by Leslie Meier
I never let that night dampen my enthusiasm for Halloween. Nowadays, I love hosting my own parties, and these next two yummy recipes are popular annual staples! I hope you love them as much as I do!
Boo Boozy Milkshakes
Ingredients
½ pint chocolate ice cream
½ pint vanilla ice cream
8 ounces chocolate milk
5 ounces bourbon
Combine ingredients in a blender, tailoring them to your liking. If you prefer a thinner shake, add a little more milk. If you like thicker, add more ice cream. Divide into 2 large glasses and enjoy.
Monster Meatball Sliders
For this recipe, you’ll need 1 12-ounce jar marinara sauce, either one you’ve made or your favorite from the supermarket. You’ll also need a package of 12 Hawaiian rolls or slider buns.
Turkey Meatballs Ingredients
(Note: to save time, you can use your favorite frozen meatballs)
1 pound ground turkey
1 egg, beaten
2 slices of bread, torn into small pieces
½ cup Italian bread crumbs
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
½ cup panko crumbs
½ tablespoon Italian seasoning
½ tablespoon garlic powder
½ tablespoon dried basil
½ tablespoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground pepper
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking pan with foil and spray with cooking spray.
In a large bowl, add all of the ingredients and, with clean hands, combine them. Shape scoops of the meat mixture into 12 same-size meatballs. Place meatballs in a sprayed baking pan.
Bake in preheated oven for 20–25 minutes or until cooked through. You can cut one to check doneness. Add them to the warmed marinara sauce.
Assembling the Sliders
¼ cup butter
½ teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
12 Hawaiian rolls or slider buns, sliced in half
2 cups shredded Mozzarella cheese
Butter, with Italian seasoning to taste
Parmesan cheese to taste
Use your favorite or homemade marinara sauce. On the stove, warm it in a pan big enough to hold the meatballs.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a small saucepan, melt the butter with the garlic powder and Italian seasoning, and set aside.
Butter a 9x13 baking pan and place the bottom halves of the Hawaiian rolls in the pan, then top each roll with a meatball, some extra sauce, and sprinkle the shredded Mozzarella evenly over the meatballs. Do this for all the rolls.
Carefully add the top halves of the rolls and gently press. Brush melted, seasoned butter over the tops of the rolls, then sprinkle the Parmesan cheese evenly over the tops.
Cover with tinfoil and bake in a preheated oven for 10 minutes. Remove the foil and put back in oven to bake for 5–7 minutes longer. Remove, slice, and serve warm.
Chapter Ten
As Sergio pulled Bruce aside to bring him up to speed on the dead body in cold storage that was currently lying inside the walk-in freezer, Hayley, Liddy, and Mona huddled together, all of them still rattled by the thought that there could be a cold-blooded killer lurking among them.
Hayley had discounted everyone in her mind, even Dr. Reddy, because she honestly could not conceive that any one of the guests left at her Halloween party was capable of such a malicious, violent act, especially the kids.
Nothing made any sense.
But who else could it have been, especially with the back door locked and all eyes on the front door the entire time?
Jodie tugged on Mona’s sweatshirt. “Mommy, I’m tired. When can we go home?”
“Soon, baby, I promise. When Sergio says we can leave,” Mona said, rubbing her daughter lightly on the head.
“But Pia got to go home. Why can’t we?” Jodie whined.
“No, Jodie, Pia’s right over there with her Mom,” Mona insisted.
“No, she’s not,” Jodie said.
They all looked over at the table near the front door, where Dr. Reddy and Pia had sat earlier. It was empty.
Liddy frantically glanced around the dining room. “Where did they go?”
“They couldn’t have left out the front door. One of us would have seen them,” Hayley said.
“They went out the back,” Chet murmured, without taking his eyes off his phone.
“What? When?” Mona barked.
“Just now,” Chet said, thumbs furiously tapping on his screen.
