If You Can't Stand the Heat

by Robin Allen

  Jamie offered to speak with the arson investigators and I let him because I felt guilty about rousing these guys in the middle of the night to risk their lives to save mine. I stood on the sidewalk and watched the enormous light green truck drive off, taking with it the noise and color of the sirens and lights, the shouts and efficiency of the firemen. Neighbors went back inside, perhaps a little nervous about the safety of their own homes, and probably a lot upset with me for getting them out of bed so early on a Saturday morning.

  Jamie ran back over to me. “They’re pretty sure it was deliberate. The burn pattern in the grass outside your bedroom window indicates an accelerant. It’s not gasoline, but they need to run tests to determine exactly what it is.”

  Jamie was right. Someone had tried to kill me. Panic began an excruciating climb up my chest and into my throat. I didn’t even have a chance to stop the tears.

  He pulled me to him and I laid my head on his chest. “You’re safe with the Johns tonight,” he said, stroking my back. “And a policeman is going to patrol the area.”

  I focused my eyes on an overturned potted pencil cactus on my porch to take my mind off of Jamie’s familiar sleepy scent. I pulled back from him. “I called you around midnight. You didn’t answer.” I sounded a little jealous, and maybe I was.

  “Brian called at the last minute. He sprained his elbow kickboxing and needed me to sit in for him. He raised an eyebrow. “What did you want me for at midnight?”

  “Come back to the Johns’ and I’ll tell you.”

  We sat at the kitchen table, keeping our voices low while I told Jamie about Will and the investors. He whistled softly, as surprised as I that Mitch would relinquish control of Markham’s.

  “See what you can find out about those three men,” I said. “They could be mafia or something.”

  “Investing in an old restaurant in Austin, Texas? I doubt it. Besides, I think Mitch would have better sense than to get mixed up with la familia.”

  “My father has better sense than to do a lot of things, but that hasn’t stopped him lately.”

  “Some of us would like to sleep!” John Without shouted from the bedroom.

  Jamie got up and took his cup to the sink. “George Clooney and Jeff Daniels.”

  I laughed. “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

  I don’t like sleeping in someone else’s house, especially one I’ve never stayed in before. Like most adults who have lived alone for many years, I like things just so. I like it quiet—no fans, radios, televisions, or police scanners in the background. I like the heft, protection, and warmth of a comforter when I sleep, so in the summer I turn down the air conditioner temperature, and in the winter, I crack open my windows. I also like to sleep with my bedroom door shut and locked. Jamie likes lots of background noise, a thin sheet, and a warm room. Thank goodness I didn’t have to make those sorts of compromises any more.

  I changed into the white men’s t-shirt laid out on my bed, then slid between the cool sheets. I assumed that my mind would keep me up all night as it played and replayed the night’s greatest hits, so I was surprised to wake up in the Johns’ guest room with sunlight streaming through the window. Perhaps the sweet smell of two-by-fours curing in the room, or the fluffy down comforter, or the crisp white sheets that smelled of bleach and lavender had lulled me to sleep.

  I smelled coffee and heard whistling—two sure signals that it’s time to start the day. I abhor whistlers, all fake cheery, filling a silence that doesn’t need to be filled. After a quick trip to the hall bathroom and a glance in the mirror to see if I looked as refreshed as I felt (I didn’t), I walked into the kitchen. The Johns each had a cup of half-full coffee in front of them on the kitchen table. A plate of cranberry bagels sat between them, next to the bulk of the Saturday paper.

  When I appeared in the kitchen, John Without raised the sports section in front of his face and stopped whistling. I knew it was him. John With looked up and smiled. His hair, untamed by styling gel, spiked out in all directions, and he hadn’t shaved. He looked adorable. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, standing to give me a brotherly hug. “John just made a fresh pot.”

  “Smells like hazelnut,” I said, waving him back into his chair. I looked for my green cup from the night before, but all the dishes in the sink had already been washed, dried, and put away. I pulled a fresh cup from the cabinet and filled it, then refilled their cups before joining them at the table.

