Sugar and Spice - Chapter Three

 

Chapter Three

October 16 Thursday Evening

Juliana Beaudoin’s Home

Malden, Massachusetts

 

“WHY DON’T YOU want a sleepover?” Anne-Marie Beaudoin asked her daughter Juliana.

“Because the house always stinks like an Italian restaurant. And you might cook fish.”

The sneer on her daughter’s face annoyed Anne-Marie. “Forgive me for earning a living.”

Juliana flounced out of the kitchen saying, “Besides I live out here in Malden and none of my friends want to come out here from Cambridge and Boston.”

This was not any ordinary kitchen. The house had been her immigrant parents’ home, lovingly restored by her father, who had also created a vegetable garden in their back and front yards.

After her husband had died without life insurance, Anne-Marie had moved back home with baby Juliana. After her parents died, she had inherited the house.

There were no siblings. Anne-Marie considered she had a guardian angel who provided what she needed when she needed it, if she put in enough work. Guardian angels sometimes require help. They don’t weed gardens, but they can work with a cloud to provide rainwater.

The 1930s kitchen and dining room had been converted into a commercial kitchen for Anne-Marie’s catering business, the same business which Juliana repeatedly said she hated. She told her mother that she wished her mother worked in finance or held some high-level corporate job like her friends’ parents just as she wished her mother earned more money to be able to give her more things. The only thing her mother was good at, according to Juliana, was lectures.

Juliana thought it bad enough that her mother catered small weddings, usually under 50 people, but during the week she would do dinner parties for people too busy to do it themselves.

Anne-Marie still smarted from the temper tantrum Juliana had thrown when she discovered her mother did a dinner for one of her school friend’s parents. Maybe Anne-Marie thought she had been wrong scraping money together to pay for the part of the tuition not covered by a scholarship at that fancy private school, but she wanted Juliana to have all the advantages she never had. Anne-Marie’s biggest advantage was a mother who taught her how to cook.

For the party tomorrow night, she had designed a village of four houses made of sausage on lettuce beds. It was the creative touches like that, something out of the ordinary that brought her more work. Because the hosting family had nothing to do with Juliana’s school, Juliana would sulk less about her mother’s work.

As Anne-Marie put the last sausage sliver to finish the roof, the doorbell rang.

A man and a woman, showing badges, introduced themselves. The third was the HJPS Headmistress.

“My hands are greasy,” Anne-Marie wiped them on her apron. “Is something wrong?”

The man, did he say his name was Bunker (?) asked to come in. Once seated she offered them coffee or tea. Wasn’t that what everyone did on those British mystery shows she loved to watch when she finally had time to herself?

“This is difficult,” the woman said. “There’s been an incident at your daughter’s school.”

“Do you want to see her? Juliana?” Maybe if Detective Lee saw her daughter, the police would think they had the wrong house. The hope didn’t last long.

“We will. Tomorrow at the station. At 1 p.m.” Samantha Lee produced a map.

“I don’t understand.” Anne-Marie wasn’t sure that she understood after she heard the police’s explanation. Murder plot? Against a classmate? The potential victim was all right. Some girl had overheard Juliana and three other girls planning it all. Bathroom?

The two police showed themselves out, leaving Anne-Marie sitting in the chair. None of it made any sense. She went back into the kitchen and finished what she needed to do for tomorrow night, difficult at best, when she tried to think what to say to her daughter.

Juliana’s bedroom door was closed. It had been Anne-Marie’s room when she was little. It had gone from her childhood love of dusty rose to turning it into a nursery after Juliana was born as part of the room shuffle to accommodate everyone with the new needs of a widow and baby.

Her mother had given Anne-Marie her sewing room where she’d created quilt after quilt, first as gifts for friends then for orders until she had four people working for her. Anne-Marie tried to use her mother’s model to grow her own catering service.

Anne-Marie would have liked to have a time machine so she could go back and show the room’s many transformations. Once it had been a happy place, a refuge, but Juliana had all but put up a “do not enter” sign on the door.

Anne-Marie knocked.

“What?”

“I need to come in.”

“I’m busy.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

Juliana was sitting on her bed reading. The thought, at least she’s a reader, was a comfort to Anne-Marie who believed and/or hoped that sooner or later her daughter would grow out of this obnoxious stage.

“What do you want?”

“Tomorrow we have to go to the police station.”

“Why? I’ve a test tomorrow.”

“You don’t have a choice.”