by Jane Heller
“How about this?” he asked, referring to the music. “An oldie.”
I quickly closed the book and composed my face into what I hoped was a sex kitten look.
“Elvis,” he said when the song started to play. He beckoned me to him, held me tightly around my waist, brought his face close to mine, and starting humming as we moved side to side. “‘Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.’ Apropos song title, maybe?”
“Um hmm,” I said noncommittally. My mother used to listen to Elvis’s records while she was ironing, and she would imitate his hip swivel. She had a sense of humor when she wasn’t railing against my father.
As Jonathan resumed dotting my neck with kisses and the occasional flick of his tongue, my mind continued to wander. Could he really be a murderer? He seemed like such a dear man, and he liked me. But just to be safe, I peppered him with questions about Chef Hill as we danced. Was he angry with the chef for denigrating food bloggers? Did he think the chef was a fraud, the way the letter writer did? Did he come to Cultivate Our Bounty week to take farm-to-table cooking classes and fulfill his summer travel obligation to his mother or did he have another purpose in coming? He asked why I was asking, but gave me satisfactory answers to the first two questions. And then he smiled at the last one.
“Yes, I did have another purpose in coming to Whitley.” He stopped dancing and gazed into my eyes. Our bodies were pressed together, and I felt his erection. Oh God.
“Another purpose?” I said, trying to ignore the fact that he was aroused in the middle of my interrogation.
“Don’t laugh, but I think I came here to meet Elaine Zimmerman,” he said, his own eyes hooded with desire. “I think it was our destiny to meet.”
Let me say a few words about destiny: I don’t believe in it. I also don’t believe in one door closing and another door opening. I don’t believe in everything happening for a reason, either. I believe that we go along and work hard and do the best we can, and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn’t and that’s just how it is. As far as Jonathan Birnbaum was concerned, I believed that we met because we both happened to write a big fat check to Whitley Farm for the same week. But of course I didn’t say so. I said, “All I know is this trip has taken some turns I wasn’t expecting, and you’re one of them, Jonathan.”
We kissed and pawed each other as we danced, but my heart wasn’t really in it. There were too many uncertainties buzzing around in my head.
I told Jonathan I needed a bathroom break. “The heat and humidity,” I said by way of explanation instead of the truth, which was that I wanted to do more snooping. “I drank a lot of water today.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he said, his face glowing with anticipation.
I took a look around the fancy bathroom with no idea what I was expecting to find. I opened the vanity drawers and didn’t come upon anything remarkable. I checked the inside of the shower and there was nothing of interest there, unless Jonathan was planning to kill Chef Hill with his Gillette Mach 3 Turbo razor. I spotted his brown leather Dopp kit and peeked inside. Along with his deodorant, nail clippers, and cologne were bottles of pills—the usual meds for a man of his age: Norvasc, Lipitor, Nexium and—wait—four bottles of Vicodin? Each Vicodin prescription filled at a different pharmacy in Palm Beach? Each written for Beatrice Birnbaum?
I was dumbfounded, naturally. What was Jonathan doing with four bottles of an opiate that weren’t even his? Was he an addict, pretending to be his mother’s caregiver, filling her prescriptions for her arthritis pain medication and keeping them for himself? Or had he been stockpiling the pills expressly for this trip? Maybe his plan was to come to Whitley, wait until Bounty Fest, force the whole stash down Chef Hill’s throat at gunpoint and cause him to overdose.
“Don’t be too long, Elaine,” Jonathan called out. “I miss you.”
Right. Right. I was supposed to be peeing. I ran the water in the sink, flushed the toilet, rinsed my hands and wiped them on a towel. And then I took a deep breath and sashayed back out there.
Jonathan encircled me in his arms. He had turned off the music and was now walking me toward the bed, serious intent in his eyes—and in his pants. “If it’s too soon, tell me,” he murmured.
