Uncommon Grounds (3 page)

And if that weren’t proof enough it was working properly, the next day we spent the morning practicing our frothing and tamping, brewing and pouring ad nauseam at Patricia’s insistence. Consistency was paramount, she had declared in her dulcet tones. After four hours of this drill, I was ready to strangle her. Electrocution had never entered my mind, honest.

Frank abruptly raised his head a half inch off my foot, listening. I listened, too. Sure enough, a car door slammed in the driveway. I struggled to pull my feet out from under Frank who, having done his part, had gone back to sleep.

By the time I managed to get up, the doorbell was ringing. I moved the curtains and saw Gary standing on the front stoop. Most houses in Brookhills don’t have stoops. They have porches, or decks, or even verandas. Mine’s a stoop.

I turned the deadbolt and let Gary in. The living room, already overcrowded with tax papers, sheepdog and furniture purchased for a much bigger—less blue—space, suddenly made me claustrophobic.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” I suggested. “I’ll make us some coffee.” A day without caffeine, after all, is like a day without...well, caffeine.

Gary sat down at the kitchen table and pulled a notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Maggy, I’m afraid I have to ask you some questions. Is Caron here?”

I turned from the cupboard, coffee grinder in hand. “She wasn’t feeling well, so I took her home.” I put the grinder down. “What did the medical examiner say?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Exactly what I thought he’d say. Cardiac arrest.”

“From what?”

He pushed back from the table, crossing his left foot over his right knee. “Electrocution, apparently, though we’ll know for sure after the autopsy. I think the current either stopped her heart outright or put it into fibrillation. Either way, with no one there to pull her away from the machine or to force her heart into a normal rhythm, she died.”

With no one there...

Maybe if I had arrived on time, Patricia would still be alive. “How long had she been there, do you think?”

“At least a half hour. Probably longer. Her pupils were dilated and non-reactive.”

I was thinking about the half hour I’d been late. The half hour Patricia had probably been dead.

Gary read my face. “Don’t hit yourself over the head with it, Maggy. You likely couldn’t have done anything, even if you had found her earlier. Or you could have been electrocuted yourself. She was probably frozen to—” He stopped when he saw my face.

“The espresso machine,” I finished for him. “But how could that happen?”

He shook his head and picked up the notebook and pen. “You tell me. When did you get it?”

I explained about the installation on Thursday and the practice sessions on Friday. Gary took notes.

“Could it have been an electrical surge or something?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The whole machine was still live when we got there. When I saw Patricia’s hand, and the scorch mark on the sink, I suspected electrocution immediately. That’s why I wouldn’t let you touch it.”

I didn’t know what to say. Gary shifted in his chair. “Anyway, they threw the breaker and are getting ready to take apart the machine. Do you have a schematic? It would give them something to work from.”

“There’s one in the office.”

“Good.” He flipped to a fresh page of the notebook. “Now tell me about this morning.”

I gave up on the coffee and sat down at the table across from him. “I was running late. My alarm went off at five-thirty, instead of five. We were supposed to be at the store by five-thirty so we would have plenty of time to brew coffee and set up before we opened at six-thirty. If I had been there—”

Gary gave me a stern look. “Don’t start that again. Maybe this was meant to be. Maybe you were meant to oversleep, because it wasn’t your time. Now, when did you actually arrive?”

But it was Patricia’s time? I answered Gary’s question. “It was almost six. I ran in and—”

“Was the door locked?”

I shook my head. “Caron or Patricia must have left it unlocked when they came in.”

“So Caron was already there?”

I nodded. “She still had her coat on and was staring at Patricia on the floor. I started CPR, and Caron called 911.”

“Is that it?” Gary asked, flipping his notebook closed and starting to stand up.

I nodded, surprised at his abruptness. “Do you want me to come back with you and find the schematic?”

“I have to talk to Caron, then stop at the station.” He hesitated. “Actually, maybe you could go to the store and dig out the schematic in the meantime.”

