Cappuccinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse (A Cape Bay Cafe Mystery Book 1) Read Free

really did sound pretty good. I adjusted my purse on my shoulder and started on what I thought would be an uneventful walk home.

Chapter 2
    I t wasn’t a long walk —just a few blocks. My grandmother had never learned to drive, so when she and my grandfather decided their family needed more space than was available in the apartment above the café, they needed to look close by. The house they found was a Cape Cod that was old even when they bought it. It was nestled among other Cape Cods on a street two blocks over and perpendicular to Main Street, where the café was. The previous owners had adapted the house so that it had one downstairs bedroom and two upstairs bedrooms—one for the boys and one for the girls, my grandparents thought. But no children came along, besides my mother, and the third bedroom stayed empty until I moved into it as a child.
    I decided to take a shortcut across a few backyards, the same shortcut I used to take when I was a kid running back and forth between the house and the café ten times a day. I hadn’t taken it since I’d been back because I’d still been wearing my New York stilettos, which weren’t exactly suited to grassy wandering, but my aching feet had finally convinced me to dig some of my mother’s loafers out of her closet. Fortunately, her obsession with Italian leather, combined with regular visits to Cape Bay’s cobbler, meant that her nearly twenty-year-old shoes were still in great shape and comfortable to boot.
    I turned off the sidewalk and stepped onto the grass. The shade from the trees was a nice break from the summer heat. With how humid Massachusetts summers could get, I had learned long ago to keep my thick mass of hair in a chignon pretty much the entire season. As a teenager, I had argued with my mother that black hair made me hotter in the summer sun and I would be so much cooler if I could just dye it blond. She refused, insisting that it would turn orange. I didn’t believe her and bleached it at a friend’s house one summer day when I was avoiding working at the café. It turned orange. Very, very orange. After that, I listened to my mother’s beauty advice.
    I trekked across a few yards, reminiscing about all my childhood adventures. As I got close to my house, I saw Mr. Cardosi, the town barber, sitting on his back porch. He had lived two doors down from my grandparents my entire life, and I had played and gone to school with his son Matteo, or Matty as I had always called him. It was unusual for Mr. Cardosi to be home at that time of day, but it was unusual for me to be home at that time of day too.
    “Hello, Mr. Cardosi!” I called, waving.
    Mr. Cardosi didn’t move. I thought that was strange, but when he sat out back, he usually had his radio turned to the Red Sox game, so maybe he just couldn’t hear me. I decided to wait until I was a little closer to call out again.
    I waved again as I got into his backyard. “Hel—”
    I stopped, noticing that Mr. Cardosi’s chin was resting on his chest. Was he sleeping? I cut across his yard to check on him. This had always been the kind of neighborhood where everybody watched out for everybody else. I appreciated it now, but I’d hated it when I was a kid and Matty and I were running around, causing trouble. I’d never once made it home before the news of whatever mischief we’d gotten ourselves into had reached my grandmother’s ears.
    I walked across the lawn, wondering if I should call out to Mr. Cardosi so as not to startle him or stay quiet to let him keep sleeping. Not wanting to scare the old man and give him a heart attack, I called out again. “Mr. Cardosi! Mr. Cardosi!”
    He didn’t move. I slowed down as I got to the porch.
    “Mr. Cardosi?” I said more quietly. Still nothing. I nudged his shoulder. “Mr. Cardosi?”
    He slumped farther over, and I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mr. Cardosi wasn’t asleep—he was dead . I backed away slowly, reaching for my phone in