Rustine replied, “What are you missing?”
The blankness of Tom’s cop face made me smile. I’d read enough about law enforcement cat-and-mouse to know that the last thing he’d identify for Rustine was what the sheriff’s department was still missing. And if Rustine knew about the fourth cookbook, then she knew a lot more about Gerald Eliot’s murder than she was letting on.
Tom cleared his throat, then said, “André Hibbard also worked at the cabin, in the kitchen, in fact, and he died under what may be questionable circumstances. And yet, the coroner is about to rule Chef André’s death accidental.”
Rustine added eagerly, “But who knows what really happened? André worked at the Homestead Museum one day of the shoot, don’t forget that. And that guy who’s under arrest for Gerald’s murder? Burr? He’s like, the president of the historical society, which has its headquarters at the Homestead. So … I figure somebody with connections to both Merciful Migrations and the Homestead must have murdered Gerald and André.”
“The Pope was in Denver last year,” Julian commented solemnly as he served himself fruit salad. “It doesn’t mean Goldy catered to the cardinals.” Rustine shot him a furious look, but Julian was right. When it came to conclusions, this girl definitely won the long jump.
“Okay, people,” Tom soothed, “I’m going to call a buddy of mine at the department and see what we can find out about Ian’s Images, Merciful Migrations, and the Homestead Museum. Financial problems, people problems. Maybe there’s a public record that would give us an insight into whatever it was Gerald Eliot stumbled on that was going to make him rich.”
“Look,” I said to Rustine, “maybe there’s more that’s gone on at that cabin than you’re aware. You’re the one who could find out if someone, say, didn’t get a modeling job. That person could have argued with Ian or Leah, and maybe André overheard the fight. Or someone might tell you that Eliot knew about some other conflict, or saw or found out something he shouldn’t have. What if Ian Hood fired Eliot because Eliot was trying to blackmail him? Then if André stumbled on the same incriminating piece of information, it might have made things dangerous for him.”
“I can’t find that stuff out.” Rustine’s whine was full of complaint. “I’m telling you, these people scare me.”
But you want us to figure it out, I thought. Have us work on it, and find out what happened to your boyfriend, and maybe in the process, find whatever it is that’s going to make you rich. The conversation ended. Julian encouraged everyone to finish up. Rustine nibbled three shrimp without sauce. She forked a pile of romaine onto her plate, sorted away the avocado, blotted off the vinaigrette with paper napkins, and downed the damp leaves. It was painful to watch.
Locusts whirred from their hidden perches in the tall grass. A breeze smelling of pine whispered down the mountains While the sun slid into the purple outline of craggy peaks. Again I found my mind wandering back to that something stolen from the museum, Winnie Smythe’s 1910 copy of The Practical Cook Book, the facsimile of which was tucked under the driver’s seat of my van.
When the Rover ground over the gravel by our curb, Julian curtly ordered Rustine to fetch her sister. Without looking at me, he announced that when he returned from dropping the two girls off, he would unpack the picnic leftovers.
A knot of sadness twisted in my chest. But I knew better than to worry about Julian’s love life. Or lack thereof.
Seated side by side on the porch swing, Arch and Lettie were speculating on the meanings of their fortune cookie prophecies. Lettie offered us her full sunlit smile. Arch narrowed his eyes at our intrusion.
“Time to groove,” Rustine informed her sister.
Lettie grabbed her backpack and asked for Arch’s e-mail address, which he wrote on the back of her fortune. On the way to the Rover, he walked slightly behind her, like an attendant to a princess. Unbidden, he climbed into the backseat beside her. I repressed a sigh.
About to step inside the car, Rustine turned. “Goldy, when will I see you again? Will you call me?”
I reflected on the mountain of work still to be done for Weezie Harrington’s party and the Hardcastle wedding reception. And yet, like Rustine but for very different reasons, I wanted to know what had really happened at the cabin.
“We’ll see,” I promised. “Hurry back!” I added belatedly, with a hopeful vagueness intended for Lettie.
