“I’d feel like a fifth wheel,” she said. “Thanks anyway. And there will be all that food …” She flashed a smile that was half grimace, or maybe more than half.
“The problem is, once I admit to my mother that I invited you, she’ll be calling to pester you until you give in. Might as well save yourself that trouble. And you can bring a bottle of wine as your contribution.”
“Oh, why not?” she said, a real smile creeping over her face. “Thank you.”
I left Palamina’s office and went to the end of the short hall to my tiny space, enough room for a small desk and chair. Period. But I’d covered the slanting ceiling over my desk with some of my favorite articles, and photos of friends and family around the island. When I came in next week, I would add a photo of Nathan and me getting married at the beach. And maybe for a laugh, I’d change the name on my door from Hayley Snow to Mrs. Bransford. But probably not—I liked my name and had pretty much decided to keep it. And as with most things having to do with the wedding, Nathan had insisted it was up to me. I got the strong sense that he’d fought for things in his previous marriage that really didn’t matter in the end. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake with me.
I pulled my computer out of my backpack and jotted down the rough ideas that Palamina and I had brainstormed. Go deeper! I added at the end. Think psychology!
I also jotted some notes about the life and death of Audrey Cohen, from the points of view of her husband and her sister, and Eric Altman’s idea about the drug to treat depression. My mind skimmed over the events of that morning, looking for bits of information that I might have forgotten to add.
I paused for a moment to puzzle over Martha’s secret, wondering what she could have done that felt so awful. Was it something really terrible? Or was it something only moderately dreadful that took on more and more weight the longer it remained undiscovered? Didn’t we all have things from our past that we wished we hadn’t done? Why would she be so intent on keeping a secret if it would help solve the mystery around Audrey’s death? Or at least keep her out of the pool of murder suspects, if it came to that? Had she actually done something illegal, as Steve Torrence had suggested? I had to think I was squandering brain bandwidth that wouldn’t amount to much in the end. Because it made no sense that she would purposely cause the death of a customer and ruin her own reputation and that of her bosses, Eden and Bill.
Unless. Unless she had actually known Audrey Cohen, had some prior connection that would translate to a motive for murder. Which so far she’d denied.
I tapped Audrey’s name into the search bar and came up with very little other than a mention of her death in the Citizen and Konk Life. She seemed to have lived her life quietly, except perhaps within the close circle of family where she hadn’t been quiet at all.
Next I Googled Martha Hubbard. At the top of the search, I found several recent articles about her new venture as chef and food curator at Isle Cook Key West. As I suspected, her partnership with the owners was based partly on her knowledge of food and culinary expertise and partly on her knowledge of local chefs.
Below those articles, she was mentioned briefly in a piece about the history of Louie’s Backyard and several glowing reviews of her classes on TripAdvisor. Before that she’d had an exhibit of her photography at a local gallery. But nothing about the rest of her work history or any past problems—just a long, historical white space.
I needed to make another visit.
Chapter Sixteen
Chefs are not going away; we are evolving.
—“Martha Hubbard: Resident Chef at Isle Cook,” by Jennifer White, Florida Weekly, October 12, 2017
A few last-minute shoppers were browsing in the Isle Cook Key West shop, which I thought would be to my benefit. I could sail past the front checkout without attracting attention and go directly to Martha, who was working in the kitchen at the back of the store. I could smell the delicious scent of butter steeped in garlic.
“Don’t tell me you have a class the night before Thanksgiving?” I asked when I arrived at her counter. “If a person doesn’t know what she’s serving by now, I’d say make reservations.”
She looked up, startled. The anxiety did not fade from her face when she saw it was me. “Is there news?” she asked in a low voice.
“Not really,” I said. “Only more questions.” I slid onto one of the high stools at the counter. “Are you certain you’d never seen Audrey Cohen before she entered the store last week?”
“As I said, I barely paid attention to the customers that day. Just waved hello.” She patted a stray wisp of hair back into her ponytail. “If the guests had been other people I recognized, like you, I would have noticed.”