“Too soon,” I said quickly. Having sex with a possible husband would have been permissible, if a little promiscuous after only one date, but having sex with a possible murderer? Not a chance. “I mean, I really like being with you, Jonathan, but I think we should take it slower.”
“I understand.” He settled for sitting me down at the end of the bed instead of throwing me down and mounting me. “It’s just that we’re heading toward the end of our week here, and I feel the clock ticking.”
“You and me both,” I said, thinking of poor Chef Hill, for whom Saturday was D Day unless my friends and I intervened. I needed to talk to them ASAP and tell them what I found out. I looked at my watch. “Damn.” I bolted up, nearly head-butting Jonathan. “I’m so sorry. I just remembered I’m supposed to call a client in five minutes—major PR disaster, you have no idea—and I have to get back to my cottage so I’ll have my notes in front of me.”
“But it’s late,” Jonathan pointed out. “And you’re on vacation.”
“I’m never really on vacation, total workaholic, and the client is three hours earlier in California, Hollywood type,” I said, grasping for even a semi-plausible explanation for my behavioral about-face. “She’s—well, let’s just say she’s the star of a very popular TV series on Netflix.”
Jonathan perked up. “It’s not by any chance Robin Wright? She’s brilliant on House of Cards.”
“Okay, yes, it’s Robin Wright,” I lied. “But please don’t tell anyone, because she’d fire me if she thought I was betraying a confidence.” My most high-profile celebrity client at the moment was a seventeen-year-old video gamer with over two million followers on Twitter.
“Of course,” he said. “Attorney-client privilege, right?”
“Exactly. Gotta go. But we’ll pick this up again tomorrow?”
“You bet,” he said as I hurried toward the door. Between the weirdness of all the cookbooks and the giant supply of Vicodin, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Thank you for the flowers and the dancing,” I said as we stood in his doorway. “You were sweet to have me over.”
“Nothing ‘sweet’ about it,” said Jonathan. “I wanted to be with my new lady.”
His new lady, I thought as I left. Was that what I was? Maybe, if he didn’t turn out to be a cold-blooded killer.
20
“What do you make of it all?” I asked Jackie and Pat when we convened at my cottage.
“Pill popper,” said Jackie, referring to the Vicodin.
“I never would have guessed,” Pat said after a tsk-tsk. “He seemed so nice.”
“He’s still nice,” said Jackie. “But he should be at a rehab place instead of a farm resort. None of this links him to the letter though.”
“And the cookbooks he brought with him from home could just mean he really does want to be a chef,” said Pat. “He probably reads recipes the way Bill reads medical case histories.”
“I hope he’s not a pill popper.” I sighed, flashing back to my intimate moments with Jonathan. “I can’t get involved with a drug addict. I have my limits.”
“We struck out with Alex,” said Jackie. “All she did was talk about her screenplay.”
“And dental hygiene,” said Pat. “She told us the difference between calculus and plaque.”
Jackie yawned. “We’ll have better luck tomorrow when we’re all cooking together. Oh, and I’m planning to get Kevin’s take on the people in our group.”
“Who the hell is Kevin?” I asked.
“The hot gardener in charge of the foraging lesson,” she said. “He helped out when Beatrice did her ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ routine.”
I shrugged. “Sure, why not.”
“I still think you shoul
d ask Simon to help,” Pat said to me.
“And I think we should all go to bed,” I said, not having the energy to revisit that conversation.
We said goodnight and pledged to get to the bottom of the letter when we were fresher in body and mind.
“Don’t forget to lock your doors,” I told my friends as they were leaving. “Rebecca’s idyllic place isn’t so idyllic after all.”
Alone at last, I changed into my nightgown, a very short pink cotton number that fell about mid-thigh. I only resorted to wearing it in hot, humid weather, because it exposed so much of my legs and made me look like a stork, but who cared. No one would see me.
At least that’s what I thought. No sooner did I wash my face, apply moisturizer, and put my night guard in, the one that kept my teeth from grinding themselves into dust while I slept, than I heard a knock at the door.
