Spooning Leads to Forking (Hot in the Kitchen Book 2)

by Kilby Blades

  The only helipad in Sapling was owned by Donovan Packard—the same man who had turned it back into a boom town some forty years before. He’d discovered the town on a summer trip spent hiking the Southern Rockies. In the seventies, Sapling had been a tourist town in decline. Resorts at Aspen and Vail dwarfed the once-popular ski runs on the other side of Elk Mountain. Fewer people from outside came to fish and boat on Grand Lake.

  But, lumber … Packard had seen an opportunity there. The development boom farther north created demand. Sapling sat in close proximity to timber camps, and riverfront property meant any mill built on the land could be energy efficient. Investing in Sapling and building the Packard Mills had not only been wildly profitable, it had revived industry in Sapling and essentially saved the town.

  But Packard himself was a mystery. It was once believed that he had loved this place. For four solid years, he’d built up and launched the ten mills and practically lived in Sapling. But gradually, he’d stopped coming. Now, nobody could get hold of him on the phone, let alone in person. Dev had spent twenty minutes the other day brainstorming with the EDC about how to get past Packard’s handlers—to appeal to the man directly to support Dev’s proposal.

  Dev remembered being a small child and walking down that very street, bouncing on his toes and pointing excitedly whenever the helicopter would appear. He also remembered the way his mother would walk a bit faster in those moments or duck them into this store or that. Some people had revered the man—envied his success and praised the prosperity the mills brought to Sapling—but others, like his mother, pursed their lips to keep from speaking unkind words.

  “It’s about damn time…” Dev spoke aloud as the helicopter came into view, wondering whether it held the old man himself versus some executive or attorney. Dev had made calls to Packard Industries after each incident on behalf of the Sheriff’s office, asking for access to management and commitments regarding site security plans. Even Cliff, who had more clout than anyone when it came to calling corporate, hadn’t been able to reach the man.

  “Brody.” Dev had set down his travel mug in the middle of the empty street, needing his hands to reach into his pocket and fish around for his phone. As he stood there making the call, his eyes continued to scan the sky for the craft that had disappeared behind the mountain. “You know where the old helipad is?”

  “Mile seventeen up Elk Mountain. Behind the old Packard place,” the deputy answered without hesitation.

  “Can you get up there right now?”

  “Yessir,” Brody answered right away. Brody was a thorough cop. He knew procedural details with precision. He was by-the-book, which Dev needed, since Dev himself had never been to the academy. What Brody lacked in experience, he made up for in drive.

  “Good,” Dev praised. “‘Cause I’m pretty sure someone from Packard just flew in. Call Cliff, just so he knows the deal. Tell ‘em they need an escort to survey the accident scenes since the scenes are part of an ongoing investigation. While you’re escorting them, eavesdrop on every word they say.”

  8

  The Best Friend

  Shea

  “Tell me he’s not having you followed.”

  “He’s not having me followed,” Carrie parroted back so quickly and so drily, Shea knew it was a lie.

  “Ugh. I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling only regret for her best friend. She’d ceased to be surprised by Keenan’s methods.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Carrie brushed it off. “I’m hardly going out anymore, anyway. My OB told me to transition to full bedrest by the end of the week.”

  Food situation notwithstanding, Shea still didn’t miss New York quite yet. But she did miss her girl time with Carrie. Video chatting didn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Most of all, Shea was riddled with guilt that divorce drama with Keenan might cause her to miss the birth of Carrie’s twins.

  “Did he call you again?” Shea grilled.

  Carrie had taken one phone call from Keenan early on—a plea for her to tell him where Shea was, couched in a promise that Shea would want to hear what he had to say. Carrie had lied and said she had no idea of Shea’s whereabouts and that even if she did, she wouldn’t tell him.

  “He knows he’s not gonna get anything out of me. But whatever—let him try. Being married to a diplomat has its privileges.”

