He crouched down, touched her briefly, and I saw a mix of emotions on his beautiful face. Shock, followed by some kind of breathless understanding that didn’t include me. Then he lifted his head. “What happened to her?” he whispered. “Not—?” And I could tell he was remembering our discovery of a murder just three weeks ago. Considering the guy had been konked but good with one of our marble mortars, it’s not the kind of thing you want to stumble across on a stylish black-and-white-tiled floor—“even though,” my cousin admitted to me, kind of shamefaced, later, “the red really made it pop.”
“Murder? No.” I went on with the kind of hasty catalog I used to confess my sins as a kid. “No bullet holes, stab wounds, bashing, throttling, swollen tongue, blue skin—” I took a breath. “Have I left anything out?”
Landon got it. “We’ve got to take poor Georgia out of here.”
“In broad daylight?”
He squinted at the bottle of absinthe Giancarlo keeps tucked away. “Maybe in stages?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, as though Landon had just floated the idea that Earth might not in fact be flat after all. “Stages.”
“Otherwise,” he said, swiping his hand across his forehead, “Nonna will die.”
“Die. Absolutely.” Which is not to say that option didn’t have some appeal.
Landon, who could tell what I was thinking, gave me a push, then chewed his lip. “Where is she?”
That at least I could answer. “In the back office calling Paulette.”
Landon grabbed Georgia under her arms and, wincing, I lifted her by the calves. Together we carried our new and former sous chef—I sighed at all the failed promise—through the kitchen doors. All I knew for sure in that moment was that—even if we could keep it from Maria Pia— we had to keep Georgia Payne’s short employment history with Miracolo strictly on a need-to-know basis—otherwise anything could happen.
I pictured Vera weeping into the Scallop Fritters with Roasted Chioggia Beet Carpaccio as she set them in front of a gowned Fina Parisi. I pictured a flattened Jonathan describing the differences between a Barolo and a Barbaresco like he was Hamlet describing the prep for a colonoscopy. I pictured Leo and the other regulars setting a framed picture of our stricken sous chef on the Grief Week shrine and then launching into their own rollicking dirge version of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
And I knew I couldn’t take it.
Grappling with Georgia’s body, Landon and I paused momentarily in the middle of the kitchen, where, up until that moment, the only dead things we had ever handled had pretty much spent their lives either grazing or swimming. We could hear our nonna in the back office, chatting it up on the phone with Paulette. At which point Landon widened his green eyes at me: Now what? I mouthed at him what suddenly seemed to me to be the only possibility for Stage One of Georgia Removal: “The storeroom.”
Landon sagged, like it didn’t seem ideal, but caved, and we trundled our load toward the storeroom in what sounded like a demented shuffle. Once inside, I pushed up the wall switch with my shoulder, and we headed to the darkest, farthest corner, where we made a little bed out of twenty-five-pound bags of semolina flour and laid poor Georgia across it. Then we rearranged big cartons of extra-virgin olive oil, boxes of various vinegars, crates of booze and mixers until we had built a screen around the flour sacks that would buy us some time.
But not much.
Landon and I haggled over a next step.
“I say we find some excuse to get Nonna away from Miracolo for maybe forty-five minutes until we’re safely away with Georgia.” That was me.
Landon cocked an eyebrow. He wasn’t liking it. “And then what?” he asked, scratching the side of his face. “Where do we go with her?”
“Your place, my place,” I held up fingers as I rattled off a positive bevy of harebrained choices, “the ER, the urgent care—”
He held up his hands. “We’re a little past urgent care.”
“So, then, the ER.”
“Where one of us has to wait with Georgia for two hours before we’ll get any attention.”
I gave him a stony look. “I think Georgia will be okay with it.”
Landon rolled his eyes. “Do you have that kind of time today, Eve?” He spread a hand dramatically across his chest. “Do I?”
I paced, which was not satisfying because of the shelving and the boxes on the floor, and Landon tapped a foot. We finally agreed that it was surprisingly difficult to deal with someone dead of natural causes. “Who knew?” I said, hunching my shoulders. Murder, on the other hand? No problem. Cops like the Ted Guy and Sally Belts and Boots, who had helped us out three weeks ago, have a whole instruction manual for it.
