by Wilbanks, David T. ; Norris, Gregory L. ; Thomas, Ryan C. ; Chandler, Randy
Sunny tipped a glance at Joseph, who shrugged, before turning back to Deschler. “I don’t get . . .”
“Sorry, blame that one on a semester of elective American Lit. It was either that or pottery. Bustamante stuck her head in the oven after blowing out the pilot and sucked down a deadly cocktail of natural gas. She’s dead, so apart from the devil and the details, the case is pretty much closed. You can rest assured that she paid for her psycho Ginsu knife circus act in full. Now, all you need to do is heal.”
Yeah, heal was all she needed to do, easy as that, no sweat.
Knife wounds, she was told, were dirty business, and Sunny’s didn’t disappoint. Despite a hardcore cocktail of intravenous antibiotics and post-surgical care, the wound grew infected around the sutures and had to be drained. More antibiotics and added humiliation followed and, soon, Sunny’s right breast took on the appearance of a war wound.
The physical agony was difficult enough; the mental that accompanied far worse.
Before the attack that late May night, Sunny slept on her right side, on the right side of their bed, a position that was both natural and reassuring because it put her in clear view of Joseph, who normally slept sprawled on his back, and usually naked.
In early June, after the infection cleared up and the mottled skin around the wound stopped looking like rancid meat, Sunny took to facing away from him, on her left side, and only then after a nightly pain pill that didn’t so much help her to sleep as knock her out. Lying on her back was impossible. She’d never slept on her spine, even before running into Rona Bustamante’s knife.
Joseph’s hand wandered over her outer thigh. She imagined him, so handsome with his swarthy, unshaved face, the face of a pirate, his emerald eyes filled with mischief. He growled in that lusty way that normally did the trick while touching her the way she loved, only now his advances felt like an invasion. She pushed his hand away.
“No.”
Joseph kissed her shoulder. “Why?”
She knew why. She wasn’t ready. She felt ugly, splayed open. But mostly because the bitch who’d tried to slay her was still in the room, an apparition lurking in the shadows. Rona Bustamante was dead, but she’d never really left.
“You sure?” he persisted.
Sunny felt his stiffness jabbing into her, and the scrape of his hair-covered athlete’s leg against hers. She wanted to want him; he was a god among men, at least on the outside, and he was crazy about her. She didn’t want to because she knew the agony would far outweigh any ecstasy. Still, she caved to his advances and was proven right.
The wound necessitated certain changes from their normal repertoire of positions. Sunny rode him reverse cowboy, in which Joseph couldn’t see her face but more importantly her front. He mistook her sobs for moans of pleasure.
“I need to see it,” she said. “The place where Bustamante offed herself.”
Deschler looked at her like she’d asked him to fuck a goat. “You’re joking, right?”
“Lieutenant, the day some insane asshole runs a knife through your flesh, you can question my sincerity. Until then . . .”
“Why?” the policeman asked, shooting her a look from across a desk littered with the clutter and chaos of fresh crimes.
Sunny fought the urge to cry and won the battle. It was getting easier to vanquish the tears, not so easy to abolish the nightmares, the night terrors, or the phantom chills that Rona Bustamante was somehow still out there, lurking in wait to come at her again.
“Because I’m not convinced the bitch is dead and buried,” she admitted, aware of the tick in her lower lip and the nagging nervous twitch she’d developed under one eyebrow.
“She isn’t,” Deschler said matter of fact. “She was cremated. Her ass is mostly ash now, floating around in the clouds. The rest of her is in an urn at the county coroner’s office, waiting for someone to claim it. So far, nobody has.”
“I need to see the place where she lived. Where the bitch died. Please,” she stressed. “If I’m ever going to get over this and not piss myself every time I walk into a bathroom un-chaperoned . . .”
Deschler sighed. “Fine. I’ll take you over.”
“Thanks, seriously.” She started to rise.
Deschler lifted his dress shirt by the corner, taking the gray T beneath up with it. “Seven years ago.”
Sunny’s eyes zeroed in on a zipper-shaped scar, worse in scope than hers, which the best plastic surgeon on the East Coast had promised to remove once she was ready.
