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

anything missing or out of place that Mike didn’t notice?”
    “We?” I asked, surprised. We’d been close growing up, but I had barely seen Matty since high school. Even though I’d been thrust back into his life, I didn’t expect him to want to share such a personal moment with me.
    He shrugged. “I don’t really want to be alone. And you’ve just been through the same thing. You’re not going to be all nosey and stuff, asking me a bunch of intrusive questions about how I feel about everything.”
    Well, that was true. The first days after I’d been home, several of my mother’s “friends” had come by, including some of the women from Mrs. D’Angelo’s Ladies Auxiliary. They supposedly wanted to express their condolences, but they’d seemed more interested in poking around the house, making snide comments and asking not-so-subtly about what had gone wrong with my fiancé. The people who came by and just wanted to express their condolences and sit quietly with me, drinking a cup of coffee while I stared into space, were few and far between, but they were much more what I needed as I struggled to process everything.
    “Okay then,” I said. “Where do you want to start?”
    “Living room?” Matty suggested.
    That seemed like as good a place as any, so we walked back to the room where we’d sat and waited for Mike what seemed like ages ago, even though it had only been an hour. We worked our way through the house, one room at a time. Matty looked around in each, surveying the contents. He told me stories about the objects in each room—souvenirs they’d picked up on vacation, the lamp he’d broken when he threw a baseball through the open window while playing catch with his dad, knickknacks that his grandparents had brought over from the old country, trinkets that had belonged to his mother. I already knew a lot of the stories from growing up with Matty, but I let him share them anyway. I knew how much he needed to talk about his dad without any pressure from me.
    We finished without finding anything that looked unusual and returned to the living room.
    “You want a cup of coffee?” Matty asked. “I know it’s getting late, but I think my dad keeps some decaf. Although I feel a little inadequate making it for the coffee queen here.”
    I laughed a little. “Whatever you have will be fine.” Yeah, I’d been around coffee my entire life and could tell a good cup from a bad cup by the look and the smell, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have manners. Besides, decaf or no, I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep that night.
    “All right,” Matty said as we headed toward the kitchen. He reached to open the coffeepot to put in the filter and grounds but stopped suddenly.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “I didn’t notice before—the coffeepot’s half full. It looks like Dad was only on his first cup.” He pulled out the coffeepot and held it up for me to see.
    Sure enough, it was only partially empty. Matty paused, staring at the coffeepot. The visual evidence of his dad’s interrupted morning must have brought his grief back to the forefront. Not that I could blame him. He looked at it for a few more seconds then poured the coffee down the sink. He rinsed out the pot and started a fresh batch.
    We sat in silence at the kitchen table, each of us lost in our thoughts of our own parent’s recent passing. With a lot of people, that kind of silence might have been awkward, but with Matty, it felt completely comfortable. When the coffee was ready, Matty poured us each a cup and brought them back to the table.
    “Sorry, no fancy designs,” he said with a sad smile.
    “It tastes just as good without them,” I said before taking a sip. It did not taste good. Clearly Mr. Cardosi hadn’t spent any more on his coffee than he’d absolutely had to. It was so bad, I actually wondered if there might be something wrong with the coffeemaker. I set my cup on the table. I’d had a lot of bad coffee in