If Mashed Potatoes Could Dance (12 page)

I swallowed the panic rising in my throat and looked at Jake. “This is insane.”

“I know.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It was on my podium. I found it right before I called you. I’d come back here for a minute, and when I went back out to the front”—he pointed—“there it was.”

“We’ve got to call Cliff immediately.” I pulled out my cell phone.

“What? Did you not notice the last part?”

“Of course I did. That’s what these things always say, don’t they?”

“When’s the last time you dealt with something like this personally, Betts? Not in a movie or a novel, but really? When?”

“Never, of course, but we’ve got to get the police involved, Jake. They’ll handle it appropriately. It’s what they do. There are people’s lives at stake.”

“Exactly!” Jake stood. “That’s what I’m saying, too. What if we contact the police and other people get killed?”

“Odds aren’t in our favor here, Jake. They aren’t.”

“Betts, I wanted you to read this so you could help me, not so you could call the police.”

“Help you do what, pack the money in a bag and drop it off? It’ll never be seen again; those poor people won’t either.”

He looked like he was weighing what I’d said. I hoped my
words were getting through, but something told me they weren’t. Would I call Cliff on my own? Would I betray Jake? I thought I probably might, but only with the hope that he’d forgive me later. How was it possible that less than an hour ago I’d considered that I’d be more likely to help Jake hide a crime than report one? It didn’t make sense even to me.

Finally, I said, “Jake, look, there are things happening here that I’m not sure you know about.”

“What do you mean?”

“You found Mr. Carlisle right outside your place, right?”

“Yes.”

“That might have been intentional.”

“Betts, I really don’t understand.”

“Mr. Carlisle’s wife, Georgina, has some ties to Broken Rope.” I inspected his face for anything other than curiosity or confusion, but the only additional emotion I saw was an edge of fear. “She’s related to Stuart Benson; they’re cousins.”

“Okay, so?”

“She’s also related to someone from your, our past. Damon Rim. She’s Damon’s older sister.”

Jake’s eyebrows came together. “Damon Rim? The bully from high school?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t get why that’s important,” he said.

“Damon Rim was vicious to you. You found the body outside your door. There’s something odd going on, and I feel like you’re being…involved on purpose.”

“Damon Rim was vicious to lots of people. That was high school, which feels like it was so long ago that it was another life. I don’t get what you’re saying.”

I sighed. “Cliff grabbed me right when you were starting your show. He asked me questions about you. I didn’t have
any information to tell him. I would never think you were guilty of anything anyway.”

“Guilty? Cliff thinks I’m guilty of something?” Jake’s face fell and turned a whole new shade of white as he sat again.

“No. No.” Though I wasn’t sure that was totally true. “I think he’s worried about you. I know I’m worried. This note only adds to the concern. This is too big for you and me to handle. We need to get Jim involved. Or Cliff. Maybe we could just start with Cliff. He’s our friend.”

“He’s still a law enforcement officer. The note says—”

“I know, but this really is too big for us. You see that, don’t you?”

The best way to describe Jake at the moment was
freaked out
. There was no doubt about his state of mind. I knew he knew that we had to involve the police. He needed me to be his voice of reason. Stress had twisted his own reasoning ability.

Finally, he began to nod slowly. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”

I pulled out my cell phone.

“No!” Jake jumped up and grabbed it from me. “We can’t just call them or have them come over, or go there. What if I’m being watched?”

A part of me wanted to tell him he was still thinking wrong, but another part of me wondered if he might be right this time. What if someone was watching him, his every move?

“If so, they saw me come in here,” I said.

“Not necessarily. We timed it just right. You came in at the end of a performance. There were people everywhere. Maybe you weren’t noticed. You’ll have to go out the back and sneak away and take the note to Jim. No! Don’t take it
there. Call him to meet you. Better yet, call Cliff to meet you somewhere.”

“I think I’ll go out the front, but I won’t go directly to the jail. I’ll go back to my car, drive…somewhere, and then call Cliff.”

“You have to go out the back. It’s the only safe way.”

Again, I knew Jake’s paranoia was getting the best of him, but there might—might—be something to what he was saying. It wouldn’t hurt for me to go out the back anyway.

I’d sometimes wondered about these sorts of moments. You’re faced with a situation that seems so easy to figure out when you’re an outsider looking in, like when watching a movie or reading a novel. What would I really do if such a dilemma presented itself? Would I walk into my house if it looked like the lock had been broken? Would I go toward the sound in the closet, or would I run for dear life?

I didn’t know, but I was willing to concede that going out the back door wasn’t a terrible price to pay for Jake’s peace of mind.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Both Jake and I jumped with the noise. We both needed to get a grip.

“Gram?” I said as calmly as I could. “What’s up?”

“Betts, I need your help. Can you get back to the school? Right away?”

“What’s up?” I repeated.

“I’m being forced to bake, and since you can see the ghosts, too, I thought I’d try to pass this responsibility off to you.”

“Huh?”

“Just get over here.” She clicked off.

“I gotta go. Why don’t you come with me,” I said as I put the phone back in my pocket. “I’m going to the school. You should be with people.”

Jake considered the offer but soon declined. “I’ve got performances. I’ve got plenty to do here. The more normal I act, the better, don’t you think?”

“Okay. Call me if you need anything. And lock the doors when there’s no one else around. Got it? I’ll get a hold of Cliff.”

“Sure. Sure.”

I folded the note and put it in my pocket. If there was any evidence on it, Jake and I had surely compromised it.

“Call me, Betts,” Jake said before he shut the door behind me.

