Death by Deep Dish Pie (18 page)

Mrs. Beavy beamed at me, then poured her own cup of tea, which she left unsweetened.

“The pie was great,” I said. “Thanks.”

She nodded, then took a big sip of her tea, smacking her lips in satisfaction.

“Isn't that great tea? And thank you so much for getting that blood stain out of my blouse! However did you do it?” Mrs. Beavy leaned toward me and winked. “Or is that top secret?”

I laughed. “Not at all. It's just a matter of knowing what you're really dealing with.” I paused, then added gently, “Which in this case, I realized, was really red wine.”

And then Mrs. Beavy—who had buried parents, in-laws, all of her siblings, her husband, two sons (Vietnam War), one daughter (breast cancer), and a grandson (car wreck), but had never been seen to shed a single tear no matter how grief-racked her expression—burst out sobbing.

“Mrs. Beavy, please,” I said, putting my cup down, then resting my hand on her arm, “I won't tell anyone you had some wine. Besides, isn't a glass every other day supposed to be good for medicinal purposes? Why, I'm right sure your doctor could prescribe—”

“He brought the wine over and he talked so pretty to me and he asked if I minded if he poured himself a glass and then he said I should give it a try—that it was a merlot and would be warm and soft on my palate—and I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded nice—” Mrs. Beavy was still sobbing as she talked. I got another paper towel for her just in case she needed to eventually blow her nose. “—and I didn't want to be rude and so I didn't say anything when he poured me a glass and it had an aroma that reminded me of the wild cherry cordial Harold, God rest his soul, brought out on our first picnic alone together—”

I lifted my eyebrows at that. Harold Beavy was Mrs. Beavy's dearly departed husband and had been a deacon for forty-seven years in the Baptist church before he passed on. It was hard to imagine wild-cherry-cordial-picnics with Mrs. Beavy in their youth, but now she was crying a little less and smiling a bit dreamily, as if she had drifted back to the past.

I patted her hand. “Go on, Mrs. Beavy,” I urged gently.

“Well, I couldn't be rude, could I? So I offered him buttermilk pie and he liked it and then I had a glass of wine with him and then he kissed me and I was so complimented such a young man like that would be interested in me—” She broke off, sobbing wildly now.

“Who?” I asked, completely confused. “Dr. Stamper?”

We had been referring to her doctor a few minutes ago, hadn't we? Dr. Eugene Stamper had been the family doctor of most Paradisites for as long as I could remember—and I couldn't imagine him planting a kiss on anyone, not even Mrs. Stamper, what's more Mrs. Beavy. “Or do you mean Mr. Beavy?” Maybe she'd not really snapped out of her reverie about the picnic.

“No, no,” Mrs. Beavy said. “Cletus Breitenstrater!”

I stared at her. Her sobbing had settled into hiccups. I pushed the square of paper towel at her. She blew her nose. Then she looked at me, for all her eighty-something years, with the expression of a little girl who has just been found out doing something naughty.

“Mrs. Beavy, I came over here to return your blouse,” I said, “and to ask you about Cletus Breitenstrater.”

Her eyes grew wide. She looked around the kitchen anxiously as if spies might be lurking in the spice rack somewhere between “parsley” and “sage.” “You mean you knew about—”

I shook my head. “No, now listen to me. Yesterday afternoon, Alan Breistenstrater died from an apparent heart attack at the annual pie-eating contest. Cletus never showed up and as far as I know he still hasn't.” That was something I'd double-check on my next stop, to see Geri Breitenstrater. “You did hear about all this, didn't you?”

Mrs. Beavy nodded, sniffled, dabbed at her nose.

“Well, I got to thinking about something you mentioned back when you first brought me the pink blouse,” I said. “You said you'd been helping Cletus Breitenstrater with a special project that involved the town's history. And at the play meeting he announced he'd rewritten the play about that very history to reveal some stunning new information. A week later, Alan dies and Cletus disappears.”

Mrs. Beavy's eyes widened. “You think all that's related somehow?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But maybe.” I made my voice a little softer for my next statement. “Mrs. Beavy, tell me what you know.”