“Sergio! She’s making a run for it!” Hayley cried, dashing out of the dining room toward the rear exit off the kitchen, next to the storeroom and pantry, where she came upon Dr. Reddy, clutching Pia’s hand while sliding the bolt of the back door open to make her escape.
“Stop right there, Doctor!” Hayley exclaimed.
Dr. Reddy froze in place halfway out the door. Guilt was written on her face before she quickly masked it with indignation. “Don’t be so dramatic, Hayley. I was just going to take Pia home. She’s tired and needs some sleep. Don’t panic; I was coming back. I was going to have my older daughter, Nina, babysit.”
Hayley stared at her skeptically.
“My daughter has been through enough trauma for one night. I am doing what’s best for her. I should think Mona would do the same with her own child.”
Sergio and Bruce suddenly appeared behind Hayley.
“I wasn’t running away!” Dr. Reddy protested.
Liddy scampered in behind Sergio and Bruce, craning her neck, trying to see past the two much bigger men. “Yes, you were! The guilty always run!”
Dr. Reddy covered Pia’s ears with her hands. “There is a dead body not twenty feet away from here. I will stay here all night if I have to, but this is no place for a child!”
“Dr. Reddy, as I have told you multiple times, no one is going anywhere, not yet. I called the county forensics team, and they’re on their way, so we just need to sit tight until they get here. Hopefully, they can help us fill in a few of the blanks. I understand Pia is tired—we all are—but this is a crime scene, and your daughter is a potential witness, and so I insist on everybody’s cooperation. Is that clear?”
Dr. Reddy’s face flushed; her instinct was to argue some more, and she opened her mouth to protest, before sighing and slamming the door shut and sliding the bolt back into place.
“Can I at least get a cup of coffee to keep myself awake if we’re going to spend a few more hours in this godforsaken place?” Dr. Reddy groused
She then marched back toward the dining room, dragging behind her a yawning Pia, who struggled to keep up with her mother’s pace.
Sergio turned to Hayley and gave her an apologetic smile. “Do you mind?”
Hayley waved everyone out. “Go. Just make sure she doesn’t try to duck out the front! I’ll put a pot on.”
Sergio and Liddy returned to the dining room to join the others.
Bruce hung back and gave his wife a comforting hug. “Long night, huh?”
“You could certainly say that,” Hayley sighed wearily.
“I sure hope nobody mentions the corpse in the freezer in their Yelp review,” Bruce joked.
“You better go help Sergio in case somebody else tries to make a break for it. I’ll be right out with the coffee.”
Bruce kissed Hayley softly on the lips.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Thanks, I needed that.”
He winked at her and then bounded out of the kitchen in his gorilla suit.
Hayley took a deep breath, exhaled, then wandered into the pantry to fetch a package of coffee beans. She spotted it on the top shelf, grabbed it, and was turned halfway back around when something on the floor caught her eye.
It looked like a tiny piece of glass at first.
She set the coffee grounds down on a mid
dle shelf and picked up a mini broom and dustpan to sweep it up, fearing someone might cut themselves on the broken glass, but as she bent down, it quickly became obvious the sparkling object wasn’t glass.
It was a diamond embedded on a silver wedding band.
Somebody at the party must have accidentally dropped it.
Hayley carefully picked it up and examined it.
Something was inscribed on the back of the band.
Forever Yours, Irving.
Irving.
She only knew one Irving in town. And that was the late Irving Beaumont, who had died long ago. His widow, however, was still very much alive.
Clara Beaumont.
The poor elderly woman who was at this moment in the hospital recovering from a brutal attack during a home robbery.
How on earth did it get here?
It suddenly dawned on Hayley. Bruce had mentioned earlier that Clara Beaumont had told the police before passing out at her home that the robber had made off with her wedding ring.
This was it.
Engraved by her loving late husband, Irving.
And Lenny Bash had stolen it.
Which meant Lenny had been in this pantry at some point.
But how?
And why?
