Baby, It's Dead Outside Read online

  Baby, It’s Dead Outside

  An Un-Cozy Un-Culinary Josie Tucker Mystery

  EM Kaplan

  Copyright © 2019 EM Kaplan

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 9781690833482

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by the author.

  FOR

  Arlene Lynes of Read Between the Lynes Bookstore

  and the wonderful people of Woodstock, IL.

  Thanks for your support!

  And for Max, my officemate.

  RIP, little buddy.

  CONTENTS

  Thanks

  Part 1: Chill Out

  Part 2: Frosty Reception

  Part 3: Freezer Burn

  Part 4: Major Meltdown

  Part 5: Warmed Over

  Notes from The Author

  MANY Thanks to

  Megan Harris, editor

  Katherine Cruz, editor

  The Josie Tucker VIPs

  Part 1: Chill Out

  Cold soup seems like a contradiction against the very nature of soup. A blueberry slushy on a hot summer day sucked through one of those combination spoon-straws can be undeniably delightful, but a shiver-inducing spoonful of vichyssoise slaps you right in your soul if you’re not expecting it.

  When you want belly-warming “soup is good food” comfort that melts you from the inside out, but instead encounter a slosh of chilled lobster bisque, the internal insult can freeze you to your core. Who knew cream, potatoes, and leeks could cut so deeply and with such a razor-sharp icicle’s edge?

  Watermelon gazpacho, sour Korean naengguk, cold lobster bisque, bloody-red borscht garnished with a blob of cream. Swedish fruit soup, which I think could just be called juice in a bowl. The frosty hyperborean madness never ends.

  —Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food

  Chapter 1

  The Pleasant Valley senior residential care facility had a very high creepy factor, as if the ghosts of grandmas past might be lurking in its shadows.

  Josie shivered as she lingered, much like a specter herself, in the dimly lit hallway. She expected to hear a moan, the clink of chains, a clang of a metal door slamming shut…or maybe run into a stern-faced nurse with a severe up-do. The old building brought to mind every single spooky asylum movie she’d had ever seen and every “abandoned places” BuzzFeed article she’d ever read.

  Her shadow cast a dark, distorted streak on the floor ahead of her. As she continued down the corridor, the uneven linoleum tiles—a tripping hazard for old, unsteady feet—changed from green to gray where a modern addition to the building began. A fluorescent ceiling light hummed and flickered overhead. Although the passageway sprawled out ahead of her like a fever dream, she didn’t see a single other living soul.

  Snap out of it, dummy. This is the twenty-first century. The building might be a historical structure, but this nursing home is licensed, regulated, inspected by the state of Illinois, and it probably costs a huge chunk of cheddar to live here.

  …But for all that money, couldn’t they get the place to smell better? This assisted living facility, just like the one that housed her own mother several states away, was saturated with the same medicinal and biological odor she thought of as Institutionalized Pee.

  She shook her head and kept walking. Abundant fresh air was for the young and healthy. She’d get her fill and count her blessings later when she was finished with the task for which she’d been hired. When she reached room 39, she found the door open. Still, she knocked before she leaned to peek inside.

  “Hello?” she said, but the room was unoccupied.

  Two single beds lined the wall with a window between them. Both sides of the room clearly had residents with their separate belongings, territory marked by different colors and styles of bedspreads much like a college dorm or a prison cell. One bed covering was fairly typical for an older lady, with a handmade crocheted afghan in muted autumn colors across the foot of the bed, while the other was swathed in a rich purple velvet duvet with red and orange beaded fringe. That bed was a little more haphazardly made, a little less smoothed over, a little Wild, Wild West Boudoir, if Josie had to give it a name. She half-expected to find a discarded corset peeking out from the chest of drawers on that side of the room.

  A toilet flushed, and an adjoining door she hadn’t noticed before, opened.

  An elderly woman, who looked startlingly like the granny from the Looney Tunes cartoons emerged from the bathroom. Soft gray hair was pulled up in a bun. Circular lensed glasses perched on the tip of a tiny pink nose. A fuzzy gray cardigan softened a tidy white shirt with a Peter Pan collar. A gray plaid wool skirt covered her legs and met peach-color compression socks at the knee.

  Maybe that’s what old age has in store for me—I’m going to turn into a caricature of myself. And oddly, I’m okay with that.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked. Then she frowned and turned back into the bathroom. “Hold your horses, I forgot to wash my hands.”

  She came out a minute later, drying her hands on her skirt. “I’m not senile. I’m in a rush to get back to my novel. I just got to a good part. Used to read on the toilet, but I was spending too much time in there. My legs would fall asleep, and I once dropped my e-reader in the bowl, which was a darned tragedy.”

  From behind her spectacles, she squinted at Josie with rheumy suspicion. “Are you the hitman I hired to take out my roommate?”

  

  “Chicago in February can’t be that bad, can it?” Josie had asked two weeks earlier, pacing back and forth across her tiny living room in her Boston apartment with her cell phone pressed to her ear. Her question was rhetorical; she didn’t expect an answer. Good thing, because there was dead air on the other end of the line. The silence lasted so long, Josie pulled the phone away from her face to check if the call was still connected.

