by Libby Klein
“I am so sorry. What horrible timing.”
“They were also tearing up the yard. Do you know anything about poisonous plants? Especially one called conviarta majory? Or something like that.”
“Hmm. I haven’t heard of that, but I know there are a lot of common plants that are poisonous. Do you know anyone with an exotic flower bed?”
I had no idea what people’s houses or yards looked like around here. All I remembered was a lot of houses with crushed seashells strewn about in the place of grass. “No, but I can ask around.”
“I have an old textbook here somewhere that covers herbology. I’ll call you if I find anything.”
I thanked Dr. Melinda and hung up. I checked my phone for texts from Sawyer. Nothing.
A black Kia Soul pulled up in front of the house.
Aunt Ginny came tearing down the stairs, followed by Fig. “He’s here! He’s here!”
“Oh, God, I’m going to be sick. I just know I’m going to make a fool of myself.”
Aunt Ginny patted me on the shoulder. “You’re going to be fine. Take a deep breath.”
“Do I look okay?”
“You look fantastic. Don’t worry.”
I reached to open the door but Aunt Ginny stopped me. “Not yet. You don’t want to appear too eager.”
“How long am I supposed to make him wait? He’s just standing out there.”
“Slowly count to ten. Then open the door.”
This seemed ridiculous, but Aunt Ginny had five husbands to back up her methods, so I started the count. At ten, I opened the door just as he was about to knock a second time. “Hi.”
Tim was wearing faded blue jeans and a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow. His blond hair fell in waves around his face and curled out at the collar. Years of living at the beach left him with a permanent tan and laugh lines around his eyes. He was the walking embodiment of surf sexy.
“Hey, beautiful. Long time no see.” He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
I went all light-headed. “So you’re sure you want to do this?”
“I’ve thought about this moment for almost twenty-five years. I’m sure.”
I took a deep breath to calm myself. Why do men look better with age but women just wrinkle and sag? Life isn’t fair. I felt myself staring all moony-eyed at him.
Aunt Ginny saved me. She put her hand on the back of my shoulder and gave me a push toward the door. “Okay, now. You kids have fun.”
“I’ll have her back before you know it.” Tim waved good-bye to Aunt Ginny.
Aunt Ginny called after us, “You can keep her.”
That is not helping, Aunt Ginny.
Tim just laughed. “She is still a riot.”
“Oh, she’s a pip all right.”
Tim took me to a little French restaurant in West Cape May called Le Bon Gigi. “You will love this. The chef here is a friend of mine.”
His “chef friend” was a cute little thing in her late twenties with long blond hair worn in a ponytail and about ten percent body fat. She came bouncing out in her tiny little chef coat and Tim leaned down to give her a hug. She stood with one hand on his shoulder while she spoke to me.
“It’s so nice to meet you. Any friend of Tim’s is a VIP here.”
“Geej is into the farm-to-table movement. Everything on her menu comes from local sources.”
“Geej” smiled adoringly at Tim. “I think it’s important to support local farms. Just about everything in my kitchen is organic including the milk, cream, and eggs.”
“Oh. That’s . . . very nice.” I guess. What do I know? Everything I know about organic I learned a few days ago from Dr. Melinda.
Tim asked Gigi, “How’s your turnover?”
“Good today. Smooth. Last weekend we were slammed. I was in the weeds every night. A bus of Wheel of Fortunes pulled up and wanted a dollar menu. How were you?”
“My salamander’s down until tomorrow so I’m pushing the scampi and two of my servers were no-shows.”
“Gah. What is it about this time of year everyone goes nuts?” Gigi turned her big brown eyes on me. “Are you a chef too?”
Oh, good. And I was afraid this would be awkward. “Nope.”
After an uncomfortable pause, Tim pulled out my chair. “Well, why don’t we sit down?”
The heel of my boot caught on the carpet and I stumbled onto my seat. I recovered quickly only to knock my fork on the floor.
Gigi removed the menus, and my clumsy fork, from our table. “I’ll send a waiter over to get your drinks. Don’t worry about ordering. I’ll take care of everything.”
She flounced back to the kitchen before I could even form the word gluten in my brain. Please, God, don’t let me die today from either embarrassment or bread crumbs.
Tim and I locked eyes. “So, alone at last.”
I once met Steven Tyler after an Aerosmith concert and I wasn’t nearly as starstruck then as I was right now. I spent years dreaming about this scenario. A dream that usually did not include Gigi. I tried to cover my nerves, but still rambled, “Tell me everything. I want to know all about college and work and how did you start your own restaurant? And your mom, does she still hate me?”
Tim gave me a broad smile and I felt the heat rise up to my cheeks. “Yes. But to be fair, she hates most people.”
I giggled.
“Poppy, I’ve been wanting to tell you something for years.”
I swallowed hard. “Yes?”
“I owe my whole career to you. You’re the reason I became a chef. If you hadn’t pushed me into going to culinary school, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
“Then I bailed on you.”
He shrugged. “That’s all in the past. We were kids. What matters is today.”
“I’m so sorry things went the way they did. I made a mistake that derailed our entire future together.”
