The Gourmet Girl Mysteries, Volume 1

by Jessica Conant-Park

  “Oh, Mrs. Rafferty, I am so sorry about Eric. I just can’t imagine how devastated you must be.” Why was she calling me? What in the world was I supposed to tell this woman? Your son was dreadful and pompous during the two hours I knew him, and then I found him with his throat slit on a men’s room floor?

  “Well, dear,” she managed to continue, “Eric’s father and I knew he’d been dating.” She paused. “Dating someone serious. Well, not someone serious. Or not necessarily a serious person, that is. Dating seriously. There. And Timothy told us who you were. I know you must be just as heartbroken as we are. His parents. He was our only child, you know. I had the understanding … well, I may have misunderstood. Well, no, I didn’t. I had the sense that this may have turned into a more permanent relationship. Cut short by Eric’s death. But it’s consoling to know that after all, he found great love. During his life.” As opposed to after his demise? Although the bereaved Mrs. Rafferty claimed to be consoled by the thought of her son in love, this notion sent her into another loud gale of moaning.

  I couldn’t blame her, obviously, for her tears, and I attributed her evident confusion to grief. Losing a child must be unimaginably painful. No wonder Mrs. Rafferty sounded so fragmented. I had to do whatever I could to comfort her and decided that a nod-and-smile-and-agree-with-everything attitude would be the kindest approach. And very social workish. “This must be awful for you. Please let me know if I can do anything for you,” I said in my best soothe-the-grieving-mother voice.

  “Well, actually, Chloe, I want your advice. About the funeral. I’m sure you want to be involved. So I thought I’d let you know that Madeline Rock … Do you know her? From Magellan, it’s called. It’s a restaurant. She offered me her executive chef, a Josh something-or-other, and his staff to do the food. Catering. For the gathering at our home after the funeral. Now, Eric was a fan of Timothy’s. But what do you know about this Madeline? What do I tell her? Of course, Eric is my only child, and I adored him to pieces … such a precious and wonderful son, but truthfully, Eric and I did not have the closest relationship in terms of day-to-day life. Or else we would have met you by now, of course. So, I’m not sure what he would want.”

  Okay, I’d hardly known Eric, but I did know that he had loved food and loved the whole restaurant business, and had seemed quite fond of Magellan. Furthermore, I felt certain that Eric wouldn’t have refused the offer of free food. Who was I to talk? But why was his mother soliciting my advice, anyway? What ulterior motive could Madeline Rock possibly have that should arouse suspicion and require a consultation with me? The notion of a gourmet-catered funeral was a little odd, but it always struck me as peculiar that death was customarily surrounded by tons of food. When someone died, were the surviving loved ones hit with sudden cravings for casseroles and fruit salads? Still, after a death, visitors expected be fed and, more than that, fed well. When our neighbor Ray died, my mother was highly irritated at the pathetic spread served at the family’s house. Mourners were offered tea and crustless minisandwiches. “Protestant sandwiches,” my mother had declared, by which she meant skimpy offerings. “This isn’t tea with the Queen of England, for God’s sake. They could spring for something more filling.”

  “I’m sure Eric would have been thrilled with that idea,” I told his mother. “He was just praising Magellan’s chef the other night. Eric was quite food oriented, as you know. He took me to Essence to see what I thought about his investing there. He talked a lot about the quality of the food at Magellan, and he was hoping Essence would reach that status. So, he’d want you to accept Madeline’s offer. I can’t think of a more fitting way to remember Eric and celebrate his life.”

  “Oh, thank you. I knew Eric’s girlfriend would have the answer. Now, my husband, uh, Eric’s father is here. He’d like to speak to you. We’ll see you on Saturday at the funeral home. Ten a.m.” Mrs. Rafferty gave me the name and address, which I reluctantly wrote down. Having resigned myself to attending the funeral of my supposed beloved, I hoped that there wouldn’t be an open casket. Ugh. I’d already seen the poor man dead once. That had been enough.

  “Okay, here’s Phil,” she said as she passed the phone to her husband.

