Hungry Spirits [Spirits 04] (22 page)

“
Sounds yummy.”

“
Oh, it is.” She shaped her dough some more and frowned. “Perhaps I should make it for the family one of these days. Perhaps at Easter.”

That notion perked me right up. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”

She gave me a small, ironic smile. “Anything you don’t have to cook sounds good to you, Daisy Majesty.”

“
I sure can’t deny that, although I haven’t erred too terribly in my cooking class so far, thanks to you.”

“
I’m happy to help, dear. I think you’d be a good cook if you concentrated more.”

That was what I loved best about my family. They were always happy to help anyone who needed help, and they always thought the best of everyone, even when it was me. “Thanks, Vi,” I said humbly and meant it sincerely.

She frowned down at her dough. “I don’t know, though. Beef Wellington is pretty expensive. I don’t think we could afford to feed the entire family, including Daphne and Walter and their spouses and children, if I served beef Wellington.”

I had what I considered a brilliant idea. “You could make it for my birthday.” Then I grinned slyly at her.

She laughed again. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

“
I’ll pay for the sirloin of beef,” I told her as an encouragement.

“
You shouldn’t have to pay for your own birthday dinner, Daisy Majesty.”

“
Heck, I don’t mind. It’ll be my birthday present to myself.”

Vi smiled, although I noticed a little sadness lurking around the edges of the smile. Because her only son had been killed in the war, she’d be alone in the world if it weren’t for the fact that she had us. That war had done so much damage to so many people. But I didn’t want to dwell on it. Instead, I watched my aunt.

She’d finished wrapping the roast in the pastry and picked up her rolling pin. She rolled out another hunk of dough and began cutting leafy shapes from the rolled dough with a sharp little knife and setting them aside.

“
What are those for?”

“
I’m going to decorate the roast with a vine pattern. It’ll look pretty that way.”

“
Oh, my, that sounds very fancy.” I squinted at the dough leaves and back at the rolled roast. “Do they stick all by themselves?”

“
With a little help from a dab of water. Then I’m going to brush an egg wash over the whole thing right before I bake it.”

“
An egg wash? What’s an egg wash?”

“
An egg beaten with a little water and brushed over the pastry. Cooks use egg washes on lots of pastries.”

Good grief. That sounded like a whole lot of work for something that was going to be carved up and eaten in probably a matter of minutes. This demonstrates yet one more way in which rich folks are different from the rest of us. I mean, I don’t mind spending a lot of time sewing for my family and myself, but when you sew something, it lasts for more than a single wearing. I aimed to make Christmas shirts for all of us beginning as soon as Thanksgiving was over. It was fun, when we got together on Christmas Eve, to have everyone wearing the same patterned shirt. At least it was fun for me, and the family didn’t complain. Well, Billy did, but he always complained about everything, so his opinion didn’t count.

“
Did you get a call from Mrs. Kincaid to do a reading today?” Aunt Vi asked as she started pasting leaves onto the dough clinging to the beef.

“
Yes.” I sighed. “She’s sure in a state about her wedding, isn’t she?”

“
She is indeed. Marriage is a big step for her. You know how her first one ended.”

Boy, did I ever. “I remember all too well.”

Aunt Vi shook her head. “Once bitten, twice shy, I guess is the expression to describe poor Mrs. Kincaid’s nerves these days.”

“
But Mr. Pinkerton is nothing at all like Mr. Kincaid.”

“
And thank the good Lord for that,” said Vi firmly.

I added my own “Amen” to her sentiment and moseyed out the back door to climb into our Chevrolet and head to the library to return my family’s crop of last week’s books and check out some more.

