Jennifer L. Hart - Southern Pasta Shop 02 - Murder À La Flambé (7 page)

Jones still hadn't returned from his latest job. I hoped Lizzy wouldn't stick around too long waiting for him, as I didn't want to be trapped in the bedroom all night.

"Of frigging course she showed up," I grumbled to myself. Because I was already feeling like crap, Lizzy had to come rub my nose in it. Not that she was actively
doing
anything to me at the moment, but then again, her presence had a habit of getting my dander up, as Nana used to say.

"You girls have always rubbed each other the wrong way," Nana had told me one day when I'd been complaining to her about how Lizzy had superglued my locker shut. "Some people are oil and water together and just shouldn't mix."

"Like Pops and Aunt Cecily," I'd said.

Nana had rolled her eyes heavenward. "Those two are a whole different kettle of fish."

I smiled at the memory, then frowned as I wondered if Nana had seen the spark between her older sister and her husband of forty years even then. I sure as hell hadn't known their bickering was anything other than two stubborn people who were forced together on a regular basis. In reality, their sniping had been based in their mutual attraction, a thought that still made my lip curl up in revulsion.

Someone knocked on the bedroom door. "Andy?"

"Yeah?" I called out, then frowned when Lizzy pushed open the door. Technically this was her bedroom, the one she would share with my baby daddy whenever the hell they got around to tying the knot. The fact that I was hanging out in my bathrobe only added another level of awkwardness to the mix.

Lizzy entered the room and shut the door behind her, though she didn't come any closer. "How are you feeling?"

"Like crap on toast," I griped. Pulling punches wasn't my style. "What's up?"

"I wanted to talk to you about my dad."

"Oh?" I said, surprised. "Why?"

She shook her head and lowered her voice until it was barely audible. "Not here. Will you be at the pasta shop tomorrow?"

"Yeah," I said slowly. Was she trying to set me up for something? Damn it, I couldn't think. My thoughts were too insubstantial. We were adults now, and the childhood pranks and resentment were behind us. Well, mostly. "Lizzy, is everything all right? With your dad, I mean?"

I hoped Mr. Tillman hadn't received any bad news. God, how would Jones cope if his estranged father had been diagnosed with a terminal illness? My former nemesis looked more discomposed than I'd ever seen her, her eyes darting to the window, back literally against the wall. Either she was a great actress, or she was seriously freaked out. Not a good sign.

"No." She spoke softly, and her eyes filled. "I think my dad might be the arsonist."

Parmesan Pasta Salad

You'll need:

8 oz corkscrew pasta, cooked until al dente

10 oz fresh spinach, washed, dried, and torn into small pieces

8 oz mozzarella cheese, cubed

8 oz ham, cubed

4 oz green chilies, chopped and drained

For the Parmesan dressing:

1 egg

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 teaspoon pepper

1/4 teaspoon cloves

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

2 minced garlic cloves

Place egg in blender, and blend 5 seconds.

With blender running slowly, add extra virgin olive oil until thickened. Add and blend until smooth. Mix with remaining dressing ingredients, then toss with salad and chill. Sprinkle with additional Parmesan cheese, and serve.

**Andy's note: A friend of mine from culinary school grew up with this dish in her family's restaurant, and it's a crowd pleaser. For the record, she didn't like Lacey L'Amour either.

"Lizzy thinks her father might be setting the fires?" Donna screeched.

"Sssh," I shushed her, glad I'd had the forethought to talk to her in the car, where we couldn't be overheard. My head still hurt, though it didn't feel about to split open like an overripe melon as much as it had the day before. The incredulous note in her voice was like a fork scraping over bone china though. "Yes, and you can't tell Steven. Lizzy doesn't want anyone to know."

"Are you sure she isn't just messing with you?" Donna raised a brow. "I mean, why tell you and not tell her fiancé or her brother, who could, you know, do something about it?"

I'd asked Lizzy the very same questions and repeated what she'd told me to Donna. "Kyle's the sheriff. He'd investigate, and if he found something linking Mr. Tillman to the fires, he'd have to act on it. Just like if you told Steven something of a criminal nature, especially if people died because of it."

Donna nodded as though accepting the inherent wisdom in that reasoning. "She still could have told her brother though."

I shifted in my seat to look at her more closely. "When I mentioned that to her, she shut me down quick. I've been mulling over the why of it all night. The only thing I could come up with was that she doesn't want to turn Jones against his father for good. If he found out his father was an arsonist, he just might turn his back on the man forever."

Donna shook her head. "It still doesn't make sense though, Andy. Lizzy doesn't even like you, so why would she trust you with such a huge secret?"

"There's no one else. She doesn't have any friends she could trust with this sort of thing—they'd all go blabbing it around town. Even though Lizzy and I aren't besties, she knows me. I would do anything to protect Jones. If news that his father is a suspected arsonist spreads around town, it'll ruin the whole family's reputation."

