Pushing Up Rhubarb (A Millsferry Mystery Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ~ Book 1: The Investigation ~

  Prologue: a Wake and a Sleep

  1. Subject-Verb Agreement

  2. Not Just a Fair-Weather Partner

  3. The Swan Song of a Crowned Crane

  4. There Once Was a Nomad Named Dottie

  5. The Art of Baking

  6. Two Geeks and a Cajun Walk Into a Bar

  7. Body Counts on the Rise

  8. Stymied by Rhubarb

  9. The Jam Thickens

  10. What the Grocer Said After Putting His Pants On

  11. An Intervention, But Whose?

  12. The Trouble with Living in a Small Town

  13. Tickling the Runes

  14. You Pay Extra for Baggage

  15. Lovely Young Red-Headed Men

  16. Why You Can't Blame the Sister

  17. Munch's Revenge

  18. Unreasonable Doubt

  ~ Book 2: The Trial ~

  Prologue: A Writer's Notebook

  1. Killer Theory, But Can We Prove It?

  2. Potayto, Potahto

  3. If Only She Hadn't Given Away That Kidney

  4. An Egg-celent Sandwich

  5. The Nightmare was Nothing Compared to the Coffee

  6. The Mortification of Nina A. Braco

  7. You'll Never Guess Who Else Goes to Jail!

  8. Opportunity Knocks, and Sometimes It Just Comes in Uninvited

  9. We're Serving Crow at My Pity Party

  10. My Friend's Enemy's Sister is My What?

  11. The Sovereign of Sickly

  12. Recovery

  13. Discovery

  14. Tyning the Runes

  15. Startling Developments

  16. An Unexpected Ingredient

  17. Defense Exhibit N

  18. Twenty-Three and a Half Days

  Epilogue: In Defense of Rhubarb

  Nina's Collection of Recipes from Millsferry's Kitchens

  Alita's Simple Flan

  Chloe’s Rhubarb-Peach Galettes

  Scotty's Sweet and Spicy Tuna Melt

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A Millsferry Mystery

  Diana Saco

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Pushing Up Rhubarb

  Complete Edition, Books 1 and 2

  Millsferry Mystery Series

  Published by Arctic Zebra Press

  Cover design by Nikki Saco

  Copyright © 2015 by Diana Saco

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Associated websites:

  Millsferry.com

  CreepyCorner.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943273-03-4 (epub)

  Other: ISBN-13: 978-1-943273-02-7 (pb), ISBN-13: 978-1-943273-00-3 (epub, bk 1), ISBN-13: 978-1-943273-01-0 (epub, bk 2)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ~ Book 1: The Investigation ~

  Prologue: a Wake and a Sleep

  At the age of fifty-five, several years prior to her actual demise, Mrs. Charity-Grace Banks of Millsferry, Massachusetts, hosted her own wake. She reasoned that she didn’t want to miss such an important event owing to something as inconvenient as dying. The ceremony might have passed into the void of the forgotten had she not bequeathed some of her worldly possessions. These gifts included the following.

  “To my niece, Monica Munch (née Moffit), recently arrived from Oklahoma with her new husband, Marvin, I leave my dear mother’s cooking diaries. Remember, a happy home begins with a wholesome hearth.”

  This inscription was on the first of the twenty-six volumes that changed ownership prematurely that day. Little did Charity-Grace know that this legacy would lead to her niece’s death—coincidentally, in the middle of her own fifth decade on earth.

  I learned about the inheritance a few days into my investigation of the incident at the Millsferry Annual Bake-Off. I had to commit more time and energy, however— and a tiny criminal act—before I would come to realize the deeper significance of those diaries. They contributed not only to the means of Monica Munch’s death, but also to the motives and opportunities that inspired her killer.

  The main ingredient was rhubarb. That was my first clue that this wasn’t going to be a routine case. Turns out it wasn’t even a standard whodunit. The tale of Monica Munch’s demise was equal parts riddle, recipe, romance, and reform. I just didn’t figure on being one of the lives so thoroughly changed by these events.

