“I want you out of your comfort zone,” Jim continued, and I snickered under my breath. If he thought comfort had anything to do with me in the kitchen, he had a lot to learn.
“Tonight,” he said, “we’re going to change cooking partners.”
A murmur went through the classroom.
“Oh, come on!” Jim laughed. “It’s not the end of the world. If you can cook with your friends, you can cook with anyone. So let’s get to it.” He moved closer to our cooking stations. “You…” He pointed to the Incredible Hulk. “With you.” He took the mother from the station in front of ours by the hand and moved her into place. “You…” He pointed to another student. “With you. You-” He turned toward Eve, but he was already too late. Before he could assign her a partner, John, the accountant, had already staked his claim. As if by magic, John’s groceries had already displaced mine. He and Eve were chatting like old buddies.
Which pretty much left me out in the cold.
“You…” When Jim pointed my way, he grinned. I felt a little warmer. “Let’s put you…” He glanced around the room. “Let’s put you over there with Beyla.”
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea.” It slipped out before I could stop myself. Beyla kept staring straight ahead, and I could only imagine the thoughts going through her head.
It was bad enough that Jim had paired her with the woman who’d set off the smoke alarms in the classroom the night before. But also the woman who had been party to practically accusing her of murder?
Maybe I could make it up to her.
I took comfort in that thought as I stepped around John to repack my chives and my bacon and my goat cheese. I sidestepped my fellow students who were busy playing musical cooking stations. I’m not very tall, and it was hard to see across the room, and the next time I caught sight of Beyla, she was reaching into her purse, apparently putting something away. As I approached, she tossed the purse aside and stepped away from the cook station.
She greeted me with, “We will use your stove.”
It was better than I deserved, which, as far as I could tell, was more along the lines ofGet out of here; I don’t want to work with a woman who has crazy ideas about me murdering a man I didn’t know.
“Can’t.” I shrugged and set down my bag. “Eve and John have already started to work over there.”
“We will tell them to move.”
Why is it that beautiful women think they own the world?
I bit my tongue and got out the pan we’d be using to boil water and cook the collards. There was a small sink between each of the two-stove stations, and I filled the pan with water and set it on the stove.
“Let’s just get to work,” I suggested.
Beyla took another step back. She ran her tongue over her lips. “We will find another place.”
“There is no other place. In case you haven’t noticed, all the other places are taken.”
“Then we will say we cannot-”
I wasn’t listening. I didn’t blame Beyla for not wanting to cook with me, but we didn’t have any choice. Better to get this over with than to stand here and argue.
I turned my back on her, vaguely aware that when I reached to turn on the stove, she moved away.
I flicked on the burner.
And the stove blew up in my face.
WHEN I CAME TO MY SENSES, I WAS ON MY BUTT with my back against the wall. I had a vague recollection of a noise that sounded like the base line of a Metallica song, and of a wall of fire bursting out of the stove. Fortunately, it came at me with enough force to knock me off my feet. I was stunned but not burned.
My ears were blocked, though, and my head pounded. I think the funny aroma that tickled my nose had something to do with my singed eyebrows. It all must have happened pretty fast, because for a nanosecond, I was alone, and everything around me was perfectly quiet.
Then all hell broke lose.
My fellow students ran to surround me, their words a jumble of noises I couldn’t decipher. I saw Eve fight her way through the crowd. She knelt at my side.
“Annie? Are you OK?”
At least that’s what I thought she said. It was hard to tell, considering that her words sounded like they came from underneath a thick feather pillow.
I shook my head, hoping to clear it. All the motion did was make it pound harder.
“Annie?” This time it wasn’t Eve’s voice-it was lower and richer. I turned to find Jim kneeling on my other side. “What the hell-” He glanced up toward the stove, where Beyla was standing just outside the ring of soot around the cooking station where I was supposed to be working. She shrugged, and the simple gesture made it clear that she had no idea what had happened or what I’d done to cause the conflagration.
“I turned on the stove.” OK, so that much was obvious. I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. My voice sounded like it came from far, far away, and I spoke a little louder. “All I did was turn on the stove.”
“I know. I saw it.” Jim offered me a hand and helped me to my feet. The room wobbled a little, and I guess I did, too. He put an arm around my shoulders.
“I swear,” he grumbled, the burr in his voice more pronounced than ever, “if that no good son of a bitch Lavoie isn’t taking care of the equipment the way he should be-” He remembered where he was and swallowed the rest of his words. “Are you all right?”
I was when he was holding me like this.
“I’m fine,” I told him and reminded myself not to get carried away. “My ears are just a little…” I shook my head again and the rushing noise inside them settled down a bit. “The stove…” I looked that way and cringed at the mess. “I blew it up.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Jim was being kind. He patted my shoulder. “I don’t want you to get discouraged.”
Now he was being delusional.
“I almost destroyed the entire school.”
“There’s no real damage.” He shooed everyone back to their places. When I tried to take a couple steps, he stood at my side just to be sure I made it. “As long as you’re all right…”
“I am.” I tried another couple steps. “Nothing broken,” I assured him. “Nothing burned. Nothing-” I glanced down at my capris, which were covered with black soot. “Almost nothing ruined.”
