned shy. “Are you … are you single?”

Again I felt self-conscious, though now I was also craving chocolate pudding. “Yeah, I’m single.”

“And how did you wind up in the armpit of the state? Lose a bet?”

I laughed nervously. “I thought you liked this place.”

“I do, but you’re a city girl.”

“Not really. I spent my early childhood in a small town. Not this small, mind you. We actually had a zip code.” It was his turn to laugh. “And as I said before, when I was a kid, I dreamed of visiting the country. I dreamed of a bucolic life.”

He rested his forearms on the table and fingered his napkin. “But now you’re all grown up and live in Minneapolis. You work for a major newspaper and love the excitement of city life.”

“Well, I work for a major newspaper. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Oh, no. We can’t ‘leave it at that.’” He drummed his fingers on the table. “The way I read the situation, Emerald Malloy, you’re after something—something far beyond recipes.” More drumming. “Yeah, I suspect you hope to score a big story while you’re here in town—a story that will propel you from writing about food to what?” He squinted at me. “Hard news?”

My shoulders hitched. “I never said that.”

“Not in so many words. But that’s why you’re asking about Samantha, isn’t it?”

With insight like that, he should have solved the murder long ago. But being polite, I didn’t point that out. “I find the case interesting. Nothing more.”

I thought I sounded convincing, but the deputy’s eyes conveyed disbelief in the whole “nothing more” thing.

As for me? Well, even if, deep down, I was rattled by the guy’s perceptiveness, on the surface, where I normally hung out, I was too enamored with him to give it much thought.

I picked at the pink wiggling
mass on my plate. I was anxious again but couldn’t get a fix on why. Yeah, the deputy was probably on to me, but I didn’t get the impression he’d try to stop me from making inquiries about the murder. Nor would he complain to my editor. Deputy Ryden was his own man. I was pretty sure of that.

I poked at the Jell-O some more as the jitters wreaked havoc on my stomach. Throughout the day, I’d also been doubting my skills as a writer, but that couldn’t have prompted my current angst either. I regularly bashed my professional capabilities. Usually daily between brushing my teeth and ordering my morning coffee. On bad days, I could stretch it out till noon. No, these nerves were caused by something else.

I put my spoon down. Then it struck me. The source of my agitation. Earlier, Deputy Ryden had voiced what sounded like genuine interest in me. And because the guys in my past were rarely sincere, his words had apparently awakened my feelings of vulnerability. Yep, even after all my therapy, my vulnerabilities tended to be light sleepers.

Relationship insecurities had definitely caused me a number of problems over the years. Case in point, Boo-Boo. But I was working with my therapist on those personal issues. And now I’d stumbled upon an opportunity to improve my professional life. If I could put aside my skill-related doubts and concentrate on unraveling the Samantha Berg murder mystery, I could possibly go from “glorified gopher” to full-fledged investigative reporter. I could become “somebody” at the paper and in the news community. And that would go a long way toward boosting my confidence in my personal life as well, wouldn’t it?

“So,” I said to the deputy, “are you going to tell me more about Samantha’s death?”

He sighed. “I’ll say it again, there’s not much to tell.”

“Oh, come on. You must have some information. Why won’t you share it?”

He held his hands up in defeat. “Well, I suppose I can talk about what’s on the public record.”

“Including what exactly?”

He shifted in his seat. “Oh, for one, we know Samantha was at home before she disappeared because—”

“How do you know that?”

He sighed again, evidently unimpressed by my enthusiasm. “Jim, the guy who runs the VFW, called her right after eight. He asked her to fill in for him behind the bar. He’d met someone online and wanted to go out. Samantha said she’d do it at ten o’clock, when the Hallmark movie she was watching got over. But she never showed up.”

“And you didn’t find any clues at her house?”

“Nope. No sign of struggle. No peculiar fingerprints.”

“What about on her body? Any clues there?”

“No. None.”

“But she was naked when she was discovered, which means—”

“She was partially naked. Her clothes got ripped away by the ice and the debris in the river. And before you ask, there was no evidence of sexual assault.”

That aside, a number of questions dangled from my brain. Most related to Ole, though a few pertained to other possible murder scenarios. But since I was certain Ole was the culprit, I didn’t believe any of them to be credible. Even so, the words of my graduate school advisor kept me from dismissing them outright.

“Explore all possibilities,” he’d routinely instructed me and my classmates, “even those you doubt. Ask questions and seek opinions, especially from experts. And always obtain corroboration. Then, and only then, disclose your findings. That’s what serious, contemplative journalists do.”