“We will!” Julian assured me pointedly from behind the wheel. I don’t think he’d even looked at Rustine since her confession at the picnic table. “Unless Rustine has someone else she wants to run into!”
I checked our messages: nothing from the Merciful Migrations people about the Soiree. So maybe I still had a prayer of winning the competition from Craig Litchfield. Fat chance, the way that charming sleaze operated. … I called Marla and left a message on her machine, saying I hoped she was surviving the audit. Next I called Pru, as I’d meant to earlier, and again got her nurse. “She goes to bed around seven these days,” Wanda told me flatly. “But she seems to be doing all right.”
I assured her I would see them at the memorial service Thursday. Then I hustled out to my van and pulled out the hidden photocopy.
“I have something I want to show you,” I murmured to Tom.
Tom was proudly surveying the wreckage of the kitchen. He’d stripped the cabinets off the walls so that all that remained were the wooden studs. Looking at the way the studs marked off coal-black paper torn here and there to reveal bright pink insulation, I tried not to think of how much my kitchen now resembled an eighteenth-century prison. I sighed.
“Miss G. Here’s where your lazy Susan will go.” He motioned to the shadowy corner far to the right of the gutted sink area. “Oh, by the way, do you want a soffit above your cabinets, or do you want the cabinets to go all the way to the ceiling?”
“Tom, I don’t know.”
He whipped out his measuring tape and snapped it along the wall. “All the way up, I’d say. Have more storage space.” He frowned at the dark wall. “Do you want under-cabinet lighting? If so, we’ll need to cover it with molding. We don’t want the molding to come down so low you can’t use your food processor.”
“Agh!” I cried. “Who’s we, cop? I just need to get my workspace back!”
“Now, take it easy. I’ve set up space for you and Julian in here.” He led me out to the dining room, where he’d stacked the furniture against the wall by the hutch. In the center of the room, four sawhorses supported two four-by-eight pressboard work surfaces. Large cardboard boxes had been carefully labeled to show their contents. I read one list: Large mixer, bowls, beaters. Food processor.
“Great. Thanks.” This was not the time to squabble with Tom about my working conditions. I had to show him the cookbook facsimile and see what he thought. “Now please, may I show you something, Tom? In the living room?”
He nodded, nabbed a few of Julian’s truffles from a covered dish, and followed me to the couch. “While you were outside, I put in a call to Boyd. He’s going to get back to me tomorrow on our questions about unusual goings-on at Merciful Migrations and the Homestead. Meanwhile, I need to set up a third temporary counter for you and Julian.”
“I promise, this will just take a minute.” I handed him the thick sheaf. “It’s a photocopy of the missing cookbook,” I explained. “Check out the inscription. Also pages thirty-three and one-thirteen.”
He put the pile of paper down on the coffee table and tapped it with his forefinger. “How’d you get this?”
“The museum keeps photocopies of all the volumes they possess, Tom. I was a docent there, remember. I know how they operate.”
“And this is the museum copy?”
“Will you stop being such a fussbudget? No, of course not. I made my own copy.”
“With their permission, of course.”
“They don’t own the frigging copyright, Tom.”
“Aha!” he said triumphantly as he picked up the sheaf of papers. “So you
didn’t steal it, you only borrowed it for a little bit. Who else knows the museum keeps photocopies of their volumes?”
“Well, anybody who’s worked there, I guess. Plus, André asked, remember, so he knew.”
Tom nodded thoughtfully as he went through the pile one page at a time. He took several minutes to peruse the two pages with their bewildering list of random letters. Then he shook his head. “Presumably, this is the handwriting that is supposed to make this book valuable, right? So Fuller’s guys must have already taken a look at it, and think there’s nothing to pursue.”
“And we all know how competent Fuller is,” I observed tartly.
He offered me a truffle and I took one. “So what do you think?” he said mildly.