“Don’t you worry about that. What’s important is that you’re not hurt. All right,” he raised his voice so he could be heard above the hubbub. “Annie’s fine, and we’ll get the stove fixed. She and Beyla can work up front here with me tonight. Before any of the rest of you get started, I’m going to come around from station to station and test the stoves to make sure we don’t have any more surprises.”
I smiled at Eve to assure her that I was all right. Knees still shaking, I headed to the front of the room. It wasn’t until the last second that I realized I’d left my ingredients back at Beyla’s stove.
My grocery bag was crisp around the edges, but nothing inside sustained any damage. Rather than leave a trail of ash, I took out the ingredients one by one and piled them in my arms. I was all set to return to the front of the room when I dropped my collards. I stooped to retrieve the bundle of greens, and stopped cold.
There was a fragment of a piece of paper on the floor just in front of the stove. It was partially burned, which told me that it had been somewhere in the vicinity of the stove when it blew. The top line had gone up in flames but I could read the block letters of the second line well enough. And what I read didn’t exacly make me feel warm and fuzzy.
“You are next.”
Six
WAS THE NOTE MEANT FOR ME? DID IT REFER TO Drago’s death?
And if so, was it a warning?
It was the next night, but questions still swirled around my brain.
Fortunately, between that and the headache that felt like it was going to rip apart my skull, I didn’t have a chance to think about how the rest of the class had progressed after the explosion.
Perhap
s I should say regressed.
My goat cheese bundles turned out soggy. My skewered veggies were limp. And the bacon pinwheels? Well, let’s just say they gave the termcrispy a whole new meaning.
Which I suppose in the great scheme of things was better than how crispy I would have been if the explosion hadn’t thrown me back and out of the blast range.
Just thinking about it all brought me back around to the note.
And that made my head hurt all over again.
I massaged my temples with the tips of my fingers while I listened to Jim get us started on night number three: Superb Salads and Dazzling Dressings.
“Freshness, that’s the key.” Jim stood at the front of the room, a bunch of romaine in one hand and an expression on his face that was almost transcendent. This guy loved to cook. I mean, he really loved it. Go figure.
“You always want your vegetables to be as fresh as possible,” Jim said. He rolled ther infresh, and the sound tickled its way up my spine. “They need to be nice and crispy.”
There was that word again.
I groaned.
“Are you all right?” At least Eve remembered to keep her voice down. Neither of us wanted to be caught talking in class again. “You look worried.”
“I’m fine,” I whispered back.
Eve didn’t look convinced. She shot a look across the room toward the stove where I’d nearly been fried the night before. It had been fixed, Jim assured us, and it was as clean as a whistle. Still, Beyla had refused to work there again, and I for one couldn’t blame her. The Incredible Hulk had taken her place, and Beyla and her cooking partner, John, were working one station closer to us. I made sure I kept my voice down so she couldn’t hear me.
“I’m just thinking,” I told Eve. “That’s all.”
She nodded. “I know just what you mean. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too.”
I’d told Eve about the note, and I knew it had only cemented her theory about our mysterious classmate’s guilt.
Eve was 100 percent positive that it all came down to Beyla.
“I’m telling you, Annie, she looks as guilty as hell,” Eve said.
“She doesn’t.” I knew this for a fact, because I was looking right at Beyla, and Beyla was calmly going about her business as usual, unpacking her ingredients and setting up her cooking station.
But Eve wasn’t about to take logic into consideration.
OK, I admit it. Mentioning the note to Eve had been a major blunder. I knew it the moment I opened my mouth. But let’s face it, I had a good excuse. I’d been pretty upset. And worried. I’d been thrown for a loop (literally and figuratively), and so darned confused by the whole thing, I’d just naturally shared my discovery with Eve.
And Eve had just naturally blown the whole thing out of proportion.
Sure I found the note. Sure the stove went kablooey. But that didn’t mean that one thing was related to the other.
Did it?
In my ordered, logical mind, I liked to think it didn’t. Because I knew in my ordered, logical mind that if it did, I was still in danger.
Call me the queen of denial, but I had decided to believe that the note had nothing to do with me. That it wasn’t referring to Drago’s death. That the whole stove incident was nothing more than an unfortunate accident, and that I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The explosion was a desperate attempt by the culinary gods, that’s what it was. A not-so-subtle way for the powers that be to warn me to stay away from anything that even resembled cooking.
And the note?
It had simply fallen out of somebody’s purse or pocket.You are next in line at a doctor’s office.You are next because whoever “you” was had a birthday coming up.You are next for a haircut or a nail appointment or for a tire rotation down at the garage.
Delusional? Sure. But it beat thinking that Beyla was out to get me.
While I was busy pondering all this, Jim told us to start stripping romaine leaves off the bunch, and I did, setting them in a colander so that I could rinse them.
“Maybe the note wasn’t meant for me at all,” I suggested to Eve. “Maybe it has nothing to do with any of us. Or maybe someone left it there for Beyla.”
“Yeah.” Eve sniffed. “That’s why you saw her putting a pen back in her purse.”
