by Jane Heller
“Sure I think country music is boring,” he said, “just like bitter ex-wives who dredge up their sad pasts every chance they get.”
I ignored his abuse and focused on the three discrepancies in Alex’s phone conversation with her fiancé: she seemed to be planning a wedding and now Eric was saying they weren’t; she said he loved enchiladas and he said he couldn’t stand Mexican food; she said he was a fan of country music and he said it was boring. It didn’t take a genius to put three and three together and figure out that the man Alex was talking to, the man she identified as “babe,” the man to whom she said “I love you,” wasn’t Eric Zucker. She was a phony friend to us and she was a phony fiancée to him. The question was why?
I thought back to the other names on her “To Call” list by the phone in her cottage: the department stores and a doctor and a man with a boy-next-door sort of name. Arnie? Frankie? Stevie? No, no, it started with a d. Danny. That was it. Had she called this Danny person and told him she loved him while Simon and I hid in her bathroom? Was she having an affair with him even though she was engaged to Eric? Was she leading some kind of double life?
Why would she bother? Was it really Eric’s money she was after? Or was he her cover—a shield of legitimacy for when she killed Chef Hill? Yes, Jonathan had vaulted into the number-one slot on my suspects list, but maybe she’d asked Eric to come to Whitley a day early so he could be her unwitting getaway driver. He really was gullible enough not to see through her if she did lead a double life. The question was why would she lead a double life, and what was her possible motive for wanting to kill Jason Hill?
“Why don’t we go sit down, sweetie?” Eric suggested to her.
“You’re allergic to hay,” I reminded him, stalling for time so Alex wouldn’t slip away. “You’ll have a wheezing attack if you sit on one of those bales.”
He gave me a “none of your business” look and said, “I take medication for that now, Elaine.”
“Okay, but I haven’t formally introduced you to my friends,” I said, and did just that. “I met Jackie and Pat the day I divorced you. We went out and celebrated.”
My friends nodded, not knowing exactly how to react to the sudden appearance of my ex and the volley of insults between us.
“I celebrated after our divorce, too,” he said. “I bought Lola a mink coat.”
“Of course you did, since nobody wears fur anymore,” I said, rolling my eyes. “And this is Simon, my boyfriend.”
Simon smiled. “So we’re back to calling me that?”
“Not now,” I muttered to him.
“Let’s sit down, Rick,” said Alex, clutching her tote bag and trying to steer him away. “I really want to watch Chef Hill cook.”
“Great! We’ll join you!” I said merrily, gesturing at my cohorts to follow them.
There weren’t enough bales for all of us to sit together, so our team sat a few rows behind the charming couple.
“I can’t believe your ex is here,” Jackie said.
“Was he always so grumpy?” said Pat.
“All I can say, Slim, is I’m a big upgrade over that guy,” said Simon.
“Could we focus, people?” I asked. “I think Alex wrote the letter, that she’s our killer.”
“Just because she’s manipulating Eric?” said Jackie. “Doesn’t make her a killer. We need a motive.”
“And we need one fast,” said Simon. “If Chef Hill’s biting the dust, it’ll probably happen during one of his breaks.”
“I’m sticking with Jonathan,” Jackie said, nodding two rows down. He was sitting next to Mommy, but they weren’t speaking, just staring blankly at the stage.
“Lake and Gabriel are fighting,” said Pat. “Look at them.”
The Vanderkloot-Arnolds, who were three rows down, were engaged in a shouting match all right, but they were drowned out by the music, so we couldn’t make out their words. All we knew was that he was gesturing wildly at her, stabbing his finger in her face no matter how many times she batted it away. Was he trying to talk her out of her plan to kill the chef over the burger chain? Was he defending himself against her accusations that he wasn’t man enough to help her commit the crime? Or were they arguing over the pregnancy issue and merely having a domestic quarrel?
