Milkshakes and Murder Read online

  Milkshakes and Murder

  Christy Murphy

  Edited by

  Robb Fulcher

  Copyright © 2017-b by Christy Murphy

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For my family

  David, Edie, Mom, Dad, David, Diana, Darwin, Ana, Anthony and Jason

  Contents

  1. Shakes and Surprises

  2. Diapers and Detectives

  3. Betrayal and Burritos

  4. Rumors and Reconciliation

  5. Meatloaf and Mayhem

  6. Leads and Lunch

  7. Mining and Motives

  8. Coffee and Confrontation

  9. Howls and Hiking

  10. Hot Chocolate and Hot Water

  11. Time and Treasure

  12. Fast Food and Friends

  13. Diners and Disaster

  14. Mom and Me

  15. A Note from the Author (and her mom)

  Also by Christy Murphy

  Shakes and Surprises

  I stood behind the tall bamboo tree next to the hostess stand, hiding from two things I dreaded most in life—conflict and cameras. I peeped through an opening in the long, thin leaves of the potted tree and watched Mom and Wenling take turns posing for photos. Fletcher Weekly, our town paper, was preparing for its annual "Best of" edition. Mom had entered for "Best Milkshake" and Wenling for "Best Egg Roll."

  Al from the Fletcher Diner stood just inside the doorway not far from me. I'd hoped he'd leave after Chef Li threw him out of the kitchen. But like accidental toot in small room, Al lingered to make a stink.

  The bell above the door clanged. Brent Cryer, and Todd Fletcher, the owner and editor of Fletcher Weekly, squeezed by Al to come inside. The lunch crowd stopped eating to watch them.

  Most of the town regulars knew Brent was the "judge" for this year's "Best of." For the few who didn't, the portly man had donned a loose-fitting baseball hat with a paper sign reading "judge" safety pinned to the front. A display of authority that I didn't find at all authoritative.

  Brent staggered into the dining area swaying, as if he were judging the best cocktails in Fletcher Canyon. For the record, the nearest drinking establishment was a dive bar called The Watering Hole in the city adjacent to ours.

  In addition to his portliness, Brent Cryer came equipped with a large nose, a triple chin, and one of those thin, muppet-like mouths that seemed to have no lips. His face looked perpetually sunburned, but his coloring probably had more to do with his high blood pressure than any kind of enthusiasm for the outdoors.

  "I object to this, Todd. She's not even a restaurant owner," Al yelled from the doorway, his arms folded.

  "Your objection is noted, Al. But she's already won several times. We can't eliminate Jo now," Todd said.

  Al scowled. The reality of our small town is that each item or service listed in the "Best of" edition was the only place where you could get said item or service, that is until Mom's submission for "Best Milkshake." Fletcher Diner, Al’s restaurant, served milkshakes.

  Judge Brent plunked down at the table with the milkshake and the egg roll. "I'll start with the main course," he said and grabbed at the egg roll like a cross-eyed toddler. It took two tries before he got it into his meaty hands.

  "Are you all right?" Todd asked.

  "Forgot to bring my glasses," the judge said as he took a bite out of the egg roll, swallowed, and finished the rest of the roll in two large chomps. He looked around and grabbed a glass of water off a neighboring table to drink. The glass wasn't even a fresh one. It was obviously half empty.

  "Hot," the judge said.

  "Well?" Wenling asked about her entry.

  "Results appear in the paper," Brent said.

  Wenling rolled her eyes. She'd won for "Best Egg Roll" for the last twelve years, aka since the first "Best of" edition of the Fletcher Weekly.

  "And now for the much protested milkshake," Brent announced.

  I could almost hear Al's teeth gnashing as the judge reached for the glass.

  It took a while for his mouth to find the straw, but once the portly man locked around it, he sucked half the milkshake down in a matter of seconds.

  Mom's expression showed she was pleased with his rapid consumption of her entry. She thought it boded well for her chances.

