French Fried

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French Fried Page 11

by Kylie Logan


  “Nothing,” I grumbled to myself, seeing that I’d been right; the screen was purely decorative, there wasn’t even room in back of it to get dressed or undressed. I stepped forward to get a better grip on the screen and move it back into place and that’s when my heart bumped.

  “What the—” I stepped to my right, nearer to the wall and at a better angle to see if my eyes were playing tricks on me. They weren’t. There was a note stuck not on one of the lace panels, but on the wooden brace that surrounded it. And no wonder. The small, sharp knife that anchored the note to the wood would have ripped right through the fragile lace.

  I took another couple of steps, the better to read the words written on the sheet of paper in dark, angry letters.

  Leave the past in the past.

  • • •

  WHAT DID IT mean?

  And maybe even more important (as Declan pointed out), who had stabbed the knife through the note and left it hanging on Rocky’s dressing screen?

  I would bet any money it wasn’t her. Sure, Rocky had an eclectic style of decorating, and her house was a bit . . . er . . . jam-packed; she’d never met a bar of French soap or a French photograph or a French antique that she didn’t like. But she treasured her possessions. Every single one of them. I could tell because though the house was cluttered, it was clean, and like a museum, each and every thing she owned was put out on display, as if Rocky was dedicated to sharing the beauty with everyone who came to call.

  She never would have damaged that lovely dressing screen by jamming a knife into it.

  She never would have written a note in which every pen stroke of every letter vibrated with anger and resentment.

  Leave the past in the past.

  • • •

  IT DIDN’T MAKE any more sense to me the next day than it had the day I found the note.

  “Tony will figure it out,” Declan had told me, and I wanted to believe he was right. Tony had the expertise and the forensic backup to check the knife for fingerprints and maybe to even do a little of the kind of CSI magic I saw on TV and figure out who could have written the note from the kind of paper that was used, the type of pen, the handwriting.

  Still, knowing the experts were on top of things did little to calm the cha-cha in my stomach when I thought of discovering the note.

  Had Rocky seen it?

  It was certainly well hidden. Yet I couldn’t help but picture her casually moving that dressing screen one sunny afternoon, and thinking about how her blood must have run cold when she saw the bold, furious words.

  Leave the past in the past.

  It was surely a warning, but who delivered the message?

  And why?

  The questions swirled through my head later that afternoon when I drove from Hubbard to Youngstown, the biggest city in the area and home of the university where in just a couple of weeks, Professor Jill Weinhart would be hosting that day-long symposium about peace. Professor Weinhart was teaching a class when I arrived, and I stood in the hallway outside the closed door of the lecture room and wondered as I had so many times over the years, what my life would have been like had I been given the encouragement and the guidance to attend college.

  “It would have been like boring,” I reminded myself with a smile and a silent prayer of thanks that Nina Charnowski, Sophie’s sister, had taken the chance on a kid no one else wanted to take in. Nina had worked at a restaurant and because of her, I’d learned the skills I needed to find a job and move up in the culinary world. In fact, I’d always had a theory that one of the reasons Meghan Cohan hired me in the first place was that I had the background she knew publicists would love: edgy and just a little off-center. By hiring me, Meghan could be viewed as generous, and charitable, and just a little willing to take a walk on the wild side.

  Not that I’m complaining. In her own way, Meghan had changed my life every bit as much as Nina had. Every bit as much as Sophie was trying to.

  I twitched off the thought just as the door of the classroom popped open and a line of students streamed out. After the last one left, I stuck my head in the room.

  “Professor Weinhart? I’m Laurel Inwood.”

  The professor was a woman of fifty or so with short-cropped hair and big glasses with dark, heavy frames. Though I had chosen tailored pants, a silk blouse, and a tweed blazer for the occasion, she was much more casually dressed in jeans, Toms shoes, and a tie-dyed sweatshirt with a peace symbol on it.

  She waved me inside and into one of the desks in the front row, and she finished erasing a time line on the board that showed the progression of the American labor movement, then plopped into the desk next to mine.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I was when you called and told me about Rocky,” she said, her words as matter-of-fact as the level look she gave me. “That really stinks.”

  “You liked her.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I didn’t know her well enough to dislike her,” she admitted. “But the few times we talked . . . well, I didn’t think I was going to like her. Not at first.”

  It was the kind of thing people don’t usually say about the recently deceased, and the way she added a brittle little laugh, I knew Professor Weinhart realized it.

  “The first time I talked to her, when I invited her to speak at the symposium, she turned me down flat. No muss, no fuss. Just an instant no thank you.”

  “Did she say why?” I asked.

  “She said she knew her friend Sophie had contacted me. She said Sophie was way off base. That there wasn’t anything she could tell me that the history books haven’t already explored.”

  “But you didn’t buy it.”

  The professor had to think about this for a moment. “I guess I could have. After all, I didn’t know this Sophie person from anyone. When she called . . . you know, that first time when she told me I really should be talking to Rocky . . . she said she’d read about the symposium in the paper and that she had the perfect speaker for me.”