He got all the way to the door before he turned around. “One thing you should know, though. When the county medical examiner got the call, he saw who the victim was and called Jake Pavlik, the new county sheriff. The Harpers are important people, and the bureaucrats don’t want anything to...slip through the cracks.” He seemed to be quoting.

“Slip through the cracks?” I got angry, since Gary was too well-mannered to do it for himself. I like to think of myself as an advocate for those less bitchy. “You’ve protected presidents, for God’s sake.”

Gary shook his head. “Nobody cares about what I did ten years ago. To them I’m just a retired security guard turned small-town cop.”

He was heading for the door. “Anyway, like it or not, Pavlik is at Uncommon Grounds now, and he’s in charge. And Maggy, tread carefully. I hear he can be a real prick.” He closed the door softly behind him.

Chapter Three

I wasn’t all that anxious to get back to Uncommon Grounds, but I couldn’t stay holed up in the blue room all day either. Besides, I needed to know what was going on. I filled Frank’s food and water bowls, handed him a pig’s ear, gathered up the tax papers to drop off with Mary later and headed out to the van.

Gary’s last words were still echoing in my head. Gary Donovan calling somebody a prick, of all things, was totally out of character. It would be like your mom saying it. Gary had been an Eagle Scout, for God’s sake. Or still was. I think that’s like being an alcoholic, you never completely recover. In the ten years I’d known him, I’d never heard Gary curse. Not once. Pavlik had really gotten to him.

So Pavlik must have been the mysterious dark-haired man with the medical examiner. I hadn’t paid much attention to the election, but I knew he’d replaced our former sheriff, an obese man who had died of a heart attack at his desk.

If memory served, the new sheriff in town had been some sort of hotshot in Chicago. His “Take Action” campaign slogan had struck a chord with an electorate who had watched their last sheriff do little but slowly eat himself to death. Pavlik pledged to take an active role in law enforcement in the community. I guessed this was it.

Poor Gary, he didn’t need this. He had paid his dues, going from the Milwaukee PD to ATF, and then on to Secret Service. When he had retired from the government at fifty, Gary took over the security at First National, bringing the albatross of a financial organization into the modern world, security-wise. He irritated the execs by making sure they didn’t travel together and endeared himself to me by taking over the security and risk management aspects of two very large events First National sponsored and I managed.

Gary was an enabler in the best sense of the word. For example, when there was a sexual assault in the bank’s parking structure, he not only provided security escorts, but also taught self-defense classes so women could feel confident about protecting themselves. Gary figured his job was teaching people not to need him.

Which might explain why, four years ago, First National had downsized him. That and the fact that the bank had been robbed of nearly four million dollars a few months earlier.

I’d always suspected that Gary had taken the robbery “on my watch,” as he put it, harder than he had the downsizing. But at the time, he’d sworn he was itching to get back into real police work anyway and didn’t mind having a nice severance package from First National to finance his search. Not that it had been much of a search. Gary was a Brookhills native and the town had jumped at the chance to bring him in as police chief.

Speaking of the police, as I turned into our parking lot, I saw they had cordoned off the sidewalk in front of the store. At first glance, business around Uncommon Grounds seemed to go on as usual. Until you noticed no one was moving. At the corner, the patrons at Rudy’s barbershop looked like they had planted themselves there till the next haircut. Next door, dental patients appeared to be lining up for extractions.

I walked up to the door of my own store and knocked on it.

Inside, I could see a group of suits. One of them moved away from the group and peered through the window. It was Pavlik.

He opened the door. “Yes?”

I had started in, but stopped. I had to, he was blocking the door. “This is my store,” I said. “I’m—”

His eyes—yep, dirty gray Chevy—narrowed. “This,” he said, “is a sheriff’s investigation of a potential crime scene.”

Gary’s description of Pavlik was proving apt. “Fine. Chief Donovan asked me to give you the schematic for the espresso machine.” I stepped back and started to turn away. “But if you’d prefer to find it yourself...”

He held up a booklet. “I already have. You might as well come in, though. I have some questions for you, Mrs....”He let it hang.

