The Secret Ingredient Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

  “Suspicious of what? You haven’t done anything.”

  “You make them think I have!”

  “I did not, Jason.”

  Genia slid their plates in front of them. “Who needs water? Salt and pepper? Kevin, Donna claims you eat Tabasco sauce with everything. Is that true? Should I see if I can find some for you?”

  The distraction of food did the trick she had hoped it would.

  The father grinned at Genia and said, “That was only because her cooking is so bad, right, Jason? No offense to your mother, but if we hadn’t got divorced, I would have grown an ulcer from all that Tabasco I had to eat. But this looks great, Genia, even without hot sauce.”

  “What will happen now, Kevin? Do you know?”

  “I guess they’ll take his body to a funeral home.”

  “I wonder if they’ve notified his daughter.”

  Kevin sat up straighter, looking startled, as if he’d only just realized there would be other people who had loved Stanley who had to be told. “My God, Nikki and Randy! She’ll be so upset about her dad.” A small, wry smile moved his lips. “Randy will have to pretend to be upset.”

  There was a time when Genia might have felt compelled to remonstrate with Kevin for saying such a thing, when she might have chided him. But she had lived long enough and seen and experienced enough things to feel that it was far better to voice an uncomfortable truth than to speak comfortable lies. She took note of the implied cynicism about Stanley Parker’s son-in-law and let it pass. It wasn’t as if Stanley himself had ever had a good word to say about Randy Dixon. Why should she be surprised if the bad feelings were mutual?

  “Aunt Genia, may I have more of this lobster stuff?”

  “You like it, Jason? Your sister helped make it.”

  Kevin pulled his mouth down into a funny grimace. “It’s a good thing you didn’t tell us that before we tried it. It’s really good. Are you sure Janie had anything to do with it?”

  “Stop it, Dad.” Jason’s eyebrows drew together in the scowl that appeared so often on his face. “Janie’s not Mom.” Before bending to his food again, he muttered, “And I’m not you.”

  His dad’s face flushed, and he looked hurt again.

  When Genia went over to pour extra coffee in Kevin’s cup, she placed her hand on his shoulder for a moment, wanting both to comfort him and to pull him back from saying any more of the wrong things. Gently, she said to both of them, “I love the way you and your sister support each other, Jason. I wish my own children had been so nice to each other when they were growing up. It’s good to see.”

  “Janie is his best friend,” his father said.

  “No, she’s not,” his son countered. “My best friend’s dead.”

  And suddenly, the boy began to cry. He put his elbows on the kitchen table and bent his face into his knuckles and sobbed until his whole body shook. His dad looked surprised and helpless. Genia placed her hands on his shoulders and leaned over until she could place her cheek against the top of his head.

  “I’m so sorry, Jason,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  When she straightened up and caught a glimpse of the father’s face, she was surprised to see that he didn’t look sympathetic, he looked angry again. Was Kevin jealous of his son’s relationship with Stanley? she wondered. If so, she thought a bit angrily herself, he need never worry about that competition again! She couldn’t stay mad though; it was unkind to resent a father for loving his son so much. But maybe that’s why Janie was so hateful about Stanley earlier this evening, Genia suddenly realized. If she wasn’t her brother’s best friend anymore, she might understandably feel left out and jealous. But why would that anger crop up so suddenly, when the girl hadn’t previously expressed any hostility toward her twin’s employer?

  Genia shook off the questions. They no longer mattered.

  As soon as Jason and Kevin finished eating, Jason took the car that he shared with Janie and said he was going home to his mother’s. Genia gave Kevin a ride in the opposite direction, to a friend’s house where he said he could spend the night.

  “Weather’s too bad right now to get back out to the island,” he commented. “I’d have to be crazy to take my boat back out tonight.”

  “You’re more than welcome to stay here, Kevin.”

  “Thanks, Genia, but my friend will have clothes I can change into. I wouldn’t look too good in one of your dresses.”

