Inherit the Word (The Cookbook Nook Series)

by Gerber, Daryl Wood

  Bailey bobbed her head. “He worried that, if Mitzi found out, he would lose his meal ticket.”

  “Except she’s not his meal ticket.” I transferred the drained basket of chicken to the cutting board. “He has his own income.”

  “The question is, how much? You heard Mitzi and Sam at the grocery store. Mitzi gives him a food allowance.”

  “You don’t know that. They could simply have a budget for each month. He does the home shopping; she does the purchasing for her business.”

  Bailey set bowls of soup on serving dishes. “They live in that fabulous house near your dad’s. Sam drives a Mercedes. He wears expensive suits. Do you think he can afford all that on a business manager’s salary? He makes, what, five percent per client? It’s not like he’s business manager to the stars.”

  “He has a couple of very wealthy clients, and Mitzi said he invests.”

  “Didn’t she also confide that he is invariably out of cash?”

  “Jenna, I’ll handle the chicken,” Katie said. “You arrange the salads.” With bare fingers, Katie removed the chicken from the basket. She set it on a cutting board and, using a super-huge blade, sliced the meat into long narrow strips.

  I winced. If I’d touched the hot chicken they way she was, I would have been shrieking. Could I ever become as comfortable as she was in a kitchen?

  “What kind of financial manager loses all his cash?” Bailey asked.

  “The kind that messes up.” I assembled three salads with avocado, crumbled blue cheese, diced hardboiled egg, and bacon on top of the lettuce, and proudly presented them to Katie.

  Acting unimpressed—a chef rarely compliments, Katie said—she topped the salads with sliced chicken and then drizzled each with homemade Caesar dressing. She handed me finished plates. “Take the salads to the dining room. I’ll be right there.”

  I did as instructed.

  Bailey followed me, carrying the soup. “Those conferences Sam attends aren’t cheap.”

  “Perhaps Mitzi covers all of those expenses and expects something in return,” I said.

  “Fealty or sex?”

  “Both.”

  “Face it,” Bailey said. “Mitzi already suspects Sam of having an affair, but she hasn’t kicked him out. She loves him no matter what. For an attractive woman with tons of money, she’s very insecure.”

  I set the salads at three place settings. “Women can be needy, even when looks, brains, and cash are in place.” I’d seen it happen before. A woman I knew in the city, who was a ten in every way, discovered her husband was having an affair and became insanely jealous; her self-confidence floundered. She sought professional help. She even tried hypnotherapy, but nothing worked. In the end, she believed she would never be worthy of love again.

  “The trail keeps leading back to jealous Mitzi,” Bailey said. “I think she killed Natalie.”

  But we had no proof. Zip. Nil.

  Chapter 24

  AT 10:00 P.M. I drove home, feeling fuller than a stuffed pigeon. Katie had insisted we make double chocolate soufflés with warm fudge sauce using a recipe she’d found in a magazine; a week ago, Bailey had suggested we stock a few foodie magazines like Taste of Home and Simple & Delicious. Our customers were reliably adding those to their purchases. Brilliant.

  As I maneuvered the roads, theories skittered through my brain like pinballs, each one hitting a target and plunging toward the game’s drain, only to be batted back into the field by mental flippers. I used to love playing pinball. My father was a pinball-machine collector; he had packed his den with game units. I remembered when he purchased Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure. Though I was primarily a reader, a girl needed silly downtime, too, and the gold and black colors and the slam-bang-ping sounds of the pinball machine hooked me. It didn’t hurt that, throughout the game, hunky Indiana Jones was staring straight at me, a gawky, boy-crazed preteen.

  Ping. Who had killed Natalie? In my mind, Mitzi was the prime suspect. She had motive, opportunity, and she was loony enough to have killed on impulse. Ping. Ping.

  Had Mitzi killed Willie? She could have donned Ellen’s coat. The lipstick in the pocket was a clue. Ping. Ping. Score.

  It dawned on me that maybe the Mumford family ought to fear other attacks. Did Mitzi intend to do away with the whole clan? Ping. Ping. Drain. Start over.

  A mile from home, Tigger mewed in his travel cage. I said, “Almost there, buddy. Be patient.”

