Devil's Food Cake (10 page)

I’ve got some lounge pants and a T-shirt you can change into,” Sadie said as she pushed open the back door of her house and ushered Gayle inside and out of the increasing snowstorm. It was good to be home. She’d ended up giving Andy one of the full cakes by way of apology and handed the partial cake to one of his employees, leaving her with only the two that she needed to bring in from the car. She’d do it in a minute. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me?” she asked, giving Gayle one more chance to change her mind.

“No, I’ll go to Amber’s. It will be fine.”

Gayle had called her daughter, Amber, as soon as they left the hotel, and Amber had insisted her mother come stay at her house. She was running to the grocery store for milk and could pick Gayle up from Sadie’s house on her way back. Gayle could take the time to change into something more comfortable so she wouldn’t be stuck in her evening gown all night. A gown saturated in the trauma of the evening.

“You can stay in Bre’s room,” Sadie added while leading the way into her bedroom.

“I’m fine,” Gayle said. “I don’t want Amber to have hurt feelings.”

Sadie pulled open two drawers before finding her favorite pink-and-black plaid lounge pants. They were three sizes too big but insanely comfortable. She moved to the closet in search of a roomy T-shirt. There wasn’t much to choose from. A pox on the Salvation Army drive last month!

“Thank you for the offer,” Gayle said as she sat on the edge of the bed, absolutely exhausted. “And thank you for the clothes. But spending a night at Amber’s will help me pull myself together much quicker.”

Staying at Amber’s didn’t sound very restful to Sadie; she’d met Amber’s kids. She smiled at Gayle’s ironic tone, though. It was nice to see a small spark of her old self, though her eyes still had a blank dullness about them.

“She said it would be about twenty minutes,” Gayle said, rubbing at her forehead.

Sadie finally found a T-shirt. Last fall, all the Red Cross volunteers had received matching shirts for their help with the blood drive at the Baptist church. The shirt was white, which would match the lounge pants, but the words Got Blood? were printed on the back in red lettering. Sadie frowned. The shirt was definitely not appropriate, but after a quick twice-over through her closet, Sadie realized it was the only shirt she had that would fit over Gayle’s—ahem—voluptuousness. Whereas Sadie held her excess weight in her hips, Gayle held hers a bit higher.

“Mom!”

Both women looked toward the door. Sadie offered a comforting smile to her son, Shawn, who nearly filled the doorway. If she and Neil had had any idea they’d have a son of his magnitude, they’d have built their house with ten-foot ceilings throughout. But life had a funny way of throwing you curveballs. Sometimes those curveballs were devastating strikes—like Neil’s early death—and sometimes they were home runs—like adopting a beautiful son who, though built like a truck, was as sweet and cuddly as the proverbial teddy bear.

Shawn’s eyebrows pulled together as he looked from Sadie to Gayle. “Is Gayle okay?”

“I’ll talk to you in a minute,” Sadie said, giving him a strong look.

He nodded and backed up to allow Sadie to enter the hallway. She turned to look at Gayle, who was simply staring at the floor and holding the plaid lounge pants to her chest.

“Is there anything else you need, Gayle?” Sadie asked from the doorway, wishing there was more she could do. Then she remembered the French chocolate and felt better. It was Sadie’s Aunt Melinda’s recipe and perfect for entertaining. There was no party tonight, of course, but something a little fancy seemed like good balm for all the tender emotions of the evening. Plus, it would give Sadie something to do.

Gayle looked up. “I’m good,” she said. “I’ll be right out.”

Sadie smiled and pulled the door shut, taking one last look at the T-shirt she’d laid on the bed. “Wait,” she said, opening the door again. “I bet Shawn has a better T-shirt.”

“Um, my clothes are still in the wash,” Shawn said a little sheepishly from the doorway. It was just like him to bring an entire suitcase of dirty clothes with him on the plane. “Two birds with one stone” is what he called it. Sadie called it “Get Mom to do my laundry any chance I get.”

