Death of a Blueberry Tart Read online

  Mona’s couch-potato husband, Dennis, even managed to drag himself away from ESPN long enough to man the burgers and breasts of chicken sizzling on the grill. Mona had pots of lobsters boiling in the kitchen and side dishes laid out on a picnic table. A few hand-picked baby boomers from their mothers’ high school graduating class had also been invited, and everyone showed up with six-packs of beer and bottles of wine. Randy arrived to tend bar. However, his husband, Sergio, the local police chief, was a no-show because he had to work since the summer tourist season was in full swing and the busiest time of the year for law enforcement.

  Sheila had been gushing all day about how excited she was to see Liddy’s mother, Celeste, and Mona’s mother, Jane, her two partners in crime since middle school. In fact, their tight circle mirrored the close friendship Hayley shared with Liddy and Mona a generation later. When Hayley and her mother, along with Bruce, first arrived, the shrieks and cackles as the older ladies jumped up and down, hugging each other, was downright deafening. Hayley marveled how much Liddy and Mona so closely resembled their mothers, Celeste being a highly opinionated, well-traveled fashionista like Liddy, and Jane being plain-spoken, salt-of-the-earth-but-just-don’t-cross-her kind of woman just like Mona. Hayley couldn’t understand why her friends could be mirror images of their mothers, but Hayley was the exact opposite of her own mother. When Hayley mentioned this to Bruce, he promptly spit out the beer he was guzzling and guffawed. She rather irritably asked him if he had anything to say, and he quickly shook his head no and announced he was going to grab some potato chips before skedaddling the hell out of there to avoid any further discussion.

  Hayley suspected Bruce might not agree with her assessment that she was nothing like her mother, but was not about to engage in an argument at Mona’s barbecue. It could wait until they got home and Sheila was safely ensconced in her daughter Gemma’s old room, well out of earshot.

  Hayley wandered over to the bar and had Randy pour her a glass of red wine. “Do you think I take after Mom?”

  “In what way?” Randy asked, eyeing her carefully.

  “I don’t know. Personality-wise, I guess. I tried talking to Bruce about it, and he just took off like he was outrunning the plague.”

  “Smart man,” Randy said under his breath as he handed Hayley her wine.

  “What did you say?” Hayley asked pointedly.

  “Nothing,” Randy said, almost too quickly. “I have nothing to say on that subject at all.”

  Hayley grimaced and then her eyes fell upon Sheila, Celeste, and Jane chattering away incessantly, catching up, belly-laughing at old memories.

  “It’s like watching me, Liddy, and Mona twenty years from now,” Hayley remarked to no one in particular.

  “Except that you and Mona are spitting images of your mothers, but I couldn’t be more different from mine!” Liddy roared from behind her.

  Hayley spun around to see Liddy and Mona approaching. Mona, studying her mother’s pageboy haircut and bulky, shapeless, dull gray sweater and torn blue jeans, raised an eyebrow. “Do I really dress like her?”

  Liddy put a comforting hand on Mona’s shoulder. “Of course you don’t, Mona . . .”

  “Thank you, Liddy,” Mona said, not used to hearing a compliment come out of her mouth.

  Liddy folded her arms and gave Mona the once-over. “You look worse.”

  Mona shook away Liddy’s hand and glowered at her.

  They all turned back around to stare at their mothers, who were no longer laughing and were now laser-focused on someone who was just arriving at the barbecue. The new unannounced guest was a tall, bony woman with teased-out hair dyed blond and leathery skin tanned a tad too dark. She wore a red polo pullover and a jean skirt with brown sandals. Her toes were painted to match her red shirt. She carried a pink box with her. She stopped to kiss Dennis, who seemed startled by this woman invading his personal space. He held up the spatula he was using to flip the burgers almost as a weapon to defend himself, but couldn’t stop her from planting her lips on his sweaty, scruffy cheeks.

  “I didn’t know you and Caskie Lemon-Hogg were friends, Mona,” Liddy said, confused.

  “We’re not,” Mona snapped.

  “Then what’s she doing here?” Hayley asked.

  “Beats me. I didn’t invite her,” Mona said.

