If Fried Chicken Could Fly (2 page)

Two ceiling tiles would have to be replaced, and grease seemed to be all over the range and the floor around it, but since everything else in the immediate area, including Gram’s favorite skillet, was covered in white powdery foam, we couldn’t be certain of the full extent of the damage. There were still plenty of cooking space and clean stovetops, but the sooner we got rid of the mess, the better.

Gram’s Country Cooking School was located in an old bingo parlor that Gram had frequented back in the eighties with one of her boyfriends. I’d heard that before it was a bingo parlor it was a church, which I could easily picture. The building sat on a short hill; it was long and thin and had
a peaked roof. It was also right next to an old cemetery. The cemetery was a big Broken Rope summer tourist attraction. Among others, Jerome Cowbender, famous southern Missouri outlaw, was buried there. So was Sally Swarthmore, famous Missourian who, in the late 1800s, took an ax to her parents.

A small reception area was located in the front of the building. Full swinging double doors led from there into the long kitchen where eight large butcher block tables filled the center of the well-furnished space. At each end were an extralarge refrigerator, an extralarge freezer, and pantries. Against the walls were a total of six six-burner gas stoves; worktables; and shelves full of pots and pans and other utensils, such as spatulas, spoons, and Ginsu-like sharp knives. There was a seldom-used classroom with about a dozen desks and chairs at the other end of the kitchen. Farther along were Gram’s and my offices, followed by the non–food supply room, which held everything from aprons to every kind of kitchen cleaning supply known to man- and womankind.

Though we had the supplies and always cleaned up after classes, we also had a full cleaning crew come in every night. It was this cleaning crew that Gram cussed as we opened the door of the supply room.

“Aw, Betts, what do you suppose happened in here? When did the cleaning people start doing this?” Gram put her fists on her skinny hips and stood in the familiar stance that was all Gram—left toes forward, right toes pointed to the right.

It looked as though someone had just thrown, willy-nilly, mops, towels, sponges, and buckets to the floor. Where once
there had been an organized room full of supplies, there was now a disaster.

“I don’t understand. I’ve never seen it like this. Do you suppose they were in a hurry last night?”

“This is worse than a hurry; it’s destructive,” Gram said.

I gently toed an overturned white bucket.

Gram gasped. “Betts! Is that a hand?”

I looked at the spot where the bucket had just been.

“Oh, Gram!” Yes, it was a hand.

Gram and I dove in and cleared the mess. Now we were throwing towels, brushes, and bottles full of cleaners every which direction. Seconds later we uncovered the body of one Everett Morningside. We knew who he was because he had been Gram’s newest suitor and they’d planned on a late-night dinner that evening. A dinner that clearly wasn’t going to happen, because there was no doubt that Everett Morningside was no longer in any condition to eat. He was dead, presumably killed by the plastic bag over his face and tied around his neck.

“Oh, oh no!” Gram said as she reached for the bag.

My mind was jumbled with fear and concern, but I still managed to grab her arm. “Don’t touch it, Gram. We’ve messed up the scene enough.”

She looked at me with tears in her eyes and nodded. But then she pulled her arm from my grasp and hurried out of the room. I thought she might be calling the police, but she returned only a few seconds later.

“Aw damn, Everett. What happened?” she said as we both stood over the body.

The entire scene was surreal and bizarre, but I was suddenly more worried about Gram than poor Everett. I’d heard
her described as “one tough cookie,” “a tough old broad,” and “tougher than nails,” but finding her date dead in the supply closet was bound to cause her some distress.

“You okay?” I asked as I reached for her hand.

She nodded.

We looked at Everett for another long few seconds. It was difficult to process, difficult to stay in the room, and yet almost impossible to leave. We should have been screaming or freaking out or hyperventilating, but for those long seconds, I stared at Everett’s body and tried to understand how something so unreal could possibly fit with reality.

