The Big Chili Page 7

  I sighed and pulled back into traffic.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  October 28 was a cold day—so cold that I had to put on a coat and mittens before I bundled Mick and my covered dish into the car and drove them to the home of Maura and Mike Sullivan. Maura and Mike were leaders of a Boy Scout troop—a job they’d been corralled into when their son Tommy joined—and they almost always felt overwhelmed. Today they were having some troop leaders over for breakfast, and they wanted to appear calm and in control. Or so Maura had told me once in the grocery store, where we had bonded over a surprising sale on chocolate chips.

  I came across my secret clients in a variety of ways, and most of them, after hiring me once, tended to hire me again. This was the fourth meal I’d made for Maura and Mike. It was a lovely breakfast casserole based on quiche Lorraine, but with a few additions of my own, including blue cheese dressing. All they had to do was bake it for thirty minutes, and voilà—they’d have something fragrant and delicious.

  The song in my head was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Of the many covers of that song, I favored the one by Suzy Bogguss and Delbert McClinton, and it was their version that I hummed as I pulled into the Sullivan driveway on Crisp Street. Maura came running out, wearing her Troop 17 bandanna over a gray fleece jacket that matched her gray pixie haircut. The dish was concealed in a cardboard box, which I handed to her. “Here are those brochures you ordered, Maura.”

  She winked at me. “You’re a lifesaver. Here—I’ll toss the money on your front seat with your doggie. Now let me take that heavy box from you.”

  We made the exchange, and then Mike ran out to take it from Maura. “Thanks, Lilah,” he called over his shoulder as he marched back in.

  Maura stayed for a moment. “Cold, isn’t it? But I love it. This is my weather, I’ll tell you.”

  “Yeah—I do like fall,” I agreed.

  Suddenly Maura looked slightly conspiratorial. “You’re a parishioner at St. Bart’s, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So—do you know anything about Alice Dixon? Did you hear what happened to her?”

  There was no escaping the name Alice Dixon in this town. “I was actually there when it happened.”

  “Oh my God!” Maura’s face was a mixture of horror and curiosity. “What did it look like? I mean, did she just drop dead, or did she say she’d been poisoned?”

  “How did you know she was poisoned?”

  She pointed behind her. “In the paper. There’s a whole big story about it. The headline says ‘Poisoned in the Parish.’”

  “Oh geez.”

  “Yeah. But the article itself is well written, and kind of interesting. They say the police are pursuing leads.”

  “I guess they are. There were quite a few uniforms swarming around that night.”

  “Did they make you all stay in one room, like they do in the movies?”

  “For a while. Then we all got to leave, after they had our information. How do you know Alice?”

  Maura sighed. “She was our neighbor. That’s her house.” She pointed to a blue Cape Cod a couple of doors down—well kept but rather prim and Puritan-looking, unadorned by any decorative plants or pumpkins or wreaths. Prim and Puritan—two words that described the personality of Alice Dixon herself.

  “Oh—well, it must have been unnerving to everyone on this block.”

  “Yeah. And now her husband has to figure out what to do with the house. It was hers, but she left it to him in the will, I’ve heard.”

  “Ah.” That would certainly give Hank some capital to pay for the super-expensive house his wife-to-be wanted. “Well, I’d better get going, Maura. Just text or call if you need something again.”

  “You know I will—you’re a treasure,” she said, giving me a quick hug. “You take care, now. Brrr, it’s cold.”

  She ran back into her house, and I got into my car, at which point I called Pet. Harmonia answered after the third ring—I knew it was her, because she had the most musical voice, and she made my name sound like a song she was singing. More than apropos, considering her name. “Oh, hello, Lilah. Yes, Pet’s here. Hang on.”

  A clunk of the phone—the number was for their landline—and then Pet’s voice. “Hi, Lilah. What can I do for you?”

  I wasn’t supposed to call Pet at home because of her intense secrecy about the covered dishes. I had asked her once how she fooled her sisters into believing the food was all hers, and she said that she told them she made it in the rectory kitchen, where there was more room, and that she always left samples for Father, so that he would have something to eat when helpful parishioners weren’t around. This was an effective lie, because Pet spent a lot of time at the rectory: cleaning it, helping sort the mail, and doing any other odd jobs with which Father needed assistance.

