Hail to the Chef

by Julie Hyzy

  “The hospital said the damage was incredible. They were surprised he hadn’t died on the scene… that he lasted as long as he did.”

  In unspeakable pain, no doubt. The little I knew about electrocution was enough to realize it was a ghastly way to go.

  We were silent for a long moment, until I had to ask. “There’s no connection between Gene’s… death… and the bomb scare today, is there?”

  Bradley grimaced, taking his time before answering. “We don’t believe so. There will be a full investigation into the electrical system. In fact, that’s going on right now. The Secret Service can’t overlook any possibility of a correlation, of course, but preliminary findings suggest this is just a terrible coincidence.”

  I stared down at the diced mushrooms before me and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t remember what I’d planned to do with them. I cleared my throat. “Thanks for letting us know, Bradley.”

  “We’ll be sure to keep everyone informed about arrangements.”

  I nodded.

  “Go home,” I said to Bucky and Cyan as soon as Bradley was gone.

  Cyan’s eyes were red. “But…”

  “We aren’t going to get anything done tonight,” I said. “Not after this. I’ll clean up. It’ll give me a chance to clear my head. You guys go home now. We’ll just work harder tomorrow.”

  For once Bucky didn’t fight me.

  When they were gone, I stood in the silent kitchen, reliving Gene’s final minutes in the White House. Could I have reached him sooner? Would it have mattered? Fragmented recollections raced through my brain, out of order and seemingly without purpose. Why had I noticed that the laundry lady’s hairnet made her ears stick out? Why did it matter that the drill Gene had been holding cracked the marble floor when it fell? Why did I notice that salt was the top jar in the bowl that Cyan had erroneously carried out to us?

  Instead of noticing these unrelated, irrelevant details, why hadn’t I done more for Gene?

  I closed my eyes, pressing fingers into my eye sockets, as though that could wipe the visions of his stricken body from my memory. Maybe, if I pressed hard enough, I could wake myself up and discover this terrible day had been a figment of my imagination. Maybe-

  “Ollie?”

  Startled, I jumped. Sparkles from the sudden release of eye pressure danced before me, but I recovered. “Mrs. Campbell,” I said, ready to jump into action. “What can I do for you?”

  Waving away my concerns, she made her way around the stainless steel worktable. “How are you doing?”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I bit my lip.

  By then she’d reached my side and placed a warm hand over mine. “I wanted to see you because…”

  Words didn’t often fail the First Lady. She looked away.

  When she faced me again, her eyes were shiny. She took several deep breaths before she spoke again. “I want to share something with you-something not a lot of people know.” She took another deep breath and I got the impression she was steeling herself. “A very long time ago, when I was a teenager, a friend of mine drowned. We weren’t twenty feet apart, Ollie, not twenty feet. We were in a public pool being watched over by lifeguards, and Donna was a good swimmer. But when I looked for her, she wasn’t there.” When she took a breath this time, it was labored. “She was at the bottom of the pool and…” Mrs. Campbell stared up at the ceiling, wrinkling her nose as though to dispel the emotion. “By the time we got her out, there was nothing any of us could do for her.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She gave me a wry smile. “Everyone told me that I wasn’t to blame. But I didn’t believe them. I was seventeen, you understand, and I knew, I just knew, that she’d died because I hadn’t been more careful. It was my fault.”

  Politeness urged me to contradict her, but good sense warned me not to.

  “I lived with the guilt for a long time.” She sighed. “A very long time. It wasn’t until years later that I found out Donna had suffered a heart seizure that afternoon. It didn’t matter that we were in a pool; she would’ve died at home in bed that day.” Swallowing, Mrs. Campbell gave a resigned shrug. “Her parents never told me because they didn’t know the guilt I was carrying. They were carrying their own. They believed they should have seen it coming, and that they could have prevented her death.” She shook her head. “I’m telling you this because you were the first person to reach Gene. I know you feel responsible.” She squeezed my hand. “Take it from someone who’s been there. I’m here to tell you that when it’s truly a person’s time to go, there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

  My throat raw, I managed to say, “Thank you.”