"Not like it could take another blow," Donna agreed. "So is that the only reason?"

"Well that, and she knows I'd believe her."

Donna raised a brow. "And do you?"

I considered it for a moment. "It makes sense. I told you about how we found him in the woods at Christmas, right? All drunk and crazy, wielding a shotgun. I barely recognized him. He was a far cry from a respectable business man."

Donna snorted. "Sounds like half the population of the town, if you ask me."

"This is serious. What if he really is setting these fires? What do I do?"

"Does she have any proof?" Donna drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

"Not that she mentioned, but Pops and Aunt Cecily were loitering outside the door, so she didn't really get into it. She's coming by the pasta shop in a little bit to talk to me."

Donna's even, white teeth sank into her lower lip. "If she asks you to do something crazy, promise you'll call me first."

I rolled my eyes and then wished I hadn't. "So you can do it with me? Seriously, Donna, we're turning into Beaverton's own modern-day Lucy and Ethel."

She pointed an accusing pink-polished fingernail at me. "Don't look at me—you're the one who started a bar fight."

"Well, you're the one who took me out drinking. You know I'm banned from Judy's for life? What kind of an example is that to set for my kid?" Never mind where would I go when I needed a stiff drink?

"Do as I say, not as I do," Donna quipped. "Seriously though, don't let Lizzy get you in over your head."

I nodded and then regretted it when the residual ache in my cranium gave a noticeable pang. "Trust me, Donna. I've got it handled. I'll call you later."

I slid out of her car and waved as she drove off. The morning was clear and crisp. Across the street I saw Lacey L'Amour fussing with a grand-opening banner in her front window. When she saw me, she stuck her pert little nose in the air and flounced away. I shrugged and headed into my own restaurant, trusting that the people of Beaverton would see right through all her phony glitz and she'd be out of business in a month.

"Good morning, Andy." Mimi greeted me with a huge smile and a stack of receipts. "Would you like to go over the sales from yesterday?"

"A little later. Thanks for handling the place all alone yesterday. I hope it wasn't too much for you."

"Not a problem. Business was sort of slow." Mimi's smile was a little too bright. It was the kind of expression someone wore when she had bad news and thought delivering it in a positive way would lessen the impact. For the record, that never worked.

I blew out a sigh. "Okay, Mimi, you might as well tell me what happened."

She cringed. "The health inspector stopped in."

"Theo?" Theodor Randolph, our county health inspector, was as old as the hills. "Did he give us a score? What was it?"

She winced. "An 89.9."

My eyes rounded in horror. "He gave us a B? The Bowtie Angel has never once gotten a B. Not in fifty-two years." When word of this got out, I'd be the subject of gossip for months. Never mind what Aunt Cecily would do. Not even a month into running the pasta shop on my own, and I'd already tarnished her pristine sanitation record. "What went wrong?"

Mimi wrung her hands. "I'm sorry. He caught me at a bad moment. The walk-in was open, and the temperature was up too high. Not dangerous or anything. We didn't lose any inventory. I don't know what happened. I swear I'd shut and latched it, but the latch was broken, and it was hanging open. I had to prop a chair against it to keep it shut. Plus, the trash bag broke when I took it out of the can, so I was in the middle of cleaning up garbage when he showed up. He said he understood, that those things happened, but he still penalized us for it."

"That's a lot of crappy luck all at once." I hung up my coat and purse and sidled back to the walk-in refrigerator and bent down to examine the handle. It looked fine to me, just as it had the last time I'd used it. I moved the ladder-back chair Mimi had propped against it, and sure enough, the door swung open. "Son of a gun, it's busted, all right. I'll run to the hardware store and get a padlock to keep in place until we can get it repaired. No idea how that could have happened?"

Mimi shook her head. "It was fine in the morning, caught and held as always."

"And no one else was back here? Did we get any deliveries?" I swore on my best spaghetti pot that if Druggie Don had brought over tomatoes while he was high and busted my walk-in without saying anything, I'd take it out of his hash-smoking hide.

Mimi's forehead creased as she thought back. "No deliveries. Kaylee came in after school and did some dishes. Oh, and that French lady stopped by."

I'd been reaching for my apron but froze midmotion. "French lady?"

Mimi smiled. "Yes, Lacey L'Amour. She offered me a job in her restaurant, as a pastry chef. I declined of course." She said this last in a rush and stared worriedly at me.

Damn, damn, damn. Bypassing Mimi, I strode for the pantry, took down the box of garbage bags, and took the next one out. "That sabotaging, sous-chef-stealing skank."

"What?" Mimi had followed me in. "What's wrong."

I showed her the small slit someone had cut in the next trash bag, and the one after that. "Mimi, did you leave her alone back here? Tell me everything that she said and did, word for word."

