Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 04 - Chocolate Mousse Attack (3 page)

Since Rick had dated Muffy, Becky,
Vanessa, Lisa, Susan, Mary, Julia, etc., etc., while we were married, he certainly had no right to complain about Trent, but Rick hates to lose any of his possessions, even the ones he doesn’t value.

He spread his hands and smiled the smile that sold a lot of commercial real estate to gullible buyers and a lot of Rick to gullible women. Yes, I fell for it once and married him. But I was young and dumb in those days. Now I knew if he was smiling, that meant he wanted something.

“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it is any of my business.” His smile turned sad. “I screwed up and lost that right, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” I reached into the display case, withdrew the last chocolate ch
ip cookie and handed it to him on a napkin. “Compliments of the house. Now go. We need to lock up.”

As if on cue, Paula appeared from the kitchen with the shop key in her hand and
went over to stand beside the front door.

Rick accepted the cookie and smiled again but made no move to leave. I sighed and waited.

He took a bite and rolled his eyes as if in ecstasy. “You make the best chocolate chip cookies in the world.”

“At least we agree on one thing.” I lifted the mop and let the water drain back into the bucket. “Now I really need to lock up and clean up. Everything left in here will get mopped.”

Rick smiled sadly, combining two of his most effective expressions. This was going to be big!

“I miss that sense of humor
,” he said.

“You mean the one you used to call warped and sick and strange? That’s the sense of humor you miss?”

He laughed.

“Damn it, Rick, I’m busy, I’ve been up since two o’clock this morning and I’m in no mood for your garbage. You have thirty seconds to get out of here before I smack you in the face with this mop.”

He blanched. If I’d threatened him with a gun he’d have laughed it off, but the thought of getting mop water on his perfect hair, perfect shirt and perfect pants terrified him.

“I need a favor, Lindsay.” He cleared his throat. “And I’m willing to do a favor for you. We still have some properties to sign off on, and I’m willing to throw in a little extra.”

The only things I’d asked for in the divorce were my shop, Death by Chocolate, the rental house where Paula and Zach lived and the house where I lived. Death by Chocolate brings in a decent income, but I’m not getting rich. And Rick had enough money stashed in offshore accounts to qualify as pretty close to rich. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to listen to what he wanted in exchange for some of his precious money.

“How much extra?”

He shrugged. “A thousand?”

“Ten.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Thousand?”

“Yep. And I already know that much wouldn’t even cause a ripple in your funds.”

He drew in a deep breath. “Okay. So we have a deal?”

My chest tightened in fear. If Rick agreed to part with that much money so readily, he must want a really big favor. Murder? An alibi?

“Not until you tell me who you want me to kill. If it’s your mother, we might be able to work something out.”

He tried to smile again, but it got stuck halfway. “It’s nothing really. You’ll probably enjoy it.”

Paula, waiting at the front door, key in hand, ready to close up as soon as we could get rid of Rick, shook her head firmly.

“What do you want that’s going to be so enjoyable for me you have to pay me ten thousand dollars to enjoy it?”

“Just one little favor. I need you to babysit Rickie for a couple of weeks while Ginger and I are in Hawaii.”

Chapter
Three

“You want me to babysit your son? Not for all the chocolate on the planet!”

Rick looked uncomfortable. I liked that look on him. “Please? Grace just dumped him on me. She’s off on a honeymoon with some creep who’s only interested in her because she’s getting an outrageous amount of child support from me, enough you’d think she could hire a babysitter. But, no, she dropped the little…” He stopped and compressed his lips to hold back the name he’d been about to call his son. Demon child? Brat? Unholy terror? “She left him on my front porch and drove away.”

I tried unsuccessfully to keep the smile off my face. “That’s your problem, not mine.”

“He’s your stepson!”

My chin fell straight to the floor. “Excuse me? I never met that child until a few months ago and even then you said he wasn’t yours until DNA proved he is! No, he is not my stepson and I’m not going to babysit him!”

Rick put on his pitiful expression. “What am I supposed to do? The tickets to Hawaii are nonrefundable.”

“You have two choices. Get on Craig’s List and find a babysitter or eat the tickets.” I nodded to Paula, and she opened the door. “Neither of those involves me. Good-bye.” I lifted the mop threateningly again.

Rick stepped back, moving in the direction of the open door. “What am I going to do if I get a babysitter and
when Grace finds out I left her son with a stranger, she takes away my visitation rights?”

I laughed. “Off the top of my head, I’d guess you’d celebrate.”

“One day, Lindsay, you’ll need a favor from me, and I’ll remember this.”

“You will remember? Been taking your ginkgo biloba, have you?”

He turned and headed for the door but not before I saw his angry expression. Rick doesn’t like not getting his way. You’d think after eight years of marriage to me and one year of divorce he’d be used to it.

