When the Grits Hit the Fan Read online

  I laughed. “I grew up across from Santa Cruz Island, in Santa Barbara. Santa Cruz is definitely the biggest island of the archipelago, and it’s gorgeous on a clear day. It’s like seeing the top of a mountain range push up from the ocean. Which I suppose it is. They’re all gorgeous—Anacapa, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, even tiny Santa Barbara Island.”

  “Sounds like you miss them. Well, thanks, miss. I appreciate the help.” He chuckled. “Thought I was only coming in for biscuits, gravy, and bacon.”

  “My pleasure. Will that be all today, guys?”

  He looked at his tablemates, who nodded. “Yes, I do believe so. It was all very tasty.”

  “I appreciate that.” I slid their ticket facedown onto the table and headed for another table. The cowbell on the door jangled and I turned my head to see Maude Stilton holding the door for her tiny mother, Jo Schultz. I’d bet Jo was all of five feet when she stood up real straight, although Maude was a good five or six inches taller.

  “Come on in, ladies,” I called, and headed that way, instead.

  Jo, the former owner of my building, handed her wool coat to Maude and sank onto the bench. “Hi, there, Robbie. How’s my store?” She smiled, further creasing her lined face. She always wore her white hair in a bun on top of her hair, giving her an even more old-fashioned look than her almost seventy years would suggest.

  “It’s good. And busy this morning, as you can see.” I gestured behind me. “I’m sorry you’ll have a short wait, Jo, but I’m glad to see you.” I greeted Maude, too. “There are two parties before you. Breakfast usually turns over pretty fast, though.”

  “Not a problem, Robbie. Glad you’re busy.” Maude, a successful local architect and Professor Stilton’s wife, didn’t look a bit old-fashioned. Barely a line showed in her face, even though she had a nearly twenty-year-old son. Every time I’d seen her, her streaked chestnut hair was freshly colored and cut in an elegant layered style that fell between her ears and her shoulders. She slid out of a stylish cardinal-red coat and hung it on the coat tree with Jo’s.

  “It’s looking real good in here,” Jo said. She might look like an older lady, but both her mind and her eyes were clear and sharp. “You done a good job with the renovations. And I’ll bet you’re glad not to be involved in any more murders.”

  “You can say that again.” I shuddered inwardly at the memory of being face-to-face with a killer right here in my store at the end of November. “It’s been nice and quiet for three months, and I’m planning on it staying that way.”

  “Say, you ever get a chance to work on the upstairs like you said you were wanting to?”

  Danna dinged the little bell indicating an order was up. I swiveled my head in her direction and caught an annoyed look. Busy like we were, I had no business chatting up a customer even if we were connected through this building.

  “Gotta run, Jo,” I told her. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I ran my tush off for the next half hour, clearing, taking orders, and serving up platters of tasty, filling breakfasts. By the time I delivered an egg white omelet with dry toast and a bowl of fruit for Maude and a half order of banana-walnut pancakes for Jo, it was almost thirty minutes later and the crush was over. Three tables were empty and four others already had their checks.

  “Whew. Sorry that took so long,” I said, setting down their food. “Can I top off your coffees?”

  “No thanks,” Jo said

  “Please,” Maude said. “I ought to take some to Ronnie. He’s out ice fishing all day. At nineteen, did he think to take a thermos of something warm to drink? No, he did not.”

  “That’s one cold way to have fun,” Jo said. “But he’s my grandson. I expect he has a mind of his own, and right that he should.”

  “I helped him take his equipment onto the lake this morning when I dropped him off. You wouldn’t catch me sitting on a bucket all day long hoping to catch a couple perch or bluegill.” Maude raised perfectly arched eyebrows and shook her head.

  “Jo, you were asking about the upstairs. I’ve been working on it this winter.” I’d done all the renovations on the downstairs myself. My mom had had a successful business as an artisan cabinetmaker in California and had taught me carpentry. When she’d died suddenly a year ago, the money I inherited from her, together with my savings from working as a chef in nearby Nashville, Indiana for the three years prior, had helped me buy the property from Jo. But I’d rather still have Mom alive. “So far I’m still in the demolition phase.”

