Key Lime Die: A Key West Culinary Cozy - Book 2 Read online

  “SubLime Sweets, how can I help you?” she asked in a relaxed manner, taking a small bite of pie.

  “Hi, I know this is terribly last minute but I was wondering if it would be at all possible to place an order for seventy-five pies for this coming Saturday?” a harried woman’s voice requested.

  “How many did you say?” Marilyn’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Seventy-five. I know it’s terrible to ask at the last minute,” the woman said apologetically. “My daughter is getting married and she’s thrown a fit about the cake and now I have five-hundred guests coming and no dessert. Key Lime pie seems like an appropriate and creative option doesn’t it?”

  “Of course it does, this is Key West,” Marilyn chuckled. “I’m looking at our calendar and it looks like it’s you’re in luck. With a bit of careful planning, I can have seventy-five fresh pies ready for you on Saturday morning.”

  Marilyn held her breath, waiting for the woman to change her mind, not quite daring to believe that she would finally be getting some of her profits back all at once.

  “Wonderful,” the woman sounded as relieved as Marilyn felt. They finished the arrangements and Marilyn hung up with a grateful heart. This had been a horrible week, but today had proved that things could get better. She and Tiara spent the entire week reviewing finances and making plans to test out some of their own advertising. They needed someone who could clean up their presence on the internet and, unfortunately, that came with a high price tag.

  “This is real life I guess,” Marilyn sighed. She’d gotten away with trading pies to barter for services in the past, but Tiara made it abundantly clear that ‘real’ business people didn’t do such things.

  **

  “By the way,” Tiara said from her perch on Marilyn’s overstuffed couch, “I invited Paige over tonight.”

  “What?” her mother was taken totally by surprise. “She’s coming here? Tonight?”

  “I’m sorry, I know that this week has been just so crazy. I was finally able to get in touch with Paige this afternoon and I invited her here, knowing we’d be doing this, and I just completely forgot to tell you,” her uber-responsible daughter admitted, chagrined.

  “That’s my girl,” Marilyn leaned over to give Tiara a hug.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” she remarked, not sounding overly optimistic.

  Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang and Tiara went to greet her former classmate. The two girls chatted in the doorway for a few minutes before coming into the house.

  “Paige this is my mom, Marilyn. She owns SubLime Sweets.”

  “Hi,” Paige looked a bit shy. She was a mousy sort, plain looks with a soft voice. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Marilyn felt oddly nervous.

  “Sit,” Tiara said. “I’ll grab a snack for us.” Without pausing for a response she headed to the kitchen.

  “So you two went to high school together?” Marilyn led with a safe, innocuous conversation starter.

  Paige nodded her head, seeming uncomfortable and Marilyn wondered what her daughter was up to.

  “That’s nice,” she gave what she hoped was an encouraging smile, wracking her brain desperately for another topic.

  They sat in awkward silence until Tiara returned with three slices of pie. She distributed the sumptuous sliced and they all dug in with gusto.

  “So Paige, you work for Joseph, how do you like it?” Tiara quickly dispensed with formalities, going right to the heart of the matter. Marilyn liked her style and wished that she had even a fraction of her gumption.

  “It’s ok. It’s a job you know,” the girl shrugged, clearly enjoying her pie and choosing to focus on it, rather than the two women facing her.

  “How long have you been there?” she continued the blitz.

  “Just the last year,” she admitted.

  Everyone grew quiet and Marilyn took a large bite of pie without even enjoying it, just for something to do.

  “This is really good,” Paige enthused, making the beleaguered pie shop owner smile. So, maybe they could connect after all. Following her daughter’s lead, Marilyn decided to dive into the conversation.

  “The thing is,” she began, “your owner, well…the store’s owner, we think he’s trying to put me out of business and I guess I really don’t know what to do about it,” she confessed, going for shock value.