“I didn’t say anything about a pen. I said I saw her with her purse.”
“I’ll bet there’s a pen in it.”
“I’ll bet there’s one in yours.”
“OK. Fine. If that’s how you want to be.” Eve tossed the last of her romaine into the colander and turned on the water. “Maybe she didn’t write it. But if that’s true, why-”
Eve’s words stopped as if they’d been snipped in half by scissors. Her colander was still under the spigot, and water was still running over her romaine. But Eve was frozen in place. All it took was one look at the doorway to know why.
A man had just stepped into the room.
Tyler Cooper.
“My hair looks like hell.” Still staring toward where her ex-fiancé was introducing himself to Jim, Eve ran one shaking hand over her ponytail. She blinked rapidly, her eyes moist with emotion. “Kaitlin must have mentioned to him that she saw me. That’s got to be why he’s here. He didn’t know where to find me before now.”
It didn’t seem likely, at least not to me, but there was no use pointing it out. As her theories about Beyla proved all too clearly, once Eve got something into her head, it was nearly impossible to dislodge it.
That’s why I didn’t bother to mention that Tyler was a cop, and that cops can find anyone anytime they want. And that Eve hadn’t moved since the days when she and Tyler were a couple, that her phone number hadn’t changed, and that he’d bought her cell phone at the same time he bought his own. Her number was only one digit different from his.
“Ladies and gentlemen…” Jim tapped a spoon on the side of his metal colander to get our attention. He wore a serious expression, and a thread of uneasiness knotted in my stomach.
Why was Tyler Cooper at Très Bonne Cuisine?
“We’ve got a visitor, and I’m going to let him explain what he’s doing here.” Jim turned to Tyler. “This is Lieutenant Tyler Cooper of the Arlington Police Department. He’s-”
“Here to see me,” Eve said under her breath, standing a little straighter.
“Here to tell us some rather disturbing news,” Jim finished.
Eve’s shoulders drooped. She looked at me, confusion clouding an expression that only moments before was wavering between hope and disbelief. Before she could say a word, Tyler cleared his throat and stepped to the center of the room.
I have to admit, I was never quite sure what Eve saw in Tyler. Just like I couldn’t quite remember what it was about him that I didn’t like.
Oh, he was good-looking enough. He was a smidgen under six feet tall, with broad shoulders, sandy hair, and eyes that, in the right light, looked like they were lit with blue neon. But with Tyler… well, his physical appearance wasn’t nearly as important as his attitude. And Tyler had attitude to spare. I suppose it was one of the things that made him a good cop. Tyler was tough, and every move he made was designed to make sure no one would ever forget it.
We knew it now, just by the way he stood there with his shoulders squared and pulled back slightly, his chin raised, his jaw tensed. He sized up each of us in turn, and I swear, he didn’t even flinch when his gaze landed on Eve.
Now I remembered what I didn’t like about Tyler.
He had a cold, cold heart.
“Most of you have probably heard by now that a man died in the parking lot behind the store two nights ago,” Tyler said. Apparently, not everyone did know. There was a buzz around the room and I automatically looked Beyla’s way.
She didn’t even blink an eye.
Tyler silenced the class with a look. “His name was Drago Kravic. Did any of you know him?”
My hand twitched.
Twelve years of Catholic schooling had taught me nothing if not how to be honest. Eve slapped her hand over mine to keep it in place.
Beyla didn’t move a muscle.
“It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t know him,” Tyler went on. “What does matter…” Again he glanced around the room. It wasn’t like I had anything to feel guilty about-well, except for fibbing to Kaitlin Sands-but just the touch of Tyler’s icy blue gaze made me shift from foot to foot.
“We were sure he had a heart attack,” Tyler said. “Now…” He shrugged. “Well, let’s just put it this way. This morning, an autopsy was performed on Mr. Kravic. And now we know that he was murdered.”
Murder?
The single word shivered through me, turning my blood to ice water. If Drago was the victim of a killer,you are next took on a whole new meaning.
I clutched the countertop to steady my suddenly wobbly legs as Tyler finished up. “Maybe you saw something,” he said. “Maybe you heard something. That’s what I’m here to find out. You just go about your business and do your cooking. I’ll come around and talk to each of you in turn.”
“Ladies room,” Eve said. She turned off the water, grabbed her purse, and ducked out. I wanted nothing more than to go with her, but I knew it would be suspicious if I did, so I stayed put. While I waited, I forced myself to keep busy. I rinsed my romaine and broke it into bits, just the way Jim recommended. My bits were too bitty, and when I added what was supposed to be a drizzle of olive oil, it turned into more of a rainstorm. The salt and fresh ground pepper I sprinkled on sort of clumped in the oil and sank to the bottom of the bowl. I crumbled some blue cheese just like Jim showed us and got more on the floor than in the salad.
All the while, I was watching out of the corner of my eye as Tyler walked around the room.
Eve was back in a flash, a fresh coat of lipstick on her mouth, a little more mascara on her lashes. “Has he been by yet?” she asked, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes followed Tyler as he made his way from station to station, talking to my fellow students and writing in a leather-covered notebook.
Cooking Up Murder Page 6