Beef Brisket Murder: Book 11 in The Darling Deli Series Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  BEEF BRISKET MURDER

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Beef Brisket Murder

  Book Eleven in the Darling Deli Series

  By

  Patti Benning

  Copyright 2016 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

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  BEEF BRISKET

  MURDER

  Book Eleven in the Darling Deli Series

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Would you look at that?” said Moira Darling. “Edna sure came through. What do you think, Darrin?”

  The young man, recently promoted to manager, took a step back and shaded his eyes as he looked up at the side of the short, white refrigerated truck. They had just gotten the vehicle back from EZ Wheels, the local auto shop, where it had gotten some much-needed attention. Besides giving the truck an oil change, four new tires, and cleaning the interior thoroughly, they had painted the deli’s logo on the side of the truck. Now Darling’s DELIcious Delights adorned the two sides of the truck in swirly, black lettering, with artfully drawn wheels of cheese, cuts of meat, and steaming bowls of soup placed around the lettering. Beneath were the words We cater! and the deli’s phone number.

  “I think it looks great, Ms. D,” he replied. “With this truck sitting out in the parking lot, we’re bound to get more calls about catering. We never really advertised it before.”

  “I think so, too. It was nice of Mrs. Young to post that great review of us online after we catered that church event for her. It got me thinking that I really should make more of an effort to advertise. The truck is just the start; what would you think of getting a website for the deli set up?” she asked.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” he said. “Most places these days have one. That way people would be able to check our prices for catering and special orders more easily. We could even update it every day with that day’s soup and sandwich special, so if we’re serving someone’s favorite soup, they’ll know to come in.”

  “I’ll have to see how much it will cost to hire a professional,” she said. “It’s definitely not something I’ll be able to figure out on my own.”

  “Actually, I’ve got a friend that does web design. Do you want me to give him a call?”

  “Sure. If he’s willing to let us hire him, go ahead and set up a time for the three of us to meet here at the deli and we’ll go over different designs.”

  Excited at the new plans for the deli, Moira headed back inside to finish preparing the potato and kale soup for the day’s special. She knew that she was a lucky woman to be able to make a living doing something she loved—cooking—and was continually amazed at how something that had started out as a part-time hobby had grown into something much more.

  Now that the deli was more of a thriving business than a hobby, she found herself busier than ever. Promoting Darrin to manager had been a good move, and it had given her a few extra days off each month. Before letting some of the responsibility for running the little shop fall onto his shoulders, it hadn’t been unusual for her to go two weeks or more without a day off. She had been able to keep that pace up for a while, but after having yet another violent close encounter involving a bullet wound to the arm and a painful concussion, she had decided that it was important to set more time aside for her other interests, including her two dogs, her wonderful daughter, and the handsome private investigator boyfriend.

  Recently, however, she had found herself drawn back to a busier life as word about the deli’s catering spread. In just a couple of weeks, she was supposed to cater an event for the local high school, and she’d agreed to a couple of other engagements even further out. The extra business brought in much more money than their normal daily sales, but it also meant a lot more work and preparation on her part. Luckily she had the coming weekend off, and she meant to make the best of it, starting with having dinner at Candice’s house tonight.

  ***

  “What’s cooking?” she asked her daughter as she walked through the door to the apartment a few hours later. “It smells amazing in here.”

  “The grocery store had a big sale on beef yesterday, so I decided to try making a pot roast,” the young woman replied. “I hope it turns out okay.”

  “It looks and smells just perfect,” said Moira, cracking open the oven to see the huge slab of meat simmering in a pan with carrots, onions, and garlic.

  Her stomach growling, she straightened up and walked into her daughter’s living room, where she took a seat on the couch, put her purse on the table, and pulled out her tablet. A calico kitten raised his head on the cat tree across the room and gazed at her with dark grey eyes for a moment before turning onto its back and stretching.

  “Hi, Felix,” she said with a smile. Raising her voice so her daughter, who was still in the kitchen with the roast, could hear her, she added, “Candice, can you come in here for a second? I have some ideas that I want to run by you.”

  Her daughter came into the room and perched on the arm of the couch. She peered down at the screen of the tablet.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I was thinking of hiring someone to design a website for the deli. A friend of Darrin’s does web design, and he agreed to come meet with us later this week. This website is an example of his work, and he has a couple of different designs. Which one do you like best?”