  Her sometimes boss, Greta Williams, spoke finally, ignoring her question. “The reason I’m sending you on this trip is personal. I know someone named Lynetta Downes, who feels as if her life is being threatened. She lives in a nursing home in a far west suburb of Chicago called Lake Park Villa. I need you to go and look into the matter for me.”

  Josie scoffed inwardly.

  Who is she kidding? All of Greta’s motives are personal. The world revolves around planet Greta. The rest of us are just parasites clinging to the cold, dead surface, hoping not to be flung off into the abyss of outer space.

  “What if I’m busy in February? It’s the month of hearts and flowers. What if I have big plans?” Josie couldn’t help but poke the bull. Especially when the beast was a steely eyed blue-blooded Boston matron who could spend Josie’s net worth on a handbag without a blip in her pulse…if she had a heartbeat and wasn’t, in fact, Nosferatu’s mother. The jury was still out on that one.

  After a pause, which dripped with disbelief, Greta said, “Well, do you have other plans?”

  One of these days, Josie would get a reaction. “No, but that’s beside the point. When you ask someone for a favor, you should actually ask it. That involves a question instead of a command. In speech, that means you lift your voice upward at the end of the phrase. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, maybe if you’ve been in the presence of a teenaged girl recently? Where the tone of the voice? Goes up like this? Like maybe you’re not sure of the response?”

  More silence. Then her part-boss, part-puppetmaster said, “I’ll text you the dates. You can check your calendar and get back to me. I’ll have Henry email your plan
e tickets and itinerary.”

  “Wait, I haven’t said yes yet,” Josie said, stalling even though she already knew she would agree to go on the mission. She didn’t want to admit it to Greta, but she lived for these weird little missions the older woman sent her on.

  Writing her food blog was fantastic. No other job in the world could combine her love of cuisine with the flexibility of sleeping in late and working from home in her pajamas, especially with her unpredictable stomach. But going on “errands” for Greta fulfilled another side of Josie, the part of her that lived to stick her nose in other people’s lives, to solve puzzles, and to put the scattered pieces of strange, nonsensical—and sometimes terrible—events back together.

  Not that she would ever in a million years admit this to Greta. Josie also lived to be a thorn in the woman’s paw, the irritating itch between her shoulder blades that she couldn’t reach despite her seemingly unlimited resources. The woman could sit on her dragon’s hoard of gold coins in her Massachusetts mansion, but Josie had the mobility, the flexibility, and the relative anonymity that Greta did not.

  “How long is this ‘job’ going to take?”

  She hoped her finger quotes were loud and clear because she liked to rile the woman up, even though Josie didn’t really care about the timeframe. Her calendar was wide open, other than a little wedding she needed to plan—namely, her own. However, she had to ask some questions if she wanted to play hardball with the woman. How else was she going to fool herself into thinking she ever had the upper hand with Greta?

  “Not more than a week or two. I don’t know if Lynetta is imagining these attempts on her life or if she’s simply feeling paranoid. I haven’t seen her for some years and I am unable to gauge her mental well-being over the telephone.”

  “How well do you know Lynetta?” Josie imagined Greta’s childhood to be a series of tweed pinafores and nannies. Charter planes and private tutors. Swiss boarding schools and a small girls’ college in the 1950s or 60s, somewhere untouched by current events and modern technology in some far off place, like Vermont.

  “Lynetta is my sister.”

  “Sorority sister?” Josie’s mind scrambled for the most reasonable explanation. Surely Greta had been hatched out of a single reptilian egg and had not been nurtured in the warmth of a mammal’s warm womb?

  “She’s my sister,” Greta said again.

  Josie let the phone connection fall silent as she tried to digest this new information. If Greta had a sibling in a nursing home in a remote suburb of Chicago…what did it say about her origins? Was she also originally from Illinois? Had she grown up in a creaky old house on a sprawling prairie estate? Josie felt a slight tilting of the earth, a shifting of planets.

  Am I going to have to stop teasing the woman if it turns out she’s an actual human?

  “Lynetta is a good deal older that I. My sister met a Navy man and married against our parents’ wishes. She moved away from New England when I was still quite young. We were never close,” she said without emotion.

  Annnnd, worldview back to normal.

  “You keep in touch regularly?”

  “We speak on the phone one or two times a year.”

  “When was the last time you saw her in person?” Another pause ensued, and Josie didn’t know if Greta was reluctant to say or if she was getting out a protractor and scribbling calculations in her Louis Vuitton portable agenda book.

  “I saw her in 1985 when our mother died. However, she is the last remaining member of my immediate family.”

  Okay, then. So they weren’t close, and yet Lynetta was obviously important enough to Greta that she was sending Josie to Illinois to check on her. Even after all these years, the woman was concerned enough about her older sister to send Josie, a minion—albeit one with a high success rate dealing with Greta’s previous odd errands—to investigate. If Lynetta meant that much to the woman, the job was important to Josie.

