A Catered Mother's Day Read online

  “I don’t know,” Bernie said. “From where I stand, I’d call what you did selling her out.”

  Lisa’s expression hardened. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so judgmental.”

  Bernie leaned forward. “So you still consider yourself Ellen’s friend?”

  “Yes. Definitely, even though we’ve been having a few business disagreements.”

  “Then why did you tell Bruce about Ellen’s plan?”

  “I didn’t. My husband did.”

  Libby made a rude sound. “Please. Give me a break. Unless my mind is going, you just told Bernie and me that you told Jeremy about Ellen’s plan, and that you both discussed it and you decided that Jeremy should tell Bruce. Is that correct?”

  Lisa started to nibble on one of her nails, realized what she was doing, and touched her necklace again. “Truth?”

  “Truth would be refreshing,” Libby said.

  Lisa bit her lip while she paced back and forth in front of the prep table. “I did tell Jeremy I thought it would be a good idea to tell Bruce what Ellen was planning,” Lisa said, coming to a stop. “Now I wish I hadn’t, but I just thought Ellen needed a wake-up call. I told her not to do what she was planning. I told her several times. I begged her not to. I begged her to talk to Bruce. I begged her to go back into therapy. It never occurred to me that something like Manny would have happened. Not in my wildest dreams. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes,” Bernie said, although she wasn’t completely convinced.

  Lisa sighed in relief. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “About Manny,” Bernie said.

  “Yes,” Lisa asked. “What about him?”

  “Why did you hire him?” Bernie asked. She’d found that sometimes if she asked the same question again she’d get a different answer. This time she didn’t.

  “I already told you we needed someone and he was there,” Lisa promptly answered. “If we’re going to expand we need someone to fill orders, run errands, do deliveries.” Lisa looked at Libby and Bernie. “You two of all people should realize that.”

  “I understand completely,” Libby said. “But I think what my sister is asking is how did Manny show up on your radar?”

  Lisa smiled. “He’d gotten in touch with my husband. They’d had lunch together or something the day before. I think Jeremy said he wanted some advice.”

  “About what?” Libby asked. Jeremy seemed out of Manny’s pay grade.

  Lisa shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask, but at dinner that night I mentioned that we were thinking of hiring someone; Ellen wanted to volunteer her sons.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “I didn’t even want to think about that, so when Jeremy mentioned that Manny was looking for a job, I said okay. He had a driver’s license and he seemed nice enough. I figured he could do the job, he was available, so it was a good fit.”

  “He wasn’t working at the time?” Bernie asked.

  “Not as far as I know,” Lisa answered. “He told me he’d been striping but he’d been laid off.”

  Bernie cocked her head. “Striping?”

  “Painting stripes on the roads,” Lisa explained.

  “Did you ask him for references?” Bernie continued.

  Lisa shook her head. “No. Jeremy knew him. What more did I need? I called Manny up right away. Then I called Ellen up to tell her the good news. Let me tell you she was not happy.”

  “So how does your husband know Manny?” Libby asked.

  Lisa shook her head in disbelief. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I knew,” Bernie replied.

  Lisa’s hand crept up toward her necklace again. “He and Jeremy are brothers-in-law, or ex-brothers-in law, I should say.”

  “Really?” Bernie said. Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.

  “Yup. This was a long time ago. Manny married Daisy when they were both out in Colorado. The marriage didn’t last very long, but Jeremy told me he wanted to help Manny out for old time’s sake.”

  “As simple as that,” Bernie said.

  “Yes. As simple as that,” Lisa answered.

  “What did Ellen say about Manny?” Libby asked.

  “I already told you. She wanted to hire her son. She said he’d work for free. She didn’t think hiring someone was necessary, but then she never wants to spend money. We’d still be in her basement if I hadn’t forced her to sign the lease for this place.”

  “Have you ever thought that maybe she’s right about keeping things small?” Bernie asked.

