Basil Instinct (22 page)

Jealous because she seemed that good in the kitchen? Aggravated that I hadn’t consulted him on the new hire? Just plain cramped by another sous chef on site, even if temporarily? No, no, no. I knew Landon almost as well as I knew myself, and he was never jealous about anybody else’s kitchen skills, and he pretty much stayed aloof from the actual running of Miracolo.

But there was something.

And I just couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

In the meantime, I was twenty-four hours away from what I could only think of as the point of no return—Maria Pia’s induction into Belfiere. Was Nonna more likely to become like them, these dangerously secretive poisoners . . . or to become the vulnerable new Anna Tremayne, someone appalled by Belfiere, someone committed to bringing it down? I climbed out of my blue butterfly chair and gazed at the weak sunlight far across the yard, glimmering through the trees. About my nonna, I couldn’t feel what was true, but I knew she was at risk, either way.

So that gave me twenty-four hours to figure out
how I was going to infiltrate her induction into the mah-jongg club at Fina Parisi’s home on Gallows Hill Drive.

*   *   *

Certain things I knew for sure.

Notwithstanding the lovely kisses, Joe Beck was not going to approve of the plan. So I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity.

Landon would be a great undercover agent but I couldn’t smoke him out.

Choo Choo was never inconspicuous, so that let him out of the evening’s agenda.

Aside from Paulette Coniglio, there was no one else I trusted. I might get to that point with Mrs. Crawford, but we weren’t there yet. So I called Paulette, who was in the middle of getting her roots done, and laid out the plan for her, which she approved in principle. It wasn’t a question of getting her to come along with me—on that score, I had decided it was wise to travel light—no, I needed her to do an emergency sewing job: running up a second Belfiere gown in midnight-blue satin . . . this time, for me. She declared the assignment “easy peasy,” and thrilled to the challenge of fashioning the “extraordinarily silly” silver mask.

Over the next twenty-four hours, Joe called to report that Milo, his assistant, had made a tenta
tive link between one of the Belfiere members—an Elodie Tichinoff—and Magritte, the failed Manhattan eatery. Apparently, Elodie’s son Dimitri was head chef there, although he didn’t own a piece of it. I made encouraging noises at Joe—the kind that lead in the direction of more research, not the bedroom—and told him I was, well, ordering a new outfit (true). Keeping me terrific company during this time was Abbie, who was exploring the few surfaces in my little Tumbleweed, settling on the window seat as the choice place for general lounging and luxuriating.

Choo Choo checked in with me to let me know he had picked up Nonna from her one-day getaway at the Sisters of St. Margaret Retreat Center, and would drop her off later at Fina Parisi’s place for the Belfiere induction. Just far enough up the road that she could appear to be arriving on foot and alone. Count on Choo Choo Bacigalupo to figure the angles.

Maria Pia herself called me, high on whole grains and meditation, just to touch base. When she mentioned something vague about being interested in trying a “cleanse” after the induction was behind her, I came close to telling her the induction itself might produce the same effect. But I told myself, I’d be her own personal “special ops,” on hand to keep an undercover eye on her so she wouldn’t fall afoul of any of the highly suspicious
Belfiere activities that were afoot. Afoul and afoot. Even my language was changing . . .

I oohed and ahhed at everything Nonna told me, so as not to tickle her flawless antennae for grandchild crap. Nothing new to exchange about the police investigation into Georgia Payne’s death. Yes, yes, business as usual as of Monday morning, when Miracolo could reopen. After such a momentous evening at Fina Parisi’s, Maria Pia was planning on arriving at Miracolo a couple of hours later than usual (I mouthed “Yes!” at Abbie, who blinked with perfect feline understanding).

And then I remembered. “Nonna, before you go, Georgia Payne wasn’t her real name.”

“Who?” she barked. So much for whole grains and meditation. Nonna was back.

“Georgia. The dead woman. The victim.”

“Yes?” she said in a clipped, get-on-with-it way. “Yes?”

“Georgia’s real name was Anna Tremayne.” Start her out small. “I understand she was a chef.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she replied. My nonna was a woman who believed—maddeningly—that if she didn’t know something already, then it wasn’t worth knowing, that it was inconsequential and possibly subject to review by a team of experts. “But the name . . .” she said in a high, vague way. “What did you say it was again?”