Because I was wildly curious about Gertrude Minneke and her brother, even though I wasn’t longing to see her again anytime soon because I’d have to disappoint her about the money and train-ticket thing, I set out to search for her after I’d selected my books—
Dark Hollow
and
The House of Whispering Pines,
by Anna Katharine Green and
The Sleuth of St. James’s Square,
by Melville Davisson Post. I actually wanted to pick up some more books before I left the library. Billy had asked me to look for some more Westerns, even if they weren’t by Zane Grey, and Pa was finished with
The Beautiful and the Damned.
With a grimace of distaste, he had given it to me to return to the library and asked me to pick up something more compatible with his view of the world.

Which brings up an interesting point. Well, I think it’s interesting. Probably other people won’t, but I’m going to say it here anyway. We Gumms stick together on our dislike of shallow people with more money than sense and no awareness of social responsibility. I can stand working for Mrs. Kincaid and Mrs. Bissell, both of whom probably had more money than was good for them, because they were good-hearted people who did their best to help other people, even if they didn’t quite understand how the rest of the world actually got on. For instance, Mrs. Bissell was a big supporter of the Humane Society in Pasadena, and Mrs. Kincaid gave lots of money and other stuff to the poor, even if she didn’t understand how anyone could be poor.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s people, who are well set up in the world as a rule, all seemed to be suffering from massive cases of ennui for no good reason that I could discern. Heck, our next-door neighbors’ boy, Pudge Wilson, had a bigger sense of responsibility to his fellow beings than the people in Fitzgerald’s books. At least he did a good deed every day for the sake of his scouting group. Generally he tried to get it out of the way early so he didn’t have to worry about being good for the rest of the day, but at least he tried.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I aimed to pick up some more books, in other words, but the ones I already had were heavy enough to be lugging all over the library, so I decided to look for Westerns and stuff after I’d found Gertrude.

But I didn’t find her. Because I was still curious, I asked Miss Petrie if she knew where Gertrude was.

“
Gertrude Minneke?” Miss Petrie said, looking a little startled that anyone would be asking her about a library page. “I believe Miss Minneke is out for the day. Someone said she telephoned to say she was sick.”

“
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“
What’s your interest in Miss Minneke, Mrs. Majesty? Do you know her from somewhere?”

Was it my imagination, or did Miss Petrie have a certain look on her face? I couldn’t quite place it, but it seemed to me that it was a combination of suspicion and dislike. It was, as usual, probably my imagination. “No, I don’t really know her well. I’m helping out a friend on Saturdays at the Salvation Army, and Miss Minneke is one of my . . . er, she’s one of the people who joins in the effort.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t take one more person laughing at me for telling her I taught a cooking class. And Miss Petrie didn’t even know what a terror I was in the kitchen.

I swear, her expression cleared. “Ah. I see. Yes, I understand Miss Minneke has taken advantage of a program offered by the Salvation Army. The library has hired, I believe, three people through their auspices.”

“
The Salvation Army is a great organization,” I said loyally.

“
Indeed.”

Miss Petrie didn’t seem as thrilled with the Salvation Army’s good works as I. Curious, I asked, “You don’t seem to care much for Miss Minneke, Miss Petrie. Or am I wrong about that?”

She hesitated for a moment or two, then said slowly, “It’s not so much that I don’t care for her. I . . . just get a funny feeling from her.”

A funny feeling? “Um, I’m not sure I understand.”

Miss Petrie heaved a sigh. “I’m not sure I do, either. Miss Minneke is always polite, and she does her work well. Perhaps it’s that brother of hers. He comes in to fetch her after work sometimes, and he doesn’t appear to be an upright individual to me. Although, really, I suppose I shouldn’t say that, since I don’t know the young man at all, and it’s not right to judge people if you don’t know them.”

“
I suppose it isn’t, although I understand what you mean.” Perhaps Eugene wasn’t as innocent as Gertrude wanted to believe him. Miss Petrie had always seemed a logical, eminently sane person to me; I doubt that she made unfavorable snap judgments about people very often.

Since I couldn’t very well tell her about Gertrude and Eugene’s problems, I toddled off to search out more books and tried to forget about Gertrude.