“Connie and Ronnie aren’t fighting, but they’re not happy,” said Jackie as we all glanced in their direction over to the left. “Remember how crazy excited she was about seeing Chef Hill in the beginning of the week? Look at her now: one big scowl.”
“And Ronnie’s wearing one of those vests with pockets that conceal weapons,” I said. “Pretty suspicious in this heat, right?”
“Not if he filled the pockets with muffins,” Simon said.
“Good morning, everybody. Nice turnout today, huh?”
Chef Hill had begun his program, his minions scrambling to set up all the prepped ingredients, the country music band singing and strumming in the background.
“We’re kicking off the demo with pickling, the process that preserves our veggies all year long so the farm experience is always with us,” he said. “Let’s get cooking—bang bang.”
He started with beets. He cut them up, boiled them, drained them, rinsed them in cold water, peeled the skins off, sliced them, and plopped them in vinaigrette. “Let them marinate for half an hour at room temperature,” he said, “and then eat ’em, store ’em, have ’em by themselves as a side dish, or throw them in with other pickled veggies.”
He moved on to cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus, and peppers and pickled those, too—or his assistants did, since there were only forty minutes to each session. When he was finished, everybody applauded, and he hopped off the stage for his break, and his crew cleared the demo table and set up for the next show and tell.
I kept an eye on all our suspects throughout the demo to make sure they hadn’t budged. They were still accounted for even during the break.
“Mildly interesting about pickling all those vegetables,” said Simon. “But if you ask me, Chef Hill was pretty pickled himself.”
“You think?” I said.
“Definitely a cokehead,” he confirmed. “And all that ‘bang bang’ stuff has gotten really old.”
“It got old on day one,” I said. “I was ready to kill him myself by day three.”
Eventually, Chef Hill’s twenty-minute break was up and he was back onstage at the demo table. I stayed glued to our suspects’ every move during the forty minutes of recipes for farm fresh eggs—from spaghetti carbonara to frittata with green lentils and smoked trout.
“He’s not a bad cooking teacher,” Simon commented as Chef Hill left the stage for his second break. “How he finds time to do this gig with all his other projects I have no idea. Why even bother to have a channel on YouTube with instructional videos when you’ve got so many restaurants?”
“How did you know he has a whole channel on YouTube?” I said. “The letter only mentioned the video where he talks about pudding.”
“First of all, I went on YouTube yesterday and watched the channel,” he said. “I was looking for clues. Second of all, Alex told me about it during the cheese making. Or was it the fish day?”
“You cooked with me during the fish day,” I reminded him. “We made salmon carpaccio together.”
“I loved cooking with you, Slim, even if you did have a heavy hand with that mallet. Maybe we could try again at my place next week. I’ll buy some of the stuff we made with the group and we’ll take a crack at it ourselves.”
“About the videos,” I said, my anxiety level rising. “If Alex told you about them, she must be our letter writer.”
“Not necessarily. She could have watched them to research her screenplay.”
“A hundred bucks says there is no screenplay.”
“You’re on.”
I glanced over at Alex. Eric was still sitting on his bale of hay, but she and her tote bag were gone.
26
Jackie, Pat, S
imon and I bolted for the row where Eric was playing RhinoBall on his iPhone.
“Where’s Alex?” I asked, trying to catch my breath, which was coming in shallow spurts.
“The ladies room, I guess,” he said.
“Then why did she take her tote bag with her?” said Jackie. “She could have left it with you.”
“Maybe she wanted to put on some lipstick, comb her hair, spray herself with perfume,” he said. “How do I know why you women do anything? I don’t even know why she wanted to come to this bounty thing except that she likes the cockamamie chef. She even has a nickname for him.”
We all looked at each other as if our lives depended on the nickname, as if Chef Hill’s life depended on it.
I put my hand on Eric’s shoulder in an effort to show him I came in peace. Touching him was like petting a brown snake. “What’s the nickname?”
“Lemme think,” he said. We were all in agony waiting for his answer. “Custard. Or maybe it’s Jell-O.”
“Could it be Pudding?” asked Simon.
