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

  Being multilingual made me a lover of words. This was not the same as having a passion for storytelling. As I said, I learned to appreciate storytelling from Nonno. But the story was the narrative, the plot, the blueprint. The words were the building blocks, the materials used to construct the story. This was a fascination I developed at the margins of the cultures that made me. As I translated ideas into my native languages, I learned that the connection between words and things was like a paper clip, removable and reusable for holding different things together. This flexibility excited me—trying out different words to communicate a thought and discovering in the process that I could give my topic a whole new personality. That expressive space became my sandbox, a writer’s sandbox. And I began playing there from the time I was old enough to ask for my snack by announcing “Mami, quiero queso. Voglio formaggio. Cheese, please!”

  I had already started writing stories long before Nonno died. But after he was gone, I felt a kind of duty to step in and take on the mantle of becoming the family storyteller. They say some traits skip a generation, and that’s how it was in our family. My own parents preferred non-fiction, especially real-crime accounts and how-to books. When reality shows came along, they said they had died and gone to heaven. Maybe that’s why for a year after they were taken from me by a truck with faulty brakes, the only thought that brought me any solace was imagining them sitting together on St. Peter’s sofa, enjoying whatever passes for reality TV inside the Pearly Gates. I can’t say I actually believed it, but I think it made a nice story.

  I wasn’t any closer to writing the great American novel when I started having to figure out what I was going to do with myself. I had managed to acquire a broad set of skills and, in particular, a knack for research, observation, and description. I could also eavesdrop on Spanish and Italian conversations because my blonde hair and green eyes made me look Anglo instead of Latin. And, thanks to Alita, I had learned a lot about food. Not just cooking, but selecting ingredients, working with herbs and spices, brewing, braising, baking. All of it.

  I always wondered if I would have been such a foodie if Italian, Iberian and Caribbean cuisines hadn’t figured so prominently in my upbringing. Would I even like food if my family had been from England or Northern Europe? Most of the Brits I had met went to pubs to drink, not to eat. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard anyone suggest a nice Norwegian restaurant for dinner? I had very few ethnic biases, but when it came to culinary considerations, I was the first to admit—I was a food snob.

  So what should a frustrated writer with research, language, and food skills do for a living? For me, the choice was obvious. I became a private investigator. And I discovered a surprisingly lucrative niche working on food-related cases—intellectual property thefts of secret family recipes, food-industry sabotage, due diligence on restaurant takeovers, and even the occasional poisoning.

  Most days, I enjoyed the work. But it was still just a job. I couldn’t help feeling a kind of fracture in my own identity—a grammatical disagreement between who I was and what I wanted to do. This was the reason I left Miami. It was too much of a reminder of the stories I was aching to tell—someday.

  I went to college in Massachusetts and discovered the small island town of Millsferry on a weekend excursion in 1991. At that time, personal computers were still a novelty in most places. But in Millsferry, everybody had one—with a modem, too. Bitnet, Usenet, Internet? It was all old-hat to the locals.

  Historically, the place had been the quintessential New England mill town. Owing entirely to the power generated by the water mills dotting the banks of the Tulliver River, the town flourished from the middle to late nineteenth century. It was a manufacturing center for everything from ploughs to guns, and most famously for its wool. When other sources of power were discovered and industries moved south and west for the cheaper labor, the town’s economy declined. It reinvented itself for a time as a pleasant tourist stop.

  The town didn’t truly thrive again until a native computer-hacker-turned-entrepreneur founded a technology company there. Virtually overnight, Mia Information Technologies (or “Mia-Tech,” as the locals called it) transformed the sleepy hamlet into a high-tech city. Within two short decades, Millsferry had a state-of-the-art infrastructure, several smart homes, solar-powered vehicles and a totally sustainable local economy. For a while afterward, the townspeople took to saying they were from “Millsferry 2.0” until even that notion became dated. They went back to calling themselves “Millsferryzians,” which made me laugh the first time I heard it. To me, “Millsferrians” or “Millsferriers” or even “Millsferry Islanders” seemed better demonyms for the people of Millsferry. I never did learn how they settled on “Millsferryzians,” but it was a good fit. The town’s quirkiness appealed to my literary sensibilities. It was a transformative space with a comic twist—a place that inspired change and adaptation and growth, but without taking itself too seriously. I wanted some of that promise. So when I was ready to put down roots, I returned to this town and became a proud Millsferryzian myself.

  In Millsferry, I became part of a community that believed in self-renewal. Living here made it okay to be a work-in-progress. I still felt misaligned a lot of the time. But I also woke up most mornings with a sense of anticipation—like something pivotal was about to happen.

  2. Not Just a Fair-Weather Partner

  I got most of my investigative work from Cape Cod and the larger islands nearby. But Millsferry turned out to be a regular Wisteria Lane, with enough intrigue behind those white picket fences to give me a fair amount of local detective work, too. That’s why my business partner and I started renting office space downtown in the Cryer Building, just off Union Street.

  What made it a plumb location for us was the fact that it was close to the Millsferry Pub, known to locals as “Bert and Ernie’s” because it was on the corner of Bertha Street and Ernest Court. We occasionally went there for a drink after work, but the draw for us was the breakfast. It was the best in town.