He was a hefty man and his belly made a round even mound. He was also one of Gram’s youngest “friends,” and probably hadn’t been more than sixty years old. He wore a black suit with a buttoned-up vest, which was what he always wore. He was the newest owner of the Jasper Theater—Broken Rope’s one-auditorium theater that had been around for over a hundred years. It had seen burlesque and live-action shows, and now it played the current films, well, current to Broken Rope at least. The big cities were a few months ahead of us when it came to new releases. Fitting with the theme of the town, Everett dressed like a gentleman from times past.

“When did you talk to him last?” I said.

“We talked on the phone last night around nine to confirm the dinner date tonight. Who in the name of all things wicked and horrible do you think did this to him?”

“I have no idea, but I think we’d better call the police.” I swallowed some fear. I’d inherited some of Gram’s unshakable demeanor, but Everett’s seemingly violent and intentional death was finally beginning to rattle my nerves.
Suddenly, my knees were shaking and I couldn’t quite catch a full breath.

“Of course,” Gram said with a sigh. “Poor Everett.” Then, almost in a whisper, she added, “This won’t be good for business.”

I was taken aback at her reaction, but I chalked it up to the stress. Plus that was the least of Gram’s worries. We had a waiting list of students for our numerous courses. Anyone who tasted her cooking, or talked to someone who tasted her cooking, or heard about her cooking, wanted to learn how she did what she did.

She’d taught me, law school dropout and her only granddaughter, free of charge. Since law school hadn’t been all I’d wanted it to be, and she and my parents had decided I would wander aimlessly through life if I didn’t find something to do, she asked me to help her at the school. I have been trying to keep up ever since. As horrible as it was to even consider, the dead body was going to put a big kink in our routine but probably not our business.

Broken Rope, Missouri, was full of gruesome stories and odd tales of death, after all. It was our history of knife battles, gunfights, hangings (it was when this method of death didn’t go quite as planned that the town got its name, but that’s another story), and homicidal scorned women that formed the base of our busy summer tourist economy. Even though at that moment I was more concerned about poor Everett than anything else, later I’d realize this would prove to be just another strange happening to add to the morbid charm that was Broken Rope.

We bypassed the office phones and hurried back through the long building to use the phone in the reception area. The
school was located in the country, right on the edge of Broken Rope, but Main Street and the jail where our local police had their small office were only a curve in the two-lane highway and about three minutes away. We could probably watch them drive up before we hung up the phone.

“Yeah, we had a fire and we got a body here,” Gram said into the phone. “No, the body isn’t a result of the fire. They’re two different incidents. Yes, we’re pretty sure he’s dead. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. He’s in our supply room. No, the fire wasn’t in the supply room. Oh for goodness’ sake, just send some cops and firemen.” Gram slammed down the phone and looked at me as she put her hands on her hips again. “Sometimes I wonder if the fake cops have infiltrated the ranks of the real ones. What was with all the questions?”

“Procedure, I guess,” I said.

“Procedure my foot,” she said, and then disappeared back through the swinging doors.

The fake cops she mentioned were the ones who dressed like sheriffs and law enforcement officers from the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the summer and with all the other actors/characters, they would walk up and down the boardwalks of Broken Rope, their spurs jingling, and good-naturedly tip their hats, gently pretend to harass the tourists, and stage fake gunfights. My brother had been a pretend sheriff six years earlier, the summer he was twenty-one, but they took his badge and fake gun after he got drunk one night and scared a family from Boston out of their wits. He interrupted their dinner, pulled his plastic gun, and told them they were being arrested for having such a sexy daughter. Yes, his methods for attempting to get a date had proved to be a bad moment for all of us.

The good news was that the family from Boston didn’t push the real police to press charges. The young lovely thing in question also slapped him, which was entertaining to a number of women. Even with his poorly thought-out behavior Teddy was too attractive for his own good, and he left an angry trail of broken hearts in his wake.

They’re here,
I said to myself as I saw a real police car pull up in front of the school, well illuminated by the building’s outside floodlight above the front door. It was just one of the many changes Gram had made to the building.

