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

knew what else to do or had the emotional energy to argue, so we did as we were told and got our purses then headed out the door.

I shuddered as I locked it behind me. People kept getting sick in my café, and it terrified me.

Chapter 17

We ended up sitting on the deck at a restaurant that had just opened up a couple of weeks before. It was the kind of place that came and went in a beachside town—open for a year or two then shuttered again when the owners realized that they hadn’t made enough from the tourist season to pay the rent through the winter. Some businesses made it, of course—mine was one of them—but they were more the exception than the rule.

The restaurant we were sitting in was the third that had been in the building in the last ten years. It was a great location with a beautiful view that had tourists flocking to it during the season, but the same thing that made it successful was also what led to the restaurants’ downfall. Restauranteurs fell in love with the location and all the money they made from the tourists but forgot that we locals weren’t going anywhere just for a view we saw every day and that rent still had to be paid in the winter.

In any case, the drinks and appetizers were good. Not that we were enjoying them much. It was hard to have an appetite when you’d just seen what we had.

“She’ll be okay, won’t she?” Sammy asked, staring at the iced tea in front of her. She always had an aura of sweet innocence about her, but this sounded naïve even for her.

Rhonda looked at me. I looked at the lobster lettuce wrap in front of me. I couldn’t get the sight of Ephy’s blue lips out of my mind. Even after all that CPR, she was still limp and blue when they carried her out.

“Sammy, I don’t—” Rhonda started.

Sammy cut her off with an imploring look. “Just say yes.”

Rhonda met her eye and then looked down. “I really hope so.”

“How is everything?” Our chirpy waitress had appeared beside us as we all stared at the table. “Everything tasting delicious?”

I looked up at her, wondering how to explain that our plates were all untouched. As much as I was now worried about people eating the food at my café, I usually worried when they didn’t.

Her cheery smile faltered slightly when she finally seemed to notice that none of us were eating. “Did I get your order wrong or something? It looks like you haven’t touched a thing!” She pulled out her notepad and started looking at what she’d jotted down.

For some reason, I still couldn’t find the words to string together to explain that everything was right—we just weren’t in the mood to eat it.

She looked up from her notepad with her lips pressed together as she scanned the table again. “Well, it looks like—”

“Our friend just collapsed in front of us and had to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance,” Rhonda said brusquely. “We’re just taking a minute to talk about that.” Leave it to Rhonda to take the situation in hand, I thought.

“Oh, um, okay. Um—” The waitress’s eyes scanned the table like she was trying to remember if there had been a fourth member of our party when we sat down, and she’d just somehow missed the ambulance carting her off.

“We’ll call you if need you,” Rhonda said. Even with her tendency to be blunt, she sounded a little cold.

The waitress, still looking confused, glanced around the table again, then turned on her heel and walked away.

“It’s not her fault. She didn’t know,” Sammy said quietly.

Rhonda looked at me.

I gave a half-hearted shrug. “You did come across a little harsh.”

She sighed and wiped at the condensation on her water glass. “I’ll leave her a good tip.”

We sat in silence for a few long minutes before Rhonda picked up her fork and stabbed her lobster salad. “What?” she asked when Sammy and I looked at her. “I’m paying for it. I may as well eat it. It doesn’t do Ephy any good to let it go to waste."

She wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t make me feel any more like eating. Sammy did start to poke at her fried clams, though. I wasn’t even sure why I had ordered anything when my head was swirling so fast that I could barely put my worries into words.

“Do you think it’s something about the café?”

Rhonda made a face around her mouthful of lobster salad.

“What could it be?” Sammy asked, rolling a clam over with her fork. She still hadn’t gotten any of them to her mouth, instead playing with them and moving them around the way a child did when they were hoping to convince their mom that they were eating when they really weren’t. “We’re all fine.”

“This time,” Rhonda said, having swallowed.

Sammy looked stricken.

“This time, yes,” I agreed. “But who knows why? Maybe Ephy is just more susceptible to whatever’s going on, and that’s why she—”

I cut myself off, seeing her limp body again in my mind’s eye. She was just a kid. Becky and Amanda leapt to my mind. What if something happened to them? I would never forgive myself. Ephy was in her early twenties—young enough to still seem like a kid—but Becky and Amanda really were kids. Kids whose parents lived in town and came into my coffee shop on a regular basis. For their own safety, I’d have to take them off the schedule until whatever was happening was sorted out. Rhonda, Sammy, and I would just have to hold down the fort. But Rhonda had a family. I put my head in my hands. It was too much.

Sammy put her hand on my back and rubbed it gently. “It’s okay, Fran.”

“It’s not,” I moaned.

“It will be.”

I dragged my hands down my face and looked at Rhonda for some commiseration. She looked alarmingly