  My associate and friend, Al Dupree, rarely came downtown on a Saturday. He was a family man and preferred spending leisure time with his wife and children. But since the rest of the family was away visiting the maternal grandparents, I had managed to coax him into helping me catch up on my client billing. I bribed him by agreeing to pick up the tab, but I was beginning to worry about reaching my credit limit when he ordered a second stack of pancakes. He could tell and decided to tease me about it.

  “Sha, this is gonna have to go on the corporate AmEx there, ya think?”

  I laughed. “If you keep eating like a cross between a brown bear and the Chicago Bears!”

  “But that’s who I am, ya know—a teddy bear the size of a linebacker.”

  “With shoulder-length dreadlocks, T-Bear,” I added.

  Evidently liking the new nickname, he laughed deeply, which made his locks swing attractively about his head.

  Born Aloysius Dupree in Lafayette, Louisiana, Al shortened his name before he was even old enough to speak a full sentence. Since folks could tell even then that he was going to be big, eventually topping off at 6 feet 10 inches and weighing over 260 pounds, everyone accepted his preference for the shortened version. The one exception was his paternal grandmother, who, at 4-foot-9, was bigger than all of them. She decided Aloysius was a fine Catholic name and used it every chance she got. Al accepted his fate with his usual good cheer.

  When he was eight, his parents moved the family to Eagan, Minnesota, not far from the Twin Cities. Given the size of his family and the comparative lack of diversity in the Upper Midwest, Al joked that the immediate effect on Minnesota was an increase in the African-American population by a whole percentage point. The effect of the move on Al and his seven siblings was that they developed among themselves a curious patois that was equal parts Cajun French and Midwest Scandinavian, and barely recognizable to anyone outside their family.

  Over the years since I first met him, he had lost
some of the dialect if not the idioms. But I made the mistake once of asking him if he still had problems being understood.

  “Heck ya mean, Sha?”

  “You know, that Midwestern-Cajun thing you have going? Does it ever get in the way?”

  “Yeah, sure, yabetcha,” he said, laying it on thicker than usual. “Mais, I tones it down for regular folks like you so’s you don’t get the frissons. Yeah.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave him an “uff da” in mock pain.

  Al moved back to Louisiana in his twenties—mostly for the food—and remained there until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. He and his wife lost their house and everything that mattered to them except the five things that mattered the most—their three children and each other. I had met him in 2000 while working on a case in New Orleans and had wanted to partner up with him ever since. He knew foods I didn’t and had business training I lacked. After Katrina, he accepted my offer and moved the family to Millsferry figuring they’d at least be safe from hurricanes in New England.

  Al didn’t talk to me for a week when I admitted knowing that hurricanes did occasionally hit that far north. Actually, he showed signs of forgiving me the next day, but our mutual buddy Farm overheard the conversation and very unhelpfully pointed to a Wikipedia page he had pulled up on my laptop. The entry was for the New England Hurricane of 1938. It killed hundreds of people and caused billions in damages (at current values). Adding some of the movie trivia he was known for, Farm also brought up another Web page stating that Katherine Hepburn’s family home in Hartford, Connecticut, was among those destroyed by the hurricane. Just my luck, Al was a huge Hepburn fan. Good ol’ Farm!

  I eventually convinced Big Al that hurricanes of that magnitude were rare for New England, and, more to the point, that I had no prior knowledge of the 1938 storm. A day or two later, I also pointed out that none of Hepburn’s family were hurt in the storm. That’s when he finally forgave me for the earlier omission. But when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, he relocated the family to Minnesota and threatened not to come back. It took a month of cajoling and arguing to get him to return. I convinced him that natural disasters occur pretty much everywhere. Unlike floods, volcanos, earthquakes and tornadoes, however, hurricanes gave a fair amount of warning before they hit. Al saw reason, moved back to Millsferry, and we’ve been working cases together ever since.

  “Done!” he announced.

  “But wait, there’s more,” I said, trying to hand him more expense entries to enter.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Sha, I already did half your work. Now you’re gonna try to give me half of what you started out with there? You take me for a couillon?”

  “You get through it more quickly than I do.”

  “That’s because I don’t sit there day-dreamin’ or makin’ up stories or whatever you do in that pretty blonde head of yours.”

  I was about to object to the implied blonde joke when Bruno Everly walked up to the table looking every bit like the small town sheriff he was. He usually had this cool, rugged Gary Cooper bearing, but today he looked like a man with something important on his mind.

  “I’m glad I caught you two together,” he said. “Something’s happened that I could use your help with.”

  I was expecting the usual crop of misbehaviors and misdemeanors—wayward spouses, truant children, or petty thefts by bored teens.

  “What’s up, Bruno?” I asked.

  “It’s about the Millsferry Annual Bake-Off. A woman just died there under suspicious circumstances.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Better get the cameras,” Al suggested.

  “I have them in my bag,” I replied, as I started packing up the papers we’d been working on.