  WHEN I FINALLY REACHED MY APARTMENT building that night, I’d taken to heart what Mrs. Campbell had said, yet I felt strongly that it hadn’t really been Gene’s time. With the new knee, his determination to be part of the White House Christmas preparations, and the intensity with which I knew he approached safety issues, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was not right. With wonderment, I realized, too, that it had been just this morning that the First Lady and I had been sequestered with Sean in the bunker. It seemed like it had been weeks.

  James sat in the front lobby. Although my building’s owners hadn’t hired James to sit at the front desk and screen visitors, they encouraged his continued cooperation by reducing his rent. A win-win situation. James, with his fixed income and empty apartment since Millie died, enjoyed the constant busyness. The building’s owners liked the idea of the added, albeit limited, security James provided at the front door.

  Though his build was slight, James had a deep voice. He greeted me with a gusty, “Hiya, Ollie! How’s the president today?”

  I answered as I usually did. “Great. He sends his best.”

  James laughed at our little joke. “You’re home kinda late,” he said. “I bet it’s a lot of work to prepare for a White House Thanksgiving.”

  James loved any presidential tidbits I cared to share, and although I never gave him information that couldn’t be found online or in the newspapers, he always felt as though he was getting the scoop from me. I started to answer, but a random thought stopped me. “Is Stanley around?”

  “I saw him go up a little while ago. Why? You having power problems in your apartment?”

  I shook my head. “I just want to ask him a couple questions.” Realizing swiftly that Gene’s death would make the early news tomorrow, I added, “We had an accident at the White House today and I just want to pick his brain a little.”

  “An electrical accident?”

  “Yeah, but if Stanley ’s done for the night…” I let loose a sigh of frustration. Stanley was another of our building owner’s priceless finds. He took care of building maintenance in return for a small stipend and free rent. I wondered if, when I retired, the mighty owners would consider putting in a restaurant on the main floor and give me free rent, too. “I’ll try to catch up with him tomorrow.”

  But James was already dialing. “This may be a matter of national security,” he said with mounting excitement.

  “No, not at all-”

  He waved me quiet when Stanley answered. “I’ve got Ollie down here at the desk,” James said, his voice low, and heavy with importance. “She wants to talk with you about an electrical situation at…” He faltered a moment, looked at the receiver, then continued, very slowly, “… at the location where… she… works. You got that?”

  He hung up. “ Stanley will be right down.”

  “You didn’t have to-”

  His voice barely above a whisper, he asked, “So what happened? Are you allowed to talk about it?”

  “You’ll hear more tomorrow,” I said. Before I could bring the words forward, my stomach dropped, silencing me. I didn’t want to say it out loud. Gene was dead, but talking about it to someone who didn’t even know the man made this afternoon’s tragedy seem gossipy and trivial.

  James’s eyes were bright with anticipat
ion. “Yeah?”

  There was no question about it making the news tomorrow. Heck, I was sure it was racing across the Internet already.

  “Our head electrician was… killed today.”

  James’s mouth dropped. “Electrocuted?”

  “Autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow, but that’s what it looks like.”

  “Electrocution is a bad way to go.”

  I looked away. “I know.”

  “You didn’t see him, did you?”

  The elevator dinged its arrival, sparing me from having to tell James that I’d been the one to find Gene. I could already sense James’s fatherly comfort welling up. In a minute he’d rise from his chair to pat me on the back. I didn’t want that right now. All I wanted, really, were answers. Maybe I’d never get the ones I sought. But maybe Stanley…

  He alighted from the first car on the right, his graying hair mussed on one side, his face creased, his pajama shirt tucked into blue jeans, and his feet in house slippers. “What happened?” he asked, bouncing alarmed glances between me and James. “What kind of emergency?” Stanley ’s words tumbled out fast, more slurred than usual. Probably owing to the fact that he’d been sound asleep up until a moment ago.