  "What kind of milkshake was that?" Judge Brent asked.

  "Strawberry," Mom answered, which given the color, taste, and the actual slice of strawberry garnish should have been obvious.

  He nodded, but his face looked confused.

  "Are you sure you're okay, buddy?" Todd asked.

  "Must be an ice cream headache," the judge slurred. Everyone including Todd and Mom traded confused expressions.

  "Ice cream headache," I translated. I guess spending the better part of the last ten years around drunk people at music venues, gave me special insight into slurred speech.

  Everyone nodded, but the vibe in the restaurant was one of concern for Brent. The judge mumbled something else unintelligible, got up, and swayed his way to the door.

  Todd followed, grabbing the man's arm to steady him as he made his way toward the door. "Let's get you home."

  Al's face turned red. "He's supposed to taste my chili next!"

  "I don't think–" Todd started, but Brent buckled over at the waist and interrupted Todd's thought. "Open the door. He’s gonna blow!" Todd said to Al.

  Al stepped out of the way and pushed opened the door, but he wasn't fast enough. And not to be too graphic about it, I'll just say Brent became ill all over the door-the glass door.

  "I don’t think you’re going to win for Best Milkshake," Al said as Brent staggered out the door.

  "Maybe it wasn’t the milkshake," said a member of the lunch crowd. "It could have been the egg roll."

  People stopped eating and stared out the window.

  "Or it could be that he came in drunk," Mom said. Everyone turned to look at Mom. "He was staggering around before he even sat down."

  People nodded, but turned their attention back to Todd, Al, and Brent on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. It looked like a bad Jerry Lewis movie out there. Todd and Al tried to help Brent stand up, but Brent kept wriggling out of their grasp and tripping on his own feet.

  The oddball floor show lightened the mood in the restaurant for a moment or two.

  But the atmosphere of amusement crashed when Brent hurled on the sidewalk, slipped on the mess, and slammed his baseball-capped skull onto the sidewalk. Most of the restaurant ran to the door to check on Brent, but I did what I always did. I dialed 911. Brent died the next day. The entire town became convinced that it was The Lucky Dragon’s egg roll, Mom’s milkshake, or a combination of both that killed him.

  Now it's obvious where the milkshake part of this case comes in, but what about the murder? The man fell, after all. Well that takes a little explaining. This is where we travel back in time to a week and a half earlier.

  Cue the harps and insert dreamy flashback music here…

  I grabbed a second cup of half-caff coffee from the pot on the kitchen counter. Mom popped her head into the freezer for the tenth time. "You want to taste it anyway?"

  "It’s a little early for ice cream." It was half past ten in the morning. We'd been up late the night before baking almond cookies and desserts at The Lucky Dragon Restaurant.

  I'd recently moved back home to help Mom with her catering business. Her best friend, Wenling, owned The Lucky Dragon. We baked for her every week in
exchange for the use of her commercial kitchen for our catering business. And we hung out there most afternoons.

  Mom closed the freezer and said in a disappointed voice, "Oh, okay."

  "I’ll have it when it hardens," I said trying to cheer her up, but also with full knowledge that no previous batch had ever completely hardened.

  Mom smiled. Her confidence and optimism never wavered on anything, especially not things in the kitchen.

  Mom's ice cream problem, in my opinion, rested with her purchase from her favorite shopping channel host, Kurt the Kitchen King. The Super Cold Creamer was allegedly an "ice cream maker and so much more." Except so far it just made thick sort of iced pudding that Mom had made me "taste anyway" for a week. I love to eat, especially things that fall into the category of dessert, but all of this odd dairy had taken an unpleasant, lactose-y toll on my digestive tract.

  Mom cell phone dinged with a text.

  "What's up?" I asked Mom.

  "Wenling wants me to submit her for Best Egg Roll at the city council meeting this afternoon."

