Margaritas, Marzipan, And Murder

“To Sammy!” Dawn said, lifting her margarita glass in the air for a toast.

“To Sammy,” I echoed, clinking my glass against Dawn’s and Sammy’s. “To her freedom!”

“Hear, hear,” Dawn cheered as Sammy blushed.

The three of us—me, Sammy, and Dawn, Sammy’s best friend since preschool—were gathered on the oceanfront deck of Fiesta Mexicana, Cape Bay’s best and only Mexican restaurant, to celebrate Sammy’s breakup with her longtime loser boyfriend, Jared.

They’d been together for ten years, since their senior year in high school, and Jared had been refusing to move their relationship beyond boyfriend-girlfriend status for almost as long, always claiming that it would break his mother’s heart if he left her to get married.

Even so, Sammy had held out hope for a ring for their one-year anniversary, then their five-year, then their ten-year anniversary a few weeks ago. In the last case, the big surprise he’d promised her turned out to be an evening of go-karting. When that happened, even I, who hadn’t known her well for all that long, asked her what she was still doing with him. She said it was because she loved him. I let it go. But Dawn didn’t.

“God, I’m glad I finally convinced you to break up with him,” Dawn said, coming up from a long drink from her glass. We had been at the bar less than half an hour, but she had ordered a second round, despite Sammy and me having made nowhere near the impact on our drinks that she had. I’d never gone out with Dawn before, but I could already tell she was either going to be a lot of fun or no fun at all. She was that kind of girl.

“Fran did some convincing, too,” Sammy said, nodding in my direction.

I looked at her with my eyebrows raised as I swallowed the sip I’d just taken. The margarita was made just the way I liked it: a little tart, a little sweet, a little salty, and exactly the right amount of burn from the tequila. “I did?” I asked after the liquid had made its way down my throat.

“You did.”

“What did I say?” I asked.

“It wasn’t so much what you said as the fact that you said it. It was one thing when Dawn told me I needed to break up with him. I mean, she’s been saying that for years.”

“Nine and a half years to be exact,” Dawn interjected. “Maybe nine and three quarters.”

Sammy rolled her eyes with a smile and a shake of her head at her best friend. Clearly, they’d had the same conversation more than once. “Anyway, I’ve been hearing about it from Dawn for years, but when you said something after we’ve only really known each other for a few months…”

I looked down at my glass, embarrassed that I’d been so blunt. It was very un-New-England-y of me. Well, being blunt was very New England, but sticking my nose in someone else’s business wasn’t. Who someone else chose to spend their time with was none of my concern, even if I did think they were making a huge mistake. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have pried into your personal life.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Sammy exclaimed.

“Please,” Dawn chimed in. “If that’s what it took to get the girl to see reason, I’m glad you said something!” She tipped her glass up and emptied it.

“Still—” I started.

She was so worked up that she didn’t even notice that some of it sloshed over the side and fell onto the deck floor. I reached out, took it from her hand, and placed it on the table. She kept going without missing a beat.

“I had to keep telling people we were waiting until we were a little older, a little more established, had a little more money. It was so embarrassing! And then when I had to tell you that my big anniversary date was go-karts? Ugh! I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear! And what was my excuse? That I loved him? When that’s how he treated me?” She stopped and shook her head. “I’m just glad I finally realized it before I wasted any more time on him.”

I was surprised and impressed by Sammy’s outburst. It was so far out of character for her. Sammy’s usual disposition was as sunny as her blond hair. She smiled a lot, laughed a lot, got along with everybody, and made customers at the café smile. She rarely got worked up about anything, and on the incredibly rare occasion that she did, she never had that much to say about it. I liked seeing that kind of spunk and passion from her.

Not knowing what else to say, I raised my glass toward Sammy. “To getting out and not wasting time on losers!”

“I’ll drink to that!” Dawn said, clinking her glass against mine and Sammy’s.

The waiter had brought the second round while Sammy was venting about Jared. Dawn tipped it back and drank so much I felt reasonably confident we’d be on to the third round soon. Of course, if we kept going at our current pace, she could just drink Sammy’s or mine. She’d be ready for her next one long before we were.

“You know, I gotta say, Sam, I am glad you’re finally done feeling sorry for yourself about the breakup. Jared was a loser and not worth all the crying you were doing over him, was he, Fran?” Dawn said.

The native New Englander in me wanted to make a noncommittal grunt, but apparently my opinion had meant something to Sammy before.

“I can’t fault you for crying. I know I cried my share of tears when I found out my fiancé was cheating on me. But it’s definitely good to see you getting past the really depressed phase. He didn’t deserve you, and you deserve to be happy.”

Sammy gave me a small, grateful smile. I knew from my own recent experience that Dawn’s tough-love attitude was sometimes exactly what the doctor ordered, but other times, you needed someone to tell you that whatever you were feeling was fine and that they were there for you no matter how long it took you to get back to normal. Between the two of us, we had Sammy’s emotional needs covered. But that, I suspected, was why I’d been invited along.

The night out on the town had been Dawn’s idea. She’d come into the café the evening before, after Sammy had gone home but before I closed up shop. I didn’t know Dawn personally, but she came into the café sometimes after Sammy’s shifts to hang out with her.

