The Gourmet Girl Mysteries, Volume 1

by Jessica Conant-Park

  She grabbed the remote and started flipping channels. Oh, good. Perfect Strangers was on. And coming up next, Shannen Doherty’s brilliant made-for-TV movie Friends ’Til the End, in which Shannen stars as the lead singer of a rock band who acquires her very own stalker. Unbeknownst to the other women in the room, I’d seen this movie a few times and considered it one of the best guilty pleasures of all time. By exerting superhuman self-control, I might be able to refrain from humming along to ex-Brenda singing the idiotic “Does Anybody Hear Me?” I seriously hoped that Dora wasn’t planning to start flipping channels again.

  Adrianna began combing Dora’s hair and clipping up sections in preparation for foiling in highlights. “What’s going to happen to Oliver’s business now that he’s gone?”

  “Oh, the Full Moon Group will be fine. All their businesses run themselves at this point. Truthfully, I’m a little relieved that I don’t have to listen to any more talk about Oliver’s unfailing sense of brotherhood with that goddamn group. I loved him, but I didn’t love his work. Especially Barry and his ridiculous desire to convince people that he’s some kind of aristocrat. A gourmet restaurant is nothing but a silly, expensive hobby. Oliver was the one who knew how to make the money, and all Barry wanted to do was throw it away by opening a fancy new place with great food and no profits. Don’t get me wrong. I like to eat out at nice restaurants as much as the next person, but I don’t want to own one. But they’d known each other for years, so Oliver could take Barry’s irritating whims better than I could. I don’t know how Oliver was so patient with Barry, but he thought of him more like a brother than a partner, so those two had a sibling love-hate relationship. They’d be fighting one minute, and the next, everything would be fine.”

  Adrianna held her hand out, and I handed her more hair clips. “Can you grab the foils out of the bag while I finish this?” Her tone of voice was meant to make her sound like a master speaking to an apprentice.

  “So you’re going out tonight, Dora? I’m glad you’re getting out of the house.”

  “Yes, Sarka insisted that I join her and Barry tonight at some new restaurant.” Oh, great. She was going to be at Simmer for the grand opening. “I’m only going because Sarka is truthfully a very nice woman, and she doesn’t want me to lock myself in the house forever.” In this case, “forever” meant the entire three days since her husband had been murdered. Three days, and this woman was actually going out to dinner to celebrate New Year’s Eve!

  “Dear,” Dora continued. “I’ve forgotten to ask you. Would you be able to stop at Sarka’s to do her hair for tonight? Barry called me last night to see how I was doing, and when he found out I was having you come by today, he thought it might be nice for Sarka to have some pampering, too. She’s been upset about Oliver as well.”

  “Not a problem,” Adrianna assured her. “I’ve got some time before my next client. Does she live far from here?” Ade eyed me, silently asking if that would be okay. I quickly nodded a yes.

  “No, they only live a few blocks from here. She won’t want anything too fancy, so it shouldn’t be a long appointment. I think Barry just wants to do something nice for her. Sarka’s expecting you. I said that you’d go there as soon as you were done here.”

  Ade showed no reaction to Dora’s high-handedness. She quickly mixed up a smelly bowl of hair color and started weaving a comb handle through thin sections of Dora’s hair, separating strands into the foil sheets I was now handing her. “I’m glad you have friends to help you out. What restaurant are you going to?”

  “Some place on Newbury Street. Simmer, I think it’s called.”

  “Oh, how funny! We’re going to be there tonight, too,” Adrianna said.

  “Oh.” The fact that mere folk like us would also be at Simmer seemed to lessen the upscale factor. “Well, we just wanted to go somewhere simple for the evening. I’m not really up for much more, obviously.”

  I refrained from kicking Dora for referring to Simmer as “simple” and kept quiet as Dora and Adrianna made small talk. I disliked this woman, but I couldn’t find any obvious reason to think she’d killed her husband. She wasn’t a sobbing wreck right now, but her composure wasn’t proof of guilt. And why kill off the man who was supporting her and her awful taste? Unless she was unimaginably tired of dealing with the tumultuousness of the business? But if she was going to get rid of half of the Full Moon Group, why not destroy the partnership by taking out Barry? My reasoning made no sense, even to me. In searching for motives, I was inventing weak possibilities.