I considered not answering it. I considered calling the front desk. I considered screaming, “Help!” It was much too late for visitors, so I was sure it was the killer who’d found out I’d been snooping and come to carve me up with a bread knife.
I peeked out the side window and saw it was only Simon. Since he was the lesser of two evils, I let him in.
“Whaareyoudoinghere?” I said.
He pointed to my mouth. “Could you take that thing out so we can talk?”
“Oh. Right.” I pried out the night guard and put it in its little plastic case in the bathroom. By the time I was back, Simon was hanging his black rain slicker on the hook in the entryway. I’d been so focused on the murder business that I’d completely ignored the fact that it had started to thunder—the first storm of our week at Whitley. There was lightning, too, and the rain was intensifying—summer storms often flared up in the heat only to peter out an hour or two later. “And the reason for this drop-in? Are you writing a piece about an agritourist who would rather go to sleep than rehash the same old argument with—”
He didn’t let me finish. Instead he pulled me into his arms and kissed me, and I nearly passed out from the sheer exquisiteness of his mouth on mine. This was nothing like what Jonathan and I had been doing. This was the real thing, the thing I’d missed more than I’d wanted to admit, and I couldn’t allow myself to get sucked back into it.
I started to push Simon away the minute our lips made contact again, but like many a heroine of a romantic melodrama, I succumbed and fell deeply into the kiss, into his arms. We stayed in the entryway like that—kissing and taking a breath and then kissing some more—for at least ten minutes before he finally took my hand and led me to the bed. It occurred to me that I should have shaved my legs. It occurred to me that I should have worn something sexier than the stork nightie. It occurred to me that I should have skipped the moisturizer, which was rich and creamy but left a residue wherever it landed. In this case on Simon’s shirt.
“What’s the point of this?” I said as he lowered me down onto the bed.
“No analyzing. Let’s just be together, Slim, and the future will take care of itself, okay?”
The future involved the murder of a famous chef and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity, so the present was infinitely more appealing. “Okay,” I said, feeling my body open up to the man I couldn’t have stopped loving no matter how hard I tried.
“I love you,” he murmured as he lifted the nightgown over my head. “You make me crazy, but I love you.”
“Same here,” I said as I unzipped his jeans. I used to think of myself as a non-sexual person before I met Simon. The sort of throbbing, soaking wet, multiple orgasms, transcendent sensory experience that other women raved about had escaped me. And then Simon and I made love for the first time on the Princess Charming and I thought: This is what they’re all talking about. This is why they can’t get enough of it. This is what they mean by “great sex.” Not only was Simon an expert at lovemaking, but he made me feel desired and cherished when we made love. And another thing: he made me feel safe—not a bad way to feel, under the circumstances.
Day Five:
Friday, July 19
21
“Did you know that mosquitoes are attracted to people who give off carbon dioxide during exertion?” said Simon as he was pulling on his jeans, tucking in his shirt, and watching me at the same time. “So try to keep the heavy breathing to a minimum.”
The rain had given way to an oppressively hot and sticky morning with the threat of more thunder showers forecasted for later in the day. I dressed accordingly in a light, loose-fitting tunic and capri pants, and slathered myself in both sunscreen and insect repellent.
“Thanks for the tip,” I said, wondering if I’d be exerting myself and breathing heavily as I was fending off a crazed letter writer. Yes, Simon and I had shared a blissful night together, and being with him had helped me block out visions of death and destruction, for which I was grateful, but nothing had changed between us. He hadn’t proposed either before or after our athletic sex or indicated that he would when we got back to New York. And so I had vowed yet again to move on without him. Still, I couldn’t deny the wisdom of telling him about the letter and letting him offer another point of view.
When he was ready to leave the cottage, he stroked my cheek tenderly. “I guess you’ll go back to ignoring me today?”
“Actually, no,” I said. “Could you sit a minute? I could use your input.”