  “She’s not,” Lisa replied with utter conviction in her voice. “You grow your business or you die. The trick is to be able to expand and be bought out by some big corporation. That’s the way things go these days.”

  “That’s not what Ellen wants,” Libby said. Even she knew that. She reached into her pocket, brought out a square of chocolate, and popped it in her mouth. The chocolate had almost melted and Libby realized that soon it would be too hot to carry chocolate around.

  Lisa made a dismissive noise. “That’s because she’s back with the dinosaurs.”

  “By those standards I guess we are too, but we’re doing pretty well,” Bernie replied. “I mean we’re not going anyplace. We’ve stayed the same for years.”

  Lisa smiled. “But you have options,” she pointed out. “You could expand or franchise.”

  “We don’t want to,” Libby replied. “We’d lose the whole character of the place if we did.”

  Bernie nodded her head in agreement.

  “Which is fine if that’s what you want,” Lisa said in a patronizing tone. “Don’t get me wrong. But Ellen and I want to go somewhere.”

  “Define somewhere,” Libby demanded.

  “In all the supermarkets,” Lisa said. “We have a good product and it deserves to be on all the shelves.”

  “You mean you want to go somewhere.” Bernie put air quotes around the word you. “Ellen maybe not so much.”

  Lisa put up her hand. “Oh no. She wants to, that’s her dream. She just doesn’t want to do what it takes to get there. She prefers to stay at home and fantasize about being rich and famous instead of getting out there and getting her hands dirty.”

  “That may be,” Bernie said. “But I can tell you she’s not very happy with the move.”

  “She’ll come around and see this is for the best,” Lisa said. “Like I said before, Ellen doesn’t like change.”

  Bernie couldn’t argue with that because it was true.

  Lisa looked from Bernie to Libby and back again. “Any more questions before I get back to work?”

  “Yes, one,” Libby said. “For the record. One more time. Ellen definitely knew who Manny was?” She just wanted to make sure that Bernie couldn’t argue with her later about that.

  “Of course Ellen knew who Manny was,” Lisa replied exasperatedly. “I already told you that twenty times.”

  “Four,” Libby said.

  “Whatever. How could Ellen not know? Manny came to her house. She gave him his deliveries. She paid him.”

  “Bruce said that you were in charge of deliveries,” Bernie said.

  Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know where he gets that from. We both were.”

  Bernie nodded. Then she leaned over the prep table, turned Lisa’s music back on, and thanked Lisa for talking to them. “Come on,” she said to Libby. “I think we’ve heard enough.”

  “I knew it,” Libby said when they walked outside. She shaded her eyes from the sun’s glare. “I knew Ellen was lying to us.”

  “She probably had a reasonable explanation,” Bernie replied.

  “Like what?” Libby demanded. “Short of saving us from the clutches of a serial killer, I can’t think of any.”

  Bernie was about to answer when her phone vibrated in her bag. She dug it out, read the text, then showed it to Libby.

  “Come on,” she said to her sister as she texted Ellen back. “Let’s go before she changes her mind and tak
es off again.”

  “Well, I for one will definitely be interested in hearing what she has to say,” Libby said as she climbed into Mathilda. “I’m going to love listening to her explain why she did what she did.”

  “You and me both, kiddo,” Bernie replied with feeling. “You and me both.”

  Then she called her dad and asked him to find out what he could about Daisy Stone.

  Chapter 26

  Fifteen minutes later, the sisters were down at the other end of Skylar Park, the far end, the end that most people in Longely don’t go to. As Bernie put on her sunglasses, she pondered why she didn’t come up to this end more frequently. She really did like it a lot better. She liked the solitude and the sound of the waves slapping the shore. She liked watching the seagulls wheeling above the water.

  This end didn’t have benches for sitting or trails for walking, or fields for soccer or baseball. This end of the park was mostly boulders and scrub grass and trees interspersed with clumps of dandelions, daisies, violets, and drifts of speedwell. Wild turkeys lived here as well as a colony of feral cats and the occasional raccoon. Bernie had spotted a couple of eagles riding the thermals the last few times she’d been here. She’d been told they had an aerie not too far away.