  That still left Naomi as a likely suspect. Would she have done something so stupid? And so violent? The Avenging Harassment Angel, she’d be called in the headlines. And when I needed a job reference, what would I do? Have her compose one from prison?

  When Ade went to the bathroom to mix some more color, I followed her. “Ask her if she killed Oliver,” I demanded.

  “Are you nuts? I’m not asking her that. Besides, she’s obviously in a state of shock and trying to go about her life as though nothing has happened.”

  “Okay, well, ask her about Oliver’s life insurance policy. And the key man thing Owen told us about. Maybe she’s getting a huge settlement of some kind.”

  “Fine, I’ll try,” she agreed, going back into the bedroom. “But I’m not saying key man. She’ll think we’re investigating her.”

  “Well, we are.”

  Adrianna waited until Dora was bent over the sink having the color rinsed out before broaching the subject. “So, are you going to be fine moneywise, Dora? I don’t mean to be nosy. I just want to make sure you’ll be okay.”

  Dora shouted above the noise from the faucet. “Oh, I’m fine. Oliver had a standard life insurance policy and all that.”

  I nudged Adrianna, and she nudged me back harder before asking, “What about the business? Do you get anything from that?” she asked.

  “Barry is signing over that part of the insurance money to me.” Before I could shout “J’accuse!” and point my finger at the murderer, she continued, “But I don’t need it. I have my own money. I’m going to donate all the money from the business somewhere. I don’t know which of my charities needs it most, though. Maybe I’ll divide it up and give some to each.”

  I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Why doesn’t Barry want to keep the money and put it back into the business?”

  Adrianna glared at me for overstepping my bounds.

  “He says he just can’t keep money that came from Oliver’s death. All their places will keep making money, and Barry and Sarka are well enough off. They just don’t need it.”

  With all these people tossing aside large sums of extra money, I was starting to feel slightly bitter that no one was handing any over to me. Or to Josh, whose salary was barely going to cover his bills.

  It took most of Friends ’Til the End to finish Dora’s hair. Adrianna wasn’t kidding when she’d said Dora liked elaborate updos. Her newly highlighted shoulder-length hair seemed to take forever to pin up with individual sections twirled and then rolled into flattened circles and with the rest of her hair pulled tightly back into a mess of curls that stood in a perky mound on the top of her head. The style, perfect for a prom, was by no means suitable for a middle-aged widow, and the new light color seemed to mirror and even to mock the yellowish hue of the woman’s skin.

  “Okay, just how you like it,” Adrianna announced after jabbing one final bobby pin into Dora’s hair disaster. I couldn’t understand how Ade could stoop so low until I saw how much cash Dora handed her. And me.

  After getting directions to Sarka and Barry’s house, we left Dora alone in her cavernous mansion and packed up the trunk with Adrianna’s bags. As I walked to the passenger door, I noticed a tremendous trash pile by the driveway. Next to a mountain of garbage bags was an oversized aquarium tank complete with a screened lid and a fluorescent light fixture.

  “Hold on!” I stopped Adrianna before she got into the car. “Look what Dora is throwing out! A per
fectly good tank. This would be perfect for the hermit crab Walker gave me. Help me move it into the car.”

  “You are not trash-picking from one of my clients, Chloe! That is disgusting. What if she’s looking out the window and sees us rooting through her trash? No way. Get in the car.”

  “Fine. But there’s no reason that I shouldn’t take it if she’s getting rid of it.” I buckled my seat belt and sighed. “Dora’s husband just died, and apparently her pet something just died, too. She’s not having a good week at all.”

  “I can’t believe it’s already eleven fifteen.” Ade sighed as she started up the engine. “So what did you think of Dora?” she asked.

  “If she did kill her husband, it obviously wasn’t for the money. But that is certainly a lot of trash outside today. I wonder if she’s throwing out some of Oliver’s stuff. Seems pretty quick to be cleaning out his closets, don’t you think?”