  1. Subject-Verb Agreement

  I’m Nina A. Braco, of the Havana Bracos, and this is my story.

  When I was fourteen and fairly bursting with a combination of hormones and romantic ideas about great love and great art, I found out that I shared my birthday with Boris Pasternak. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was certain that being born on the same day as the novelist who wrote Doctor Zhivago meant that I, too, was astrologically fated to make beautiful prose. This discovery gave me great hope for all of the half second that passed before I read that I also shared my birthday with Jimmy Durante—the Schnoz! Suddenly, the natal alignment of my planets didn’t look so favorable. My adolescent mind reckoned that I had the makings of either a Nobel prize-winning writer or else a person with a nose for mangling the English language to great comic effect. The universe was laughing at me.

  Not that I had anything against Jimmy Durante. Even I thought he was funny. But my dreams were more literary. Coincidentally, I stopped subscribing to this birthday theory a short while later. In my weaker moments, however, I would still catch myself sending silent prayers into the cosmos that my gift with words would one day be more like Boris’s than like Jimmy’s. I just couldn’t get excited at the prospect of inka-dinka-dooing my way to fame and fortune.

  I had always been a storyteller, crafting narratives almost subconsciously, like an involuntary reaction. While I was out doing something routine—like biding my time on surveillance or walking my alpaca or hiking in the Runes—my headspace was always somewhere else. In some exotic land wondering how James Michener would describe it. Envisioning large social themes through the eyes of a spirited child as authentic as Harper Lee’s. Fleshing out a character with so much depth that she would make a Tennessee Williams heroine seem superficial.

  That last notion gave me an idea once for a story beginning with the line, “Blanche DuBois throws a Tupperware party.” I had scribbled it on a napkin. I don’t know where I was when I wrote it or what exactly I had in mind. And that pretty much summed up my predicament. I wasn’t likely to write the Great American Novel out of a collection of one-liners and half-starters. As a rule, great literary works were seldom lean. The flavor was in the fat. (Being half Cuban and half Italian, I was sure that I had this knowledge genetically encoded in my DNA.)

  I was born in Miami, which was also fat. The city was far too big for the space it occupied. It was so full of bodies and heat and culture and flavor that it bustled over its edges and flopped into the Atlantic like a pregnant woman lying on her side along the shoreline, taking in the sun. Whenever I needed ideas, I would go downtown or to the Gr
ove or for a walk down Calle Ocho and just soak it all in until I was saturated. And then I would need to retreat and process, giving my senses a break from the colors and smells and noise and especially from that beat that Gloria Estefan later made famous. I’d find a quiet place and try to recreate my experiences in writing. And this was as far as I usually got—lost in the vast emptiness of the blank page before me and feeling woefully inadequate to the task. Ironically, the very things that made Miami great for me as a writer also made it terrible. It was sensory overload. It made me doubt I could convey even a fraction of the vibrancy and passion I had seen.

  I came from a family of exiles. That doesn’t mean very much when you’re a kid. But I did detect a sense of loss hearing my grandparents talk about it. I tried to imagine what it was like for them. Whether I could fit everything I care about into one small suitcase. Leave a homeland I love. With those remaining behind thinking of me as a traitor to their cause or worse an opportunist. To go to a place I wasn’t wanted. Where I was accused of stealing someone’s job or was simply treated as one of the unentitled. Where no one even spoke the same language. And to do it all in the hopes of giving my children a better life. I always came awake from that daydream with the same conviction rattling in my head. That my family had major cojones—even the women!

  I’d grown up surrounded by novel people. It was only natural that I’d want to retell their stories in novel form. Literary fiction became my canvas. But every time I tried laying ink on that canvas, it was like painting with water. It lacked the substance and depth of their recollections and revealed none of the richness of the colorful lives they had led. No, not led. Chased! They hadn’t simply tugged a remarkable life behind them like a little red wagon full of memories. They had chased after it with arms outstretched, always reaching for the next wonderful experience! That was my family. Mi gente.