God help me, I wanted to stick out my tongue like a five-year-old and say, “You tell me, if you’re so smart.” The idea of him going through our cabinets to find the schematic, which had been in the back of the bottom drawer, next to the box of emergency Tampons, really ticked me off.

I behaved myself, though. “Thorsen, Maggy Thorsen. And it’s Ms.” I automatically asserted my pending independence and then, just as automatically, felt silly. I stuck out my hand to hide my confusion.

He ignored it and stepped back. “Please come in, Ms. Thorsen, and take a seat. I’ll be with you as soon as I’m free.”

I sat down to wait. Pavlik returned to the group that was still conferring near the condiment cart, and I turned my attention to the spot where we had found Patricia barely three hours ago.

Her body was gone, evidently having been photographed, poked and prodded sufficiently. The scorch mark remained on the counter just to the left of the sink, along with the puddle of milk on the floor. The pitcher sat on the counter, encased in a giant plastic bag, the gallon of vitamin D milk next to it and Patricia’s latte mug next to that. All nice and neat. Patricia would have approved.

Pavlik was finishing up and the group dispersing. A young man who looked like he was wearing his father’s suit took the schematic from the sheriff and went over to the espresso machine. A gray-haired woman with a camera and a man who looked like a present-day Ichabod Crane started out the door.

Pavlik called to one of them. “Steve, hang on a second.” Ichabod stopped at the door. Pavlik pointed to me. “Get her fingerprints before you leave.”

I really hate being called “her”—a carryover from my relationship with Ted’s mother, who called me “her,” “she,” “your wife” or “your mother,” depending on whom she was addressing. And all with me in the room.

Steve loped over and fingerprinted me, politely asking my name and recording it before he repacked his case and left.

Now I read mysteries, I watch TV, I know the police needed my fingerprints to eliminate mine, which belonged there, from others that didn’t. It still irritated me. By the time Pavlik finally deigned to speak to me, I was primed:

“I don’t know how you treat people in Chicago, but here you’ll get a whole lot further with a little common courtesy.”

Pavlik raised one black eyebrow at me. “I apologize.” He pulled out the chair across the table from me and sat down, flipping open his notebook. “Now, Donovan said there are three partners: Mrs. Harper, you, and...” He checked his notes. “Caron Egan.”

He glanced up, his eyes suddenly looking steely blue instead of dirty gray. Weird. “Ms. Egan was with you when you found the body?”

“Yes, Caron was with me.” She was there before I found the body, too; but if he wanted specifics, he could ask for them.

“Uh-huh. Tell me about the partnership.” This time I raised my eyebrows at him. He shifted in his chair. “In other words, how is it set up? If one partner dies, for example, what happens to her share of the business?”

I felt like I had stumbled into a bad movie. “Her interest would go to her next of kin. The remaining partners retain the option to buy that person out at a market value to be determined by an independent audit,” I said parroting the partnership agreement. “But since we rent the space and haven’t opened yet, we have no market share and no name recognition. The only thing we do have is the equipment, which is worth considerably less today than when we bought it two weeks ago.”

Pavlik moved on. “Mrs. Harper evidently was here very early. Her husband says he was still asleep when she left home. Do you know what time she was planning to arrive?”

“We all wanted to be in early since this was our grand opening. Five-thirty, latest, so we could be ready to open at six-thirty.”

He just nodded.

“I was late,” I admitted for the second time that day, “and got here around six. I’m not sure what time Patricia came in, but it was likely before five-thirty.”

Pavlik raised the other eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

I swallowed. “Patricia is—was—very precise. That’s why she handled the books and the scheduling.”

“Do you have other employees?”

“No, we’re covering all the hours ourselves, at least for now. Patricia mapped it out so two of us work each day. One is the set-up person and starts at five-thirty. The other comes in just before we open at six-thirty, and stays to close. Patricia was supposed to do set-up today and Friday. Caron has Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I have Wednesdays and Saturdays. Each of us has every third day completely off.”

Pavlik looked bored.

Not that I cared. “Anyway, my point is that Patricia was the kind of person who wouldn’t have wandered in at five-thirty today. I’m sure she came in early to make sure everything was exactly the way she wanted it.”