Dying for Dinner Read online

  “I wonder what they’ll do if we don’t-”

  This was something else I didn’t want to think about. Two weeks was a long time. Too long to go without word of our friend. Rather than consider it, and the emptiness that assailed me when I thought about the way I’d feel if we hadn’t made some positive progress by then, I kept on reading.

  “Here’s a page that talks about Vavoom! and how popular it is.” I shook my head and clicked to the next page.

  “Look! Here’s one that says something about Monsieur’s early life in France. That’s exactly the kind of information we’re looking for.” I clicked on the article and when it popped up, Eve and I both bent forward, eager to read more.

  The article was a profile piece that appeared in D.C. Nights, the local (and locally influential) culinary magazine, seven years earlier, long before I’d known Monsieur, or Jim, or that a place as terrifying to a kitchenphobe as Très Bonne Cuisine even existed. The headline declared Monsieur the “King of D.C. Cuisine.” It appeared right above a full-color photograph that showed a beaming Monsieur in a blinding white chef’s jacket. He was smiling in that devil-may-care way of his while he motioned in a very Gallic, voila! sort of way to the sign over the front door of Très Bonne Cuisine.

  “Gosh, I hope he’s all right.” Eve’s sentiments pretty much echoed my own thoughts. I glanced over to see that, as she looked at the photo, her eyes filled with tears. “What if he’s-?”

  “Not going to talk about that,” I said, and because the photo of Monsieur made the same impression on me, I scrolled down to the body of the article as fast as I could. “Not even going to think about it. All we’re allowed to think about is what we can do to find Monsieur. For now, this is what we can do.”

  Eve agreed, and reached into her purse for a tissue.

  At the same time that I instructed my computer to print the article, I started skimming.

  “He’s been in this country for seventeen years now,” I told Eve, and without me even asking her to do this, she grabbed the legal pad and added the information to my list. “His mother was named Marie. She was a pastry chef back in France and he credits her for giving him a lifelong interest in food and a desire to prepare it correctly and serve it with flair. His father was Pierre Lavoie, a sommelier. That’s a wine expert,” I added, because I knew even without her asking that Eve didn’t have a clue.

  “Monsieur was born in a little town in France called Sceau-Saint-Angel. The family bloodlines go back there for hundreds of years. Wow. Imagine having that kind of wonderful, rich heritage. I’m surprised he didn’t talk about it more. I’ve never heard him even mention Sceau-Saint-Angel, have you?”

  “No.” Eve squinted at the screen so she could copy down the proper spelling of Monsieur’s hometown. “Maybe he had an unhappy childhood.”

  I read some more. “Maybe not. He talks about accompanying his parents on trips to wineries and orchards and to the markets where they purchased the freshest ingredients for their cooking. Look, here he says something about the first time he went to Paris and ate at Lapérouse.” I added another aside for Eve’s benefit. “It’s an old, old restaurant. Very famous. Supposed to be romantic, and with fabulous food.”

  “So we know Monsieur had a happy home life.” Eve rapped the pen against the pad. “Maybe something terrible happened to him after he came to this country. You know, unrequited love. Or a love triangle with another chef and a gorgeous food critic. Or-”

  When Eve got this way, it was best to stop her before things got out of control. That’s why I asked her to get the article out of my printer and put it in the file folder I’d left on my desk, the one where I’d written Monsieur on the tab.

  I printed out some of the other information we found out about him, too, but honestly, by the time we were finished, we still didn’t have much to go on.

  Except for that information about Sceau-Saint-Angel, of course.

  I checked the clock, did some quick mental calculations, and Googled the name of the town.

  A couple minutes later, I had the phone in my hand.

  “How’s your high school French?” I asked Eve.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, EVE’S HIGH SCHOOL FRENCH WAS nonexistent.

  I should have remembered that.

  Eve took four years of Spanish. It wasn’t that she was some kind of fortune-teller who anticipated our current global economy. Or that she had an inkling of how valuable it would become to be truly bilingual.