“Anna Tremayne.”

She hummed. “Rings a bell, Eve. I’ve heard it before, but I can’t remember where.” Then, she tried it out again: “Tremayne.”

Just then I heard an insistent rap at the front door. But Maria Pia’s comment was interesting to me. If she didn’t recognize the name Anna Tremayne from the culinary world—where, then? Georgia Payne she didn’t know. But Anna Tremayne—maybe she did. And not from their lives as chefs.

At the same time, we both said, “Gotta go,” and hung up.

Paulette Coniglio brushed past me into my tiny home, muttering something Paulette-ish, like, “Good thing you’re not claustrophic.” In her arms she carried a dark, shimmering garment that could only be my disguise. She chucked her purse into my one club chair and did a quick survey of the premises, remarking, “You got a cat.”

“It’s Georgia’s.”

“Ah.” Her face was burnished with the June sun, and the color job on her hair looked expensive and expert. Why things had never worked out between her and my deadbeat dad—other than the fact that he was my deadbeat dad—I’ll never know. I’d swear she was still carrying a torch for the guy, long after I, the daughter, the only child, had per
sonally given up on him, but she always pushed off my comments on this score. And pushing off the comments usually entailed thwacking me playfully with a white linen napkin from Miracolo.

Paulette worked out religiously and dropped a pretty penny on personal grooming just, I think, to keep from looking not a day older than the last time she’d seen the wayward Jock Angelotta, seventeen years ago. Just to be prepared for that inevitable moment when he’d walk back into the restaurant, fall to his knees, and beg for her forgiveness.

Where he’d stand on
my
forgiveness was not, I think, part of her fantasy. She was that kind of faithful woman that beggars common sense, a woman who keeps the home fires burning long, long after the worthless man has stopped thinking about the home, the fires, or the woman herself. “So,” she asked, shaking out the voluminous robe she had “run up” on her machine, “are you going to try this on? I haven’t got all day.”

I slipped into the Belfiere robe, tried retracting my tattoo-less wrist up inside the long sleeves—success!—and twirled the stick she had glued to the right side of the “extraordinarily silly” silver masks we had seen times fifty just the other night at Maria Pia’s dinner. Paulette had fashioned a great fake, what with silver spray paint and glitter. I held it up to my face. “How do I look?”

“As flat-out creepy as all the others.”

I lowered the mask. “Then I’ll fit in just fine.”

Paulette turned me in pushy little half-circles, eyeballing her work. Then she cast a quick look of concern at me. “All you can hope for tonight at Fina Parisi’s House of Belfiere Horrors,” she said, her broad, pretty lips stretched out thin, “is that no one’s counting heads”—she gave me a tight hug—“and that their crazy mugs are hidden the whole time by their masks. She held me at arm’s length and fixed me with a hard, bright smile, “Otherwise, darling, you’re up the Amazon without a fly swatter.”

*   *   *

You know the scene toward the end of
The Wizard of Oz
when the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion—Toto, too, I think—fall in behind the Wicked Witch’s soldiers as they march across the footbridge and into her castle? That’s precisely how I felt when I drifted into a loose cluster of robed Belfiereans converging on the home of Fina Parisi. From my reconnaissance point about one hundred feet down Gallows Hill Drive I had watched Choo Choo pull up—still driving Junior Bevilacqua’s limo—and dispense our nonna, who batted away his attempt at kisses and headed up the long driveway.

I waited until she was far enough ahead of me and Choo Choo had eased on down the road to lock up the Volvo, slip the key into a tiny waist pack strapped underneath the gown, and follow the robed Maria Pia into what I could only think of as potential hell but with a fabulous menu, if you overlook the alleged poisons.

But at 9:55, just after nightfall, what kind of late-night goodies or diabolical food games was Fina planning? Why did my mind keep skulking around the words
human sacrifice
?
Maybe Maria Pia Angelotta wasn’t really here so much to be inducted as offered up to the Fates, Clotho and the other two Weird Sisters mentioned on the invitation.

