Allergic to Death (4 page)

Adora sidled up to Emilio and batted long, sooty eyelashes at him. Emilio immediately reached for a glass and began to pour some wine. It sloshed over the side, and he apologized profusely, grabbing a rag from the bar and soaking up the small puddle.

“I’ve just heard the news, and it’s all too dreadfully sad. Poor, poor Martha.” Adora took her glass and perched on one of the empty bar stools. Emilio continued to fuss behind the bar, and Gigi noticed him glancing longingly at Adora.

“We weren’t just neighbors, you know.” Adora looked around the group, her eyelashes lowered demurely. “We were friends as well.” She put a strong emphasis on the word
friends.

“That why she came to see you this morning?” Alice asked with what looked to Gigi like a slight smirk.

“To see me?” Adora fiddled with her cocktail napkin. “She didn’t come to see me. What ever gave you that idea?”

“What was she doing at the theater, then, I wonder?” Alice plucked an anchovy off the remaining piece of pizza and popped it into her mouth.

“I…I…don’t know.” Adora’s hands fluttered to her face. “Something to do with repairing the air conditioner, I think.” She gave a loud sniff. “I can’t believe she’s gone.” She reached for a napkin on the bar and pressed it to her eyes. She gave a sob, and Emilio rushed over to pat her shoulder.

“Let’s just hope she got the air conditioner fixed before she died.” Alice rolled her eyes. “Especially if I have to wear that blasted sweater.”

Adora gave another sob. “How can you say that when poor, dear Martha is dead?” She buried her face in her hands. Emilio patted her shoulder harder, looking distressed.

Alice rolled her eyes again.

“I just hate to think of how frightened Martha must have been.” Adora leaned back against Emilio and glanced at him over her shoulder.

“It must have been a heart attack, no?” Carlo looked around the group, his eyebrows raised. “Maybe she went like
that
”—he snapped his fingers—“and never knew what happened.”

Adora smiled at him. “I hope so. I certainly hope so.”

“Gigi said her purse was stolen and she was very upset.”

Gigi nodded at Carlo. “Yes, and she was upset already. When I ran into her in the hall, she said something about the morning having been a complete waste of time.”

“I feel so terrible,” Adora said, looking anything but. “I never even said good-bye.”

“
Cara
, please, do not upset yourself.” Emilio hastened to refill Adora’s wine glass. “We never know, do we? Life can be snatched away like
that
.” He snapped his fingers and looked around the table.

Sienna insisted on driving Gigi home and helping with preparations for that evening’s Gourmet De-Lite dinner.

“These smell divine. What did you put in here?” Sienna sniffed the pan of marinating chicken kebobs that Gigi pulled from the refrigerator.

“Lime juice, tequila, some chopped jalapenos and a bit of olive oil.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Sure.” Gigi grabbed a bowl of cut-up peppers, cherry tomatoes and onion wedges. “These need to go on skewers, then I’ll go heat the grill.”

Sienna set to work. “How’s this?” She held up a skewer of alternating peppers, tomatoes and onions.

“Perfect.” Gigi added one last tomato to the end of her skewer.

“Did you notice Emilio and Adora this afternoon?” Sienna fished an onion wedge from the bowl.

Gigi shook her head. “Frankly, I was too shaken up to notice much of anything. What were they doing?”

“Let’s just say that Emilio seems quite taken with Adora, and vice versa.” Sienna stabbed the last piece of pepper and held the skewer up triumphantly. “There!”

“Thanks.” Gigi took the skewers, placed them on a baking sheet and brushed them with the marinade. “Carlo said Emilio hasn’t been interested in much of anything since his wife died two years ago. Maybe Adora will bring him out of his shell.”

“If she doesn’t break his heart instead.” Sienna wiped her hands on some paper towels. “I didn’t realize Martha and Adora were such good friends.”

Gigi shrugged. “Neither did I. They certainly don’t seem like they’d have much in common.”

A horn tooted just outside, and Sienna looked up. “That must be Oliver. Anything else I can do?”

“Thanks, no. You’ve been a great help.”

“Feeling better?” Sienna put a hand on Gigi’s arm.