  “Listen, you don’t have to say anything out loud, but I’m wondering if you know when I’ll get my Crock-Pot back. That’s the biggest one I have, and I need it for other jobs.”

  “That’s a good point, Lilah. I see what you’re saying,” Pet said in a loud fake voice. “Let me think about it and text you if I have an idea.”

  I sighed and thanked her, then hung up. I rolled my eyes at Mick, and he nodded. I started my car and pulled out of the Sullivans’ driveway, sparing one last glance for Alice Dixon’s empty house. Then I screamed, because a face appeared in an upper window and scared the life out of me. The face resolved itself into the familiar countenance of Hank Dixon, who was frowning. I realized that Hank had gone through several of the top stressors in the last couple of years: divorce, a new relationship, moving, and death. That was one downer of a combination, I thought as I contemplated his long, sad face. He didn’t see me, so I didn’t bother to wave.

  This day was getting a little too Halloween-y for me. My phone buzzed; I saw my mother’s number on the screen. I clicked it on. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hey, daughter. Just to let you know we won’t need you at the office today. Mrs. Andrews is doing the filing and Dad has someone coming in to do the floors.”

  This was good news, except that I wouldn’t get paid for my normal half-day hours. Still, I preferred freedom to the real estate office. “Okay, that’s cool,” I said, although I did think that I was better at the job than was Mrs. Andrews, who had worked in the place since about 1950 and wore her stark white hair piled high on her head like a giant ice cream sundae. She tended to dislike modern technology, which is why she still filed everything the old-fashioned way—in paper files and a file cabinet—while I made PDFs and preserved everything in Google Docs. I supposed that in the case of a solar flare or a zombie takeover, we would be glad that Mrs. Andrews had kept all of her 1950s files intact, labeled with such whimsical headings as Client Filofax Info and Meeting Memorandums. Working with Celia Andrews was like taking a vintage bicycle ride back in time. “I’ll make new plans—thanks for letting me know, Mom. I have to go now because I’m driving.”

  “Sure, honey. See you soon!”

  I hung up, but my phone buzzed again, so I pulled over under a maple tree farther down the block and looked at the screen while Mick studied the rustling leaves with his philosopher’s face. It was a text from Pet:

  Lla, Trxi sd sh wd lnd me th chrch pot in the bsmnt ktcn. You cd gt it instd nd sy its fr me.

  Since I was used to Pet’s annoying texts, I was able to translate this to mean that there was a big Crock-Pot in the church basement kitchen, and Trixie, who was sort of in charge down there, said that Pet could borrow it until hers was replaced. I could claim it instead, and if anyone stopped me, I would say I was bringing it to Pet as a favor.

  This was a workable plan. I certainly didn’t want to ask the police when that Crock-Pot was coming back. “Mick, we’re headed to the church,” I said, and Mick agreed.

  On the way there I stopped at McDonald’s (I’m normally against fast
food, but we all have cravings that go beyond logic) and picked up two Egg McMuffins. One went to my companion, who snarfed it up only slightly faster than Jay Parker had eaten his Mexican casserole. This made me smile to myself.

  After we ate, I headed to the church lot. I hadn’t been back here since Alice Dixon died, and I felt a little weird about it. I went to Mick’s side of the car and he leaped out. I grabbed his leash and said, “You’re my protector today.”

  We walked across the lot and down the steps that led to the basement entrance. A police officer met me at the door. “Hello—can I help you?”

  “Oh—I was supposed to pick something up from Trixie’s kitchen in there. Uh—is it open to parishioners again, or—”

  Then I heard the loud, loud voice of Trixie Frith herself, a woman who I was convinced must be deaf because she said everything about five decibels above what her listeners could endure. “It’s okay, Li! You can come on back. The cops are here, but they said it’s okay for me to clean back here.”