  Seconds later, my telephone chimed. I had received a text. At the first stoplight I reached, I glimpsed the phone, which was lying faceup on the passenger seat. Bailey had arrived home safely. I would never text while driving, so a response would have to wait, but I was relieved. My pal, a lightweight when it came to drinking, had imbibed an extra glass of wine while we cleaned and put away the dishes at the café.

  A half mile later, something niggled at the edge of my mind. I eyed the cell phone again, and a new thought struck me. Bailey remembered hearing a ping sound right before the break at the first Grill Fest. She said Natalie glanced at her cell phone, even though Natalie was in cooking-combat mode, ready to defend her title and defeat the other contestants. What had she received: text, e-mail, or voice mail? Who would have dared interrupt her? On more than one occasion, Mitzi had caught Sam texting Natalie. She’d worried that Sam was having an affair with Natalie. He swore that his texts were about business, but what if they weren’t?

  I conjured up a possible scenario for the day of the murder. Sam texted Natalie to say he would hook up with her in the alley outside the café’s kitchen. Natalie, who I was certain had interest in Sam, given the girlish albeit snappish behavior she had exhibited that day on The Pier, would have gotten a thrill out of duping Mitzi. Except Sam had not been in town at the time of the murder. He had attended a money-management conference. Or had he? What if he hadn’t gone? I recalled the conversation with Flora at Home Sweet Home. She claimed to have seen Mitzi spying on Sam at the bank late on the afternoon of the murder. What if Sam had returned to town during the Grill Fest? Maybe he never left Crystal Cove in the first place.

  I fashioned a new scenario with Sam, not Mitzi, as the murderer. He was a detail-oriented guy. He purchased a spot at the money management conference to establish an alibi, but he didn’t go. Then he texted—

  No, he wouldn’t have needed to text Natalie. He knew her well. He would have known she would sneak away to have a cigarette. He could have laid in wait.

  But what if he had texted her? What might he have written? That he was ready to throw aside Mitzi for Natalie, and he was coming back to town to see her. If Mitzi caught sight of the text, she would have gone berserk and—

  On the other hand, what if Sam texted something entirely different? What if he wrote that he didn’t want anything to do with Natalie? He begged her to steer clear of him, saying he didn’t want to jeopardize his marriage. Natalie was the one who lost control. She saw the discarded panini grill and was ready when Sam showed up, but Sam surprised her and gained control. Sam struck Natalie. The fire alarm would have muted any screams. He disappeared down the alley and reemerged at the bank later that day.

  Ping. Ping. The motive was weak. No score. Drain. Start over.

  Sam’s appearance at the bank on the afternoon after the murder still niggled at me. Needing to know more about his exact whereabouts, I sped home and raced with Tigger into the cottage. After I released him from his traveling crate and refreshed his water, I revved up my laptop computer, which sat on the kitchen table.

  Online I found a site about the money-management conference in San Jose. The acronym was MONEY. Very subtle. The conference, a one-day event starting at 7:00 A.M. and running until 7:00 P.M., breakfast and lunch included, involved multiple tracks of seminars. Though the conference had concluded, I sent an e-mail to the coordinator. I knew from having conducted similar events for my former company that the coordinator wouldn’t wrap up her work for months. Refunds, complaints, and tips regarding next year’s event
were expected. I asked whether Sam Sykes had attended the conference.

  To my surprise, despite the late hour, I received a response almost instantaneously. Ten days ago, Sam had begged for a spot. Thanks to last-minute cancellations, the coordinator had been able to grant Sam’s late request. That information supported my theory that Sam might have used the conference as an alibi.

  I sent a follow-up e-mail asking whether the coordinator had any way of knowing whether Sam had really attended. Again, the coordinator responded quickly. She knew Sam personally and had seen him check in.

  Rats. I sent off another e-mail: Was he there for the whole day?

  The speed of the Internet never failed to astonish me. Seconds later, a reply arrived. The coordinator wrote that over one thousand people had attended the conference. Who didn’t want to learn how to make a buck? she joked. She remembered seeing Sam around 10:00 A.M. and then again around 1:00 P.M.; however, there were at least three hundred individuals at each session. Sam wouldn’t have been missed if he had left and returned.

