Chapter 22
A
FTER THE SHOP
cleared, we removed the portable cooking stations and set the shop back to its normal layout. All the while, I kept hoping Cinnamon Pritchett would call to say, thanks to Keller’s statement, she had finally solved the murders. The call never came.
Toward the end of the afternoon, we had a fresh influx of customers. Product was moving faster than ever: grilling books, gift items, and recipe holders. A few women detained me and asked for my expert advice on cooking a grilled cheese sandwich.
Me? Advice? I panicked. “Um, extra cheese,” I said, riffing. “It’s called a grilled
cheese
.”
One of the women thought I was the cleverest person in the world. Ha! Fooled her.
When the shop closed, I hurried to Katie and said, “Cooking lessons. Now.” Although we had accommodated the mayor and kept The Cookbook Nook open for the competition, we hadn’t opened the café. It was mine, all mine. “Make me bold, Katie. Confident. No fear. I want to be an expert chef by Thanksgiving. Got me?” When I set my mind to something, I could be relentless.
“You’re on.” Katie nabbed two cookbooks and went to the kitchen.
Bailey joined us. “I’m in, too. What are we making?”
Katie lodged the cookbooks into a pair of antique bronze book holders on the counter, then handed each of us hairnets, latex gloves, and aprons. “We’re going to attempt eggplant-and-Parmesan soup and a Caesar BLT salad.”
“That’s bold? That’s confident?” I said, donning my kitchen garb.
“It’s delicious and challenging.” Katie gathered eggplants, mushrooms, herbs, and shredded Parmesan from the refrigerator and set them beside one of the many wood butcher blocks. The recipe she was using came from an all-soup book called
New England Soup Factory Cookbook: More Than 100 Recipes from the Nation’s Best Purveyor of Fine Soup.
From accounts online, there were two Soup Factory restaurants, both located in Massachusetts, both very popular.
Katie named Bailey soup sous-chef; I was put in charge of the salad.
“That will make me fearless?” I said.
Katie chuckled. “Never question the chef. First, you need to learn to wield a knife with flair. Fetch the ingredients for your salad, and then start chopping tomatoes. Use the serrated knife. Bailey, get the white wine, leeks, and homemade stock.”
Bailey saluted. “Aye, aye
,
O, Captain, my Captain.”
I threw Bailey a sardonic look. “You do know that’s a line from a Whitman poem about Abraham Lincoln’s death, don’t you?”
“Yes, but . . . Oh, for Pete’s sake. I was honoring Katie.” Bailey sashayed to the refrigerator. “Don’t tell my mother, but I like Katie’s food better than my mom’s chef’s food.”
I flashed on the chef whose resignation had ignited a firestorm of resentment between Natalie and Lola. Luckily for him, he had a good alibi for the day Natalie was murdered. I said, “Did you know your mother has threatened to steal Katie away?”
“She wants to steal me?” Katie said, apparently learning for the first time of Lola’s interest. “I won’t go.”
“Of course you won’t. I won’t let you.”
“Are you going to double my salary to keep me?”
“Not quite yet.”
Katie chuckled. “It was worth a try. Don’t worry. I’m sticking around for a long time. I love the café. It’s my baby.”
I set up my station with items for three Caesar BLT salads: lettuce wedges, avocados, tomatoes, hardboiled eggs, already-cooked bacon, and blue cheese. While I was chopping tomatoes, Katie brought a bowl of ice water and placed it beside the lettuce wedges.
“What’s my secret to great salads?” Katie said and didn’t wait for a response. “Glad you asked. Prepping the greens properly. Now, Jenna, take the lettuce and dunk them in that ice bath I’ve prepared.” She pointed to the bowl. “Don’t overhandle them, or the lettuce will wilt. Simply agitate them a bit. Hoo-boy.” She patted her abdomen. “Am I ever hungry. I couldn’t cook like this at home. Papa would grumble and moan. Plain meat and potatoes for him.” Katie’s father was not the most sympathetic man in the world. Recently I’d learned that he had verbally abused Katie her entire life, calling her ugly and worthless. She was neither.
“Where will I find chicken breasts?” I said.
“In the refrigerator. Second shelf from the bottom. Grab three eggs, as well.”
I fetched the chicken breasts and, following Katie’s lead, dipped the pieces in egg and then rolled each in seasoned flour. Next, tentatively—I had never fried anything before, and hot oil doesn’t look all that friendly—I set the dredged chicken in a basket.
No fear, no fear.
I lowered the basket into a vat of bubbling canola oil and quickly moved back.
“Eight minutes,” Katie said.
I was more than willing to be patient. There wasn’t an oven mitt long enough to make my arm feel protected from hot oil. “Why does the oil have to be scalding?” I asked.
“Oil has to be hot enough to seal the outside of whatever you’re cooking. If not, the food will absorb the oil.” As Katie chopped up eggplant, she said, “Butter is different. We want the onion slices to absorb the butter.”
Bailey sautéed the onions until they were brown, and then she slowly added the eggplant and herbs. “Jenna, any word on what your mysterious key fits?”