  Of course I’m going. Greta has an actual flesh-and-blood human sister. How can I not want to meet her?

  “All right. I’ll go, but on one condition,” Josie said, patting her dog, Bert, on his bony head. “I’d like to drive and I’ll need a rental car. Preferably one with a roomy backseat.”

  Chapter 2

  “Tell me again why you’re driving to Illinois instead of flying?” Josie’s fiancé, Drew, asked later. He sprawled on their bed watching her dig through a pile of sweaters and wool socks.

  “Do you think I’ll need mittens? I have gloves, but are mittens warmer? Are my fingers less likely to freeze when they’re squashed together like lobster claws or when they are individually wrapped like hot dogs in their own buns? Never mind. I don’t even own mittens,” she admitted and fluttered the fingers of her gloves at him before tossing them onto the bed beside him.

  “Just pack what you have, and if you need something, buy it when you get there. I’m sure Illinois has mittens you can purchase.”

  “Good point,” she said, feeling a small weight lift off her shoulders. Her mind was ping-ponging around with her trip preparation, but Drew always had a way of making her feel better. He had such a calming effect on her. Well, other than when he was riling her up. She gave him a heated glance but was distracted by another thought. “Ooh,” she said. “I need to think about snacks for the car. For Bert, too.”

  Her mind went on a little road trip of its own, imagining rows of candy bars, baked goods with more preservatives than natural ingredients, and beef jerky of unusual flavors she could choose from—all of the illicit processed foods she usually avoided to appease her grouchy stomach, as well as her over-protective doctor and personal watchdog.

  She cast a guilty glance at Drew out of the corner of her eye. Since they were engaged now, she’d officially switched the primary care role to another doctor in Drew’s practice, but he was still her go-to guy for medical advice and questions…and the frequent source of heartfelt nagging to take better care of herself which she swore she was trying to do.

  “I know you love your gross snack foods,” he said—she’d promised not to eat shrimp chips or smelly seaweed snacks in the enclosed confines of a car with him again because all good relationships had a healthy bit of compromise, right?—“but you’re avoiding the question. Driving to Chicago will take two days. If you fly, you can touch down at O’Hare in a couple hours.”

  She put down the ball of fuzzy knitted socks she’d been holding and sat on the bed next to him. “For one thing, I know you’re going to be busy with meetings in the next couple of weeks at the clinic with the merger.” A large corporation had recently purchased the clinic where he ran his medical practice, and he had massive amounts of paperwork to complete and new software to learn on top of it. “If you need to work long hours, you won’t have to worry about coming home to take care of Bert if he’s with me.”

  At the sound of his name, the dog cocked his head at her. She scratched his velvety ear and patted him on his bony noggin that always reminded her slightly of Patrick Stewart for some reason.

  “For another thing, I’ve never been to the Midwest. This will give me some time to get out of New England an explore the breadbasket of America.” She didn’t know which states that encompassed exactly. Other than Illinois, she had a vague notion the Midwest meant Nebraska and grain, corn and wheat. Or what the breadbasket was supposed to represent. In that annoying kids’ game, Operation, it was somewhere near the gut. And that’s where carbs ended up, after all.

  “In the dead of winter?” Drew asked, cocking one of his dark eyebrows.

  “February isn’t the dead of winter.”

  “You’ve never been to Chicago in February.”

  “Why do people keep telling me that? Victor said the same thing when I had to cancel my counseling-slash-karate session with him. It can’t be that bad, can it? But you know, whatever.” She flapped her hand to signify she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. “The real reason I want to drive is because it’s on Greta’s dime. She was
just going to book me tickets on a plane and I needed to be stubborn about something in the heat of the moment. She can’t just boss me around all the time, like she’s my—”

  “Boss?” he asked, with his eyebrow going up again. On purpose. He knew she liked it when he looked at her that way—kind of amused, kind of indulgent, kind of hot.

  “But is she? I’m a free agent when it comes to running errands for her.”

  “You earn almost as much from her as your blog. You’ve worked weekends for her and done some seriously crazy things. If she’s not your boss, she might be your—”

  “Capo?” The idea of Greta in the mob was about as nonsensical as a lead crystal champagne flute at a tailgating party down at the KFC parking lot. Josie held up a finger to emphasize a point. “I have not killed anyone for her.”

  “That’s where you draw the line?” Drew reached for her, tugging her toward him with an arm around her waist. She leaned into him.

  “There are a lot of things I’ll help her with, but murder is not one of them. Also, I’m not willing to put on pantyhose for her or anyone else.”

  “Me either. No pantyhose at our wedding. Done.” He gave her a kiss. “Just be careful out there.”

  “Aren’t I always?” she said, which got a rueful laugh in return.

  

  “Wait, where are you going?” Susan’s voice came through the rental car speakers as Josie eased onto the highway heading west.

  “A suburb of Chicago. Just for a week or two.”

  “You realize it’s still February, right?”

  Josie slapped her hand on the steering wheel. “Why do people keep saying that? I know it’s going to be cold there. I packed for this. I have a winter coat. I have layers.”