A Berry Cunning Conman: A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 4) by A.R. Winters

Author:A.R. Winters [Winters, A.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The next day I overslept again, woke up with another pounding exhaustion headache and barely managed to get some food made before customers started coming in.

Opting to make something that would allow me to throw ingredients into a pot and then coast, I made chili. Lots and lots of chili. I made it just like Brenda had shown me. Three pots of the stuff. I burned the bottom of one pot, and it became an instant addition to the Oops Board. The rest got labeled with full price.

Through it all, I managed to take three cat naps. Literal cat naps. On the floor of the kitchen with Sage sleeping on top of me. By the time I got through the morning crowd—I’ll be generous and call it a “crowd”—I felt grimier than I looked. Despite all of that, I let Joel drag me off to deliver cupcakes to Mrs. Edith Green.

We picked her brain about Morgan, she got misty-eyed, and then showed us a check that she’d already written out to him. It was for $55,000. This while we sat in her modest home with her husband’s ashes in an urn on the table next to her, a car at least ten years old sitting in her driveway, and carpet that was threadbare in a couple of places.

I was glad that Morgan was on a cold slab in the morgue. It meant that Mrs. Green’s life savings were now out of his reach.

Heading in through the back door of the café’s kitchen, I stopped. The first thing I noticed was the absence of burned chili smell. The second thing I noticed was how clean everything was. The third thing I noticed was a man in over-large shabby clothes sweeping the floor at the far side of the kitchen. He was wearing one of my aprons.

“Henry?” I said, my voice full of disbelief. He was a homeless man I’d met a couple of weeks ago. I accidentally saw more of him than I’d ever meant to when I walked in on him washing himself in a public park bathroom. He’d been using the bathroom as his home.

The man stopped sweeping, looked up and spotted me. “Henry?”

I felt like doing a face palm. Henry was the name I’d made up for him when talking about him later, but I actually had no idea what his name was. “Uh, sorry, sorry, um…”

“Jonathan,” he offered. “Patty hired me.” He was a little taller than me, had white, shoulder-length hair and a trimmed white beard, with a forehead that extended halfway to his crown.

Patty had hired him? Patty! I was going to have a talk with that woman. Sure, she said she’d talk to some people and try to find me someone to help out. I had not given her carte blanche to actually hire someone. And for me to walk into my café to find him working here without even an introduction first—that was not okay.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he continued, “but I noticed that one of your pots of chili had burned on the bottom.

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