  Maude looked worried as she glanced at her mother.

  Jo seemed to shrink into herself, but she mustered a smile. “That’s nice. I know you want to make the place into an inn.”

  “I’m sorry.” I cringed at my thoughtlessness. “That’s not very nice of me to mention the demolition. You both used to live up there. It’s just that I wanted a configuration of walls different from the previous ones.” And insulation. And modern wiring. And a myriad other improvements.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Maude said.

  Jo’s smile brightened. “I’m glad you’re going to improve it. The place got pretty run down, I admit.”

  “That striped wallpaper I put up in my room was pretty bad, as I recall,” Maude said. “But hey, I was a teenager.”

  “And you did it all yourself, don’t forget.” Jo smiled at her daughter. “You did a good job.”

  “If you need a consult on the new design, my office is right above the bank.” Maude’s mouth smiled, but not the rest of her face. “I’d be happy to take a look one of these days.” She kept smiling as she talked.

  I don’t know why it was, but people who smiled while they were talking had always struck me as insincere. “I’m finding some interesting things in the walls,” I said.

  Maude, who had a bite of omelet halfway to her mouth, halted her fork and tilted her head and eyes toward the ceiling.

  “Oh?” Jo asked. “What have you found?”

  “Some coins, a newspaper, an old cup. Things like that.”

  “Can we see them now?” Maude asked. “I was away on sabbatical with my husband last year when the store was sold. I never got to do a farewell walkthrough of the old place.” She smiled wistfully.

  Danna motioned to me as a party of eight pushed through the door.

  “I have to get back to work. I’ll bring them by for you to look at one of these days, shall I?” I asked Jo.

  “Please, dear. Please do.” She glanced at her plate. “Oh, don’t these flapjacks look yummy, Maude?”

  Maude blinked a few times, and stared at her own plate. “Absolutely, Mom. They sure do.”

  Chapter 3

  Lou and I clipped our snowshoes onto our boots at the back of her little SUV in the Crooked Lake lot off Route 135 at three-thirty that afternoon. She’d picked me up at the store twenty minutes earlier. Only one pickup truck sat in the lot, likely a late-day ice fisherman. I’d driven by in the morning on one of my days off last week and the lake had been full of guys sitting on low stools watching the flags they’d set up to indicate a nibble. Others were twisting giant augers to drill new holes or hauling up a wriggling fish. I should see if I could buy a supply of catfish or whatever they were catching for next week’s IU dinner or even for a lunch special.

  We still had three hours of light before sunset at six-thirty, and I needed to get out and stretch my legs in the fresh air. When I’d called Lou to propose an outing after the store closed, she was as eager as I was. Winter can be a long season for cyclists when ice and snow make biking outdoors a real pain.

  “You can almost taste spring,” she said with a grin. “Look how much light is in the sky.” She wore a cone-shaped purple and pink knitted hat with ear flaps along with a breathable pink jacket and stretchy black pants.

  “It’s only a month until the equinox.” I tugged my own striped knit cap down around my ears. My jacket was green but my double-layer pants were the same style as hers. “Funny how in late August this much light j
ust seems sad, like summer is over. But now? It means the snow’s going to be gone one of these days.”

  The main path down to the lake had been trampled flat by dog walkers and fishermen. I grabbed my poles. At Lou’s direction we set out to the left on the five-mile trail around the lake. I’d only been out there once in the winter. Other hikers and snowshoers had broken trail, so we weren’t floundering through two feet of white stuff. We both wore modern metal and plastic snowshoes instead of the traditional ones made of wood with the long point at the back. I didn’t see any point in not having good gear.

  “You lead the way.” I pointed with a pole. “Your legs are a lot longer than mine and I don’t want to hold you up.” I followed her as we trudged into the woods. It was a little tricky not to step on my own shoe, especially with my short legs. I had to adopt a wider stance than I normally walked with. Lou wasn’t using poles for extra balance, but I liked the extra stability they gave me. Swinging poles also added more of an upper body workout.

