Kernel of Truth (4 page)

I leaned back on my hands and looked up at her. “Lee, how come you don't want me to go to the store?”

She sighed and leaned against the post. “They have a new display up.”

It took me a second to get what she meant. “Antoine's new line launched today, didn't it?” No wonder he had texted me so many times. He was trying to find out if I'd seen it without actually asking me.

She nodded. “There's a life-size Antoine cardboard cutout at the end of the pasta aisle. In fact, it might be more than life-size. I'm pretty sure Antoine isn't that much taller than me.”

If I thought I could escape living in Antoine's shadow when I left Napa, I had been mistaken. His television show,
Cooking the Belanger Way
, kept getting more popular, and he'd launched a line of salad dressings three months ago. The pasta sauces launched this week. He was everywhere. There were articles in magazines, ads on TV, and now apparently life-size replicas in supermarkets. There was no way to escape him. Most people didn't really understand why I'd wanted to. Sometimes I didn't understand, but then I remembered all the lonely nights waiting for him to come home from the restaurant or a taping. All the lonely days waiting for him to come home from a trip. All the lonely hours when he was home, but was too busy planning menus for L'Oiseau Gris, creating new dishes and writing scripts for his television show to talk to me or even notice I was still alive.

I met Antoine Belanger when he did a series of guest lectures at the CIA when I was still a student. He liked my béarnaise. He liked it a lot. He liked it so much that he showed up the next week and asked me out.

I went.

We were married six months later.

Whirlwind? You bet. Romantic? Absolutely. Deeply flawed? Oh, baby. More fatally flawed than a fallen soufflé.

“I can't hide from him,” I told Haley. “Although I appreciate the effort.”

Haley had never exactly approved of my marriage to Antoine. She'd gotten married the way she felt we were supposed to get married: in a white poufy dress with half the town there to see who caught the bouquet. Antoine and I had gone to the justice of the peace in downtown Napa with the maître d' and hostess from L'Oiseau Gris as witnesses. I hadn't even told Haley we were getting married until after the fact. For a while, I thought she'd never forgive me.

Luckily, she's not that kind of sister.

I gave Evan
his bath, which seemed like a travesty to me when I picked him up from his booster seat after Haley fed him his dinner, which did not include peas. He smelled like grass and apple juice, pretty much the best cologne I'd ever sniffed. Why wash that away? I put too much bubble bath in the tub and an epic battle between a plastic stegosaurus and a Fisher-Price boat was waged. We were both pretty much equally soaked by the time I got him out to put him in his jammies.

He was also getting sleepy and had molded himself to me as I carried him downstairs on my hip. Dan and Garrett were on the back porch with the grill fired up while Haley finished making a salad in the kitchen. She smiled as I walked in and reached her arms out for Evan.

I shook my head. “It's the last thing your back needs. He's getting bigger every second, I think.”

“I know. I'll go get Dan. He'll want to tuck him in.” Her
brows furrowed. “The timing's not so great. Maybe Garrett can take over grilling the steaks.”

I sighed. “Haley, I have a degree from the Culinary Institute of America. I can handle a grill. I can probably even make the steaks do fancy flips as I turn them.”

“Could you just maybe make sure they're cooked through and not charred anywhere?” She waved me on.

“Consider it handled.” I opened the back door with my free hand. “Hey, Daddy-o. I think your services are needed.”

Dan looked up from the grill. He'd changed out of his uniform into a T-shirt and jeans and he looked like my old high school buddy Dan more than Sheriff Cooper again. I swear his whole body melted a little as he looked at his son. I nodded my head at Evan. “Haley says you want to be on bedtime duty.”

“Best duty ever.” He held out his spatula to me. “Trade?”

“You bet.” I handed over Evan and took the spatula, then went to check the grill. It was a classic kettle running on charcoal. Dan was an old-fashioned guy. Sprocket came up from where he'd been lounging in the yard and settled at my feet, most likely hoping I'd slip up and drop one of the T-bones. With Sprocket around, there was no five-second rule. Whatever got dropped got eaten before it ever had a chance to hit the ground, much less languish there for an entire five seconds.

“How's it going?” Garrett came over to stand next to me as I inspected Dan's handiwork. I nodded. I'd taught Dan well. There was melted butter ready to go.

“I've been better.” I liked Garrett. Really, I did. He just somehow also made me nervous. As usual, he looked like he'd come straight from his law office, which he probably had. He was wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt. His tie was gone, the shirt's top two buttons were undone and the sleeves were rolled up, but he still looked pretty corporate.

