MalContents (10 page)

Sunny covered her mouth and turned away. So far, she hadn’t found much in the apartment to connect her to the dead woman. Sunny owned three properties, and every one of them—the townhouse in Boston, the New York loft near the YUM! studios, and the house on Foster’s Island some forty or so miles from where she stood in Northern Massachusetts—was a study in immaculateness. There were no food stains on the furniture, nor rotting shellfish or produce in her refrigerators. So far as she could recall, she’d never coveted or conspired against any of the other network chef-lebrities. She’d simply taken her clean, basic style of cooking all the way to the top. Talent, point of view, style…none of which was apparent here in Rona Bustamante’s former little world.

Anything in evidence of the woman’s crime had already been removed, Deschler had told her: the computer, which contained Bustamante’s
Slice and Dice
audition video, photos, backpacks and handbags. The effect depersonalized the place, at least in the terms that mattered to Sunny. The woman was a slob. She didn’t cook lobster, Inner Bitch joked childishly; she cooked
slobster
.

The woman was crazy. She’d killed herself after trying to butcher a stranger she’d never met, and whom she’d falsely accused of plagiarism, of theft. The kind of neat, organized closure Sunny hoped to find might never be, because the bitch had been a big, ugly patch of chaos that left apple cores on her furniture cushions. Sunny had come here seeking sanity in an insane realm.

She passed the other door, which was closed. A shiver tickled the nape of her neck. Sunny hesitated. The shudder tumbled down her spine. Sunny reached for the doorknob, which felt oily beneath her touch. That’s because, Inner Bitch reasoned, Rona’s greasy fingers had left a residue behind over the years, until a slick, permanent layer remained. It was a pantry of sorts. Rona Bustamante had tried to transform it into a garden, one specifically for growing mushrooms. Plastic trays full of mulchy dirt lined the two lowest shelves. The mushrooms had turned dark and rotted. Sunny caught a hit of decay and foul earth, and this time she vomited. The pressure against her chest unleashed fresh pain behind her healing wound.

“Everything okay in there?”

Sunny’s throat lurched again. “Y . . . yes,” she managed, the long, drawn-out word putrid on her tongue. She reached into her pocket. Mercifully, she’d brought along a handful of tissues, just in case the visit resulted in tears. And it had, though tears of a different kind. After losing her lunch, thick clotted globs of water filled her eyes.

She tossed the tissues into the sink, a symbolic act, she reasoned. She left the spilled contents of her stomach where they’d sprayed, right in the middle of the floor.

Following the trip to Lovell Green, Sunny started to feel better. She sensed it in the lightness of her steps as she moved around the clean and airy Boston townhouse, admiring the elegant antique furniture, the Sleepy Hollow sofa and matching chairs reupholstered only the previous February in merlot-colored Italian velvet, no food stains. She glided into her office, once a pair of smaller bedrooms knocked into one. Therein, her Emmy, James Beard, and other awards, trophies, framed reviews and news clippings, and certificates held places of honor along one wall. An original Lehnig original watercolor hung above the desk, a stunning study of an indoor kitchen over which grapevines curled. She’d loved the air of whimsy as well as the elegance of the image, which seemed to suggest that one’s culinary dreams could be realized if one only dreamed boldly enough. Sunny sure had.

For the first time in weeks, Sunny entered the room and sat at the desk, another stunning piece, with delicately carved legs and a top of inlaid rosewood. No lingering flicker of pain racked her chest upon taking to the chair, a first. The desk and the room welcomed her back.

Rona Bustamante never had a room like this, and she never would. Truths she already knew but had overlooked during the recent crisis rose clearly in her thoughts in the magnificent stillness. YUM! employed readers to sort through the stacks of fan and hate mail that arrived daily to the studio, the modern equivalent of wine tasters, just in case something nasty like a dead rodent or white powder dusty with anthrax was enclosed. It also employed detectives, who compiled lists of the whack-jobs who fell madly in love with the chef-lebrities, those who wanted to snip off fingers or an ear to add to some special recipe so the diner could feel closer to the divine.