Why would Lenny Bash show up at Hayley’s Halloween party with dozens of people present after having just robbed Clara Beaumont’s house? There was the possibility that he had arrived in disguise—all the guests were wearing costumes, after all—but again, why? What would draw him here? Why would he risk hanging out in public where someone might recognize him, especially since he had no way of knowing whether or not Clara Beaumont had been able to identify him? Any rational burglar would no doubt go into hiding, lie low, and avoid the cops until he could skip town, not crash a party.
It made no sense.
And why was he in the pantry?
That’s when Hayley noticed a few empty pans that had been shoved in the corner on the bottom shelf. She pulled one out and noticed small chunks of hamburger meat and crumbs of bread left on the bottom. She examined the other pan and found half of a mini pepperoni and bits of a flaky crust.
Or course!
Her missing food.
She had noticed that two pans of appetizers she had prepared for the party were missing earlier in the evening.
Her Mummy Meat Sliders and Pepperoni Pizza Pockets in the shape of jack-o’-lanterns!
Someone had scarfed them down right here in the pantry.
It had to be Lenny.
But what happened to him?
Where did he go?
On the video Randy had shot on his phone, all the guests had been accounted for as they left the restaurant. And the rear door was locked from the inside, which would have made it impossible for Lenny to flee from the back of the restaurant.
How could he have shown up at the party, chowed down on Hayley’s food in the pantry, accidentally dropped Clara Beaumont’s wedding ring at some point, and then just vanished into thin air?
This was a real head scratcher.
Hayley closed her hand around the diamond ring and was about to head back out to show Sergio what she had found when her eyes fell upon a deep scratch in the wooden floor of the pantry.
She bent down and ran her finger alongside it. What appeared so odd was the shape of the scrape. It was not your ordinary wear-and-tear scrape from heavy foot traffic or from someone dropping cans of food, causing damage to the floor. No, this scratch formed a large half circle that ran almost the full width of the pantry, almost as if in the shape of a rainbow.
What would cause a scratch like that?
Hayley looked around, failing to find any sharp object someone could have used to dig into the floor.
The shape reminded her of a door sagging from loose hinges scraping across the floor as someone tried to open it.
But the door to the pantry was at an opposite angle.
There was simply no way it would have been able to cause that scratch.
Her eyes settled on the back wall of the pantry.
Then she had a thought. She had seen enough movies set in gothic mansions to suspect that maybe . . . just maybe . . .
The thought made her chuckle.
No, she was being ridiculous.
But what if . . . ?
Hayley stood up and moved slowly to the back wall. She reached up, took hold of the top shelf, and gave it a good yank. Suddenly the wall began moving forward, creaking, as the bottom scuffed across the hardwood floor, following the pattern of the long half-circle scratch.
Hayley couldn’t believe it.
The back wall of the pantry was a giant door.
Her new restaurant had a secret room!
Behind the wall, foreboding darkness.
Hayley poked her head in, squinting, able to make out an empty hallway that led down to a flickering light.
Hayley silently made her way down the hall toward the light until she came upon a small room that reminded her of a bunker where someone might hide to wait out the apocalypse. The light was from a couple of burning candles. There was a small, lumpy-looking cot in the corner. A rifle hanging on the wall. A few boxes of canned goods and supplies. And as she had expected, paper plates with a few of her Mummy Meat Sliders and Pepperoni Pizza Pockets jack-o’-lanterns.
There was no one in the room.
Whoever had been here was gone.
Or was he?
Hayley suddenly felt a rush of air against her neck.
As if someone was standing behind her, breathing.
She spun around.
A scream caught in her throat as she found herself face-to-face with Pennywise the Clown!
Chapter Eleven
As the creepy Pennywise, with his grotesque, distorted, evil smile and beady menacing eyes, advanced upon Hayley, she bolted forward, trying to push past him and out the door of the bunker.
But Pennywise anticipated the move and forcefully shoved her back as she tried ducking around him. Hayley stumbled and fell back on the cot as Pennywise slammed the door shut and locked it, effectively trapping her inside with him.