  Paige played with her fork and pie for a bit, not looking up from her plate. “Well, he’s not a very popular guy, and he can be really tough to work for. I haven’t heard him say anything about you though.” She fiddled again. “I have noticed the uptick in advertising though. He just put a billboard up for visitors as they come into Key West…and it’s all about the new Key Lime pie.”

  “Did I do something to upset him?” Marilyn wondered, mostly thinking aloud. “Why would he focus any energy on my store and my share of the market?”

  “I don’t know,” Paige shrugged, looked at her pie and set it on the coffee table, standing abruptly. “I actually have to go, sorry to eat and run but… I told Tiara earlier, I have plans for tonight.” The poor girl acted as though she couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

  “Well that was completely unhelpful,” Tiara sighed, once the door was closed and Paige was sure to be out of earshot.

  “At least we know it’s not a store-wide conspiracy,” her mother replied, trying to find a silver lining.

  Marilyn had visited the home of Rachel, Joseph’s receptionist, earlier in the week, fully intending to speak with the girl’s mother regarding her rude behavior. She had a pie in hand and had carefully planned out what she wanted to say, but Rachel was the one who answered the door.

  “Rachel?” Marilyn asked, knowing immediately that the brazen girl in front of her had to be the same one she’d spoken to on the phone.

  “Yeah, who wants to know?” the ill-mannered teen asked with extreme disinterest.

  Marilyn chose to ignore the insolent question. “I just wanted to bring you one of my pies. I realized that you probably said those inaccurate things about my pie the other day because you haven’t tasted it yet,” she tried out a smile, hoping it came across more genuine than it felt.

  The teen’s bony hip jutted out to the side and Marilyn watched as Rachel looked from the box back to Marilyn.

  “No thank,” came the bored-sounding reply. “I am not eating that.” She pursed her lips together and Marilyn bit back the reply that she wanted to give, determined to have a positive outcome.

  “I just wanted you to see that my pie is actually very good. I know you’ll like it,” she insisted, with another fake smile.

  “I bet you put something in it, you couldn’t pay me to touch that thing,” Rachel stepped back and slammed the door in Marilyn’s face.

  Marilyn’s blood was boiling. She rang the doorbell again, then another time. No one answered. Marilyn knocked on the wood surrounding the screen.

  “Rachel,” she called loudly trying to make her voice carry through the door. “I would like to talk to your mother.” That happened to be the worst possible thing that she could have said if her goal was to get the girl to actually open the door and take the pie, but she was so livid at the girl’s sassy attitude that she just couldn’t keep the words from coming out of her mouth.

  She banged on the door several more times and rang the bell for another minute before heading back to her car in defeat.

  All of Friday was dedicated to producing the seventy-five pie order, prepping all the ingredients then beginning the process. Marilyn had decided that she would do all the baking herself from the time the shop closed to the time it opened in the morning. She planned to wait for Margaret, the mother of the bride, to come in and pick up the massive order, then she’d happily leave Tiara in charge and go home to get some sleep.

  The first three hours were fine. She played classic tunes at full volume in the kitchen and enjoyed herself tremendously, something she hadn’t been able to do for the pas
t couple of weeks. She absolutely loved making Key Lime pies that had actually been a special order and would all be eaten. From one to two thirty Marilyn felt her energy flagging. She knew that if she laid down her head down anywhere, or even took a seat for a moment, she’d fall asleep immediately.

  Several cups of coffee and grim determination gave her a second wind, but, by five a.m. the tides of exhaustion had turned against her and were pulling her under. Her vision was fuzzy and she worked slowly and carefully to ensure that every detail was perfect. After splashing water on her face in an attempt to be more alert, she double-checked each and every pie to make sure they were wedding worthy.

  When Tiara came in, Marilyn was ready to crash, hard.

  “You look terrible,” her daughter observed, looking fresh as a daisy.

  “Thanks,” her mother grimaced. “This is what I look like when I’ve been awake all night.”

