An Appetite for Murder (11 page)

“But—”

“But much as any one of us in the food service business may have disliked her, we certainly wouldn’t have killed her,” she added briskly. “Any more than you would have. I’m just saying she made few friends up in Miami and she was working hard at killing the possibilities here.”

“In what way?” I asked before she could turn away, thinking Eric would be proud of that open-­ended question.

“You’ll hear about it if you end up working for the
Zest
. And if you were wondering why this food doesn’t taste like Blue Heaven, that’s because it isn’t. Kristen’s sister fired them yesterday. This food has been prepared
by the chef who was going to cook at the new restaurant on Easter Island.”

The first I’d heard of this project was in Ava’s eulogy. As far as I knew, that little island, a stone’s throw from Mallory Square, had nothing on it but pine trees. It was surrounded by small sailboats whose owners couldn’t afford an apartment or home in Key West. I knew, because I’d looked into a mooring myself. I only lacked the boat to tie to it. Besides that, I couldn’t figure out how I’d handle the bathroom thing.

“Is that still going forward?” I asked.

Just then Chad appeared, a glass in his hand and a grim look on his face. I’d have hoped he might have softened a little from the ugliness of yesterday.

“Would you excuse us, Porter?” he asked. Porter made a face and quickly backed away.

“Why are you here?” he growled. “Haven’t you done enough?”

“I’m sorry for their loss.” I tipped my chin to indicate Kristen’s family. Under the church roof’s overhang, out of the sun, Ava helped her mother into a chair and then folded her fingers around a glass of wine.

“As if you cared one whit about them,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m not the one who was singled out as a jerk in the eulogy,” I huffed, draining the second glass of Prosecco. “You take what you want until you’re satisfied and then you just throw it away.”

He sneered. “You’re so naive, Hayley.”

“And while we’re on that subject, there was no reason
you had to fire Connie. She didn’t send me over to clean your place—­I did that on my own.”

His newly shaved neck reddened again. “Hayley, I need to be able to rely on the people I employ, not worry about whether they’ll give my apartment keys to people I don’t trust.”

“And I would never have even considered setting foot in your stinking apartment if you hadn’t refused to give me my stuff. My grandmother’s recipes are gone—­can’t you think for a minute how that feels? They were in
her handwriting
! And my best knife, and the serrated set I bought with my graduation money. Except for the one you were using to break down boxes. Why would you keep any of that stuff? You don’t even cook!”

“I didn’t keep it—­it’s in the Dumpster,” he said.

As our voices rose, the people around us turned to look. Across the room, I noticed Detective Bransford staring at me. I realized right away that it wasn’t the black swing dress, which fell a couple inches above my knees and made my legs look longer than they actually were, that caught his attention. Or the sparkly shoes or any Hayley Mills thing I had imagined earlier. It was me fighting with my ex at a funeral reception, possibly appearing guilty—­and if not guilty, certainly out of ­control—to the trained eye.

Eric materialized from behind two gawking matrons in black suits, grabbed my arm, and offered a perfunctory smile to Chad. “I have someone you must meet, Hayley.” He put my empty plate on a card table and dragged me away through the crowd of chatting mourners to the other side of the room.

“Who?” I asked.

“No one.” He tapped my head with his knuckles and gave a tight smile. “I just rescued you from making an awful scene. And why waste one more minute talking to that blockhead?”

Eric’s friend Bill approached us with an arm around a sobbing woman whom I vaguely recognized from somewhere.

“Meredith is having a tough time today,” Bill whispered. “I told her you see a lot of grief and that it’s perfectly normal to let your feelings out.” He mouthed “help” in Eric’s direction as the woman sobbed into his lapel.

“You must have been a dear friend of Kristen’s,” Eric said. “Come, I saw a bench in the hallway. Let’s go have a chat. Hayley here was on her way out.”

He glared at me and pointed to the door.

“Every pastry has the potential of making someone perfectly happy, of momentarily stripping them of adult
worries and baggage.”

