A Deadly Feast

by Lucy Burdette

  “Nathan will be here any minute; he said we should go ahead.” He hadn’t said that—in fact, he hadn’t answered my last three texts at all. But I was afraid my mother wouldn’t start the meal without him, and that would make me even more anxious—and her along with me. Not to mention ruining the dinner. “And some people out there need something besides alcohol in their stomachs. Like my boss.”

  I helped them ferry all the dishes out to the sideboard in the dining room—the turkey, gravy, Sam’s cornbread stuffing, pumpkin biscuits, pasta with sage and roasted squash, green beans almandine, and an enormous salad topped with walnuts, dried cherries, mango, and goat cheese. Then my mother invited everyone to grab a plate and fill it.

  “It would be nice to have a blessing,” my mother said, looking at my father first—he made a horrified grimace—and then Sam.

  “I’m the senior citizen,” Miss Gloria said. “May I? I have so much to be grateful for.” She smoothed the napkin on her lap, smiled, and bowed her head. “Three years ago I was living alone on a small houseboat, my sons hounding me to move north. And then along came Hayley Snow, who has become a daughter to me, and brought with her a delightful and precious family. I’m so grateful to God and the Universe for that. And grateful for the opportunity to live on this island, in this country, in this world. Remind us always to give back more than we receive. Amen.”

  “That was lovely,” Allison said. And Lorenzo reached over to cover my roommate’s hand with his, his eyes shimmering with tears.

  When we’d finished eating, Sam, my mother, and I got up to clear the table and move the desserts into the prime viewing space on the sideboard. In the lull before tackling dessert, my mother poured coffee and Sam offered brandy.

  “This dinner has been outstanding,” my father said as he moved along the dessert buffet. “Thank you for including us. And I’m grateful for your hospitality and for the maple pumpkin pie.” He grinned at me, then piled a mountain of whipped cream onto his slice and slid a pecan bar next to that.

  Allison turned to Lorenzo. “I’m so curious about how your brain works when you’re doing a reading. Are you watching your customer’s body language for cues about what they’d like to hear from you?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I know some people think the whole thing is a hoax. That we fortune-tellers read people by listening to what questions they are asking, looking for wedding rings, and so on. And I suppose there are bad eggs in this business, like every other venture. For me, the message comes through in many ways, but my cards are the medium. They fine-tune it for me. But the truth is, I can read people by holding one of their shoes.”

  I could see my father’s eyes practically rolling out of his head. Even Allison, who was both warmer and more polite than my father, seemed to be struggling with Lorenzo‘s description. She was a scientist, and scientists weren’t that open to reading the future through a set of multicolored cards.

  “Will you read my cards?” Rory asked.

  Lorenzo glanced at my father and then Allison, as if to ask her permission. She shrugged.

  “Think of a question you want answers for,” Lorenzo said to my stepbrother.

  “How will I do on the SATs?” he said quickly.

  We all chuckled, and my father said, “I think that answer is more likely to come as a result of how much you’re willing to study, and whether you’ll go to bed early the night before.” Obviously this had been a sore point between them.

  “Never mind, then. How about Detective Bransford?” Rory asked. “Can you read his fortune when he isn’t even here and you don’t have a shoe?”

  “That’s not really fair to ask,” I said, with a wink in Lorenzo’s direction.

  “To play a parlor game, you should be in the room,” my father said.

  As I was opening my mouth to protest his rudeness, Lorenzo smiled at me and said, “It’s OK, my friend, I understand skeptics. I’ve faced them all my life.” He looked directly at Rory. “My readings happen after the querent—that’s the person who is seeking the answers—adds his or her energy by shuffling the cards. So, for example, if Hayley draws the cards”—he pushed the deck across the table—“we might be able to read Nathan through her, and through their relationship.”

  Everyone looked at me, but I felt frozen.

  “Go ahead,” said my mother. “Isn’t it always better to know?”