I nodded. “We were all in our own worlds, I guess. I was taking notes on what Analise was telling us and thinking about how to write up the article. From what I’m hearing, though, it’s possible that Audrey died because of a bad reaction of food and beer with her antidepressant.”
She glanced up, a whoosh of relief in her eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that, but in some ways it takes the pressure off. If it’s true.” She dumped a blue ceramic bowl of dough onto her floured counter. Then she began to knead it, stopping at every turn to sprinkle fresh rosemary leaves on top and knead those into the mixture.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Rosemary garlic brown-butter rolls,” she said. “I let them take the second rise in the fridge. Then I bake them before dinner and slather them with more garlic butter right before bringing them to the table. Guests go mad for them.”
“Sounds fabulous,” I said. “What else is on your menu?”
“Smoked turkey with a honey vinegar glaze and red-eye gravy, confetti succotash, mashed potatoes with cream cheese, sour cream, and scallions, the usual,” she said, finally cracking a smile.
“I’m practically drooling,” I said. “You take Thanksgiving to a new level.”
She paused for a moment, looking puzzled. “Did you need something else?”
“I stopped by because I’ve just come from a powwow with my boss. She wants me to write a piece about the effects of the MeToo movement on the restaurant business, specifically on our island. I figure you’re a good place to start because you’ve worked in different places in town and you know a ton of chefs.”
She punched the dough with more force. “I don’t know what I’d have to add.”
I watched her sprinkle sea salt onto the dough—a lot of sea salt—and then plop it back into a greased bowl. She stretched a length of plastic wrap over top of the bowl. “Crap,” she said. “I forgot to add the browned butter.” She removed the wrap, swung around to the stove, grabbed the small pan of melted butter with garlic, and poured it over the top. Then she rolled the dough in the butter until it glistened.
She wasn’t going to talk about this as easily as I’d hoped. “I’m wondering how common harassment is in restaurant work? I’ve read the pieces about celebrity chefs getting taken down since the MeToo movement surged into public awareness. Seems like there are lots of men in positions of power in this business, so maybe this problem appears in regular restaurants as well?”
Martha began to peel and chop onions, her knife slicing quickly through the white flesh, filling the air with its sharp, eye-watering tang. “I’ve worked in kitchens since high school, when I took a job at Denny’s to make enough money for the senior class trip to Disney. Of course there’s a lot of joking around and cursing, and some of it is in bad taste. But from what I’ve seen and experienced, it’s lower-level stuff, not the big stuff like you read in those articles.”
“What kind of smaller stuff?” I asked.
“Things like a guy saying, ‘Your coat’ ”—she paused her chopping and pointed at her chef’s coat with the tip of her knife—“ ‘would look good on my floor tomorrow morning.’ ”
“Really? That blatant?”
“Oh sure. And I’d say something like, ‘Geez, dude, take a shower once in a while and
change your grease-spattered pants, and maybe you’ll get lucky.’ ”
I laughed. “You gave it back as good as you took it.”
She wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her coat, waving the knife in the air. “It was a rite of passage, you know? When you said something like that, you were showing that you were one of the guys and you could take a joke. And I can take a joke. You probably haven’t seen that this past week, but I can play along with pranks and jokes. Some of them were even funny.”
“But …” I raised my eyebrows, hoping she’d continue.
“No but,” she said, scraping the onions into the oil that sizzled in a frying pan on the front burner. Hot grease splattered the back of her hand, but she didn’t flinch. “End of story.”
“You’ll let me know if you think of anything else?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
She was looking a little irritated, and I realized I was overstaying my welcome. “One other thing before I leave you to it,” I said. “My boss wants me to write ‘bigger pieces,’ like psychological trends in the food world in Key West. Any thoughts about what’s going on here in town?”
She scratched her head with one finger and stirred the onions with the other hand. “I’m not sure what she means by psychological trends. Some of the chefs around here have begun to feel very possessive about their food. They don’t want patrons making demands about ingredients and so on.”
