Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  His smile was moonlight on dark water. “I know I like you there.”

  “Likely to hurt you, though,” she said, and stood up. “I’m feeling better, just a bit on the fragile side, and it’s after eight. I need to ring the hospital and ask about those two people.”

  “I checked,” he said. “The pregnant one, whose name is Cherie—she’s going home. The older lady’s better off, too, though she’s still there. Stable, which is good.”

  The relief had her sitting down and reaching for her tea. “Good. I have two missed calls from Amanda as well. I want a moment to think, though, before I ring her back. Now that I’m feeling better and can think. I’m going in to work after I get some toast in my stomach, by the way. I always bounce back fast.”

  Brett looked like he wanted to say something about that, but he didn’t. She was glad. She said, “Only two things make sense. The icing on the cake or the pizza, and only one of those makes real sense. I couldn’t have got that sick from a couple bites of veggies or salad, even if they’d been affected. Carrots and parsnips and pumpkin, sweet potatoes and agrias—potatoes—that’s what I roasted. You’re peeling them first, which would remove any toxins. The only way they could’ve caused those symptoms is if they were precut or the potatoes had been green. I’d never have used a potato that had turned green. Not possible.”

  “Lettuce?” he suggested. “Seems I’m always reading about bagged lettuce and food poisoning.”

  “E. coli and salmonella,” she agreed. “Which is why I don’t buy bagged greens. The biggest risk is when the leaves are damaged. The juices from the cut ends allow the bacteria to multiply, which is one reason to eat the whole bag as soon as you can after you open it, by the way. You can get it when you harvest greens as well, just from those same cut ends at the base of the leaves, but the fresher it is, the less the chance of that. Freshness isn’t just about taste, or even about nutrition. I bought all the veggies Saturday morning from my best organic supplier, and he’d just harvested the greens. That’s fresh. I’ve been in his veggie beds, and I’ve seen him harvesting. The timing’s wrong as well.” Brett didn’t say anything, but the tilt of his head told her he was listening, and she went on. She needed to talk it out, and he always asked the right questions. “Twelve hours to get sick from salmonella. Days, usually, for E. coli and listeria. It was too fast. A few hours. Only a couple things that can be.”

  “Lamb?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Again—E. coli would be the only real possibility, and lamb’s safe cooked rare. The farmer’s careful, and so is the butcher. I had two bites at most, too. It wasn’t the lamb. The sweet was hummingbird cake. Listeria’s one possibility, from the cream cheese, which I don’t buy in packets. I buy it from an organic dairy instead. The taste is night and day. Again, though, listeria takes too long to develop. The other possibility there is staph. That’s definitely possible.”

  “From . . .” Brett said.

  “Food handling. I didn’t make a mistake, though the cheese maker could’ve. The milk to make the cheese was pasteurized, but an infected food handler? That could be it. I tasted only a couple bits of icing, though, to make sure I had the sweetening right. Staph wouldn’t affect everybody, mostly people who are already vulnerable for some other reason, and it turns up fast and causes those symptoms, so that’s plausible. Nausea and vomiting, which ticks the boxes. The cake itself isn’t possible, because the only thing that could’ve done it was the pineapple, and I cut it myself. Mashed bananas, toasted macadamia nuts, and unsweetened coconut aren’t going to make people ill, and neither are cooked eggs or oil or spices and vanilla. Flour and sugar? No. Besides, I only tasted for sweetening before I baked it. That isn’t enough.” Here came the truth. “If it’s staph, we’ll know it, because everybody who got sick will have tested positive, and if that is it, it’ll be hard to prove whose fault it was. Small-batch cheese, and with no widespread infection across distributors, you don’t have a convenient trace back to a packaged-goods producer. The only other possibility is the goat cheese, which came from a different dairy, or the mushrooms on the pizza. Any of those would be bad. Correction. Any of those would be terrible.”

  An hour later, having left Brett looking resigned but not happy, she arrived at Nourish to find three ovens and two burners going, Amanda whisking meatball dipping sauce and looking angry, Jamie stirring pots on the stove with both hands and looking sulky, Crystal using tongs to remove chocolate shortbread shells onto racks and looking gently martyred, like she thought she was Cinderella, and a stranger half-inside the walk-in cooler, a woman with a too-thin nose, too-narrow eyebrows, an iPad, and a general air of officiousness, who said “Government” all the way.