  “You should go, I can make sure that her pies are safely stashed in her van,” Tiara assured her.

  Marilyn looked with love and pride at her only daughter. “Of course you can, sweetie, but I talked to her on the phone and I just feel like I owe it to her to be here, you know?” she explained, brushing a lock of Tiara’s hair back from her face.

  “Sure,” she nodded, and began putting things away that had been left out from her mother’s night of pie making. “You can take a nap in the office if you want to and I’ll get you when she comes in to pick them up.”

  “Nope, I would never wake up. Once my head is down and I’m asleep, I’m staying that way for at least eight hours,” Marilyn blinked and yawned at the thought.

  “Yeah, I get it. You know Mom, I was thinking about this Joseph thing…”

  “And?”

  “Well I was thinking that maybe we should invite him to dinner or something. If he got to know us there’s no way he’d want us to go under. He might still do all the big bucks advertising but he would have to stop the directly aimed stuff. Don’t you think?” Tiara asked, eyes wide with youthful naivete.

  “I don’t know honey, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person I want to go to dinner with but you may be right. I’ll think about it, ok?” her mother replied, too tired to even form a coherent thought.

  Both women had their hands full with clean up and organizing for the next two hours. The store opened and Marilyn started to get antsy. She wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl under the cover. She glanced at the clock in annoyance. The mother of the bride was coming from Georgia, so it must be taking her longer to get here then she’d expected. Or hopefully, for her sake, she was already in Key West and had just over-slept in some nice bed and breakfast by the beach.

  It frustrated Marilyn to no end when people acted like an hour or so, here or there, didn’t matter. After yet another hour Marilyn was ready to faint from exhaustion, and the mother of the bride was still missing in action.

  “Call her,” Tiara said for the third time, handing the phone over.

  “She promised she would give me at least a twenty four hour notice if she had to change anything.” Marilyn held the phone and looked at the door one more time as if that would be the moment Margaret would walk in, then wearily trudged back to her office and pulled the phone number. The second her finger hit the last button Marilyn knew.

  “It’s out of service,” she told Tiara dully.

  “What?”

  “Margaret’s phone number, it’s out of service,” Marilyn repeated.

  “Are you sure you dialed it correctly?” her daughter frowned, hoping that her mother had been so tired that she’d punched in the wrong number.

  Marilyn dropped her forehead into her hands. “She didn’t give me a deposit, she wanted to pay in cash…and I was just so happy to have an order at all. I should have known better,” she lamented.

  “Oh,” Tiara replied in a small, worried voice.

  There was no Margaret, there was no wedding, there was no deposit, and there would be no payment. Marilyn had been set up.

  Chapter 5

  Marilyn was beyond livid, knowing that most of the seventy-five pies that she had stayed up all night to prepare, would have to be donated to charity or thrown away. What sort of man would do such a thing to another human being? To say that she was seriously displeased with Joseph Hernandez was the understatement of the year. At this point, she was surprised that she didn’t have smoke coming out of her ears.

  “Mom,” Tiara said, firmly. “You’ve been awake all night. Don’t you think it would be a good idea go home, get some sleep, and deal with this when you’re feeling more…refreshed?”

  Marilyn tried to calm down before responding to her daughter, who was just trying to help. Her sound, reasonable advice made sense, but right now she just wanted to yell and throw things and cry but she knew that that would not be the best example of adult behavior that she could model in front of her daughter. Silence seemed to be her most prudent option at the moment, so she pressed her lips together and placed a fingertip over her twitching left eye.

  “Mom, you know I’m great at coming up with creative solutions, and I would be happy to take care of all these pies today. Just go home and get some sleep and when you wake up I’ll have done something worthy with each one,” Tiara promised gently.

  Marilyn rolled her neck back and forth over her shoulders, hearing the crackles of tension popping. She laced her fingers behind her head and pulled it forward, feeling the strain all the way down between her shoulder blades. She took a deep breath in and released in slowly, while her daughter watched her attempt to wind down.

