Dark Chocolate Demise (17 page)

She held out her hand, knowing full well that Joe kept her key on his key ring.

He looked staggered by this, and Mel thought she might have gone too far. But that was crazy, right? Because they were broken up and fighting and despite any feelings they had for each other, the nature of his work meant he would never feel safe being married to her or anyone, or so she suspected.

Probably she should have insisted he give her key back weeks ago, but there had been this crazy little flame of hope inside of her that he would change his mind and come back to her. Now she knew. A relationship was never going to work between them, because every time Joe took on a scary case, and as a prosecutor when wouldn't he, he was going to dump her. Mel couldn't live like that. If they were going to be together, he had to be all in.

“Fine,” he said. “If that's how you want it.”

“It is.”

Joe pulled his key ring out of his pocket and unfastened her key from it. When he handed it to her, their fingers brushed, and Mel felt the same pop of awareness she always felt when she came into contact with Joe. It made her want to cry, but she refused. She'd shed enough tears over Joe DeLaura.

He didn't seem inclined to move, so Mel took a deep breath and stepped around the counter. She marched to the door and unlocked it. Joe followed her, slapping his disguise back on as he went. Mel was relieved. It was a lot easier to say good-bye to redneck Joe than her Joe.

He paused in front of her. She noted that even behind his beard, his jaw jutted out, looking stubborn behind the synthetic hair.

“For the record, I don't give two hoots what you think you know about me, I'm still not calling it quits between us,” he said.

Mel felt her heart flutter around in her chest until she smacked it with a mental flyswatter. No. She was not doing this again.

“Good-bye, Joe,” she said.

He stepped through the door and she closed it after him. Immediately, she wanted to yank it open and throw herself at him, but she didn't. She supposed her strength of character should make her feel better, but it didn't.

After she had calmed down, Mel headed back down to the bakery. She figured some good old-fashioned baking therapy was in order.

Did she feel bad about what was happening between her and Joe? Yes. Did it feel worse than what had already been happening? No, not really.

She stomped into the kitchen to find Angie there alone. The cupcakes she had left with Angie were all done, and she appeared to be beating the heck out of a lump of fondant, working a bright pink color into it.

“Everything okay in here?” she asked.

“It is now,” Angie said. She motioned to the swinging door that led to the front of the bakery, and Mel noticed that a long board was wedged across it, barring anyone from entering or leaving.

“Okay, then; want some help?” Mel asked.

“You're not going to tell me to take it down?” Angie asked in surprise.

“Nope, I think I know exactly how you're feeling,” Mel said.

“Crowded,” Angie replied. “Shadowed, pinched, squeezed, suffocated.”

“Harassed, nagged, scolded, and squelched,” Mel added.

Angie paused in kneading the fondant and looked at Mel with her eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Do tell,” she said.

“Mom and I had lunch at Frank and Mickey's over on Hayden Road,” Mel said.

“Mel!” Angie squealed. “That's—”

“Frank Tucci's place,” they said together.

“Yeah, I know,” Mel said.

“What were you thinking?” Angie asked.

“Now, don't you start,” Mel said. “I've had all the lecturing I'm going to take from your brother.”

“Oh,” Angie said. Her eyes and mouth making perfect O's in her heart-shaped face.

“I made him give me the key back to my apartment,” Mel said.

Angie dropped the fondant and came around the worktable and hugged Mel.

“Oh, sweetie,” Angie said as she squeezed her tight. “I'm so sorry.”

“No, it's okay,” Mel said. “It was overdue.”

When Angie stepped back to study Mel's face, her own eyes were red and watery, and Mel found herself comforting her friend.

“It'll be okay,” Mel said. “Someday.”

Angie reached across the table, picked up the fondant, and said, “Have at it. I've found it very therapeutic to slap it around a bit. It's even better if I mold it into one of the brothers' or Tate's face and then put my fist in it.”

Mel laughed. “You might be onto something there. I'll just go scrub up.”

She washed up at the sink and then met Angie by the table, where she took a sizable ball of fondant out of a tub. Angie handed her the green food coloring, and Mel went to town working the color into the fondant until it was a solid bright apple green.