  Amanda said, as sharply as in her messages, though the content was exactly opposite, “You cannot be here, Willow. The Food Authority prohibits working with food while ill. You know better.” Which wasn’t what she’d said last night, but was clearly, from the glance Amanda shot the woman, aimed at the iPad bearer.

  “I’m no longer ill,” Willow said, keeping it calm. She may have done a little channeling of one Mr. Brett Hunter in order to succeed with that. “I’ll be wearing a mask and gloves, though, just in case.” She washed and dried her hands, then went to a cupboard and got them down, not waiting for an objection.

  Ms. Thin Eyebrows said, her voice as hard-edged as Amanda’s, “Are you the caterer who fell ill last night? Good. Finally. I need to interview the other person as well. The waitress. Nobody seems able to tell me where she is.”

  “Vomiting into a toilet, still,” Willow said, pulling on her disposable gloves and checking the menu attached by a magnet to the cooler. “I rang her an hour ago. You probably don’t want to interview her yet, in case this is something contagious. I’ll fill the tarts, Crystal. You might take over one of those pots from Jamie. Excuse me,” she told Eyebrows, pulled the paper mask up over her nose and mouth, and retrieved an enormous, covered stainless-steel bowl from the cooler. Chocolate filling.

  They’d do her ice blocks as well, she decided. She’d made three new batches a few days earlier, and she finally had the green ones sorted. A layer of yellow was the secret: putting a strip of mango/lemon puree into the top of the mold, then pouring in the spinach/lime mixture. The bridal couple was sporty, spontaneous, and fun, it was another warm day, and the ceremony was being held at the beach and the reception at the Yoga Center. Definitely ice blocks.

  “You said the kitchen inspection was complete,” Amanda told Eyebrows. “I don’t understand why you’re still here. Surely the rest of this can wait until tomorrow. We have an event in a few hours, and I’ve earned five stars from the Food Authority during every inspection for over four years. Your cotton swabs are going to turn up nothing no matter where you stick them, because they always turn up nothing.” PR skills near nil and falling fast.

  “Of course we want to cooperate, though,” Willow said, beginning to fill tart shells as she talked. Amanda still looked murderous, but that was tough cheese. This was Willow’s business as well, and she wasn’t risking it being closed because they’d been short with the inspector. “With two people still in hospital? We want to get to the bottom of this at least as much as anybody else. I cooked the meal yesterday, so I’m sure you want to talk to me. I want to tell you, too. I need to know what happened.”

  “Maybe you can enlighten me, then,” Eyebrows said, “as to where the dishes and the food you made last night are. Nobody else seems to know.” She cast a dark eye around the kitchen as if she expected a cupboard door to open and a pile of incriminating unwashed stainless-steel bowls to fall out.

  “Crockery, silverware, and glasses washed up and put away again, I’m sure,” Willow said, which the others would surely have said as well. “They came from the catering supply firm anyway, not here. Prep dishes went through the dishwasher long ago, and are put away again as well. Any leftover food not eaten by staff on site was binned as the first stage of cleanup, as per usual, then br
ought here and disposed of.”

  “We should be able to find something by testing the food,” the inspector said. “I’d like the rubbish bags, please.” Like a woman with a career or a point to make, out here on a Sunday.

  “It’s a disposal, basically,” Willow said. “An enormous version of the thing in your own kitchen. It’ll be down the sewer. What did the lab results show, do you know?”

  The woman seemed to be deciding whether to answer, but finally said, “No listeria, no E. coli, no salmonella. Staph in three samples, but not in the others, leading me to believe that it was naturally occurring in those individuals. They’re running more tests as we speak.”

  Willow took a breath and said it. “I’m glad you’re here, then, because as far as I can work out, that only leaves one possibility. The mushrooms. I’d like to go with you to ask about them.”