  She had to laugh at that, in spite of the burden in her heart. And she felt secretly glad to be able to return to her cozy rented home to collapse into bed, without having to worry about an overnight guest. On the way to his friend’s house, and just to make conversation, she said, “I hear you’ve changed your mind about the art festival, Kevin.”

  “Me? Changed my mind about what?”

  “About holding it on the island. I know you were really opposed to that idea, but I heard tonight that you think it’s all right now.”

  “No offense, but you heard wrong, Genia. I mean, no way. I don’t want all those people out there tromping around my studio. Who said that, anyway?”

  “I must have heard wrong,” she fudged. “So you’re still opposed to it?”

  “Absolutely. Look, if they want to hold their stupid festival in town, let them. But Stanley rented me that island for my own private use. I’ve got my little house. I’ve got my studio in the barn. I’ve got my dock and my boat, and just enough room for my kids to come out and visit me. Do you know that island’s even got a well on it I can use? I’m completely self-sufficient and solitary out there and that’s the way I like it. If Stanley wants to invite thousands of tourists to look at arts and crafts, let him hold the damn festival up at his own house.”

  Genia didn’t say anything in reply, because she couldn’t speak.

  “Oh, God,” Kevin said quietly. “I’m really sorry I said that.”

  They rode in silence, until Kevin broke it. “I didn’t know the old man meant that much to Jason, did you?”

  “Well,” Genia said, “I know Stanley thought the world of him.”

  Kevin glanced at her. “He said that?”

  “Yes, in many ways.”

  Kevin turned toward the window. “Somebody ought to tell his mother that, because she thinks he’s going straight to hell. I tell her this is normal teenage stuff, and Jason just got unlucky and got caught, but she’s determined that if he doesn’t straighten up we’ve got to send him to military school.”

  “Kevin, no, not really?”

  He nodded. “One more slip, Donna says.”

  Stanley would have hated to hear it, she thought sadly. He’d been sent to military school himself, when he was a boy, and he had hated it, and he had resented his parents deeply for making him go there. “I was only a boy,” he’d groused to Genia, “and I should have got to stay a boy until I was ready to become a man. They forced the sprout to grow and that’s not natural.” She recalled the anger in his eyes as he spoke of it. “Turn a boy into a man too soon, turn him out into the company only of other males, and you’ll make him disciplined and hard, and ruin him for living with women.” His smile had been wry and bitter. “You could ask Lillian, if I hadn’t sent her to an early grave.”

  “Stanley!” she objected. “It’s not your fault she died!”

  “Yes, it is,” he’d argued stubbornly. “If I’d been a better husband, she wouldn’t have left me, and then she wouldn’t have remarried, and then she wouldn’t have fallen in love with sailing, and then she wouldn’t have gone out in that damn boat of hers alone, and then it wouldn’t have capsized, and she wouldn’t have drowned out there.” He looked determined to hold on to self-recrimination. “If I’d been a better man.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she had repeated firmly.

  Genia resolved to discourage Donna from sending the boy off to military school. It made her feel better, to think of doing something positive for Jason, in Stanley’s honor.

  While undressing for bed, Genia discov
ered that her grandmother’s diamond and pearl brooch had fallen off her blouse, exposing the bloody spot. She wasn’t particularly worried about the brooch at first, because she thought it had to be either in the house or in her car.

  Exhausted though she was, she felt she ought to look for it now.

  It was large and should be easy to spot.

  But after going downstairs and carefully checking every room, she found it wasn’t so easy after all. Despite the rain, she even went back out to check her car. Front seat, backseat, in between, under the seats and even on the floor of the garage—no brooch.

  Suddenly she was too weary to search for it any longer.

  “It’s fallen under a cushion,” she said to herself. “I’ll see it better in daylight.”

  Her futile search for the brooch left her feeling bereft and discouraged, however. A brooch, even one of diamond and pearls, was a small thing to lose compared to the life of a human being. But it had been her grandmother’s and had great sentimental value.