  I nodded my OK, and Lorenzo said, “Let’s see what is revealed.” He bowed his head and did his prereading centering that always looked to me like a prayer, and then asked me to divide the deck into three piles and choose one of them. From the pile I chose, he turned over three cards—the Devil, the Empress, and the Eight of Pentacles.

  He studied the cards and then glanced quickly at me. “The Devil is one of the Major Arcana, and those cards carry more weight. This is a dark, heavy card with a lot going on underneath the surface. It has to do with being bound up in our attachment to the material world, feeling compressed and contained. It’s a Capricorn card.”

  “Nathan’s definitely a Capricorn,” I said.

  “He may face a dark force,” Lorenzo added.

  “That’s no surprise, being a police officer,” my mother inserted. “And Nathan’s a very cautious man. That’s one way he and Hayley differ, and it makes them a good match. And I can say that because I’m a little impulsive too. So she comes by it absolutely naturally.”

  She was babbling the way I always did when I felt nervous.

  “Do you usually worry when your customer draws this card?” Allison asked.

  “Not if the card is reversed,” he said. “That would mean liberation from feeling bound up, imprisoned.”

  But the card had not been in the reversed position. After this first card in Lorenzo’s reading, I was beginning to feel cold tendrils of fear snaking up from the pit of dread in my stomach and encircling my heart and squeezing, squeezing. To make things worse, I could see the worry in his eyes, too.

  “What else?” I asked. If he could really sense trouble, my mother was right, I’d rather know about it than be taken by surprise.

  He tapped the second card, the Eight of Pentacles, reversed. “This has to do with evaluating a situation, possibly a time of diligence and focus. And perhaps realizing there is not enough.” He cocked his head to one side, appearing puzzled, but continued on to the third card after I shrugged.

  “The Empress is often a woman’s card. It has to do with nourishment, getting enough of something, fertility, abundance. In this case, the Empress is reversed, so the querent is not comfortable, not getting what he needs.” He touched the card, which showed a queenlike figure with a crown, a scepter, and a voluminous white robe dotted with red flowers. My friend seemed even more puzzled. “Could he be concerned about food?”

  I looked at my mother, and we both burst out laughing. “He eats to live, rather than living to eat,” I said, feeling better immediately. “Nathan leaves the food obsession to the Snow family. And we tackle it with gusto.” Sometimes Lorenzo got signals crossed when there were too many people in the room.

  “Can we offer anyone a ride home?” my father asked as he got to his feet, his hand on Allison’s back. “I hate to break up the party, but tomorrow’s a big day.”

  “Do you mind dropping off Miss Gloria and Lorenzo?” I asked. “I’m going to help with dishes and stick around in case Nathan comes by for leftovers.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Amina opened her refrigerator. A collection of takeout boxes slumped together like old men in bad weather.

  —Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

  After we’d all exchanged hugs and our friends and my father’s family had trooped out into the perfect Key West night, I returned to the kitchen, where Sam and my mother had begun to tackle the mountain of dirty dishes.

  “We can do this,” Sam said. “We have a good system and we’re almost finished.”

  “I’d rather stay busy. I can’t imagine going home
to bed to just worry.” I scraped the debris on the plates into the trash while Sam rinsed them and loaded the dishwasher. Meanwhile, my mother covered the leftovers and put them in the fridge.

  “I’ll pack some up for you and Miss Gloria. A little something to snack on tomorrow before the wedding. Or for later if Nathan gets hungry. Or you can freeze them.”

  “I’d say that all went very well,” said Sam, sinking into one of the kitchen chairs and reaching for a pecan bar.

  “Except for the no-show,” I said, picking up a snickerdoodle and then putting it back down. I kept hoping for the friendly ding of my mother’s doorbell. Even a text message saying Nathan was exhausted and going directly home to crash would have been welcome. “I don’t get it,” I said, perching on the chair across from Sam. “It’s Thanksgiving. Couldn’t he manage to tap out one line to say he wasn’t coming?”

  “If he’s in the middle of a stakeout or something, he isn’t going to be texting,” said Sam firmly. “He has to pay attention every minute he’s on the job. And he did warn us this was a crazy week, right?”