  After mauling Dennis, and then moving on to Bruce, who tried to get away but wasn’t fast enough, Caskie hooked an arm around Bruce’s neck and smashed her lips against his face. She aimed for his lips, but he managed to duck enough so that she smacked his forehead. This didn’t deter her at all, and after releasing Bruce, she carried her pink box right over to the makeshift bar to assault Randy. Randy was quick enough to hand her a stiff drink, a martini with two olives, Caskie’s cocktail of choice apparently. Caskie was so grateful to have a martini in her hand that the gesture saved Randy from having to suffer through the same public display of affection as Dennis and Bruce had just endured.

  Caskie, still balancing the pink box in one hand as she gripped the stem of her martini glass with the other, glanced around at the other people at the barbecue. Sheila, Celeste, and Jane all turned their backs on her before she had a chance to greet them. So instead, Caskie made her way over to Hayley, Liddy, and Mona.

  “Mona, there you are. I am super embarrassed to be crashing your party like this. I just stopped by to give you this,” Caskie said, handing her the pink box.

  “What is it?” Mona asked, staring at it, confused.

  “One of my homemade blueberry pies,” Caskie chirped.

  “That’s so sweet of you,” Hayley said because she knew Mona probably wouldn’t bother with any further pleasantries.

  “Well, Mona gave me a steep discount on a lobster order last month when I had some family in town and so I wanted to repay her kindness,” Caskie said, smiling sweetly.

  Caskie Lemon-Hogg was a local eccentric, widowed for over two decades. Some say her husband, a retired Air Force major, took his own life rather than face the prospect of spending the rest of his life with his overbearing, obnoxious wife, but that was just a cruel rumor. Although her husband, Max, did die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the coroner ruled it was an accident when the gun unexpectedly discharged while he was cleaning it. Since then, Caskie had lived off her husband’s pension and several property rentals they had together, and basically spent her time driving around town poking her nose in other people’s business and flirting with men of all ages. Her one hobby was picking blueberries in the summer months. She also crocheted Christmas stockings in the winter, which she donated to needy families, but blueberry picking was her true passion. Every year by Labor Day she had so many Tupperware containers of blueberries, she had an extra freezer installed in her garage to store them all. Then she would spend the rest of the year baking pies, muffins, cakes, any recipe that required blueberries. She was described by a few gossipy locals as the Blueberry Queen. After a well-documented scandal that involved the wife of a town council member walking in on her husband in bed with Caskie, Mrs. Lemon-Hogg was renamed the Blueberry Tart.

  Mona reluctantly flipped the pink box open to reveal a delectable-looking blueberry pie. “Looks delicious,” she said, trying to muster a slight bit of enthusiasm, but sadly failing.

  “Is that your father over there, Mona?” Caskie asked, her eyes brightening at the sight of Mona’s white-haired, crotchety, stout, seventy-something-year-old father, Sid.

  “Yeah, that’s him.” Mona shrugged.

  “I haven’t seen him in ages! He still looks so handsome!” Caskie cooed, dashing off.

  “Better get to him while he’s still coherent. He’s on his fifth bourbon,” Mona called after her.

  Once Caskie was off to accost another unsuspecting victim, Sheila, Celeste, and Jane marched over to join their daughters.

  “What the hell were you thinking, inviting that woman to this barbecue, Mona?” Jane barked.

  “She didn’t, Mrs. Butler,” Liddy said
. “Caskie just came by to give Mona one of her blueberry pies. As a thank-you.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” Sheila said sharply. “I’m sure she heard I was in town and decided to come over to see how much I’ve aged!”

  “I’m sure that’s not true, Mom,” Hayley said.

  “I can’t stand her!” Celeste cried.

  “Why? What did she ever do to you, Mother?” Liddy asked, curious.

  “She was always such a fake and an opportunist, ever since we were teenagers back in high school. She pretended to be so smart and superior, but then I would catch her cheating off my paper in history class. Can you believe that?” Celeste huffed.

  Sheila gasped. “She cheated off me in biology!”

  “She never cheated off me, but I never got higher than a D-plus in any class,” Jane grumbled.