Such blessed forgetfulness was not to be mine. I kept picturing Gertrude in my mind’s eye, sneaking in disguise to the train station on South Raymond Avenue and being captured, tied up and flung into the rear seat of a big black car by a bunch of big, burly thugs from back East. Shoot.

As I was running through that, and similar scenarios in my mind’s eye, all having to do with Gertrude being punished for her brother’s sins, I managed to get my hands on
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis—which I suspected Pa wouldn’t like much, either—
Tarzan the Untamed, A Princess of Mars
and
The Gods of Mars,
by Edgar Rice Burroughs for Billy. Then, because I didn’t think Pa was going to care for the Sinclair Lewis book, I poked around on the shelves until I found
The Path of the King
and
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan. For myself, I added
The Man in Grey
by Baroness Orczy, and
The Devil’s Paw
by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and I left the library burdened, but happy with my choices.

Chapter Thirteen

I was right about Pa and
Main Street,
but he really liked
The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Billy was pleased with the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, too. He loved
Tarzan
in particular, probably because Tarzan could do all sorts of things Billy couldn’t do any longer. Poor Billy. Then there was my cooking class. I honestly don’t think I had an easy moment for the entire seven weeks that class lasted. But there were only two classes left, thank God.

For next Saturday’s lesson, I decided to prepare a dessert. We hadn’t made a dessert before. Unfortunately, most of the recipes in
Sixty-Five Delicious Dishes
required that the desserts, mainly puddings, be steamed for hours, and we didn’t have hours to use the Salvation Army’s stove. We had one hour, and I sure as anything didn’t want to prolong my own agony. I don’t know if my students felt the same way.

Anyhow, I decided on a recipe even though I didn’t know how to pronounce it, and still don’t: Arme Ritter. I decided, for no particular reason, that it was French, so I pronounced it with a French accent. It was basically French toast—which I knew about because Aunt Vi served it for breakfast every now and then—but spiced up with cinnamon and sugar, and served with fruit preserves. I thought I probably couldn’t kill that one, even with a stick. Vi agreed with me.

So, that decision made, I called Flossie to tell her to provide eggs, milk, cinnamon, sugar and fruit preserves and then thought some more.

In fact, I wracked my brain (which hurt) to think of a bang-up dish for my cooking students to fix on our last—hallelujah!—class together. Then I took a deep breath and decided to tackle the pea castle. One of the students had asked if we could make it, and I saw no
real
reason not to, as long as Vi could help me figure out what a bread croute was, and show me how to build the castle. There’s supposed to be a little upside-down V over the u in that word, but I don’t know why. The recipe didn’t really require a whole lot of cooking, since I could ask Flossie to boil up some eggs and have them ready for the class on that final Saturday along with some milk, butter, peas and flour. It occurred to me to write the Fleischmann Company and ask them why they’d named such an elegant-looking dish something as prosaic as Eggs and Green Peas.

To be on the safe side, I asked Vi to help me a couple of weeks in advance. No sense taking chances, after all. Bless Vi’s heart, she did.

After several attempts, Aunt Vi finally managed to teach me the rudiments of making a bread croute, which is a lump of bread that’s been hollowed out and then cut around the upper edges with a sharp knife so that it resembles a castle’s crenellations. If that makes any sense. Once you’ve turned the bread lump into a castle tower, you fry it in hot fat until it’s golden brown. That was the hard part for me, since almost everything I fry burns to a crisp.

“
All you need to do is concentrate, Daisy,” Vi told me sternly. “The reason you burn things is that you lose interest and your mind wanders. You have to keep your mind on your work.”

“
My mind never wanders when I’m sewing,” I said meekly in my own defense.

“
Exactly. That’s what I’m telling you. What you need to do is expend the same concentration on cooking as you do on sewing.”

But I liked to sew. I
hated
to cook. Cooking bored the socks off me. I thought about pointing that out to Vi, but figured I’d be better off not doing so.