Finally we started spitballing more sanity-challenged ideas for Stage Two of Georgia Removal. Driving her to New Brunswick, New Jersey, and depositing her on Belladonna Russo’s doorstep and then just waiting to see what happens. Driving her in her own car back to wherever she lived—problem noted: that precise location was as yet unknown—and then just waiting to see what happens. Driving her to the Quaker Hills Volunteer Fire Department and then just waiting to see what happens. We thought we could see a theme emerging about waiting to see what happens and decided we liked that part of any plan, anyhow. It was progress.
In the end, waiting to see what happens became the entire plan.
I threw up my hands. “I got nothing else, here, Lan,” I said.
“So we leave Georgia here for now,” said Landon decisively, smoothing his hands across the air in front of him, the way I’d seen him “frame” an antipasto plate he was particularly proud of.
I held up a finger. “But we”—I gazed at canisters of almonds, looking for the precise word—“do”—it was the best I could come up with—“something final—”
“And responsible—” added Landon responsibly.
“And at the first opportunity.”
“Agreed.”
“And we’re agreed our goal is to keep knowledge of Georgia’s—” I groped for some great concept that just wasn’t coming.
Landon jumped in, “Death.”
I toggled my head like, well, it was the easy choice, but we were in definite straits. “Death,” I acquiesced without any taste for it, “to keep Georgia’s death from Nonna on her big day with the Crazy Club.”
Landon dipped his head once. “Also agreed.”
Then we did a quick shuffle of our human resources, trying to smooth over the sudden and inexplicable absence of Georgia Payne. We decided to pull Choo Choo off his usual post at the podium and put him with Landon and me in the kitchen. Paulette could handle the initial seating of all the Belfiere guests, who would more or less arrive at once, and then return to her default setting as server. Jonathan would need to stay as sommelier just for the full classy effect of what he does best. (Landon insisted. I caved.)
So Paulette, Vera, and Corabeth would serve. With a whiff of panic, we realized we needed two more servers, so Landon agreed to give the sixteen-year-old Li Wei a battlefield promotion and call him pronto so the kid could run out and furnish himself with the Miracolo look. We could only hope none of the Belfiere lady maniacs didn’t also happen to be members of the state liquor control board. And I agreed to call L’Shondra Washington, from the nondelinquent half of my cooking class, probably the only one aside from poor dead Georgia who was actually interested in the restaurant business.
I shot Georgia a quick look, who not surprisingly seemed okay with the plan, and I was convinced all over again that the present dilemma was all the fault of Choo Choo Bacigalupo. But running down blame is a lot like tracing your roots, and I was able to get to the next level of blame genealogy. Had Choo Choo not fallen in love with Vera Tyndall, he never would have talked me into the cooking class gig as a way of—his—performing some community service. I narrowed my eyes. In a strange way, then
, the fact that Landon and I were whispering in the storeroom next to a dead body was Vera Tyndall’s fault.
So shouldn’t Georgia Removal be Vera’s problem? It was tempting.
No, even I could tell that wasn’t fair. I didn’t need Joe Beck smelling delectable and wringing his ringless hands and explaining annoying things like laws to me. Poor Georgia was my problem. I should have had her go for a physical as a condition of employment.
Suddenly I heard the inevitable outside the confines of our hidey-hole storeroom: Maria Pia emerging from the back office, calling my name, and other voices heading through the dining room. Landon and I gave each other a quick look, and I loped to the door. “Coming, Nonna,” I called. Over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of Landon leaning over poor sprawled Georgia, where he moved her legs closer together over the semolina flour sacks and gently lifted the necklace by the tourmaline pendant and gazed inscrutably at the silver birdcage that enclosed it. As I slithered through the door, the last thing I noticed was Landon sinking quietly onto the sacks, where he folded his hands in his lap and stared without comment at our dead sous chef.
