“No, I’m fine.” I pushed open the front door, which had been left unlocked for—I checked my watch—nearly five hours. I shivered. “Thank you so much for—” I paused, “—well, everything.”
He nodded and studied me. There I went, blushing again. Suddenly, Jackie was running over to greet me with a frantic yap, yap, yap, which I interpreted as “Where have you been?” I picked her up.
“Call me if you need anything.” Mitchell said, hopping over the railing that divided our joined stoops.
“I will. I promise.”
He turned to unlock his own door, and I found myself checking him out. Hmm. He does have a nice butt. I closed the door behind me and carried Jackie to the mudroom.
“Be honest with me, Jackie. Just how bad do I look?” She stared at me, horrified.
When I looked in the mirror five minutes later, all that was missing were blood and bruises—otherwise, I looked exactly like Rocky after the fight. I shuddered to think that Mitchell had actually seen me like this. I couldn’t go out in public and especially not to the restaurant. I’d scare the customers away. I didn’t even want Toni to see me. I picked up the phone and pressed the speed dial for Skinny’s.
The moment Toni heard my voice she became anxious. “What’s wrong? You sound like you have a cold.”
“Well, there’s nothing to worry about anymore. By tomorrow morning I’ll feel perfectly fine.”
“What do you mean you’ll feel better in the morning? What’s wrong?”
I told her what happened. As much as I tried to make light of it, Toni was dismayed.
“I’m coming right over,” she said, hanging up before I could talk her out of it.
Sure enough, soon Toni was at my door. I let her in, hiding behind my hands, which she pulled aside—in her eyes I saw shock, immediately followed by amusement. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just…your lips look like they’re on steroids.”
“Not funny.”
Her laugh was infectious, and soon I was laughing, too—a short, weak laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. She regained her composure, then launched into ten minutes of “Poor you. You could have died. Why didn’t you call me? Maybe Skinny’s should stop serving seafood entirely.”
At last she calmed down and in no time took over. She let Jackie out for her pee-pee, made me a cup of tea, got me cold compresses for my face and reassured me that I still looked gorgeous. Yeah, right. Even though I knew that last one was an out-and-out lie, it helped me feel better nonetheless. I followed Toni’s advice and crawled into bed. Within seconds, I was in a deep dreamless sleep.
When I next opened my eyes, it was morning. The sun was streaming in, and joy of joys, when I walked my fingers over my face, it felt normal. The swelling was gone.
“Good morning.” I looked up to see Toni, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. She set a cup of coffee on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You stayed all night? You didn’t have to do that.”
She dismissed it with a shrug. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever wake up. It’s ten o’clock.”
“Oh, no, poor Jackie.” I struggled to sit up.
“Don’t worry. I already took her for a walk.” As an afterthought, she added, “That little thing sure has a mind of her own. She wouldn’t let me take her anywhere but to the park.”
“You didn’t happen to run into Kim with her Yorkie, by any chance?”
She looked at me blankly. “No, does Kim have a Yorkie? I had no idea.”
I harrumphed. “She does—just got one recently. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I swear, I think she got her dog only so she has something in common with me. And of course, her dog is a male and Jackie has a crush on him.”
“You are nuts, you know that, don’t you?” It did sound crazy. “Maybe she just wants to be friends.”
I shrugged. “Anyhow, whenever Jackie sees Kim’s dog, she completely ignores me. Even liver treats won’t make her come. I think she’s in love.”
“Jackie, Jackie, Jackie,” Toni said, shaking her head. “You and I are going to have a talk about men.” She continued in mock-serious tone. “A woman doesn’t know what real happiness is until she’s married. And by then it’s too late.”
“Speaking of men and marriage, how are things with you and Steven?”
“Things with Steven?” She gave me a blank look. “Nothing worth talking about, really.” A small smile peeked out of the corners of her mouth.
“By the way, I ran into your neighbor.” She changed the subject, as she did whenever I asked about Steven. “He wanted to know how you’re feeling today. He said he drove you to the hospital?” She watched for my reaction as she added with a purr, “You know how you should show your gratitude to a sexy guy like him?”
“Stop it, Toni!” I exclaimed. Then, in an even tone, I told her about inviting him to dinner.
“You invited him for a date with half a dozen other people, two weeks from now? What kind of a thank-you is that?”
“I thought that was nice of me.”
“Sweetheart, I’m sure he doesn’t want you to be nice. Don’t you know that when a girl is good, she’s good, but when she’s naughty, she’s so much better? You should practice being naughty once in a while. You’ll have way more fun.”
I chortled. “You have a point.”
“All right, time for you to get up. Or are you planning to play invalid all day?”
I sighed and threw back the covers. “So much for being pampered.”
“By the way, Janice Bradley called last night. She said something about wanting to thank you for tea. When Jake told her you were sick, she was very concerned. She offered to come over after her shift.”
“That’s so nice of her. I’ll call her in a little while.”
“I can do that for you. Should I ask her to come?”
“No, I’m fine now. Besides, I have a great nurse right here.”
“Hah! More like Nurse Ratched, if you ask me.”
I hopped out of bed. “Okay, I’m up, I’m up. Save your electroshock treatment for the next victim.”