  Another reason no one came to this end of Skylar Park was that it was difficult to get to. You had to drive down a rutted, narrow access road and pull over onto the dirt to park. The road abutted a steep slope, which turned into a scree of pebble-sized rocks that led down to the marshy banks of the Hudson River. Ellen was standing on the gravel contemplating the river’s debris-clogged dark waters when Libby and Bernie arrived. She could hear Mathilda coming and turned, waiting for the van to appear. She hugged herself as she watched Libby park the van and the sisters get out and scramble down the side of the hill.

  “That was fast,” she said to them when they reached her.

  Bernie bent down and rubbed her ankle. The walk down the hill had irritated it. She decided she needed to wrap it again to give it more support.

  “We didn’t want you to disappear again,” Libby explained. Ellen looked exhausted, Libby decided. She looked as if she was having trouble staying on her feet.

  Ellen shrugged.

  “What’s the shrug supposed to mean?” The question came out harsher-sounding than Libby had intended, but she was tired too, and when she got tired she got irritable.

  “It means I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble.”

  “As well you should be,” Libby told her, trying for a lighter tone.

  As she studied Ellen, Libby realized that she looked more than exhausted. She seemed flattened, deflated, as if her will and energy had run out somewhere down the line.

  Bernie took a step forward. “Why haven’t you answered my calls?” she demanded.

  “I needed time to think,” Ellen stammered.

  “About what?” Bernie said.

  Ellen looked at her. Her eyes were glazed over and dull. “You know. About stuff. About the Riverview Motel.”

  “You mean about what happened to Manny?” Bernie asked.

  “Yeah, Manny,” Ellen said quickly—maybe a little too quickly, Bernie decided.

  “You still could have called,” Bernie told her. “We’ve been worried about you. Really worried.”

  “She’s been worried about you,” Libby couldn’t help saying. “I’ve just been really annoyed. What the hell were you thinking, taking off like that? Bernie sprained her ankle chasing you and I got grabbed by your husband. He scared me half to death.”

  “Libby,” Bernie said, warning her to be quiet.

  Ellen held out her hand. “It’s okay,” she told Bernie. Her voice grew a little more animated. She turned to Libby. “You have every right to be angry,” she said to her. “I just wanted to tell you guys why I did what I did. I wanted you to know.”

  “You mean why you ran away?” Bernie asked.

  Ellen bit her lip. “Yes.”

  “Tell us,” Bernie urged.

  Ellen looked out over the water. “It’s just so hard for me to talk about.”

  Bernie waited, not saying anything. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Ellen began.

  “When I came back and saw Manny on the bed just lying there,” she said, “I panicked.”

  “I can see that,” Bernie said. A dragonfly buzzed around her head and she waved it off.

  “My first thought was that you’d help me . . . you know . . . get rid of him . . . bury him or something.” Ellen’s voice faltered. She rubbed her shoulders. She was wearing a light cotton T-shirt and shorts and the breeze that had sprung up was making her feel cold. She wished she was wearing her jacket, but it was in her car, and she didn’t have the energy to climb up the hill and go get it.

  “So you told us,” Libby said. Her tone of voice was not friendly.

  “I’m truly sorry about that,” Ellen told Bernie and Libby. “I was scared. I don’t know what I was thinking. Then after I said it, when I saw your reaction, I realized how wrong I was to even think that.”

  “Why did you keep insisting you didn’t know who Manny was?” Bernie asked.

  Ellen laughed bitterly. “I think I thought that if I didn’t admit I knew Manny, this thing wasn’t happening. It would go away.” She hugged herself tighter and walked in a tight circle to keep warm.

  “So why did you run?” Libby asked.

  “Because I heard you talking about calling the police. I just couldn’t deal. It’s like I’ve been dropped into the middle of a nightmare and I can’t wake up.”

  “That’s for sure,” Bernie allowed. “So who do you think put Manny in the bed?” she asked.