“I made some mistakes of my own. I should have tried to stop your wedding. Make the grand entrance and yell, ‘I object!’”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t have the guts. Plus, my brother got me drunk just in case I worked up the guts.”
“If you had crashed my wedding, I probably would have run off with you.”
We sat in silence for a moment. The weight of what could have been hung heavy between us.
“Were you happy?”
“I was. Until John got sick and died. He was a great husband.”
“Did you love him?”
“Not at first, but I grew to love him very much. Did you ever get married?”
“Almost. Twice, in fact.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t work out. They both eventually said the restaurant was my first love and they couldn’t compete with her. But they were wrong, because you were my first love.”
It was one of those moments where you feel an invisible pull between two hearts right before something wonderful happens. It was interrupted by butternut squash bisque.
Gigi had come from the kitchen to serve us personally. Goody. “How is everything so far?”
I suspected Gigi was there more to spy on Tim than to do quality control, since we hadn’t tasted anything but water. “Good.”
Gigi flounced back to the kitchen and I watched Tim watch her go. The moment was broken between us.
“So fill me in on what the heck happened at the reunion. I was in the kitchen most of the night, but I heard bits and pieces.”
I told him all the gory details that I knew.
“So that congressman was Barbie’s husband?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“No. He comes into my restaurant a lot but he has a different woman with him each time.”
“Really?”
“And by the way he was acting at the reunion, I figured he was with Kelly.”
Once again Gigi appeared at Tim’s side. “Next we have a summer salad of fresh tomatoes and white corn with ros
emary and a homemade garlic butter–soaked crouton.”
Tim smiled at Gigi. “I love your croutons.”
Gigi smiled back. “I know you do.”
Is crouton a euphemism for something I need to know about?
When Gigi had reluctantly returned to the kitchen and we were alone again, I asked, “What do you mean ‘the way he was acting’?”
“When I came out of the dining room, to check the chafing dish levels, I saw them looking very cozy in the corner. Kelly was whispering something to the congressman and he definitely looked like he was into it. It wasn’t too long after that the police were locking the place down. I tried to find you, but Connie said you had disappeared to look for Sawyer.”
He reached for my hand. As if pulled by an invisible beacon, Gigi materialized. It seemed the closer Tim and I got to connecting, the faster Gigi appeared at his side to break it up.
To her credit, Gigi served five courses of amazing small plates. After the bisque and the salad there was a mini broccolini-and-gruyere napoleon. The main course was broiled lamb chops with garlicky roasted beets and purple fingerling potatoes. I was starting to think all the garlic was another attempt to sabotage our date. But then she brought tarte tatin with homemade maple ice cream for dessert, and I was temporarily pacified. I knew in my heart that none of it was gluten-free, but I ate it anyway. I was having serious doubts about my ability to stick to Dr. Melinda’s diet.
And then there was Gigi. Next to Tim. With her hand on his shoulder. Again. “How was everything?”
Crowded.
“Fantastic, Geej! You are one gifted chef. Everything was so fresh. What’s the secret to your broccolini? How do you get it so tender?”
“Harvesting at the right time. My produce guy doesn’t harvest the plant too early like most farms. He waits until it is perfectly ripe and at the peak time to cook it. And you don’t want to cook it where the farmer cuts it off at the dirt. Trim the pieces off where they are tender.”
An image of the windowsill in Kristen’s office flashed before my eyes. She had rows of orchids, lilies, and other exotic plants. And one of the pots has stalks of something cut off at the dirt. My heartbeat started to pick up the pace. Amber was looking for exotic plants in my yard and Kristen had some right out in the open in her office. And Kristen worked down the hall from a chemistry lab, plus she had access to needles.
“Isn’t that right, Poppy? Poppy?”
Tim was asking me something and I had no idea what it was. I nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”
Tim turned to Gigi. “See. Poppy would love to take some cooking lessons from you sometime.”
Oh my God! What? No, I wouldn’t!
Gigi gave me a tenuous smile. “Sure. Call me anytime and we’ll set it up.”
“That sounds good.” Almost as good as an indictment.
Gigi handed me a business card with the restaurant information. “Tim has my cell number. You can get it from him if you can’t get me at work.”
Well played . . . Geej.
Tim paid the bill and chatted with Geej—a small part of me died each time I heard that name—for a couple more minutes while I made a plan to pay another visit to Kristen as soon as possible.
By the time we pulled up in front of Aunt Ginny’s, I was up to my neck with “farm-to-table.” It had been an afternoon of mixed signals and missed opportunities. I was disappointed, but at least I hadn’t done anything humiliating.
I said good-bye and reached for the door handle. Tim spun me around to face him. He had a look of such intensity in his eyes, one that I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and I was afraid to breathe and break the spell.
He leaned in and kissed me—and twenty-five years dropped away in moments. There was something familiar, yet exciting, about being in his arms and I never wanted it to end.
I found myself in the foyer, and didn’t know how I got there. Tim may have said he would call me later. I may or may not have said good-bye. All I knew for sure was that whoever said you can’t go home again had never been kissed like that.
