Three Blonde Mice

by Jane Heller

  We talked for another hour or so. He told amusing stories about the snowbirds in Palm Beach. He said what a relief it was when they all flocked north after Easter because he could finally get a table at a decent restaurant, a parking space at the local Publix supermarket, and a respite from the hectic round of parties. I told what I hoped were amusing stories about my clients at Pearson & Strulley and how rewarding it was when I was able to get them media attention for an actual accomplishment instead of trying to put a positive spin on something idiotic or even criminal they’d done. As I said, Jonathan was easy to talk to. I didn’t have to strain to make conversation. We commiserated about being only children and how it was a plus not having to deal with sibling rivalry but a minus not being able to deflect parental attention. We had a lot in common, it turned out. Like me, he was part of a trio of friends who got together often. Like me, he preferred companionship but was perfectly fine with living alone. Like me, he placed importance on honesty and trustworthiness. When he walked me back to my cottage, he lingered on the porch, as if contemplating whether to kiss me goodnight. And then he did kiss me goodnight. It was a soulful kiss that became a series of soulful kisses involving lip contact, tongue contact, my arms around his neck and his arms around my waist, even a little below-the-waist exploration.

  “You’re a terrific woman, Elaine,” said Jonathan a bit breathlessly when we broke apart.

  I wasn’t breathless—it had been a little odd and disorienting to kiss someone other than Simon—but I wasn’t a store mannequin, either. Having a man find me desirable triggered a reciprocal desire in me. I liked having Jonathan touch me and said so.

  “I’m trying to be a gentleman, since we just met,” he said. “But we’re two mature adults with no reason not to express our feelings, right?”

  “Right.”

  He kissed me once more, said goodnight, and stepped off my porch into the night.

  As I was turning to go inside, standing there fumbling in my bag for my key, pondering my life as Mrs. Birnbaum of New York and Palm Beach, I heard someone clomping onto the porch and assumed Jonathan had been unable to contain himself and come back for more kissing.

  “Hello,” said Simon, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He might as well have been whistling the way he was standing there with that happy-go-lucky look on his face. “So you were out with what’s-his-name?”

  “Jonathan, yes,” I said. “Were you spying on me?”

  “Not exactly. I saw him leave, that’s all.”

  “I like him,” I said. “Just so you know.”

  “Duly noted. Now, how about taking a walk with me?”

  “No, Simon.”

  “Want to stay here and talk?”

  “No, Simon.”

  “Want to sneak into the dairy barn and milk Missy?”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. I’d found my key and opened the door. “I can’t prevent you from finishing out the week here, but I think I’ve been more than straight with you. Call me unreasonable. Call me insensitive. Call me self-protective. It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is still this: I don’t want any involvement with you unless and until you’re all in and maybe not even then.”

  “None at all?” He stared at me with those stupidly gorgeous baby blues.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Not as a friend?”

  “I have enough friends. No.”

  “Not as someone you can tell your deep, dark secrets to?”

  “I don’t have any deep, dark secrets. Weren’t you the one who said I was born without a filter?”

  “Right. How about as a lover then? I could ravish you between cooking classes.”

  “Goodnight, Simon,” I said and closed the door behind me.

  13

  I luxuriated in a warm, soothing bath fortified with Whitley’s eucalyptus and vanilla bath salts. The idea was to get clean, of course. I’d spent the morning in a dairy barn, after all, and while Missy the cow was an enchanting creature with whom I would always feel an intimate connection, I did stick my face in her pristine-but-nevertheless-farm-animal privates. But the bath was also to decompress after the long, emotionally complicated day.

  After I nearly fell asleep in the tub, such were its restorative powers, I revived, stepped out onto the cool marble floor, and toweled off. Next came Whitley’s creamy, rich, lavender-and-jasmine body lotion, which I slathered all over my pruned skin before folding myself into their white velour robe with an elegant shawl collar. If it was possible for a neurotic, tightly coiled New Yorker with boyfriend problems to feel Zen-like and serene, I did at that moment.