*~*~*

I left work, got in my little red Celica and called Trent before I pulled out of the parking lot. “Have I got some stories to tell you,” I said as soon as he answered the phone. Because we both work crazy hours, we sometimes can’t get together until the weekends. It was only Wednesday.

“Are you driving
while talking on your cell phone?” he asked. As I said, sometimes he takes the business of following the rules way too seriously.

I put on my blinker to move over a lane. The car behind me sped up so I couldn’t. “
I’m not going fast enough to worry about it, thanks to traffic, stoplights and jerks. Anyway, I’m on my Bluetooth, and I was sitting in the parking lot when I hit your speed dial. I can make chocolate chip cookies and talk to Paula at the same time. I really think I can handle driving home and talking to you at the same time.”

The
car in front of me, the one being herded down the street by a young girl with a cell phone stuck to her ear, slowed. I tensed. The traffic light ahead was still green, but if she dinked around long enough, it would eventually turn red and stay red for a long time.

The light turned yellow and she stopped.

I sighed. “I’m currently parked at a two-hour red light,” I said to Trent. “Do you want to hear my stories or not?”

“I want to hear your stories. I just don’t want to hear the sound of crunching metal.”

The light finally turned to green, but the idiot in front of me was paying more attention to her conversation than to my need to get through that intersection before I was eligible to collect Social Security. I tapped my horn. Okay, I leaned on it.

Trent sighed. “I don’t even want to know who you’re honking at or why.”

The girl finally noticed the green light and moved on. I made it through on yellow. “Good,” I said, “because I don’t want to tell you. Okay, moving on. First, I met the new owner of the house across the street and Fred called at two this morning to ask me to come over and coax her out of his closet.” That diverted his attention from the subject of my driving.

I was
on the highway, almost finished with Sophie’s story, when I crested a hill, saw a motorcycle cop with a radar gun and slammed on my brakes. The officer immediately stuck his radar gun in his belt and climbed on his bike.

“Damn! Damn, damn, damn!”

“Please tell me you’re not getting another speeding ticket.”

I drove past the cop, pulled docilely over to the shoulder and fumbled in my purse for my license.
I knew the routine.

“Lindsay? You still there?”

The motorcycle cop, lights flashing, sped right past me, chasing another car.

I laughed. “It wasn’t me! He didn’t give me a ticket! He’s after somebody else!”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, but that means somebody was going faster than I was. That’s kind of humiliating.” I merged back onto the highway, relieved but a little sad.

By the time I pulled into my driveway at home, I had finished Sophie’s tale and the story of Rick’s babysitting needs.

“Call me if you need help,” Trent said. “You probably haven’t heard the last of Rick and little Rickie.”

“I know.” I got out of the car and lifted my garage door then checked up and down the street. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see Rick’s car parked there or even the man himself sitting in my front porch swing. He’s the top salesman at Rheims Commercial Real Estate for a reason. He is relentless and doesn’t understand the word
no
.

“Cookout at my house on Saturday night,” I said. “You get to meet the new neighbor
who has a fondness for Fred’s closet.”

“Cookout? In this heat? How about I bring pizzas?”

I was tempted. I do love pizza but I also love sitting outside on summer nights. “We’ll see. It’s only Wednesday. We’ve got plenty of time to figure out the details.”

We hung up and I walked across the yard to my house, enjoying the faint scent of clover and the buzz of bees as they
darted among clover and various other blooms. Grass is a lot of trouble not to mention that it’s boring. I prefer to let the natural process of evolution prevail in my yard.
Only the strong survive
.

Needless to say, Fred doesn’t share my dedication to nature. I’ve caught him tossing weed killer granules onto my lawn in the middle of the night. That certainly messes with the process of evolution and gives the grass an unfair advantage. But clover and dandelions are strong. So far the grass is losing the battle in spite of Fred’s foreign aid.

I opened my front door and Henry met me, launching into his usual
I love you so much, Mom, and I don’t need anything from you in return but if you want to give me some food, it will show how much you love me
routine.

I poured nuggets into his German shepherd size bowl then added half a can of something disgusting and smelly.

He dug in immediately, properly appreciative of the food I’d slaved over a hot can opener to produce.

Henry appeared out of nowhere a couple of months after Rick and I separated and I moved into this place. I’d made the mistake of letting Rick spend the night and was feeling guilty, sad and desperate to get rid of him when King Henry strolled into my house and my life, announced he was staying and Rick was going. I’d never been able to find his previous owners and had no idea of his lifestyle before he claimed me. Perhaps he had offspring I knew nothing about. Perhaps one or more of them would show up on my doorstep one day the way Rickie had.

