Cooking Up Murder (24 page)

"So you followed us."

He nodded.

That much of the story made sense. "But why?" I continued. "You said yourself that our investigation was goofy. You said we should leave it to the real professionals. If you don't care, why did you bother to follow us?"

He tossed the towel aside and sat down next to me. "Who said I didn't care?"

Between the touch of his hand against mine and the way my head suddenly started twirling all over again, I could barely get the words out. "You mean--"

"Look, there's something you should know about me right now," Jim said. "I've got some ideas that might be considered old-fashioned. About things like watching out for people I care about and keeping my eye on a woman who's special to me, just to be certain nothing bad happens to her. That's also the reason I'm staying here tonight."

So it wasn't the most romantic declaration I'd ever heard. Was I complaining?

I guess the fact that I practically leaped off the couch and headed for the bedroom pretty much told Jim everything he needed to know.

But I didn't expect him to laugh about it.

"Hold on there!" Jim exclaimed, keeping me in my place with one hand on my arm. "I'll admit, this isn't how I imagined we'd spend our first night together, but you're staying put. And I'm staying right here." He pointed to his chair. "That way, I can wake you now and again just to be sure you're all right, and keep an eye on you all night long."

It sure wasn't what I had in mind, but as I sank back onto the couch and my eyes drifted closed, I realized that in the great scheme of things, it was a pretty good trade-off.

I'm pretty sure I was still smiling when Jim kissed me good night.

Fifteen

"ALBA STRU."

I was staring down at Drago, clasping his clammy hand in mine. His face was contorted with pain as he choked out his last words.

"Alba Stru . . ."

I sat up with a start.

"What's that you said?" Jim poked his head out of the kitchen door. He was still dressed in the clothes he'd worn the night before. Of course. Since he'd slept sitting up--if he slept at all--he wasn't too wrinkled or mussed. Except for his hair. A thick lock of it hung over his forehead. It made him look younger and a little sleepy in an incredibly sexy way.

He was making French toast, and it smelled divine. "It sounded as if you were talking another language."

"Not a language, a name." I stretched and swung my legs off the couch. When I sat up, my head didn't hurt, and the world didn't wobble. Both good signs. "It was one of the things Drago said to me before he died."

"And this Alba person . . ." Jim called over his shoulder, as I made my way into the dining room. As much as I would have liked breakfast in bed (or more accurately, breakfast on couch), I knew it was time to stop being coddled and get back to reality. I had to be at work in a little over an hour. There was no time for spoiling or shilly-shallying.

Jim brought two plates in, smiling when he saw me up and around. He pulled a chair away from the table for me and chuckled softy when he saw my eyes widen. In front of me was the most incredible breakfast I'd ever seen.

The French toast was made with cinnamon bread that I knew for certain Jim hadn't found in my kitchen. He must have been up and out early, then back before I even knew he was gone. Each slice of bread was at least an inch thick, coated with a thin glaze that made syrup extraneous.

"It's a sugar lover's dream." I dug in and was rewarded with a taste as heavenly as the aroma. "But wait a minute . . . what's that you said about Alba?"

Jim was taking a sip of coffee, enjoying watching me enjoy my breakfast. "That's right, Alba." He set his cup on a saucer. "When I heard you say the name, I wondered. Do you know who she is?"

"Not a clue," I admitted. "I've checked the phone book, traditional and the Internet white pages. No one named Stru listed anywhere. And it's a weird name, anyway, isn't it?"

"Foreign." Jim sliced his French toast into neat pieces. He held his knife and fork oddly, the way the British do, fork upside down in his left hand, knife in his right. "Like I said, when I heard you say it, I thought you were speaking a different language."

I held my own fork the regular old American way. It was halfway to my mouth when an idea hit out of the blue.

"You don't like it." Jim mistook the frozen fork and the look on my face for displeasure. He frowned. "The French toast. It's too sweet, isn't it?"

"There's no such thing as too sweet. And I love it, honest." He might have been more inclined to believe me if I didn't push back my chair and race away from the table.

When he found me again, I was in my bedroom, at the computer that sat on a desk in the corner by the window.

"Looking for a new French toast recipe?"

I like the way he said
looking
. It was like
cooking
with that scrumptious, long
oooo
sound.

"Not looking for a recipe," I told him, unconsciously adding the same long
oooo
. I clicked my way around the Internet. "Looking for Romanian."

He braced his hands on the desk and leaned over me for a better look. "Because . . . ?"

"Because I've been a moron!" I would have slapped my forehead if I wasn't afraid it would make my head start hurting all over again. "Look!" I pointed at the screen. "Romanian translations.
Albastru
. It's not a name, it's a word. It means
blue
."

"Blue?" Confused, Jim stared squint-eyed at the Web page. I remembered that though he knew most of the details of our investigation, there were some things I hadn't had a chance to fill him in on yet. Like our visit to the Angel Emporium.