  The way I remembered it, there was a cute football player who Eve had her eye on back in our high school days, and since he was Puerto Rican by birth, he was taking Spanish for an easy A. While I muscled my way through French I, II, and III under the eagle eye of Sister Mary Nunzio, Eve struggled just enough in Spanish class to make sure she needed extra tutoring from you-know-who. She went steady with that cute linebacker for the better part of our junior year.

  Funny, isn’t it, how even incidents like that from years ago have repercussions in the present.

  That’s why I found myself with the phone in my hand, listening closely as the person on the other end spoke slowly in the hopes of getting through to me.

  “Cent dix-sept?” Just to be sure I got it right, I repeated what the kind gentleman from Sceau-Saint-Angel had told me. “Êtes-vous certain?”

  I nodded in response to his answer. “Je comprends,” I told him, then thanked him and hung up.

  “You don’t look happy.” Eve’s comment was an understatement.

  “Monsieur Brun… he’s the owner of the one and only local bed and breakfast in Sceau-Saint-Angel… Monsieur Brun has lived there all his life.” I thought back to our conversation. “I’m not exactly sure, but either he said he’s two hundred and eleven or he said he’s seventy-one. I’m guessing the seventy-one is right. Either way, he’s been there a long time and he knows every single person in town. Everybody knows everybody else in town. They know everybody’s families. And their families’ families.”

  “And?” Eve leaned forward, anxious to hear more.

  “And there are only one hundred and seventeen people in Sceau-Saint-Angel,” I told her. “So it isn’t hard to know what’s going on there. Monsieur Brun… he says he’s never even heard of a family named Lavoie.”

  Eight

  MAYBE COOKAHOLICS GET ANTSY WHEN THEIR FAVORITE shop is closed. Maybe they spend their Sundays pacing their kitchens, or poring over cookbooks and planning the meals they’ll prepare in the coming week. I didn’t have to try hard to imagine legions of them taking the seasonally color-coordinated notepads we sold in aisle one (shades of sherbet this time of year) out of the modular drawer organizers they’d bought from aisle two and scratching their lists of ingredients and the details of the pricey cookware they’d need to make their culinary dreams come true.

  Maybe that’s why Monday at Très Bonne Cuisine was so incredibly busy. I couldn’t see straight much less take the time to consider what we’d learned the previous afternoon from Monsieur Brun in Sceau-Saint-Angel.

  Why had Jacques Lavoie lied to us, his friends?

  Why had he concocted a history for himself that didn’t jibe with the facts?

  If his background was phony, what did that have to do with the IDs?

  And with his disappearance?

  Too bad I didn’t have a second to spend on the problem. I was so busy during the day that when five o’clock rolled around and I finally remembered it was class night at Bellywasher’s and I was supposed to supply the gadgets Jim would demonstrate that evening, I panicked.

  I raced to the back of the shop and printed out the e-mail Jim had sent earlier in the day. Then, like a deer in the headlights of a fast-moving catering truck, I stood in the middle of the shop and stared at it.

  “Rasp?” My voice was a little edgy (OK, it was whiny, I’ll admit it), but it didn’t matter. For the first time since I’d opened the front door that morning, I was alone. My desperation echoed back at me from the hardwood floors and the granite coun
tertops. It was not a pretty sound. “What in the world is a rasp?”

  “I might be able to help.” The answer came just after the refined ring of the bell over the front door and I turned just in time to see a man close the door behind him.

  I did say man, right?

  I think I might have been more accurate describing him as a mountain.

  The guy was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were so wide that when he stood in the doorway, he blocked the outside light completely. He wore crisp khaki pants and a pressed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life white cotton shirt with short sleeves that showed off biceps where muscle bulged on top of muscle. His neck was as thick as the ham Jim prepared for the last week’s class at Belly-washer’s, and his chest looked to be chipped from granite.

  “I’m Raymond,” he said, moving forward to shake my hand. “You look a little surprised to see me. You knew I was coming tonight, right?”