  My paternal grandfather told stories. He was a cabinet-maker by trade, like his father before him and his children after him. Nonno created designs in his head. He would then sketch his ideas on rolls of heavy brown paper, like the stock used for shopping bags. He had a habit of losing the thick ebony pencils he preferred, so whenever I visited his workshop, I was always put on pencil-finding duty. I was into junior-detective novels at the time, so I treated each misplaced pencil like a missing person and developed a pretty good investigative style even at this early stage.

  I would ask Nonno, “Where did you last see one? What were you doing at the time? Did anyone else see you?”

  The shade was called “Very Black,” but with his thick accent—more Spanish than Italian—it came out as “Betty Black.” The first time he asked me if I’d seen his Betty Black, I wondered who she was and why it didn’t bother my grandmother that Nonno said he needed her. Come to think of it, his pronunciation probably accounted for my fantasy that I was helping him find a missing person.

  When he wasn’t looking for his precious pencils, Nonno was sawing and carving and sanding to coax his designs out of whatever piece of wood he was working with at the moment. The tasks were manual and repetitive, especially the endless sanding. It was then that he would tell a story. Usually it would be a funny joke or a fable with a moral. Occasionally, he’d recite a short literary work that he admired enough to memorize. Other times, it would be a recollection of something that happened when he was younger. One of his favorite stories was about how he came to live in Cuba and then in Miami.

  When his father—my great-grandfather, Franco Bracco (with two c’s)—emigrated from Genoa, Italy, he picked the island of Cuba instead of Ellis Island. Italian Cubans were rare but not unheard of, Nonno explained. He told me that Cuba even had its own Mantua, at the northwest end of the island in the province of Pinar del Río. Our own family settled a little farther east of that, in the capital of Havana.

  Nonno was only five years old at the time but still remembered his father saying, “Se Cuba è stata abbastanza buona per Colombo, è abbastanza buona per noi.” The truth was that Franco had seen pictures of the island and decided it was a tropical paradise. He would have moved to Cuba even if Columbus hadn’t decided it was “good enough.”

  Over the next twenty years, Franco’s growing family adopted the local customs and language, even to the point of dropping one of the c’s from their surname. In the span of a single generation, the Havana Bracos had become thoroughly Cubanized. So when Castro came to power, and Nonno was faced with a similar decision of where to emigrate, it was only natural that he and his family should ride the tides taken by so many other Cuban exiles. A few months after the revolution, the Braco family took the Stock Island ferry across the Florida Straits, and then drove northeast another 90 plus miles until they reached Miami. This was my father’s family—the Italian side.

  My mother’s family made a similar journey but starting from the Iberian peninsula instead of the Italian one. They were Cuban going back at least three generations. Prior to that, it was hard to say for sure. But official records and oral history both vouched for an ancestor who had sailed from Galicia in Northern Spain. This detail was enough for everyone to regard this side of the family as the Spanish side. My maternal grandparents, therefore, were formally known as Abuelo and Abuela. In Spanish-speaking cultures, it was also customary to add a diminutive suffix to the people we held dear (or who were smaller or junior to someone else). This is how my mother referred to my grandparents, as Abuelito (little grandfather) and Abuelita (little grandmother). Since I hadn’t yet mastered speaking, however, my adorably condensed baby talk turned Abuelito into Alito and Abuelita into Alita. Naturally, all of the adults ate it up.

  Alita, especially, adored her nickname. It matched the Spanish word for “little wing.” This suited her personality, which was equal parts free and flighty. She was one of those people who got bored easily doing the same things every day. She avoided the tedium by embracing new experiences and ideas. This was particularly true in the one activity Alita was passionate about—cooking. And I fell in love with the products of her passion. In other words, while my beloved Italian grandfather was teaching me how to value a good story, my little Spanish grandmother was igniting my ardor for good food.