  “He didn’t give you any idea about what he was working on?” my mother asked, her brow furrowing. “Lorenzo said something about food. Could the case have anything to do with food?”

  I hadn’t thought so. But then the smuggling ring that Martha Hubbard mentioned, which I in turn had mentioned to Steve Torrence, flashed into my mind. I explained what little I knew to my parents. “The only thing is, if the stakes were high enough, I suppose he could be involved. If the bad guys were ruthless and they needed their top dogs, they’d call on Nathan. If more people were in danger, he’d for sure be in the middle of it.”

  I felt sick to my stomach with worry, and it must have shown on my face.

  “Have you learned anything more about the man who died? Or his wife?” Sam asked. “Is this part of what Nathan is working on?”

  “I don’t know if there’s a direct connection.” I told them about visiting JanMarie and Zane earlier in the day, where I had learned exactly nothing. And then, because I trusted them completely and I could feel a wave of panic growing about Nathan, I told them about Martha’s history with Marcel.

  “He sounds like an awful man,” my mother said.

  Sam nodded. “Sounds like he would believe he had a reason to get back at her, hurt her in some way—if he realized that she was the one who’d torpedoed his restaurant,” Sam said. “But can you picture Martha being responsible for either of those deaths?”

  “No, I really can’t imagine that at all.” And then I remembered the conversation I’d had with the Naples food critic. “Apparently Marcel was a hot ticket on a fast track to celebrity chef. I wonder if I could find a copy of his cookbook? Maybe there’d be old photos that could give us a clue about who he hung out with back in those days?”

  I was on the phone Googling Marcel’s cookbook before I finished speaking. Every link I checked indicated that it was out of print and unavailable. And it had been published long enough ago that there wasn’t a “look inside” feature available on Amazon that might have shown me what I was looking for. If I even knew what that was. And then it occurred to me to call Suzanne Orchard, the owner of the Key West Island Bookstore that carried many older used books, including a stash of cookbooks. Luckily for me, even on Thanksgiving, she picked up on the first ring.

  In a breathless rush, I explained that Nathan was missing and that I was afraid his absence was connected to the two deaths on the island earlier this week. And that I needed to get my hands on a copy of this old cookbook. “I know I’m not making sense, but I’m desperate.”

  “It doesn’t sound familiar at all. So I’m pretty sure I don’t have it. I don’t even remember seeing it, but let me check with Paul.” Paul was her husband, another local chef.

  In a few minutes, she came back on the line. “He doesn’t know the cookbook, but he’s pretty sure he’s seen this Marcel on a YouTube video.”

  “I don’t think YouTube had been invented when this guy had his restaurant,” I said.

  “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t transcribe and post older film clips. It’s done all the time with musicians.”

  I thanked her, hung up, and typed Marcel’s name into the YouTube search bar.

  “I’ve got it,” I called out to my mother and Sam.

  They came over to the couch and flanked me on either side to watch. The film was grainy and the sound faded in and out, but I recognized Marcel behind the counter and in front of the stove. He had a very attractive assistant with long hair and deep cleavage who had apparently prepared the ingredients for the chef. As he cooked, a complicated recipe for duck pâté en croûte, he rewarded her by pretending to peer down her shirt and slap her on the rear end. She giggled and protested, but he reminded her he was the brilliant chef.

  “He’s utterly obnoxious and disgusting,” my mother said.

  “But totally in character,” Sam said, “when you think about Martha’s experience with him.”

  We watched all the way to the end, after the cooking part of the show had finished, but the film kept rolling. The videographer had caught the tail end with Marcel reaming out his assistant for allowing his pastry dough to get too warm to roll out perfectly.

  “He’s an awful bully,” my mother said.

  And the film ended with a snippet of another man arguing with Marcel about whether a retake was in order. I hit the pause button and moved it back to replay.

  “I swear, that was Zane. The other man from our food tour. If Marcel knew Zane, Martha maybe knew him, too.” I felt sick to my stomach and even more frightened.

  “If all the people on the food tour knew each other, wouldn’t you have noticed?”

