Punch, Pastries, and Poison by Harper Lin (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

“Well done,” Rhonda said quietly to me. “I think she made it through lunch on sheer adrenaline.”

“I’m still going to try to get her to go home after her break. She’ll run herself ragged if I let her.”

Rhonda nodded and grabbed a rag. “Guess I better get to work cleaning things up back here.” She started wiping down the counters.

I turned to Ephy, who was examining her cuticles and looked dangerously close to biting one off.

“Ephy, can you work on busing and wiping the tables while I—” I stopped and glanced around the room, trying to figure out where to start. I waved my hand in the air helplessly.

Rhonda chuckled quietly to herself as she scrubbed at a coffee stain on the counter, and Ephy, to her credit, grabbed a dish tub and started clearing dishes from the closest table. I stood for another second and stared, trying to get a grip on the situation. Then I gave up, grabbed another dish tub, and headed to the next table.

We worked slowly but steadily, making our way around the room, clearing dishes from the tables as we went. A few customers came in, and Rhonda stopped her scrubbing to take their orders while I ran and grabbed a clean cloth to wipe off the tables so the customers would have somewhere to sit. I started just following behind Ephy, wiping the tables as she cleared them so at least everything looked a little cleaner. The floor still needed to be swept and mopped, but the sweeping could wait until the dishes were cleared, and the mopping could wait until we closed. At least I kept reminding myself of that to keep from going crazy. I imagined toting around a dustpan and broom under one arm with a mop and bucket under the other while somehow wielding a rag and dish tub at the same time. Even at my overachieving best, I didn’t think I could pull that off, so I resigned myself to taking it one step at a time. Slow and steady wins the race and all that.

Slow was the right term for it, but steady wasn’t. As customers came in, they naturally sat at the clean tables, which I then had to circle back and clean again. Ephy and I were just getting to the last few tables when Sammy came back into the café from her break.

“I’m going to work on refilling the pastry case,” she announced. “Is there anything in particular you want me to focus on, Fran?”

I turned and looked at her with a hand on my hip. She still didn’t look too good, although her cheeks weren’t as flaming red as they had been before she sat down. “I want you to focus on going home and getting some rest.”

“I’m fine, really.” But I could see how she was leaning against the counter.

“Then why don’t you—”

Before I could finish my sentence, Ephy interrupted.

“What’s this?” She held up a box wrapped in brown paper and rotated it around.

“It looks like a package,” I snapped, irritated by her obliviousness. “The mailman probably came in while we were busy and dropped it off.”

“No postmark. Just your name on it.”

I sighed and grabbed the package from her hand, thinking it was entirely likely that she just didn’t know what the postmark on a package looked like. But, to my further annoyance, she was right. Just my name on it—and not even my full name like my mail usually had. Just “Fran Amaro,” and that was all. No address, no postmark, no nothing. “Someone must have dropped it off during the rush.”

I thought about just dropping it back on the counter and worrying it about later, but I was curious about what was inside. I thought maybe Matt had brought something by for me and decided to leave it when he saw how busy we were. Besides, I knew Ephy would pester me about it until she got to see what was inside.

I slid my finger under the neat folds of the paper and pulled one side open. The gift box inside slid out easily. It was square and large enough that I could only just hold it in one hand. The box was nondescript, a dark gray color with no logo on either side. I pulled the lid off.

“Chocolates.”

“Someone left you chocolates?” Rhonda asked, leaning over the counter to look.

“Looks like it.” I poked my finger around the edges of the box, looking for a card or anything else that might give me an idea of who had left it or where it had come from, but I found nothing. I looked again at the brown paper the box came wrapped in. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, but my name was written in block letters, which made identifying the writer difficult. “But it doesn’t say who it’s from.”

“Matt,” Rhonda said.

“Probably.” He didn’t usually write like that, but maybe he was trying to be sneaky. I put the lid back on the box.

“You’re not going to eat them?” Ephy looked incredulous. She eyed the box as I put it down on the counter near where she’d found it.

I was surprised. I’d never taken her for the kind of girl to go for chocolates, especially after her comment about not liking sweet stuff. Maybe I needed to talk to Mike about her after all. But her palate had surprised me before, so maybe chocolate just worked for her in a way that other sweets didn’t.

“Not right now. I want to get everything cleaned up and the cases restocked before I sit down and have a snack.”

“Well, can I have one?”

The answer that came immediately to my lips was a resounding no, but she was so contrary that I knew she would ask why, and I was too tired from being sick and too daunted by the mountain of work still left to be done to argue.

“Sure, just don’t stick your finger in the bottoms to pick out