  The Food Authority woman’s name, it turned out, was Katherine. She didn’t talk as they bumped over the narrow, rutted, single-lane road that led up toward Nightcap National Park, and Willow didn’t, either. In her case, because she was having trouble with her stomach again. She hadn’t even considered that. Mistake. She breathed through her mouth, tried to think non-winding-road thoughts, and kept her eyes glued to the road’s edge. Pity it was too narrow to have a center stripe.

  The sedan made the turn into Ben Bankside’s drive at last, though, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Three dogs came bounding across the yard, scattering chickens along the way, and Katherine said, “Right,” like a woman who was trying to convince herself.

  Willow had never been so thankful to get out of a car. She gave Zeus, a black Labrador mix, a pat, told Hera, a bouncy young pointer, “Sit,” and thumped Hercules, a dignified white Great Pyrenees, on the shoulder. “They’re friendly,” she told Katherine. “They’ll lick you to death, that’s all.” Katherine didn’t look one bit convinced, or one bit excited about stepping in chicken droppings, either. She was probably imagining salmonella that would creep straight through the soles of her shoes.

  Ben’s house didn’t look any more flash than it had the last time Willow had been up here, months ago. A ramshackle wooden affair, it was never tidy, but his mushrooms were the best, and that was what mattered. Meanwhile, the birds were loud in the trees, the gum trees were tall, their leaves rustling in the breeze, the air was warm and humid, and Ben himself had come out to stand on the porch in shorts and work boots, pulling his stained kangaroo-hide bush hat over his shaggy head of gray hair. You’d think “full-on Aussie bogan,” until you saw the hint of shyness in his eyes and met his lovely dogs.

  Willow led the way, trusting that Katherine was following behind and hadn’t made a dash for the dogless confines of the car. “Hiya, Ben,” she said from the base of the porch. The dogs flopped down behind her in the dust, since the entertainment was sadly over.

  Ben didn’t invite them up, and he didn’t come down and give her the usual awkward cuddle, either, much less a handshake. Ben didn’t trust new people, outside the confines of his weekly stall at the farmers’ market, which was where she’d met him. She went on, “This is Katherine McGill with the Food Authority. Come to talk about mushrooms.”

  Ben’s mountain-man gray beard didn’t bristle, but his dark eyes were wary. “Why would that be?” he asked. And still didn’t even invite them up the stairs.

  “We have eighteen people down with a food-borne illness from a dinner last night,” Katherine said, like a woman who’d never heard the phrase “ease into it” in her officious life, “some of whom have required hospitalization, and we’ve narrowed it down to the mushroom pizza. I believe you supplied the mushrooms.” She pulled her iPad out and hit the button as if she needed to consult it. Or as if she were using it as a shield. “Chanterelles, is that right?”

  Ben had his arms crossed over his skinny chest, and he wasn’t backing up. “That’s right, and every bloody one of them was a chanterelle.” He shot a look at Willow. “It was something else. I’ve been collecting mushrooms for fifty-five years, since I was a wee lad going out with my mum and dad up here, and I’ve been supplying them for thirty. You know that. I can’t make a mistake like that. It’s not possible.”

  “That’s the problem I’m having as well,” Willow said. She passed a hand over her brow. “Can we sit, Ben? I got it myself, whatever it was, and I’m still a bit crook. Would you have a glass of water?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Come up, then,” backed up a pace, hauled the screen door open, and banged it shut behind him. Willow sank down on one of the dirty, mismatched chairs, a couple of which had rungs broken, so you had to be careful. Katherine, after some visible hesitation, joined her on another, grimacing as her narrow bottom hit the dusty surface. She’d be grimacing more if she fell through the cane seat, which was entirely possible. Willow cheered up a bit at the thought.

  Ben came out, banged a tin cup of water down in front of Willow, and took a seat. “They were chanterelles,” he said again.

