Bone Appétit (3 page)

The deliveryman produced a giant box and handed it to Karrie. “This is also for you.” He stood a moment and when it became clear she had no intention of tipping him, he gave her a disgusted look and left.

One thing about Karrie Kompton: She knew how to play a moment to the hilt. She held out the box, shook it lightly, and then very carefully untied the pink organdy ribbon that adorned an ornate, foil-stamped, fuchsia box. Chocolates were my guess.

When she lifted the lid, instead of a squeal, she sighed
with pleasure. “Look at this. I’ve never seen chocolates like this before. They’re so big and dark and expensive looking.”

The girls and male admirers all leaned in to examine the box. Even after eating a dozen or more appetizers, I couldn’t stop my mouth from watering. Chocolate was definitely my weakness, and Karrie had the ability to make others want what she had, even a box of candies. I waited for her to pass them around to her friends. Instead, she picked one out and held it up for all to see.

“It’s like a chocolate shell,” she declared, turning it this way and that. “And stamped onto the top is an exact replica of the crown I’m going to win. These had to have been handmade just for me.”

“Eat the damn thing or put it down,” Crystal Belle Wadell finally said. “You aren’t going to share, so just eat it and shut up about it. Brook, Janet, Gretchen—let’s go find out about our schedules.”

The four young women stood.

“Jealous because I have a secret admirer?” Karrie taunted. Her laughter danced around the room. “I’ll bet this is a gift from one of the judges.”

The audacity of her statement made Tinkie’s eyes widen. “What an instigator she is,” Tinkie whispered. “I’m surprised one of the other contestants hasn’t whipped her ass.”

“The night is still young.” I sipped my drink as Karrie teased the other contestants with her flowers and candy. She had a genuine talent for torment, and everybody in the bar, including Tinkie and me, couldn’t stop watching. Whatever Karrie lacked in kindness, or even basic human decency, she made up in spades with the ability to mesmerize an audience.

Two women stepped into the bar, one a bit older than me and the other obviously one of the contestants. Pale and
elfin, she had an ethereal quality. When she turned around, I checked to see if she sported fairy wings. Whoever she was, she was lovely. And the older woman was attractive, too. The possibility that they were sisters crossed my mind.

“Amanda, let’s order something in the room,” the older one said.

“I want to stay here, Mother.”

My relationship questions were answered. Mother and daughter. If I were a beauty contestant, I’d want my mother with me for moral support. Hey, given my druthers, I’d have my mom around for all occasions.

Karrie reclaimed the floor as she eased the candy to her mouth. She did it slowly, playing to her audience. She placed her perfect white teeth on the delicacy, and then she slowly bit the candy in half.

To my utter horror, the half she still held in her hand began to move. Hairy legs protruded, and the back half of a giant cockroach fell onto the bar and began crawling crazily around. Headless, it had no sense of direction.

Karrie froze. She stared at the half-a-roach, which wouldn’t accept its own death. The most intriguing expression passed across her face, and then she spat chocolate and roach all over the bar.

Shouts, shrieks, and screams of laughter erupted. Pandemonium ruled. Tinkie and I stood on our chairs for a better view of a fistfight between several of the contestants. Women shoved and trampled one another to get away from Karrie. Ingeniously, Tinkie clicked photos of the mayhem with her cell phone.

Someone pushed the candy to the floor, and in the melee, people stepped on the chocolates, freeing more roaches that had survived being dipped in chocolate and were understandably pissed off. The area around Karrie was an expanding disaster.

“Holy Christmas.” Tinkie was having a blast. “Can you believe that? Someone sent her chocolate-covered roaches. That is too creepy.” And then she burst out laughing. Karrie didn’t generate a lot of sympathy. At least not from Tinkie. Or me. I was enjoying the spectacle as much as she was.

I looked over to see Hedy’s reaction. She was gone. As were the mother-daughter duo. The roaches sent a lot of people scurrying, but a team of Alluvian staff arrived to work damage control.

“How hard would it be to chocolate-coat a roach?” I asked. “Maybe just heat a little chocolate—”

“You wouldn’t even have to do that. There’s a product that hardens instantly on cold surfaces. Someone froze those roaches—like fishermen do catalpa worms—then coated them in chocolate and got them over here before they thawed enough to eat their way out of the shells.”