  It was a stroke of luck that Carrie’s wife worked for the Israeli Embassy. It hadn’t stopped Shea from asking Carrie to use burner phones whenever they talked. Keenan had a twisted sense of boundaries. He also suffered from extreme hubris. Five times before she left, Shea had asked him for a divorce. Five times, he’d brushed the idea off, insisting she would change her mind—that whatever was wrong, they could work it out.

  “How goes your badass plan? I’m gonna need all the details,” Carrie ordered. “Third trimester is boring as hell. Let me live this real-life soap opera vicariously through you.”

  “So far, he’s been predictable.” Shea sat on the back deck, her body angled toward good light so that Carrie could see her face. It was a warm, beautiful afternoon. Shea had made so much good progress on her screenplay that day, she’d treated herself to early wine.

  “He’s trying to get to me through the attorneys. Making his big, sad pleas to reconcile, playing the victim and saying he was shocked by me leaving. He’s even been trying to send love letters and flowers and cards through Tasha.”

  “Oh, God…” Shea could hear the distaste in Carrie’s voice. “What do you think they say?”

  Shea scoffed. “I don’t know—I haven’t accepted any of them. Knowing him, he’d put a GPS device in anything he sent me, just so he could track where it went. Tasha’s tech guy has my computer. He’s already confirmed more than ten hacking attempts.”

  Carrie shook her head and rubbed her engorged belly absently. “Seriously … what’s his deal?”

  Shea felt like she’d tried to explain her relationship with Keenan dozens of times. Carrie knew him, of course, and had spent time with him and understood a few things. But the tethers of relationships—unhealthy ones—were impossible to explain. People only tended to understand the parts they saw.

  “He loves me,” Shea said simply. It was the one piece of all of this she’d never had to doubt. “Even if his definition of love is twisted. And he’s always had too much privilege for his own good. He doesn’t believe I don’t love him anymore and he doesn’t want to accept there’s something he can’t win. Because he’s won every other game he’s ever played.”

  “Only, he can’t win,” Carrie was quick to point out. “He can’t stop you from filing for divorce and he can’t stop a judge from granting it. This is happening whether he wants it to or not.”

  “Which is exactly why he’s holding on,” came Shea’s retort. “The last piece of me he has influence over is whether to hold me hostage within the process. It’s the whole reason why I decided to move to another state.”

  Being 1,800 miles away meant that no court would reasonably expect Shea to appear. If she’d stayed in New York, she would have ended up in the same room as Keenan, sitting across the same table to negotiate every minute point.

  Carrie chewed her lip and got quiet for a minute. “I dated a woman like Keenan once. We got together for all the wrong reasons. She was this artist and…” Carrie sighed. “I idolized her. She thought things between us were okay. Early on, I did too, but one day I woke up and realized—”

  “Your relationship was a lie and your half of it was a performance?”

  Shea hadn’t meant to interrupt her friend, or for all of her own shit to come out like that. But she worried about such things. It was another reason why she and Keenan shouldn’t work through their divorce face-to-face. What would he do when her façade was dropped? When he saw the true version of herself she’d had to hide away? Men like him didn’t do well with blows to their inflated, fragile egos.

  “Sorry ... how’d you get away from her?” Shea asked, wanting to get back t
o Carrie’s story. Shea had never known Carrie with anyone other than her wife, just as Carrie had never known Shea with anyone other than Keenan. Shea didn’t like to think too hard about the fact that she’d given a full ten years of her life to him.

  “The same way you did, I think.” Carrie’s voice was calm. “I found my own niche. Did my own thing. Made it so every piece of me wasn’t tied to her. And, when the time was right, I left.”

  Shea thought of what it must be like to stand in Carrie’s shoes, cankles and pregnancy swelling and all, her Mrs. Wrong a distant memory as she prepared to welcome her baby with Mrs. Right.

  “What are you gonna do about Kent?” Carrie wanted to know, lobbing the question that hit Shea like a cold bucket of water, sobering an otherwise welcome buzz she was getting from her wine. For weeks, Shea had relied on the change of scenery to distract her from her guilt. The math of quitting had made sense: Shea didn’t want to be married to Keenan anymore, nor did she want to continue as the elusive food critic for The Times. Besides, moving out of state and reviewing restaurants didn’t mix.