I never looked corporate. Even when I tried to look corporate I looked like I had emerged from a tornado. My hair never stayed in place. My shirts never stayed tucked in. My skirts always wrinkled. One of the fabulous things about opening POPS was that I didn't have to try to look corporate or even kitchen corporate. No suits. No toque blanche. I was a blue-jeans girl every day of the week now.

Garrett leaned against the railing of the deck, arms crossed with a longneck bottle dangling from between his fingers. He was tall and lanky and loose-limbed and looked like he was born to stand exactly like that. Well, maybe not in the lawyer clothes. “You look like you were caught out in the rain.”

I looked down at my damp jeans and peasant shirt. “Hurricane Evan,” I confirmed.

He reached into the cooler that sat near the railing, pulled out a beer and offered it to me. “I hear you had a rough day.”

I took the beer and nodded. “You heard right.”

“I'm really sorry. Dan says you and Coco were close.” He retreated back to the railing.

I nodded and gave the steak at the edge of the flame a little touch with my forefinger and then touched my chin. I flipped them over.

“What did you just do?” Garrett stared at me, brows slightly furrowed.

I thought through my last few actions, not sure at first what he was talking about. “Face tested the meat. Why?”

“You what?”

“Face tested it.” I explained. “If you touch it and it feels like your cheek, it's rare. If it feels like your chin, it's medium. If it's like your forehead, it's well done. Haley and Dan like their steaks medium. When the steaks feel like my chin, it's time to flip them.”

He shook his head. “You're a strange woman, Rebecca.”

“Perhaps, but I grill a great steak.” I shut the lid and consulted my watch. “Could you tell Haley the steaks will be ready in four minutes?”

“Not three or five?” He laughed and took a long swallow of his beer.

I didn't laugh. Instead I took a long swallow of my own beer and looked at my watch again. “Now it's three minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Seriously?” he asked.

“Three minutes and twenty-five seconds,” I replied.

He set his beer down and held his hands up. “Fine. I'm going. I'm going.”

“Three minutes and twenty seconds,” I called after him as he went into the kitchen.

I poured some of the melted butter onto the serving platter and took another swig of beer. At the appointed moment, I took the steaks off the grill, brushed both sides with butter and went into the house, Sprocket at my heels, hoping against hope that those steaks would slide off the platter.

Haley had everything on the table ready to go. I set down the platter and everyone helped themselves.

Garrett took a bite of his steak and made a moaning noise. “So this is what they teach you at that fancy California cooking school? To make steak taste like this?”

“Among other things.” Like how to care for my knives and how to season food and the right way to julienne a carrot and how to keep a soufflé from falling. I would have learned none of them if Coco hadn't encouraged me to go, hadn't insisted I go, hadn't held my hand and led me out of Grand Lake, then held my hand again and led me back. I held up my wineglass. “To Coco.”

Dan, Haley and Garrett all lifted their glasses and echoed, “To Coco.”

And then they all gave me the best compliment a person can give any chef: They stopped talking and ate.

*   *   *

Our plates were
empty, but no one was leaving the table. It was one more reason it was so weird to be back in Grand Lake. My parents' dinner parties had always been like this. Everyone leaning back in the upholstered chairs, finishing the last of their wine from the Dublin Crystal goblets, laughing and arguing about all the things you're not supposed to bring up in polite company like politics and religion and money. I remembered it all with a golden glow on it. Maybe I romanticized it. I didn't care.

Tonight with the specter of Coco floating over us, there wasn't so much laughter. Other than that, it was pretty much the same. Same two-story house. Same dining room with the same bay window and floral drapes. Same dining room table with its extending leaves. Same floral-patterned china. I twirled my glass, watching the legs the wine made on the side. I thought it might be the same damn Dublin goblet.

The one thing that was definitely not the same: me. I'd left here a wild child full of anger and returned a chastened woman. Humbled by the big bad world. Down, but not out, thanks in large part to Coco.

I went to the kitchen and got my popcorn balls. I brought them out to the table on a platter with another smaller platter of special ones for Haley. “Everyone ready to be my guinea pigs? Except you, Sis. I made you nonalcoholic ones.”

I got pretty much the same reaction from Dan and Garrett as I had from Annie. This time I allowed myself the sense of satisfaction I generally got when my food was well-received.

“How many of these would I have to eat to get a decent buzz on?” Garrett asked, leaning back in his chair.

“Probably a lot,” I admitted. “It's more the spirit of the thing, you know? That and the flavor.”

“I'll keep that in mind.” He grinned, then turned to Haley. “And how is your dessert?”

Haley licked the last of the unadulterated chocolate sauce off her fingers and then said, “Fabulous.”

“I was working on these with Coco,” I said, brushing off my own fingers. “I wish she'd had a chance to try this batch. I think she would have approved.”

“So what have you found out, Dan?” Garrett asked.