  I reached him before he made it to the desk. “No emergency,” I said, placing a restraining hand on his arm. “I just have a few things I wanted to ask you. But I didn’t mean to wake you up. Really-this can wait till tomorrow.”

  James boosted himself from his seat, eager to join the discussion. “I told Ollie you’d want to help her right away.”

  Stanley blinked twice. “’Course. But I can’t do much until you tell me what happened.”

  This was not going the way I’d planned. But there was no sense sending James back to the desk or Stanley back to bed at this point. Both were waiting for me to spill whatever revelation they thought I carried. Except for the three of us, the lobby was empty, the elevators quiet.

  I wanted information. There seemed but one way to get it. I told them about Gene, about finding him outside the elevator closet, about the subsequent news of his death. The two men standing before me stood silent a long moment when I finished.

  I got to the crux of my reason for being there. “I thought there were safeguards against electrocution,” I said, addressing Stanley. “Gene wasn’t working on power lines. He was inside the White House. A residence. Things like this shouldn’t happen, right?”

  We’d drifted back toward the entry desk and Stanley rested his hip against it. He scratched at his gray-stubbled chin. “Well,” he said slowly, “the problem is, electrocutions do happen. Not too often these days, but still…” He ran his fingers across his chin again, staring just over my head. “What was he doing?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “I know that one of the rooms was out of power, and I know he was drilling something.”

  “Go over it all again, real slow.”

  A phone call pulled James’s attention away from our conversation. Still feeling guilty about waking Stanley up, I decided the best thing I could do was to make this interruption worth his time. I launched into a detailed play-by-play of the scene, starting when I found Gene on the floor.

  “Back up,” Stanley said. “How did you know he was restoring power to one of the rooms?”

  “We’d talked about it earlier, and then right before he started the repairs. He had just complained that the power should’ve been fixed before and that he wasn’t using his favorite tools…”

  “What was he using?”

  I described the tool belt, the old-fashioned drill, the stepladder.

  As Stanley pondered that, I continued, “Gene was always such a sweet guy, but he was in a bad mood today. With all the problems, though, I couldn’t blame him.”

  This time, instead of rubbing his chin, Stanley ran his hand over his mouth. Talking between his fingers, he said, “Can you describe the drill?”

  “It was old,” I said. “Black, but shiny where the paint had worn off.”

  “Shiny?” he repeated. “He was using a drill that wasn’t insulated?”

  I had no answer for that.

  “What was he drilling?” Stanley seemed agitated now. “Where was he standing when this happened? Describe it.”

  I desperately wished I had more details, but even scraping my brain to provide the best account of the incident I could wasn’t working; I knew it came up short.

  Stanley kept his hand over his mouth and his gaze on the floor. He was quiet so long I worried he’d fallen asleep. James finished his phone call and must have had the same impression because after a long, silent interval, he said, “ Stanley? You got any ideas?”

  His head came up and he pointed at me as he spoke. “A guy with that much experience knows not to take chances. If he was using a drill that wasn’t insulated, he had to be pretty damn sure he wasn’t puncturing anything hot. You with me?”

  I nodded.

  “Was he wet? Perspiring?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah. A lot.”

  “I gotta tell you-he would have known better. Mind you, we all take risks, try for the shortcut. And I don’t know this fellow, but if he was a master electrician-”

  “He was.”

  “Then I have to think he knew exactly what he was doing. If he’s been with the White House for all those years, then he knew that place inside and out. He wouldn’t have taken that risk with the drill unless…”

  Stanley ’s gaze dropped, and the hand came back to rub his chin.

  “Unless?” I prompted.

  He made a thoughtful sound. “We had a big storm today, didn’t we?”

  James and I nodded.