6
To understand how we lost track of Georgia, you have to know something about the path of that violent little weather system known as a derecho. It’s a fast-moving windstorm that topples towering trees like bowling pins and that’s only slightly friendlier than a landfall hurricane. This also describes Chef Maria Pia Angelotta in a kitchen. She whirls, dashes, races, mystically creating a swath of culinary havoc in at least four separate locations all at once. I think there are even moments when her feet leave the floor.
Whenever I happened to be her sous chef, before she retired, and my pals would call from Manhattan, I’d have to get off the phone, telling them, “I’m putting out fires.” Most people mean it as a kind of expression—the copy machine is jammed and the boss forgot to take her Xanax. Not me. If I wasn’t actually putting out real fires, I was at least turning them down when Nonna’s back was turned. If you close your eyes, all the bubbling and sizzling in a kitchen run by Maria Pia is like the soundtrack of Hell.
Still, one of her greatest gifts as a chef is that she’s a wonderful tactician. She sets all the mini-tornadoes in motion and never loses sight of the big picture. Once I realized she was a force of nature in a commercial kitchen, I relaxed about helping her, chopping and grinding my way into a Zen state that let the culinary chaos swirl around me. I had to trust her. I had to trust that what was terrifying primordial chaos to me was just a fine welter of magical morsels to her. All the rest of us cooking Angelottas had cauldrons in the kitchen. For Maria Pia, though, the kitchen itself was the cauldron. She’s just that great.
So, after Landon and I left Georgia Payne lifeless in the storeroom (which we locked and hoped no one much noticed), the derecho began. Maria Pia appeared in the center of the Miracolo kitchen, wearing the loose boxy top and pants from the Mao era in the color I call Congestive Heart Failure Gray. I think when she invokes the gustatory gods she likes to appear before them as a blank slate—a blank slate with no taste of any kind. In clothes, food, home décor, or men. It clears her mind. It frees her of prejudices. She becomes one with the glorious universe, in which the firmament was created pretty early on just as a place to stick a stove.
And then it began. She marshaled the troops—Landon, Choo Choo, and me—and we knew she was getting in the Zone when she forgot all our names and just called us “you.”
“You”—she pointed to Landon—“pound the veal.”
“You”—she pointed to Choo Choo—“batter the scallops.”
“You”—she pointed to me—“whip the cream.”
Pound, batter, whip.
Like General Patton only without the warmth.
Then our nonna got that misty look she usually saves for when the garlic in her bagna cauda—garlic and anchovy—sauce is coming up short. “Where’s what’s her name? The new girl?”
And if Georgia were alive and standing next to me, she’d still be called “you.”
Landon muttered she was under the weather. And I muttered she had heart trouble.
At that, Choo Choo lifted a whisk from the batter for the fritters and drew together his eyebrows, which pulled his whole bald scalp down over his eyes like an avalanche.
“Car trouble?” barked Nonna.
Landon and I gave each other a regretful look like, yeah, car trouble might have been the better lie, in the circumstances.
Over the next couple of hours, several things happened. Several things quite aside from cooking. James Beck arrived with the order of white calla lilies and bemoaning the shortage of clear glass marbles for the vases. This, by the way, pretty effectively killed whatever was left of my crush on James since I discovered I didn’t have much taste for a man for whom a shortage of glass marbles was a serious problem on the level of, say, world hunger. Corabeth arrived looking slightly the worse for wear, bemoaning Georgia’s failure to pick her up, so she had to steal a bike. (We laughed merrily, assuming it was a joke.)
Jonathan arrived, and announced he was having an anxiety attack about whether we had enough pinot noir on hand to pair with the veal, and as he headed for the storeroom, Landon and I both bellowed, “No!” And then added: “We’ll check!” And Paulette finally arrived with Nonna’s new midnight-blue satin “chef jacket” gown for her membership in the Psycho-Chefs Club, beautifully steamed and hung.
Bubble, sizzle, pop.