Eric snapped his fingers and nodded. “Pudding. Go figure.”
Bingo. So Alex must have written the letter. “Listen, Eric,” I said. “I hate to break this to you, but your fiancée is about to kill Chef Hill unless we find her right away.”
He sighed. “Elaine, you haven’t changed. You’re still a neurotic shrew. You really need to get over the sour grapes too. I’ve found someone else. I’m happy with her. Deal with it.”
“Hey, don’t talk to my girlfriend that way,” said Simon.
Eric looked at him with pity. “You have no idea what you’re in for.”
“Enough, okay? This isn’t about me,” I said. “Alex isn’t the woman you think she is. We have reason to believe she wrote a letter threatening to kill Chef Hill right here at Bounty Fest, right this second for all we know.”
He looked at Simon again and laughed. “Good luck with her, pal. You’ll need it.”
“Useless jerk,” I said as Jackie, Pat, Simon, and I ditched my ex-husband and ran up to the stage, where we tried to coax Chef Hill’s assistants into telling us where their boss was taking his break. To our great frustration, all they’d say was: “We can’t give out that information.”
“It’s for his own safety,” said Jackie to an androgynous-looking millennial dressed in head-to-toe black, a color that worked in the city but was a poor choice for a sweltering day on a farm.
We got the same stock answer, no matter which member of his entourage we asked: “We can’t give out that information.”
“Fine. We’ll find him ourselves,” I said in a huff. You try to do someone a favor, and this is the thanks you get?
“Maybe he’s in the main building where we had the Welcome Happy Hour that first night,” said Jackie once we were out of the demo tent and in the middle of the festival grounds. We were being pushed and shoved by throngs of Bounty Festers.
“Or maybe there’s a green room and that’s where he is,” Pat volunteered.
“Whenever Bill is booked on GMA he waits with the other celebrities in a little room before going on the air. It’s just outside the studio. They serve coffee and donuts there.”
I’d been accompanying my PR clients to green rooms for years. “Not a terrible idea. Maybe there’s a tent just for the talent.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Simon.
We ran. We ran through men, women, and children. We ran through a group of wackos in green costumes handing out kale chips. We ran in and out of tents that were hosting everything from a lesson in making jewelry out of wild berries to a lecture on promoting the nutritional value of spelt. We ran into Rebecca, who shouted to everyone within earshot, “Those people are not supposed to be here!”
She started chasing us, her braids flying, which made us run faster.
“Watch where you’re going!” yelled a woman in the tent where people were engaged in a walnut oil tasting. Apparently, Pat had bumped into the woman, causing her to knock over a bottle of oil on the display table, which created a domino effect; the one bottle toppled the bottle next to it and it toppled the one next to it, and within seconds the entire row of bottles crashed to the ground. “Now look what you’ve done!” cried the woman. “We have an oil spill!”
We kept darting in and out of tents until we had lost Rebecca and circled all the way back to the chef’s demo tent. Eric was still sitting on his bale of hay waiting for his fiancée to return from the ladies room.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s been way more than twenty minutes and the chef should already have started his session on cooking with Swiss chard?” I said to him as I scanned the tent and noticed that Lake and Gabriel, Connie and Ronnie, and Jonathan and Beatrice were gone too. Was it possible that I had jumped to conclusions about Alex? Maybe the fact that she’d watched a YouTube video of Chef Hill talking about pudding meant absolutely nothing and that her nickname for him was just a coincidence. Maybe one of the other AWOL suspects was bashing Chef Hill over the head with a rolling pin right that very minute.
“Yeah, how long does Alex usually spend in the bathroom?” said Jackie.
“I’ve never timed her,” Eric said sarcastically, but he was finally starting to look concerned.
“Eric, there’s something wrong here,” I said as gently as I could. “We really need to find Chef Hill and we don’t know where to look. Someone wants to hurt him, and we don’t know who.”
“You people spent the week here, not me,” he said. “Where does he go when he wants to get away from all of you?”