Gigi shook her head. “I’ll be okay. I’m going to get these meals finished and delivered, and then I’m going to spend some quality time with the television.” She grinned as she pulled open the front door to the cottage.

Sienna waved from the driveway before hopping into Oliver’s station wagon.

Gigi stood on the steps for a moment, admiring the pots of geraniums that flanked her front door. She pulled a few dead leaves off one and poked at the soil to see if they needed water. She rubbed at a spot on the shiny brass door knocker, which she polished weekly.

She got a thrill every time she realized this house
was hers. In a manner of speaking, of course—she was renting it, but saving every penny she could toward its eventual purchase. Martha Bernhardt had been her landlord. Gigi felt a frisson of panic. With Martha dead, what would happen to the cottage? Would a son or daughter or long-forgotten sister sweep in from some far-off place and demand the keys? She shivered. She didn’t want to think about that.

Sienna had been the one who’d talked her into giving Woodstone a try, and together they had brainstormed the idea for Gigi’s business. Gigi had felt like a fish out of water at first, but now she complained as loudly as the rest of them over the annual summer and fall influx of tourists from the city who crowded their shops and sped down their country lanes in expensive sports cars.

Her Italian grandmother on her mother’s side always said, “It’s all for the best.” Maybe she was right. It had all started with a forty-thousand-dollar Versace wedding gown—one that Gigi had lost track of during a photo shoot for
Wedding Spectacular
magazine. Some assistant to an assistant would probably be sporting it at her own wedding in Brooklyn any day now.

Gigi still couldn’t believe she had been so careless! She’d always prided herself on her organization—her spices were alphabetized, her taxes done by the afternoon of January 1, her Christmas wrapping finished while the Thanksgiving turkeys were mere babes. How could she have let it happen?

It had all been Ted’s fault. Gigi slammed the front door and felt the satisfying shudder the house gave. She had to stop blaming Ted for everything. But if he hadn’t devastated her by leaving, she certainly never would have messed up so badly and lost her job as food and entertainment editor of
Wedding Spectacular
. Ironically, he had left her for an
older woman—just when she’d begun to fret about another birthday and being on the wrong side of thirty-five.

But then if it hadn’t all happened, she wouldn’t be here now. Maybe she should thank Ted instead of blaming him. She loved her little cottage, her business was taking off and there was Carlo.

But she didn’t want to admit that last bit even to herself.

Gigi was taking the chicken and vegetable kebobs off the grill when she heard a car pull up outside, followed by the faint
thump
of the door knocker echoing from the front hall. She brought the platter in and set it on the counter. The chicken, grilled to a golden brown, continued to sizzle slightly, the bright red cherry tomatoes looked ready to burst and the green peppers were blistered and shiny.

Gigi glanced at her watch as she hurried to the foyer. She could see the hazy outline of a man through the sheer curtains covering the windowpanes of the Dutch door. A salesman? she wondered. She didn’t have much time. She had to pack up the dinners and be on the road shortly. Her clients were usually too hungry to be kept waiting.

“Yes?” Gigi opened the top half of the door and looked out.

“Ms. Fitzgerald?”

“Yes,” Gigi repeated.

“Detective Bill Mertz. May I come in for a minute?”

Gigi unlatched the bottom half of the door and opened it. She supposed he had come to talk about Martha’s accident. A policeman at the scene had taken down her name, phone number and address.

“Do you mind terribly if we go into the kitchen? I was right in the middle of something.”

He was tall, ramrod straight and looked as if he’d been chipped out of stone. Sharp blue eyes, light brown hair cut
short and precisely parted and thick, and straight brows gave him an air of authority that came off him in waves and nearly vibrated in the small space of Gigi’s front hall.

She felt herself bristling and was tempted to click her heels as she turned and led him down the hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house.

He looked around without saying anything, legs slightly apart and hands clasped in front of him. Gigi moved to the tiny work island where she had Gourmet De-Lite containers lined up and ready. She grabbed the platter of kebobs, placed them on a wooden chopping block next to the open containers and added one skewer of grilled chicken and vegetables to each. She paused and entered a number on her calculator.

She could sense Mertz watching her, and she felt her face getting flushed. She stole a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. He really was quite good looking. She continued to ignore him as she exchanged the pan of kebobs for a pot of brown rice pilaf. Carefully, she measured half a cup into each container and then punched another number into her calculator.