I frowned and savored the dense, dark, velvety sphere of chocolate. But it didn’t help me come up with a theory. “I want to know why Gerald Eliot was killed. If the motive was really murder, and you wanted to make it look like robbery, why not take something really valuable from the museum? If the motive was robbery, and the object was the cookbook, the killer could have just taken the file, forget about stealing the actual volume. Forget about killing a contractor-guard.”
Tom licked chocolate from his fingertip. “Unless the robber didn’t know the photocopies existed.”
“Sheesh.”
“Tell you what: I agree with you about one thing, Miss G.—I’m convinced that Cameron Burr didn’t kill Gerald Eliot. There are just too many loose ends. Eliot was on to, or up to, something. Rustine, despite her lack of forthrightness, has convinced me of that. And whatever Eliot was up to got him killed. And got the museum messed up in the process.”
“I just keep thinking about reverse psychology,” I said. “General Farquhar used to tell me that a good burglar will always try to make it look as if he hasn’t broken in, so that it takes longer to discover the crime and longer to find him. But this burglar-killer didn’t do that.” I hesitated. “Your anonymous hiker who phoned in the tip about Gerald Eliot? Exactly when did he call?”
“Monday afternoon, the eighteenth. We left immediately for Burr’s house.”
“Okay. Say the true motive is burglary, not homicide. You want to make it look like homicide, though. You need to distract people from the real crime. So you steal stuff you don’t want and dump it in the trash of the guy you’re trying to frame. And the guy you’re trying to frame—Cameron Burr?—is someone you know hated Gerald Eliot. Now, Eliot was guarding the thing you’re stealing. The thing you’re really stealing, not the things you’re stealing as decoys.”
Tom frowned at my logic and drummed his fingers on his knees. “If you wanted the original of this cookbook, why not just steal it, and plant some other stolen stuff at the house of the person you’re trying to frame? Why kill the guard and try to frame that other person for murder? And why, when this was all over, did André, now dead, ask for a photocopy of this exact cookbook? It’s like the damn thing’s the kiss of death.”
I shook my head, baffled, as Arch and Julian came through the back door and called for us. I said, “I don’t understand it.”
With a heavy sigh, Tom got to his feet. “Beats me, too, Miss G. But in the meantime, I’ve got a counter to set up.”
Over my protests, Julian volunteered to work in the dining room to get a few things started for the Harrington party. I reminded him that he was not a servant, he was a member of our family. But he was in the mood for cooking, he insisted, and if he was a member of the family, he should do what he was in the mood for. I was too tired to argue. Instead, I put in a call to Sylvia Bevans. She answered on the third ring, sounding annoyed.
“I’m sorry, Sylvia,” I said after identifying myself. “Is it too late to be calling? I just had some historical questions about … Charlie Smythe. Would tomorrow be better? It’s very important,” I added in the same apologetic tone.
“I do not discuss historical society business at night,” she told me crisply. “However, I will call you at precisely seven o’clock tomorrow morning. Is that too early for you? I have an early meeting with our board of directors.”
I told her seven was fine, then hung up and told Julian I’d meet him in the kitchen at six A.M.
“I have something to tell you,” Arch announced in the living room, when it was just the two of us. “Lettie and I are going out.”
“You just went out. To the Chinese place.”
“Jeez, Mom.” Arch was impatient. “You don’t get it, do you?”
My son had run up the stairs before I realized he’d told me he finally had a girlfriend.
Chapter 17
I dreamt of a sinister figure spinning strands of caramelized sugar in the cabin kitchen. Then André appeared in his white apron, and the dark figure strangled him with smoking strings of sugar. I tossed uncomfortably and finally rose at dawn, when the slanted light of late summer streamed into our bedroom. Outside, all was hushed. Most songbirds had already fled Aspen Meadow for points south. Their absence and the attendant silence seemed a bitter reminder that cold, short days, blizzard-closed roads, and the increasingly uncertain future of the catering business, all lay ahead.