  Alita was a force of nature in the kitchen. She was an expert on all the Cuban standards—roast pork, chicken and rice, fried plantains, black bean soup (my personal favorite). But she was also a devoted student of the craft, exploring different cuisines and new techniques. She endeared herself to my father’s mother by asking her one day about traditional Italian recipes. Nonna herself was not Italian. She had married into the Braco family. Because she loved my grandfather, she willingly subjected herself to learning his favorite Italian dishes from her mother-in-law, who, according to everyone, was an insufferable woman. Nonna shared what she knew with considerably more charm and patience than her own teacher had shown, and soon Alita was making Italian dishes better than Nonna ever had. It became a joke between them. The upshot was that I learned to make Italian dishes, too, from my Spanish grandmother.

  Lesson one was selecting the right ingredients. Everything had to be fresh. Alita detested the bland flavor of industry-farmed meats and produce. She loathed processed foods. And she seldom used the refined white sugar sold in American supermarkets. She preferred traditional Cuban raspadura, which literally meant “hard scrape.” Made from whole evaporated cane juice, raspadura was a dark brick of raw sugar that still tasted of the molasses and nutrients that hadn’t been separated out. It was only marginally healthier than refined sugar, but it wasn’t as bland. I valued my grandmother’s opinion on the subject of sugar not simply because she was my elder, but also because she was Cuban. Sugar was a substance Cubans knew well. It was in our blood and in our culture. It was so ingrained in our sense of Cubaness that Celia Cruz, the queen of Cuban salsa, used to rally her audiences with a resounding cry of “¡Azúcar!”

  I never developed a liking for raspadura, but I did prefer it for some of the recipes I learned from Alita, especially as a rub
for ham and other meats. But it was hard finding it outside of South Florida. I experienced an acute case of righteous indignation—and sticker shock—in my thirties after one of my food shopping excursions up north. I had been to an urban health food co-op where I had picked up the closest item they had to raw sugar, a one-pound bag of semi-processed evaporated cane juice. When I got home, I was skimming the receipt when I noticed that the sugar had cost me $10.00. I balked at the price knowing that it was exorbitant for any sugar—more so for a sugar that wasn’t nearly as good as the bricks of raspadura Alita used to get at the Cuban market for about 39 cents back in the day. Okay, so that was two decades earlier, but the price difference owed more to hype than to inflation.

  It was during my short-lived vegan period, and I had just discovered that bone char was used in sugar processing to get that whiter-than-white color. I resented the way healthy or just animal-friendly eating was treated like a gourmet-food niche to justify the higher cost. The worse part was knowing that the pricier items were usually cheaper to make because they didn’t go through as much processing. I avoided the price gouging by doing a lot of my shopping at neighborhood ethnic food stores. The Indian markets offered a similar version of raw sugar called jaggery. And I eventually found a Spanish food company that sold Alita’s traditional raspadura under the name panela—and at a more reasonable price of $2.00 per pound. For me, it wasn’t the price that mattered but the principle. People shouldn’t have to pay more for whole foods. This was an attitude cultivated in my Spanish granny’s kitchen. I learned more natural ways of cooking under the shadow of the little wing.

  Both of my parents were born in Cuba, but came over as children and grew up American. They met each other in an American high school and went to an American prom, and they spoke English with a barely discernible accent. But they still maintained some of their traditions. So when I came along, Spanish was the first language I spoke. It was inevitable since Alita and Nonna were my babysitters while my parents were at work. English was my second language and became my main mode of communication—the language of my written work and of my thoughts. That was inevitable, too, since it was the language on television (my other babysitter) and the one spoken by my playmates and my teachers. I also picked up a little Italian along the way, mostly curse words and food-related phrases—but really, how much more Italian does one need?