  “I already had one run through here this morning,” Lou said over her shoulder. “It’s a great place to exercise.”

  “You went running in the woods?” I asked.

  “Sure. Didn’t see a soul except when I did a loop on the lake.”

  “It’s so pretty in here.”

  The sun filtered through the trees and scattered sparkling light on a set of tracks that paralleled our trail for a few yards. The sharp clean air tickled my nostrils and made my lungs happy.

  “We don’t have snowy woods in California. At least not in my part of the state.”

  “Yeah, but you have the Pacific Ocean. And great wines.”

  “I’ll say.” Which I wouldn’t mind a glass of when we were done.

  “Want to sprint?” Lou flipped a grin over her shoulder, then set off running, the snowshoes fwap-ping behind her.

  “Are you kidding?” This was only my second time out on the contraptions. But hey, I didn’t have strong cyclist’s quad muscles for nothing. I gave it a try, lifting my knees and pushing off. I’d been at it for only a couple of minutes before I tripped. I yelled on the way down and nearly face planted. “Yo, Perlman,” I called.

  Lou stopped, turned around, and fwapped back to me. She extended her hand. “Here, pull yourself up.” She was clearly trying not to laugh, but a snort slipped out.

  “It’s not really that funny.” My own giggle made a liar out of me as I managed to get vertical again. I brushed the snow off my jacket and legs. Leaning on my poles, I shook the white stuff out of first one snowshoe then the other. “Okay if we walk? My legs aren’t as long as yours.”

  “Wuss.” She stood there grinning.

  “Show-off.”

  “Scaredy-cat.”

  “Jock.” I tramped around her. “I’m going to lead now.”

  “Whatever you say, Shorty.”

  As we tramped along, I spied a Pileated woodpecker through the trees and pointed out its tall black and white body and its distinctive red crest to Lou. She talked to me about her plans to attend an academic conference in Sweden in April. I told her about how glad I was the restaurant had been full all day. We continued in idle chat until we fell silent, the only sounds the noise of our footwear and the crunch of the snow underneath.

  “What was up with you and Charles Stilton last night?” I finally asked.

  “He’s unscrupulous and unfair. When I came to IU, I thought I could work with him. He’s very charming on the surface. We collaborated on some research. That is, I researched my idea and wrote it up, but I met with him once a week to talk about it. He steered me in a particular direction, and that was fine. It was a good tip. Then I saw in the department newsletter that he’s about to publish my work under his own name.” Her voice was filled with disgust. “He outright stole it.”

  “That’s terrible. Can you do anything about it?”

  “Not really. I talked to Zen, but the paper has already been accepted by a major journal, and I can’t really prove that he robbed me. What I can do about my studies is change them. I’m switching topics. I’m never working with that jerk again. My coursework is finished, so I won’t have to study with him, either.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “It’ll take me longer to get my degree now, but one good thing is that Zen is going to be my adviser.”

  “I liked her.”

  “She’s very cool,” Lou said. “I’m glad she joined the department. Our former chair recently retired about ten years after he should have.”

  “Did you know I bought my store from Charles’s mother-in-law?”

  “Really?”

  “Jo Schultz. She’s a very sweet, very sharp older lady, but she hadn’t been keeping it up at all. The place was kind of a wreck, even upstairs where she lived.”

  “It isn’t a wreck now. You’ve done a fabulous job with it.”

  I thanked her. “I’m working on the second floor, so it’s even more of a wreck, but it won’t be for long.”

  We kept going until we came to an opening with a clear path leading off the trail to the right.

  “Want to check that out?” I asked, pointing with my pole. “It might lead down to the lake. We can watch the ice fishing.”

  “Sure. That’s the direction of the lake.”

  I took a right. The snow was deeper and didn’t look like anyone else had taken the same turn. I lifted my knees and pushed down, breaking trail for Lou until my thighs and calves burned. After a minute we came to a small frozen stream with a couple of wide logs laid over it as a bridge. We crossed and trudged along as the path sloped downward, soon opening up to a clearing at the edge of the lake. The bank was only a foot high, so I figured out how to maneuver myself down. The poles came in handy. When Lou caught up, she simply jumped onto the lake.

