The Long Quiche Goodbye (12 page)

“Now, why don’t you help me serve this ice cream.” I clipped the tip of her nose with my knuckle.

“What about Clair’s allergies?”

I loved that she cared so much about her sister, a result of the twin bond, I imagined, or perhaps the bond that grew stronger when a parent left. My bond to my grandparents had certainly cemented after my parents died.

“It’s gluten-free,” I said, “but that one’s the biggest scoop, so it’s yours.”

She giggled, and leaving the album on the kitchen table, trotted out of the room carrying two dessert dishes.

By the time we finished our meal, it was close to nine.

“Bedtime,” I said to the girls. “Gather your things.”

Rebecca yawned, thanked my grandparents for a lovely dinner, and headed home. She lived a block away. So did Meredith. I considered stopping by her place, but dropping in unannounced was not my style.

Before Delilah could slip out, Grandmère clutched her arm and asked if she would teach the morning dance classes for the next week. The elderly students really needed the workout, she said, and, well, the women wouldn’t want to exercise on the lawn.

As they negotiated hours and salary, Delilah insisting she needed none of the latter, I went in search of Rags and found him lying on the living room floor. He looked like the Cheshire Cat, a grin on his silly face. Pie crust crumbs led from a little rooster plate on the floor to Rags’s mouth. The scamp must have begged Pépère for a taste of quiche, and Pépère, knowing I would disapprove, brought it to him on the sly.

“Slob,” I muttered and hoisted him into my arms.

Pépère appeared in the arch. He eyed the cat and his mouth tilted up on one side.

“She is better, no?” he said. “Your grandmère?”

“Yes.”

“I keep replaying that night. How I wish—”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Chief Urso. He pressed me for the truth.”

“As he should have.”

“Ed and your grandmother argued, Charlotte, nothing more.”

I patted his shoulder. “Pépère, do you remember seeing anybody running in your direction as you left the Igloo?” The ice cream store stood three doors north of Kristine’s Boutique. If I had murdered Ed, I would have headed away from the crime scene. I would have weaved my way home on side streets. Someone had to have seen her.

“I saw no one.” He tapped a finger to his chin. “You know, I did see Ed with Vivian the night before he died. They were at his office. They were quarreling. I can’t remember ever hearing Vivian raise her voice before. She is such a lady.”

If disagreement was evidence that could hang a person, we would all be suspects in the murder of Ed Woodhouse. Everyone except Pépère. He never bickered. Oh, sure, he lambasted himself in French diatribes, but he never lashed out at others.

“She must have learned that Ed sold her building. I’d have raised my voice as well.”

“
Oui
, of course. Oh,
chérie
, this is making me think like a crazy man.” Pépère beat the side of his leg with his palm. “Vivian is as innocent as your grandmother, no? Everybody is innocent until proven guilty. That is the American way.”

Usually, unless one was covered with the victim’s blood.

I kissed him on both cheeks and said, “Get a good night’s rest. I’m sure we’ll find answers tomorrow.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“The girls and I can walk.”

“I’ll drive.” He was adamant.

I gathered the twins, kissed my grandmother good night, and we headed for his Audi. As I opened the passenger door, I heard Jordan’s voice coming from next door. I peered around the hedge of well-trimmed holly.

Jordan was standing on the porch talking to an attractive woman who had moved to Providence only last week. Grandmère had promised to get me the dirt on her but had yet to do so. I didn’t know what the woman did for a living. She didn’t own a shop in town. She didn’t have a husband or a pet or any children, as far as my snoopy grandmother could tell. With a solid build, strong features, and athletic forearms, she looked like the kind of woman who could wrestle a Wall Street broker to the ground at the end of a day of heavy trading. Grandmère and I teasingly called her Mystery Woman.

So who was she, how did Jordan know her, and why was he hugging her?