Mrs. Beavy took a long sip of her ginseng tea. The skin on her tiny hands was shiny and thin so that her veins showed through. She held her cup with both hands, like a child does, and her hands shook a little as she sipped her tea.

“I was surprised to see Cletus Breitenstrater on my doorstep one morning a few months ago. We weren't his kind of people, you know.” I knew. Even in a town as small as Paradise, there are levels of society. The levels aren't talked about of course, but they're there, and the Breiten-straters had always used their position at the top as an unarguable excuse to avoid interacting with much of anyone else.

“He said he wanted to look through the archives for a special project he was working on, but he didn't say what it was,” Mrs. Beavy said. “Well, he spent a lot of time up in the archives and of course it gets hot and stuffy up there and so of course I invited him to take a break and have sweet tea or lemonade and some of my buttermilk pie—I mean, it was the only hospitable thing to do, right?” Mrs. Beavy's voice rose thinly, and her gaze pleaded with me for approval.

I patted her hand. “Of course you had to offer him something,” I said.

Mrs. Beavy sighed. “When you get right down to it, even with all of his flaky ways, Cletus is really very charming. And it just gets so lonely here, you know? I mean, my kids and grandkids visit as often as they can, and I'm grateful, but still. The church, the market, and your laundromat, Josie, are about the only places I get to these days.”

I knew that. And I knew how hard it was on her to tote even her little basket of laundry two blocks over to my establishment.

“So you and Cletus became . . . friends,” I said encouragingly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Beavy said, blushing. The pink was an attractive contrast to her soft waves of silvery white hair. “Oh, I'll just say it. I was flattered by his attention. And he really is bright. He told me all about ginseng tea being good for lowering blood pressure,” she said. In the back of my mind I tried to put everything together: ginseng tea is good for lowering blood pressure; Alan had high blood pressure; but Alan had a heart attack as he was eating a ginseng health-food pie, right before he could make an announcement Cletus didn't want him to make . . .

“And just like you said, Cletus told me how red wine is good for your heart—if taken in moderation, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And I think . . . I think he was right sweet on me.” Mrs. Beavy shook her head. “Of course, maybe he was just acting that way to get his way. You know how younger men can be.”

I swallowed, having to ask the question, and almost afraid to know the answer. “Urn, Mrs. Beavy, what did Cletus want?”

Mrs. Beavy leaned toward me and half-whispered, “Why, to take some documents with him, of course.”

I was genuinely shocked. Mrs. Beavy never, ever, ever let anyone borrow anything from the Paradise Historical Society's collection. Why, in eighth grade, our field trip with Mrs. Oglevee was to Mrs. Beavy's garage apartment to look at things—an old chest, a few dresses, books, diaries, a milk churn, a cast-iron clothes iron, a washboard (the latter two items being of particular interest to me since I was by then living with my aunt and uncle who would one day leave me the laundromat), and so on. But we weren't ever allowed to touch anything. Even Mrs. Oglevee couldn't borrow things. Breathing around the stuff in Mrs. Beavy's historical museum over the garage was tolerated only insomuch as necessary.

“What did he borrow?”

“You know, I'm not sure,” Mrs. Beavy said, her gaze drifting to the window that overlooked the garage cum museum. “He found some letters and a diary underneath a false bottom of that old chest—you know the one?”

I nodded.

“He told me they were very important to his special project and he wanted to borrow them. And . . . I found myself telling him he could.”

Mrs. Beavy looked at me, crestfallen. “Then he kissed me. Right on the cheek.” She put her hand to her thin cheek, right to the spot, I reckoned, where Cletus had kissed her. “And—and it was nice. Do you think Harold minds?”

Harold Beavy, the deacon, the one I'd always known, would have been outraged. But then, I'd never known Harold Beavy, the wild cherry cordial picnicker. I was learning over these past few weeks that lots of people had hidden stories.

I smiled at Mrs. Beavy. “I don't think he minds a bit.”

I went over to the garage museum by myself. Mrs. Beavy said her arthritis was flaring up and she just didn't feel up to going out to the museum and up the stairs to where the chest was—I'd know where to find it. She gave me a key to the garage door. Mrs. Beavy was getting, I realized, too old and frail to take care of all those items she so cherished.