“And just so you know, he was insane and an asshole.”
Sunny nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Deschler waved it off. “Come on, let’s do this so you can get over your fear of powder rooms, and I can get back to the active cases trying to bury me alive.”
She didn’t tell Joseph. Riding beside Deschler in the front passenger’s seat of the unmarked police car, she questioned the decision. Though sitting up front, Sunny imagined herself in the backseat, behind the metal security screen, a prisoner forced to ride on seats where other criminals had bled and puked. Her pulse galloped. Joseph would be pissed to know she was traveling north of Boston, headed to Lovell Green. Pissed, because she hadn’t really moved on, as she’d lied, hadn’t returned to cooking, or to YUM!, even with the new seasons of Sunny’s Side Up and Slice and Dice being readied for pre-production. But how could she get over what had happened when she still didn’t understand why?
Over a friggin’ mushroom recipe? Sunny remembered the nauseating shudder of crab-stuffed crimini right after the bitch stuck her. The basic yet beautiful recipe, which had pulled crab, butter, garlic, breadcrumbs, fresh basil, salt, cracked pepper, minced shallots, and mushroom together, creating the perfect bite, had appeared in her newest cookbook, Sunny Soirees. A basic recipe from the third season of her flagship show, ideal for entertaining. She hadn’t stolen it. Legally, such a crime didn’t even exist. The only thievery in the kitchen existed in the paranoid family cooks who either kept their recipe boxes under lock and key or grandmothers determined to take their favorite creations to the grave.
Sunny drew in a deep breath. The lingering blood and barf in the car struck her imagination like crab-stuffed criminis. She vowed never to eat another mushroom for the rest of her life.
The house was a typical 1970s split level, with an atypical detached two-car garage and an apartment above it. They pulled to a stop across the road, on a pitted stretch of asphalt the color of faded denim. Sunny’s heart hammered in her chest. The twitch behind her eyebrow ticked.
“So this is it?”
“This is it. The owner of the house isn’t too happy about this, just so you know. She lost the rent, and the renter. You’d think people would be lining up to take the place. The whole celebrity angle. But from what I’ve heard, they haven’t.”
“My heart’s done bleeding, literally and figuratively,” Sunny said, exiting the car.
On the march toward the garage, Deschler said, “I’m just warning you. The landlady’s got a thorn in her ass and it’s made her prickly.”
The woman stood at the base of the outside staircase, keys in hand, a lit cancer stick clutched between the fingers of the other. A question mark of noxious gray smoke curled above her. She was hag-gard-looking, short, with bottled red hair.
“Mrs. Whittenburg,” Lieutenant Deschler said.
The woman fixed her dark eyes on Sunny, tisked, and exhaled a locomotive breath. “Make this fast. I’ve got someone coming in to check the place out at four-thirty.”
She ran her eyes up and down Sunny, slaying her with a look, then turned. The smoke cloud dispersed as she ascended the stairs. Deschler moved up next. Sunny followed, and the healing wound pulsed with her steps, the ache reignited by gravity and memory pressing down on tender flesh.
The steps blurred underfoot. Sunny drew in a deep breath and held it. Breathing hurt now, too. She was the closest she’d come to Rona Bustamante since the night of the party, the night of the stabbing, a
nd her body knew it. The body didn’t forget, and seemed to be remembering the intimate details of the attack on a cellular level.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sunny huffed, willing the anxiety to vanish.
The phantom pain crackled out, and her next sip of air came with greater ease. Rona Bustamante was dead, reduced to ashes. It was time to move on. First, she needed to move in and see the place for herself.
The Whittenburg woman unlocked the door. A smell of must and spoiled food wafted out, bitter on the nostrils. “I’ll leave you to it. Don’t touch anything.”
She lobbed another hate-laced leer at Sunny, then plodded down the stairs and out of sight.
“Must be a fan,” Sunny said.
Deschler snorted a chuckle. “Do you want me to go in with you?”
“Yes,” Sunny said. Deschler started to move, but she touched his arm, stopping him in place. “But for my purposes, I think I need to go it alone.”
He nodded, and Sunny wandered into the gloom.