  I paid the bill, and then we headed out. Bruno wanted to fill us in on the way, so we piled into his “prowler,” a term he picked up from the movie Fargo, a mutual favorite. The label was anachronistic for the sleek hybrid with mobile broadband, which was built, like everything else in Millsferry, for environmental protection and Internet connectivity. Feeling magnanimous, I let Big Al ride shotgun to give him the extra leg room. He flashed a grateful smile as we turned our attention to Bruno.

  “I haven’t been to the scene yet. I sent one of my deputies ahead to secure the area.”

  “Who’s the victim,” I asked.

  “Monica Munch. Know her?”

  I shook my head at him through the rear-view mirror, but Al did know her. “The lady that bakes those fancy cakes? You bet. My kids are gonna be crushed.”

  Al had four children now. I thought back to his youngest daughter’s birthday the previous month and remembered the cake with marzipan figures on it shaped like fairies. “She made Angie’s cake?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?” I asked Bruno.

  “The coordinators were making their way around the grounds to see if all the contestants were set up. When they got to her area, they found her lying on the ground dead. We don’t have cause of death, yet. The M.E. is on her way there, too.”

  “So it could have been natural causes?” I followed up.

  “Yes,” Bruno said. “Although she wasn’t that old, fifty-something. Plus these competitions can be vicious.”

  I snorted. “You don’t really think somebody murdered her over a cooking contest, do you?”

  Bruno shrugged. “I sure hope not.”

  I nodded thinking about the contest in question. The Millsferry Annual Bake-Off was a day-long cooking competition inaugurated eighteen years earlier by Mason Tidwell, III, a well-to-do southern gentleman with twinkling eyes, a friendly disposition, and a smile full of sweet teeth. By his own account, his work was epicurean philanthropy, which he described as “giving the less fortunate a taste of the good life.” The Tidwell Foundation funded food kitchens in several major cities, needs-based scholarships to culinary schools, and dozens of cooking contests throughout the world, most of which Mason attended personally.

  His hobby, by contrast, was pro bono criminal defense of hard luck cases. The word on the street was that when Mason was a boy, he had witnessed an out-of-control mob beat an innocent man nearly to death. Most people might have become jaded by the experience, but it wasn’t in Mason’s nature to condemn the entire human race for the actions of an unruly few. On the contrary, he seemed to believe that all human beings were by nature decent folks, but that events and mass hysteria occasionally made us behave in unjust ways. The experience apparently galvanized Mason’s faith in the rule of law as a bulwark against “such unfortunate moral back-sliding.” So he made it his mission to defend people he considered innocent, especially the ones who had already been prematurely tried and convicted in the media.

  But while justice certainly mattered to Mason, his first love was food, especially desserts. Then one day he developed a nostalgic yearning for a toffee-flavored chocolate chip cookie his nanny Eugenie Cromartie made for him when he was a boy. Mason traveled the world over with his paralegal and personal assistant Alice at his side, holding contests for famous bakers, amateur cooks and talented homemakers, trying to find someone who could duplicate the recipe from his childhood. He had just about given up when he got to Millsferry. On the day of the very first bake-off, he finally sampled a cookie that exactly matched his fondest memory. Ironically, it wasn’t one of the entries but rather a snack that Alice brought him that evening.

  To his everlasting surprise, Alice had silently pined for him throughout their years together. Being a capable detective herself, she ran several public searches on the Internet to track down Mason’s nanny. She found Eugenie still lucid and baking in an assisted-living community in Savannah, Georgia. Eugenie was overjoyed to learn that Mason had done well for himself. She was also delighted to give the earnest young woman the family recipe for those cookies Mason had loved as a boy. The old adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was too true in Mason’s case. Alice’s gesture made him realize she was the love of his life. They were marrie
d in Savannah later the same year, with Nanny Eu agreeing to make the wedding cake. Having fallen in love in Millsferry, they decided it was a better place than most to build a home together. It was only natural that they would make the bake-off an annual event after that, given the role it had played in bringing them together at last.

  “Will Mason and Alice be there?” I asked Bruno, returning my thoughts to the morning’s tragic discovery.

  “Mason’s out of town until this afternoon, but Alice is there. In fact, she called it in.”

  “What else do we know about the deceased?”

  “Alice said Munch has been a contestant every year since the bake-off started and that she regularly placed in a couple of categories.”

  “Al, you met her. Did you get the sense that she might not be popular with some people?” I asked.

  “Well, Sha, when she came to our house to talk about Angie’s cake, she brought her contest scrapbook and made sure we knew it was one of many. Get the picture?”

  “Not a graceful winner,” I concluded.

  He nodded.

  We had just passed Sumac Avenue, which put us only two blocks away from our destination. The contest was held near the mall and farmers’ market on a strip of land surrounded by an oval road that was known as the Loop. This was the staging area for various fairs and outdoor shows throughout the year. As we made our way around the lower half of the Loop, I could already see several craft-show tents in a variety of vibrant colors. Balloons and streamers abounded throughout, and I heard carnival music coming over the speakers mounted around the fairgrounds. Everything evoked fun and festivities. I momentarily got swept up in the excitement. Then Bruno turned the prowler into a parking area and pulled up next to the Medical Examiner’s van. (Reality check.)