The shirt couldn’t be helped, she supposed. She quietly shut the door again, and immediately found herself nearly lifted off the floor in a bear hug from her baby—a two hundred and eighty pound baby. After a moment he returned her to the floor, and looked at her with those soft, brown eyes she’d fallen in love with the day they picked him up from the hospital where his birth mother had left him.

“I’m okay,” Sadie said as he let her go. He was Samoan or Tongan by birth—they weren’t certain which—and likely had some African-American blood in his genetic pool as well, which accounted for his tightly curled hair that he liked to pick out so it surrounded his head like black foam. “I’m sorry you were so worried. How did you hear about it?”

“Crab has a—”

“Jonathan,” Sadie cut in automatically, disappointed that the nickname was still dogging her former student. She’d hoped it had been a third-grade thing he’d grow out of when he stopped pinching everyone during recess, but the name had stuck.

“You’re the only one who calls him that,” Shawn said with a grin. “Well, other than bill collectors, I guess. Anyway, I was helping him install new speakers in his car when his dad came out and told us. His dad’s a volunteer with the fire department so he listens to the scanner all the time.”

“You must have been worried sick,” Sadie said sympathetically. “I left my phone in the car all night.”

Shawn nodded. “The police wouldn’t let us in the parking lot so Crab brought me back here. I’ve seen a couple breaking news reports on TV since I got home, but no one is saying much. So, what happened? I was totally freaking out.”

Sadie couldn’t help but feel the annoyance in Shawn’s voice was a fair turnabout. How many times had she grilled him with the same questions when he had come home late?

“And you said library fund-raisers were boring,” she chided.

Shawn put both of his huge hands up in mock surrender. “I take it back. What
happened?
”

“I don’t know where to start,” Sadie said with a shake of her head. It was amazing how much could happen in a short span of time. “I promised Gayle I’d make her some French chocolate,” she said, heading to the kitchen. Shawn was more than a foot taller than Sadie and stood to the side, but it was still a tight squeeze past him in the hallway. “She was backstage and saw the whole thing.”

“It happened backstage?”

“No,” Sadie said, kicking off her shoes, which meant her skirt pooled on the floor. She grabbed a clothespin from the odds-and-ends drawer. Why people paid so much money for those plastic bag clips when they could get fifty clothespins for two bucks was a mystery to her. She gathered up her skirt so it was a few inches off the ground and used a clothespin to hold it in place on one side. Before heading for the fridge, she grabbed another pin and clipped up the other side. There hadn’t been time to change, and besides, Gayle was still in Sadie’s bedroom.

“Will you get the hot fudge from the pantry?” she asked as she pulled open the fridge in search of whipping cream. Front and center, however, was what was left of the Angel Snowball cake she’d made a couple days earlier to celebrate Shawn’s first weekend home in months. The cake would go great with the French chocolate, and since she’d never finished eating her devil’s food cake at the fund-raiser, she felt she deserved a slice herself. Of course, she had two full devil’s food cakes sitting in her car, but she wasn’t sure she or Gayle wanted the reminder right now.

After putting the Angel Snowball cake on the counter, she returned to the fridge for the whipping cream. She shut the fridge at the same time that Shawn thumped the jar of hot fudge on the counter.

“Mom,” he said as if running out of patience. “Will you please tell me what happened?”

“Oh, right,” Sadie said. While she assembled the things she needed for the French chocolate, she gave Shawn the condensed version of the evening. By the time she finished the account, the milk was heating on the stove, the cream was in the bowl ready to be whipped, and the hot fudge had been softened in the microwave.

Shawn sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and stared at his mother. “You saw it?” he breathed, leaning forward, his eyes wide.

Sadie shook her head. “Not exactly. I was savoring cake, but Gayle was only fifteen feet away when it happened.”

“Oy,” Shawn said, sitting back in the chair.

She took advantage of the pause in the conversation to start up the electric beaters, whipping the cream into a froth. As she added the powdered sugar and vanilla, she glanced at the clock in the living room. It was 9:12. Two hours ago Mr. Ogreski was alive and well. She wondered if he had a family. How many lives had been changed forever because Mr. Ogreski had chosen to do an introduction? Or had Mr. Ogreski been the intended target all along? And what had prompted Jane’s meeting with him?

