Cook's Christmas Capers (The Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

by Joanne Pence

  This all had to be some awful joke. Some "let's make the bride think she's nuts" kind of a joke that all her friends were taking part in.

  Well, she hated to tell them, but they were doing a much better job than they ever expected. She had visions of a rubber room in her future.

  o0o

  Paavo Smith shut his eyes and, in hopes of clearing his mind, spoke aloud one of the personal mantras he had been given by a disciple of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. "Shri angh namah namah." He took a deep breath on a count of three, held it, released it on a count of five, and then opened his eyes again.

  The crazy woman before him looked as insane as ever, but now she was staring at him as if he was the one who had lost his mind. He held out his hands to her, and in a soft, hushed voice said, "You must calm yourself. Tell me the name of your doctor."

  She socked him in the arm. It hurt!

  They stood in his doorway. He had been suffering with another of his migraines, and was lying on a futon with a banana peel draped across his forehead, when he heard the insistent ringing of his doorbell and pounding on the door. He opened it to find a very attractive woman who shouted, "Paavo!" then threw herself into his arms babbling about an earthquake, about the world going insane, about his disguise—what disguise?—and wondering what she should do.

  When he simply asked her who she was, she burst into tears.

  He peeled her off him and studied her. Frankly, he wished he could place her because she was stellar, but she was a stranger to him.

  Her brown hair was cut much shorter than most women wore, and it had gold streaks in it. Her skirt was a strange style that hung straight and then flared out at the bottom, and reached all the way down to her knees as if she were an old lady rather than someone who looked like she was born for mini-skirts. Besides that, she seemed to have on two tops, both stretchy and fitted close to her skin. The outer had a deep scoop-neck, and the under garment covered up some of the plunging cleavage. Which was a shame, in his opinion.

  At least her platform shoes were stylish, although he had never seen ones quite like hers.

  He glanced down at his own shiny Florsheims with their inch-high heels. Now, those were shoes!

  "Not you, too!" She wiped away her tears. Her voice caught as she lamented, "What's happened to you, Paavo? What's happened to the world?"

  The world? His mind raced. Maybe she was a peacenik who was sure the US, Soviet Union and Red China would blow each other up. That the Cold War would become hot had been predicted for a long time, Vietnam notwithstanding.

  He dropped his hands, feeling somewhat foolish when he realized he had been standing there with them dangling in the air. "You're scaring me, miss. How do you know my name?"

  "How?! We're..." She stopped speaking.

  He leaned back. "We're what?"

  Her soulful brown eyes looked so pleadingly at him, he wanted to say something to help her, but he had no idea what that would be. "I'm sorry, miss, but you must have me mixed up with someone else."

  "Don't call me miss! My name is Angie. I'm Angie!" She was growing hysterical again as she shouted her name at him. She seemed to expect it to mean something. It didn't.

  The neighbors would be coming out any minute the way she was shrieking. "You've got to chill!" he said.

  "What?"

  That surely didn't work. "Where's your home?" he asked softly.

  "Russian Hill," she murmured, then shook her head. "This has got to be a dream." She gazed up, her pain evident. "It's one of those dreams that feels very real. You have those, too, don't you, Paavo?"

  Her familiarity with him, her ease despite being a complete stranger, troubled him. It made him want to help her, to protect her...and the last thing he needed was another woman in his life. Especially such a pretty one. "I'm sorry, miss. Did we meet at some party, maybe?"

  Her eyes widened. "You hate parties!"

  "Now I know you've got me mixed up with someone else. I love parties."

  As she gawked at him, her hands curled into little fists. She had already hit him once. Was she violent as well as crazy? He stepped back.

  "This simply isn't funny, Paavo! It's no joke! If anything, it borders on cruel."

  What in the world is she talking about? Strangely, she sounded so convincing, it made him want to believe her. But he couldn't. "I don't know what's wrong, miss, but this is no joke."

  "Angie, I said! My name is Angie." She drew in her breath. "The last thing that made any sense to me was the big earthquake."