  It was in this blissful state that I decided it really was time to find Whitley’s tote bag with the recipes, Chef Hill’s bio and cookbook, and whatever else Rebecca Kissel had stuffed into the bag, so I went searching around the cottage. I looked in the clothes closet. I looked in the coat closet. I looked in the bottom drawer of the dresser. I even looked under the bed, just in case the housekeeper had stowed it there while she was vacuuming.

  “There you are,” I said when I found the bag in the corner, shoehorned between the chaise and the oversized suitcase I’d crammed with pants and tops and shoes, most of which would have been more appropriate for a week on the French Riviera.

  There really wasn’t much of interest in the bag, I discovered, as I toted the tote over to the bed, plopped down on the duvet, and dumped the contents in front of me. I had expected free goodies, as in cheeses, chocolates, a bottle of wine—something tempting thrown in with all the press releases and directives—but there was just a bunch of papers along with the cookbook.

  “No swag here,” I said. I made piles of the tote bag’s contents on the bed: a pile for Chef Hill’s information, a pile for the recipes, and a pile for miscellany—i.e. the history of Whitley Farm, a site map of the property, testimonials from past travelers, a FAQ sheet, the schedule for our agritourism week, and a list of activities for the Saturday Bounty Fest finale.

  I was about to toss the last document into the miscellany pile—I figured it was just Rebecca welcoming us yet again to our week of fun and games—when my eyes lit on the letter’s addressee. Instead of Dear Cultivate Our Bounty Guests, Dear Agritourists, or Dear Farm-to-Table Enthusiasts, the letter read: Dear Pudding.

  Who in the world was Pudding?

  Because of my advancing age, I held the letter at a distance so I could actually see its words without squinting.

  “What are you all about?” I asked the letter, and started reading.

  There was something in there about a cooking video on YouTube. There was something in there about the chef in the video loving pudding. There was something in there about Hollywood movies in which villains dissolved and vaporized—a lot of drivel is what I’m saying, and I was surprised. Rebecca had struck me as a levelheaded, high-minded sort of woman, but judging by the letter she wrote to “Pudding,” she must have had a silly, whimsical side too.

  I was about to keep going, keep reading, but then I stopped. Abruptly. It was the first sentence of the second paragraph that seized me with a sense of foreboding and caused my throat to constrict.

  The letter wasn’t from Rebecca at all, it turned out, but rather from a member of my group, someone I’d foraged with and milked with and made cheese with, and the recipient was…. Well, the letter must have been intended for Chef Jason Hill, even though I’d been the recipient instead. Why I was the recipient, I couldn’t fathom.

  I signed up to be a guest at the hotel’s Cultivate Our Bounty week just so I could get close to you, but since we won’t have quality time alone until the very end, I thought I should write a quick note to say how much I despise you.

  Sheesh. Somebody sure didn’t like Chef Hill. He wasn’t my favorite person either and, as I’ve said, I planned to critique his teaching style on various websites, but it wouldn’t occur to me to write a letter trashing him to his face.

  Yes, despise you. Does it scare you to hear that? Are you
shocked that someone doesn’t think you’re God’s greatest gift to the world? I’ll pretend to be your fan for the entire week, and you’ll probably buy my act, because you don’t have a clue. You walk around like you’re this important chef, someone whose passion in the kitchen we’re supposed to admire, but we both know you’re in it for the money and the ego. You’re all about having foodies slobber over you as a promoter of the farm-to-table movement—excuse me, the farm-to-fork movement. Or is it plough-to-plate, cow-to-kitchen, barn-to-bistro, or mulch-to-meal? I can’t keep track of your terminology anymore, can you? Bottom line: There’s only one movement you promote, and it’s your own.