Mertz cleared his throat. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Certainly, but I hope you don’t mind if I continue with what I’m doing.” Gigi knew she sounded waspish, but she couldn’t help it. He was making her uncomfortable. He reminded her of the guards at Buckingham Palace who never responded to what was going on around them. What would it take to make Detective Mertz lose his cool?

“I believe you witnessed an accident this afternoon in front of Bone Appetit,” he said, mangling the pronunciation like so many of the denizens of Woodstone.

Gigi nodded as she took a ripe, round cantaloupe from the counter and placed it on a clean cutting board.

Mertz reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pad and pen. He clicked the pen and held it poised over the paper. “Did you witness the entire thing?”

“Yes.” Gigi shuddered and closed her eyes for a moment as the accident played through her mind. She wondered how long it would be before she stopped seeing it over and over again.

“Where were you standing?”

“I wasn’t. I was in my car, right behind.”

“Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened?”

Who else’s words would she use? Gigi wondered. She selected a knife from her knife block—her biggest, sharpest chef’s knife. She thought she noticed Mertz flinch slightly, and she smiled to herself as the knife sliced through the cantaloupe as if it were butter.

“I followed Martha out of the theater parking lot—”

“You were acquainted with the deceased?”

“Martha? Yes.” Gigi held half the melon over the sink and scooped out the seeds. “Everything was fine, at first. We turned onto High Street and headed toward town. We were passing the bakery when Martha started driving strangely. She was weaving from one side of the road to the other, going back and forth across the yellow line. At one point she even hit the curb. I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t anything I could do.” She turned toward Mertz, palms up.

He nodded briskly. “Go on.”

Gigi sighed. “That’s it, really. She went up over the curb and hit that tree outside of Bon Appétit.” Gigi shuddered. She scooped the seeds from the other half of the melon, then began to cut it up, putting a half moon slice in each of the containers.

“Did you speak to Ms. Bernhardt before leaving the parking lot?” Mertz looked up from his notepad.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Was she acting normally? Did she appear ill or agitated?”

Gigi took a container of blueberries from the refrigerator, where they had been macerating in a couple of tablespoons of orange juice and some artificial sweetener. She put a spoonful on top of each melon slice. “Not ill, no, but she was upset. Someone had stolen her purse.”

Mertz jerked as if startled. “Her purse was stolen?” He scribbled some notes on his pad.

“Someone took it out of her car while she was in the theater. Apparently she’d left the doors unlocked.”

“I wish the lovely people of Woodstone would realize it’s not nineteen forty anymore. They can’t go around leaving things unlocked.” Mertz sighed and ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Did you happen to notice if she ate anything while she was at the theater?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Gigi began closing up the containers. “I’d just delivered her lunch—”

“She was a client of yours?” Mertz’s eyebrows rose slightly as he gestured toward the containers on Gigi’s counter.

Gigi nodded.

“And she ate something you’d given her before getting in the car?”

Gigi nodded again. “One of the melba toast appetizers I’d prepared for this afternoon’s lunch.”

“Melba toast? Did you buy them—”

“Of course not. I made them.”

“That’s all they were? Just toast?”

“No.” Gigi ran through the list of ingredients. She couldn’t imagine what Mertz was getting at. What could the melba toast possibly have to do with Martha having a heart attack?

“Any peanuts?” Mertz asked.

“Absolutely not.” Gigi said emphatically. “Martha was deathly allergic to peanuts. It’s one of the first things I ask a new client.”

“So you knew Ms. Bernhardt was allergic?”

“Yes.” Gigi closed the last container and paused with one hand on the lid. “But she had a heart attack, didn’t she?”

Mertz shook his head. “The autopsy hasn’t been performed yet, but the doctor is fairly certain she was in anaphylactic shock when her car hit that tree. And her medical records indicate a severe allergy to peanuts.”

Gigi’s hand flew to her mouth.

“You’re certain that you did not use any peanuts, peanut oil or any other product containing peanuts in the preparation of the meal you delivered to Martha Bernhardt this afternoon?” he asked, sounding as if they were already in court.