CHAPTER 13

A night of tossing and thinking about Jordan Pace, his cowboy good looks, his husky voice, and his arms wrapped around Mystery Woman did nothing for my mood. Neither did dressing in a somber suit and tight heels for Ed Woodhouse’s funeral. Determined to do something that felt constructive, I called Urso. He wasn’t pleased that I was, yet again, his first call of the day. He reminded me that it was the day of the funeral, and he was on his way to it. I told him I was, too, but I wasn’t going to wait to tell him that there had to be a witness who had seen Kristine leaving her coterie of friends on the night of the murder. I recapped my conversation with Pépère in three sentences, and Urso be-grudgingly promised to check into the entire town’s alibis. After the funeral.

The Congregational Church was packed to overflowing. Among the assemblage were many familiar faces: Delilah and her father, Meredith and other schoolteachers, Freckles and her group of crafters, Mr. Nakamura and his teensy wife. The last to enter was Urso, looking decidedly handsome in a dark blue suit.

Huge five-foot candles lined the curved apse behind the altar. Early morning sunlight gleamed through the six stained-glass depictions of scenes from the New Testament. The pastor and his wife Gretel sat in a pair of brown velvet, high-backed chairs in the chancel.

Kristine, for once appropriately clad in a black dress, strutted down the aisle of the nave, her chin held high, a black-veiled toque cupping her perfectly coifed hair. Willamina, also wearing a black frock, shuffled behind her mother. The poor thing looked as sallow as a corpse. Her nose was chapped and red, her eyes swollen. She twisted a handkerchief in her hands. Without a glance back at her daughter, Kristine proceeded to the first pew. As Willamina passed, I had the urge to swoop her into my arms and comfort her. I fought the impulse with all my might. The girl didn’t need me to incite her mother.

Felicia, Prudence, and Tyanne followed Kristine and Willamina, each wearing a black chiffon sheath and black lace gloves. Each carried a black linen hankie. How much had Kristine charged them for those get-ups? I wondered, and pinched myself for such catty thoughts. They slid into the first pew, with Willamina squeezed between her mother and Felicia.

Urso had granted my grandmother dispensation to appear at the funeral, but Grandmère said she didn’t think Kristine would want her there, so she had declined. Pépère sat beside me, Matthew and the twins beyond him, and Rebecca at the far end. Vivian came in late, wearing a dark blue suit buttoned to the neck, and wedged herself into the pew beside Rebecca. We shared a somber nod.

The pastor, with his sage voice and owlish looks, gave a lovely sermon about life in the hereafter and reminded the family that they should feel solace knowing that they were loved. I wasn’t sure how much of that was true, but it sounded good. Attendees who had lost loved ones in the recent past were weeping. A tear slipped down my cheek in memory of my parents. I often wondered what my life would have been like had they lived, but Grandmère warned that dredging up the past could only lead to sorrow.

After the organist played a mournful tune by Bach, the pastor offered Kristine the opportunity to address the congregation. If it was me, I would have passed, but Kristine practically leapt at the chance. She stood and cut a bitter look in my direction. I tensed. Would she attack my family? Were we wrong to have come?

Pépère grabbed my hand.

I squeezed his hard. “Be strong,” I said. I had encouraged him to attend, to be the face of innocence for Grandmère. Our friends—our real friends—believed she would be exonerated.

Like a queen ready to be crowned, Kristine strode to the front of the church, lifted her mid-calf-length skirt an inch, and took the carpeted steps to the podium, one at a time, slowly, deliberately. She moved behind the pulpit and braced her hands on either side, gripping so hard that her knuckles turned white. She took a deep breath, glanced up at the ceiling, and then back at the crowd. I had seen an actress in one of Grandmère’s plays do the same thing to prepare for her overly melodramatic monologue. She was panned for her performance, a critic saying she had run the gamut of emotions from A to B.

