Moving Can Be Murder Read Free

summer
after spending a few years in L.A. pursuing a graduate degree in
English, and being pursued – and sometimes caught -- by a variety
of highly unsuitable young men, in my humble opinion. Especially
the last one, Jeff, whose controlling attitude had finally driven
Jenny back to the East Coast.
    Not that I would have ever voiced that to my
daughter, of course. I do have a big mouth, but I’m not that
stupid. Both Jim and I were delighted that she now was pursuing a
graduate degree and supporting herself (with a little help from
good old Mom and Dad) with a part-time teaching assistant’s job at
the local college.
    And I was over the moon about Jenny’s new
relationship. Her boyfriend du jour, whom I hoped would be The One,
was Mark Anderson, who had been a classmate of Jenny’s way back in
grade school. He was also a local police detective, and he and
Jenny had become reacquainted last summer when My Beloved had been
(falsely, of course!) suspected of committing a homicide. I was the
one who had finally figured out who the real culprit was, but
modestly, I let the police department take all the credit.
    “Carol, are you ever going to swallow that
food? We’re not having a blackout meal tonight, are we?” Jim
interrupted my daydreaming with a feeble attempt at humor.
    Blackout meals used to be my specialty. Our
part of the country was subject to power failure after power
failure in the mid-80s. The family used to tease me that I’d take
advantage of the situation by cleaning all the leftovers out of the
refrigerator and slapping them together into some sort of makeshift
meal before everything spoiled. Frequently, no one could identify
what they were eating. Jenny and our son Mike called them blackout
meals, and always eyed them with great suspicion.
    I admit that I did come up with some pretty
unusual combinations – leftover hamburger with a side order of
pineapple Jello was one of them. I never claimed to be a gourmet
cook; I just hate to waste food.
    “No, Jim,” I replied, washing down my food
with a dainty sip of chardonnay, “I can assure you that a blackout
meal is not the menu tonight. Nor is all-day meat, in case you were
wondering.”
    If you don’t understand that phrase, think
of chewing a tough piece of meat forever and ever – all day, in
fact. Hey, in those days Jim had me on a pretty strict grocery
budget. No filet mignon for us.
    Come to think of it, not much had changed on
that score.
    Sensing a tad of tension in the air once
again, Jenny tried to lighten the mood by going down memory lane a
little more. “Mom, one of my all-time favorite meals is your
meatloaf. We haven’t had that in ages. Maybe now that I’m a
grown-up, you’ll finally share the secret ingredient with me so
mine will come out as good as yours does.”
    I laughed. “The secret ingredient is pretty
simple, Jenny. It’s adding a pinch of allspice to the meat mixture.
You know,” I went on, getting into the spirit of things a little
more, “I remember the night we did the meatloaf poll.”
    “The what?” asked Jim, clearly confused by
this reference.
    “It was one of those nights that you were
out of town on business,” I said, thinking that those were the good
old days. “Mike never liked meatloaf, and he used to grab his
throat and roll all over the kitchen floor whenever I served it.
Just getting him to eat one forkful was a major event.
    “This one night -- I guess you were about
twelve, Jenny, so Mike must have been ten -- I got sick and tired
of his antics and I challenged him to call his friends to see how
many of them liked meatloaf. We made a deal that he could call
eight of his friends, and if five or more of them liked meatloaf,
he had to clean his plate.”
    “Pretty clever, Carol. Did it work?”
    “It sure did, Dad,” Jenny chimed in. “Mike
was really mad when he found out so many of his buddies liked
meatloaf. In fact, I think a lot of them wanted to know the next
time Mom was making it so