*
After my shower, I found Toni in the kitchen, cleaning out my fridge. The floor around her was covered with an assortment of jars—mayo, Dijon mustard, ketchup, even the milk carton was getting ditched.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I got rid of everything that was opened.”
“So much for milk in my coffee.”
“You had an unopened carton. I kept that one. I know I might be going overboard here, but until we figure out what caused your allergic reaction, you shouldn’t take any chances.”
“I agree. But if I ever have another reaction, I can inject myself. They gave me my own epinephrine kit.”
She grimaced. “Oh, gross.”
“My sentiments exactly. But it beats going through that panic again.”
As she left a bit later, I assured her that I’d come in to work in a few hours.
“Only if you’re up to it. And in the meantime, stay away from shellfish.” She kissed me goodbye and dashed off.
*
I was on my way to Skinny’s when I saw Jake darting through traffic to greet me. And right there, in the middle of Queen Street, he threw his arms around me in a bear hug. When he pulled away, I was touched to see tears in his eyes.
“I can’t believe what happened. It’s so awful! You almost died!”
“If we stay here, we’ll both die,” I retorted as a car honked its horn.
We dashed back to the safety of the sidewalk.
“From the fuss you’re making, you’d think I’m Lazarus raised from the dead. Don’t worry. I’m perfectly fine.” Admittedly, I was still a bit shaky. All this life-and-death drama was hard on the nerves.
“Toni told me to keep all seafood away from you,” he said. “So I set new rules in the kitchen. Everyone has to use the meat counter strictly for the seafood preparation. You are not to go near that one. The other counter
is now for meat. We can prep everything else on the assembly counter. The same goes for chopping blocks and wooden spoons. Oh, and you’re not allowed anywhere near the walk-in refrigerator.”
“In other words, Jake, you’re turning this into a kosher kitchen?”
He laughed. “Sounds that way, doesn’t it? Don’t ever tell my mother, not even as a joke. She’d die if she thought her nice Catholic boy was turning Jewish.” He winked at me. “There’s a lot about me I don’t tell my mother.”
As I closed the door behind us, Marley appeared from the kitchen. “Someone’s on the phone for you, Nicky.” He handed it over to me.
“Nicky, how are you feeling?”
I immediately recognized Janice’s voice.
“I’m fine. Toni told me that you offered to come by. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t want anyone to see me looking like the Creature from the Blue Lagoon.”
“What happened? Toni said you ate something. Was it food poisoning?”
“It was an allergic reaction, it seems. But I have no idea to what. As far as I know, the only allergy I have is to oysters, but I was having chicken when it started.”
“Were there any nuts in the recipe?”
“No, not at all.”
“You’ve got to get yourself tested. Have the leftovers analyzed.”
“Too late. Toni got rid of practically everything I had in my fridge.”
“Did the hospital give you a list of foods to avoid?”
“Yes, and they gave me an epinephrine kit.”
“Oh, good. Now promise you’ll call me if you don’t feel well,” she said. “Actually, I might drop in on you anyway. Make sure you’re all right.”
As I hung up, I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was that so many people cared about my well-being. When Toni came in, I told her about all the steps Jake had taken to make the kitchen safe for me. “Have you noticed that he’s been taking on a lot of responsibility on his own?”
“I know. He’s been supervising the food orders, too. And yesterday, he took charge when I left. He even did the books and prepared the deposits.”
“He’d be a great manager, don’t you think?”
“Between Jake and Charles, we hardly have to be here anymore. We could take time off,” she said with a growing smile. “As long as we can keep this place afloat, that is.”
In the kitchen, I noticed a folded newspaper on the prep table. I picked it up and scanned it briefly. Much to my relief, there was no mention of Rob’s murder. The papers rarely published articles about the murders anymore. For weeks I’d lived in fear that the papers would link my name to the restaurant, but that had never happened. If it had, there’d be no need to create a new menu. We’d be out of business.
Life could always be worse.
I set the paper aside and went to the pantry for tomato paste for the next recipe I wanted to create. I was rummaging through the cans when I came across a small glass bottle that looked like… I picked it up. It was a bottle of oyster juice. My heart went into overdrive. Could my allergic reaction have been purposely induced? I was staring at the bottle in my hands, when Toni appeared at my side.
“What’s that?” she said, and then, “Oh, my God.” She grabbed the bottle from me and threw it into the garbage can. “We can’t have any of that lying around here.”
I watched, openmouthed, as she left the kitchen. All I could think was that Charles had made the chicken dish I’d had for lunch the previous day. And Toni had handed me the bag. And she’d been awfully quick to clean out my fridge. Getting rid of evidence? Could one of them have…? No, that was just too awful to even consider.
a balanced diet is one
cookie in each hand
By the next morning, I’d concluded that I would be out of my mind to suspect Charles or Toni, and had dismissed that idea. Since missing a few days of work over a month ago, Charles had been nothing but punctual and dependable, so we’d never had that talk with him. Besides, what could his motive possibly be? As for Toni, she was my closest friend.