It was a square place, with every curtain drawn and plenty of dark corners. The sort of apartment where a recluse hiding from exposure to the light and the outside world would flourish. The perfect place for growing mushrooms, Inner Bitch said.
The door opened on a living room. The furniture was overstuffed and appeared somewhat ominous in the shadows. Sunny flipped on the nearest light switch. A pair of lamps on occasional tables lit. The long sofa bore splotchy stains and, she noted, the rotted core of an apple. Sunny pressed forward, passing the first of three doors at her left. A bathroom, she saw through the half-open door. Piles of clothes littered the floor. The next was a bedroom. She had neither the need nor the desire to go in there after catching a private glimpse of Rona Bustamante’s former life, displayed in layers of mess and clutter. Besides, Sunny was there for the kitchen.
The musty stink of spoiling food grew stronger on those final few steps. The kitchen occupied the right side corner at that end of the apartment. There were two windows, both cloaked in dark fabric. Sunny flipped another switch. An overhead light snapped on and rained an unhealthy fluorescent glow onto a dirty white gas range, where her adversary had done the deed, a mismatched harvest gold fridge, a spice rack, and a sink filled with dirty dishes. Sunny guessed that the source of the putrid odor in the place originated in the soup of that brewing science experiment.
Sunny covered her mouth and glanced around. Builder beige walls. A wine rack, with three bottles. Cutting board. Knife block. Sunny exhaled a breathless, “Fuck,” and pulled out the blades, one at a time, noting the sharpness of each. She then turned toward the refrigerator. The door to the side-byside’s freezer was broken. Even before opening the fridge side, Sunny’s Inner Bitch opened an internal dialogue with her.
I’d never eat at Sally’s house.
“Sally?” Sunny asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Yeah, Sally Monella . . .
Sunny shook her head and opened the door. A stink of rotting food spilled out, enough to make her gag. She slammed the door shut, but not before catching a look at what was inside. Among the rotting vegetables, she saw a pair of whole crabs sitting on a platter, well past rancid. There was nothing quite like the smell of spoiled seafood.
Sunny covered her mouth and turned away. So far, she hadn’t found much in the apartment to connect her to the dead woman. Sunny owned three properties, and every one of them—the townhouse in Boston, the New York loft near the YUM! studios, and the house on Foster’s Island some forty or so miles from where she stood in Northern Massachusetts—was a study in immaculateness. There were no food stains on the furniture, nor rotting shellfish or produce in her refrigerators. So far as she could recall, she’d never coveted or conspired against any of the other network chef-lebrities. She’d simply taken her clean, basic style of cooking all the way to the top. Talent, point of view, style…none of which was apparent here in Rona Bustamante’s former little world.
Anything in evidence of the woman’s crime had already been removed, Deschler had told her: the computer, which contained Bustamante’s Slice and Dice audition video, photos, backpacks and handbags. The effect depersonalized the place, at least in the terms that mattered to Sunny. The woman was a slob. She didn’t cook lobster, Inner Bitch joked childishly; she cooked slobster.
The woman was crazy. She’d killed herself after trying to butcher a stranger she’d never met, and whom she’d falsely accused of plagiarism, of theft. The kind of neat, organized closure Sunny hoped to find might never be, because the bitch had been a big, ugly patch of chaos that left apple cores on her furniture cushions. Sunny had come here seeking sanity in an insane realm.
She passed the other door, which was closed. A shiver tickled the nape of her neck. Sunny hesitated. The shudder tumbled down her spine. Sunny reached for the doorknob, which felt oily beneath her touch. That’s because, Inner Bitch reasoned, Rona’s greasy fingers had left a residue behind over the years, until a slick, permanent layer remained. It was a pantry of sorts. Rona Bustamante had tried to transform it into a garden, one specifically for growing mushrooms. Plastic trays full of mulchy dirt lined the two lowest shelves. The mushrooms had turned dark and rotted. Sunny caught a hit of decay and foul earth, and this time she vomited. The pressure against her chest unleashed fresh pain behind her healing wound.
“Everything okay in there?”
Sunny’s throat lurched again. “Y . . . yes,” she managed, the long, drawn-out word putrid on her tongue. She reached into her pocket. Mercifully, she’d brought along a handful of tissues, just in case the visit resulted in tears. And it had, though tears of a different kind. After losing her lunch, thick clotted globs of water filled her eyes.