Dan leaned forward onto his elbows. “Not a whole hell of a lot, to be honest. Jessica left the shop at around four thirty, so Coco was alive then.”

“Why did Jessica leave so early?” Jessica usually stayed until at least close to closing time. She taught preschool at the church in the mornings and then helped Coco in the shop in the afternoons and then walked around with butter not melting in her mouth the rest of the time. She also ran the church youth group and helped out with the historic preservation committee. She was everywhere. I was finding it harder to get away from her than it was to get away from Antoine.

“Something about doing some shopping for the Thursday night teen social at the church. Honestly, it got a little garbled, but I guess she'd promised the kids a make-your-own-sundae night and she had to get everything ready.” Dan shook his head. “She feels terrible that she might have been able to stop whoever broke in if she'd stayed later.”

“Seriously?” Jessica is about five foot nothing. She might have been able to stop an attack by a big bunny rabbit or a rambunctious grade-schooler, but anybody else could have probably steamrolled right over her.

Dan shrugged. “She feels guilty. She feels like she should have been there.”

I had a momentary twinge of sympathy for Jessica. I felt like I should have been there, too.

“Any idea what's going to happen to the store?” Garrett finished the last of his wine.

I polished mine off, too. “It'll go to Jessica. That was always the plan. Leave the store to Jessica.” I stopped there. I doubted that any of the other plans would be relevant anymore.

Dan's eyes narrowed a bit. “Only the store? Not the recipe?”

Figured that I couldn't slide that past him. “Well, that was the plan.” For the past ten years, Jessica had been trying to get Coco to sell her chocolate recipe to one of the big chocolate companies. There would have been licensing money and all kinds of residuals, but then the recipe would no longer be Coco's and Coco's alone, and Coco was a big believer in God blessing the child who had her own. She knew once she was gone that Jessica would be able to do whatever she wanted with the recipe. Unless, of course, she didn't leave the recipe to Jessica.

Dan sat up a little straighter. “Do you know where Coco kept the recipe?”

“In the safe in the office.” It wasn't like Coco needed to consult it. She probably knew it better than her social security number, and she'd had that for a seriously long time. “Did anyone mess with the safe?”

“No. It looks a little like Coco might have heard the glass breaking in the back and instead of calling 911, went to see what was going on.” Dan shook his head. If he had his way, we'd all be calling 911 for every branch scraping on a window and every neighborhood cat knocking over a garbage can. Better safe than sorry seemed to be his motto these days. I wished I could tell his high school self about this. High School Dan would have squirted milk out his nose
he'd be laughing so hard. Or possibly beer. Yeah. More likely beer. He'd changed, too, I guessed. We all had. Except possibly Jessica.

“How do you know?” Haley asked, starting to stack some plates.

“There was glass on the feet of her quad cane. She must have walked through some of it and tracked it back to the office. As if maybe whoever it was backed her into the office and she dropped the cane by the door in her hurry. She might have been going for the phone when the perpetrator confronted her.” He turned and looked at me. “Of course, it's not like our crime scene is pristine.”

So we were back to this again, were we? “What was I supposed to do? Leave Jessica screaming in there and not go see what was wrong?” I glared at him.

He thought for a second. “No, but you should have left everything alone after that. You definitely shouldn't have messed with the quad cane.”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn't touch the quad cane except to keep from tripping on it, and no self-respecting woman would have left Coco with her dress up around her waist like that.”

“Amen, sister,” Haley said, and we bumped fists. I handed her my plate and Dan's.

“You sure about the quad cane? You didn't clean it off or something?” Dan's eyebrows creased.

“I only touched it to move it out of the way. Why?” I picked up a few wineglasses to carry into the kitchen.

“Just, yours were the only prints on them. Everything else had been wiped.” He drummed his fingers on the table.

“I only touched what anyone would have touched.” I carried the glasses into the kitchen and then came back out.

“Jessica didn't touch anything,” Dan pointed out. “Absolutely nothing. She stepped over the quad cane.”

“Jessica this. Jessica that,” I said in a singsongy voice. Sprocket raised his head up and cocked it to one side. “Jessica stood around and screamed and didn't do anything and still is somehow right and I'm wrong when I'm the one who actually called the police.”

Haley laughed. “Oh. My. God. You still have it in for Jessica?”

I threw my hands in the air. “I do not and did not have it in for Jessica. Jessica had it in for me. She was just so sneaky she always made it look like my fault.”

Haley and Dan started to laugh. Garrett leaned forward. “Let me in on the joke, guys. It sounds like a good one.”

I sat back down in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest and scowled. “It's not funny.”

“Oh, come on, Bec. It's been so long. Can't it be a little bit funny?” Dan reached his hand out to me.