She turned on the laptop, pondering the madness that had targeted her while it booted up. Sunny shook her head. A sarcastic grin played on her lips. That life could change so quickly . . . one moment, you’re on top of the world, with two hit TV shows, a new cookbook, your
fourth
, a line of cookware whose boxes bear your name and your likeness…the next, you’re on the ground, gutted and bleeding, and some bitch with a hairy mole and an ass the size of a stove with six burners on the cook top is telling you that you’ve stolen her secret recipe.

If Sunny had, and she knew she hadn’t, why didn’t Bustamante hire a lawyer? Why hadn’t she complained to YUM! Why? Because Rona Bustamante was flat-out nuts, and Sunny was still seeking rational explanations for a crazy person who hadn’t cooked or lived in a sane world. There was the answer, the solution. Sunny had cooked as she lived, which was why she was the one sitting in a beautiful trophy room with its multi-million dollar view of the Charles River, while the knife-wielding nut was dust.

More weight lifted from her shoulders, and she realized that her breaths were coming with greater ease. For the first time in weeks, she felt like her old self; she felt
sunny
.

Then she logged into her e-mail. Among the expected forwarded well-wishes from other network stars, friends, and a prompt from the executive producer of
Slice and Dice
asking whether she was ready to return, was a most-curious note from Conelle Gilad, her manager. The subject line read:
View at your discretion
. Sunny opened it. It was a five-minute stream of video. Rona Bustamante’s audition tape. Sunny scanned the e-mail’s text. Conelle had gotten a copy of the bitch’s demo from YUM! in order to cement her legal position. Sunny imagined the veiled threat her dragon lady had likely used.
In case you’re curious, I thought you should have this
, Conelle wrote.

Only she wasn’t, not much anymore. Not after seeing and smelling the lay of the land in Lovell Green. That disgusting fridge. The filth in the sink. The mucus-colored paint on the kitchen walls. Sunny had never stepped on another person’s back to make it to the top. She’d certainly never knifed anybody in the back. Or the front.

She reached for the delete button. At the last second, she opened the fucking thing, and Rona Bustamante’s fat face jumped out of the computer screen at her. Sunny fell out of the chair and landed hard on the indigo and lavender weave of the Persian rug. All illusions about healing vanished in a sharp rush of pins and needles along her right side, and an icy whisper across her flesh.

“
Hi, I’m Rona. Rona Bustamante, and you’d better remember the name, because you’ve never met a chef like me before.
”

The woman’s voice slithered out of sight, from the top of the desk. Sunny blinked, and she was again back on the bathroom floor at the Pru, being screamed at by a chef the likes of which she really had never met before.

“My point of view mixes traditional flavors with cherished family recipes, with a bit of bite and unapologetic flair. You see—”

A croaking thunderclap shocked Sunny out of her paralysis. She crawled back to the chair and pulled herself halfway up. The top of the desk and the laptop lowered into view. On the screen, in that wretched apartment in Lovell Green, Rona Bustamante stood dressed in shiny black latex, black fishnets, and boots with spiked heels that looked about six inches tall. She wielded a riding crop, which she struck against her thigh again, producing the whip-crack of thunder.

“I’m a hell of a chef by day and an even more hellacious dominatrix by night. That’s right, you sniveling dogs . . .” She aimed the crop’s leather strap at the viewer. “Tonight, I’m making my Nona Bustamante’s famous crab-stuffed mushrooms for you, and you’re gonna love them.” She delivered the rest in patronizing shouts. “You’d better . . . or else! Now, in order to bake my Nona’s favorite appetizer, set your damn oven at 410 degrees. Yes,
ten
, you miserable worms. Don’t question my late, great and powerful Nona. I learned everything from her. She was a wise woman…and you’d best never question her grand-dominatrix, Rona, because if you do . . .” Sunny clicked off the video. Bustamante’s voice rambled on for another second or two, spilling out of the laptop’s speakers as the system caught up.

“ . . .
I’ll find you and make you suf—
”

Sunny slammed the laptop shut. Rage rose white-hot inside her, and she briefly thought about pitching the laptop through the window, onto the street below. But that was a crazy person’s solution, a Rona Bustamante way of doing things.