  I avoided telling Adrianna that Oliver had been after Hannah. To pass on Sean’s account would have been to raise the specter of Naomi as an avenging angel. Out of loyalty to Naomi, I didn’t want anyone, even my best friend, to know of my fear that my supervisor had radically violated the principles of the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers by murdering a harasser. Still, I might be able to glean a little information about Dora and Oliver without betraying Naomi. I wondered whether Oliver had made a habit of pushing himself on other women and whether he regularly had affairs. Could Dora, like Sean, have caught Oliver and Hannah together in the gallery office? But we could hardly have probed by asking Dora whether she’d enjoyed Food for Thought: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

  “Do you think they were happy together?” I settled for asking. “I mean, you’ve been in their house a bunch of times, so you must have a feel for their relationship, right?”

  Adrianna nodded. “Well, Dora is stuffy and snobby and not my most favorite person, but she’s always spoken highly of Oliver. She seemed very off today. I almost feel bad leaving her by herself in that mansion. She and Oliver had been together for years, and she must be totally lost. Like I said, I think she’s in a state of shock and has no idea what to do with herself.”

  Throughout the short drive to Sarka’s, I continued to press Adrianna about Dora and Oliver’s marriage, but nothing I heard suggested a motive for Dora to have murdered her husband. Oliver had clearly been an ass of some sort, but whether or not Dora knew it was questionable.

  “Why are you so interested in her?”

  “No reason. Just wondering about the lifestyles of the rich and widowed,” I said innocently. “And we’ll see about Sarka.”

  “So now you think Sarka killed Oliver?”

  “No, but maybe we’ll get some juicy information from her,” I said.

  THIRTEEN

  As Dora had said, Barry and Sarka Fields lived nearby. After a four-minute drive, we arrived at what turned out to be my dream house: a traditional two-story colonial painted gleaming white, it had black shutters, an attached garage, and a white fence topped with latticework. Christmas lights and garlands were strung around the bright red front door, and on the door itself was a big fresh wreath. There was even smoke billowing out of the chimney! I was ready to move in.

  Not knowing what Sarka wanted done with her hair, Adrianna and I unloaded all of her bags again, went up the brick walkway, and rang the bell.

  The door opened, and there was Barry, dressed in an expensive navy suit, clearly ready for a workday. “You must be Adrianna. Thank you for coming on such short notice.” He reached out and shook Ade’s hand and then realized that I was standing there, too. “Chloe? What are you doing here?”

  My cover had been blown. “Adrianna is a good friend of mine, and I’m just tagging along with her today to get a feel for the business. I’m writing a paper,” I said vaguely. “On, you know, self-employed women who … work.” I’m not always quick on my feet.

  Barry, however, apparently accepted my feeble explanation. “Oh, well, great. Ladies, please come in out of the cold. It is finally starting to feel more like winter around here, don’t you think?”

  We stepped into the warm house and hung our coats in the entryway. The look and the ambiance here were completely different from what I’d noticed at Dora’s. The living room walls were a rich red; the trim, a warm ivory. Everything was cozy and comfortable and totally livable, as if the Extreme Makeover team had just left. There were two big, soft couches and a matching chair and a half (one of those oversized, cushiony armchairs I’d been wanting and for which I lacked the funds and the space). The rest of the furniture was, I guessed, from Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn. A fuzzy rug covered the center of the room. A real wood fire burned in the fireplace, and the mantel held lighted tapers in a natural honey color. In a corner of the room a Christmas tree was smothered in ribbons, bows, vintage-looking ornaments, and string after string of lights. I sighed. I’d have given anything for a living room like this. These people had somehow leaped into my brain, extracted my fantasy house, and set it up for themselves.

  As if reading my thoughts, Barry said, “Make yourself at home.” He gestured to the comfy couches, and I somehow controlled the urge to hurl myself onto the overstuffed pillows. “I’ll go find Sarka. I’ve got to go do some work today, and she didn’t have any plans, so I thought it might be nice for her to do something for herself while I’m gone. I hope it wasn’t inconvenient for you to come over today?”

  “Not at all,” Adrianna said. “Dora is a regular client of mine, and I’m more than happy to see one of her friends.”

