Introduction

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

It might have been Kindred Spirit Days in Elmwood Park, but Suzanne Dietz wasn't exactly feeling the spirit. Shifting from one moccasined foot to the other, stuck behind a table selling slices of soggy pineapple cake, hard-as-a-rock fudge, and gooped-up cherry pies for the Library Committee's fundraiser, Suzanne would have much preferred to be back at her own place, the Cackleberry Club.

Closing her eyes against the intrusion of laughing clowns, frenetic jugglers, and accordion music, she imagined herself bustling about in her own cozy café this Sunday afternoon. If brunch ran late, as it often did, she'd be juggling plates of Eggs Florentine, Huevos Rancheros, Slumbering Volcanoes and towering omelets stuffed with gooey, molten Gruyere cheese.

Eggs, of course, were the morning specialty at the Cackleberry Club. But lunch was delectably creative, too, with specials like drunken pecan chicken, brown sugar meatloaf, and frozen lemonade pie. And Suzanne also laid out a pretty snappy afternoon tea that could probably tempt even the most proper English lady.

"We ought to be selling our own cakes and muffins and scones," Petra murmured, as if reading Suzanne's mind. Petra was the second partner and principal baker and chef at the Cackleberry Club. "I don't know how we got roped into this. Trying to be do-gooders, I suppose. I thought we'd be selling books!"

"Me, too," said Suzanne as she brushed back shoulder-length silver blond hair and gazed with keen blue eyes at the morose selection of baked goods. "Ours would certainly be better quality. Unfortunately, this stuff

is . . ." she glanced around to make sure one of the pie makers, a glum-looking little woman named Agnes, wasn't in earshot . . . "beyond pathetic."

"I'm terrified folks will think these baked goods are from the Cackleberry Club," Petra murmured in hushed tones. Brown-eyed and square-jawed, Petra was big boned and big hearted. She was known to show up at the front door of a new neighbor with casserole in hand, owned an overweight Russian Blue cat named Rasputin, and had mastered the art of trout fishing.

"Heaven forbid," said Suzanne, pushing up the sleeves of her denim shirt and letting loose a slight shudder. The Cackleberry Club was her baby and she considered herself a stickler for quality control.

"Just look at us," giggled Petra, "we're two volunteers who are really curmudgeons at heart." In fact, they weren't curmudgeons at all. Suzanne, Petra, and their friend, Toni - the third partner in the troika that ran the Cackleberry Club - were just mature women who didn't give a rat's backside about what people thought or said about them. Now that they were on the high side of forty, careening toward fifty, they spoke their minds and lived their lives with grace and fortitude, without dwelling on past actions or feelings of remorse. For some reason, this somewhat pragmatic mid-life philosophy led to better mental health and left them all feeling strangely liberated.

"We're on our own now," Suzanne had told Petra some six months ago. "Free to blaze our own trail, free to make our own mistakes." Suzanne's husband had just passed away and, a few months earlier, Petra's husband, Donny, had gone into the Center City nursing home. But even as Alzheimer's had robbed Donny's mind, it had ignited Petra's spunk and determination.

As a final coup de gras, Toni's slightly younger juvenile delinquent husband, Junior, had up and left her for a bar waitress with a head full of hot pink extensions.

That's when a merciful God had smiled down, taken pity, aligned the planets, and helped set gentle plans in motion for the Cackleberry Club to

be - excuse the pun - hatched.

The Cackleberry Club, a whitewashed, rehabbed Spur station out on Highway 65 was a kitschy, quirky place. With a decent kitchen installed, battered wooden tables and chairs put in place, and legions of antique salt and pepper shakers and ceramic chickens arranged on shelves, a delightful little café with a tangle of wild roses out front had emerged.

Because there were a couple of extra rooms for sprawling, it became readily apparent that a Book Nook might bring in extra business. So cases of books, mostly mysteries, romance, and children's books, had been ordered and neatly arranged on shelves. Petra, who was a knitting and quilting freak, decreed there was also room for a Knitting Nest in an adjacent room. Colorful skeins of yarn and hundreds of knitting needles were carefully displayed, along with towering stacks of quilt squares. And once rump-sprung armchairs were liberated from attics, draped with wooly afghans, and arranged in a cozy semi-circle, customers felt more than welcome to sit and stay a while.

In a relatively short time, a few months to be exact, the Cackleberry Club had emerged as the crazy quilt apex for food, books, knitting, quilting, and good old-fashioned female bonding that drew fans not just from Kindred but from all over the tri-county area.

Petra nudged Suzanne with an elbow. "Look. Mayor Mobley's squeezed in a little campaigning."