“So how does that play out in restaurants?”
“If a diner asks the server to leave off the lemon or the spicy rub or the artichoke sauce or something, the server is supposed to say our policy is not to make changes to our menu. Because if you take off the rub or the sauce, it’s no longer our recipe, is it? People should understand this coming in—we do a limited menu and we do it super well.”
Honestly, I thought this was a little mean-spirited. What if someone was severely allergic to salt or onions? Those ingredients were included in practically everything. Out of luck, I guessed. Maybe chefs felt about their food the way writers felt about their words—these were their darlings, carefully crafted pieces of art and no one should mess with them. But on the other hand, I had learned since joining Key Zest that a good editor often made a piece of writing stronger.
“One other topic to think about—I’m just putting this out there before my wedding gets any closer and my brain turns to mush. What about trendy ingredients on our island? Anything unusual turning up lately?”
She turned off the gas burner and moved the pan to the back of the cooktop. “There’s always some competition about finding a flavor that no one else has or using it the way no one else does. That’s why I like going out to dinner from time to time—it’s important to check out what other people are doing. Of course, I read cookbooks too, and read some of the bigger chefs’ blogs and follow their Instagram feeds.” She pulled a large package covered in butcher paper from the fridge and began to unwrap it. Sausage. “Saffron seems like it’s big around here lately. And making desserts that glitter in the candlelight. Customers love ending the meal with a showstopper.”
“Yikes,” I said. “We’re wrapping up our Thanksgiving dinner with good old-fashioned pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Although I did slide a little chai spice into the filling. But don’t mention that to my father if you see him; he’ll have a heart attack.”
“There you go,” Martha said, laughing. “Sometimes diners want the same thing over and over. But no one likes to cook the same thing ad nauseam. No matter what the fussy customers insist they want done.” She wiped her hands on a clean dish towel that read, SORRY, I’M IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP WITH BUTTER. “If you hear anything different about the death, you’ll text me?”
I nodded. “Of course. And have a fabulous holiday.” On the way out, I glanced back at her once more. She was dumping the ball of rosemary dough into the trash.
As I drove home, I thought about what I’d learned—if I’d learned anything. Martha seemed tense to me, as if still worried about a lingering threat. Watching her liberally sprinkle ingredients into the bread dough, I’d thought of her salty lime juice. And I could imagine her getting upset, making a quick mistake, and then forgetting she’d done it.
Why did I always leave a conversation with her with the sense that she’d left out half the story?
Chapter Seventeen
Spending your days trying to one up your own palate is exhausting. Stepping away from the wood-grilled matsutake mushrooms with nasturtium agrodolce, and towards an uncomplicated hunk of meat is the gastronomic equivalent of collapsing into your bed at the end of a long day.
—Helen Rosner, “On Chicken Tenders,” Guernica, June 12, 2015
I had planned to pick up my father and stepmother at the airport in Miss Gloria’s car, but my father, true to form, wanted to have his own transportation. I honestly didn’t mind, as it took some pressure off. What bride wanted to have to worry about how her extended family would get to the various events, and how to help them escape if the parties ran long or were dull? Instead, I met them in the bar at Casa Marina, the large Waldorf Astoria resort on the Atlantic Ocean, where they were staying. Allison looked wonderful, slender and elegant, with her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail and a pair of thick gold hoops in her earlobes.
She pulled me into a warm hug. “You look wonderful,” she said, “glowing just like a bride should.”
Which left me feeling instantly guilty. At her wedding to my father years ago, I’d been a terrible brat—reluctant in every way, from shopping for a dress with Allison (which I refused to do) to standing with them at the altar in that hideous choice (which my mother insisted I do). But what preteen wants to see her father sign his life away to a woman who isn’t her mother? And honestly, the dress was cutesy-squared with a lace collar and full skirt and sash—something a five-year-old might have loved. The only saving grace was that Rory, Allison’s little boy, had acted even worse.