“His cottage?” Simon suggested.
We raced back out of the tent, this time with Eric tagging along. He was convinced his fiancée had gone to interview the chef during his break and was now in mortal danger, and he demanded that we find her and save her from whichever lunatic agritourist was on the loose. We hightailed it out of the festival grounds and into the area of the property where the cottages were. When we got to Chef Hill’s cottage, we all agreed to approach the situation quietly, delicately, so as not to provoke any of them—not Lake, Gabriel, Connie, Ronnie, Jonathan, Beatrice, or Alex—into turning us into that collateral damage mentioned in the letter.
Eric, however, decided to go rogue. He pushed past us and burst inside the front door yelling, “Alex? Are you in here, sweetie? I’ve come to protect you!”
We followed him in, and she was there all right.... She wasn’t in danger. She was the source of the danger. And forget the rolling pin. She was pointing a handgun at the chef with both hands. It was a small gun but it had a long black metal cylinder attached to the end of it—one of those silencers or repressors or whatever they called them in the movies. In any case, the whole contraption looked longer than the pork tenderloin Jonathan had butterflied and stuffed with pesto.
“Why, Alex? Why? Why? Why?” Eric wailed.
Chef Hill, who had flattened himself against the wall, was quivering in terror, and said in a tiny squeak, “Please help me. She’s about to pull the trigger on that thing.” In front of him was a coffee table on which there were several lines of coke, along with a credit card and a rolled up dollar bill.
“They can’t help you,” Alex said, turning the gun on us. “They’ve insinuated themselves into a private business matter and now they’ll have to bite the bullet, so to speak.”
I felt the panic rising up in my throat and swallowed hard. So it was Alex all along. If only I’d guessed right sooner. “Would it be okay if I asked what the business matter is?” I said. My hands were in the air as if I’d just been arrested. I wanted to show her I was in complete compliance; that I didn’t intend to attack her or flee, only to talk.
“It’s about fiscal responsibility,” she said cryptically.
“In the political sense?” I asked. I found it hard to believe that Alex would kill Chef Hill over the balanced budget amendment.
“I meant personal responsibility,” she said. “When you owe someone money—a lot of money
—and you don’t pay it, you pay with your life.”
“Chef Hill’s a wealthy man,” said Simon. “Why would he stiff you?”
“He’s not so wealthy anymore.” She nodded at the coffee table where the cocaine beckoned. “He was our best customer for a long time and then—pfft—no cash all of a sudden. My boss told him we couldn’t let him run a tab forever. Business is business, like I said.”
“And that business is dealing,” I confirmed as I noticed that Simon was starting to inch away from the rest of us, ever so slowly and surreptitiously toward the other end of the room. I was dying to call out to him, to beg him not to try and be a hero, but I knew him, knew he was going to attempt a takedown of Alex and her gun from behind. It was that damn savior complex of his. He’d gotten his face punched in when he’d tried to rescue me on the Princess Charming and now he was at it again.
“Only Colombia’s best,” she said proudly.
“Alex, please tell me this is just dialogue from your screenplay,” Eric pleaded. “It’s not particularly good dialogue, but you said you’re still on your first draft.”
She laughed. “There’s no screenplay, you dork. And my job working for Dr. Bill Nash D.D.S. was a cover, just like my engagement to you—total bullshit.”
“You owe me a hundred bucks,” I would have said to Simon if he’d been right beside me instead of hovering perilously close to Alex.
Eric’s shoulders sagged as he looked at her, and a lock of his brown hair fell limply across his forehead. “I should have known something was off when you asked me to bring you here for the week. You’re as worthless in the kitchen as Elaine.”
I let that one slide since we all had a gun pointed at us.
“But I probably could write a screenplay,” Alex went on. “I’m a better-than-average writer. I came up with a dynamite death threat note for our chef friend. It was so convincing it even scared me.”
“It scared me too,” I said. “You put it in my tote bag by mistake.”