  “You’d think,” I said. “But Martha was hardly there. And Audrey pretty much sucked the air from the room. And I was working, taking notes. I wonder if I should call Zane directly, ask him what the H–E–double L is going on?”

  “No,” said Sam, at the same time my mother said, “Let’s put another call in to Steve Torrence.”

  Reluctantly, I called my friend again. He didn’t pick up, so I left a second message, this time adding the bit about recognizing a younger version of Zane in Marcel’s cooking show, trying not to sound hysterical. “Three of the people on that food tour knew each other years ago. There has to be a connection to the murders. I just don’t know what it is.” Then I turned back to Mom and Sam and held my arms out as if to say, What now?

  My mom took one of my hands and squeezed. “There’s nothing else to do here, and honestly I think you should get home and get some rest so you look your very best tomorrow,” said my mother. “We don’t want gray circles under your eyes in all the wedding photos.” She stroked my hair, which brought me back to being comforted as a child. “I feel in my bones that everything will be fine, and you know my bones are always right,” she added.

  I smiled, but my chest felt tight and heavy. “I’ll call you if I hear something.”

  But then an alert flashed on my phone’s screen from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office: SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT AND KEY WEST POLICE SEEK LEADS IN MURDER.

  I clicked over to their page. POLICE REPORTED A BODY FOUND IN THE DUMPSTER BEHIND THE BUOYS’ CLUB ESTABLISHMENT WEDNESDAY NIGHT. SOURCES STATED THAT THE VICTIM WAS OF WIRY BUILD, WITH A BEARD, AND THE APPEARANCE OF GLITTER IN HIS HAIR AND POCKETS. MURDERER REMAINS AT LARGE AND IS LIKELY TO BE ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ON THE DEATH SHOULD CONTACT …

  Glitter? That would have been common during the Fantasy Fest week leading up to Halloween. Though during that festival, arrests for public nudity and drunkenness were more the norm than murder. There had been one terrible murder a few years ago involving fairy wings and glitter. And Palamina had seemed obsessed with the idea of gold in food. What if Zane and Marcel were working together in some kind of foodie smuggling operation? I remembered the check marks I’d seen on Nathan’s food tour information brochure. And the ma
gazine at Martha’s shop.

  This line of thinking was beginning to make me literally nauseous, fearing for Nathan’s safety. I punched in his cell number again, but it went directly to voicemail as it had all afternoon. My panic was swelling, making me feel as if I might choke.

  “Honey, you have to breathe,” my mother said, reading the distress on my face. I followed her lead, sucking in some air and pushing it out. “You haven’t heard one word from him? Is it possible that you overlooked a text?”

  I shook my head and handed over my phone so they could read the grisly report about the dead man found in the dumpster.

  “Not since last night.”

  “Have you talked with any of his colleagues?” Sam asked, while studying my phone.

  I tried to breathe again, and to push my shoulders away from my ears, to not let the terror that was knocking on the door overwhelm me. It was as if all the scary moments from the past few years—and there had been too many of them—were rushing into my brain. Those memories gathered and circled like mean girls, chanting, “And you thought we were bad …”

  “Steve Torrence told me that Nathan would stay safe. He knows what he’s doing and his fellow officers would not let him get into trouble. I think he even said not to worry if Nathan doesn’t make it to the rehearsal at the beach in the morning. He said that he has the easiest part in the ceremony—all he has to do is walk down the path and stand at the altar looking madly in love. And if he gets lost along the way, Steve will nudge him in the right direction. He doesn’t have your complicated family to worry about; that’s what he said verbatim,” I told them.

  “Sounds like he knew something big was in the works,” my mother said. “Maybe you should call the person on duty tonight. Ask what’s happening with the murder.”

  “I’m a civilian; they won’t talk to me about an active case. I could call the police department, but tell them what?” I asked after I’d taken back my phone. “My fiancé didn’t show up for supper?” Then I thought of Danielle, whose cop boyfriend was at her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. I dialed her number and explained that Nathan was missing and had not contacted me.