“Someone really doesn’t like Karrie Kompton.” My smile was painfully wide.

“We’ll have to remember this. The day might come when we want to make our own chocolate delivery.” Tinkie loved mischief.

We raised our glasses and drained them. “Thank you, Tinkie. This was exactly what I needed.”

We’d just ordered another round when Tinkie’s cell phone rang. Cece had been delayed at the newspaper and would come the next evening for sure. When Tinkie relayed the roach episode, Cece wanted Tinkie’s photos for the newspaper.

Tinkie held the phone so we could share it. “Cece wants to hire us to cover the beauty contest until she gets here.”

For some reason, that appealed to me. “Sure.”

“We’re on,” Tinkie agreed into the phone. “I’ll get someone to help me send the photos from my phone. And, yes, we’ll buy a better camera.”

__________

My aunt Loulane, my father’s sister, cared for me after my parents died in a car wreck when I was twelve. She was a Southern cook who could make a table groan under the weight of ham and sweet potatoes or cheese grits and homemade biscuits. There was not a day when I came in from school that a hot dewberry cobbler or a fresh apple pie wasn’t cooling in the kitchen window. She fed me like a prize steer headed for the state fair.

She mentored me in table manners, but she never taught me the basics of cooking. In my second class at the Viking Cooking School, I did my best to strain a lumpy mass of butter and flour through cheesecloth. I conceded that just because I could sometimes make Sawmill or Redeye Gravy, I had not mastered the French “sauce.” In my own defense, my stiff arm impeded my work. The break I’d suffered in my last case had healed at warp speed. Nonetheless, the arm was weak.

The “saucier” directing the morning lesson was a kind woman, but I could read my failure in her eyes. I managed to retain some facts: A famous French chef had categorized sauces into four families, each based on a mother sauce—béchamel, espagnole, velouté, or allemande. I hadn’t mastered the art of creating any of them, but I was learning. There were white roux, blond roux—some based on milk or brown stock, some requiring egg yolks and heavy cream as a binding agent. By lunchtime, my head was spinning with the many aspects of sauce.

“Taste mine,” Tinkie said.

I glared at her simmering pan of béchamel. It was neither lumpy nor watery. It was perfect. And it tasted good, too.

Covered in splotches of food, my apron askew, and my
chef’s hat sunk low to my eyebrows, I was relieved when the class was done.

Tinkie’s cell phone rang. “Cece, darling,” she said, talking as we left the cooking school behind and stepped onto the downtown Greenwood street. She grabbed my uninjured arm. “The photos made the front page of the paper! Cece said everyone is calling in to say how great the story is.”

I gave her a thumbs-up. This vacation was something Tinkie and I both needed. My depression was still with me, but it had receded due to the frontal assault of fun and good cheer Tinkie aimed at it. I’d fallen out of my life and I didn’t know how to get back in, but the distance no longer seemed insurmountable. I was finally starting to heal emotionally, as Jitty predicted.

While Tinkie chatted away, giving Cece a blow-by-blow of her successful sauce morning, I took in the scenery. Greenwood had once been the heart of cotton production in the landlocked portion of the Delta. The cotton was ginned and baled here and then taken by rail to Greenville on the Mississippi River, where it was shipped far and wide.

Greenwood’s streets were paved with bricks, and railroad tracks crisscrossed the town. Both the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers swirled around the city, which boasted some of the finest antebellum “town” houses—in contrast to the working plantations—in the South. But Greenwood had fallen on hard times in recent years, like much of the Delta. The twenty-first century hadn’t been kind to agrarian cultures.

The Delta city was rebudding, though. The Viking Range headquarters, the Alluvian, the blossoming of Turnrow Books were all signs of downtown revitalization. Life had touched this Delta town, as it had Dahlia House. And me.

Tinkie took off to find a digital camera with a telephoto lens, and I went back to the hotel room and placed a call to
Graf. They were wrapping the Western he was shooting in Northern California, and I hoped to catch him on lunch break.

In the four weeks since I’d been so savagely attacked during my last case, Graf had been back to Zinnia twice and called every day. He was worried about me. All of my friends were concerned—Graf more than anyone else.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “How’s cooking school?”

“I’m hell on appetizers, but sauces have whipped me.”