  I nodded and pretended I hadn't forgotten about the meeting. In my defense, I hadn't finished my second half-caff coffee yet. I drink about eight coffees and a half dozen diet sodas a day. I had to switch to half-caff coffee, because that amount of the fully caffeinated stuff made my hands shake and my left eye twitch.

  "So what are you going to submit this year, Mom?" I asked, expecting her to say one of her cakes or cookies. She usually won for best cake or cookie.

  "I might make something different this time."

  Later, I found out what Mom was going to make–trouble in the form of a strawberry milkshake.

  The scarcity of street parking told me most of the people had already arrived.

  "I like it better when we meet at Margaret's house," Mom said. Margaret Sanders owned a large property with plenty of parking. Although I admired Margaret's home, like most of the expensive homes in Fletcher Canyon, she lived on the mountain. But since I started driving a stick shift, I found I enjoyed driving in the flatter (less expensive) neighborhoods like this one (and ours).

  I nicked the curb with my tires a mere two dozen times as I parallel parked. Mom and I had traded my compact automatic Honda for this catering van, and let's just say I still had to make a few adjustments regarding parking, driving, and breathing in the van.

  As we got out, we spotted a red-headed man with a beard holding a protest sign. The sign had one word: Crook.

  "Who's that on Brent's lawn?" Mom asked me, just as Simon, Brent's neighbor, approached us, his long gray hair damp with sweat and his skin weathered by the sun.

  "That’s Brent's old business partner, Howard," the neighbor said. "The man can't stand him."

  "I've never seen anyone protest at one of these meetings," Mom said, as we watched Todd Fletcher go over to Howard to talk to him, reporter notebook and pen in hand.

  A police officer showed up. I looked closer on the very slight chance that a certain handsome detective might show up. No dice.

  "Nobody usually even goes to these things. Why the crowd?" Simon asked.

  "Todd’s taking entries for the best of issue of the Fletcher Weekly," Mom said as she headed down the sidewalk to get a better look.

  "Thank goodness," he said, following us. "I worried they were taking nominations for mayor."

  Mom had been mayor four times already, and she considered her time in local politics served.

  "When are the nominations for mayor set to happen?" he asked.

  Mom and I knew what he was hinting at. "Simon, I’m not going to run for mayor."

  "But the power, Jo. Think of all that power," he joked.

  Mom laughed. "You be mayor."

  "I’d love to, but I might be moving."

  "That’s been your excuse for twenty years," she said.

  "But this year I'm really going to do it. Machu Picchu awaits. I’m going to climb it and paint the view."

  "If you do go, you should have a party." Mom was good at drumming up business.

  Simon smiled. "I might just do that, but about this mayor situation. If we can’t find someone else, Brent will run." He turned to me. "What about you?"

  "I haven’t been a resident long enough," I said. "Besides, what’s wrong with Brent?"

  I hadn’t met Brent at this point, so I didn’t know at the time that the man wasn’t that popular with the townsfolk. "Read the sign."

  "He’s not that bad," Mom said.

  "He can’t be mayor," Simon said.

  "Everybody always seems to have a gripe with the mayor anyway, maybe that makes Brent perfect for the job." Mom said as we walked up the front walk to Brent’s house.

  Simon stopped walking. "Don't tell him I said anything. I don't want any trouble," Simon said, and then headed back in the direction of his house.

  Brent, a large, doughy-bodied man with a face that looked irritated with life answered the door. "Jo," he said to Mom, ignoring me altogether. "Can't you convince the rest of the council to hold elections earlier? It's ridiculous that we don't have a mayor yet," Brent barked.

  I shot Mom a questioning look.

  "Harold Sanders was the mayor," Mom explained to me.

  "Oh," I said surprised that the man whose murder we solved six months ago had been mayor.

  "So the town is just running on its own for the next few months?" I asked.