  “That’s great. Thank you. I’ll be upstairs on the computer, and I’ve got tons of phone calls to make. There are still so many people who haven’t heard about Oliver, and Dora is really not up to making those calls.”

  When Barry left the living room, I was tempted to trail behind him to sneak a look at the rest of the house.

  Adrianna was as awestruck as I was by the beautiful room. “Well, this definitely looks nothing like Dora’s house, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re not kidding. There isn’t one smidge of bad taste in here, is there?”

  Sarka appeared a few minutes later, her hair wet from the shower, her face bare of makeup. If she hadn’t been so scrawny, she’d have been stunning. She wore a matching white zip-up sweatshirt and pants that mercifully covered what must have been visible bones.

  “Hello, I’m Sarka. It’s nice to meet you. Dora says wonderful things about you.” She smiled softly at Ade. “And you must be Chloe? Barry says we met briefly the other night at the gallery. I’m so sorry I don’t remember.”

  My memory of Sarka that night was that she’d looked exceedingly bored, so I wasn’t surprised that she’d forgotten our introduction. “That’s okay,” I said. “There was a lot going on that night.”

  Adrianna lifted up her bag. “Where would you like me to set up?”

  Sarka waved her hand around the room. “We can stay in here if you like. I’ll just pull a smaller chair in from the dining room, and we can sit by the fire.”

  The suggestion astounded me. My graduate-student living room was nothing by comparison with Sarka’s, but when Adrianna did my hair, we used my bathroom or kitchen. The chemicals she used for color were, by definition, designed to tint what they touched, and I didn’t want a hennaed couch or highlight-splotched pillows. Furthermore, there was already more than enough of Gato’s fur everywhere without the addition of the trimmed-off ends of my own hair. Even though Sarka could clearly have afforded to replace anything that was stained and ruined, and even though she undoubtedly had cleaners to vacuum up hair, why use the living room? Even if she merely wanted Adrianna to put up her hair without tinting or trimming, it struck me as odd and inappropriate that she wanted us to stay here instead of moving to her bathroom or bedroom, or even to her kitchen. Was she in the habit of blow-drying her hair in the living room? Did she brush her teeth here?

  “Would either o
f you like some coffee or tea?” Sarka offered. “Or there’s some frittata left over from breakfast, if you’d like.”

  “Actually,” said Adrianna, “I’d love a piece of frittata and some tea, if you don’t mind. I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast.”

  “Oh, you must be hungry. I’ll bring out food for all of us, then, okay?”

  I nodded happily, and Sarka left for the kitchen.

  “I can’t believe she wants her hair done in this gorgeous room,” Adrianna said. “I hope she doesn’t want color, because I might have a panic attack if I spill anything. I wonder if I have a plastic sheet I could put across the floor.” Adrianna rifled through her bag.

  “You can’t do color in here! We’ll have to move to the kitchen or bathroom.”

  Moments later, Sarka returned with a tray that she set down on the coffee table. “The frittata has Cheddar cheese, jalapeños, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh basil. I hope that’s okay? Have a seat and help yourself to whatever you want.”

  “It smells delicious. Thank you,” I said, sitting down on one of the plush sofas. The frittata was spicy from the jalapeños and had a hint of sweetness from the tomatoes that cut the heat. “It’s incredible. Where did you get this?” I wondered aloud.

  “Oh, I made it. I love cooking, and this is a new recipe I found in a magazine. The secret is that you add some of the liquid from the pickled jalapeños to the beaten eggs. I never would have thought to do that, but it really works, I think.”

  I wouldn’t have pegged Sarka as a cook, since she’d snubbed Josh’s food at the gallery and looked as if she subsisted on water, with the occasional bite of celery stalk as a special treat. So far, however, she was much warmer than the icy woman I’d met the other night.

  “So, what would you like done with your hair today?” Ade asked between mouthfuls of the egg dish.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t get my hair done very often. I usually just tie it back in a ponytail, but Barry wanted to cheer me up. He thought it would be fun for me to have something new done for tonight. I feel sort of silly having someone come to the house just for me, but it was really sweet of him. Because of Oliver, we’re coming a bit unraveled. Whatever you want to do is fine.” Sarka helped herself to a thin slice of the frittata. So she did, in fact, eat!