When she bought it, she had the inside completely gutted and rebuilt to accommodate the cooking school, so if there’d ever been a pew or a bingo card in sight, they were long gone now. When Gram’s second husband (my grandfather was her first husband) died from injuries sustained from falling down a well, she was left with lots of money. For a long time she hadn’t done a thing with it, saying that she’d know how to spend it when the time was right.

The time had been “right” shortly after my brother’s fake sheriff incident and my escape from law school (our parents had been particularly challenged by their children that summer); as she drove by the abandoned building one day, she decided immediately that she would build a cooking school.
“
Hell,” she’d said, “everybody, dead or alive in this town, wants me to cook for them anyway. Might as well get paid to show them how to do it. Plus,” she added to my parents, “it’ll give Betts something to do.”

I hadn’t protested. In fact, I was thrilled with the idea. For a brief time I was humiliated at my poor life choices and my return to Broken Rope with my tail between my legs, but Gram was my favorite person in the universe and
I loved to cook, and someday I might almost be as good as she was. It seemed mostly perfect.

Until today at least. With a body in our cleaning supply room, I experienced a fleeting thought that we might need an attorney, and if I’d stayed in law school I’d be pretty experienced by now. Also, if I’d stayed, there might not be a cooking school, so therefore no supply room and finally, no dead body.

I devoted a few minutes every day to beating myself up and second-guessing my decisions. It was a hard habit to break.

But the assessment of my present situation was rudely interrupted by a ghost from one of my past situations. The two police officers who got out of the car were familiar, which wasn’t too unusual. Broken Rope was small enough that I knew pretty much everyone or recognized some feature about them that hinted at which family they came from.

One of the officers was Jim Morrison, like the singer, but not really. This Jim Morrison had looked the same for the last ten years: bald, big-shouldered, and somewhat soft around the middle. He was approaching fifty and wore Clark Kent glasses, but his wife once told me he never did manage the transformation into someone Superman-like, though he was a good guy.

It was the other officer who was the ghost—if not literally, certainly figuratively. Cliff Sebastian was my first love. We’d known each other all our lives, dated when we were at Broken Rope High School, and then ended the relationship when we both went to different colleges. I’d dated since then, but I’d never cared for anyone as much as I had Cliff. In fact, there were times, when I felt like being extradramatic,
that I was certain he’d ruined me for anyone else. Though we lost contact over the years, my family continually snuck in updates about him: “Pass the beans, Betts. Oh, did you hear that Cliff Sebastian finished architecture school and is moving to San Francisco?” Or
“
Would you run to the store and get me some milk, Betts? Oh, and did you hear that Cliff Sebastian still isn’t married?” Or “Betts, brace yourself, Cliff Sebastian is getting married to a medical school student.” That last one was sprung on me about ten minutes after I made it home with the new title of Law School Dropout.

No one had ever snuck in, “Oh, and did you hear that Cliff Sebastian is now a Broken Rope police officer?” That seemed like a pretty big update, so either my family was slipping or they didn’t want me to know that Cliff was back in town. With a wife. And probably some kids. It wasn’t that I minded him having a family so much—I just didn’t want to have to be around it, and I really didn’t want to have to be nice to it…
them
.

But hang on. Something didn’t fit. Something was wrong. I stepped closer to the window and rested my forehead against it as I stared hard. Cliff Sebastian was a successful architect in San Francisco. He was married to a woman who must be a physician by now who surely wouldn’t have the sort of career in Broken Rope that she’d have in San Francisco.

Maybe it really wasn’t him. Even with the bright building light, it was dark outside. But why did the person, dressed like a real and modern police officer, who was walking toward the cooking school front doors, look so much like him?

If it was Cliff, he hadn’t changed over the years as much as he’d just slightly expanded. He still had stick-straight brownish hair, though it was shorter than it had been in high school. He was still tall, but instead of thin, he was trim, his shoulders wide, his stomach flat, his legs long and muscled, and Lord help me, his face still dotted with a dimple on his right cheek. He used to be adorable, and now he was just plain old handsome. I lifted my forehead from the glass and then dropped it again, not hard but hard enough.