  “A website for the deli? That’s a good idea. I should do the same thing for the candy shop.” Candice owned and ran Candice’s
Candies, making a lot of her own candies, chocolates, and fudge to sell there. Her business was new, but from what Moira knew about its popularity, it seemed to have promise.

  “I figured it was about time. A lot of businesses smaller than the deli have websites, and not having one for so long has probably hurt the business.” She handed her daughter the tablet to she could scroll through the different design options, then scratched her fingernails against the couch in an effort to lure the kitten over. Felix watched her with interest, but seemed reluctant to give up his comfortable perch.

  “I think I like this one,” the young woman said, handing the tablet back to her mother. “It’s simple, and not too crowded looking. Plus, it will look good on phones, and that’s probably how most people will be seeing it.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of my favorites.” Moira took the tablet back and pressed the buttons that would take the screen shot. This would at least be a good starting point for when she and Darrin met with the web designer next week.

  “Let me know when you find out how much it will cost. I may be interested in something similar, but I don’t want to spend too much.”

  “Sure. I’ll be sure to get a business card from him for you, too.”

  “Thanks.” Candice gave her mother a bright smile, then slid her cell phone from her pocket to check the time. “Oh, it’s time to take the pot roast out. You can go sit down. Just make Felix stay off your lap. Eli fed him from the table a few times, and now he seems to think that he eats with us.”

  The two women sat down at the small dining room table and Candice carved the roast. Moira helped herself to mashed potatoes, and added some salad to her plate.

  “Isn’t your birthday coming up?” her daughter asked as she served herself. “What do you want to do for it?”

  “Oh, the usual,” Moira said. “Let’s just grab dinner somewhere nice. I’m too old for birthdays to be much of a celebration anymore anyways.”

  “I’m never going to be too old for birthdays,” Candice said. “Cake is awesome no matter how old you are.”

  “We’ll see how you feel in twenty-five years, sweetie. So how is everything with the candy shop and Eli?” she asked.

  “Good. Business is still doing well, and Eli and I have been spending a lot of time together. Neither of us has many days off, but at least our shops don’t open until the afternoon. Dinner together is a rare treat, but we eat a lot of brunch.”

  “I’m glad you two are doing so well. I have to admit, I don’t feel like I really know him that well,” the deli owner said. “Now that you don’t live at home, I guess I don’t really have much of a chance to see your friends.”

  “Do you want to go out to eat with us sometime?” her daughter offered. “His grandfather has been wanting to meet you. I guess his daughter has taken him to the deli before, and he was impressed with the place. You could get dinner with us at the retirement home some Sunday evening. I join Eli there about twice a month. It works out perfectly, since their dinner starts about half an hour after the candy shop closes.”

  “I would love to,” she said, touched. Just a few years ago, when Candice was still a teenager, she would have thrown a fit had Moira even been in the same room as her and her boyfriend. Now Candice was inviting her mother out to dinner with the boyfriend. It was quite the improvement, and just served to show how much their relationship had improved over the years.

  “Awesome. Will next weekend work? I think that’s actually the next time Eli and I were planning on going.”

  “That should work for me. I’ve been taking weekends off since I promoted Darrin. It’s nice to have something like a normal work week again.”

  “I bet,” said the young woman with a smile. “Nothing compares to lounging around the house on a Saturday afternoon, especially when you know you have the next day free, too.”

  “That’s exactly what I plan to do tomorrow,” said Moira. “I’m looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The problem with nice, relaxing weekends was that after just a few hours, they tended to get boring. Moira had never been one to sit around the house all day, so once she finished her cup of coffee and caught up on two of the shows that she watched, she found herself itching to get something done.

  She pulled the to-do list of house and garden work and assessed it. It was pouring outside, so the weeding, mowing, and trimming would have to wait. She had been meaning to look into enlarging the fenced area behind her house so the dogs could have more space to run around, but since she was already going to be spending money to get the deli’s website professionally designed, that should probably wait too.

  That left cleaning out the basement and the attic, which the house’s previous owners had left full of junk; regrouting down in the bathroom; or painting the master bedroom.