Fighting off the trembling, I marched up the driveway and fell in behind a small group of robed Belfiereans, masks raised, voices low and sporadic. The moon wasn’t up yet, but there were solar-powered lamps lighting the way. I thought I spotted Nonna up ahead, her thick salt-and-pepper hair bouncing with each unsuspecting step. Behind us a souped-up car blasted by, windows down, music with a pounding bass line disturbing the night. Right about then, though, I would have preferred to take my chances with Mr. Metallica instead of whatever lay ahead of me. When an old, wavery voice back on the sidewalk started encouraging
something called Fritzie to “Make!” I felt uplifted. I could be back on Market Square in Quaker Hills, it suddenly felt so familiar.

Fina Parisi’s house was what I could only call alight. Awash in light. Alight, awash, afoul, afoot. Sheer terror had flung me straight back to the nineteenth century, apparently. It was a two-story brick house with what looked like multiple chimneys and porticoes—for all those horse-drawn carriages, or hearses, that come to call at the Parisi homestead. I would call it sprawling but that would come off as a little too disorganized for this, well, edifice. For the temporary home of a two-hundred-year-old secret cooking society, it was brilliantly lit. Disturbing, considering I had been hoping for whole zones of shadows where I could retreat, unobserved.

The double doors stood wide open and in we all sailed, I with my silver mask high, murmuring something positive to the frumpy sorority sister next to me, who chose that moment to complain about her girdle. This was news to me—I didn’t know such things still existed, let alone that they didn’t fit any better than I heard they ever did—but I quickly dismissed it as irrelevant to the case of Anna Tremayne. In Fina Parisi’s “foyer” you could park half a dozen of my little Tumbleweeds—you might cramp the sweeping central staircase that
looked like it had been snitched from Tara, but you could do it.

Now that I was inside enemy HQ, my plan, aside from keeping an eye on Nonna, was to slink off into the shadows to snoop around Fina’s digs. Had I but known that Fina’s digs were the size of Uzbekistan, I would have brought a sleeping bag. And some pesto. As the others headed into the parlor the size of a hotel lobby, joining their sisters, I slipped to the side of the arched doorway and made a quick scan.

Hanging from the high rafters was, much to my relief, not a member who had violated
omertà
, but an eight-foot banner bearing the Belfiere “coat of arms.” There in the upper-right quadrant of the funnel-shaped shield were the three silver knives with ebony handles, and the carmine-colored slash ran diagonally to the black mortar and pestle in the lower-left quadrant. And on the scroll below the shield was the Latin for Never Too Many Knives. Just seeing this creep-show banner reminded me that this was a group I couldn’t let down my guard for, even if they do incorporate the Hokey-Pokey into their club pledge and then swoon over Scallop Fritters with Roasted Chioggia Beet Carpaccio. After all, even Lucrezia Borgia had to eat . . .

In front of the cavernous stone fireplace, a long table had been covered in a gold cloth and decked
out in chafing dishes, demitasse cups, beakers, and what looked like an apparatus from a high school chemistry class. Was something being distilled? A handful of members wearing gold cowls seemed to be organizing the induction ceremony. Their masks were gold, smaller than the handheld silver “general membership” masks, and clapped to their mugs with elastic, leaving them hands-free for dishing out whatever was kept warm in the chafing dishes.

I was so busy sizing up the situation that I realized with a pang that I had lost sight of Nonna, who had disappeared into the crowd. I thought I picked her out, sitting to the left of the long table, on one of Fina Parisi’s several love seats that had been pushed aside to make room for folding chairs. Finally, breaking into the subdued conversations came the voice of “La Maga” herself, Fina Parisi, who took her place behind the table and clapped her hands to settle the crowd.

Not surprisingly, she had a gold mask and cowl, not to mention a stage presence that stilled the room quickly. When I noticed that members were handling what looked like a two-page program of the evening’s agenda, I found myself wishing I had managed to grab one. Then I caught sight of a basket on a table just inside the doorway—programs! But it was a dilemma. If I entered the parlor to get
one, I could get stuck there and lose my opportunity to snoop. But if I didn’t get one, I had no idea when the most worrisome parts of the ceremony were scheduled.

Well, it was a night of no guarantees. Either way.

And I needed to snoop.

While Fina chanted in Latin, her voice lifting above the silent crowd, I had two thoughts. One, now was the time to slip away into the other parts of her house. Two, she’d make a great replacement for Dana Cahill should we actually ever hammer together enough of a backbone to let Dana go. A few voices joined in with the chant in a strange counterpoint that sounded kind of plaintive. Maybe they were complaining about the maddening popularity of spaghetti and meatballs.