She burst through the door unceremoniously, calling out before she even had the chance to see that I was standing right at the counter.

“Fran!” she bellowed. “We have to do something about Sammy!”

“We do?” I asked.

“For God’s sake, yes!” she said, slamming her hands down on the counter. “She’s been moping around, crying her eyes out for a week now. I can’t take it anymore!”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked Dawn.

While I considered Sammy a friend, she was also my employee. I’d known her for a long time but had only really gotten to know her personally over the past couple of months since I’d returned to Cape Bay from New York City. I really wasn’t sure I was the right person to help break her out of her funk.

Dawn looked at me as if I was stupid. “We need to take her out. Like, to party. Girls’ night out. I know that’s not just a Massachusetts thing. I watch TV. They have girls’ nights out in New York.”

“Even if they didn’t, I’m from Massachusetts.”

She didn’t look as though she believed me.

“I know,” she replied coolly. “You were just away so long, I thought maybe you forgot.”

“Forgot the girls’ nights out that we also have in New York?”

She gave me that “are you stupid?” look again then shook her head as if she couldn’t be bothered. “We need to take Sammy out,” she said, giving up on explaining the concept of “girls’ night out” to me.

“Do you really think Sammy would want me there? I mean, I’m her boss.”

“And her friend. Of course she would want you there. Are you free tomorrow night?”

Even though I knew it would take Sammy some time to get over the breakup since she’d been with Jared for so long, I couldn’t help but think that it would do her some good to get out, have a little fun, and remember that there was a big world out there as soon as she was ready to rejoin it. So I had agreed to Dawn’s plan for a girls’ night out.

And that was how we’d ended up on the deck of Fiesta Mexicana, tipping back margaritas and breathing in the salty sea air. It was the last week of the summer tourist season, and you could already feel the chill creeping into the air. Labor Day was coming up on Monday, the kids would go back to school on Tuesday, and Cape Bay’s tourist traffic would be confined to the weekends for the next six weeks until Columbus Day, when it essentially ground to a halt.

There would be a few tourists over the holidays and Valentine’s Day, but it wouldn’t be anything noteworthy until the spring breakers invaded in March, after which it would stop again until the season started on Memorial Day weekend. After the emotionally and physically exhausting summer, my mother’s sudden death, and the long hours I’d been working at the café, I was more than ready for the slower pace of winter.

Dawn downed the last of her drink and stood up. “I’ll be back. Gotta hit the little girls’ room.”

I watched her walk away then looked over at Sammy, who was staring out at the ocean. The sun had long since set, but the full moon lit the water up brightly enough that the people walking along the beach didn’t bother turning their flashlights on to light their way. It was a perfect late-summer night, but I could tell from Sammy’s face that she wasn’t really enjoying it.

“You okay?” I asked her quietly.

She nodded without taking her eyes off the water. The light from the neon beer sign behind her shone down on her hair, creating a halo effect. It wasn’t the first time the word “cherubic” had come to my mind in relation to Sammy, although it was usually the smiling cherubs I thought she looked like, not the tearful ones.

“It’ll get better,” I said. I knew from experience. It had only been a few months since my then-fiancé had broken the news that he was leaving me for the girl in his office he’d been cheating on me with. The first couple of weeks had been agonizing, and then when I wasn’t looking, the cloud began to lift.

She turned away from the water and looked at me, the corner of her mouth twitching up while her eyes stayed sad. “Promise?”

“Promise,” I replied. “It might seem like forever, but things will be looking up before you know it.”

The door from the deck to the patio opened, and Dawn walked through. She moved slowly, and I thought I detected a wobble in her step as she passed the table next to ours. I nudged Sammy and nodded in Dawn’s direction. Sammy’s eyes got big, and she started to stand, but before she could get up, Dawn lunged into the chair closest to her.

Dawn’s head tipped back, coming so close to the woman sitting at the table next to us that it nearly rested on her shoulder. Sammy and I looked at each other again. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with Dawn, and from Sammy’s expression, I guessed that she didn’t either.

“Dawn, are you—” I started, leaning across the table toward her.

Her head snapped forward, and one finger flew to her lips. “Shhhhh!” Her eyes were round and intense as she looked at me then at Sammy. After a few seconds, she leaned back again and turned her face upward.

I leaned over to Sammy and whispered, “Is she okay?”

Sammy shook her head and shrugged, no surer of Dawn’s condition than I was.

I looked back at Dawn, who was still inexplicably staring at the ceiling, her shoulder-length, rust-colored hair actually falling over the back of the other woman’s chair. The people at that table had just been seated, and they were chatting as they looked over their menus, too absorbed in what they were doing to notice that Dawn had practically joined their party.

I had no idea what was going on with her. She had seemed fine before she left the table. And she’d seemed okay—strange, but fine—when she’d sat up and shushed us. She’d only had two drinks, and she’d been right there with us until she’d gone to the bathroom.

No one except the waiter had come near us. I didn’t think she’d had enough alcohol to be drunk, and unless someone had intercepted her on her way to the bathroom, I couldn’t imagine that she’d been drugged. That wasn’t even something I would have worried about going out with girlfriends in New York, let alone sleepy little Cape Bay.

Something was very wrong; I just didn’t know what.