  Flipping a mental coin, she decided to get a start on the basement. She thought she might also check for leaks that might not have been evident when the inspector cleared the house on a sunny week late in the spring.

  She remembered seeing some broken china down there last time, so she slipped her feet into a pair of sandals and made Keeva and Maverick wait upstairs. The huge grey Irish wolfhound and only slightly smaller German shepherd watched with interest as she made her way down the stairs. The two of them were her constant shadows around the house, and were never happy when they weren’t allowed to be right by her side.

  Armed with a broom, a dustpan, and a garbage bag, she began the task of sweeping up the cleared areas so that she could walk around without worrying about cutting her feet. Since she had moved here after losing the majority of her possessions in a fire at her old house, she hadn’t really needed the storage space. However, she knew she would want it eventually, and there was no better time than the present to get started on a project.

  Most of what had been left down there was simply trash. Cardboard boxes full of old magazines, stacks of yellowed newspapers, and broken bits and pieces of vases, plates, mugs, and bowls. Whoever had lived here before her definitely hadn’t been one for throwing things out.

  She got a good start before she began to get distracted by the old newspapers. It was obvious that this was a collection that had taken decades to accumulate—some clippings were from as far back as the 1980s—and it was possible that there were even older ones towards the bottom of the piles. There didn’t seem to be any particular pattern to be found in the old articles. Sometimes the whole newspaper had been preserved, still folded neatly and tossed on a pile. Other times single stories had been painstakingly clipped out, then tossed haphazardly into a heap.

  I wonder why this person kept all of these newspapers, she found herself wondering. It’s really kind of strange. The hair on the back of her neck began to prickle, and she put down the clipping of an article about a local school’s girls’ volleyball team from twenty years ago. Each of the girls’ faces was circled in black marker, and one had an X drawn through the circle.

  The dark, musty-smelling basement with all of its nooks and crannies began to wear down on her nerves. She usually didn’t get creeped out so easily, so she decided to go upstairs, make some tea, and let the dogs out. The break would get her head back in the game. She would also do one last sweep across the floor to make sure all of the broken glass had been cleaned up; that way she could have the dogs down here with her. The company would be welcome.

  The weather was still wet, and she stood for a couple of minutes at the back door while the dogs sniffed around the yard. There was something about the scent of a summer rainstorm that she had always loved. The low roll of thunder in the distance reminded her of the August evenings spent at the softball field in town while Candice played, and she felt a sharp pang for the times before she and Mike had separated. When she was younger, she never thought that she would be facing her middle years alone. Would she and David ever share those sorts of family memories? She often wondered where her relationship with him was going. There were peri
ods when they both seemed serious and committed to a long-term relationship, but then there were weeks when they were both so busy that they hardly saw each other. With her new work schedule, she hoped to have more of the latter, and less of the former… but somehow, things kept seeming to come up.

  The fault wasn’t hers alone, she knew. Just last week David had spent a few days out of town for a case he was working on. The week before he had cancelled a dinner with her because he had to tail someone’s allegedly cheating husband. She didn’t mind those sorts of things, not really, but their busy schedules sometimes made it hard to spend quality time together.

  She heaved a sigh, drained the last of her lukewarm tea, called the dogs to her, and headed back to the basement to continue her work. It was time to set her melancholy mood aside and focus on making some sense of the mess that the house’s previous owners had left her.

  Keeva and Maverick seemed to enjoy the opportunity to sniff around the basement while she sorted through the piles of old papers. They hadn’t been down there much before now—Moira had been worried about them finding mothballs, mouse poison, or some other sort of danger left behind by previous residents. The German shepherd seemed particularly interested in the crawlspace in the back, and she had to keep telling him not to climb over the boxes as he tried to reach it.

  “I don’t know what’s in there, buddy,” she said. “There might be old fiberglass insulation, or even more broken bottles. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  The dog finally gave up and lay down next to Keeva on the old blanket she had spread out for them. Moira eventually became bored with reading the old papers, so she just began to toss them haphazardly into the garbage bags. A box of old nature magazines she kept, and she put aside a few antique-looking knick-knacks to sell to the local antique shop. She doubted they were worth much, but she had never liked throwing away things that were still in perfectly good condition.