  Somewhere in the back of a brain crammed with information I’d never known existed, been concerned about, or wanted to know about cooking and cookware, a memory floated to the surface, and I recalled that my new assistant was set to arrive that evening. In fact, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (actually it was right there at Très Bonne Cuisine the week before when Jim brought up the subject), I’d heartily approved of the plan. With someone else working the shop, I might be able to get over to Bellywasher’s in something close to reasonable time on nights like this, and, once I was there, I could try to clear my desk of the papers that were piling up on it like sand dunes on a windy beach.

  I had not, though, expected Raymond.

  At least I hadn’t expected the Raymond that Raymond turned out to be.

  Jim had told me the man he hired to help out was a Très Bonne Cuisine regular. I knew he was in his forties and that he was some kind of IT genius who ran his own incredibly successful business but longed to leave the corporate world behind and become a chef.

  Go figure.

  Raymond was gay, Jim had also told me. He was also helpful and friendly and when it came to food and cooking, he had encyclopedic knowledge. He lived in one of the million-dollar town houses that had just been built nearby.

  All that was well and good. But whatever picture had formed in my mind, it was not a buttoned-down African American version of the Incredible Hulk.

  Sometimes I catch on slow. But eventually I do catch on. At the same time I gave Raymond a welcoming smile, I realized that in the last week, Jim had come into the shop to help a couple of times, and always in the evening. Not coincidentally, evening was when Greg had been killed. Sure, Jim had hired Raymond to provide the culinary expertise the shop was sorely lacking now that I was in charge. But he was also looking out for me. He was worried about me. Jim had not just hired an assistant, he’d hired some muscle. Some incredibly amazing muscle.

  “Raymond! I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!” True on both counts, the culinary count and the muscle one. “It’s going to be so nice to have help here. We’ve been slammed.”

  “And from what I hear, when it comes to cooking, you’re not exactly Martha Stewart.”

  Raymond said this with so much good humor, I couldn’t help but laugh along with him. “You got that right,” I admitted.

  “Then I’m going to assume Jim was right about everything else he said about you, too.”

  I should have accepted the compliment at face value, but who could blame me for being a little curious?

  “Oh?” I had to crane my neck to look up at Raymond. “What, exactly, did Jim say?”

  Looking me over, Raymond ran a hand through his close-cropped hair. “Pretty, Jim said. He got that part right. He said you were smart, too, and I’m betting that’s also correct since you single-handedly took over this place and it’s looking as good as ever. He did not, however…” He plucked the list from my hands. “He did not tell me that you didn’t know what a rasp was. Do you even know what it’s used for?”

  “Rasping?”

  Raymond was kind enough not to point out that my guess was lame.

  Instead, he strode down the nearest aisle (he practically filled it) to where the gadgets were displayed. He pulled what appeared to be a giant (and dangerous-looking) file from the shelf and held it out to me, its bright yellow plastic handle pointed my way.

  “Rasp,” Raymond said. “Sometimes called a rasp grater or a zester. What’s Jim making?”

  I stood on tiptoe to point to the printed e-mail message in Raymond’s hand. “Broiled lamb chops with lemon caper sauce. See. It calls for lemon zest.”

  “And it sounds divine!” He smacked his lips. “What he’s going to do…” Raymond grabbed another rasper and demonstrated. “The rasp is run across the skin of the lemon. Like this.” He pretended to hold a lemon in one hand, then glided the rasp over it. “That will shave off the zest, and it will gather here.” He pointed to the underside of the grater blades, which, the way he was holding the rasp, were facing up. “Then Jim can measure the zest and put it in his recipe. See, it’s really pretty easy when you just know what to look for. What else do you need, babycakes?”

  I doubt I’ve ever been called babycakes by anyone, much less six feet four inches of muscular man. Had I been thinking clearly in an I-am-woman-how-dare-you-minimize-me sort of way, I actually might have been offended.

  If I didn’t like it-and Raymond-so much.