  "Big earthquake?" he murmured. The last big earthquake that hit San Francisco was in the 1950's! This poor young woman really was battier than a loon. He would have to humor her. "Sure, the earthquake." He gave her a dopey smile.

  o0o

  Alice in Wonderland falling down a rabbit hole, stepping through a looking glass, or both, had nothing on her, Angie thought, as she looked at the ridiculously smiling stranger who was also her fiancé.

  She pinched herself and could feel it. Did it hurt when one pinched oneself in a dream?

  This didn't feel like a dream, though. Had the earthquake left her mad? Or could it be—she swallowed hard—that she'd been killed in the quake? That she was dead? If so, was this heaven? Actually, considering the way Paavo looked with his long, fluffy hair, sideburns that resembled bacon slabs, a mustache that would make a walrus proud, and wearing plaid polyester slacks and a shiny blue shirt, it was probably The Other Place.

  Yet, she stood on the doorstep of his house. She had taken a bus to get here—her coins worked in the fare box.

  Paavo lived in an old bungalow in the outer Richmond district not far from the Pacific Ocean. It wasn't elegant enough to be called a "Craftsman," but was simply a little one bedroom, one bath cottage, like so many in this area that had been inexpensively built around the 1930's. She came here out of desperation, although she hadn't expected him to be home. He usually worked until late at night on his cases, yet here he was.

  Tears filled her eyes. "Paavo, it's me, Angie. Angie Amalfi. Surely that means something to you."

  "Amalfi?" If he were a cartoon, a light bulb would be shown above his head. "I know!"

  "Yes?" Hope filled her.

  "It's a place in Italy! The Amalfi coast. I've heard of it!" He frowned. "I've never been there, though. Never been out of the States, as a matter of fact. I was one of the lucky ones. My number didn't come up in the draft."

  What draft? She put her hand to her chest to calm her racing heart. "May I use your phone to call my father? Maybe he can make sense of all this. I'd use my cell, but it's missing."

  "Your cell?" He took a step back. "You live in a cell? What...what kind of cell?"

  He warily eyed her as if he thought her cell must be padded. "Of course I don't live in a cell! I live in an apartment, or"—she thought about her apartment—"I did."

  Her breathing grew faster and the world started to flash black and purple spots before her eyes. What was happening to her, to her family, to her fiancé?

  Somewhere on the street, she began to hear music—a saxophone—playing a slow, mournful rendition of "Beyond the Sea."

  Paavo was talking to her, she saw his lips moving, but she stopped hearing his words. A loud wail filled her ears...and it took a moment to realize the sound came from her mouth. A loud, long cry of desperation. A moment later, the world went mercifully black.

  o0o

  Angie opened her eyes to find Paavo's arms around her waist as he half-dragged, half-carried her into the house. "I'm sorry, miss," he kept saying over and over, along with, "What are the neighbors going to think?"

  Since when did Paavo care about his neighbors?

  He dropped her onto a chair...or sort of chair. It was a navy-blue bean bag monstrosity. It was all she could do not to roll right off. Somehow, she managed to sit up.

  It was Paavo's living room...but wasn't. "Where's your furniture?"

  Wide frightened eyes, darted left and right. "It's...uh...all around you?"
/>
  "No! Your big sofa and overstuffed arm chairs. Your TV, VCR, DVD, PC, MP-3—"

  "Miss, I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Angie!" she shouted. "My name is Angie!"

  He took a deep breath before continuing. "My guru says the best thing one can do is rid oneself of possession and find a quiet spot to meditate." He gestured toward a Japanese wall scroll. Beneath it was a large black rock and a gray pottery bowl filled with water. "I use the tokonoma, water and earth as my personal resting place."

  Angie was sure she would need a personal resting place—an eternal one—if she didn't get to the bottom of this nonsense and soon.

  Slowly, her gaze drifted over his living room. She gawked at a fake Christmas tree made out of what looked like aluminum foil. It held a few blue ornaments. On the floor, a color wheel with green, red, yellow and blue plastic filters faced it. At least it wasn’t switched on and rotating.