  Ellen turned and studied a tugboat going down the river. It was pushing a barge heaped with coal. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe someone who knew what you were going to do,” Libby suggested.

  “I’ve thought of that,” Ellen admitted.

  “Lisa tells me you told everyone,” Bernie informed her.

  Ellen turned back and faced Bernie. “No. I just told you and her.”

  “And the manicurist,” Bernie said.

  “That’s true,” Ellen admitted. “But I’m not sure she counts. Her English is very bad.”

  “Well, Lisa told her husband and Jeremy told your husband.”

  “That’s what she told me when I was at her house the other night,” Ellen said. She started biting her cuticles. “That’s the thing, the awful thing.” Ellen fell silent.

  “What’s the awful thing?” Bernie prompted.

  “Everything. That this is all my fault,” Ellen whispered. She covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

  “Was that because you slept with Manny?” Bernie asked. The time for subtle was past.

  Ellen raised her head. “It wasn’t like that,” she protested.

  “So what was it like?” Bernie asked.

  “We were friends. Good friends.”

  “Friends with benefits?” Libby said.

  “No,” Ellen cried. “Not at all. We liked the same things. He made me laugh.”

  “Unlike Bruce,” Bernie observed.

  Ellen didn’t say anything.

  Bernie crossed her arms over her chest and studied her friend.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Ellen demanded.

  “Are you sure you didn’t sleep with Manny?” persisted Bernie.

  Ellen looked away.

  “You did, didn’t you?” Bernie said.

  Ellen’s face fell. “Once. Just once,” she whispered in such a low voice that Bernie had to lean in to hear her.

  “Did Bruce know?” Libby asked.

  Ellen shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

  “You’re sure?” Libby demanded.

  “Yes,” Ellen said, but her voice wavered.

  The three women were quiet for a moment. A tugboat guiding a barge down the river tooted its horn.

  “Ellen, do you think Bruce killed Manny?” Bernie asked su
ddenly.

  “No. No, I don’t,” Ellen cried.

  “But you suspect it,” Bernie said.

  The fact that Ellen didn’t reply told Bernie all she needed to know. Instead, Ellen studied the rocks under her feet. The wind had picked up and Bernie could see the goose bumps on Ellen’s skin. Bernie tried to hug her, but Ellen waved her off. She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. Then she started to talk.

  “I knew we shouldn’t have hired Manny. I knew it. We didn’t need him. I knew things wouldn’t turn out well. Sometimes you just have this feeling in your gut and you have to go with that.” Ellen made a fist and lightly hit herself in her stomach. “I told Lisa that, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listens to anything I say. Just because she was this big PR person down in New York she thinks she knows it all. But she doesn’t. If Manny hadn’t come back none of this would have happened. There was no way we could keep them apart.”

  “Them?” Libby said. “Who are them?”

  But instead of replying, Ellen bit her lip and turned to the river. She’d begun crying again. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “It’s all such a mess,” Ellen said. “I can’t believe things have gotten so out of hand.”

  “What’s gotten out of hand?” Libby demanded.

  Ellen just shook her head.

  Libby threw up her hands in disgust. “Why did you ask us to come if you won’t talk to us?”

  Libby bit her lip and turned to watch a yacht tying off on a buoy two hundred feet from shore. At this moment she reckoned that Ellen had to be one of the most annoying people on the planet.

  “Bruce wants me gone,” Ellen said suddenly. “He doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “Why are you saying that?” Bernie asked her friend.

  Ellen looked away.

  “Because he forgets your birthday?” Bernie said. “Lots of men do that. It’s just not as important to him as it is to you.”

  “It not that,” Ellen replied.

  “Then what is it?” Bernie demanded. She was running out of patience. All this drama was exhausting her. “Just tell me why you said what you did.”

  Ellen began wringing her hands. “Because I heard Bruce on the phone. He was saying, ‘This would be a good time to get rid of her.’ Is that good enough for you? Is it?”