Murder on the Menu Read online

  “Are we ready, do you think?”

  Some time while I’d been lost in thought, Jim had come out of the kitchen. I heard his voice right behind me. I turned and tried for a smile that told him everything was under control and I wasn’t the least bit apprehensive about what the day would bring.

  Fat chance.

  I could no more pretend I wasn’t nervous than I could make believe that being anywhere close to Jim didn’t make my hormones flare like a kitchen grease fire.

  Jim MacDonald is himself a born-and-bred Scotsman, and he has the knee-melting accent to prove it. Jim is tall and rangy. Mahogany hair. Hazel eyes. Athletic body. We met at that cooking class; he was the instructor. And if it sounds like I’m head over heels about him?

  I tamped back the thought and those out-of-control hormones.

  Sure, Jim is good-looking. Sure, he’s decent and kind, and he has a great sense of humor. Yes, he’s made it clear that if I’m interested, he’s plenty interested, too.

  But…

  I twitched aside the thought and told myself to get my mind off my disastrous romantic track record and back on the restaurant where it belonged.

  “We’re ready,” I told Jim. I guess I didn’t look all that convinced, because he laughed.

  “You’re not being made to march in front of a firing squad. Loosen up, woman! If you forget to breathe, we’re going to have more trouble on our hands than just some missing radicchio.” He drew me closer and kneaded my shoulders.

  Jim has strong hands.

  Expert hands.

  Warm and gentle hands.

  I nearly fell under the spell, until reality hit like a ton of made-out-of-recycled-tires place mats.

  “What do you mean no radicchio?” Before I even realized I’d shot out from under his grip, I was on my way back to my office to find the appropriate paperwork. “I know you ordered it. I know I paid for it. I can find the invoice to prove it. The rest of the produce came, didn’t it? We aren’t out of lettuce? Or tomatoes? Oh my gosh, how are you going to make the mozzarella salad without tomatoes?”

  “Annie.”

  Jim’s voice barely penetrated the panic-induced fog that filled my brain. I didn’t pay him any mind. Already in my office, I shuffled through the papers on my desk.

  “It’s here,” I mumbled. “I know the invoice is here. I know I marked it as paid. I saw it yesterday.”

  “Annie.”

  “It was with all the other bills I’ve paid.” I was babbling now. Stress and fear and first-day jitters were bound to produce some sort of phobia in a person like me who treasures nothing as much as predictability. “If you give me a minute, I’ll find it and call them and—”

  “Annie!” This time, Jim wasn’t taking any chances. Putting his hands back on my shoulders, he spun me around to face him. The heat of his skin penetrated the black blazer I’d chosen to wear that day along with black tailored pants and a creamy blouse. OK, so I was no more daring when it came to fashion than I was about anything else in life. That didn’t change the fact that Jim’s touch warmed me through to the bone. He was far taller than me, and he bent down to look me in the eye.

  “I don’t care about the radicchio,” he said, speaking low and slow, the way a mother does to a small child. Or a trainer does to a dog.

  I swallowed a gulp of dismay.

  “I’ve already worked around the missing radicchio,” he continued. “I’ll use endive in the salads instead. We’ve got it. It’s fresh. It isn’t as colorful, but we’ll make do.” He gave this news time to sink in. It wasn’t until he was sure it had and that I wasn’t going to start rooting through the papers on my desk again that he loosened his hold.

  Loosened, not let go.

  He linked his fingers at the back of my neck and tugged me a little closer. His thigh brushed mine. His breath was soft against my cheek. “Feeling better now?” he asked. His gaze dipped to my lips.

  I nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded again, anyway. How could I do anything else? It was hard to think rationally when Jim was this close and when—according to the clock I could just catch a glimpse of if I twisted ever so slightly—we had exactly ten minutes to go until opening.

  “You don’t want to forget this whole restaurant thing and just go back to working only at the bank?”

