A Slice of Murder by Chris Cavender Page B

for everything I owned in the world.
     
    I glanced back at the pizzeria as we walked out onto the wide swath of brick in front of it. We’d picked up the building’s lease on the plaza after it had housed an unsuccessful clothier named The Blue Note. The owner, obsessed with the color blue, had gone so far as to paint most of the brick facade a shade darker than the deepest sky, though she’d adorned the architectural trim with a lovely off-white that somehow worked well. Joe and I had priced the job of having the paint removed, but the process was such a delicate one, given the age of the bricks, that we knew we’d never be able to afford to have it done. That had led to us playing with dozens of names for our business, from The Blue Pizza to A Pizza of an Entirely Different Color, but we finally decided to ignore the blue instead of incorporating it into our name. A Slice of Delight was our original name when we couldn’t come up with anything we liked better, and somehow it just stuck.
    As we walked down the steps between the buildings—the same steps that I’d raced up a couple of hours earlier—Maddy must have sensed my concern for shutting down. “Closing is the best thing we can do until we figure this out. You know that, don’t you?”
    “This isn’t going to become a habit,” I said. “We’ve got today to dig around, but tonight we reopen, even if it’s just the two of us.”
    “I’m still not delivering any pizzas,” she said defiantly. “Who knows what we’ll find the next time we do it.”
    “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to,” I said. “If none of our staff shows up, I’ll do it myself, if it comes to that.”
    “That’s what you get for hiring high school and college kids,” Maddy said.
    “It’s all I can afford,” I said as I shrugged. “They’re happy for the work and I’m thrilled I don’t have to charge twenty-dollar-minimum orders. It’s the only way we can afford to stay open.”
    “I know. It’s just that sometimes working with these kids makes me feel so old.”
    It was a rare admission for my sister, so I said, “There’s no way you’re ever going to be old. You’ve got too much spirit. Sometimes I wish I had some of yours.”
    “Are you kidding me? You’ve got a lot more guts than I do.”
    I looked at her as we walked to the back parking lot, where our cars were waiting for us. “How do you figure that?”
    “You married a man you barely knew, and on your wedding day you bought a run-down house that no one else in town saw any potential in. The two of you defied all odds and renovated it without even coming close to divorce, so what do you do after that? You open up a pizza parlor, of all things. I’d say those were all bold moves, and you still managed to stay in love all along the way.”
    I smiled at her. “When you put it that way, it sounds like I am pretty adventurous. It just seemed so normal the way Joe proposed it all. I had the confidence that he could do anything he set his mind to, and he never let me down.”
    “I won’t, either,” she said. “We’ll find out what happened. Don’t worry.”
    “Are you kidding me? Worry’s about all I’ve got right now. If you take that away from me, I’d be lost.”
    She laughed. “Then we’ll worry together. Now, who’s going to drive, you or me?”
    “Let’s take my Subaru,” I said. “I need gas anyway, so we might as well fill up the tank on the way to Richard’s.”
    We stopped at the Ezee Fill, and as I was pumping my gas, a car pulled up behind me. There were two other pumps open. Why didn’t they just pull around and take one of those, instead of lingering behind me?
    I glanced back to point that fact out when I saw who was in the car.
    As she got out, I tried my best not to throw the pump to the ground and drive away.
    Instead, I bit my lower lip as she approached.
    “I’m almost done, Joanna,” I called out as I cut the pump off.
    “Go on and fill it,” Joanna Grant said.