LITMIR.BIZ

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new.”

      “And today?”

      “Bounceless,” I said. “Truthfully, Caz, I’ve started to doubt I can fit in.”

      “At the deli? Or are you talking about Nashville in general?”

      I shrugged, spreading my hands. Technically Cazzie Watts and her family were my neighbors outside Nashville, our adjoining villa-style condos being located in Antioch, a small suburban town about a dozen miles southwest of the city off Highway 41.

      “It’s the whole deal, Caz,” I said. “I’m not sure I can cut living here. Or if I’ve got what it takes to run Murray’s. It’s awful.”

      She just stared at me and shook her head.

      “It isn’t awful?” I said.

      “I think it’s very normal considering what happened yesterday,” she said.

      I looked at her. Cazzie was an African American woman of about thirty-five with a nutmeg complexion, dark brown eyes, and fine, high-cheekboned features accented by a lush wedge of soft medium-length black curls. She was wearing a raspberry halter-neck blouse and faded skinny jeans of an enviously small size…one that would have led to a full, numbing loss of circulation in my legs had I dared try them on.

      “Do you want to discuss it?” Cazzie said into the extended silence.

      “Nothing to discuss,” I said with the shrug that had become my all-purpose gesture of the morning.

      She continued to peer across the table. Too tired for a staring contest, I lowered my eyes to the cereal boxes between us. One was Lucky Charms, her seven-year-old Cole’s fave. The other was Cocoa Puffs, which his brother Jimmy, who was a wizened eight, deemed a superior product.

      I had cast my lot with Jimmy. Probably the reason was my chocolate fetish. Also, I identified with the cuckoo bird mascot, since its crest kind of resembled mine before I dragged a brush through the frizz every morning.

      As I turned the boxes sideways and diligently studied their nutritional ingredients, Cazzie reached over to her countertop for the newspaper and made a brief show-and-tell of its front page. The Nashville Times tabloid writers had been more pedestrian about slapping on their headline than I’d foreseen:

      BUSTER SERGEANT DIES AT 56

      Deli Dinner Becomes

      Auto Legend’s Last Supper

      “I thought maybe this was the cause of your funk,” Cazzie said, holding up the paper.

      I poo-poohed her suggestion with a flick of my hand. “Why’d anybody let that stupid rag of a paper bother them?”

      Cazzie made a face. “Gwen…do you or don’t you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

      I breathed in the naturally perfumed air from outside, exhaled. “What’s wrong is that I felt irrelevant last night,” I said at last. “I’m the restaurant’s owner, but I might as well have been a spectator. It was like I’d stepped into a situation I didn’t understand…and that hardly needed my involvement.”

      “Dealing with the police, you mean.”

      “No,” I said. “Well, yeah. Except it all started before they came. With the hog that was supposed to be pastrami.”

      “So a roast hog made you feel irrelevant?”

      “Not the hog per se. But the screwup drove home how much I don’t know about running a delicatessen. It should have been a pastrami. It really should have.”

      “Right, I think you’ve established that—”

      “My uncle did the deli’s ordering himself, Caz,” I interrupted. “He wrote all his suppliers’ names in notebooks, but now they’re scattered everywhere…and even Thomasina’s clueless about where he bought half his stuff.” A sigh escaped me. “Bottom line, I called a meat wholesaler in Joelton for a pastrami and instead got Porky the Pig after a serious forest fire. I’m not prepared to fill Murray’s shoes—or cowboy boots as the case may be.”

      Cazzie looked thoughtful. “You handled the situation, didn’t you?”

      “No,” I said. “All I did was spend a fortune on crisis management. And look how things turned out.”

      “Gwen, give yourself credit. You’re drawing a connection between two things that couldn’t be more separate. What happened to Buster had nothing to do with that pig.”

      I shook my head. “I’m telling you, the pig was a honey-glazed bad omen. And I’ve got a hunch more trouble’s on the way.”

      “Like what?”

      “I wish I could put a finger on it,” I said with a shrug. “When the police detective arrived and took charge of the scene, I sensed some kind of tension between him and Thom. He seemed pleasant enough at first, but his attitude got downright nasty after they exchanged words.”

      “Did you try asking Thomasina what it was about?”

      “No,” I said. “And I got the distinct impression she didn’t think it was any of my business.”

      Cazzie quietly reached for her coffee and sipped. I did the same, but only after eating a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs from my cereal bowl. I was thinking maybe I should’ve had the Lucky Charms instead. I needed a drastic reversal of fortune. A green shamrock marshmallow surely couldn’t have hurt my chances.

      “There’s something more to this,” Cazzie said. “Isn’t there?”

      I nodded slowly. “I don’t understand why the cops put us in lockdown last night,” I said. “McClintock—”

      “That’s the meanie detective?”

      “Right, sorry,” I said. “He not only orders his men to bag samples of our food, but has them seize our order pads and kitchen tickets.”

      Cazzie’s eyes had narrowed. She was a junior partner with a law office, and though her expertise lay in intellectual property and copyrights, it was clear the attorney in her was paying attention.

      “Did he tell you why they took all that stuff?”

      “And actually not keep me in the dark for a change?” I said, and expelled another sigh. “Caz, you couldn’t have pried an explanation out of him with a crowbar. I only got one because—”

      I was interrupted by the sound of clunky little feet thumping up behind me. Snapping my head toward the kitchen entry, I saw Cazzie’s youngest appear there in a T-shirt and over-the-knee cargo shorts. A toothbrush poked from one corner of his foam-slathered mouth.

      “Jimmy, what are you doing?” Cazzie asked.

      “Cl kpshgng thsnk!” Jimmy said.

      Cazzie shot him a disapproving look. “Care to repeat that so I can understand you?”

      He pulled the brush out of his mouth. “Cole won’t stop hogging the sink,” he said. “He—”

      “Not true! I didn’t do anything wrong.”

      In case you’re wondering, that adamant denial had come from none other than Cole himself, who was in the bathroom down the hall.

      “Did so!” Toothpaste bubbled from Jimmy’s lips. “He wouldn’t get off the stool or stop smiling at his ugly puss in the mirror!”

      “I wasn’t smiling,” Cole shouted. “I was checking for food crud—”

      “Then finish checking and let your brother rinse his mouth,” Cazzie said. She glanced up at her wall clock, a green apple design she’d made in her ceramics workshop, don’t ask where she finds the time. “Aunt Grace said she’d be here in ten minutes, so you’d better have your beach bags ready.”

      Cole spun his head around toward the entry.

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