There’s a secret world behind the buildings along Broken Rope’s main boardwalk. Because we’re a performance-oriented town, we have many props to contend with. Consequently, a number of storage sheds line a groomed patch behind the buildings. The area reminded me of the backstage and hidden sections of a theater. I usually found it a pleasant place to be, but not today.

I didn’t see anyone else as I hurried along the path. Suddenly, Jake’s paranoia made me jumpier, and I couldn’t get out from behind the buildings fast enough.

It was probably because I was moving so quickly or because the roasted almond cart was firing up and filling the air with a delicious aroma that I didn’t smell the unusual scent I’d noticed earlier.

But it was there, attached to a ghost who hadn’t yet figured out how to speak to me directly.

“You’re being forced to make sweet potato pie?” I asked.

“Sort of. It’s something I promised Sally a long time ago,” Gram said. “I think that promise will extend to you.”

I looked at Sally, who was perched on the end of the butcher block looking more than pleased with herself. I’d gone from one of the most serious moments of my life—a moment that had included a note demanding money in exchange for lives—to needing to bake a pie.

Gram had sounded…urgent, like she needed me to get to the school right away. Had I known what the urgency was specifically about, I might have told her I was busy with Jake.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“When I was a little girl, the ghosts were sometimes my playmates. We lived out in the country, and many times it was just me, my mother, and whichever ghost was visiting. My mother was an amazing cook, but so are, or
were
most of
the ghosts when they were alive. One of Sally’s favorite things to bake was sweet potato pie. Years ago, she promised she’d share some of her recipes with me if I would prepare them with her present. I promised I would.”

Gram and Sally could not have known what they’d pulled me away from, and I didn’t want them to find out. I switched gears as smoothly as possible.

“So…so your amazing cooking and baking skills, your recipes, they come from the ghosts?” I said, teasing.

Gram laughed. “Some of them. Not all of them.”

“If I could still have cravings, I’d be craving sweet potato pie, so that’s what we’re making today,” Sally said.

Gram shrugged. “You never know when they’ll leave, so I usually have to respond quickly to a request. Since we’re not cleaning, I thought you could join us for the topping. Did I interrupt anything?”

“Not at all.”

It wasn’t the best time to be cooking, baking, or just hanging out. I had too many other, more serious things to contend with. I’d called Cliff and asked him to meet me at the school; it had seemed like a good idea, a good way to get him out of town and to a place that wouldn’t be an odd or unusual destination for him. But as I’d driven away from downtown, I’d wished I could stop by Stuart Benson’s shoe shop just to…well, I wasn’t sure, but I would have liked to have at least asked about Georgina and seen where the conversation went from there.

Instead, it looked as though I’d have to spend some time in the school’s kitchen, which, though not convenient at the moment, was also not an unusual event in my schedule. If anyone was watching Jake or had watched me as I left his building, at least I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.

Sweet potato pie was one of those desserts that, despite the word
sweet
, I thought shouldn’t taste good. I wasn’t a fan of sweet potatoes in any form—except when they were cooked, peeled, and blended with sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, salt, nutmeg, and milk. And then poured into a piecrust, baked, and finally topped with egg white and marshmallow meringue. The resulting creation was the only form in which I found sweet potatoes palatable.

I’d baked a few sweet potato pies in my day, all of them topped with meringue that I’d made with an electric mixer. Sally insisted that we use a whisk, a copper bowl, and muscle power, as well as precise and perfectly timed ingredient additions. I still wanted to pull out the mixer, but even Gram insisted that I follow Sally’s instructions.

“In fact, this is how we should teach our students first. I think we’ll do that this year. I can’t believe I got meringue lazy, Betts. We should have been doing this all along. Meringue was around long before electric mixers.”

I nodded but hoped she’d forget the decree by the time classes started.

“Betts, did you tell Miz about the book?” Sally asked.

“No, not yet,” I said.

“Tell me,” Gram said as she handed me a whisk.

“Jake made a copy of a reporter’s notebook from the time of Sally’s trial,” I said.

“Wait, his name was Edgar O’…something,” Gram said.

“O’Brien. He kept an account…no, mostly just notes about the trial. Sally and I were going over some of the notes this morning. Maybe there’s something in there to help us find Sally’s diary, so we don’t have to…dig her up.” I dubiously inspected the whisk.

“Dig me up! I like the sound of that!” Sally said with a
smile. “There’s still a chance that the diary’s buried with me, but I’m willing to look around. I just need Betts to do something. Or you could do it, Miz.”

“And that would be?” Gram said as she absently wiped her fingers on her Dartmouth T–shirt.

“I need someone to search the Monroe House.”

I realized that this had been Sally’s mission the whole time. She hadn’t wanted Gram or me to bake, she’d just wanted to get us together so she could enlist Gram’s help, either to search the old house or convince me to.

“That old place? Why?” Gram said.

“It’s been around forever. I remember—and this memory is getting clearer and clearer—I remember hiding in that house.”

“Hiding from what?” Gram said.

“I’m not sure. I just know there’s something about that place that makes me feel safe. I think I just needed to get away from everyone sometimes.”

“Interesting,” Gram said, less than enthusiastically.

It wasn’t that Gram didn’t like the ghosts. She did like them; they’d been a part of her life for as long as she could remember, but this was her healthy detachment speaking.

“Why don’t you search the house?” Gram said a second later.

“I can’t move things to look inside drawers or closets, you know that. And something won’t let me in there, Miz. I tried.”

Except for two blinks, Gram seemed to freeze in place for a long few seconds. When she finally spoke, she said, “What do you mean, Sally?”

“I mean, I’ve stood in front of the house with the full intention of going inside it, but it won’t let me. I’ve willed
myself inside from every conceivable angle. I’ve never run into that before. In this state,” she pointed at herself, “I can usually go anywhere.”