  So she’d extricated herself. Only, now, she regretted not having thought out a better ending for her fans. She’d written a brief but heartfelt letter at the tail end of her last review. Her best-loved write-ups had always been the ones that appreciated the city’s classic joints. She’d liked the symbolism of choosing Fraunces Tavern for her final act. It was the oldest operating restaurant in New York.

  “Nothing. That’s the whole point,” Shea finally answered Carrie. “I can’t do anything with Kent. It needs to be clear that I’m giving up the column. You know it was never part of the plan.”

  “I know you have a prodigious talent that you take for granted,” Carrie scolded in a manner she had plenty of times before. “And that squandering your fan base is just about the stupidest thing you could ever do.”

  Shea shook her head in protest. “Kent is a food critic and an anonymous one at that. Revealing my identity now would spoil the cachet. And, for what? It’s not like any of the screenplays I want to write have anything to do with food.”

  “You only think that now,” Carrie said matter-of-factly.

  Shea sighed and pointed out once again. “I can’t. It’ll have a material impact on the divorce.”

  “That’s the part I still don’t get,” Carrie pushed back. “If you’re not after half his money, why go out of your way to show you don’t have a job?”

  “Because if it gets ugly, him holding my money hostage will be a big part of my case. Keeping the column would undermine my argument that I’ve had to go to extremes to escape my marriage.” Shea picked up her laptop and turned a circle to show Carrie her surroundings. “Look at me. I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

  When Shea turned the computer screen so that she could see Carrie again, her friend was wearing a smirk. “You never know…” Carrie responded cheekily, rubbing her belly. “A lumberjack might just come walking out of that forest and offer to chop your wood.”

  “The gentleman at the bar would like to buy you a drink.” Trudy delivered the news with a knowing look. They’d been through this routine before. Shea had long-since gathered that she was on the same schedule as Buffalo Bill—William Cody, as he’d been unfortunate enough to be named.

  Beyond his nickname, his pattern of taking a shine to women half his age and buying them drinks from the bar all night had earned him a reputation as the town flirt. Shea’s favorite waitress at The Big Spoon, Trudy, was gracious enough to provide her cover. Trudy’s early advice to Shea—to accept the drinks lest he take rejection as a signal to try harder—had paid off in spades.

  Shea had seen Buffalo Bill in action by then. He was simultaneously the most aggressive—and the slowest—would-be suitor that Shea had ever met. If a woman refused his drinks, he’d try to chat her up for hours. But if a woman accepted his drinks, he kept his distance.

  Shea picked up the bourbon sidecar that Trudy had just set down, turned toward the bar and raised her glass as she made eye contact with Bill. He was hard to miss, with his short stature, Staker hat and graying van dyke beard. She tipped her head and threw him a smile.

  “The usual?” Trudy asked with a smile as Shea turned her attention away from Bill. Shea wasn’t crazy about the food at The Big Spoon, but she liked Trudy. The dark-featured brunette must have been a knockout in her younger days and she continued to turn heads now. Still, something about her looked a bit run down, even with all her good bones. Trudy was an aging beauty, kind of like The Big Spoon.

  The building itself was done in the style of a grand mountain lodge—all sturdy wood beams and stonework on the outside. The place stood high on the side of the main road out of town. You couldn’t tell from the front that there was outdoor seating in the back. But a large, comfortable patio for al fresco dining overlooked Grand Lake.

  Though the outside appeared weathered—in need of a wash and marked with a dated sign—the interior was mountain chic, with layouts and details that balanced rustic and modern. The bar was open with stacked rows of bottles lit from behind. From complex beam configurations hung antler chandeliers. Their glow cast dinnertime in warm, dim light brightened by a two-way fireplace at one end of the hall.

  “What’s the soup?” Shea wanted to know.

  “Just the chicken noodle and the tomato bisque. No soup of the day right now.”