His brows furrowed and he settled into one of the chairs. “You’re in trouble. All those who-could-be-a-murderer questions while we were making salmon carpaccio weren’t just small talk. Am I right?”
I pulled the letter out of the dresser drawer and handed it to him.
He read it quietly and then said with a headshake, “Jesus, people are really nuts.”
I filled him in on the failed attempts to get Chef Hill, Rebecca, and the police to take the letter seriously. I also told him what Jackie, Pat and I knew about the members of our Cultivate Our Bounty group. I even admitted I’d been digging around in Jonathan’s cottage during my date with him last night.
He looked wounded. “You were with both of us?”
“Not the way you mean.” I was many things, but a slut was not one of them. “The headline is that Jonathan had four vials of Vicodin with his mother’s name on the prescriptions. They were right there in his bathroom. If he’s a drug addict, he could be so addled that he wrote the letter to Chef Hill and didn’t know what he was doing.”
I sat in the other chair and waited for Simon to respond to my theory.
“Far be it from me to praise the guy, since he wants to get in your pants,” he said, “but he’s no druggie.”
“And you know this because….”
“Remember when I told you Beatrice and I had a little heart-to-heart the other day? Well, in between criticizing Jonathan for wanting to be a chef, she criticized him for confiscating her pills. She went on quite the tirade about how controlling he was. She said he was a lawyer, not a doctor, and who was he to decide what she needed for her back pain and how much was too much. Bottom line? Your boyfriend’s a good son for trying to protect his mother from herself.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t write this letter though.”
Simon read it again. Then he and I went down the list of the other group members and speculated about which of them might be “enraged” enough to murder Chef Hill at Saturday’s Bounty Fest.
“I’ll call Larry,” he said, referring to his boss, a corpulent, much-divorced man whose family owned several magazines, including Away from It All. Larry was always threatening to fire people but was really just horny. “He eats at Jason Hill’s restaurant at least three times a week. Maybe he knows something about the guy.”
“Worth a shot.”
“And I’ll find out if any of my reporters have done a travel story on Kenosha, Wisconsin,” he added. “They might have sources who know Ronnie and Connie.”
“‘Sources.’ I like when you talk like a journali
st.”
“And I like when you include me in your madcap adventures.”
“Some adventure. I don’t mind telling you this whole thing scares me,” I said, hoping he would put his arms around me, which he did.
“I won’t let anybody hurt you, Slim. You know that.”
You hurt me, I thought, but didn’t say. My heartache seemed like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
22
“Here we are for our last class of the week,” said Chef Hill from behind the center island as we all sat in our seats. He was twitchy, hyperkinetic, moving around so fast that it was unnerving to try to follow him. I wondered how much of his supposed fortune paid for his cocaine habit and whether he had to cut corners in his business, make compromises, make enemies in order to keep the white stuff in ample supply. “We’re gonna do chocolate desserts today, gang, and not just any chocolate desserts, or they wouldn’t be farm-to-table. I didn’t get a reputation in the food world by turning out Hershey’s bars, you know? Not that I’m here to knock mass-produced name brands. They serve their purpose. But do they serve the planet and the farmers? Offer us a sustainable, healthy alternative? Taste as pure and clean as possible? Not a chance. My chocolate desserts may be rich and not for the calorie conscious, but they’re desserts you can feel good about. They’re the ecstasy without the guilt—bang bang.”
The plan for the first part of the day’s cooking class was for the Three Blonde Mice to grill our designated suspects, even if it meant going back over territory we’d already covered with them. Jackie would focus on Lake, Gabriel, and Alex, Pat would interrogate Connie, Ronnie, and Beatrice, and I would have Jonathan to myself. Simon, meanwhile, would duck in and out of class in order to work his contacts. The ducking in and out wouldn’t be easy for him, because he loved chocolate with the blinding passion I’d hoped he’d have for me. If chocolate were a woman, he wouldn’t have been “almost ready” to marry it.