  Would Sam have driven to Crystal Cove and back a couple of times? San Jose was a good hour’s drive from town. Even if I could check Sam’s car for mileage, I wouldn’t learn a thing. I wouldn’t have a clue what the odometer had read before Sam left town. Would Mitzi know? She had tracked him down at the bank. When Flora told me that, I had wondered whether Mitzi had put a GPS device on Sam’s car. How else would she have discovered his early return?

  I refocused on jealous-beyond-all-get-out Mitzi. Though Mitzi acted impulsively now, pre-Sam, she had reigned in the business world. She had managed a corporation. Who knew what kind of manipulator she had been in her previous life? What if she had texted Natalie, claiming she was Sam using Mitzi’s cell phone? Screwy, but possible. As Sam, she wrote that he had stolen into town. He needed to see her. Would Natalie have been naïve enough to buy that?

  I paced the cottage, thinking of my comment earlier to Bailey and Katie about not obsessing over the murders. Why was I so focused on them? We had a strong police force. Cinnamon was a vital leader. I ogled the Lucky Cat and realized that the puzzle David had left me was the reason I was fixated. The more I concentrated on someone else’s problem, the easier it was for me to avoid mine.

  Back to Natalie. Who had wanted her dead?

  What about Norah? What was her story? Maybe she was avoiding problems of her own. Maybe she had escaped an abusive relationship. Was that why she was so dead set on helping her sister exit hers? Perhaps Norah considered herself her sister’s savior. Both Willie and Natalie had been overbearing. Ellen had been at risk.

  I spun on my heel. “Why?”

  Tigger, who apparently thought I was targeting him, darted beneath a chair.

  “Cool it, buster. I’m not yelling. Boy, are you jumpy.”

  Like mother, like cat.

  I scooped him up and scruffed his head. “Sorry, fella.” He rumbled his thanks and burrowed into me.

  As we paced the length of the cottage, my phone chimed again, and I realized I hadn’t responded to Bailey. I set Tigger on the floor, punched in a quick text telling Bailey to sleep tight, and hit Send. As the message whooshed through the stratosphere, I thought again about the message to Natalie. Would the text, e-mail, or voice mail still exist on Natalie’s cell phone? Was the killer clever enough to have erased it? Even if he or she had, I would bet a skilled technician could find it. I couldn’t count how many times I had asked Taylor & Squibb’s geek department to recover a deleted e-mail. As my father would say: Fast fingers make for regrettable computer errors. I had superfast fingers. Good for playing the Minute Waltz on the piano, not so good for business correspondence.

  I spied the Lucky Cat that was once filled with gold coins and wondered whether there could be something hidden inside Natalie’s cell phone, like a SIM card or backup recovery data solution. Could our police department tech geeks—if we had tech geeks; maybe we relied on the county for technical support—recover the information?

  My cell phone dinged again. Bailey had written a response: Don’t let the bedbugs bite, our standard phrase after that fateful week we had spent at summer camp when, indeed, bedbugs had plagued us. Gag.

  As I considered a response, a game of mental pinball started up again inside my head. Ping. Ping. I flashed on the call I had received from Willie the night he died. Sam had suggested it was a pocket call. What if Willie hadn’t called me? What if the murderer dialed my number to make it seem like Willie was alive at 10:00 P.M.? The coroner guessed that Willie died around 9:00 P.M. What if he’d died even earlier than that? Ellen’s alibi covered her from 7:30 P.M. to midnight, but Norah’s alibi wouldn’t hold up. What if my original theory about Norah’s actions that night was correct? She’d left her ailing niece in the car, slipped into the motel, killed Willie, called me using Willie’s cell phone, and fled.

  Sam and Mitzi claimed to have been home for the night, but could I trust their accounts? According to Sam, Mitzi was involved with her nightly ritual. If she was primping, would she have noticed if Sam left the house?

  No, I was wrong. The motel maid saw a woman visitor, not a man, in a black coat. Ellen found a tube of bright red lipstick in her coat pocket. I reworked the theory to fit Mitzi. What if Sam, who was making phone calls to locate Willie, hadn’t noticed when Mitzi stole out the back of the house? The Sykes lived in an elegant one-level home. A path along the side of the house led to the rear patio. Mitzi could have sneaked away, done the deed, and tiptoed back in without Sam spotting her.