  I started to hyperventilate. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree that Chef Hill was a phony or that the farm-to-table thing had gone beyond the bounds of sanity, but the writer’s tone was angry, threatening, and personal, and it made me very anxious—so anxious that I tried doing a mindfulness meditation involving a warm sandy beach. I tried imagining healing energy in the form of shimmering golden light traveling through my crown chakra right down to the tips of my toes. And I tried Andrew Weil’s 4-7-8 breathing exercise, which required me to purse my lips and make whoosh sounds.

  Nothing worked. I set the letter on the bed very gingerly, as if it might detonate, and reached into the drawer of the night table, rummaged frantically among my antacids, fiber supplements, and hand sanitizers, located the Xanax, and popped one.

  I allowed my heart rate a few minutes to return to near normal and read the rest of the letter, knowing full well that my week at Whitley had most likely taken a dark and possibly devastating detour.

  You’re a fraud—100 percent con artist. You wouldn’t know authenticity if it hit you over the head with one of your overpriced cast iron skillets. You have the image of this do-gooder who’s all about the land and the farmer and the planet, when in fact you have no conscience, no remorse for your actions. Do you know how much those actions enrage me? Enrage me, as in pure, unprocessed, non-genetically modified rage. If you don’t get that, you will—as soon as it sinks in that your miserable life is nearly over. When that happens, your instinct will be to use this letter to protect yourself, but you won’t show it to anybody: not the police, not even the little toads who work for you, because you have too many secrets of your own and can’t risk the exposure. Pretty interesting predicament you’re in, wouldn’t you say?

  Yes, whatever was eating the writer was personal, deeply felt, and dangerous. Chef Hill needed protection from this person—that much was obvious—and I planned to alert him and his entourage so they could determine who was harboring a massive grudge against him. Surely whatever skeletons were in the chef’s closet wouldn’t prevent him from trying to root out the loony tune in our midst and hand him or her over to law enforcement right away. In all probability, the letter writer was simply venting—didn’t we all need to blow off steam from time to time? This didn’t mean the writer actually intended to cause bodily harm. It calmed me down to believe that. But then I had to finish reading the damn letter, of course I did, and there was nothing and no one that could calm me down by the time I got to the end.

  I’m sorry about having to kill you on Saturday at the Bounty Fest thing. Not because you deserve to live—we’re all better off with you dead, believe me—but because killing isn’t something I do on a regular basis, and I really don’t want to get caught. There’s always the chance that some unlucky bastards could show up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’d have to take them out too. Still, while I’d rather not commit multiple murders, killing you will be so satisfying after what you did that I’ll just have to shrug off potential collateral damage. Besides, any idiots who fall for your Cultivate Our Bounty bullshit deserve whatever they get.

  I was a mess after reading that, Xanax or no Xanax. The saliva in my mouth dried up even as my skin grew cold and slick. I was exploding with questions, so many questions, and in the dead quiet of my cottage with only the occasional cricket chirps for company, I couldn’t begin to answer them.

  My initial ones were these:

  Which of my fellow agritourists wrote the letter?

  Which of my fellow agritourists was a good enough actor to pretend to care about agritourism?

  What incident or series of incidents between one of my fellow agritourists and Chef Hill had provoked the letter?

  How did the letter find its way into my tote bag given that all the tote bags were lined up on the hospitality table during the Happy Hour Welcome Party, each with our name tag on them?

  Why couldn’t Jackie and Pat and I take a simple vacation together without somebody trying to kill somebody, for God’s sake, and what the hell was I supposed to do about it?

  14

  I slipped the letter into the pocket of my Whitley robe, put on my socks and sneakers, and hightailed it over to Pat’s cottage, where we’d agreed to meet after I’d called both my friends and told them I had an urgent matter to discuss.

  Praying I wouldn’t get caught running around outside in my robe, I ran into Lake and Gabriel, who were taking their nightly walk around the grounds.

  “Exercising after a meal is the key to good bowel health,” he said.

  “Absolutely,” I said, nodding vigorously. “That’s why I’m out here. Much better than Dulcolax.”

  “You shouldn’t take laxatives,” Lake scolded. “They’re loaded with chemicals, and your colon becomes dependent on them.”