At one point I happened to glance out the back windows and saw a couple of familiar figures dashing through the deserted courtyard and scrambling over the back fence. This I would have chalked off to kids just passing through had it not been for the flopping mane of dirty, beaded dreadlocks on one of them. Mitchell Terranova! And the clean-cut miscreant with him must be his partner in crime, Slash Kipperman. Paying me a visit? Casing the joint? Too shy to hand me my polished apples in person? Even after one class with those two, I knew better. I set down the beater I was jamming into the hand mixer and hurried outside.
Gone.
I headed through the courtyard, eyeballing everything, looking for some evidence of—what, exactly? Theft, first. Scanning, scanning. Nope. Votive candles all there and intact. Hmm. Slipping on my delinquent hat, I even peered into the compost bin, just to see—ascertain, as Detective Sally Belts and Boots would say—whether they’d deposited some roadkill. Nope. Could it be Mitchell and Slash just wanted a peek at where I worked? Despite their tough talk, were they harboring a little crush on me? The psycho lambs . . .
On my way back inside, I spied a colorful can lying at the side of the building. I picked it up—an empty can of neon orange spray paint. Two feet away lay a half-full can of neon green spray paint. And then, of course, I looked up, and staggered backward to get the full effect of the graffiti on the beautiful old red brick of the restaurant. It was an orange, eight-foot-high, pretty fair likeness of my face in profile, downing, with great relish, a neon green cannoli, or what I could only assume was a cannoli. Also in green was my phone number.
As I walked back to the kitchen door with spray paint cans in my hands, and my eyes narrowed to slits, I pondered the situation. If I called the cops then, we’d have the same problem on Nonna’s busiest day ever that we were already hoping to avoid by stashing poor Georgia for the time being. For now, I had no proof and no time, but plenty of conviction that the wall defilers were none other than Mitchell and Slash. Who didn’t know I had seen them.
Ah.
A grim smile played about my lips.
This . . . this was a job for the fictitious Don Lolo Dinardo. And it could wait until later.
Right then, though, once I was back inside the kitchen, I called Adrian the bouncer at Jolly’s Pub across the square, who owed me for a few free meals I’d given him. He was quickly enlisted to spray over the graffiti with as good a match to the brick as he could find at the local ha
rdware store and to do it pronto. By me, Adrian and I were now square. Then I dropped the paint cans into a gallon-size ziplock bag and stashed it on the low shelf on Landon’s prep table, just in case they’d yield some incriminating fingerprints later. Lastly: I’d talk to Choo Choo at the first opportunity about how—oh, yes, how—he could make good on his colossally stupid idea about teaching cooking to CRIBS kids.
Then I glanced at my watch and let out a little yelp. Were we really just three hours away from the arrival of the blue-haired psycho sorority? I threw myself into the prep work with manic glee, just to forget the billboard-size sketch of myself on the side of our restaurant left for all of Quaker Hills to see. And, with my luck, call me up.
In the couple of times I came up for air, I was vaguely aware of a babbling flow of humanity, whose questions I just waved away or ignored altogether. We were already up to our elbows in scallop batter and scaloppine, yelling across the kitchen to one another for time checks. But when Maria Pia paused in the creation of delectable chaos long enough to go back to the office with Paulette and try on the official Belfiere gown—“Not that it isn’t perfect,” murmured the confident Paulette—Landon and I paused, shot each other a wide-eyed look, and saw our opportunity. I cleaned off my hands with a dish towel so fast you’d swear I was wrestling a wildcat, then tossed the rag to Landon. Our pants got the rest of the stuff off our hands as we scampered off to the storeroom.
Looking around furtively as though we were busting into Tiffany’s, we slunk into the lighted room, where I had a quick, bad moment trying to remember whether we had forgotten to turn off the light. We leaned breathlessly against the back of the door.
“I can’t wait for this day to be over,” I whispered.
Landon suddenly said something useful. “I parked in the alley at the back of the courtyard.”
Bingo. We had a destination for Georgia.
“But we have to get rid of Choo Choo,” I hissed.
Landon looked at me anxiously. “You do mean just get him out of the kitchen, don’t you?”
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