  I wasn’t surprised by any of this. When it came to supporting causes—or people—she felt needed a boost, Sophie was no wallflower. “Did she say why?” I asked the professor.

  “She said Rocky had experiences few other people had ever had.”

  “With the peace movement when she was in college.”

  The professor nodded. “Only I never got that far with Rocky. Not the first time we talked. Like I said, she cut me off at the knees.”

  “What made her finally change her mind?”

  The professor took a piece of nicotine gum out of her denim purse and popped it in her mouth. She shook her head. “I can’t really say. She only said she’d thought about it. That she’d reconsidered. She said she thought it was time to put the past behind her.”

  Leave the past in the past.

  Rocky’s words were another variation on the theme of the unsigned note I’d found in her bedroom. “Did she explain?”

  “She said all would be made clear at the symposium.” The professor made a face. “Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like I was going to let some stranger just show up here and start talking and I had no idea what she was going to talk about. I met with Rocky . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking. “Two . . . no, three times. Twice here at the university and once I went out to that wonderful little farm of hers. We talked for hours, and I was convinced that she had a lot to say that people should hear. It was quite an honor to hear the story from someone who was actually on the front lines of the peace movement. I did my homework and I found out that Rocky made a name for herself back in the day. She was part of the Young People’s Underground for Peace.”

  When I looked at her as if I didn’t know what she was talking about—because I didn’t—the professor shook her head.

  “You had lousy history teachers,” she said. “Or history teachers who were so caught up
in the far-distant past, they didn’t understand the implications of the early ’70s to everything that’s happening today. YPUP . . . Young People’s Underground for Peace . . . they were real movers and shakers back then. They worked to end the war in Vietnam. They fought for equality between the races.”

  “And Rocky was one of them.”

  “From what I could gather from the little information there is, she ran the movement in the Midwest.”

  I wasn’t surprised; Rocky was one smart cookie.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “That’s what I hoped Rocky would explain during her talk. But I imagine the movement broke up because of what usually happens in groups like that. Political differences, ego wars. I was counting on her to fill us in. She said she would. Now . . .” She lifted her hands, then dropped them back in her lap. “I suppose a lot of what she knew is lost. That’s how we lose our history. It gets forgotten along with the people who made it, and that’s a real shame.”

  I thought about the hang-up phone calls, the prowler, and that note stabbed into the dressing screen. “So you don’t know exactly what she was going to say at the symposium.”

  “Not in detail, but if those research materials of hers were any indication, it was going to be one blockbuster of a presentation.”

  I sat up. “Research materials? Like? . . .”

  “Scrapbooks, old newspaper articles, flyers that she’d hand out back in the day at peace rallies at universities across the country. She showed me a lot of it. Upstairs in that room of hers, the one that has all those wonderful old botanical prints on the walls.”

  The botanical prints. And that big old table that was perfectly clean and completely empty.

  Interesting, yes? Especially in light of the fact that Declan and I had been from one end of the house to the other.

  And we hadn’t found one scrap of anything that looked like research for a talk on the ’70s peace movement.

  Chapter 10

  I arrived at Pacifique just as the sun was coming up and yes, I will confess that before I got out of the car, I took a good look around and made sure Minnie Greenway wasn’t lurking anywhere nearby. As it turned out, there was no sign of her, no sign of anyone, in fact, and there was a profound silence in the yard that seemed in keeping with the day’s event.

  Rocky’s memorial service.

  There was a nip in the early-morning air, but I didn’t pay it much mind. For a few minutes, I stood in front of the house, my hands poked into my pockets and my head thrown back, listening to the silence and letting the truth wash over me.

  Rocky’s memorial service.

  It was a day to mourn and a day to celebrate a remarkable life, and feeling more at peace with the thought than I had since Saturday night when Declan and I arrived at the house and found Rocky dead, I reminded myself that none of that mourning or celebrating was going to happen if I didn’t get my act together.

  Ready to face the day and whatever it might bring, I got to work.

  It would have been crazy for me to drive all the way to Cortland without bringing something along that we needed to host the one hundred or so folks we expected for the service, and I unloaded the boxes from my car: silverware and plates and the white linen tablecloths we’d put on the long serving tables and the round tables where guests would be seated. A couple of boxes hoisted in my arms, I headed back toward the barn, and wisps of fog floated in front of me and to my sides as I passed, as if Nature itself was asking me to dance.

  Once around the house, I stopped cold and stared at the white tent that had been erected the evening before. There, too, drifts of sun-warmed fog floated in the morning air, tinted with the same pink light that touched the clouds above me. The fog wrapped around the base of the tent and climbed up its sides like the icing on a wedding cake.

  It was so pretty.

  And so quirky.

  Rocky would surely have approved.

  Suddenly smiling on a day when I would have sworn I never could, I stowed the boxes and went back for a second load. Once I was done, I took a minute to sit on the stone step near the back door. Sophie, George, Inez, and Misti had left the Terminal right behind me, but with Sophie driving, I knew they’d be a few minutes, so I took advantage of the quiet and drank in the beauty of the way the light filtered through the last of the leaves on the trees.