  What would Grandmother Andrews have said tonight?

  Genia put imaginary words in her grandmother’s mouth: “A person must always be prepared to say good-bye.” To things, or to people. And the older you got, the more ready you’d better be.

  As she slowly climbed the stairs to her bedroom again, a terrible thought crept in: Had Stanley died instantly? Or had he lain helplessly on the beach, hoping vainly that somebody might come along to help him? And when they didn’t, did he realize he was going to die? She felt very sad to think of him dying alone and aware of what was happening to him, as the rain pelted down on his face.

  6

  REGRETS ONLY

  Genia slept uneasily that night, waking up several times. Each awakening was, at first, a relief and an escape from bad dreams—until she remembered what had happened to Stanley. Finally she opened her eyes and saw a little light seeping in between the edge of the curtains and the windowsill. It was the quiet that had awakened her this time, she realized: the rain had finally stopped. Looking at the bedclothes, she saw that she had twisted her sheets into braids of damp cotton percale.

  “I give up.”

  Genia slipped out of bed and into her robe and took her worries to the kitchen table until there was enough daylight to allow her to act on them.

  She made a cup of tea and waited for the sun to rise.

  At six o’clock, as pale streaks of sunlight fell across the kitchen floor, she rose and dressed in waterproof boots, slacks, and a sweater, and carried the weight of her sadness into the day. She didn’t know what she would find or see, but gut instinct propelled her out of the house and into movement, toward the scene of Stanley’s death. She told herself that she needed to see where it had happened, to convince herself that he was really gone.

  The morning air was cool and moist against Genia’s skin. In her boots, she didn’t have to avoid the puddles.

  The adjoining properties meandered in oddly shaped ways, creating a longer walking route than one would have expected from looking at a map. There were two ways to go, one along the dirt path that bordered the ocean, and the other along a paved road that curved through the cul-de-sac, and by which her guests had come and gone last night. The only way to get from one route to the other was to break through the woods or to climb the steep hill from the beach.

  She took the ocean path, which would have been Stanley’s way.

  Genia entered the coolness of the woods, where droplets fell like crystals from the leaves of the trees, and the path was muddy. Difficult to navigate on a motorbike, she thought.

  Did he die before the rain began, or after?

  It was a bumpy route, rutted with pine tree branches and tangled roots of ancient oaks that lifted the earth in spots as if underground gnomes had hunched their backs. Stanley had driven his motorbike so often along here that it should have been second nature to him to avoid the worst spots with neat little twists of his handlebars, controlling his speed and direction. To hear him tell it, he was agile as a motor-cross rider. It had made her smile to hear his boasts. Genia walked the trail frequently herself, and only today did the tapestry at her feet take on a sinister feel. She could easily imagine a motorbike thrown off balance, tumbling down the rocky incline toward the ocean. They were lucky the tide hadn’t swept his body out to sea.

  Stanley was always so careful on that bike, or claimed to be.

  In all the time he’d owned that bike, not once, he’d boasted, had he had an accident. It had a battered appearance, but that was only because he had tended to forget to prop its kickstand up well enough, so that it was constantly falling over and banging into things.

  What was different last night? she wondered.

  Was it just the weather? Had that made all the difference? Or was he preoccupied, not paying attention to where he was going, taking his skill ill-advisedly for granted? Or was he ill? Was he in a hurry, because he was late?

  She hoped it wasn’t that.

  From what Kevin said, it happened along here.…

  She had walked several hundred yards along the path by now. At her feet she saw a maze of footprints and trampled signs of last night’s fatal accident and the recovery of the body. The police had marked the spot with plastic strips left tied to trees, and the ends of the strips now flapped lightly in the breeze. She was glad she’d put a sweater on. The air still felt unseasonably cold, and the humidity made it feel even cooler. Branches from small trees and bushes looked snapped off, smashed into the mud by large feet. The interweave of urgent footprints crisscrossed the path and led down the rocky incline to the little beach where she was accustomed to go swimming, and where it was so pebbly she always wore rubber swimming shoes to protect her feet.