Chapter 30
I waited for the final bell to ring. When the pack of students swarmed the parking lot and bus line, I was on the move. I donned a pair of mirrored sunglasses and grabbed a ball cap that was sticking out of a backpack as it walked past me. I shoved it down on my forehead and tucked my hair inside. The security guard was occupied with harassing a couple of freshmen who were still getting the hang of high school protocol and I slipped past him and down the hall to the nurse’s office.
Kristen was packing up her belongings, ready to go home for the day. A bottle of water, an orange, a cell phone. I could see the row of plants on the window behind her. The one with the cut stems was gone but a brown ring stained the wooden ledge where it had once been.
Kristen’s face twisted into a frown when she saw me. “What are you doing here? I thought you were banned.”
“I brought you something.” I pulled the peace offering from my bag and placed it on the desk in front of her.
She looked at it warily. “You brought me a Snickers bar?” Then she grabbed the bar and tore off the wrapper like it was the last crab leg on the all-you-can-eat buffet. Her mouth was full of peanuts and caramel, but I could just make out, “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about getting pregnant.”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking about having a baby. My late husband and I were never blessed, and now my time is almost up. If I’m going to do this I need to do it now. I heard you had in vitro to conceive.”
She was suspicious but the sugar was kicking in, so I had about twenty minutes of mellow before she crashed.
“Have you picked a donor yet?”
My mind flashed on Tim and I suddenly felt giddy.
“Whoa! I’ll take that giant blush you’re showing as a yes. You need to get started right away with a fertility doctor. It takes several rounds of hormone therapy before your body is ready to receive a viable embryo. And at our age it can be hard to get the pregnancy to take.”
“How often did you have to give yourself injections?”
“Every day for two weeks, and you might have to repeat the process for months until you get enough eggs harvested.”
“That sounds painful.”
“It’s not fun, but it’s worth it.” She rubbed her giant belly.
“Don’t you have to fill the needles at home? You’re a nurse, so I’m sure that was easy for you, but I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“No, you get prefilled disposables.”
“What happens to them when you’re done?”
She stopped rubbing her belly and furrowed her brow. “What do you mean what happens to them? You throw them away in a sharps container.”
“You can’t reuse them for something else?”
“No. Why would you want to?”
“What if you had no choice and it was an emergency? Could you reuse them then?”
“They would be contaminated. They would have to be boiled and sterilized, then disinfected with a strong bleach.”
Bleach. Like what Amber was looking for in Aunt Ginny’s kitchen. Now it made sense why the police were looking for both a chemical and a plant. The bleach would kill whatever was in a syringe the first use and the plant must have been poisonous.
She stared at me for a moment, then her face flushed red. “Wait! You don’t want to know about in vitro, you’re nosing around about the investigation.”
Uh-oh! Chocolate must be wearing off. “No, I’m really interested in getting pregnant. But since you want to talk about the investigation, I guess we could.”
“Wait. I don’t want to talk about the investigation.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“What? I didn’t mean to.”
Wow, we used to do this to Barbie’s clique in high school. We called it “The Wabbit Season.” I couldn’t believe it still worked.
“But you are so right. Barbie
was killed by an injection of some kind. Do you think the needles could have come from this office?”
Kristen looked like a bikini model trying to figure out calculus equations, but she went on with the conversation. “Everything in this office has a very strict sign-out procedure.”
“Have supplies ever gone unaccounted for? Like maybe an aspirin or a syringe?”
“Never.” She walked over to a locked cabinet and opened it. “Look, here is the med locker. There is nothing stronger than Benadryl in here, except for some of the students’ insulin and EpiPens. And here is the sign-out sheet. Nothing leaves this room without my signature.”
“Does anyone else in the building have access to the medical supplies?”
“Not in here. Of course, the coach has his own supply of emergency first aid for away games. He could have an EpiPen or insulin shot in there.”
“So you think the coach killed Barbie?”
“What? No, I don’t.”
“But you just said that.” I was talking in circles to make her think she’d given something away. “Why would he do it?”
She put her hand to her forehead and sat back down. “I know she was probably sleeping with him. They sure had enough private meetings together.”
“Your husband said the same thing.”
“When did you talk to my husband?”
“The other day when he was at my house.”
Her eyes widened. “For-for what?”
“He didn’t tell you? We were talking about Barbie.” The blood drained from Kristen’s face and for a moment I felt bad about tricking her. I got over it.
“What did he say about her?”
“Nothing you don’t already know.”
“So he admitted it.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Do you mean he admitted the affair or he admitted he killed her?”
“The affair, dummy. Joel didn’t kill anyone. Why am I even talking to you about this?”
“You need to talk to someone.”
Kristen started to cry so I handed her the tissue box on the waiting room table. She waved it off.
“Those things are like sandpaper. I have some in my desk that are better.”
Okay, I guess I’ll get those for you. I opened her desk and looked around. Instead of office supplies her desk looked more like a cosmetics counter. Assorted lotions and powders, tweezers and makeup brushes, a giant jar of wrinkle cream, and a well-worn copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.