  “Chloe? Phil Rafferty here.” Eric’s father had a loud, gruff voice and shouted his words through the phone lines. “You must be quite shook up. Awful situation for all of us, but we’ll get through it together. Listen, I’m a bit, concerned about Veronica. Has she been bothering you?”

  “Veronica? Um, I don’t know much …” I started. In fact, what I knew about Veronica was almost nothing. I remembered that she was the bookkeeper at Essence and Magellan, and that was about it.

  “That ex-girlfriend of Eric’s is a pain in the neck. Couldn’t get over him when they broke up. Has she been bothering you? Trying to break you up? I’m convinced that girl will show up at the funeral and steal your thunder, so to speak.” Bookkeeper Veronica was welcome to play the bereaved girlfriend. Someone should, maybe, and I was going to have a pretty hard time acting forlorn.

  “No, no. I haven’t heard anything from her at all. No trouble whatsoever,” I said truthfully. “Listen, Mr. Rafferty, Eric and I didn’t know each other that well,” I began slowly.

  Ignoring what I’d just said, Mr. Rafferty replied, “Eric’s mother and I know how special you were to him. You’re part of this. We’ll all grieve together,” he assured me. Lucky me.

  “Well, I need to get going, actually. I have school today. Orientation. I should probably run.”

  “You’re so strong. So strong,” Phil repeated. “I can’t believe how well you’re holding up. Looking forward to finally meeting you on Saturday. Better late than never, I guess, huh?”

  Relieved to have that unusual call over, I hung up. I couldn’t believe I had to go to this funeral. And what was I going to wear? Every black dress I owned was more appropriate for doing tequila shots than for honoring the dead.

  But today I had that damn social work school orientation. Who decided we needed orientation at eight fifteen in the morning? And what the hell were we going to do until four that afternoon? I figured that all the men there would probably be gay, so I didn’t bother dressing up. Jeans, T-shirt, and Keds. Yes, Keds had been over with for years, but I didn’t care. Cheap, easy, went with everything. Hair in ponytail. I grabbed a light jacket and was good to go.

  I took a notebook and a pen, and drove the few miles to school only to discover that Tuesday’s orientation sucked as much as I thought it would. I spent two hours in an auditorium listening to a series of progressively more boring speakers. The dean of the school made the mandatory welcome speech, which was about as scintillating as his welcome letter had been. The head of the library tried to present a virtual tour of the library’s many state-of-the-art features, but her computer kept freezing, and we were left to gaze at a close-up of the book-drop slot.

  At noon we broke up for lunch and were presumably expected to mingle and discuss our life’s dreams of saving the oppressed. As I hid in a corner, I looked around and noticed that everyone else was much more dressed up than I was; the others were treating this event as a foray into the professional world of suits and ties. Earnest students were gathered in groups, probably to share their hopes for the year’s academic pursuits. I felt so much like a wallflower at a high school dance that I wished I’d brought along a flask of peppermint schnapps—in high school, at least, it would’ve made me the most popular kid there.

  We’d been handed massive notebooks full of graduate school information. Mine included my schedule of classes, which ran Wednesday through Friday, and the contact information for my “field placement,” social work speak for internship. I’d forgotten about that. Monday and Tuesday were designated “field placement” days on which we were thrown into the trenches and expected to put into use the skills we were learning in the classroom. I’d been given a placement at the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace and was to call Naomi Campbell (I
swear that was her name) before Monday. Why was everything social work related required to have the longest possible title? And it was in downtown Boston, which probably meant I’d have to take the T, since parking downtown was either impossible or too expensive to do on a regular basis.