“No.” I told them about my failed Internet search yesterday for a matching key shape. Since then, I hadn’t had a moment to breathe, let alone do another search. I pictured Tito twirling his ring of keys, and although I had ruled out the key fitting the lock on a desk, I wondered if it might open an office door or a file cabinet. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
“Okay, Miss O’Hara,” Bailey teased, referring to the literary Scarlett O’Hara’s infuriating procrastination.
“I will. Promise. I just have bigger things on my mind.”
“Bigger than the puzzle your husband left you?”
“Bigger, as in another person in town is dead and Ellen Bryant might be the police’s main suspect.”
“Don’t you think Mitzi killed both victims?” Katie asked.
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
Katie hitched her chin at Bailey. “Toss in the leeks and mushrooms. Stir with a wooden spoon.”
“I hope my mother is off the hook,” Bailey said.
I hoped so, too. Why wasn’t Cinnamon Pritchett being more forthcoming? I filled Bailey in about the fight Keller had witnessed between Mitzi and Willie. She laughed at the idea of Mitzi out in public, wearing only a salon robe and blue cream on her face. Next, I recapped Mitzi’s flare-up with Sam at the shop, my suspicion that Mitzi had borrowed Ellen’s coat, and Sam’s verbal assault on Ellen.
“What about Ellen’s sister, Norah?” Bailey said. “You don’t trust her. What if she’s framing Mitzi? What if”—she held up a hand—“and I know this is a reach, but what if Norah is the one lacing Mitzi’s drinking water to make her appear tipsy and off balance?”
I said, “Don’t you think Mitzi, if she’s not a drinker, would have noticed something was different about her water?”
“Vodka doesn’t smell.”
“But it has a taste,” I countered. “And how would Norah have gained access to the water? She wasn’t here for the first round of the contest.”
“Are you sure?”
I wasn’t. Again I wondered whether Norah could have driven up from Los Angeles, sneaked into the alley, and killed her mother with no one the wiser.
Bailey continued. “Are you sure she resigned her job as a hospital administrator?”
“Why would she lie?”
“To make herself seem vulnerable. Maybe she never intended to run the diner with her sister. Perhaps she put the bug in Mitzi’s ear to buy the Word. Once the court settles her mother’s estate and Norah gets the cash from the sale of the diner, she’ll hotfoot it out of town.”
I considered that possibility. “Norah said her boss was begging her to come back. She showed me her call list. There were tons of calls.”
“Red or black numbers?”
“Red.”
“What kind of phone does she have?”
“An iPhone.”
“Same as me. Those are outgoing calls, not incoming. A technicality, I know, but it might matter.” Bailey left her post and plucked a piece of blue cheese off one of the salads.
“Bailey Bird,” Katie snapped. “Never, never—”
Bailey held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t touch food headed for customers, but that plate isn’t going anywhere, and we’re friends, right?”
Katie chuckled. “Yes. Forgive me. I’m in chef mode. I’m telling you, you do not want to hear restaurant horror stories. Chefs worry all the time about contamination and the like. If something happens to a customer, whether they get sick or hurt, the insurance claims can be ginormous.”
“She’s right,” I said. “I don’t want to think about the financial consequences if we didn’t have insurance coverage.”
“Money, money, money.” Bailey resumed stirring. “It’s always about money. Back to Norah. What is the value of the Word? Would she make out like a bandit if it were sold?”
I said, “Ellen told me the diner wouldn’t make them rich.”
“That’s if they held on to it,” Bailey said, “but I keep thinking about what Flora said when we talked to her at Home Sweet Home. She saw Sam chatting up Manga Girl at the bank, right? What if he wasn’t having an affair with her?”
“He wasn’t. You saw her canoodling with that guy at B-B-Q the other night when we went line dancing. They looked hotter than hot.”
“Exactly. So what if Sam was at the bank trying to secure a loan so he could purchase the Word? What if he, not his wife, asked Natalie to sell? Sam did the books. He would know if the diner is a cash cow.”
“Ellen said Willie told her that the diner was sucking money like a Hoover.”
Katie cleared her throat. “Ahem. Willie got kicked out of college for cheating on an economics test. I’m not sure if he could add two plus four.”
“Willie met with the teller, as well,” Bailey said. “He might have been asking the same questions we’re posing.”
I thought about the fight Keller had witnessed between Willie and Mitzi on the street. What if Willie had figured out that Sam wanted to purchase the diner? Then Willie told Mitzi, and she yelled, “You’re loco!” Had Mitzi approached Ellen simply to find out if Sam had made an offer?
Katie said, “Jenna, you mentioned Manga Girl to Chief Pritchett, right?”
I honestly couldn’t remember if I had. I had told Cinnamon that Willie had cleaned out his bank account the day he died. I wondered if she was following up on that lead.
Bailey tapped her temple. “If you ask me, that bank teller is the key to all of this, and yet—”
Crash!
Glass shattered. Then more glass.