—­Gesine Bullock-­Prado

I staggered away from the reception, my head thrumming with a jumble of feelings. I tackled the simplest problem: A food critic had to lay low in the local restaurant business. You simply couldn’t give a fair review if the chef was sending out a parade of special taste sensations that ordinary diners don’t ever experience. I hadn’t given enough thought to how I would handle having friends in this business and how their feelings and their lives could be impacted by what I wrote. I flashed on the case of the chef who committed suicide after he lost his Michelin star. That event struck fear into the heart of even the coldest critic—­I couldn’t finish reading the article.

Maybe it was time to visit Lorenzo for another tarot card reading. His services weren’t in my budget for more than once a week, but this had been an especially stressful string of days. I could use some external direction from an uninvolved party. No one was less involved than Lorenzo, who only weighed in if he had a twenty-­dollar bill tucked into his pocket. Mallory Square was not exactly a direct route home, but not a major detour either. The Sunset Celebration participants should be just setting up, and I was willing to bet he’d agree to an early reading.

When I reached the main square, many of the performers had marked off rectangular spaces of territory with ropes laid out on the cement and were unloading the tools of their trade—­knives and fire wands for the fire-­eating juggler, musical instruments for the one-­man band, and cages of restless felines for Dominique the cat man. A few tourists were lined up at the trolley bar in front of the Westin. Tony, the homeless cowboy I’d seen at Higgs Beach the other day, was lounging on the cement seawall, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer with several other men. I called out hello as I hurried by.

Fifty yards past them, Lorenzo was spreading a black cloth on his card table, his robe and hat folded neatly in a pile behind him. “Greetings,” he said with a smile.

“I know I’m early. But could you squeeze me in for a quick one?” I sank into his chair without waiting for an answer and slapped my twenty on the table.

“For you, always,” he said and offered me the witch
hazel spritzer and then the deck. I shuffled and cut the cards. He dealt them out and began to study the arrangement. And I tried to concentrate so I’d remember later exactly what he’d said. Sometimes the meaning of the reading didn’t become clear until well after I’d left his table.

“You’ve experienced lots of struggle in the past.” He straightened the corner of the Hermit card—­a sad, old man carrying a lamp—­and sighed. “Might you have regrets? But you must look inside yourself for answers. Your inner guide should lead you to the light.” He ran a finger over his waxed mustache, smoothing it into a neat curve.

I ground my teeth, hoping he could come up with something that didn’t sound like a syndicated horoscope in the
Key West Citizen
.

“Hmmm—­the Emperor again. There’s a strong man who’s a pain in your life—­perhaps he’s keeping you from moving on? And with him comes a sense of recklessness. Has there been a divorce? Did he marry for money?”

He looked up to see if I was following. I nodded: Yes, Chad was a strong man. And yes he was a pain. And yes, yes, yes, there were nothing but divorces connected to him. He did divorce for a living—­a very good living, at that. But as far as I knew, he’d never been married. And I didn’t need a set of tarot cards to explain why.

“There is a child invited on a short trip. They should definitely go.” Lorenzo lined up the edges of two of the cards and continued to study them. “You have an opportunity to go on a big trip—­you should definitely go.”

I sighed. Lorenzo didn’t seem to be on his game tonight. Maybe he’d used up his psychic powers for the week. But this was not what I was spending my money for. Not a chance I’d be going on vacation anytime soon. I tapped my fingers on the table and waited, trying not to glare at him.

“There may be a small accident, but don’t worry—­nothing serious.” He pointed to the Fool card. “There are new beginnings and surprises, but you must look before you leap.”

Now I couldn’t keep my exasperation from showing. “Isn’t there anything about a murder?”

His eyes widened, but he composed himself quickly. “Ah. Not here. Though I did read about the incident in the paper. Was she a friend of yours?”

“Not mine. A friend of the man who’s a pain.” I pointed at the Emperor card.

He smiled as he turned over one last card, and then the smile faded. The brick tower, with flames bursting from its windows.

“There will be chaos. Do be careful. And remember what I said last time about keeping your focus.”

I hurried off through the gaggles of tourists, goose bumps rising on my arms and legs, reviewing Lorenzo’s words. The emperor—­Chad—­had behaved especially boorishly over the past few days. Which forced me to ask, for the thousandth time: What in the world had I seen in him? And why did I leave my home to live with him, when I barely knew him?