  I spent the hour from one to two seated with three other students in my advisor’s office. His name was Dick Dickers, and I passed that hour wondering what kind of parents do that to a kid. So his name was probably Richard, and Rick Dickers wasn’t much better than Dick Dickers, but with a last name like that, the kind thing to do would have been to avoid anything that sounded remotely like Dickers. There were millions of names out there for parents to choose from: James Dickers, Adam Dickers, William Dickers … although Willy Dickers would probably have sent grade-schoolers into whoops of laughter. I was sure he’d been called Dicky Dickers by children throughout the public school system. Parents should name their children responsibly. Like, if my parents had had a son, they clearly couldn’t have named him James, a choice that would have resulted in a baby Jimmy Carter crawling around. But poor Dick Dickers had been doomed to a life of students being too distracted by his name to hear any of the important information he had to impart regarding his availability as an advisor to overworked social workers. As I was leaning against the back of the hard wooden chair in Mr. Dickers’s office and not listening to what he was saying, it occurred to me that when it came to naming babies, the parents of the United States had collectively lost their minds and didn’t want to find them. In particular, no one wanted advice on what to name a child, as my sister Heather could attest. When she was pregnant with her first child, her friend Ruth had rejected every name Heather had come up with because it had reminded her of some celebrity. Donald had made Ruth think of Donald Trump, Theodore had led to Ted Kaczynski, and she’d even gone from Jennifer to Gennifer Flowers. When Heather and Ben had finally decided on the name Walker, Ruth had immediately said, “Oh, like Walker, Texas Ranger?” Heather had been totally fed up by then and had shouted back angrily, “Yes, EXACTLY like Walker, Texas Ranger!” Ruth was not consulted or informed about baby number two’s name until after the birth certificate had been signed.

  I made a minor attempt to focus on Mr. Dickers until eventually my ill-named advisor wound up his spiel on future course selection and started clamoring about plagiarism and its consequences. When he finally wrapped up his warnings, my school chums and I shuffled out of his cramped office.

  From two to four that afternoon, I was supposed to attend the Peer-to-Peer Networking Social, which as far as I could tell was yet another opportunity to socialize, this time with advanced graduate students who’d share their wisdom with us newbies. I was irked enough at having to be here in the first place to bag the social. My plan for the next two years was to go to class and go directly home, and there was no way I was hoping to network with serious academic types who’d try to suck me into joining repulsive-sounding clubs such as, incredibly, something called the Social Work Student Class Spirit Committee. As I scampered out of school, I was already dreading the classes I had coming up over the next three days.

  Correctly so. The following day I discovered that the main similarity between my social work classes and the classes I’d had in college was that the first day pretty much consisted of being handed piles of papers with monster-sized syllabi and listening to professors regale the students with proclamations about impending workloads. My Social Policy course was taught by a frizzy-haired guy in his late sixties, Professor Harmon, who handed us each a forty-page list of required reading. According to his plan, I was to read approximately six thousand pages from nineteen different sources each day. And should I find myself thirsty for even more social policy information, I could jump from the required to the recommended list. I would also be writing a ten-page midterm paper and a twenty-five-page final paper. Then Mr. Slave Driver told us to go buy our books and sent us on our way. That’s just a sample. The rest of my classes that week were equally horrifying.

  The good news was that I had morning classes only; my afternoons were free. I waited until after the week’s final boring lecture on Friday morning to go buy my books. The cramped bookstore was overflowing with students, and I had to shove my way through to the back to reach the social work section. I started pulling books off the shelves, and by the time I’d filled my little basket, I realized that there was no way I could carry all these books, never mind do all the reading. I was going to have no life whatsoever. I started to panic. What had I done? I was going to flunk out of school. And embarrass my dead uncle. I stood staring at my book list in disbelief. The basket was full, my arms were aching, and I had the books for only two of my classes.

  “Honey, you don’t need to buy all those books, you know.” I turned to my left to see a six-foot bald guy in a tight yellow T-shirt. On his face was an expression of genuine pity. His gold ear clips and blue-tinted sunglasses were making me guess gay—but I’d been wrong before. He reached over and grabbed the papers out of my hands. “Okay, now who do you have for General Practice? Oh, Wolfmann. So, you only need these two textbooks, and, well, maybe this paperback here.” My savior reached into my basket and put back seven books for me. “I’m Doug Kingsley. I’m a doctoral student here. Thank God I found you, or you’d probably go home and put a bullet through your head thinking you’d have to spend the rest of your life trying to read all this crap.”

