Page 9 of A Midsummer Night’s Ghost (Murder By Design #8)

NINE

“How was play practice?” Jake asked, dipping a spoon in his sauce to taste it as we entered the kitchen from the attached garage.

The whole house smelled like tomatoes and basil and garlic and it was exactly what I needed.

“Should you tell him or should I?” Grandma asked me, setting her enormous purse down on the kitchen table.

It was a pet peeve of mine that she did that. Handbags and purses get rested on the floor sometimes if there’s nowhere to hang them, including bathroom stalls. It grossed me out. But all I could do was quickly move it to the hooks by the garage entrance door and spritz the table with cleaning spray under the guise of getting it ready to set the table.

“You can tell him.” I was feeling a little deflated and weird about basically seeing Mary’s soul leave her body. That doesn’t happen every day, nor should it.

“Tell me what?”

“Mary is dead and Clifford got stabbed. So we need a new Thisbe for the play. I told Sara we needed an understudy but she didn’t listen.” Grandma settled down onto a kitchen chair.

Jake added more salt to his sauce and glanced over at me. “We’re talking metaphorically, right? Like that’s part of the play?”

“Nope. Clifford got stabbed by Sara Murphy and it made Mary have a heart attack and drop dead. Clifford is fine though.”

“Someone got stabbed at the senior center? What the f—” Jake started to say but Grandma cut him off.

“Don’t you use that kind of language, young man.”

Apparently, snarking about Mary’s makeup was okay but swearing wasn’t. Grandma’s moral standards had some gray areas.

Jake clapped his mouth shut. “Sorry. But I don’t understand how that happened. Or honestly, what happened.”

“I was in the hallway so I didn’t see it happen but from what I was told, Sara thought the knife was a prop knife and she was demonstrating how Clifford could kill himself on stage as part of the play with real gusto. Only it either wasn’t a prop knife or even prop knives aren’t meant to be so enthusiastically jabbed into someone’s stomach.”

“Clifford’s got a beer gut, so I think that saved him,” Grandma said. “The knife couldn’t get through all that fat to hit anything important.”

“Saved by beer,” Jake said, shaking his head. “That’s a first. Is he going to be okay?”

“It seemed like it, but he was distraught about Mary, obviously.” I went to the sink to wash my hands yet again. It was then that I noticed there was blood on the sleeve of my blouse. I blanched. So much for my cute outfit.

“Bailey was a real trooper,” Grandma said. “She jumped right in and put pressure on Clifford’s wound. Sara Murphy passed out and then threw up. She was totally useless.”

“Well, she was in shock,” I said, running water under my bloody cuff. “She accidentally stabbed Clifford.”

Grandma made a “pff” sound. “She’ll make a lousy wife and mother if she can’t handle a little blood.”

“There’s blood in marriage?” Jake asked, looking amused by that thought. He dropped his spoon into the sink.

The new old house had a dishwasher but I was starting to notice he always did that. He put dirty dishes and cutlery into the sink instead of directly into the dishwasher, which meant later he had to put up disgusting wet dirty dishes and transfer them to the dishwasher. It made no sense to me. But living with another person was full of little puzzles like that. Maybe it was how you were raised. Though Mrs. Marner seemed very anti dishes-in-the-sink.

“What do you know about marriage?” Grandma asked Jake, sounding offended that he was amused.

“Nothing, that’s why I’m asking.”

Grandma sniffed. “Just take your garlic bread out of the oven. It smells like it’s burning.”

It didn’t. She was just miffed.

“I feel terrible for Mary’s family. Poor Clifford. Stabbed and then had to see his girlfriend die a few feet away from him.”

Grandma nodded. “Terrible. I hope Sara can pull it together for practice tomorrow. We need to reassign the roles.”

That didn’t sound overly sympathetic.

Jake and I exchanged a glance. “Hey, is Sara really the director because she has to do community service?” I asked Grandma.

“I have no idea.”

“Is that a thing?” I asked Jake. “Teaching seniors as restitution for a crime.”

“No. That is not a thing.”

“So why would she say that?” I mused.

“Are you sure that’s what she said?” Grandma asked. “Maybe she just meant volunteer hours to look good on a school application or a resume.”

“Hmm. That could be.” Now I was doubting the actual wording Sara had used. “At any rate, I don’t feel like she could survive jail. She was more squeamish than me.”

“You’re not squeamish at all,” Grandma said. “Who says you’re squeamish?”

I was kind of squeamish. At least when it came to blood. “I don’t like blood.”

“No one likes blood but sociopaths,” Jake commented. “Some of us just get used to it.” He fished a few strands of pasta out of boiling water. “Here, taste these and see if they’re ready.”

He shoved the noodles into my mouth before I was ready so I was slurping and chewing. I tried to talk around them. “So you don’t think Sara meant to stab Clifford, do you?”

“I have no idea,” Jake said. “Why would she stab an old man and then freak out about it? Did anyone secure the scene and the knife?”

I looked over at Grandma as I swallowed. “Did you see what happened to the knife?”

“Anne washed it and put it in the prop box. That cop said she could.”

“Two patrolmen showed up,” I told Jake. “No detectives.”

He shrugged. “Suburban cops. They must have figured it was an accident. There were what, thirty witnesses that it was an accident?”

Something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with me. “What if someone changed out a prop knife for a real knife?”

“Now you’re just looking for murder,” Jake said. “Is the pasta good?”

I nodded. “It’s good. And I’m not looking for murder. But it’s just weird. Now does a prop knife malfunction like that? I think I should talk to Sara.”