  Were there other suspects I was neglecting to consider? The former chef who had fled to Las Vegas or Rosie the mnemonic waitress? What about Flora? She wasn’t in the competition any longer, but she had been my first source of intel on Mitzi and Sam. Why would she have killed Willie? The two murders had to be related.

  I plopped onto a chair in the kitchen and ran my finger along the Lucky Cat statue as if that would help me focus.

  Bailey suspected that Willie had learned something and blackmailed the killer. What evidence could Willie have drummed up? Had he overheard something? Seen something? He’d cleaned out his account. He’d planned to run away.

  I thought back to Willie’s meeting with the bank teller. He had yelled at her. He had stabbed something that appeared to be a passbook. If only I knew the details of that conversation. Would Manga Girl talk to me now that Willie was dead?

  Chapter 25

  THROUGH THE NIGHT, I couldn’t seem to get the Mumfords and Sykeses out of my head. In one dream, Natalie and Mitzi were going at it, hurling insults and tubes of lipstick. In another, Ellen and Norah laughed and danced around town while igniting candles in paper bags. In a third, Willie and Sam yelled in unison at Manga Girl. The poor woman cowered in a cage no bigger than Tigger’s travel case. I awoke from each dream bathed in perspiration.

  By 6:00 A.M. I was drenched. No more double chocolate soufflés with warm fudge sauce at night for me.

  I rolled out of bed, peeked in the mirror, and gasped. My hair stuck out in all directions. The top looked like a hamster had nested in it. I threw on running clothes, donned a baseball cap, and headed out for a quick jog to clear my brain.

  Still leery of running on the road, I walked and ran on the sand. To the east, the sun cast a shimmering band of gold over the hills. To the west, seagulls circled above the placid ocean, each squawking eagerly for its morning meal. To keep my brain occupied so I wouldn’t dwell on thoughts about murder, I counted my strides to and from my destination. I drew in deep breaths of air through my nose and exhaled through my mouth. By the time I returned to the cottage, I was rejuvenated and ready to face the day.

  For the heck of it, seeing as I was feeling plucky, I dialed the precinct and left a message for Cinnamon. Supposition or not, she needed to know what was going on in my head. Maybe one of my theories would trigger one of her own.

  After I hung up, I made myself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. Why? Because halfway into my exercise, I’d had
such a craving for comfort food that I could barely stand it. As I sat at the kitchen table to eat—the sandwich was delicious—Tigger leaped onto the table and rubbed his cheek against the Lucky Cat’s. I shooed him away and eyed the statue. If only I could resolve the issue about the key and the gold coins. I wouldn’t be fully released from my past until I did. I thought of my father. I had started to mention the key to him that day when we met on The Pier to pole fish, but then I’d caught sight of a man who I had fleetingly believed was David. Why hadn’t I remembered to consult my father again? He had a duplicating key machine at his hardware store. He might know what kind of key I had.

  I dialed his home number, but he didn’t pick up. When the call went to voice mail, it dawned on me that perhaps he was otherwise occupied. With Lola. A rush of embarrassment coursed through me. My cheeks flushed. Like a little kid, I wanted to put fingers in my ears and sing, “La-la-la.” Too much information. I stabbed End without leaving a voice mail, grabbed Tigger, and flew to work. I would deal with the key later.

  The moment I arrived, my aunt handed me a wad of twenties.

  “Bank. Now. We need singles and fives,” she said. Many of our customers paid in cash. “It’s your turn to go.”

  “Where’s Bailey?”

  “She had a hankering for a double espresso.”

  “So much for being off caffeine.”

  “Some people don’t have that natural get-up-and-go like you.”

  I didn’t tell her that, until I had downed a decent breakfast, my get-up-and-go had gotten up and went.

  I settled Tigger in the stockroom and hurried away on my bicycle. I passed a number of serious cyclists on the road, heads down, dripping with sweat. Other riders looked as happy as I was to be enjoying the breeze and drinking in the morning sunshine. As I parked the bike in a bicycle stand outside the bank, removed my helmet, and secured both with a lock, the last dream I’d had replayed in my mind: Willie and Sam with Manga Girl trapped in a cage. Bailey had said the bank teller was key to the investigation. The word key made me flash again on the mysterious key. I assured myself that I would get personal answers soon.