A sign Mr. Beavy had made—the lettering burned into a thick plank of wood, the wood then varnished to a high sheen and mounted on a pole—was just outside the garage:
PARADISE HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM. HOURS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
It was the same sign that had been there when I was an eighth grader.

The museum itself was also pretty much as I remembered it—stuffed to the rafters. I sneezed at the moldy smell as I ran my fingertip over a set of old schoolbooks stuffed in a bookshelf. I picked up a horseshoe from a tabletop that was covered with other such odds and ends and considered: if this stuff didn't find a new home, and soon, it wouldn't last much longer. It was no doubt a fire hazard, anyway, over an old garage that probably still held gas and oil cans from before Mr. Beavy died. And no one could really appreciate what was here, with it all crowded in like this.

I went over to the old cedar chest. I remembered it, of course. Nearly as big as a casket. Ornately carved, with leather handles at either end. Empty, it would still take two very strong men to lift it, I reckoned.

I did what I would never have dared to do as an eighth grader. I kneeled before the chest and carefully undid the front latch. Then I lifted the heavy chest lid and looked in.

Empty. Not even any ornate carvings, like on the outside. The inside of the chest was just plain, rough-hewn wood. On our eighth-grade trip, we'd begged Mrs. Beavy to open the chest and let us look in, because such a chest just had to have treasure in it. She'd refused, then.

But just a bit ago, Mrs. Beavy had confided to me that Cletus had found a false bottom to the chest. I felt along the seam of the chest bottom and the sides—nothing . . . until I got to a tiny half-moon cutout on the right side that I could just put my finger in. I found its twin on the left side.

The little half-moon cutouts blended into the shadowy depths of the chest. There, in that dark, poorly lit room, the cutouts were easy to miss. I crooked my fingers and slowly pulled up. The false bottom of the chest was heavy, but finally I heaved it out of the chest, then set it on the floor.

I peered into the bottom of the chest, now able to see that the false bottom had covered over four inches of depth—small enough to not miss in a chest so deep, but big enough, given the width and length of the chest, to conceal a goodly number of letters, diaries, or other documents.

None of which were there. The true bottom of the chest was as empty as the false bottom. There were only a few tiny crumbles of old, browned paper, and plenty of dust.

But there was one thing.

On our eighth-grade trip, we were told no one was sure where this chest came from, which added to its mystery. But now I knew, for burned into the bottom of the chest was the following:

Gertrude Breitenstrater

Philadelphia

1792

12

A half hour later, I was sitting in another kitchen, with another distraught woman, sipping from another cup.

But the kitchen, the woman, the cup, and its contents couldn't have been more different than sipping ginseng tea from the white china cup with the daisy in Mrs. Beavy's cramped kitchen.

I was in the Breitenstrater kitchen, sitting at a snack bar on a stool that was uncomfortably high, so that my feet dangled, little-kiddie-like, above the black-and-white-tiled floor.

Every now and again I nervously glanced up at the very heavy-looking copper pots and pans that hung from very fragile-looking copper chains from the ceiling. The pots and pans looked like they'd never been used, and no wonder. Since there wasn't a ladder in sight, I reckoned a person would have to climb up on the stool and stand on tiptoe to get a pan down, which is a mighty lot of work for making, say, a fried bologna sandwich.

Not that I actually figured the Breitenstraters for fried bologna sandwich eaters. But then, I wouldn't have figured any of them for drinking scorched coffee from mugs festooned with Winnie the Pooh characters. I had Tigger. Geri had Eeyore.

Maybe Geri had her own collection of mugs she'd brought to her marriage to Alan Breitenstrater. I could just see her, first day back after the honeymoon, stashing the mugs at the back of one of the many cherry cabinets, right alongside her fried-bologna-sandwich-making skillet.

Truth be told, Geri was just as common as I was. There were certain things I wouldn't have given up, either, even for taking up residence in a house so fine that copper skillets dangled unused from its ceiling. I myself, when truly feeling down and out, still have my favorite cereal (Cap'n Crunch) in my favorite plastic kiddie bowl (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—and never mind that Dopey's ears are fading).