  Because of the yellow plastic police tape, she had to push her way into the woods and work her way around the perimeter of the scene they had marked off. “You’d think it was a crime scene,” she remarked to herself, “instead of the scene of an accident.” On the far side of the police barrier, she came back around again to the path, and stood at the edge of it, staring down.

  The beach was postcard-scenic, with large boulders.

  His fall must have ended at the boulders.

  She half expected to see his old red motorbike, but it wasn’t there.

  The police must have carted it off, too, she thought.

  Genia stared at the footprints inside the plastic barrier, footprints that were pressed firmly into the muddy terrain. Some stood out clearly, because nobody else had stepped over them. There was one distinctive grooved tread which went in both directions along the path, although the ones heading back to her house were pressed in at the toes, as if that person had been running. Kevin’s, she thought those might be, made when he hurried to announce the news.

  She looked down at the beach again, where the tide was coming in, and suddenly she was awash in her own high tide of memories. Thank you for being such an important person in my husband’s life, Stanley. Thank you for becoming a good friend to me. There hadn’t been enough time. Not nearly enough.

  This moment was what had pulled her here, she realized, this deep need to see for herself where it happened and to try to determine how and why. She still didn’t know how, except to guess that his wheel hit a root or a rut, and she would probably never know why.

  God, grant me the serenity, she began to pray, to accept what I cannot change.…

  After a few moments there, she walked on toward Stanley’s house. When the muddy mix of footprints petered out, she found she was following one set alone and they went back and forth at least once.

  Jason’s, she surmised, made when she had sent him—twice—to search.

  The second time she had told him to drive over, but it looked as if he had come down this way again, probably just double-checking. And he had come upon his father, down by Stanley’s body on the beach. What a terrible shock for the boy!

  Around a final bend the woods fell back, and she spotted Stanley’s familiar prop
erty in the distance. She quickened her pace and slipped into the clearing. The property looked especially imposing this morning, she thought, and then realized that she had never before seen it this early in the day. It was the light rising over it that seemed to magnify and illuminate it. What a sight it must have looked to sailors coming over the horizon in the previous century!

  She felt lonely, being here without Stanley.

  If there was a heaven, she hoped he was already in it, reunited with Lillian, telling St. Peter how to run things and riding his celestial motorbike from cloud to cloud. He had probably already started a committee or two. No. Genia had to smile. Not a committee. Toward the end of his life, they became Stanley’s idea of hell. A crow cut into her fantasy with a raucous, scolding cry, seeming to say this was his property now and would be until Stanley’s daughter, Nikki, arrived to take over with her husband, Randy. Oh, how Stanley hated the notion of his son-in-law living in this house!

  A large stone garage was close to the pathway, its two stories housing vehicles below and a caretaker’s apartment above. That apartment should be empty, Genia knew; Stanley had planned to terminate Edward Hennessey’s employment yesterday. “And not a day too soon,” she had retorted when he told her that. Stanley had been generous to give Hennessey a chance; unfortunately the groundskeeper had proved himself unlikable and unreliable in record time. A little guiltily Genia recalled her own concern last night that Ed Hennessey might have retaliated against Stanley when the old man fired him.

  The garage sat at the edge of a circular drive that swung around past Stanley’s gardens and his home. Behind the house on the ocean side there were more gardens and terraces. A little farther to the south, and separated from the house by a fish pond, was his beloved greenhouse, where her own nephew had been hired to work for the summer.

  Genia wandered down the brick path that wound around the house and back toward the ocean view. She walked over to a knee-high stone wall that stood between her and a steep drop to the private pier below. At the moment there was one small motorboat tied to the pier, and she wondered whose it was. Stanley hadn’t believed in spending money on boats, which of course had made it all the more painfully ironic when Lillian died on one—