  “Right,” she nodded, sighing. “Of course you’re right. I should just go home and get some sleep, and I’m hoping that I don’t have nightmares about all of the ingredients that I wasted, and all of the time and effort I put into pulling an all-nighter for a wedding that never existed,” the weary shop owner said, hating how bitter she sounded.

  “Don’t do anything right now, Mom. I know that it’s your nature to face problems head-on and confront adversity the moment it rears its ugly head, but, I guarantee that you’ll have a much better perspective on the whole situation after you’ve had some sleep.”

  “I don’t want perspective,” Marilyn shook her head in disgust, the adult version of stomping her foot in anger. Once again her daughter had taken on the role of mature advisor and Marilyn was a tired and cranky child on the verge of throwing a fit.

  “What I really want, is to talk with Joseph Hernandez face-to-face. There are some things that man needs to hear.” Her voice quavered and her hands trembled as she withstood the incredible urge to unleash the wrath that consumed her when she even spoke Joseph’s name. There was no doubt that her rational and practical daughter was right about sleeping first and dealing with things later, but Marilyn’s emotions were at the boiling point and the only way to keep the pressure cooker from exploding was to let off some steam.

  She untied her apron, balled it up and threw it on the counter, picking up one of her brand-new Key Lime pies and carrying it out the door with her. Standing on the sidewalk, she took a deep breath and with pie in hand, she headed for Joseph’s shop with a determined grimace.

  Chapter 6

  When she reached the entrance to Piece of the Pie, Marilyn walked without pause through the front door and behind the counter.

  “Hey, you can’t come back here,” she recognized the obnoxious voice and whirled around to confront Rachel.

  “You, young lady, are incredibly rude. Try learning some manners.” She continued toward the kitchen, which was almost triple the size of her own, and caught a glimpse of Paige on the other side of one of the baking counters. The sweet girl’s expression was a mix of confusion, fear and disbelief, and Marilyn felt a brief twinge of guilt for having inspired it.

  A man came out of the office and stood directly in her path, determined to intervene. She’d met Joseph before and remembered him well enough to know that this wasn’t him, although there was enough of a dis
tinct resemblance that this must be his brother. The only other man, besides Joseph, that Cynthia Hernandez had mentioned was her brother-in-law, Juan.

  “Where is Joseph?” Marilyn was well aware that she sounded like a scolding mother, but her stern tone seemed to work wonders, and Juan mutely pointed toward the back office. Marilyn marched right by him and without knocking, let herself in.

  “Joseph Hernandez,” she had one hand on her hip and the other holding the pie, well aware that her fierce boldness was substantially increasing with each encounter. “How could you?” Marilyn demanded, her eyes flashing. “How could you intentionally sabotage the business of a fellow pie maker?”

  “I think we talked about this the other day on the phone,” Joseph’s demeanor was far too calm in the face of her ire. “As far as I know, Key Lime pie is not something that you have exclusive rights to make. And the pie itself is, in fact, famous in Key West. It would be bad for my business if I didn’t offer something so representative of the local community,” he finished smoothly.

  “You are just too much!” Marilyn shook her head in disgust and disbelief. “You could at least take responsibility for what you’ve done.”

  “And what exactly is it that you’re, most likely, incorrectly, assuming that I’ve done?”

  “You have quite obviously constructed an agenda to ruin my business,” she accused.

  “You mean that I have an agenda from which to build my business? What smart business owner doesn’t?” he asked, seeming to laugh at her.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. You and your people have been handing out flyers and coupons in front of my store. You blocked me from coming up in Internet searches, and when I do show up, the only thing that can be seen is a bunch of fabricated bad reviews.”

  Marilyn paused, gathering her breath and strength. “And then, to add insult to injury, somehow you seemed to find it necessary to have someone call my store to order seventy-five unwanted and unpaid for wedding pies.”