  After assuring John With that I had slept like a butterfly in her chrysalis, I told him I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, but he again assured me that I could stay as long as I needed to. John Without didn’t say anything either way. Maybe coffee and ball scores made him docile.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I started.

  “Please,” John Without said from behind the newspaper. “You’re giving John something to do. He’s been clucking like a mother hen all morning.”

  “I have not!” John With said.

  John Without dropped his paper to the table. “Oh, you have so!” he said playfully.

  His glimmer of affection blinked out, and I noticed a strange look pass between them. John With cleared his throat. “We need to ask you for a favor, Poppy Markham.”

  I hate favors. I hate doing them and I hate asking for them. They always sound so quick and innocent at first. A favor. Like a sneeze. But favors replicate, taking on a life of their own. Lending a hand in the kitchen for a few hours turns into a murder investigation, and then one night your house is set on fire. But how could I refuse after what they had done for me?

  John Without crossed his arms and looked out the back window. What on earth could this favor be? Did they want me to mow their grass? Clean their house? Lend them money? I should just say no. Have John With’s baby? “Depends,” I said.

  John With nudged a wavy lock of hair off his forehead. It immediately dropped back into place. “I’m not sure how to ask this,” he said. He seemed nervous.

  I helped him along. “What would you say if you were asking John for this favor?”

  John Without grunted, his face so tight, he looked like he had just come from the taxidermist.

  I turned back to John With and he said, “Will you be my wife?”

  John Without catapulted out of his chair, sending it banging onto the hardwood floor. “You don’t have to ask her like that!” he cried, his voice as high as Dora the Explorer’s.

  Was this a joke? I looked at John With hoping to share a secret moment of silliness at the outburst, but he dropped his eyes to his lap, suddenly intrigued by the frayed hem of his shorts.

  John Without said, “He needs you to pretend to be his wife, don’t you, John? You left out that word. Pretend.”

  The Johns explained that they were in danger of losing their most promising artistic discovery, an artist named Rodrigo Luna, whose gallery opening was scheduled for that night. His mother, Carmen, with whom the forty-two-year-old Rodrigo still lived, and who had been instrumental in getting her son’s work into the gallery, had a strong Catholic faith and disapproved of gay relationships. She had tried to play matchmaker between the Johns and Rodrigo’s six single sisters until John With told her they were both happily married. Carmen, apparently, couldn’t wait to meet their wives at the gallery opening.

  “It seems absurd, but this is becoming a major issue,” John With said. “We’ve agreed to all sorts of changes to our standard contract which basically gives her the authority to pull the plug on this whole deal for any reason.” He swiped again at the obstinate curl. “We can’t let that happen. Rodrigo is too important. We need at least one wife to show up tonight.”

  John Without had calmed down, still not happy, but resigned to the situation. He could be John’s partner, but not his wife. I felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to stop myself from throwing my arms around John With’s neck and saying, “I do!”

  “Thanks Poppy Markham,” said my new pretend husband.

  I pulled back and
tick-tocked my finger at him. “Uh, uh, uh. It’s Poppy Jones now.”

  John Without stomped down the hallway and slammed their bedroom door. John With sighed and dropped his shoulders, then went after him. I didn’t want to make matters worse for my new mate, so I vamoosed to my house for a change of clothes.

  I walked slowly up the flagstone path to my front door, which was mostly missing. As a reflex, I had shut the door behind me when John Without pulled me into the street. The firemen had banged through the door, fire hose in hand, ready for anything. Not that I faulted them for that. But they could have at least tried the knob.

  I stood in the doorway and surveyed my small living room. Except for the smell, the water, and the dirty footprints, everything looked as if I had gotten up to answer the door to let in a friend. But I had not invited this. Someone had violated my space. They walked into my yard, stood outside my bedroom, poured an accelerant on the grass beneath my window, and set a match to it. Whoever did this possessed some admirable arson skills, but also a heap of dumb luck. Had someone not tried to fry me, I probably would have followed through on my vow to mind my own business and let Mitch, Nina, and Ursula extract themselves from their own secretive mess. That couldn’t happen now. I would get to the bottom of whatever it was that had a bottom, and then I would leave my family to their own predicaments.