They worked in silence with Angie rolling out her fondant and then forming the shapes she needed for their order of specialty cupcakes. These were to have green fondant draped over a high mound of buttercream frosting with pretty pink roses on top.

Since some people were fondant resistant, Mel always put it over a good amount of buttercream. Although Mel ordered the fondant from a specialty company that created a marshmallow-flavored fondant with a firm consistency, some customers still balked at the taste. She couldn't argue because they were the customer, but also she knew fondant was an acquired taste.

The door banged and then there was a curse. Given the tone, Mel guessed that it was Marty.

“Angie, open up!” he bellowed. “I need to talk to Mel.”

“What makes you think she's back here?” Angie yelled back.

“I saw that her car was back in its spot in the parking lot,” he said. “Plus, a certain incognito DeLaura stopped by and bought a dozen cupcakes. It looked like a bout of pathetic comfort eating to me.”

Mel sighed. Joe had bought cupcakes. Why did this endear him to her? She needed to stay mad at him. She gave the green ball of fondant a nose and two eyes, and then she punched it right in the kisser.

“Better now?” Angie asked.

“Maybe,” Mel said.

“Can I let Marty, just Marty, in?”

“Yeah, he's okay,” Mel said. “But if he starts lecturing—”

“Give him the heave-ho,” Angie finished for her. “Got it.”

She crossed the room and lifted the wooden two-by-four from across the door. Once she had propped it against the wall, she called out, “Okay, Marty, you and you alone may enter.”

The door was pushed cautiously open, and Marty appeared around the edge. He glanced between the two of them as if to make sure they weren't going to throw anything at him.

“It's okay, Marty,” Mel said. “You have clearance.”

“Did you hear that?” Marty called back over his shoulder into the bakery. “I have clearance.”

Mel could hear some disgruntled grumbling from the other side of the door, which she was pretty sure came from Tate and one of the brothers.

Marty strode into the kitchen and then gave Mel a desperate look. “Mel, you have to do something!”

“About what?” she asked.

“That conspiracy lunatic from the zombie walk is in the bakery, and he's spouting more of his usual crazy talk,” Marty said. “He says he has a reporter coming to meet him here and that he has proof that Kristin was a zombie before she was killed.”

Mel bolted for the door. There was no way she was having a reporter come here to talk about
that
. If Joe was angry about her going to lunch at Frank and Mickey's, he would be bezonkers if the bakery was the setting for an article about Kristin's murder.

She spotted Chad the second she entered the bakery. His zombie attire was gone but he was ever the hipster in skinny jeans, blue Converse sneakers, and a brown tweed coat. His hair was styled so that it stuck up in a point on the front of his head, and his black-framed glasses were perched on his nose, giving him a studious appearance. Mel wondered if they were prescription or just a prop.

“Chad, what are you doing here?” she asked.

“Meeting a reporter from the
New Times
,” he said. “I'm going to give her an exclusive about the murder.”

Mel slid into the booth across from Chad. She sensed that she needed to handle this in the most tactful way possible.

“How about a cupcake, Chad?” she asked.

“No, I'm good,” he said. He peered past her at the door, and Mel forced herself not to turn around and look.

“Really?” she asked. “Because we're sort of in the cupcake-selling business and not so much the meeting-a-reporter-for-an-interview business.”

Chad slid his gaze back to hers. He must have sensed she meant it, because he nodded.

“I guess a chocolate chip mint cupcake would be all right,” he said.

“Great,” Mel said. She'd actually been hoping he'd refuse so she could show him the door, in the nicest possible way, of course. She glanced over at the counter and caught Marty's eye. “One mint chocolate chip.”

“Roger that,” Marty said. He made a face that led Mel to believe he, too, was disappointed in Chad's choice to stay.

“Chad, were you thinking of having another zombie walk next year?” Mel asked.

He shrugged and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Assuming the government hasn't infected us all with this zombie plague.”

“Why would the government do that?” Mel asked. As soon as the words left her mouth she knew it was a bad move.

Chad's eyes lit up like a sports commentator given an open mic. He was practically salivating with the opportunity to have his own monologue of stupid.

Mel held up her hand in a “stop” gesture. Chad looked like he swallowed his tongue. Marty delivered his cupcake, and Mel pushed it towards him.