  “Hi, I’m Chloe. Thank you so much. I was beginning to think I’d need a truck to get all these books back home.”

  “Yeah, they like to scare all the first-year students by throwing the syllabus at you the first day and telling you all the reading you supposedly have to do. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. Nobody does all the assigned reading. You’ll figure out what you have to read and what you don’t.” Doctoral Doug finished helping me select what to buy and what to toss back on the shelves. “And I probably just saved you six thousand dollars in book costs, so you’ll have to buy me a mochaccino sometime.” Definitely gay. Damn.

  “I’ll buy you any caffeinated beverage of your choice. Thank you so much for your help. I am totally lost here.”

  Doug wrote down his phone number for me and said to call him if I needed anything. He’d gone home after his first day of classes and wept like a baby, he said, so the least he could do was prevent that from happening to another student.

  I lugged my books home from school, checked my voice mail, and listened to a message from Heather, who demanded to know all the torrid details of my romantic Back Bay date and asked why hadn’t I called her all week, and so on. I decided to call her later. The last thing I felt like doing was telling my horror story one more time. I also had a message from my parents to announce their return from Bar Harbor, Maine, and to invite me to stop by. That would have to wait, too. I called my new supervisor, Naomi, to check in about my internship. I mean field placement.

  “Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace. This is Naomi, how can I help you?”

  Oh God, please don’t make me answer the phone there. I explained who I was and asked about starting next week.

  “Excellent,” Naomi said enthusiastically. “I’m glad you called. I was actually wondering if you could pop by this afternoon so I can show you around and get you set up for Monday. I have to go to a coalition rally at the State House early next week, so if I could get you situated before then, that would be great.”

  I groaned silently but agreed to come in at two and decided I’d park in one of those expensive parking garages. I’d thought that the school misery was over for the week, but now I had to go downtown and deal with this organization with the ridiculous name. This whole graduate school business was really going to interfere with my socializing and my television watching. What’s more, since I should make a decent impression on my new boss, I’d now have to change into something other than jeans.

  Totally annoyed, I threw on a good shirt and some decent footwear befor
e driving downtown. I parked in a garage and found the address Naomi had given me, an office building right in the heart of Downtown Crossing. I made my way up three flights of stairs (the elevator was broken) and found Suite 412. When I entered, I instantly realized it was no suite, at least as I understood the word. To me, suite conjured up the image of luxurious rooms at the top of the Ritz with beautiful views, room service, and a minibar. What I saw before me were two rooms separated by a dilapidated door that stood open. Industrial gray carpet covered the floors, and one tiny window in the second room provided a view of a concrete wall. The only furniture in the first room were two cafeteria-style tables and some metal filing cabinets overflowing with papers.

  “Hello?” I called into the apparently empty rooms.

  “Chloe?” A woman popped her head out from the far room. She walked toward me. I smiled weakly. Far from looking like an international supermodel, this Naomi Campbell had ghostly pale skin and medium-brown hair that fell to her knees and was plaited in tiny braids with multicolored beads adorning the ends. She couldn’t have been much older than I was, but she was dressed in bland, hippyish clothing, her outfit completed with, ugh, Birkenstock sandals. I’d gone to a radical leftist, politically activist, politically correct college, and I thought I’d escaped when I graduated. And what was up with her hair? I silently christened her Braids.

  Braids eagerly reached to shake my hand. “Well, let’s get started. As you can see, we’ve got tight quarters here, but we make the best of it. I’m going to clear a space for you at one of these tables, so you can have a workstation for yourself.”

  Great.

  “Come into my office, and I’ll fill you in on the organization.”

  I followed Naomi into her dinky office and listened to horror stories of women who’d been harassed at their workplaces. My job was to answer hotline calls from women who were dealing with creeps at work and needed help in fending off the jerks. Then there’d be a lot of “outreach” work, as Braids called it. As far as I could tell, outreach work meant calling random companies I would select from the Yellow Pages and offering to present sexual harassment workshops.