  The bank? I didn’t. But—

  “I just want to make sure everything is perfect!” I wailed.

  Jim chuckled. “Aye, as do I. But we’ve done all we can, Annie. And let me remind you, we’ve done it all well. We’re as ready as we’re ever likely to be, and now is not the time to worry about little things like radicchio. If you’re going to succeed in this business, you’re going to have to learn to roll with the punches. Radicchio that hasn’t been delivered, that’s not a crisis. Just a bit of an inconvenience.”

  “You’re right.” I willed the tension out of my shoulders and felt the knot in my stomach ease. “I just want things to go well.”

  “And they will; you’ll make sure of that. Heaven help us all if they don’t. Anything goes wrong today, and you’ll have my head on one of Angus’s old crockery platters.”

  “Will not.” He’d gotten his way and coaxed a smile out of me. I forced myself to keep it firmly in place even though, when I looked, I saw that the clock had ticked away another minute. “It’s just that—”

  “You’re nervous and excited.” Jim nodded. Like a diver preparing for a leap off the high board, he drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So am I,” he admitted. “This restaurant…it’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  “Which is why I need to make sure—”

  “No.” The glimmer in his eyes settled into a smoldering spark. “You don’t need to make sure everything goes right. We need to do that. There’s another thing you’ll have to learn if you’re planning to last in the restaurant business. It’s a team effort, you see. Kitchen, front of the house, business end. We all need to work together. It isn’t any one person’s fault if things don’t go right. Even when that one person is a certain woman who takes far too much responsibility on herself.” One corner of his mouth pulled into a smile that revealed a dimple in his left cheek. I knew what was coming, and I braced myself for it.

  “You might feel less stressed,” he suggested, “if you quit your job at the bank.”

  The subject had been a bone of contention between us all summer, and truth be told, I understood Jim’s point of view. Though his position could be construed as being cold and calculating, I knew he wasn’t thinking of the restaurant and how much of my undivided attention it got. He was worried about me, about how I put in eight hours a day at the bank, then another five or six at Bellywasher’s. Stress? I had it in spades. But that didn’t mean I was willing to budge an inch. Taking on the obligations of a new business was risk enough. I didn’t need to compound it by quitting a job that offered stability, a steady paycheck, and decent benefits.

  Another look at the clock and I sidestepped around Jim and toward the door. “Maybe someday,” I told him. Just like I’d been telling him all summer. “When things here are more stable. That’s when I’ll quit my job at the bank. You know, when this job is more dependable.”

  “Aye, you mean when you don’t have to take any chances.”

  I didn’t know why he had to make that sound like a bad thing. “There’s nothing wrong with being careful.”

  “There is, if you spend so much time being careful, you forget to live life while you’re at it.”

  Something told me we weren’t talking about Bellywasher’s anymore.

  The familiar thread of uncertainty coiled in my stomach. “Look, Jim, it’s not that—”

  “Not that you don’t care. Not that you don’t like me. Not that I don’t like you as well. And not that we didn’t try.”

  He was talking about the last few months, about how we’d actually given the whole dating thing a go. And honestly, dating Jim…well, that
was pretty much right up there with salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Or a bag of those dark chocolates from Dove.

  Irresistible.

  Delicious.

  And loaded with pitfalls.

  Hand in hand, we used to walk around my neighborhood. Jim would tell me about his plans for Bellywasher’s. And me? I talked about my dream of owning a home. Nothing wrong with that, right? Until I realized that every time I revealed some personal piece of myself, I flashed back to my relationship with Peter and how he’d always shared my dreams.

  Of course, that was before he ran off with the girl from the dry cleaner’s and took half of my house down payment with him.

  Other nights, Jim and I stayed in, and he cooked dinner using the recipes he planned for the Bellywasher’s menu. I know, lucky me. Jim is a fabulous cook, and staying snug and cozy at home had always appealed to me more than a night on the town. But no matter how hard I tried not to, those nights made me think about how I’d taken all the snug and cozy nights I’d spent with Peter for granted.