  I nodded at the female officer, who wore a no-nonsense short brown haircut and an even-less-nonsense expression. “Thanks,” I said. I let go of Mick’s leash so that he could pad around the cement and act important. He immediately went to the cop, and she started petting him with a significantly softer mien. Then I darted to the back of the hall, where Trixie was scrubbing the kitchen floor.

  “Hi, Trixie,” I said. She looked up at me, her shaggy blonde hair glinting with silver strands. She wore a bright coral lipstick that was a bit overwhelming for daytime use (and for scrubbing a floor). She was a friendly person, though, and I had always gotten along with her. “Is this okay to do? I mean, aren’t you—like—scrubbing away evidence?”

  “They said they got all the evidence they needed. Cleared us to come back in just this morning.” She sat back and took a breath; her face was perspiring from the effort of scouring. I was amazed by how much energy the women of this church were willing to expend just on cleaning things. I had never seen a man scrubbing a floor at St. Bart’s—or anywhere.

  “What brings you here, sweetheart?” Trixie boomed.

  Trixie was about sixty years old and clearly remembered my toddler years; therefore, like many of the older parishioners, she persisted in talking to me as though I were a little girl.

  “Well, I was helping out Pet, and she doesn’t know when she’ll get her big chili pot back—”

  I watched Trixie take a big breath—she actually needed to pull air up from her lungs to get the kind of volume she wanted—before she bellowed at me. “Oh, right! I told her she could use the church Crock-Pot. Pet is usually the one who provides Crock-Pot meals, anyway. So she can borrow it as long as she wants—just sign it out on our little list, there, so we can see where things wander off to.”

  I went to the cabinet below the big silver sink. Some of the church stuff was hand-me-down junk, so I was happily surprised to see the Crock-Pot—it was indeed big and rectangular, and almost new. It was a Breville seven-quart slow-cooker with nonstick quantanium coating and a removable cooking well. “Oooh,” I said.

  Trixie yelled her approval. “Yeah, Pet will love it. I’ve told her she could just make her chili here, save her the trouble of moving it, but you know Pet! Everything’s a secret about how she makes it. She’s priceless!”

  I pretended to be scratching my ear, but I was actually plugging the one closest to Trixie. If I were a good person I would take her to a doctor and get her a hearing exam. Instead I pulled out the box that held the pot and read about its features on the back panel.

  Just then a new head peeked around the kitchen door. “Hey, Trix! No rest for the wicked, right?” It was Theresa Scardini, Trixie’s best friend and constant companion. My mother always joked that Trixie’s husband thanked God for Theresa every day, because a person could only take Trixie in small doses—even someone who had gone and married her. Theresa was divorced, so the two of them had plenty of time to spend hanging out, and often they did it at church events, or in the church itself. They were part of what my father called the CAV, or “constantly available volunteers.”

  Theresa came all the way in. She was a tiny woman who got tinier every year. My mother remembered a time when Theresa was about five foot five, but now she was closer to four eleven. She shopped in the girls’ section at Kohl’s and wore fashionable clothes, but I feared that at the rate she was shrinking she might be microscopic by the decade’s end.

  “That’s a gorgeous top, T,” Trixie boomed.

  “Thanks. It was on the sale rack. You can get some great stuff there, and so. Ya know.” Theresa dragged out this last word. She tended to tag lots of unnecessaries to the end of her sentences. “What are you up to, Trix? And what brings you here, pretty Lilah?”

  “She’s getting the Crock-Pot for Pet!”

  “Oh, okay.”

  There was a lull in the limited conversation, and I signed my name on the borrowed-item list and hoisted the box up. “Well, thanks, ladies. Pet will really appreciate this.”

  Theresa nodded. “Yeah, ’cause we’ve got the ladies’ social coming up Friday, and I know they want Pet to make something. They all want her to go for the chili, to get right back on the horse, ya know. They’re afraid she’ll never make it again because of what happened, and the ladies don’t want that. Pet is such a good cook, and so. Ya know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s nice of the ladies to show encouragement. Have they told Pet they wanted her to make the chili for this Friday? Because I think she needs time to shop and prepare.” And some of us have plans this weekend.