  “There was also a rumor going around that she was having an affair with our history teacher Mr. Cadwell,” Celeste said. “At first I refused to believe it, mostly because I had a huge crush on Mr. Cadwell myself and wrote short stories in my diary about the two of us running away together to Portsmouth . . .”

  “That was your fantasy getaway? New Hampshire?” Liddy asked, laughing.

  “Your grandparents never took me past the Trenton Bridge, so anywhere over the state line was exotic!” Celeste snapped defensively. “Anyway, one day after school I walked into the classroom because I had forgotten my notebook and I saw the two of them about to kiss. Caskie claimed she had something in her eye and Mr. Cadwell was just trying to help her get it out, but I didn’t believe her!”

  Jane piped in, arms folded. “What about Sheila’s boyfriend, that exchange student from Santorini, the olive-skinned hunk with the wavy black hair who played on the soccer team?”

  “Dimitri!” Sheila sighed. “That’s right. He was going to ask me to prom, but then that awful Caskie Lemon heard about it, and told him I was already dating your father so she could snag the hot Greek for herself!”

  “But you and Dad did date in high school!” Hayley cried.

  “That’s not the point! I wasn’t ready to settle down my senior year, and I was weighing my options. I had gone out with Dimitri twice to the movies and was considering going steady with him until Caskie intervened. I heard he became a stock trader for a company in Düsseldorf. I could have lived in Europe!” Sheila wailed.

  “That’s all ancient history now, Mom. I think it’s time to let it go,” Hayley said. “I’m sure Caskie is a different person now.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Mona said, glancing over at Caskie, who was hanging off Mona’s father, Sid, smiling seductively as he told one of his dumb jokes.

  “Would you look at that? Now she’s making a play for my husband!” Jane bellowed.

  “Mom, you and Dad have been divorced for over fifteen years!” Mona reminded her.

  “You know what they say,” Sheila remarked. “A leopard can never change his spots. Or her spots.”

  Caskie was in no rush to leave, and stayed at the barbecue another hour, much to the chagrin of her former high school classmates, Sheila, Celeste, and Jane. After cutting her pie into pieces and serving all of Mona’s guests, Caskie eventually flitted away. Mona had to physically stop her father, who was now apparently smitten, from following her out as if she was the Pied Piper.

  However, despite the ruckus Caskie had caused by her unexpected appearance, the reminiscing did result in one good idea. With Sheila back in town, Hayley suggested it might be fun for her mother, Celeste, and Jane to organize a last-minute high school reunion for their classmates who were in town and still living. Randy even offered to hold it at his bar, Drinks Like a Fish. The mothers quickly jumped on board, and Sheila gratefully thanked her boy for coming up with such a brilliant idea.

  She turned to everyone at the barbecue and asked, “What on earth did I do to deserve such a loving and wonderful and brainy son?”

  Randy basked in the glow of his mother’s adoration and Hayley gamely went along, biting her tongue, resisting the urge to remind her mother that the reunion, in fact, had been her idea.

  Chapter 6

  The Class of 1968 was the last graduating class of Bar Harbor High School, which opened in 1908 on Cottage Street and closed its doors to merge with Pemetic and Mount Desert high schools in order to form the regional Mount Desert Island High School in the fall of 1968. Sheila, Celeste, and Jane had the distinction of being among the last students to attend Bar Harbor High, and of all the members in their graduating class, eleven had died, sixteen had moved away, and the rest still resided in town. So Hayley was surprised that twenty-two people, including spouses, attended their last-minute Class of ’68 reunion at Randy’s bar, which in her mind, was a rather large number considering the small class size of just over forty students.

  A couple of old yearbooks were laid out on the bar for the attendees to peruse and laugh at, especially the 1960s fashion choices they had made, including velvet bell-bottoms, psychedelic tie-dyed shirts, furry vests à la Sonny Bono, midi skirts that never caught on, flower-power dresses, and Beatles-inspired long hair and beards. It was a year of political unrest and upheaval for the country, with several of the boys from their class quickly drafted into Vietnam after graduation, two never to return. Still, on this night, the memories were more lighthearted and festive as the group fell back into their friendships as if over a half century had never even passed.