“You might as well take off that mask, Lenny. I know it’s you,” Hayley said, eyeing him warily, not sure what she would do in the event of a frontal attack.
Pennywise didn’t say a word, but she could see his eyes blinking nervously behind the clown mask.
“I found the wedding ring you stole from Clara Beaumont’s house in the pantry. I knew you had to be somewhere close by,” Hayley explained matter-of-factly, desperately attempting to remain calm and not let on to Pennywise that she was seconds from fainting dead away from sheer fright.
Pennywise stood frozen by the door for a few moments, still refusing or afraid to say anything.
Hayley sighed. “Lenny Bash, take that mask off right now!”
The scary clown glared defiantly at Hayley some more, but then his white-gloved left hand slowly reached up and pulled the mask off, revealing Lenny’s sweaty, troubled face.
He tried wiping the sweat off with the puffy arm of his clown costume, but the bunker was so hot, he didn’t stay dry for long before more sweat beads rolled precipitously down his forehead.
“You shouldn’t have come back here, Hayley,” Lenny growled before picking up the sledgehammer from Randy’s Annie Wilkes costume that had been leaning against the wall next to the door. “Everything would have been fine if you all had just gone home after cleaning up from the party.”
“No, Lenny, no one was going to go home. Not until we figured out what was going on around here.”
Lenny swallowed hard and raised the sledgehammer. “I don’t want to hurt you . . . But I will if I have to . . .”
Hayley, sitting on the cot, leaned back against the wall, wanting to put as much distance from him as possible. She carefully eyed the door.
“Don’t try to yell. This room is basically soundproof. No one out there will hear you,” Lenny warned.
Ha
yley glanced around, taking in the shelves of canned food, a generator, a first-aid kit in the corner—all the supplies you would need for an underground bunker during a nuclear blast or zombie apocalypse. “What is this place? How did you find it?”
“I came across it by accident when I used to work here, back when Chef Romeo owned the place,” Lenny said. “One night, after the restaurant closed and the boss thought everyone had gone home, I stayed behind because I was pumping myself up to ask Romeo for a raise. I went to his office, and he wasn’t there, and that’s when I saw the pantry wall was open, and there was this secret passage. It was the craziest thing! I thought things like this were only in the movies! I was curious, so I followed it down here to this room, where I found Chef Romeo stocking it with some canned goods! I surprised the hell out of him! At first, he was mad at me for snooping, but then he made me swear I’d never tell anybody about it!”
“How did Chef Romeo find it?”
“He didn’t. He was the one who built it. The pantry and storeroom used to be three times the size they are now when he first bought the building, but Chef Romeo added the secret back wall and turned the rest of it into an escape room.”
“But why? Was he worried Bar Harbor was going to be the target of an alien invasion or get hit by an asteroid? Normally, the biggest threat we have to face is an influx of obnoxious summer tourists and too many black flies.”
“Chef Romeo told me when he moved here from New York, he left behind a few enemies, and so he wanted to know he had a safe hiding place in case they somehow found him up here,” Lenny said.
Hayley knew the kid was speaking the truth.
She had been acutely aware from investigating the mysterious circumstances surrounding his untimely death that the colorful, gregarious and loud Chef Romeo Russo had suffered a few financial crises back in Brooklyn, using mob money to open a restaurant that went belly-up, raising the ire of his lenders when he couldn’t pay it back as the interest skyrocketed every single day. Then, there was the astoundingly bad decision to get romantically involved with a mafia kingpin’s wife; that certainly did not bring down the temperature of the already scalding-hot situation. It all resulted in the chef skipping town and starting anew in Maine, where he had hoped he would never be found. Unfortunately, a couple of adversaries from a very long list of individuals out to get the chef eventually did locate him, which resulted in his untimely demise. That’s when Hayley took over the lease of the restaurant, changed the name to Hayley’s Kitchen, and started a whole new business.