She tossed the tissues into the sink, a symbolic act, she reasoned. She left the spilled contents of her stomach where they’d sprayed, right in the middle of the floor.
Following the trip to Lovell Green, Sunny started to feel better. She sensed it in the lightness of her steps as she moved around the clean and airy Boston townhouse, admiring the elegant antique furniture, the Sleepy Hollow sofa and matching chairs reupholstered only the previous February in merlot-colored Italian velvet, no food stains. She glided into her office, once a pair of smaller bedrooms knocked into one. Therein, her Emmy, James Beard, and other awards, trophies, framed reviews and news clippings, and certificates held places of honor along one wall. An original Lehnig original watercolor hung above the desk, a stunning study of an indoor kitchen over which grapevines curled. She’d loved the air of whimsy as well as the elegance of the image, which seemed to suggest that one’s culinary dreams could be realized if one only dreamed boldly enough. Sunny sure had.
For the first time in weeks, Sunny entered the room and sat at the desk, another stunning piece, with delicately carved legs and a top of inlaid rosewood. No lingering flicker of pain racked her chest upon taking to the chair, a first. The desk and the room welcomed her back.
Rona Bustamante never had a room like this, and she never would. Truths she already knew but had overlooked during the recent crisis rose clearly in her thoughts in the magnificent stillness. YUM! employed readers to sort through the stacks of fan and hate mail that arrived daily to the studio, the modern equivalent of wine tasters, just in case something nasty like a dead rodent or white powder dusty with anthrax was enclosed. It also employed detectives, who compiled lists of the whack-jobs who fell madly in love with the chef-lebrities, those who wanted to snip off fingers or an ear to add to some special recipe so the diner could feel closer to the divine.
She turned on the laptop, pondering the madness that had targeted her while it booted up. Sunny shook her head. A sarcastic grin played on her lips. That life could change so quickly . . . one moment, you’re on top of the world, with two hit TV shows, a new cookbook, your fourth, a line of cookware whose boxes bear your name and your likeness…the next, you’re on the ground, gutted and bleeding, and some bitch with a hairy mole and an ass the size of a stove with six b
urners on the cook top is telling you that you’ve stolen her secret recipe.
If Sunny had, and she knew she hadn’t, why didn’t Bustamante hire a lawyer? Why hadn’t she complained to YUM! Why? Because Rona Bustamante was flat-out nuts, and Sunny was still seeking rational explanations for a crazy person who hadn’t cooked or lived in a sane world. There was the answer, the solution. Sunny had cooked as she lived, which was why she was the one sitting in a beautiful trophy room with its multi-million dollar view of the Charles River, while the knife-wielding nut was dust.
More weight lifted from her shoulders, and she realized that her breaths were coming with greater ease. For the first time in weeks, she felt like her old self; she felt sunny.
Then she logged into her e-mail. Among the expected forwarded well-wishes from other network stars, friends, and a prompt from the executive producer of Slice and Dice asking whether she was ready to return, was a most-curious note from Conelle Gilad, her manager. The subject line read: View at your discretion. Sunny opened it. It was a five-minute stream of video. Rona Bustamante’s audition tape. Sunny scanned the e-mail’s text. Conelle had gotten a copy of the bitch’s demo from YUM! in order to cement her legal position. Sunny imagined the veiled threat her dragon lady had likely used. In case you’re curious, I thought you should have this, Conelle wrote.
Only she wasn’t, not much anymore. Not after seeing and smelling the lay of the land in Lovell Green. That disgusting fridge. The filth in the sink. The mucus-colored paint on the kitchen walls. Sunny had never stepped on another person’s back to make it to the top. She’d certainly never knifed anybody in the back. Or the front.
She reached for the delete button. At the last second, she opened the fucking thing, and Rona Bustamante’s fat face jumped out of the computer screen at her. Sunny fell out of the chair and landed hard on the indigo and lavender weave of the Persian rug. All illusions about healing vanished in a sharp rush of pins and needles along her right side, and an icy whisper across her flesh.