  Hayley, Liddy, and Mona watched as their mothers and their classmates got rowdier as the night wore on, due mostly to Randy offering happy-hour prices on all his beer and booze. Some tables were pushed aside to form a makeshift dance floor, and it didn’t take long for everyone to be bopping and swaying to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” and “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

  “I feel like we’re in The Twilight Zone,” Mona said. “We’re chaperoning a high school dance but all the kids are way older than us.”

  “At least everyone seems to be having fun,” Hayley said.

  “Who’s that trying to dance with your mother, Mona?” Liddy asked.

  They all looked over to see a wiry old man with a long white beard and pock-marked skin, who appeared disheveled in his ill-fitting clothes, staggering around the dance floor, bumping into people, hanging off Jane, who was trying to ignore him.

  “That’s Rupert Stiles, some old geezer from their class. Now he’s the town curmudgeon and resident drunk. Look at him. He can barely keep his balance,” Mona growled, shaking her head, disgusted.

  Rupert’s watery eyes were fixed on Jane, who was trying to pretend he wasn’t there, but he refused to take no for an answer and kept tapping her on the shoulder, trying to get her attention.

  “I think she needs my help,” Mona said, rolling up the sleeves on her sweatshirt, spoiling for a fight. But before she could come to her mother’s rescue, Jane finally had had enough. She spun around, planted both hands on Rupert’s scrawny chest, and pushed him away from her. Rupert went flying across the room and crashed into a couple of people. Trying to act as if nothing had happened, he politely excused himself and then staggered over to a floor plant and threw up in the pot.

  Randy arrived with a new bottle of beer for Mona and sighed. “Did he just do what I think he did?”

  “He sure did,” Hayley said, scrunching up her nose. “I think you better cut him off.”

  “This is worse than that University of Maine fraternity party I hosted here a few years back,” Randy said, shaking his head.

  “Should I kick his butt out of here, Randy?” Mona asked, almost excited to serve as a bouncer.

  “No, it’s okay, Mona, I was going to get rid of that plant anyway,” Randy said as he moved off to wait on another guest at the other end of the bar, who was waving a twenty-dollar bill.

  Sheila ambled over to them, escorted by a distinguished older man with a handsome face and perfect teeth. He was the only man in the place wearing a sports jacket, but wit
h no tie to keep it casual.

  “Hayley, do you know Carl Flippen?”

  “Yes, nice to see you, Carl,” Hayley said, smiling.

  Carl Flippen owned an auto repair shop in town and was the go-to guy when you needed a tow truck. Hayley was used to seeing him in greasy jeans and a mechanic’s shirt so she was impressed by his efforts to clean himself up for the reunion.

  “Carl and I dated in high school a few times, long before your father mind you, may he rest in peace,” Sheila spouted, giggling, like she was still back in 1968.

  Hayley had to wonder just how many boyfriends her mother had back in the day “before her father” came along her senior year.

  “Your mother is still as beautiful as she was the day I first laid eyes on her in civics class,” Carl said with a wink to Sheila. “I remember you always smelled so good.”

  “It was Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. I wore it all the time because I loved everything French after studying the language in high school. I wanted to go to Paris and study at the Sorbonne after graduation,” Sheila said wistfully.

  “What stopped you?” Carl asked.

  Sheila sighed. “Hayley’s father. He rode a motorcycle and had a tattoo. I always was a sucker for the bad-boy type.”

  Liddy snorted. “Like mother like daughter.”

  Carl chuckled and said, “Well, I got busted for jaywalking once, so does that make me a bad boy?”

  Hayley smiled and looked at her mother. “I like him.”

  Carl turned to Sheila and smiled. “I’m going to flag down Randy and get us a couple more drinks. Same thing?”

  Sheila nodded, her eyes sparkling. “Vodka martini, two olives.”

  “You got it, beautiful,” Carl said, kissing Sheila lightly on the cheek and ambling away.

  Sheila grinned from ear to ear and said almost breathlessly, “Carl is recently widowed.”

  “You probably shouldn’t sound so happy about it,” Hayley remarked.