  Willow took a cautious sip of water, then another, mindful of Brett in hospital, drinking too fast. The last thing she needed was to be spewing over Ben’s log railing. That would look professional. “I sliced them,” she said, “and I’d swear the same. Caps like chanterelles. Pale-yellow color like chanterelles. And most of all—that heavenly apricot smell. I know that was there. I’ve kept thinking, since last night—how could I have mistaken any of that? How could I have missed the difference in the edges? The timing’s right, though, and so are the symptoms. People began feeling ill a couple hours after dinner, but not everybody was ill, not even everybody who ate the pizzas. So it wasn’t something uniformly toxic, and it certainly wasn’t anything deadly. Gastrointestinal upsets, that’s all. Bad enough.”

  Ben gave a long sigh. “False chanterelles, that’s what you’re thinking. Nearly the same color, late-summer growing and in the same places, and they’d make some people ill and hardly bother others. If you’d bought them from somebody else, that’s what I’d say. Easy mistake to make. But you didn’t buy them from somebody else. You bought them from me. They’d all have the wrong gills, they’d have downy caps, and they’d have a different edge. I wouldn’t make that mistake. I couldn’t have at ten. At sixty-five? Not possible.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dunno know how else to say it. I couldn’t.”

  “I believe you,” Willow said. “I’d have sworn it. And yet it happened. When I ate three of those little pizzas for my dinner, after the trays came back to the kitchen too full, they didn’t taste as good as I expected. Not enough sweetness, too much woodiness. I thought my taste was affected, the way it can be after you’ve been cooking all day, or that I was tired. But I think . . .” She had to say this. No choice. “They were mixed. Looking back—tasting back—they were mixed. It never occurred to me, because it’s what you said. It wasn’t possible. But it happened.”

  Ben’s gaze was piercing. “You sliced them, then you put them on the pizzas?”

  “No. I sliced them, put them in the fridge, and did the rest of the prep in Nourish’s kitchen. I finished the pizzas at the hall where the event was being held.”

  “You took them there in what?” Ben asked.

  “Paper bag. Same as always.” You didn’t put mushrooms in plastic. It made them sweat and go limp. “I had the bag in the fridge at the venue while I patted out the crusts. I put the lamb and veggies in one oven to finish, and did the pizzas in the other, just at the end, as drinks were being served, so they’d be hot and the crust would be right.”

  Ben shook his head. Slowly. “It can’t be.”

  “Except,” Katherine said crisply, “that it is. We’ve eliminated the impossible, which leaves us with the improbable, however unlikely you two think it. Do you have any of those mushrooms now?”

  Ben gazed at her for a long, long moment, then stood up abruptly, shoving the chair back with a scraping noise, and said, “In a bin in my mushroom shed. Yeah. Take them and see for yourself. Take them all.”

/>   Pity Katherine hadn’t fallen through the chair.

  Not the easiest of days. Katherine dropped Willow off back at Nourish, saying only, ominously, “We’ll be in touch,” and Willow nodded numbly, climbed out of the car, and headed in to help finish the prep and load the van. After that, it was a short journey to the Yoga Center, where the reception would be held.

  Ice blocks were definitely right, she thought as she moved like an automaton between van and kitchen, telling Amanda and the three-person wait staff, “I’ll do setup, pour water and champagne when it’s time, and fix the coffee and tea. No food service.” The rest of the alcohol was being provided by another vendor this time, which was fortunate. “This is too public, and I don’t want anybody remembering me plating meals, or even carrying them out, if they hear about what happened.”

  Amanda sighed, and Jamie shot Willow a hard look. He’d been doing that all day. She ignored it, but four hours later, when she was slotting dirty glasses into a divided carton as fast as her hands could move, and he bumped into her on his way past with barely a word, making her juggle a glass and nearly drop it, she’d had enough. “Is there a problem?” she asked him.

  “No problem,” he said. “Except that I was sick as a dog last night. Thought you were meant to be trained.”

  She straightened. “Take care.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the one who needs to,” he said.

  Crystal, who was scraping the remains of dinner plates into a bin, said, “Jamie. No. Poor Willow. She was in hospital herself, and imagine how much responsibility she feels for poisoning everybody.”

  Geez, thanks, Willow thought. There was no benefit in pursuing this now, though, and besides, she had no answer to give. The fatigue was slowing her, making her move as stiffly as a robot, and thinking was beyond her. She turned away instead, kept loading up glasses and plates with pure muscle memory, and ignored both of them.