"I should have known the moment Rainbow DayGlow mentioned it," I said. When he looked as if he was about to ask who I was talking about, I waved away the question. It would take a while to even begin to explain Rainbow, and I still needed to shower and get dressed for work. We'd have to save the explanation for another time. "She said that one of the symptoms of foxglove poisoning is that everything looks blue."

"And Drago told you. About the blue part, at least."

"Yup. He said it.
Albastru.
Blue. The poison was working in his system, and he was close to death. Everything must have looked blue to him by that time. Which means I must have looked like a perfect idiot, telling Tyler that he needed to track down someone named Alba Stru. Darn!" I slapped my hand against the desk and hit my mouse pad. The cursor jumped on the screen. "I don't care about me, but the whole point of this investigation was so that Eve could look good in Tyler's eyes. He must think we're amateurs."

"You are." Jim's smile was wry. Still, something in his words stung.

"Think he's figured it out yet?"

"You mean Tyler? Is he smart?"

"He thinks he is." I drummed my fingers against the desk. "How much do you think he knows that we don't?"

Jim could only shrug in response. I sighed as I turned back to the monitor and clicked off-line.

Little did I know that soon enough, we'd find out just what Tyler knew--and more.

SEAFOOD IS A FUNNY THING. ACCORDING TO JIM,
how it ends up tasting depends an awful lot on how fresh it is, how it's cooked, and for how long.

Who was I to argue?

The good news was that the first recipe we tried in class that night was for steamed mussels, and surprisingly, mine were pretty tasty. Even Jim said so.

The bad news was . . . well, there were really two bad things. The first was that Eve was late for class. She got there just as we were sopping up the last of the mussel broth with thick slices of crisp-crusted Vienna bread. I'd worked all day. She'd worked all day. We'd taken our breaks at different times.

In other words, I hadn't had a chance to find out where she'd ended up when she followed Beyla from the gallery the night before, and I was dying to know.

The other bad thing wasn't related to our investigation. It was all about cooking. No big surprise there.

I hated to burst Jim's bubble, especially when he saw the mussels as a sign from the cooking gods that I had turned a corner. But throwing mussels in a pot, dumping water on them along with a little chopped garlic and a bit of lemon juice and turning on the heat, that was one thing.

Grouper was the second item on the menu. Sauteeing a fillet after it had been soaked in milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, dredged in flour mixed with parlsey, then encrusted with thinly sliced potatoes . . . that was a whole different ball game.

I struck out.

Not to worry. Every cloud has a silver lining, and Fabulous Fish and Shellfish night was no exception. When Jim sampled my mussles and told me how much he enjoyed them, he leaned in close and whispered that he'd let me make him a batch of the yummy mollusks for dinner one evening very soon. Silver lining number one: a night dozing on my dining room chair hadn't made him change his mind. He wanted to see me again.

And number two? Well, I'm not one to toot my own horn. Usually. But the minute Jim said that we were going to try an experiment in class and adjust standard recipes for larger and smaller quantities, I knew I was home free.

I am, to put it bluntly, smarter than the average bear when it comes to numbers.

He asked us to double recipes.

No problem.

He asked us to halve recipes.

Piece of cake.

He told us to pretend that we were hosting a dinner party and that at the last minute, Aunt Margaret decided to bring Cousin Henry and the kids. We'd need to triple, then add a wee bit more (I loved when he said that!), and just before dinnertime when Henry called to say the kids had the flu, we were forced to cut back again.

I sailed through the exercise as easily as I cruised through the legion of numbers I faced at work each day.

"Aunt Margaret plus Cousin Henry, plus how many kids?" Eve wrote a long line of numbers on a legal pad, scratched them out, and started again. She pulled at her hair with one hand. "And how many ounces in a cup?"

I was way past that. "Sixteen cups of chicken broth," I whispered the answer to her, feeling like I was cheating on a math test. I shot up a hand to give my answer to the class.

"Sixteen cups of chicken broth." Beyla answered before I could.

"Very good." Jim went over the calculations for those who weren't as quick. "And how many pounds of chicken?"

I'd figured that out already, too.

Beyla's hand went up before mine. "Ten," she said, as confident as I would have been if I had a chance to answer.

"And the whipping cream?" Jim glanced my way to give me the perfect opening, but Beyla was on a roll.

"Four and three-quarters," she called out, and from the way she did, I could tell she was feeling mighty satisfied with herself. "Four and three-quarters cups."

Considering that she came from a country that used the metric system, I should have been impressed. I would have been if I wasn't so busy being envious at being shown up at my own game. Not only had the woman outsmarted us enough to stymie our investigation, not only could she cook to beat the band, she was also as much of a math whiz as I was.

I tamped down the jealousy that reared its ugly head. It was unworthy of me, and besides, maybe that painful fact was really silver lining number three in disguise.