“Ah, a pun. A bad one, but an attempt at humor is welcomed. This sounds hopeful.” His voice, filled with relief, was supersexy.

I related the chocolate-roach incident and had him howling with laughter. I promised to get Tink to e-mail the photos to him.

“Your friend is a genius,” he said. “This is exactly what you needed, Sarah Booth. You sound like your old self.”

“I’m better.” A lump formed in my throat. “It’s difficult. But I’m getting better.”

“Whenever you feel up to coming out here, there’s work waiting.”

Panic squeezed my chest. “Not yet.” I wasn’t ready to try acting again. While my movie career wasn’t responsible for all that had happened, it had been the initiating factor. Or so it seemed.

“There’s all the time in the world,” Graf said softly. “I don’t care if you never make another film. I want you to be with me, working or not. I love you.”

“And I love you.” I turned the diamond ring on my left hand. “I miss you.” His absence was like a toothache, a low-key, throbbing pain. But sometimes, especially when I woke up in the middle of the night alone and scared, it was a sharp and angry sensation.

“They’re calling us back to the set. Another few weeks and I’ll be done. Maybe we could take a trip to Europe. Didn’t your friend Lee tell you about a horseback ride up the western coast of Ireland? That would be incredible.”

“You have an excellent memory.”

“Check it out and see if it would interest you. I want to spend some time alone with you in a beautiful place.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” When I hung up, I caught my reflection in the mirror. I was smiling, and it felt good.

“Quit wiggling!” Tinkie tucked in the straps of the new dress she’d bought me while she was supposed to be shopping for a camera. The apple green dress fit me like a glove. Both Tinkie and Cece had the shopping gene. Alas, I did not. But then I didn’t need it because my friends were happy to make sure my wardrobe met their high standards.

A knock on the hotel room door drew an exclamation of pleasure from Tinkie. “Cece is here!” She threw open the door to reveal our journalistic friend, already dressed for the occasion. We were attending the “Poise and Confidence” segment of the beauty pageant. Evening dress was de rigueur. Since I wasn’t in the habit of traveling with a formal gown, Tinkie had provided one. She’d packed six large suitcases with everything she’d need for a summer season with the Royal Family.

“You look marvelous, Sarah Booth, dahling.” Cece
air-kissed both my cheeks and then Tinkie’s. “And you, Tinkie Richmond, are stunning.”

Tinkie wore a midnight blue velvet gown that plunged low in front and laced down the back. With her glitzed blond hair she was glam.

“You don’t look too shabby yourself,” I told Cece, whose russet gown showed her slender hips to advantage. “Are the dogs behaving?” Oscar was keeping my hound, Sweetie Pie, along with Chablis. Cece had promised to check on them every day.

“Living the life of pampered pooches. Oscar has been riding them to get ice cream. I see them parked in the drive-thru window of the Sweetheart Café. He gets two cones, one to share between the dogs, and one for himself.”

Oscar had once had me convinced that he didn’t give a damn about Chablis. Either his heart had changed or he’d deliberately covered up his affection for the little Yorkie that masqueraded as Tinkie’s dog/child. Sweetie Pie was a red tic hound I’d acquired on my first case. I would never have had a second case had it not been for Sweetie’s intervention. Likewise, Chablis had saved my bacon more than once.

“Are we ready, ladies?” Tinkie clutched her sequined bag.

“Let’s do it.”

As we rode to the auditorium, we filled Cece in on what we knew about the contestants. The driver tried not to laugh when Tinkie gave her rendition of Karrie biting into the chocolate roach. Apparently, Karrie’s personality had been inflicted on almost all of the service staff of the hotel.

“And this Hedy woman is a mystery,” Cece said. “I went through the list of contestants and did a little research.”

“Spill!” Tinkie said.

“That’s the problem,” Cece said. “There’s nothing. She’s
twenty-two, graduated high school in a tiny town on the Pearl River near the Louisiana line, and just . . . nothing.”

“She’s only twenty-two,” Tinkie pointed out.

“All the other girls list modeling jobs, dramatic roles in community theater, job titles and positions, even if they’re made up.”

I saw Cece’s point. A young woman vying for a job as spokesperson would want any and all experience dealing with public situations front and center on a résumé.

“She did appear to be a loner,” I said.

“Anything else?” Tinkie asked.