  “Oh, I’m not sure. They’ll probably call her today, ya know.”

  I paused for a moment, looking at the women who had spent so much time in this kitchen and who had been right in the thick of things on Saturday night. “What do you guys think happened?”

  They exchanged what seemed, to my imagination, like a secretive glance. “Obviously someone got to the chili,” Trixie said in a normal voice. She probably thought she was whispering. “But it’s hard to track down. I mean, there were upward of twelve women in here, and a few men, and people were lifting pot lids all over the place, sniffing and admiring. We always do that. So . . .” Trixie leaned in, and I winced. “So it seems to T and me like whoever did it knew exactly what would happen. They would kill Alice Dixon, and in the process try to implicate Pet. That’s what we think.”

  “But Pet hasn’t been implicated. It seems like she’s the one person people don’t suspect, because it would be too obvious for her to do it to her own food. So could this person have had some other intention?”

  Theresa sniffed, as though she were smelling the idea. Then she said, “Weeeeelllllll . . . I think that’s a good point. Maybe someone just hated Alice Dixon, and they wanted her dead, and Pet’s chili was just an easy way to make that happen.” She lifted an arm full of jingly bracelets and scratched her cheek.

  “Well, if they’re looking for someone who hated Alice, they’ll have to start making a list. God bless her soul,” Trixie boomed.

  I set the box down. “Who hated Alice Dixon?”

  Trixie and Theresa exchanged another glance. “Well, start with her ex-husband. God knows he had good reason, but he was pretty fed up with that woman. Then his little girl toy, Pammy.”

  “Tammy.”

  “Right. You can probably put Pet on the list, because Alice was always kind of witchy to her. Heck, you can put me and Ang on the list, too. We got into it with her all the time.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, just her constant power plays. She was always making rules and saying it was church policy, except it wasn’t. It was just Alice policy. She was a control-a-holic. We’d go to Father Schmidt and say we didn’t know about such-and-such new rule, and he’d tell us there wasn’t one, and then he’d go and have a word with Alice. But a week or two later she’d be doing i
t again, making that little tight-mouthed face of hers.”

  Trixie imitated her and did, to her credit, look remarkably like Alice Dixon when she was in judgmental mode.

  Theresa laughed, then covered her mouth. “Sorry. That was just so funny, Trix. But you should also add Barb and Mel Hadley. They got into it with Alice all the time about the way she ran bingo night. They’re kind of insane.”

  I couldn’t disagree with that, either.

  “And then there’re those neighbors of hers. The Sullivans.”

  This surprised me. I pictured Alice’s stern blue house. “Why didn’t the Sullivans like her?”

  “I guess she was always calling the cops on them. They would have Scout events sometimes in their yard—they have that nice big backyard, ya know—and Alice didn’t like noise or kids. She said a neighborhood should be silent. That’s what Maura Sullivan told me.”

  I remembered Maura’s face when she asked me about Alice Dixon’s death. She hadn’t looked very sorry. In fact, she had almost looked cheerful.

  I picked the pot back up. “I can’t even believe that one of those people is responsible. I keep thinking it must have been an accident. I can’t accommodate the idea that someone in our community intentionally committed murder.”

  Trixie shrugged. “I knew a murderer once. A lady in my knitting group. She killed her husband because he was cheating on her. She was just a kid at the time. She served twenty-five years, and then she came to live here in Pine Haven. I asked her once if she was sorry she did it, and she said no.” Trixie plunged her cloth back into the soapy water and started scrubbing again.

  Theresa, far from looking scandalized, chimed in. “I knew a murderer, too. Tony Portillo, from our neighborhood. He killed his dad, remember I told you, Trix? Shot him in the chest. He was such a nice boy,” she finished on a disturbing non sequitur.

  “Then why did he kill his dad?” I asked, shocked.

  “Oh, they were fighting. You know how it is.”

  But I didn’t. Was it true that murderers just walked among us, sitting in knitting groups and being nice boys? “What happened to him?” I asked.