“Listen, for you to have another zombie walk, you need the story about the zombie bride to go away, far, far away,” she said. “No one is going to go to a zombie walk where people get shot.”

“But they killed her because she was an experiment gone wrong,” Chad said. “Don't you see? Any one of us could be Kristin Streubel.”

Mel thought about how true his statement was in a totally different way. She shivered.

“Chad, I appreciate your concerns, but we don't know anything about Kristin except that she was a nice woman who worked as an accountant and was married to an equally nice man who was a law clerk.”

“Lies!” Chad shouted and raised his index finger to point up in the air.

“What?” Mel asked. She glanced at the clock. Time was passing and she needed him out of here.

“She wasn't an accountant and she wasn't married,” he said. “I checked. There's no wedding license on file, and the company she said she worked for has never heard of her.”

“Dude, seriously?” Mel asked. “I was at her wedding. I saw her get married.”

“No, you didn't,” Chad said. He had the crazy eyes thing going on behind his glasses, and yet Mel couldn't look away. “She works for the government and so does he.”

“He who?” Mel asked.

“Her bogus husband,” he said. “They're in on it. They're a part of the plan to kill us all.”

Mel blew out a breath and rubbed her very weary eyes with the heels of her hands. She needed inspiration, and in his paranoia, there it was.

“Why do you think this reporter is willing to meet with you?” Mel asked. Chad gave her a blank look, and Mel leaned over the table and opened her eyes wide for dramatic effect. She whispered in what she hoped was an undercover agent sort of voice, “She's one of them.”

Chad yelped and dropped his cupcake. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Mel said.

Chad's eyes darted around the room. Mel felt a little bad about playing into his conspiracy theory malarkey, but she was aiming for the greater good here.

“I have to go.” Chad bolted out of the booth, leaving his half-eaten cupcake behind. He shot across the bakery, towards the door. It opened with a jingle of bells, and a young woman stepped into the bakery. She had reporter written all over her, and Chad must have sensed it because when she went to greet him, he dodged away from her outstretched hand and ran around her and out the door.

“Hey wait!” the reporter said. “Aren't you—?”

Mel watched as she rushed out after Chad. Mel turned to the window and watched the young woman chase Chad through the streets of Old Town, no doubt only convincing Chad more and more that she was “one of them.”

Marty came to stand beside her. “Okay, so how did you do it?”

“First, I appealed to the businessman in him,” Mel said. “That didn't work, so I changed it up and preyed on his paranoia.”

“Kind of mean,” Marty said.

“But effective,” Mel countered. She bussed Chad's plate back to the kitchen, where she found Angie had taken over the green fondant and was draping it over the buttercream and then adding her pretty pink rosebuds.

She glanced up when Mel came in. “Crisis averted?”

“Barely,” Mel said. “So, you want to tell me why Tate is out there with his sad puppy face and why Ray is sitting at a table with his eyes trained on this door as if afraid he'll miss something?”

“Tate and I are fighting,” she said. “Roach is having a big CD release party blowout and I feel like I owe it to him to go, since he got hauled in for questioning as a suspect and all. Well, that and our breakup was a tad messy, but Tate—are you ready for this?—Tate forbade me from going.”

“Did you really want to go?” Mel asked. She wondered if now would be the time to tell Angie about Roach's late-night appearance but hesitated.

“That is so not the point,” Angie said.

Mel nodded. “It was the forbidding thing, wasn't it?”

“Uh, yeah,” Angie said. “Just because we're engaged does not mean he can boss me around. It would set a horrible precedent for our marriage.”

“Agreed,” Mel said. She thought about the spat she and Joe had had. It had started with him being a bossy boots; small wonder it had deteriorated.

“How did you leave things?” Mel asked.

“Funny you should ask,” Angie said. “I told him I was sleeping at your place tonight because I needed some space.”

“
Gilmore Girls
marathon?” Mel asked.

“Or
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,” Angie said. “I'm in a bit of an ass kicking mood right now.”

“I hear you,” Mel said.

“So, it's okay that I stay over?” Angie asked.

“Always,” Mel said.

“Yay!” Angie grinned, looking happy for the first time all day. “And maybe we can ditch our surveillance team and sneak out and attend Roach's party.”