  We went to ball games and to a couple concerts and to the movies. I’ll admit it, I loved sitting there with Jim’s arm around my shoulders.

  And all I could think about was how lonely I was going to be once he moved on.

  As much as I missed our friendship and the sizzle that streaked through me every time I thought about taking our relationship to the next level, I’d slowly begun backing out of the relationship even before the demands of the restaurant swamped us both.

  As if he was thinking about the same things, Jim sighed. “Back when we met at Très Bonne Cuisine, you wouldn’t have gone scampering away when I put my arms around you.”

  It was true. But that was before I came to my senses and remembered that romance and I…well, the word heartbreak comes to mind. So do the phrases, don’t go there, who are you kidding, and don’t take any chances.

  Because I knew if I did go there, if I risked everything as I had with Peter, and if things didn’t work out the way they hadn’t with Peter, then my heart would be broken in so many pieces a truck full of super-duper glue wouldn’t be enough to even begin to stick it back together.

  And I had the nerve to criticize Eve for her lack of logic? How about trying this argument on for size: I couldn’t date Jim; I liked him too much.

  I didn’t try to explain. Jim wouldn’t have understood, and besides, we didn’t have time. Instead, I stood there like a lump. I guess Jim felt as if he had to jump in and fill the silence.

  “It’s my fault,” he said, and honestly, it wasn’t what I was expecting. I guess he interpreted the blank look on my face for disbelief. He was wrong. What that look really was, you see, was total surprise. He couldn’t possibly think the fact that I liked him so darn much I couldn’t stand the thought of things going wrong between us so I’d decided that I’d never let our relationship progress far enough for me to be devastated when it finally fell apart had something to do with him. Could he?

  Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, and the big ol’ bite of divorce still hurt like hell.

  When I didn’t protest the way he apparently expected me to, Jim went right on. “I’ve been so consumed by this place, I haven’t paid nearly the attention to you that I should have these last months. We hardly talk except about the restaurant. We hardly see each other except passing to and from the kitchen. You stay late, and I have to be at the food terminal early, or I’ll be left with what the other chefs won’t touch. I know, it’s hard, and I’m sorry, Annie. I really am. Things will get easier one of these days, and when they do, I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

  “That’s really nice.” It was, and I wasn’t about to ruin the moment by explaining that even when that rosy one of these days came along, I wasn’t going to be any more willing to chance myself and my heart than I was now. I glanced at the clock instead.

  “We’d better get out there,” I told Jim. My voice jumped to the rhythm of the drumbeat of nervousness that started up inside me again. “It’s showtime.”

  “That it is.”

  So why was Jim smiling?

  “A kiss for luck?”

  He asked the question, but he never really expected me to say no. And I couldn’t, could I? After all, he was about to embark on the dream of a lifetime. Who was I to throw a damper on the day?

  Our lips brushed and met. I didn’t need to be reminded of how good a kisser Jim was or how much I enjoyed his kisses. I knew it couldn’t last, but I melted into the moment and the odd feelings that enveloped me head to toe. It happened every time I let my guard down and let Jim get close (literally and figuratively)—that tiny spark of fire, the tingling that erupted in every cell in my body, the tranquillity that somehow managed to make itself felt, even through the herd of rampaging hormones. It felt good to be in Jim’s arms.

  I might still be there if not for the sound of Eve’s voice calling from out in the restaurant. “I unlocked the door,” she said. “Here they come!”

  “Here they come.” Jim’s eyes glittered. For the first time since he’d inherited Bellywasher’s and made the commitment to turn it into the restaurant of his dreams, I heard the same tension in his voice that rushed my blood through my body like a torrent. “Smile, Annie.” He kissed me again, quick and hard, and headed for the kitchen. “It’s a wee small restaurant with a wee small menu and a staff that’s as good as they come. What can possibly go wrong?”