  I was lucky to have had the luxury of a few minutes’ peace. Once my coworkers arrived, the rest of the morning was a whirlwind of activity, what with getting George set up in Rocky’s kitchen, giving Inez and Misti last-minute instructions and a friendly reminder that serving at a function like this was nothing like slapping food down on Terminal tables, and helping Sophie arrange and distribute the vases of orange roses, purple mums, white stock, and sprigs of cut-right-from-the-garden lavender we put on each and every table.

  With everything done and our guests due to arrive at any minute, Sophie had zipped back into the house to change. Never one to worry about style, what was in, what was out, or how others would judge her based on what she was wearing, she had chosen the sort of classic outfit I knew Rocky would approve of. Black skirt, creamy colored blouse, and a black-and-white herringbone blazer that looked as if it had been made to complement her hair, which was definitely more salt than pepper.

  Sophie wound an arm through mine. The weather had warmed up considerably since I’d arrived at Pacifique, and her cheeks were pink. “We did it, Laurel. It’s beautiful. Just like it should be. Just like Rocky would have wanted.”

  It was a good thing we heard the first car pull up the drive; Sophie didn’t have the chance to get sentimental and I was grateful. Later, we’d both have the luxury of shedding a few tears and feeling sorry for a world without Rocky in it. For now, we had work to do.

  As it turned out, that first car wasn’t filled with guests at all. It was Declan (sans motorcycle that morning) who had his two oldest nephews with him. The boys (under the watchful eye of Uncle Declan) would park our guests’ cars behind the barn in an open field where in the summer, Rocky grew sunflowers that always made me think of the van Gogh painting.

  I had just enough time to change, too, though since I would be working behind the bar that day, I opted for black pants and a white blouse.

  The first of our guests started to arrive just as I stepped out of the house and scooted behind the bar, and in what seemed like mere minutes, Pacifique was filled with friends and neighbors, including Tony Russo, who was out of uniform and hung toward the back of the crowd, keeping an eye on things. There was no use asking Tony what he was really doing there because I knew he would never tell me. Still, I liked to think that even here where we honored her memory and celebrated her life, he had an eye out for Rocky’s killer.

  Declan’s parents were there, too, as were Mike and John from the bookstore and Carrie, the woman who ran the boutique across from the Terminal. From the conversations I heard all around me, I knew some of the other guests attended St. Robert’s church along with Rocky, that some were farmers she dealt with and others were merchants at the local stores where she shopped and always made their day with a smile and a bit of friendly conversation.

  Otis Greenway showed up, his bald head gleaming in the morning light. I never did see Minnie, and I wondered who watched her when Otis was gone and how he knew she’d be where she was supposed to be when he got home. Ben Newcomb and Muriel Ross made something of a grand entrance, arm in arm, and call me cynical, but since I remembered Rocky mentioning that she really didn’t travel in their circle, I wondered if their attendance was just for show.

  I poured côtes du rhône rouge and for those who didn’t like red wine, gentil, from behind the makeshift bar, really just a table set up at the back of the tent, and Misti and Inez passed baked brie, olive tapenade, and the allumettes I’d made from one of Rocky’s recipes, wonderful little puff pastry twists served with a sprinkle
of goat cheese.

  “Nice!” Declan zipped by with a plate of appetizers for a group of seniors seated near the podium we’d set up against the backdrop of the garden nearest to the house. “Everything is perfect.”

  Though I hadn’t had a sip of wine, I must have been feeling particularly mellow; knowing Declan approved of all the work we’d done made me smile.

  It was the same smile I turned on Tony Russo when he stepped up to the bar.

  “White or red?” I asked him.

  He glanced at the wine labels. “I’m not on duty. I’ll go with the red.”

  I poured and he sipped and when a group of guests stepped up and were served, he hung to the side. Once they were gone, he came to stand next to me behind the bar.

  “Thanks for pointing out that date book,” Tony said.

  I knew it wasn’t in the nature of cops to share, just like I knew if I didn’t ask, I’d regret it. “Was there any useful information in it?” I asked, playing the innocent and pretending I hadn’t looked through the date book. “Were you able to get anywhere with it?” Tony pressed his lips together. “She made a note about a prowler on the farm, but I wish Rocky would have called into the station about it. It would help to have a police report. That would make it official, not just a notation on a calendar that might—or might not—be true. It would have also helped if we knew about that note up in her bedroom. ‘Leave the past in the past.’ What do you suppose it means?”

  I was surprised he’d asked for my opinion. Which didn’t mean I was reluctant to offer it. “I’ve been going around and around about it. It might have something to do with Aurore Brisson and Marie Daigneau. Marie has been dead for three years. Her letters to Rocky were in the past.”

  Tony nodded but didn’t comment.

  “Or it might have something to do with Andrew MacLain.”

 

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