  “Wow, what a beautiful sight.” I leaned on my poles and surveyed the expanse as a cloud blew over the sun. The lake was covered with snow, of course, but the wind had carved drifts in places and swept it clean down to the ice in others. The whole scene had a bluish tint, even the trees at the far edge. A figure sat on a red stool across the way near a clearing at lake’s edge. Behind him, I could spy the truck we’d seen in the parking lot.

  “Come on. We can work up more of a sweat on the flat,” Lou said.

  “I’m already sweating.” I unzipped my jacket halfway down and ran a finger around the neck of my sports turtleneck.

  “It’s good for you.”

  “You think it’s thick enough to walk on?” It had taken me, the coastal Californian, years to trust that it was okay to walk on water. Frozen water, but still it had made me very, very nervous the first time I walked on a solid lake three years ago. It just didn’t seem right.

  “Uh, yeah. You think ice fisherpeople would sit on it all day long if it wasn’t? The paper said it’s been ten inches thick all winter. Okay, Wimpy?” Lou didn’t wait for me to answer and set out at a fast walk. “We can get back to my car in a straight line,” she called back.

  At least she wasn’t running again. When a gust of wind chilled my chest, I zipped up again and followed. I wasn’t a wimp. I was from the Southwest.

  Lou started singing out loud, a goofy lighthearted sound. Smiling, I caught up and walked next to her, but I couldn’t quite match her energetic pace. We were about a third of the way across when I spied a dark hole in the snow ahead. As we drew nearer, I saw that footsteps led away from the hole in the direction of the guy on the stool.

  “Seems far out on the lake to be drilling a fishing hole,” I said.

  “Avoiding the competition, I’d guess.” She detoured around it and kept going.

  I paused at the hole. It was a couple of feet across, and the water on top had iced over again. I leaned over and peered in. It seemed odd, with all this cold, that happy fish were still swimming around down there, carrying on their simple lives as if it was June or October. Maybe I could spot one. I saw something move and squatted to get a better look.

  I s
tared at something and scooted a little closer. What the heck kind of fish was that? I was curious but didn’t want to get too close to the edge. A gust of wind blew snow over the opening and up into my face. I wiped my face clean, then used my gloved hand to wipe off the thin layer of snow covering the ice.

  I fell back on my rear. No fish was that brightly colored green. I grew cold, not from the wind but from dread. No fish on earth sported a tidy black goatee.

  Chapter 4

  “Lou,” I called to her, but my voice came out no more than a croak. I tried again. “Lou! Come here. Hurry.” I stood and waved with my pole. Not that hurrying was going to help Charles Stilton. Not anymore.

  She turned around and joined me. “See a crappie in there, or a bass? We can have fish for dinner.” Her tone was still joking.

  “Look.” I pointed to the hole. It was if the world had frozen, too. I heard no sound, no rustle of branches, no thudding of my own heart.

  Lou spied Charles’s head. Her gasp was loud. The color went out of her face. She shifted her focus to me and stared, eyes wide. “That’s Charles,” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”

  I nodded mutely. “What do we do now?” I whispered, too.

  She swore and took another look down. “He’s beyond help, right?”

  I dropped my poles and retrieved my phone. I grabbed the fingers of one glove with my teeth to pull it off. “As far as I can tell.” I snapped a couple of pictures, making sure to hold on tight to my phone so it didn’t join Charles down there.

  “What are you doing?” Lou’s voice sounded panicked.

  “I want to be able to send a picture to the police.” I pressed 911, but all I got were a series of beeps. I examined it and let out a curse of my own. “No bars. No reception out here. We have get somewhere where we can call the police.”

  “Do we just leave him here? What if he floats away underneath the ice?”

  “We can’t do anything about that. Or”—I stashed my phone in my pocket and slid my glove back on—“I guess I could break the coating of ice with my pole and snag his shirt or something.” The thought made me shudder. “No. He hasn’t floated away yet. Maybe part of him is frozen to the top.” I caught sight of the fisherman across the lake. “Hey!” I yelled, waving my arms.