  In all the times she’d eaten at The Big Spoon, there had been a soup of the day only twice.

  “How’s the dinner special today?” Shea prodded.

  “Beef barley stew,” came Trudy’s response. Not answering directly was what Trudy did when she didn’t want to speak badly about a dish.

  Shea wouldn’t be worth her salt as a food critic if she couldn’t deconstruct food. The flavors varied greatly, depending on the day. Her theory was that The Big Spoon rotated through three very different chefs. Thankfully, today was Tuesday.

  On Tuesday nights, she always ate in. The chicken pot pie was always exquisite. It was their best dish, but impossible to take out. The wine selection wasn’t bad, but it didn’t gel with the menu. Most of the rest was just mediocre, and Shea liked a sure thing. She closed her menu.

  “I’ll take the pot pie.”

  “And your usual to-go order?” Trudy plucked the menu from Shea’s outstretched hand. Shea was so predictable Trudy didn’t need to write anything down.

  “That’d be great.” Her standard order consisted of a triple order of the smoked trout—naked—and a double plate of trout amandine without the sides, both of which were fished locally from Grand Lake. She always took one bison burger—deconstructed—an order of the lamb stew, and two slices of a caramel-apple coffee cake.

  Trudy plucked up Shea’s menu and made to walk off. “I’ll have it ready to go whenever you’re done.”

  This was the part that Shea hated. She’d never gotten used to eating alone, even after years of doing restaurant reviews. She’d done everything to avoid it when she could. It had been a bone of contention between she and Keenan: he didn’t like the idea of her traipsing around the city out to dinner with her friends every week. But he rarely ever agreed to be her plus-one. Since her chat with Carrie, Shea had successfully compartmentalized troubling thoughts about Keenan and his private eye. But she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Kent.

  Her alter ego had come from the name “Clark Kent,” the moniker she’d used for her original blog. Head Over Meals had launched her writing career. It had started out as a hobby—an outlet for her to speak her own impressions of the restaurants she went to socially with Keenan’s circle and some of New York’s very best.

  In some ways, Kent had been a byproduct of being shut down by Keenan. He’d always dismissed her when she talked about food. But Shea had grown up in the kitchen. Her father’s restaurant had been regionally-renowned. When she’d found herself married to someone who neither understood nor appreciated food but was eager to posture as if he did, Shea had started Head Ov
er Meals.

  A year-and-a-half into her venture, The Times had approached her to become their new critic. Her reviews were incendiary and fresh. At a time when The Times was losing readership, her blog had earned an enormous following. When she’d accepted, she’d dropped the “Clark” and shortened it to “Kent.”

  Even with Head Over Meals, she’d been vague about her identity. No one could know you were a critic if you wanted to be served a typical meal. Speculating about Kent’s identity had become part of the appeal for the fans. The most popular theories profiled Kent to be an ex-chef, possibly a disgruntled former head chef from a defunct restaurant and, based on “his” bold and confident tone, likely a 50-year-old man.

  In none of the theories about who Kent was had Shea ever seen a correct profile. None of Kent’s fans thought “he” was a “she” or even a “they,” Let alone a Black “she” in her early thirties with a filmmaking degree from NYU. If Shea ever were to out herself as Kent, she might not be believed.

  “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  Shea looked up from the magazine she’d brought to kill time while she waited. She’d been reading Variety for years. Keeping up on industry developments seemed particularly wise if selling a screenplay was part of her plan.

  The man who had stopped next to her table lagged behind friends who still seemed en route to the door. He didn’t look like anyone Shea remembered meeting, though her heart did skip a beat or three until her brain confirmed it was a mistake. He was dark-haired with two days’ worth of stubble, dull green eyes and the kind of puffy, red face that told her he liked his drink.

  “I think you must have me confused with somebody else.” Shea smiled politely and turned the page of her magazine.

  He half-stepped closer and gave a cocky smile. “You sure you weren’t at the Rockies game last week? Suite level at Coors Field?”