The second question was a little easier to answer: I
was looking for a way out of my life in New Jersey. Two point five years back in my mother’s nest when I was a full-­grown woman, not a fledgling, were two years too many. And, Chad or no Chad, the fact that Connie and Eric both lived in Key West made the move irresistible. His invitation had just given me the courage to fly.

The November chill was closing in as the sun dropped over the horizon. I felt worn down and a little jumpy as I reviewed the rest of my reading. Recklessness, a small accident, and chaos.

Eric disapproved of my fortune-­teller addiction. He’d even explained to me why fortune-­tellers’ predictions appeared to come true: Easy mark visits charlatan. Charlatan predicts trouble in the form of a blue truck. Easy mark scans the horizon until that blue truck appears. Fortune-­teller’s powers confirmed.

“A hundred red vehicles might pass by, but you’d only see the blue one,” he explained.

“And so what?” I remembered asking. But I was beginning to understand that Chad might have been the blue truck. And I should have let him drive on by.

I fired up my bike, settled my feet onto the footrest, and decided to make another quick stop before heading home. It was never a good idea to face an angry roommate empty-­handed. Not that Connie was angry exactly; more like horribly disappointed. Which, in my mother’s hands, had always felt like a bigger weapon than anger. As I considered which shops might be open, I remembered the hysterical girl who’d been comforted by Eric as
I left the funeral. She worked at Cole’s Peace. With any luck, she’d be there now and I could ask her some questions, killing two birds with one stone. From the looks of her distress, she must have known Kristen well. Maybe she’d have some insight into her possible enemies.

Cole’s Peace Bakery was located almost at the end of Eaton Street just before it curved into Palm Avenue and roared past Connie’s marina. As usual, Eaton was clogged with trucks belching diesel and old cars full of day workers heading off the island during our scaled-­down version of rush hour. The stream of oncoming traffic finally broke and I veered across the road into the parking lot and left my scooter near a crooked and rusty bike rack.

I’d discovered Cole’s Peace bread the first time Chad took me out to dinner at Sarabeth’s, a branch of the original restaurant in New York City. I had devoured every crumb in the breadbasket and almost but not quite ruined my appetite for dinner. I’ve been a stalwart fan ever since.

The tiny artisanal bakery and sandwich shop was attached to the greatest restaurant supply store in the southeast. That could be an exaggeration, but I doubted it. Where else could I have found the cherry pitter my mother craved? Or the good grips corn stripper I planned to use every day in corn season? Or the wooden human head knife holder that I’d given to Chad as a funny housewarming gift? While I was there, I’d stop in and price replacement of the knives that Chad had refused to return. Not that I had the money to buy
anything right now, or my own kitchen to put anything in, but someday . . .

I grabbed my backpack and yanked on the kitchen store’s door. Closed. I hurried into Cole’s. Reduced to swooning by the scent of baking bread, I chose two rec­tangular loaves—­a hearty multigrain and a breakfast bread studded with chunks of orange mango. For good measure, I added a bag of salty bagel chips and one of their homemade cheese balls. How could Connie not soften when I came in with this loot?

“We’re about to close up,” said the woman behind the cash register. “Can I get you anything else?”

I pulled myself away from the other tempting delicacies in the cooler and brought my selections to the counter. This was definitely the same woman whom I’d left sobbing in Eric’s arms just an hour earlier. Meredith, Bill had called her. The skin around her eyes had the puffy look of a serious cry. I deposited my stuff next to the cash register.

“Rough day,” I said with a tentative smile.

Her eyebrows creased in surprise and then she looked leery.

“I saw you at the funeral,” I explained quickly. “You’re Meredith, right?”

She gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I take it you were there too.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I tried, hoping she’d tell me how she knew Kristen. If she turned out to be chatty, I’d ask more. Obviously. And if she asked me how I knew the victim, I’d have to rely on some vague explanation of how small the food world is in Key West.

“Thanks. That’s twenty dollars and fourteen cents.”

I’d have to be more direct. “I’m Hayley Snow,” I said, putting my money on the counter and then reaching out to offer my hand. “Were you friends with Kristen?”