Work well today, I ordered myself. Concentrate on food and life, not death. I finished my yoga routine, pulled on a sweatsuit, and reflected that I certainly had plenty of prep to concentrate on. The dip; André’s coq au vin; rice pilaf; two salads. At least the cake was made.
In the dining room, Julian was already grating Cheddar for the layered Mexican dip. He’d processed a fresh bowl of guacamole and was stirring sour cream to make it ultrasmooth. He smiled a greeting, then washed his hands in the small bathroom between the dining room and the kitchen. Then he filled a container of water for the espresso machine.
“Sorry I was in such a bad mood last night,” he offered. “After what I went through with Claire …” He ran steaming water into demitasse cups to heat them, unwilling to pursue the subject of his tragically lost girlfriend from the summer before. “Anyway, I feel so dumb. I really thought that model was interested in me.”
“How do you know she wasn’t?” I eyed the dip recipe and the jewel-colored heaps of tomatoes, olives, and scallions that Julian had laid out. I pulled out a knife and cutting board.
But the phone rang before he could answer. It wasn’t seven yet; could this be Sylvia already? More importantly, where was the phone?
“I’m going to start on the coq au vin.” Julian hightafled it to the kitchen.
The phone rang again. I finally located the portable extension: Tom had placed it on the end of the sawhorse and someone had laid a towel over it. I nabbed it.
“Goldy, it’s Weezie Harrington.” Her voice came out in a rush before I could even launch into my customary greeting. “I just wanted to save you some trouble. I mean, I figured you’d be up cooking for my party, and I wanted you to stop—”
On his own portable sawhorse, Julian began beating chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap. I pressed the phone to my ear and started slicing the first ripe tomato into juicy, sweet cubes. Pre-party anxiety, I thought with a frisson of unease. Happens all the time. “We’ve already started, Weezie. Don’t worry, it’s going to be a great dinner. By the way, happy birthday.”
Tom’s Layered Mexican Dip
2 avocados, peeled and seeded
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons medium or hot picante sauce
2 tablespoons grated onion
2½ cups regular or fat-free sour cream
16 ounces fat-free spicy black bean dip
2 tomatoes, chopped (about 3 cups)
6 scallions, chopped, including tops
1½ cups sliced pitted black olives Cheddar cheese, grated
8 ounces regular or low-fat
Tortilla chips
Beat the avocados with the lemon juice, picante sauce, grated onion, and ½ cup of the sour cream until the mixture is smooth to make guacamole. Set aside.
Using 2 large platters or 2 9 × 13-inch pa
ns, place half of the bean dip into the bottom of each pan. Carefully smooth half of the guacamole on top of each bean layer (about 1 cup on each layer). Place 1 cup of the sour cream on top of each guacamole layer.
Layer half of the tomatoes, half of the scallions, half of the olives, and half of the grated cheese into each pan.
Chill the platters and serve them with tortilla chips.
Makes 24 servings
André’s Coq au Vin
3 tablespoons butter
1 carrot, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed through a press
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 cup dry red wine
½ cup beef bouillon
1 tablespoon tomato paste or catsup
1 tablespoon cornstarch
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts (approximately 1½ pounds)
1 tablespoon flour
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
In a large skillet, melt the butter and slowly cook the chopped carrot, onion, garlic, and parsley until the onion is soft and translucent, approximately 10 to 20 minutes. Add the wine, bouillon, and tomato paste or catsup. Simmer, covered, over low heat for 20 minutes. Stir 2 tablespoons water into the cornstarch until smooth. Mix into the wine mixture and stir until the sauce is thick and clear. Set aside, covered, over very low heat, while you prepare the chicken.
Pound the chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap until they are approximately ½ inch thick. Mix together the flour, salt, and pepper, and dredge the chicken breasts in this mixture.
Heat the oil in a large, heavy skillet. Over medium-high heat, sauté the chicken breasts for 2 minutes per side, or until almost cooked through. Place the chicken breasts in the wine mixture, cover, and cook over medium-low heat another 6 to 10 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked through. Serve immediately.
Makes 4 servings
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