Do or Diner: A Comfort Food Mystery
Read Do or Diner: A Comfort Food Mystery Online
Authors: Christine Wenger
The Deadly Special
My diner!
My heart started pounding. I’m not the greatest in an emergency. My brain just sits there in my head like a lump of dough that won’t rise.
Max and Clyde ran toward me, and I rushed to meet them. The snowflakes hit my face and eyes and melted on my contact lenses.
“Trixie.” Max breathed heavily, and puffs of steam hung between us. “The kitchen.”
“Oh no! Fire! Is anyone hurt?” I immediately thought of Juanita. I knew that she was single, and, oh merciful heavens, I didn’t know anything else about her or how to contact her loved ones. I didn’t even know her last name. “Juanita?”
Clyde grabbed a chunk of my sleeve and pulled me down the path to the diner. “No! She’s okay. Everyone’s okay. Well, not everyone.”
Either my brain wasn’t computing or Clyde was speaking Swahili. “Huh?”
“It’s Marvin P. Cogswell the Third,” Max said.
The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“Huh?” I repeated.
“Marvin P. Cogswell the Third,” they said in unison.
Oh yeah, that helped…so much.
“The health inspector!” Max added. “It looks like he had a heart attack.”
Do or Diner
A Comfort Food Mystery
CHRISTINE WENGER
OBSIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Christine Anne Wenger, 2013
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ISBN: 978-1-101-62638-2
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
There are so many people that I’d like to thank, but this book reached publication due to the brilliance of my agent, the very special and delightful Michelle Grajkowski of 3 Seas Literary Agency, who believed in me. And to Jesse Feldman, editor, Penguin Group, who said YES! This one’s for you, ladies! Thank you so very much!
Chris
Excerpt from
A Second Helping of Murder
W
hat on earth did I do?
A thrill of excitement shot through me as I stood in front of the Silver Bullet Diner. It was still hard to think of it as
my
diner, but the wad of keys in my pocket assured me that it was.
It was mid-March in upstate New York, Sandy Harbor to be exact, and the snow was falling in big fat flakes, adding to the six-foot banks around the parking lot. Still, the bright red neon of the diner’s name and the blue neon proclaiming
AIR-CONDITIONED
and
OPEN 24 HOURS
shone through the snow and lit the way for patrons arriving for lunch.
It was my diner now.
Maybe it wasn’t excitement that I felt, but more like anxiety. In diner lingo, maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew. Or maybe I was having buyer’s remorse.
Probably all of the above!
As I surveyed my new kingdom on the frozen shore of Lake Ontario, I mentally listed all the things with which I needed to familiarize myself.
A huge gingerbread Victorian house located to the left of the diner and closer to the water had been recently vacated by my aunt Stella. It was
also now mine. It had almost disappeared in the heavy snow, with its pristine white paint and dark green shutters. It had a major wraparound porch that I planned to use in the summer. I’d sit in a forest green Adirondack chair and watch the waves of Lake Ontario lap at the shore.
I looked over at the twelve little white cottages that dotted the lakefront. It looked like the big Victorian had a litter.
They were called—
care to guess?
—the Sandy Harbor Guest Cottages.
My mind flashed back to the two weeks every summer that my family rented here. We always rented Cottage Number Six, on the front row of the first chain of cottages. My sister, my brother, and I would stay in the water from sunrise until sunset. Mom and Dad had to drag us out of the water, slather us with sunscreen, feed us, and listen to our pleas to go back in.
Now all twelve cottages belonged to me, and I’d be renting them out to the next generation of fishermen and families who’d enjoy them.
The Silver Bullet was the centerpiece of my little kingdom. Smiling, I saw that the parking lot was filled with cars that were frosted with a couple inches of snow. Customers entered the diner in groups, laughing and talking and looking forward to a good meal. They left the same way they came, but now sated by delicious comfort food and finishing their conversations before brushing the snow off their cars.
The scent of baking bread drifted on the crisp
winter air and mixed with other cooking scents. My mouth was watering just thinking of what I was going to order later.
Slogging through the snow to the side of the diner, I savored every aspect of its outside appearance: the curved lines, the metallic diamond-shaped edging around the windows, and the porchlike entranceway. The Silver Bullet looked like it had just been towed into place, not like it had been there since 1950.
I looked for the cement cornerstone, which I’d always thought was so romantic, but it was buried under several feet of snow. I knew what it said by heart:
STELLA AND MORRIS “PORKY” MATKOWSKI, MARRIED 1950, TOGETHER FOREVER IN OUR LOVE
.
They were together until Uncle Porky died a month ago.
I sighed, thinking about the two of them. Porky and Stella always finished each other’s sentences and walked hand in hand. But now Stella was alone, just like I was alone, but I hoped to change that as soon as I met more people in the community. I remembered Sandy Harbor as being a friendly place, and that was just what I needed—friends.
Actually, Aunt Stella wasn’t alone right now. A gaggle of her friends came for Porky’s funeral and stayed at the house. They helped her through the first month of losing her husband, and now she was en route to a senior community in Boca with them. They planned on living like the
Golden Girls
characters, but first they were going on a cruise around the world.
Because she was busy entertaining her friends, packing to leave, and searching for her missing passport, Aunt Stella didn’t have much time to show me the entire operation.
“The same people have been working here forever. They know what to do,” she’d told me several times.
I pointed my boots toward a slushy path that led to my new house. Maybe I should unpack and get settled, but I was eager to get more acquainted with everyone and everything.
I took a deep breath and let it out. All this was so overwhelming. Mostly because I, Beatrix Matkowski (formerly known as Beatrix Burnham), was starting over at age thirtysomething.
I was freshly divorced from Deputy Doug Burn-ham after ten years of marital nonbliss. And, after ten years of trying to start a family and failing at it, Deputy Doug proved that it wasn’t his fault by getting Wendy, his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, pregnant with twins.
The day after I found out about Doug and Wendy, I was downsized from my job as a City of Philadelphia tourist information specialist, a position that meant I sat at a walk-in tourist information site and dispensed heaps of tourist information.
How things had changed in a few months!
They say that bad things always come in threes: Uncle Porky died before my divorce and the downsizing.
After the cemetery, where we left Uncle Porky’s ashes in the Matkowski family crypt, everyone
came back to the diner for food and remembering. My mother, who had rolled into town with my father in their motor home, cried and laughed with relatives and friends who she hadn’t seen in years. My father told humorous tales of Uncle Porky, his older brother.
My mom, Aunt Stella, and Aunt Beatrix all got a little tipsy and giggly, and they fell asleep in one of the back booths of the diner.
When my mom sobered up, she decided that since Stella was going around the world, she and my dad should go to Key West and take Aunt Beatrix with them. I didn’t get the parallel, but early the next morning they all took off, except for Aunt Beatrix, who was taking Amtrak back to NYC because she’d been to Key West “fifty years ago, and it’s probably the same.”