Jane.

Sadie was still terribly unsettled about that woman being in the hotel, but she tried one more time to talk herself out of it. This wasn’t her business, and she needed to stop obsessing about it.

“So what happened next?” Shawn asked, cutting off Sadie’s internal reel of unanswerable questions.

Sadie told him about her running to Gayle, and then Pete asking her to clear the stage, and then Thom running from the room. “That’s when I found the book,” she said.

“The book?” Gayle asked from across the room.

Sadie looked up from where she had been spooning the thick and frothy French chocolate into individual cups. Shawn stood up and helped Gayle to a chair at the kitchen table as if she were an old lady, which, at fifty-one, she certainly was not. But Sadie was impressed by his chivalry. Gayle smiled a thank-you at him as she sat down.

“How are you doing?” Sadie asked with concern. Gayle’s color was better, but she still had a bit of the deer-in-the-headlights look about her.

“What book were you talking about?” Gayle asked, ignoring Sadie’s question.

“Thom’s book.” Sadie tapped off the spoon on the side of the third mug, then turned to remove the now-hot milk from the stove. “Well, a copy of it anyway. I found it backstage after the, uh, shooting.” She grabbed a ladle from her utensil drawer and carefully poured hot milk into the first of the three mugs.

“It was on the podium next to that pink Post-It note,” Gayle said in quick words. Sadie looked up at her friend, splashing hot milk on the counter in the process. “The podium was pushed up against the backstage wall, and when we pulled it out, the book was right on top. Mr. Ogreski picked up the book and gave it to Thom.”

“This was right before the shooting?” Sadie asked, thinking through the timeline. “Are you sure?”

Gayle nodded. “I didn’t think about it before.”

Who did the book belong to?
Sadie wondered. “Did Thom open it? Did he read what was written inside?”

“What was written inside?” Shawn and Gayle asked in unison.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you that already?” Sadie asked. “The words ‘I’m sorry’ were written on the inside cover.”

“‘I’m sorry’?” Shawn repeated. “Sorry for what?”

Sadie shrugged. “That’s what I wondered. I don’t know.”

“They meant to kill Thom,” Gayle said weakly. “I just know it!”

Sadie made a maybe-shrug and began stirring the milk and cream together in the mug. “Do you know if he read it?” Sadie asked Gayle. “When you saw Thom take the book, did he open the front cover?”

Gayle looked at the table in concentration, then shook her head. “I don’t remember. He held the book, and then that poor man was on the floor and everyone was screaming.”

“But you said Thom left the room,” Shawn said to Sadie, leaning his forearms on the edge of the table.

“He did?” Gayle asked, reminding Sadie that, while Gayle had been an eyewitness, she’d still missed a lot of details of the evening. Sadie quickly brought her up to speed on the rest of the story.

“Maybe he ran out because he thought he was the target,” Shawn offered.

Sadie picked up a mug in each hand and took them to the table, putting them both down. Gayle wrapped her hands around a mug and hunched over it slightly, as if drawing strength from its warmth. Shawn picked his up and took a quick sip before putting it down and getting back to business. “But seriously, why leave?” Shawn said with a glint in his eye that was a little too familiar to Sadie and threatened to fan the flames of her own insatiable curiosity, which she was barely keeping under control as it was.

Shawn continued, “I mean, his manager gets whacked, and the guy makes a run for it?”

“Like you said, maybe he was scared,” Sadie offered. She pulled three plates out of the cupboard and grabbed a knife to slice the cake.

“Or maybe he had something to do with it,” Shawn said, putting Sadie’s wondering into words. “He was either running in fear or making his getaway.”

Gayle shook her head. “I can’t believe he’s guilty of anything,” she said with a sense of finality in her words. “Did you see him tonight, Sadie? He didn’t look as good up close, did he?”

Sadie thought back to what Jane had said about Thom’s alcohol problem. If it was as bad as Jane said, was he capable of making a rational decision after such a traumatic event? “No, he didn’t look good,” Sadie agreed. “But Shawn might have a point. If he was somehow involved—”