  “Tell you what, Ollie. Let me think about this one. I’ll get back to you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, A GREAT PALL HAD settled on the White House. As I shredded sharp white Cheddar for our baked farfalle, I tried without success to fight the sadness. Today hardly felt like the day before a holiday. Although Cyan, Bucky, and I went through the motions of preparing this year’s Thanksgiving meal, we did so with little of the joy that usually accompanied our planning. There was no banter, no chitchat. Conversations were brief, and even our more fun-loving assistants kept to themselves when stopping in to pick up or drop off necessary items. Agda, of course, remained unaffected by the situation’s gravity, but as she kneaded dough that would later become tiny rolls, she must have sensed our collective sadness because she gave us sympathetic glances whenever she looked up from her work.

  “We have another SBA chef coming in today,” I told the group.

  Bucky had been adding chunks of pork roast to an open pan on the stove. We always prepared the meat filling the day before assembling tamales. He turned. “Did you bother with an interview this time?” he asked with a pointed look at Agda.

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” I said. “We were able to get Rafe.”

  “Rafe!” Cyan said, exhibiting the first cheer this kitchen had seen all day. “That’s perfect. He’s a genius with sauces.”

  “Hmph,” Bucky said, which I took as his version of support. Without an opening to badger me, he returned to his task, covering the pork with water and setting the flame below the pan to medium. Before long the kitchen would be filled with the succulent, roasty smell of the simmering meat. Keeping his back to me, Bucky asked, “Did you talk to Henry? About Gene, that is.”

  “I called him last night before I left here,” I said. “Henry’s planning to come to the wake.”

  “I figured he’d want to know.” Despite Bucky’s persistent crankiness and his singular ambition to prove himself right in all instances, he wasn’t a bad fellow. His shoulders and arms moved around a lot as he worked-as though in an animated conversation with himself. The back of his bobbing head, freckled in the small patch where he’d begun to lose his hair, looked suddenly vulnerable and weak. He shrugged to no one, talking softly. “Hell of a way to go.”

  I was about to agree, whe
n I thought about my conversation with Henry. He’d been shocked and saddened by the news of Gene’s death, but then what he’d said next struck a chord with me. “I’ve had friends at the White House pass away before, but never like this. Never had to deal with an accident of that magnitude. I give you credit, Ollie. I don’t know how I would cope.”

  I’d demurred, knowing full well that Henry always found ways to deal with new situations. He’d have certainly found a way to cope.

  I stopped shredding the Cheddar to take a look around my kitchen. Agda kneaded her dough at one corner of the center workstation, humming softly. Cyan slumped before the computer, an open cookbook on her lap. Bucky moved as though by rote.

  “Before Rafe gets here,” I said, clearing my throat, “I think we all need to-”

  “Talk?” Bucky asked. “Share our feelings? Should we stand around the countertop, hold hands, and sing ‘Kumbaya’?” He blew out a breath, raspberry style. “This is a kitchen, not a grief support group.”

  Cyan looked taken aback. So did Agda, whether she understood or not.

  But I’d caught the look in Bucky’s eyes before he’d masked it with sarcasm. I realized our resident curmudgeon was afraid we’d see that he was hurting, too. If Henry had been here, male camaraderie might have allowed him to pat Bucky sympathetically on the back. Maybe that would’ve started the healing process. I didn’t know. All I knew for certain was that I wasn’t Henry. So I’d have to do what I felt was best, given the circumstances.

  “I think we all need to recognize something.” I wiped my hands and came around to his side of the kitchen. Cyan rounded in, too. Bucky took a step back, looking as though he expected bodily harm. I continued. “Gene was where he wanted to be when he died. He loved the White House more than he even loved his own home. Ever since his wife died, Gene’s been more than a fixture here; he’s been the embodiment of the White House itself.” Cyan stared downward. Bucky’s mouth twitched and he looked away. “If anyone else had just gone through knee surgery, they would’ve been slow coming back. But Gene wanted to be here for the Christmas preparations.”