  I motioned for the e-mail and read over Jim’s message. “Grapefruit citrus sectioning tool,” I said. “That’s for the spinach, chicory, and grapefruit salad he’s making.” Raymond handed me something that looked like it belonged in the garden. “These aren’t pruning shears?” I asked him.

  He smiled like I was kidding.

  I wasn’t, and since I didn’t want to break his heart, I kept reading. “Baked bananas and blueberries. Which means we need-”

  “A banana slicer.” Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Raymond whisked a weird, banana-shaped item off the nearest shelf and held it up for me to see. “Clever little object. You put your banana here and just slice along the lines. Every home should have one.”

  Mine didn’t. Rather than get into it, I went right on, reading from the list again. “He’s also going to make glazed apple slices. Don’t tell me, let me guess. That means we need an apple peeler.”

  “One that can also core and slice would be perfect.” He marched down the aisle, reached to a top shelf, and produced the gizmo. “I bought one of these from Jacques right before Christmas last year so I could make my chicken breasts with slivered apples when one of my clients and his wife came to dinner. It works like a dream.”

  “And…” I checked Jim’s list one last time. “A pineapple slicer. That’s for the Jamaican punch the drink folks will be making.”

  “Done.” Raymond added one last device to the pile. It reminded me of a small cordless vacuum, only more compact and skinnier. He must have been reading my mind. “Easy to clean up. Very simple to use. Perfect pineapple rings every time,” he said.

  And I knew that when it came to hiring help, Jim had found us a gem.

  I was past the point of proud and, as the day had proved all too clearly, I was heading straight to desperation, so I wasn’t even embarrassed when I blurted out, “How often can you work?”

  Raymond’s grin was infectious. “You’re open late Mondays and Thursdays. I’ll be here for sure those two nights. Need me on Saturdays?”

  “I need someone who knows what a pineapple slicer looks like every day of the week.”

  “I’m going to take that as a yes.”

  “Yes!”

  “I’ve got water aerobics on Wednesdays, and Fridays are always my night out so I’d rather not work that day. I have to get my beauty nap, you know! But except for the pesky meetings that keep getting in the way of my social life, I make my own schedule. If you need me during the day, I can probably make it. And don’t you dare thank me,” he added quickly, probably because he saw that my mouth was o
pen and he knew I was going to thank him.

  “This is the opportunity of a lifetime for me. It’s a dream come true. As a matter of fact, I checked my schedule before I came over here and I’m free and clear tomorrow. If you need some help during the day cleaning up or stocking shelves-”

  “Would you? Really?” I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, and rather than have Raymond think I was some kind of weirdo, I balanced my armful of gadgets and took them to the front counter. “I can’t tell you what a wonderful help that would be.”

  “Hey, I love this place. And I miss Jacques. Any idea when he’ll be coming back?”

  “Soon. I hope.” The reminder put a damper on the excitement I felt at having a new helper, and a new friend. “Not that I don’t like working here or anything, but-”

  “Jim told me.” Raymond patted my shoulder in a friendly sort of way. His hands were as big as frying pans and I had to brace myself against the counter or risk falling over on contact. “He says you’re not-so-good at cooking and great at everything else.”

  Yeah, that sounded like Jim. He was a gem, too.

  I was thinking exactly that as I loaded my cargo of gadgets into a shopping bag and gave Raymond some last-minute instructions about the cash register and locking up. While I was at it, I’d noticed earlier that our supply of soup mixes was dwindling. I didn’t remember selling any, but, hey, I was willing to chalk that up to a case of trying to do too many things at the same time. I told Raymond where the extras were kept and asked him to please restock the shelves, and I’d already hoisted my shopping bag into one hand when the front bell rang again.

  I wasn’t worried. Très Bonne Cuisine was in good hands.

  Of course, that didn’t stop me from freezing in my tracks when I saw who stepped into the shop.

  “Hello, Annie.”

  Tonight, Peter was dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt the color of the paprika in little containers on our herb and seasoning shelf. He glanced at the bag I was carrying. “You’re leaving.”