  But first I needed fresh underwear.

  I gathered a change of clothes and a few essentials, then returned to the Johns’ house to shower. In the twenty minutes I had been gone, my bed had been made and all of the lumber removed from my room. Toiletries materialized in the bathroom, along with two fluffy white towels. Maybe I would take them up on their offer to stay awhile. After all, I had just become the lady of the house. Well, one of them.

  I had forgotten to grab my toothbrush at home, then remembered I had an extra one in the smelly backpack that had so offended John Without. Also in that bag were my unused party clothes that had been marinating with my dirty chef’s coat for two days. Everything reeked of old grease and old food, an odor only slightly less offensive than the stench of smoke embedded in the clothes in my closet. A few hours in the sunshine might refresh them.

  I hung them on hangers, then took them into the back yard and hooked them on a clothesline left over from the previous owners, my former neighbors. I never did like the sight of the man’s tattered boxers waving in the wind like jumbo flags of surrender. The Johns would eventually either take the line down or drape it with outdoor lights for a kitschy ambiance.

  As I hung my chef’s coat on the line, my eyes lingered on the embroidered logo. My mind tingled with an idea that wouldn’t quite solidify. A memory of something. The old logo was a simple graphic of a spatula crossed with a spoon set inside a circle. My mother had designed it, and Mitch had printed it on everything from menus to guest checks. What would Iris Markham think of her restaurant now?

  I went back inside and spent a long hour on the phone with my insurance company who told me they had already been notified of “the fire situation” and an adjuster would be out to my house by the end of the day. The rep told me I didn’t need to be there unless I wanted to. I didn’t. I had a killer to catch.

  By 9:00 AM, I had showered, dressed, and fed myself. Saturday’s visiting hours at the jail for T through Z didn’t start for another two hours, so I decided to go straight to the source and demand some answers.

  I had a shock when the elevator doors opened. Nina had been replaced on the couch by two multi-pierced, multi-colored black-clad teens intertwined in an embrace better suited for a no-tell motel. They both looked like boys. Or girls. It was hard to tell with Austin’s youth.

  Not much else had changed, though. The television in the corner still broadcast the news, and Évariste’s death still made the headlines. They ran the same packaged story they had been running for days: a full-screen picture of Évariste’s face followed by footage of his body being swallowed by the ambulance. Seeing it felt routine, until they flashed a new element—Ursula’s face. Not a good indication that the police were considering other suspects.

  I walked to the couch and tapped out the kid on top. He, or she, jumped up as if poked with a cattle prod. “Suck face somewhere else,” I said. “You’re making people sick.”

  They boarded the open elevator without so much as an “Aw, man.”

  Seeing Nina first thing had also become routine, so I felt obliged to find her and check in. But why do that when I could finally circumvent the gatekeeper? At the nurse’s station, I discovered that Nina had arranged for my father to have a private room. It was what she wanted for him, not what my father would have wanted.

  Mitch does not like to be alone. It’s one of the reasons he spends so much time at the restaurant, and probably one of the reasons he remarried only a year after my mother died. Unlike me, he actually enjoys the surprises and complexities of other people, and I know he would have preferred a roommate. But in Nina’s mind, prosperous people recuperate without an audience.

  A nurse stood outside my father’s room making notes in his chart. I nodded hello, then reached for the door. She moved her hand to the door handle. “Family only,” she said.

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Which one?”

  “Poppy,” Nina called from down the hall.

  I looked at the nurse. “Markham. Only daughter of Mitch Markham.”

  The nurse looked at Nina, waiting to be told what to do.

  “It’s okay,” Nina said to her. “I’ll take care of it.”

  The nurse walked away and Nina held onto my upper arms as she maneuvered me around so that her back was to Mitch’s door, blocking my entrance. “What are you doing here?” she asked, a strange mix of frustration and defiance in her voice.