  An olive green shag rug covered the floor...what was with all the shag rugs? Bean bag chairs and enormous pillows as furniture. A low, square coffee table. Blue beads covering the doorway between the living room and kitchen. Boards and cinder blocks for a bookcase, and weirdest of all, large, strange posters on the wall with people she didn't recognize in odd costumes. One said Sock it to me! and the other, Here come da judge! She guessed they meant something, but she surely didn't know what.

  "Let me get you some water," Paavo said, escaping to his kitchen.

  She drew in her breath and waited for him to return.

  "Connie, it's me." She heard Paavo's voice softly speak, and then drop even further.

  He was talking to Connie!

  Please, please, please make all this madness be an evil, rotten, I'll-never-forgive-them joke.

  She crept to the door to hear better. Paavo was whispering. "I don't think she's actually crazy, just confused. I'm not sure what to do with her. She acts like she knows me. She almost has me believing I’m the one who’s lost his mind."

  Angie pressed her hand to her mouth.

  "Bad acid?" Paavo asked. "She doesn't look like a doper."

  Acid? Angie's eyes rounded like dinner plates. Wasn't that some kind of 1960's psychedelic drug? She had never paid much attention to her parents' generation.

  "Okay," Paavo continued. "I'll keep you posted. I'm getting her some water."

  Angie scooted back to the beanbag chair, but as she passed the coffee table, she saw a stack of newspapers on the floor.

  The top headline read, "Ford Greets Soviet Premier." Ford? Who was that? The only famous Fords she could think of were Henry and Harrison.

  She picked up the newspaper...Gerald Ford. She shuddered. Gerald Ford was president before she was even born.

  There was another headline about the upcoming Patty Hearst trial. Patty Hearst was more familiar to her than Gerald Ford, but not by much.

  Her eye jumped to the masthead and the date...San Francisco Chronicle...December 17, 1975.

  Her body went cold.

  She picked up an earlier newspaper in the pile. December 16, 1975. And the one before that, and before that. All were dated that same week.

  The spots that had jumped before her eyes earlier began to do their dance again. She fell into the beanbag chair and took deep breaths.

  I can't faint. I can't faint. Please, God, let me wake up from this nightmare!

  Holding a water glass straight out in front of him as if he were afraid she would turn into a snake and strike, Paavo walked toward her. He does think I'm insane! At that moment, she realized she had to be careful not to give him any excuse to cart her off to a sanitarium...or whatever they used back in 1975. Did they do lobotomies back then?

  The dark spots began to form once more.

  She gripped the water glass with two hands. "You didn't have to put it in a glass. The bottle would have been fine."

  "Bottle?" he asked. "You mean...you want liquor?"

  "Liquor? No!" She bit her bottom lip. "No, I mean a water...nothing." She took a sip. "Ooooh…tap water. Umm. Yum. Nice. Very nice."

  His expression turned even more quizzical. She took another tiny sip. She lived in the twenty-first century; she knew all about the impurities in city water. Although, come to think of it, she hadn't heard of people dropping like flies from tap water back before bottled water became the rage. She leaned forward and picked a newspaper off the floor, put it on the coffee table, and held the water glass hovering over it. "You don't mind if I put this on the paper?" She hoped he would tell her it was a rare, old copy.

  "No. I've read it already."

  "That's what I was afraid of," she whispered, putting the glass down.

  "What?"

  "Nothing." She smiled at him. "I couldn't help but overhear you mention the name Connie. Was that Connie Rogers?"

  His eyebrows rose. "Uh…yes….She remembered you asking about me at Homicide, and she thinks this—you being here—is my fault. But I swear I never met you before! I'd remember you. Trust me on that."

  Angie leaned forward, elbow to knee, chin to hand, which wasn't an easy thing to do in a beanbag chair. She was half curled into a pretzel already. "Do you work with her?"

  He bristled. "I'm no pig!"

  It took Angie a moment to close her mouth, swallow hard, and then force out, "What do you do?"

  "I'm a teller at the B of A."

  "Oh, my God!"

  "Criminy sakes, it's not that bad!"