Suzanne gazed past the face painting booth and the funnel cake wagon to watch their pudgy mayor swagger along, glad-handing folks and slapping oversized campaign buttons into their palms. "What a slime ball," she muttered to herself. Though Kindred was a picture postcard little town with historic brick buildings and well-kept homes skirted by towering bluffs and remnants of a hardwood forest, their mayor, as top elected official, left something to be desired. Suzanne always had the niggling feeling that Mayor Mobley was just this side of legitimate. And that various permits, licenses, and easements could be more easily obtained by greasing his sticky palms.

"Ozzie never came back for his pie," observed Petra, looking at the paltry few that had been reserved. Ozzie Driesden was the local funeral director as well as a civic booster. Of course, what funeral director wasn't a civic booster? They all wanted to win friends and influence people for that final trip to the great beyond.

"Hmm?" murmured Suzanne, still keeping a watchful eye on the swaggering Mayor Mobley.

"Ozzie bought a cherry pie earlier, but hasn't been back to pick it up."

"Tell you what," said Suzanne, frantic to ditch out. "I'll run the pie over to Ozzie and you pull out your squishy black magic marker and slash prices on all this stuff. Hopefully, it'll magically fly off the table so we can boogie on out of here."

"Deal," said Petra, as Suzanne snatched up Ozzie's pie. "But I think I'm going to slip a few ginger-spice cupcakes to that poor fellow sitting by the picnic tables. He looks like he hasn't had anything to eat in a week."

"Better taste them first," warned Suzanne. "You wouldn't want to kill him."

Delighted to be done with the bake sale, Suzanne set off down Front Street, finally able to relax and enjoy the afternoon. What little was left of it, anyway.

An orange September sun hung low in the sky, but the faint rays were still warm and relaxing on her back. A lingering lazy day feeling before the crispness of autumn took hold.

In fact, Suzanne was casting admiring glances at fire maples and day dreaming about riding her horse across a sunny hillside of blazing sumac when she pushed open the front door of the Driesden and Draper Funeral Home.

That's when the day's warmth and Suzanne's good humor suddenly came to a crashing halt.

The mingled aromas of over-ripe flowers, chill air, and . . . what else? . . . chemicals? . . . jarred her mind and assaulted her sensibilities.

Suzanne wrinkled her nose and set her jaw firmly. Well, of course it's going to smell funny, she told herself, taking a few tentative steps into the entry way. It's a funeral home. There's always going to be . . . chemicals.

She shook her head as a shiver oozed its way down her spine. When Walter had died, they'd held his visitation right here, in this very funeral place.

Squaring her shoulders, Suzanne crossed the whisper-soft celadon green carpet and called out, "Ozzie?" in what she hoped was a confident and slightly authoritative voice.

She waited a few moments, keeping company with a grandfather clock, a wooden podium reserved for guest books, and a small brocade fainting couch that had a small table with a box of Kleenex snugged up next to it. Sighing, Suzanne decided it was time to be a little more pro-active.

Gripping the pie tighter, Suzanne struck off to her left and peered through the open doorway into the smaller of the two chapels. The room was tastefully furnished in shades of dove gray and mauve. And it was empty, except for a nondescript sofa and a semi-circle of black metal folding chairs that looked like a cluster of skinny crows.

"Ozzie?" Suzanne called out again. "I brought your pie." But there was no answer, save the ticking of the staid grandfather clock.

Suzanne re-crossed the entry hall. Maybe Ozzie was scurrying about in the other chapel. She touched fingertips to an ornate brass pull and slid open a heavy wooden pocket door. As she glanced in expectantly, a bronze coffin met her eyes. Lid propped up, resting on a wooden bier, the coffin was flanked by two pots of slightly drooping irises.

Oops, this room is occupado.

Suzanne caught a quick glimpse of cream-colored satin brocade as well as the coffin's occupant lying in still repose. Letting out a quick breath, she quickly turned her gaze to a brass candle holder that held six white tapers. And couldn't shut the door fast enough.

Shifting uncomfortably, a little unnerved, Suzanne stared at the double doors that led to the back of the funeral home. The room where Ozzie did his sad business.

"Hey . . . Ozzie?" she called out again, drumming her fingers nervously on the underside of the tin pie plate.

No answer. Nada. And the insistent ticking of the grandfather clock was beginning to seriously grate on Suzanne's nerves. Glancing at the offending antique clock, she suddenly recalled fragments of a long-ago childhood story, whispered at night around a flickering campfire. Something about a grandfather clock that stopped dead the exact moment its creaky old owner drew his final, rattley breath.