No one said anything. I took that as they agreed that it was a brilliant idea. “I need to go change and use stain stick on this blouse. Blood is hard to get out.”

“It’s a real bitch,” Grandma agreed. “Soak it with hydrogen peroxide.”

Jake’s eyebrows went up. I knew what he was thinking. Grandma was allowed to swear but he wasn’t? Maybe there were just gradations to cursing.

I kissed his cheek. “Be right back, love you.”

“Love you too. Hey, what do you want to do for your birthday?”

I wrinkled my nose. “No surprises. That’s what I want.”

The corner of his mouth turned up. “Can’t put a bow on that.”

My life was already full of surprises. I didn’t need my friends and family popping out from behind furniture too.

“All I want is a very cute and chic cupcake.”

“What the hell is a chic cupcake?”

“Not one from the grocery store. Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out!” I went down the hall unbuttoning my top as I went.

Two days later I stared at Sara Murphy across a nicked up wooden table at a coffee shop that everyone seemed to love but me. The bathroom was always filthy, the tables had old crumbs collecting dust between the wooden slats of the farmhouse tables, and the baristas always acted like they were doing you a favor by fixing the drink you paid eight dollars for.

They were coasting on the fact that they were fair trade and people wanted to turn up for that. I wanted to turn up for that as well, but with clean tables and staff that could crack a smile once in a while.

It didn’t seem like a Sara Murphy coffee shop. She seemed like a Starbucks kind of girl with her hair extensions and her workout clothes.

“How are you doing?” I asked her, sympathetically.

“I’m a mess,” she said, raising her coffee mug to her full lips. “A total mess.”

Definitely not physically. She had on contouring and false eyelashes at nine a.m. I was going to assume she meant emotionally. “It was such a shock. What do you think happened?”

“I think someone swapped out the knives,” she said without hesitation. “But that fat old cop said I was just being hysterical. That I “misunderstood” what a prop knife means.” She jabbed herself in the chest. “I did theater for a decade! I did theater in New York City! I know a prop knife from a kitchen knife.” Then she made a face. “I just didn’t look that closely because I’m the one who ordered the props and it was totally a collapsible knife in the box when I took it to the senior center last week. I just grabbed it out of Clifford’s hand to demonstrate, assuming it was the right knife. I never dreamed it would have been switched out.”

“That was my theory too,” I said.

“No one listens to women,” she muttered. “Especially women in their twenties. They look at us and just see a pair of boobs.”

Maybe her boobs. Not mine. But I definitely understood where she was coming from.

“Why would someone do that?”

“There’s a killer loose in the senior center! Who knows why? But that janitor died too.” She picked off a piece of her vegan and gluten free doughnut and shook her head. “I’m not going back there. I might be next.”

“Don’t you have to go for your community service?” I lifted my own coffee mug and took a sip. I had a vegan and gluten free doughnut as well and it was quite tasty, with a sugar glaze.

“That’s just something my parents said I have to do if I want to live with them for free. Court ordered, because my parents are literally sitting in judgement of me.”

While it was good to know Sara Murphy hadn’t morphed into a criminal, I was now wondering why I was spending my precious pre-work time sitting here with her.

Sara shook her head. “Boomers. My parents act like I’m wasting all my money on coffee and avocado toast but rent is sky high right now. Didn’t you just buy a house? It’s ridiculous out there, isn’t it? And this is Cleveland. Like how does anyone in L.A. or Seattle or New York even exist? Next thing you know we’ll have to pay for water.”

We already did pay for water, both to drink and in our houses and apartments, but I didn’t think it would help to point that out. “It is insane right now. We had to buy an outdated house. We can’t afford a new build.”

I don’t know why I felt like I had to downplay our financial status. Must have been a Midwestern thing. We can’t take a compliment on an outfit without mentioning we got it on sale either.

“I can’t even afford life. But I can’t afford to die either so I can’t go back to the senior center. Hey, what happens to your student loans when you die?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any loans. I went to community college.” Again, I almost sounded like I was apologizing for not having debt. I needed to work on that.

“So I guess you’re the director of the play now,” Sara said, popping another bite in her mouth.

I almost choked on my coffee. “What?”

“Yeah. I can’t do it, so that leaves you.”

“Why me? I don’t have any theater experience. I didn’t even understand Shakespeare in high school. I still don’t.”

Also, why is it she couldn’t die but she was willing to let me suffer a brutal fate?

“You don’t want to let them down, do you? They’ve been working really hard.”

“I’ll have to think about it. They might not even want to do it, considering what happened to Mary. There is no Thisbe.”

“Please. All those women hated Mary for being the one to snag Clifford.”

We both realized what she said at the exact same time.

“Oh my God!” Sara leaned forward and hissed at me. “Do you think one of them switched the knives to kill Clifford because he didn’t pick them?” She lifted up her doughnut. “Women competing for a man is a tale as old as time.”

“That is true. But wouldn’t they want to kill Mary, not Clifford?”

“Hmm. Good point. Let’s noodle on this. I have to go to pilates now. I’ll text you later.” She stood up, leaving her dishes on the table and said, “Kisses, bye!”

Were Sara Murphy and I best friends now?

Maybe. I had to admit, she was shockingly fun to discuss potential murder with.

I stood up, gathered up all of our plates and mugs and put them in the serving tub so that I didn’t get stink eye from the staff. Lost in thought, I stepped outside.

“Hey! You!”

I turned around to see who was yelling at who and realized immediately they were yelling at me.

It was the guy from Danny O’s with the fresh tattoo.

I jumped and started walking in the opposite direction.

“Don’t walk away from me!”

I didn’t.

Instead, I ran.