Today, Rory hung back behind her but accepted my embrace. “Let me look at you,” I said, holding him away for inspection. “You’re practically all grown up. And you cut your hair. And you have on real clothes.”
That made him laugh. Last time he’d been in town, when he’d disappeared into the spring-break crowd and we’d thought he was gone forever, he’d sported a shaggy haircut resembling Farrah Fawcett’s (and oh how he would have despised that comparison) and refused to change out of a grungy T-shirt decorated by the rock group Purple Moan. (Yeah, I’d never heard of them either.)
Finally I turned to my dad, who looked tired and maybe more gray-haired than last time, for a hug. “I’m really glad you’re here.” He squeezed me back.
“No way in the world we would miss this,” Allison said. “Your father is all verklempt, though he won’t tell you this himself,” she added in a stage whisper. “But where is the famous Nathan?” She looked around the cavernous lobby as if he might be hiding behind one of the pillars.
“He’s on a big case,” I said, adding a cheerful smile. “He said he’d meet us at the bar at six.” I herded them outside, and we settled at a table close to the water. Who could be grumpy when sitting with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, especially when the weather was balmy compared with northern New Jersey?
A waiter in a crisp white polo shirt came over to take our order.
“Two glasses of your top white wine for the ladies, Dos Equis for me, and a Coke for the young man,” my father told him without consulting any of us.
Allison rolled her eyes and patted my hand. “He’s feeling a little bit out of control,” she said under her breath. “My advice is to give him some leeway. We’re so excited for you and your new life course, but he’s got some mixed feelings burbling underneath and he’s not too good at identifying and understanding them. Or sharing them.”
“Understatement,” I said, snickering along with her. Then I spotted Nathan’s familiar form across the patio. My stomach clenched with nerves. What if they didn’t like him? What if he d
idn’t like them?
“Don’t worry,” Allison said with a wink. “If you love him, we will love him.”
I blew her a kiss of thanks and got up to meet Nathan and bring him over to the table. “This is my famous Detective Bransford, soon to be husband. Yikes,” I added, “that still sounds so weird. Nathan, this is my stepbrother Rory and my stepmother Allison.”
“I believe we met you a couple of years ago at the police department,” he said to Rory, who I was glad to see did not shrink away. “Glad to have you here under happier circumstances.”
Allison insisted on pulling Nathan into a hug and then patted him on the cheek. “We are delighted to welcome you to our family.”
“Thanks.”
“And this is my father.” I stepped back a bit to allow them space to jostle for position. They shook hands a little too long and too hard before breaking apart. Nathan stood about four inches taller than my father, and probably outweighed him by twenty-five pounds, all of it muscle. My father looked pale and almost wispy in comparison.
“A pleasure to meet you, finally, under better circumstances,” said Nathan, smiling so that his dimples twinkled. “I’ve heard so much about you from Hayley.”
“And you,” my father grunted, signaling for the waiter. “I’ll order you a beer. Or would you prefer whiskey?”
“Sounds great, but I’m on duty tonight. I’m sorry I won’t be able to have dinner with you either”—he looked apologetic as he glanced in my direction, as this was news to me, bad news—“we’ve had a fast break in one of our cases.”
“Crime waits for no man’s dinner nor his wedding,” I said, muttering nonsense to cover my disappointment. If he was bailing out now, would this continue to happen all weekend? “Wasn’t that something from Shakespeare?”
My father looked puzzled, but Allison laughed.
“Sit, sit,” said my father, gesturing to the one empty seat at the table as if inviting Nathan to perch on his living room sofa.
I tried not to get annoyed. I had to keep reminding myself that what Allison said was true—this must be hard for my dad. He wasn’t in charge and it wasn’t his turf. And it would only get harder, watching my mother’s ease with my friends and my island, and watching his daughter—his little girl—get married. Truth was, I hadn’t been that girl for a very long time. But maybe he hadn’t realized that in his gut until now.
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