  If she had a fan, she would be fluttering it in front of her face right then. The air had gone way too still. She slowly stood. "I...I'd like to use your bathroom if I may..."

  "Sure, it's..."

  He stopped talking as she headed down the hallway. She locked the door, and leaned back against it. Her whole world, everything she knew and loved, had all changed.

  She felt as if she was living a combination of The Wizard of Oz and the old British (and American copied) TV show, Life on Mars. And she hated it!

  Why was she here?

  And how was she ever going to make things right again?

  This was madness. People don't simply wake up one day and find themselves some forty years in the past! But it wasn't really the past.

  Paavo was here.

  And Connie.

  But they weren't the Paavo and Connie that she knew. The thought struck that perhaps no one was anyone she knew. They might look familiar, but they weren't.

  The only one who's the same is me.

  What a frightening concept that was.

  She could feel hysteria bubbling up, threatening to take over.

  She splashed cold water on her face. She simply had to play along. Make everyone think she was fine.

  But her apartment wasn't hers any longer.

  And a dead man was inside it.

  "Oh, no!" she wailed, then clamped her hand tight over her mouth, staring at the door and hoping Paavo didn't hear her.

  Don't panic!

  She really, really wanted to panic, however.

  "Angie?" Paavo called. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, sweet—, I mean, yes. I'll be right there."

  With a firm resolve not to say or do anything that might give Paavo reason to call the men with white coats and straitjackets, she left the bathroom and sauntered into the living room.

  It was empty.

  She heard Paavo in the kitchen.

  The kitchen was surprisingly familiar. Its tall cream-colored cabinets with red hardware, white tile, and white appliances hadn't been remodeled for decades. The stove and refrigerator were even older than the ones she knew.

  Paavo was putting coffee grounds into a clear glass percolator. She hadn't seen one of those since the last time she was in an antique store.

  He glanced up and gave a wary smile. "Better?"

  "Yes. Much." She sat down at the kitchen table. It was gray and white Formica with matching chairs. At least it wasn't avocado green.

  His phone rang. She watched in stunned shock as he went to the wall and picke
d up a phone that had a cord attached to it.

  A cord?

  "Nona, calm down," he said.

  Nona? Nona Farraday? Why is she calling him? He scarcely knows her.

  "Nona, baby, it's all right. I'll be down there. I'll take care of it."

  Baby!? Paavo never called anybody baby—not her, and certainly not Nona! Yuck! Now she knew she was crazy.

  He faced her. "I've got to go down to City Jail. My friend Nona is being questioned. Her chef was found dead near her house, poisoned, and she's super freaked out about it."

  Angie stood, trying to overlook Paavo's weird use of 'super.' And 'freaked out.' "Are you talking about Nona Farraday?"

  He stared. "You know Nona as well?"

  "Of course! And she's my friend, not yours!"

  Paavo looked at her as if she was even crazier. "How can you say that? She's my girlfriend! I love her!"

  Angie gaped. This was not Paavo! This was not her fiancé!

  In a complete panic, she blindly ran out the door and down the street.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Perhaps because the old song "Beyond the Sea" was going through her head, without thinking about it, Angie turned towards the Pacific Ocean. Land's End, a narrow park along the water's edge, wasn't far from Paavo's home. It seemed like a good place to think.

  The park she knew had signs, monuments, and people. But now she found an empty parking lot that led to an unpaved pathway skirting wild and rocky cliffs facing the ocean. She walked along the path, and after a while left it. Out on the headland she watched the tide splash against the rocks far below.

  This, at least, was familiar to her. The ocean and the landscape around it were immutable. What could a mere earthquake do to them? The Golden Gate Bridge looked the same as ever. The Farallon Islands were off-shore and only visible on the clearest of days. The little blip of a quake in the earth's crust hadn't mattered to them at all. She held onto the view like a beacon of sanity in a world gone mad.

  In the distance, a saxophone played a slow, plaintive song. An old song, familiar...

  She followed the music. Deep into the park she saw the sax player sitting on some rocks a few feet from the walkway.