  Two

  WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

  The words spun around in my head and started my stomach gyrating, too. Was I paranoid? There was a little part of me that wanted to believe that’s all it was. But remember that cooking class. And those murders. Somebody starts talking about things going wrong, and I can’t help but flash back to it all. Poison. Exploding stoves. Mayhem and mix-ups.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Have I mentioned that I can’t cook?

  No, really. Just thinking about going within an arm’s length of a stove sends me into fits of panic, and with good reason. Where others sauté, I scorch. While others boil, I burn. And when others bake? Well, let’s just say that the one and only loaf of bread I made in Jim’s cooking class has since been donated to an architectural firm for use as a building cornerstone.

  And Jim had the nerve to ask what could possibly go wrong?

  Annie Capshaw in a restaurant, for one thing.

  Annie Capshaw working in a restaurant, for another.

  Me having anything to do with Bellywasher’s in any meaningful way was akin to thumbing my nose at the culinary powers that be. I’d never been much for tempting fate.

  Honest to a fault, I tried to explain all this to Jim when he first asked me to be his business manager. Needless to say, he didn’t listen, citing instead my facility with numbers, my (usual) inclination for organization, and my all-around common sense.

  Maybe, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  When I looked out of my office to see who the they were of Eve’s “Here they come,” I was careful not to even glance in the direction of the kitchen. This was neither the time nor the place for my bad cooking luck to rub off on Jim.

  As it turned out, they were three guys in beat-up army jackets who milled around outside the front door for a minute or two, looking unsure about stepping inside. A tall guy with glasses was obviously the leader of the pack. He pointed toward the Open sign as if to prove to his friends that what he’d heard about the restaurant’s resurrection was actually true. The others didn’t look convinced. A shorter, rounder African American double-checked the Bellywasher’s sign above the front door (newly painted in a tasteful shade of green) and glanced at the window boxes we’d added and the copper-colored spider mums Jim had planted only the night before. A heavyset man with a beer belly shuffled behind his friends, waiting for them to make the first move.

  Apparently, their thirst conquered their fear. Glasses Man pushed open the front door, and he and his friends gingerly stepped into the corridor we’d cr
eated by partitioning off the main portion of the restaurant with delicate sandalwood and mother-of-pearl screens.

  “Why, good morning, y’all! It’s so nice to see you.” Eve chirped an eager greeting. Though it was clear when they looked at her that the men appreciated the view, it was also clear she wasn’t what they were expecting. Then again, from the looks on their faces, I don’t think they were expecting the white walls, the clean floors, or the linen tablecloths, either.

  “What the hell happened to this place?” Glasses Man spoke, and his friends nodded in unison. “Where are the pictures? And the swords?”

  Eve’s laugh echoed against the high tin ceiling, and rather than explain about ambiance and chic, she took over as only Eve can. She wound one arm through Glasses Man’s and led the men to a table. “You just have a seat right here,” she told them, her accent dripping with Southern belle charm. “And don’t you worry about those nasty old pictures and such. I’ll go on back and get Heidi for you. She’s going to be your waitress today, and I just know she’s going to take real good care of you. Now, what can I get you nice fellows to drink?”

  I couldn’t hear what they ordered, but I know one thing for sure: when Eve walked back to the kitchen, she left them smiling.

  I let go the breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding.

  Maybe Jim was right, and there really was nothing to worry about. Maybe our first day would go smoothly and herald a dozen years’ worth of profitable weeks and a restaurant filled with polite and appreciative customers, cooperative and hardworking employees, good food, fine wine, and nothing in the way of trouble.

  Maybe?

  Maybe not.

  BY TWELVE THIRTY, THE ICE MACHINE HAD SUDDENLY and mysteriously stopped functioning, we’d had one fiery flare-up at the grill that didn’t do any real damage but did set off the smoke alarms, and Larry, Hank, and Charlie—the guys in the army jackets—were on their sixth cup of coffee.