  For the first time since he opened the door, Brent Cryer acknowledged I was alive. "I proposed a special election, but the council said we’d be doing the regular election in a few months so we might as well wait."

  "Can we come in?" Mom asked.

  Without an apology or another word, the man gave Mom and me an impatient wave, indicating we should enter the house. His considerable girth didn't leave a lot of room. We had to squeeze by.

  The living room was filled with folding chairs, and the couch had been pushed up against the wall to make more room. Most of the other business owners in town had already arrived. I recognized a familiar face, Barbara Turing, who ran Turing Tech in Pasadena. She waved to us from the adjacent dining room where a modest amount of refreshments and snacks had been laid out.

  Mom and I made our way to the table to get a snack. Well, I went over to get a snack and soda. I’m sure Mom was checking out the competition. Most of the City Council meetings weren't catered except the ones at Margaret Sanders' house. She wanted people to stay afterward so she could pitch them on her memorial taxidermy service and yoga classes. She always used Mom and me for catering the event. Nothing major. Just appetizers, but we appreciated the work.

  I got a small paper plate, put a few chips on it, and snagged a few deviled eggs.

  "Store bought," Mom mumbled to me as she surveyed the table with a smile. "He must’ve done this himself. No help from his wife."

  "What makes you say that?" I asked her.

  "The French onion dip is in the plastic container on the table. Nancy would be so excited to have company, she would've definitely put it in a bowl. Not to mention he's using paper plates from the overstock store with a kid's party design. His wife would have gotten a more grown up plate."

  Being hungry, I hadn't noticed the paper plates, but looking more closely I could see they featured rip-offs of characters from the movie Shrek—a kid's movie that came out well over a decade ago. Definitely for kids. Absolutely from the overstock store. Mom's sherlock-ing impressed me.

  "Do you see Nancy?" Mom asked Barbara. We catered an office lunch for her company every month ever since we helped Barbara solve a case involving one of her employees selling secrets to her competitors.

  "I don’t think she’s here," Barbara said.

  "That’s odd," Mom said.

  "I heard they’re having problems," Barbara said, her voice low so only Mom and I could hear her.

  Our conversation was interrupted by a loud banging sound. I turned to see Brent Cryer standing at a podium banging a gavel like an angry gorilla. He must've just dragged t
hat podium into the living room in the last few minutes, because I hadn't seen it when I walked in. I was beginning to see why he wasn't well liked. "I call this meeting to order. Take your seats. Take your seats," he said banging some more.

  Mom, Barbara, and I took our seats. I chose a seat by the aisle closest to the dining room (and the snacks). I hoped this meeting would be quick. This kind of stuff just isn’t really my thing.

  The meeting dragged on, and Brent tried to steer the discussion towards nominations for mayor, but he was rebutted until he finally gave up. A few minor points were discussed about repaving different parking lots and filling potholes in the town. My mind glazed over, and I wondered if it would be rude to get up and refill my diet soda. I opted to stay in my seat since no one else had done it. But the second someone else did, I was all over it.

  Finally, they got to the part that we'd come for. Todd Fletcher, the editor of our paper, read the rules about submissions. Basically, services had to be performed within the town of Fletcher Canyon. For instance, Fletcher Cleaners couldn’t nominate their dry-cleaning services as the Best of Fletcher Canyon, because they sent their dry-cleaning to another facility outside of town. However, they absolutely could nominate the laundry services, since they were done on the premises.

  The same thing went for restaurants and food. All the recipes had to be homemade, or at least partially homemade, in order to qualify. There was a lot of bickering over the rules, but finally they got to the part where each business could raise their hand and publicly state their submission.

  Al from the Fletcher Diner submitted first and left. The rest of the business owners did the same. Mom waited until everyone else had finished to put in for her and Wenling's entries. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later, I wondered if Mom had done that on purpose. Did a part of her worry that her new obsession with Kurt the Kitchen King’s "Super Cold Creamer" might ruffle a few feathers?