TUESDAY, 11 A.M.
“You’re going to do what?” asked Carla Ledwig as she changed into an apron and hairnet at the Three Sisters Tea Room. “That’s crazy! You aren’t detectives, for God’s sake.”
May looked at her twin and sighed.
“We already got this from our cousin,” said June. “We don’t need it from you. She’s a judge. She has to be official, but you—”
“—you should jump on this like white on rice. It’s Danny’s hide we’re trying to save,” May reminded her.
“Yes, but—”
“Answer me this: can y’all afford a real detective?”
“You know we can’t. And Mother won’t even discuss it. She thinks Danny did it and she half blames me, too, and every time I ask her to help me hire one, she throws it in my face that I blew my trust fund.”
“So go with the flow. What can one professional detective do that a bunch of us can’t?” May gently shaped the soft dough into long rectangles as she spoke. A smear of flour dusted her cheek. “Between us, we must know most of the people, and we certainly know Cedar Gap better than any strange detective you could bring up from Asheville or Charlotte.”
Carla frowned as May sprinkled the dough with cinnamon and brown sugar and rolled it up. “But you don’t own a gun and you don’t have a license.”
“What the hell do we need a gun for? And who needs a license just to ask some questions?” After rolling each rectangle, May passed them on to June, who sliced them into thick rounds and laid them into buttered baking trays.
Carla added the tray to the cart parked in the warmest part of the big kitchen, where more rolls were rising, and she checked on the loaves baking in the oven, loaves made from dough that had been mixed the afternoon before and set to rise overnight in the cooler. Today’s pumpkin and deep-dish apple pies were already cooling on a second cart. Here at the Tea Room, the kitchen was aswirl with spicy aromas.
At a nearby counter a middle-aged Mexican woman separated cooked chickens from their skin and bones while a young Korean woman diced celery and apples. At the deep sink in the rear, a skinny little white woman was washing a huge pile of fresh mixed greens and spinning them dry. Except for Carla, who had two morning classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they had been working since nine-thirty, and bowls of watercress and thinly sliced cucumbers were chilling in the big cooler beside a container of whipped butter.
“Should I start the pecans?” Carla asked now.
“Just waiting for you,” May said.
Carla dumped a bowl of pecan bits into a large iron skillet, added a chunk of unsalted butter, and began stirring immediately so that the nuts would brown without burning. One of the things that set their chicken salad apart from other cafes was a generous sprinkle of fried pecans. And that reminded June.
“Hey, Kim,” she called. “Could you ask Maria to please be more careful about the gristle? Some woman really freaked over a piece in her sandwich Friday. I thought for a minute there we were going to have to comp her whole lunch.”
“Sure,” said the Korean and burst into colloquial Spanish. The other woman looked over at June.
The woman nodded and gave an apologetic shrug.
“I really wish we’d paid attention in that Spanish class last semester,” May sighed for about the hundredth time since the Tea Room opened in September.
Carla echoed her sigh. “I wish I’d taken Spanish instead of French.”
“And I wish you’d think who else could’ve killed your dad,” said June.
“I have thought,” Carla protested. “I don’t know!” Her eyes brimmed in sudden tears. It had been more than two weeks, yet she still wasn’t used to his loss. And yes, he could be autocratic and demanding as hell, but until Danny, he’d also been loving and supportive.
“Everybody liked him—other doctors and nurses at the hospital and the clinic, the volunteers at the senior center, everybody at church. They all loved and respected Dad.”
“C’mon, Carla,” May protested. “That’s not what Duc told us. One of the therapists said he was impossible to please.”
“I know who he means and she’s a total slacker.” Butter sizzled around the pecan pieces and she stirred them angrily. “The rest of the staff adored him.”
“Well, what about the way he tried to bully Simon into selling him the Trading Post? We were there, for crissakes. You heard how mad Simon got.”
“You don’t think Simon—?”
May gave an impatient wave of her sticky hand. “Of course not. Everybody knows he’s an old sweetie underneath. I could see him punching somebody out in the store, but he wouldn’t go charging up to y’all’s house.”
Except that even as she was saying it, May could indeed see Simon Proffitt getting an official notice about some pesky little violation and, with that firecracker temper of his, storming off to the source of the citation. She looked up and saw that Carla and June were picturing the same scenario.
The true reality of murder hit them at the same time.
Carla stirred the pecans slowly. “It could be somebody we know and like, couldn’t it?”