  I plucked her hands off me. “Visiting my sick father.” I hoped she heard the warning in mine. “Where have you been?”

  “Checking on Dolce and Gabbana.”

  Nina is certainly the type of person who would make a special trip home to cuddle her haute couture, but Dolce and Gabbana are her dogs, two copper-colored hairless Chinese Cresteds. She claims to have them because of an allergy to pet dander, but they also conveniently meet her three requirements for just about everything: they’re unusual, rare, and expensive.

  “How is the gruesome twosome?” I asked.

  “Fine.” She smoothed her hair. “They miss your father.”

  Only because he hadn’t been home to sneak them table scraps the past few days. “I miss him too. Why are you trying to keep me away from him?”

  The look on her face confirmed what had, until then, been only a suspicion. It explained her strange behavior—ushering me out of the waiting room after his surgery, neglecting to call me with updates, being nice to me.

  “I’m doing no such thing,” she said.

  I crossed my arms and glowered at her.

  She turned briefly to look at Mitch’s door. “I don’t think it’s good for you to see your father in this condition.”

  “I’d believe a prediction from the mythical Cassandra before I believed you cared about my feelings.” I stepped toward her and lowered my voice. “What are you hiding, Nina?”

  “Nothing.” She looked toward the nurse’s station. “There’s nothing to hide.”

  “Tell me, Nina, or I drop everything right now and we’ll wait and see what happens to Ursula.” I didn’t mean it, but it was the only hand I had with her.

  Her face fell like a soufflé with too many eggs in it. “Every time you see your father, you upset him.”

  As usual, she was exaggerating. Or was she? “I’ll take the blame for the argument at the restaurant, but how was I supposed to know he didn’t know about Ursula’s arrest?”

  “Because if you’d thought about your father, you’d know that telling him something like that is not in his best interest at the moment.”

  “I think about him all the time.”

  “Then think about him in this condition.�
�� She looked defeated, but I took no pleasure in it. “If you want what’s best for him, you’ll let him rest.”

  Darn. Nina was right. I had gone there with my mind loaded and my mouth cocked, ready to fire questions and accusations at him. “Fine,” I said, stomping off.

  Mitch wasn’t the only one involved in this partnership. There were plenty of other people I could get information from. I drove to the restaurant hoping Will would be there and that he would be in a mood to talk.

  I didn’t see his car when I passed by the front or when I parked in the back, but I knew he would arrive soon to finish up the night’s paperwork and make the bank deposit. I inserted my key into the back door and slowly turned it in the lock. If these locks had been rekeyed too, I wanted to delay my disappointment as long as possible. The key turned as it always had. Finally, something that hadn’t changed.

  I looked around the kitchen, assessing how Trevor had left things. The pots hung on their hooks, by size. The pans, also stacked by size, sat on the lower shelves. Trays of clean glasses and coffee cups waited neatly by the door for the waiters to trade out for empty trays in the wait station. The silver work tables gleamed. The rubber mats stood on end near the back door. Rolled up and secured with bungee cords, they looked like sushi for a T-rex. Everything looked as if Ursula had been in charge.

  I had eaten a banana for breakfast at the Johns’ house, but felt hungry again, so I opened the door to the walk-in and entered food Nirvana, taking care that the door didn’t click shut behind me and I got stuck in there until the cooks showed up. I gathered a couple of pears and a few sprigs of fresh mint, then backed through the door.

  In the kitchen, I put a cutting board and knife on top of the prep table, then went into the dry storage room for the honey I had stashed there. When I cooked at Markham’s, I hid a lot of things in the kitchen so I would have them when I needed them—slotted spoons, bread knives, grill towels, and quart-sized metal tins that became as valuable as rubies at the end of the night when it came time to switch prepped ingredients to clean containers for overnight storage. These were items every cook coveted and sometimes, when my treasures were discovered, they would either be taken outright or replaced by something completely useless, like potato peelings or chicken bones or a note with nothing but a smiley face. I eventually became more creative with my hiding places and loved the envious look on a cook’s face when he saw me wiping down countertops with fresh white towels at the end of the night.