“My dear, dear friends,” Kristine intoned. Her words echoed into the rafters. She scanned the crowd but avoided looking in my direction. “I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful it is to see all of you here. Ed would be so . . .” She paused, licked her upper lip ever so slightly. “So . . .” She paused again, this time I was sure it was for effect. “So . . .” She began to wail. Huge, gushing wails.

The assembly uttered a collective gasp.

Kristine laid the back of her hand on her mouth, then held up her other hand as if to tell us she was all right, to give her a moment. Not a soul whispered. When she had composed herself, she wiped tears off her cheeks with her gloved pinky and began again. “Ed was the most wonderful man. I have never known another who was better than him.”

I had. Dozens. Hundreds. I bit my tongue.

“He was a wonderful husband, a fabulous father.” She didn’t look at Willamina, who was hunched over in the front pew, shoulders shuddering. “He supported me in everything I tried to do. I know he would want me to—”

Here it comes, I thought. The pitch. The beleaguered widow wants my grandmother to go to jail, and she wants the town of Providence to elect her. I squeezed Pépère’s hand harder.

“Ed would want me to continue in my quest to make this the finest city in Ohio.”

I knew it.
Voilà!
People were so predictable sometimes.

“I promise you . . .” Kristine’s hand flew to her mouth again, and she slurped back tears. A soap opera actress would be hard-pressed to emote like she did. “I promise you that I will keep his spirit alive by doing exactly that. I will make you and Ed proud. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She actually blew kisses and I was reminded of scenes from
Evita
, when the insincere Eva Peron played the crowd like a fine-tuned fiddle.

As Kristine strode to her daughter and people roused to their feet, I sat frozen in my spot, too stunned to move. The cheek, the gall. Poor little Willamina looked mortified. No siblings to help her. No grandparents to comfort her. Kristine reached out to stroke her daughter’s hair, but Willamina batted her mother’s hand away and fled into the aisle.

When I finally found my composure, I stood with the rest of my family and made my way out of the church. As we passed Kristine and Willamina, who were standing in the chapel’s foyer speaking to well-wishers, Amy and Clair whispered to Willamina that they were sorry. She mumbled the same to them, and my heart broke. The poor kid looked in dire need of a friend.

Outside the church, we kissed Pépère goodbye. I told him not to say a word to Grandmère about Kristine’s brazen promise, and he agreed.

Out in the sunlight, I looked for Jordan, hoping to catch a word with him. I hadn’t seen him in the church, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t come.

“Charlotte.” Vivian tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry. What she did in there . . .”

“Forget it.”

“It was unforgiveable. She has no class, that woman. She and Ed. They never should have gotten married.”

But they did, and the rest, as pundits would say, was history.

“I still think we can prove she killed him,” Vivian said. “Money is a powerful motivator. Do we know how much she inherited? Has Urso or your lawyer found that out?”

I didn’t know if anyone had, but I was too upset to think about it right then. I told her I would confer with both of them later.

Matthew, the twins, and I trundled home. We changed clothes, grabbed Rags, ferried the girls to school in Matthew’s Jeep, and went to the shop. Out of respect for the Woodhouse family, whether they deserved our respect or not, we had chosen not to open The Cheese Shop until ten A.M.

The rest of the day passed quickly. Rebecca and I tended to the customers while Matthew prepared for the wine tasting we were having tomorrow evening. We expected a large crowd. He didn’t mention missing dinner last night. In fact, he didn’t talk at all, and though I was dying to ask him who, what, where, and why, I kept quiet. I wasn’t a harpy. Our business was running smoothly. The girls, other than the incident with Amy missing her mother, seemed happy. Why rock the proverbial boat?

Besides, I had bigger issues to contend with. How was I going to compete with Jordan’s new flame, and how was I going to prove that Kristine Woodhouse was guilty and my grandmother was innocent of murder? I decided to deal with Jordan tomorrow when I made the weekly tour to local farms. Somehow I would get him to spill the beans about Mystery Woman and perhaps, if I was supremely lucky, I could snag a date.