“Henry,” I said as I watched him gobble down the disgusting food, “we’ve never talked about your former life, and it doesn’t really matter. We both started with clean slates as far as I’m concerned. When you came here, you’d already made the decision not to have children, but Rick’s mother made that decision for him when he was fifteen and he still managed to produce Rickie. So I just want you to know, if you have some descendants out there…” I paused, thinking about having another amazing cat like Henry. Then again, the kids could take after their mother. Maybe that’s why he’d left home in the first place. “If you don’t want to bring your kids home to meet me, if you don’t ever want to talk about them, that’s okay with me. Your decision.”

He continued eating. I took that as a sign he didn’t want to talk about his past.

I went upstairs to take a quick shower before going over to find out if Fred knew anything else about his nighttime visitor and to tell him my latest Rick-head story.

When I pulled off my
cutoffs, I found the card that Paula’s admirer had left. In all the kerfuffle of Rick’s intrusion, I’d forgotten about that guy.

Matthew Graham, Associate Professor of
History at a local college. Beneath his business phone, he’d handwritten the word
home
and another phone number. He was good-looking, employed, educated and probably not married or he wouldn’t have given out his home phone. Four points in the positive column.

I stood there in my bedroom turning the card over and over and trying to decide what to do. If I gave it to Paula and pointed out that he obviously wanted her to call him, she’d crumple the card and toss it in the trash. Maybe even burn it and flush it.
No retrieval possible.

Being married to a psycho abuser like her ex, David Bennett, was enough to make any woman reluctant to have another relationship. But I’d been married to Rick-head for eight years and I’d jumped right back into the water when I met Trent. It was time for Paula to at least dip her toes in the shallow end.

I picked up my cell phone and punched in the handwritten number on the card.

“Hi. You’ve reached Matthew Graham. I’m not available at the moment but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll call you back.”

“Hi, Matthew Graham. This is Lindsay Powell from Death by Chocolate where you had lunch today. Congratulations! You were our, uh, ten thousandth customer, and you’ve won a free chocolate dessert of your choice. Hope to see you at Death by Chocolate soon to enjoy your prize!”

Nobody can resist my chocolate concoctions. He’d be there.

Yes, that was a very pushy, controlling thing for me to do. I’m a pushy, controlling person. Deal with it.

I showered, grabbed some leftover Triple Chocolate Mousse Cake and headed for Fred’s house. Henry walked with me but left as soon as Fred answered the door and he knew I was safe. He takes his guard-cat duties seriously. If anything happened to me, he’d have to figure out how to use the can opener, a difficult task with no opposable thumbs.

“Come in and join us,” Fred invited. “Sophie’s here and we’re having coffee.”

“Trade you chocolate for a Coke.” I handed him the plastic container and went inside.

Looking beautiful in a soft blue blouse, matching ankle pants and sandals that showed off her dark red toenails, Sophie perched on Fred’s forest green leather sofa. “Lindsay, how nice to see you again and under better circumstances than the last time.” She smiled but looked a little tense. Had I interrupted something more than a chat over coffee?

Nah, they couldn’t be drinking coffee and doing anything intimate. Their breath would smell too awful.

Still I felt a little uncomfortable as I sat down next to Sophie. “Definitely a better day. We got our air conditioning at the shop fixed. Are you getting all settled in your new home?”

Fred appeared with a cold Coke and three plates holding slices of my
mousse cake. I might have made something out of the fact that he was using his good china, but he always used good china. I’m not sure he even has anything else.

Fred took a seat in his recliner and sampled my cake. “Excellent as always.” He turned his gaze to Sophie. “Lindsay makes the best desserts in the world, but don’t ever drink coffee at her house.”

It was all true so I couldn’t feel insulted. What I did feel was a little left out. Fred’s
my
friend. I’ll share him but only if I can keep the number one slot, and I sensed secrets between Fred and Sophie.

Sophie took a bite of mousse and turned to me. “He’s right. This is delicious.”

“Thank you.”

We all ate and drank in tense silence.
Well, Sophie and I seemed tense. Fred didn’t, of course.

Fred set his plate and fork on the coffee table. “Sophie remembered who Carolyn was.”

Fred was including me in the secret. I felt better immediately. 

“She was my imaginary friend when I was young.” Sophie bit her lip and held the edge of her plate tightly. That was odd. Thoughts of my imaginary childhood friends, Augie Doggie and Topatee, always made me smile. Perhaps Carolyn hadn’t been a particularly nice friend.

“I had imaginary friends,” I said. “We had a lot of fun but we got into a lot of trouble too. They always did what I wanted and sometimes that didn’t turn out so well, like the time we played pirates and buried my mother’s jewelry in the back yard. I’m not sure whether Mom was more upset about her jewelry getting dirty or Dad about the mess I made in his golf-green lawn. Did you and Carolyn get in trouble?”

Sophie smiled tightly. “Yes, we did. We played dress up with Mother’s clothes and makeup. We sneaked out at night and played hide and seek in the dark. The usual things kids do.”