I poured my energy into creating low-calorie recipes. Replicating flavors and textures with lower-calorie ingredients was even more of a challenge than I’d originally thought. I consulted countless healthy cookbooks for inspiration—everything from vegan cooking to heart-smart cooking. All this kept me occupied, a blessing really, since it helped me push my worries out of my mind.
I was studying a calorie-counting manual my mother had given me years ago. Why I’d kept this, I had no idea. This was the first time I’d as much as looked at it. To my horror, the first thing I learned from the healthy weight chart was that, because my frame was small, I’d been way more than twenty-five pounds overweight. Somewhere inside I’d probably known this, but seeing it in print made it impossible to deny. I did a quick calculation. I’d been consuming about three thousand calories a day, almost twice as much as I should be eating. I tried to imagine how much food—or I should say how little food—two thousand calories represented. Why, that was starvation!
With a groan, I began checking the calorie content of a few basic ingredients. I was an aficionado of French cooking, and as Julia Child had always said, “There is no such thing as too much butter.” I couldn’t have agreed with her more. A little butter made everything taste a little better, and a lot of butter…you get my drift. When I’d first looked it up, I’d been horrified to find that one single tablespoon was over one hundred calories. Whipping cream—fifty-two calories per tablespoon.
I put the book aside and redid my calculations. Holy shit. With the amount of butter and cream I used in a basic sauce… At work, I was forever sampling sauces. According to this, each itty-bitty taste was the equivalent of sixty-five to seventy-five calories. Multiply that by, say, twenty tastes each day. I quickly added it all up—I wasn’t consuming three thousand calories a day, but over four thousand. No wonder I was fat.
I pulled out the recipe card for my secret, super-flaky piecrust, the one I used for all our pies. Now how the hell was I supposed to make a low-calorie pie crust?
By the time I realized I was late for work, my kitchen looked like a cafeteria food-fight zone. I’d tried countless versions of a lower-fat piecrust and the best one had come out as hard as a brick. The worst one…well, let’s just say it was worse. I’d baked half a dozen different quiche lorraines and I was pretty happy with a no-crust spinach version that I was taking to the restaurant for Toni to sample. She and the boys could help me decide if it was good enough to add to our menu.
I was coming up to the entrance when through the window I noticed Toni sitting in the corner, frowning down at bills strewn all over the table. She glanced up as I walked in and then went right back to punching numbers on the calculator. I didn’t get a “How are you?” or even a “Hello.”
“You look about as happy as a turkey on Thanksgiving morning,” I told her, closing the door behind me. “If you don’t wipe that frown off your face, you’ll scare all our customers away.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms. “Do you want to know how bad things really are?” I wondered briefly if I did. “We don’t have any customers to scare off. I’ve been doing some calculations and, according to this, we aren’t even coming close to break even. If we keep on this way much longer, we’ll either have to inject a large dose of capital or close shop.”
My face must have reflected my disappointment because her eyes softened and she continued, joking, “On the bright side, I found out that whenever I want to meet a new man, all I have to do is fall behind on our bills and dozens of them come crawling out of the woodwork. And they all have the same name—Bill Collector.”
“That bad?” I asked, joining her at the table. I already knew it was that bad. But I’d hoped that Toni didn’t. I wasn’t ready to give up the battle, but I was afraid she might.
She nodded. “We’re losing thousands of dollars a month. I’m afraid an injection of cash would only be throwing good
money after bad.” She sighed and pushed away the calculator. “On the other hand, I think your idea is really good.”
“So do I.” I held out my covered pie plate. “It isn’t much, but I’ve come up with a low-calorie quiche.”
Toni stared at me wide eyed. “You have? You’ve already completed a low-calorie meal?”
“Actually, I have a few main courses. I have a low-calorie Caesar salad, a wonderful skinny chicken parmesan.” I handed her the quiche. “And this, which I’m not one-hundred-percent sure about.”
She pulled off the wrapping and inhaled. “It smells wonderful. I bet it’s divine.” At my skepticism, she winked. “If it isn’t, you’ll keep working at it until it is.”
*
We conducted our first official taste test in the dining room.
“How do you like that?” Toni asked. “Not one single customer all day. I swear I’d put up a red light and sit naked in the window if I thought it would help.”
“Dahhhling,” Jake drawled. “In this area, you might do better if you let me sit in the window.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “When we advertise our Skinny Menu, we’ll be so busy we’ll be turning people away.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear. All right, let’s start.”
I steered everyone toward the corner table.
“Not there,” Toni said. “You know what they say, ‘He who eats in an empty restaurant should not expect fresh food.’ Let’s use the window table.”
“Good idea.” I wasn’t convinced this would fool anyone into thinking the place was full, but I could see her point.
Charles brought out a bottle of chardonnay and poured everyone half a glass. “Here you go.” He passed them around, then poured himself a full one. At Toni’s raised eyebrows, he threw his hands up. “Hey, I cooked.”
Charles was the creator of the night’s entrée, a whole-wheat penne with roasted cauliflower, walnuts and feta—which he swore was to die for—and only three hundred and sixty-five calories. Across the room, Toni gave me a doubtful look. I guessed what she was thinking. The dish didn’t sound very appealing
Getting Skinny (A Chef Landry Mystery) Page 20