“No wonder the show rejected you, you crazy bitch,” she muttered, her eyes locked on the closed laptop. “You were even too psycho for
Slice and Dice
.”

Like the office, Sunny’s presence in the kitchen had been almost nonexistent since the night of the attack. Methodically, she set to creating a classic Sunny Weir spread: a luscious salad of wedged lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, red onion, and bleu cheese, drizzled with a homemade dressing; cheddar and basil scones; a colorful lobster and scallop casserole—sans crab, which she normally would have added; and a luscious raspberry and lemon tort. The meal bore Sunny’s signature bright and fresh ingredients, all of them working together in exquisite harmony, sunny in appearance with pops of solar-yellow, saffron-orange, and rich, robust reds.

Joseph entered the house, looking so handsome in his dishevelment with his tie unknotted and five o’clock shadow creeping along his chin, cheeks, and throat. He set down his Italian leather valise. “I’m home.”

“I see,” she said lightly, flashing a coy smile.

Joseph loosened his tie further. “Hello, have we met? You could pass for this woman I used to know. Hell of a chef in the kitchen. Real hot ass.”

He slapped her rear end for effect, and Sunny squealed. “Hungry?”

“Very,” Joseph growled.

She caught his scent, that deliciously clean smell of a man’s skin, a mix of sweat and masculine pheromones, and sensed he was growing aroused. He moved up behind her, dominating her body with his. Joseph leaned over her shoulder and kissed her neck. The scrape of his cheek launched a crackle of excitement through her core. She felt his instant hardness through his pants and her jeans.

“Welcome back,” he said, hugging her around the waist.

They ate the amazing meal, and they fucked with equal luxury, trying out several different positions and kinks not dared until that night. Everything seemed perfect until, in the afterglow, Sunny told Joseph that she was leaving.

A week, maybe two. However long it took. Time enough to regroup, to recoup. To reckon if, after having been sliced and diced, Sunny wanted to return to the reality competition, the decision of which was nearing its eleventh hour. Let them replace her on the show, she said. Joseph hadn’t liked that alternative and let her know it. She’d fired back that there were times when she thought he actually liked the paparazzi, who’d dogged them since the night of Bustamante’s attack.

“I’m going to Foster’s Island,” she’d said after the opening salvos were launched, setting their new peace aflame. “Alone. I’ll be back.”

“Maybe I’ll still be here,” he said, one last nuclear strike.

“That’s your choice,” she said, picking up her bags and calmly walking down to the garage.

Foster’s Island sat in the western corner of a shallow, kidney-shaped body of water in the town of Anderson, Massachusetts. In the 1940s, farmers had dammed up the lower eastern runoff, turning swampland into pond. The western side of Foster’s Pond retained its marshy appearance, while the dam had become a famous local postcard image of solid stone and concrete, with a gentle waterfall tumbling down the spill.

Very little remained of the original Weir farm. The developers who’d taken the farm in the land grab of the late ’90s had scraped the topsoil down to the clay, hacked down the ancient fruit orchards and grape vines, and had leveled the rambling New Englander in whose kitchen Sunny first explored her love of cooking. Her grandmother, too, had been a strong and powerful woman. Rachel Weir had run the farm and cared for a sick husband after Grandpa Wally came down with the Big C. She’d also raised Sunny while still managing, every night of every week, to put a delicious, sunny-bright meal on the table.

“And I didn’t have to strap on a dildo in order to appreciate her cuisine,” Sunny huffed under her breath, channeling her Inner Bitch.

The farm was gone, and a neighborhood of nondescript houses you could find in any uppity development now stood there in its place, each wreathed in lawns too green to believe as being real. Only the boathouse remained, and it still contained Grandpa Wally’s old row-boat—now equipped with a motor. Sunny had managed to hold onto that, and by the time her star had begun to rise, she’d purchased the island, with its house and outbuildings, from the town of Anderson. In seven seasons of
Sunny’s Side Up
, she’d traveled to Paris, Provence, Madrid, and a dozen other culinary capitols. But Massachusetts would always be more inspiring to her, because it was home.