"Silly," Suzanne murmured to herself. She wasn't a big believer in legends or signs or portents. Suzanne was a woman who believed in living fully and wholly in the present and not fretting unduly about what might be coming down the road. That didn't mean Suzanne hadn't noodled a five-year plan or even a ten-year plan, because she had. But that was for business. Mostly, in her personal life, she just tried to keep things on an even keel and obsess as little as possible. She found this approach helpful in retaining positive mental energy. It wasn't a bad way to keep crow's feet and wrinkles at bay, either.

Shifting the pie to her left hand, Suzanne smoothed the front of her blouse, then placed her palm flat against one of double doors. They were swinging doors, of course, similar in design to the service doors restaurants installed between dining room and kitchen. Except, in this case, there was no eye-level window to peek through. Because who in their right mind wanted to see into the back of a funeral home, anyway?

Suzanne pushed lightly, felt the door move inward.

So not locked, she told herself. Which meant Ozzie was probably puttering around in back. And since there was a body out here, there probably wouldn't be one in back. At least she hoped there wasn't. Suzanne couldn't recall any recent obituaries in the Bugle. Could only think of the one last Thursday for Julius Carr.

And she'd just encountered him.

So . . . okay.

But as the door continued to swing inward, it clanked hard, hitting a rolling metal cart. Suzanne did a double take. The cart lay wheels up, half blocking the door. To either side of her, stacks of blue and white pharmaceutical boxes, no longer lined up nice and neat on their grid of shiny metal shelving, were tumbled haphazardly on gray linoleum. Suzanne could read the labels on the upended boxes; Hizone, Lynch, ESCO.

What just happened here? she wondered.

And suddenly heard a faint clink.

What was that? The snick of a metal door, the click of an instrument being set down?

Sure it was. So Ozzie was back here. Probably.

"Ozzie," Suzanne called, rounding a corner. "What the heck hap . . ."

Suzanne stopped dead in her tracks, her words segueing to a sputter, then a dying gasp. Her mouth opened reflexively, snapped shut, then opened again. But no sound issued forth.

Because Ozzie was back here, all right. Splayed out on an enormous metal table like some sort of medical experiment gone horribly wrong.

Suzanne's eyelids fluttered uncontrollably as she took in the ghastly scene. Plastic hoses kinked around Ozzie, his right arm stuck rigidly out to one side. And there, sticking into that arm, his very white, waxy arm, was a large needle attached to a length of tubing.

Suicide? The word exploded in Suzanne's brain like a thousand points of light. Oh no, not Ozzie Driesden. He wouldn't do that, would he?

Suzanne's stomach lurched unsteadily and the beginnings of bitter, hot bile rose in the back of her throat.

Struggling to force her mind to work, to reboot her brain's frozen hard drive, she thought to herself, Got to get help.

As that thought popped into her head like a bubble above a cartoon drawing, there was a sudden, sharp snap, like a freshly laundered towel jerking on a clothesline. A soft shuffle sounded behind Suzanne, then a cold, wet, foul-smelling rag was clamped viciously across her nose and mouth.

Throwing up her hands in protest, the pie flipped end over end, and crashed to the floor. Struggling blindly, not thinking clearly now, Suzanne inhaled sharply and involuntarily breathed in the prickly chemical that soaked the rag. Her heart lurched painfully in her chest and her lungs burned like hot coals. Staggering drunkenly, Suzanne's spinning mind spat out a single word: Camphor?

Then her head was filled with the drone of a thousand angry hornets and her knees began to buckle like a cheap card table.

No . . . chloroform, was Suzanne's last semi-lucid thought as blackness descended and she crumpled atop the ruined cherry pie. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

Do you think the title, Eggs Benedict Arnold, offers a clue to its story line?

What's the starting point of the book - the one action that gets the story rolling?

Are there any characters you identify with? Any characters you particularly like or dislike - and why?

Which characters do you think offer the most comedic interest?

How would you characterize the relationship between Suzanne and Sheriff Doogie?

Why do you suppose so many women want to be entrepreneurs like Suzanne, Toni, and Petra? And why do many women prefer to own smaller, more manageable businesses?

Do you think the author has succeeded in creating a "sense of place" in the Cackleberry Club? Can you picture it in your mind?

Do you think the author's descriptions were appealing to your senses? Could you smell the bacon sizzling? Feel the softness of the yarns?

What is the over-riding theme of the book? Faith, friendship, justice?

What egg recipe would you add to the Cackleberry Club's menu?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Laura Childs' web site

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