  I held my hands up in surrender. “Never again.” I was dying to get away from this crazy couple even as I was regarding them intently. Could one of them have written the letter to Chef Hill? Did he, too, take nightly constitutionals, and had there been an argument of some sort while all three of them were tending to their bowel health? And then I remembered that the letter was written before the start of Cultivate Our Bounty week, so the would-be killer must have had a pre-agritourist grudge.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said to the VanderKloot-Arnolds, and beat it.

  Pat and Jackie were waiting by the door when I got there, and they both smelled of alcohol. Apparently, Jackie and Alex had gotten chummy and made a routine of going to Whitley’s bar for a nightcap or two, and Pat had joined them this once, sipping an iced chocolate Bailey’s Irish Cream concoction with a straw instead of throwing back margaritas like they did. The result was that I had gone to my friends about a life-and-death situation, and they were not at full mental capacity.

  “Uh-oh,” said Jackie when I showed up. “It’s the booze police.”

  “I just want to talk,” I said, “and not about that.”

  Jackie was teetering as she plunked herself down on Pat’s bed. She was slurring her words too. I was determined to keep my mouth shut about her drinking during the trip, but once we were home, I was letting her have it. As for Pat, she was tipsy, and stumbled and nearly fell as she made her way over to the chair.

  “What’s so terrible that you had to drag us away from the bar?” Jackie asked as I faced them both. “You look pale. Are you sick or something?”

  “This is not about my health,” I said. “It’s about Chef Hill’s.”

  Jackie stared at me. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, not that I wish the guy any harm, but who cares?”

  “Someone is planning to kill him—someone in our agritourism group,” I said, and waited for them to boo and hiss and call me a paranoid neurotic.

  “Elaine.” Jackie shook her head at me and groaned on cue. “I love you, honey, but you’re a psycho sometimes. Jeez. I was enjoying my drink, and you had to get me over here for some bullshit plot of yours? Give it a rest. We’re on vacation.”

  “She can’t help it, Jackie,” said Pat, who didn’t like anybody to be mean. “She worries. Some people are worriers, that’s all.”

  I pulled the letter out of my pocket. “You’ll understand after you read this. It was in my Whitley tote bag. It’s a death threat.”

  “Elaine,” Jackie groaned again. “It’s probably a prank cooked up by
Rebecca’s staff because life can’t be that exciting for kids working on a farm in the summer.”

  “Like with all that cyber-bullying on Facebook and Twitter,” said Pat, “only a letter instead.”

  “You can trace a tweet and a Facebook post,” I said. “The writer of the letter didn’t want it to be traced. And by the way, even kids who work on a farm in the summer aren’t dumb enough to risk generating bad PR for their employer. No, we’re definitely dealing with a real murder plot here.”

  “You and your murderers,” said Jackie.

  “Fine. You don’t believe me? Here,” I said, handing her the letter.

  “I don’t want it,” she said. “I’m too fucking tired.”

  “Shut up and read it, Jackie,” I said. “Out loud so Pat can hear it, unless you’re both too impaired.”

  She gave me the finger and started reading. “Dear Pudding? So it’s a recipe?”

  “Keep going,” I said.

  She read, her eyes growing wider with every word, her voice getting quieter and more disbelieving. When she reached the last paragraph about killing Chef Hill and the “unlucky bastards” who might be killed along with him, she let the letter float to the floor and slumped backwards onto the bed, legs splayed. “Not again. Not after last year.”

  Pat tiptoed over and picked up the letter with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, as if the piece of paper was on fire and she didn’t want to get burned. She sat back down and read it silently except for the occasional gasp.

  “It was in your tote bag, Elaine?” Jackie finally said, propping herself up.

  I nodded. “Obviously it was supposed to go in Chef’s Hill’s bag, but the letter writer must have been in a hurry and stuck it in mine by accident. I only got around to looking in the bag a little while ago.”

  Pat came over and hugged me. Then she looked up at me. “What does it all mean?”