I spent the afternoon filling orders and consulting with Bozz about new pictures to add to our website. He had done a spectacular job photographing an array of cheeses. Around three, I wrote the first of what I hoped would be a monthly newsletter to our customers. I had set a guest book by the register so friends of The Cheese Shop could sign up and give us their email addresses. It was nearly full. In the newsletter, I focused on three distinctly different cheeses—one goat’s milk, one sheep’s milk, and one cow’s milk—and I shared a few tips on how to serve the cheeses. One of my favorites was Caerphilly, a soft, nutty cow’s milk cheese from Wales, which tasted great with a drizzle of apricot jam and a sprinkling of chopped cashews. Matthew popped into the office and offered a suggestion for wine to go with the Caerphilly, a red Ada Nada Dolcetto d’Alba from Italy, a mouthful to say, but delicious.

At four, I returned to the cheese counter, and Rebecca asked if she could take a break.

“Before you go, grab another wheel of Morbier from the refrigerator, would you?” We had sold all of the wedges I had set out. Our customers loved specials.

Rebecca trotted off and I found myself humming for the first time in a long time. Until I heard a pounding sound. Then a kicking sound. Then a scream. Well, not a scream really. A fit of laughter. Rebecca had locked herself into the refrigerator. Again.

“Problem?” a customer with a peanut-sized child in tow asked.

“Nope.” I chuckled. Rebecca would be angry if I rescued her. I’d give her sixty seconds to figure out her escape route. “What’ll it be?”

Two more customers strolled into the store and headed straight for the wine annex.

“Don’t you need to help her?” the customer with the toddler asked.

“She’ll figure her way out. I promise.” She had before.

The woman asked for a quarter pound each of Molinari Toscano Picante salami, prosciutto, and Manchego cheese. As I filled the order, the grape-leaf-shaped chimes jingled. Zinnia scuttled into the shop.

She strode toward me and said, “Got a tidbit for you,” then she began playing peekaboo with the customer’s toddler, seemingly content to bide her time until I was free.

As I moved toward the register, I heard a slam and then a muttering of French swear words. Rebecca had escaped her chilly dungeon. I would bet she hadn’t a clue what she was saying and would blush when I told her. And I would. Later. Out of earshot of customers. I had no intention of letting my purer-than-pure helper go down a path she didn’t understand.

She shuffled to my side, looking like she had grappled with a bear, strands of hair falling around her delicate face, her ponytail loose, and the apron that she wore over her shirred-neck dress twisted almost backward. She smiled her elfin smile. “I’ve returned, thanks to the stool.” The inner handle of the refrigerator stuck every once in a while. It required a little extra oomph to open it. I had put a step-stool into the refrigerator just in case Clair or Amy got trapped. The extra height would give them enough leverage to open the door. Rebecca, as slight as she was, had to use it, too.

“Charlotte, got a sec?” Zinnia said, no longer willing to wait.

I sidled from behind the cheese counter and joined her by the display of balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil bottles. “What’s up?”

“I’m going back home.”

“But—” I sputtered. We hadn’t finished the interview.

“Don’t worry. It’s my fault we haven’t completed the interview. I’m writing the article, anyway, and I promise it’ll be very positive.”

That was a relief.

“Before I go, I wanted to impart a little more gossip that I gleaned at Lois’s B&B.” Zinnia snagged my shirtsleeve and pulled me close. “Get this. Kristine Woodhouse is trying to get control of her daughter’s trust fund.”

“What? Why?”

“Sounds to me like she might be a little hard up for cash. I don’t think Ed left her much else.”

I needed to talk to Urso. Money was always a motive for murder.

“I know you’re trying to buy this place,” Zinnia went on. “Maybe now you can get it for a song.”

No matter how destitute Kristine Woodhouse was, I couldn’t see her letting anybody get a bargain. But a meeting with my Realtor, Octavia Tibble, was in order. I’d call her on my way to pick up the twins from school.