"No." Then Mimi scowled, the expression so dark on her delicate features. "She said she wanted to make sure your grandfather and aunt were all right after the fire. I told her that yes, they were fine and staying with you for now. I had to bring some fresh pasta out front, and she said she'd let herself out."

Which she had, but only after she'd submarined my restaurant. I wondered if she'd known about the health inspection. Probably. Theo was a gossipmonger who thought way too much of his own importance, and if he'd been in town to inspect her froufrou place, he'd have mentioned he was going to pop in to the Bowtie Angel next.

I pushed up my sleeves and squared my shoulders. "This," I told Mimi, "means war."

*   *   *

Kaylee arrived again after school. "Hey, I heard about your bar brawl. Pretty boss there."

I was in the middle of a pan of meatballs I'd been preparing for a football party order, but I turned away for a split second to look at her. She looked so much like a younger version of me, though there was a good bit of Kyle in her too. "It wasn't exactly a brawl."

She shrugged as though she didn't give a fig one way or the other. "What can I do?"

I put the pan of meatballs in the oven to keep warm and then turned to face her. "Want to learn my crowd-pleasing Sweet 'N Tangy meatball recipe?"

She made a derisive noise. "Whatever."

Every time she said that word was like someone took a meat skewer to my left ventricle. Still, I wasn't about to quit on her yet. Teenagers were tough, and I had yet to find a gap that couldn't be bridged by quality food.

I clapped my hands and rubbed them together. "Okay, here's what we'll need."

She made an incredulous face as I rattled off the ingredients for my secret sauce, but went to the pantry and collected the assorted items. Soon I had her whisking a bubbling pot of gook on the stovetop while I retrieved the meatballs.

"The meatballs are actually the most time-consuming part, so if you want to make this without all the work, use the frozen kind."

One pierced eyebrow lifted. "You're a professional chef, and you're telling me to use prepackaged food?"

I shrugged. "Not always. Obviously, I wouldn't do that for the business, but if you want to make a fast hot dish and don't have the time, it's an option. Jones loves them either way."

"He's hot." Kaylee grinned at me.

I grinned back. "Yeah, he is. And the accent just makes him hotter."

She looked away, and I saw her frown. I touched her shoulder and asked, "What's wrong?"

She shrugged me off. "Nothing."

Damn, and I thought we'd been bonding over my boyfriend's supersexiness. "Kaylee—"

Before I could continue, she slammed her whisk down and stomped off to the bathroom. Mimi looked up from where she was preparing tortellini and offered me a faint smile.

"What did I say?" I asked her.

Mimi shrugged. "I do not know."

"Was she like this yesterday?" I asked, half afraid of the answer.

Mimi spooned more cheese mixture into the dough. "No, she was quite helpful."

So it was me. I took the sauce off the heat and covered it. The meatballs could wait. My daughter shouldn't have to.

I followed her into the restroom. The first two stalls were open, but I saw her pink-and-black high-tops under the third. "Kaylee, what's wrong?"

"Go away," she sniffled.

I leaned against the wall. "Not happening, kid."

"I'm not your kid," she mumbled in a resentful tone.

She was, but telling her so didn't seem wise. I had a sudden thought—was this how Jones felt with me, worried that every little thing would set me off? I hoped not, because the habit was getting old, fast. "Fine, you're not my kid, but you're still
a
kid. Let's pretend I'm just an average part-time employer, and then you can tell me why you stormed out of my kitchen when we were in the middle of something."

There was silence, followed by a sniffle. Then the squeal of the stall door as she poked her head out and glared at me. "I don't like you."

I gave her a tight smile, ignoring the pain in my heart. "Noted."

She let out a puff of air. "How can you just take that? I'm mean to you, so why would you want to be around me?"

Because I'm a glutton for punishment.
Thankfully, I didn't say that out loud. "Believe it or not, we have a lot in common."

She gave me a condescending look that only a teenage girl could pull off. It was a perfect blend of "Yeah right" and "You wish, loser."

"We do," I insisted. "We have lots of people in common. Aunt Cecily, Pops, Kyle, Lizzy, Jones, Mimi. Even Roofus. That's all common ground."

She appeared to grudgingly give in to my logic and mumbled, "What else?"

"This place." I waved a hand around.

"A bathroom?" she sneered.

"No, smartass, the Bowtie Angel. Cooking is in our blood. Why else would you have come here yesterday to do dishes when no one was making you?"

"Because I want to get paid."

I didn't buy it for a minute. "Admit it—you like being here."

Slowly, she nodded. "I do."

"I always did too. It's part of our family legacy. Lot of calories came out of that kitchen, and with any luck, there will be truckloads more for years to come. Then there's our taste in men."

She actually blushed at that, and I grinned. "Yeah, admit it. I've got great taste in men. First your dad and then Jones. Man, I bagged the two hottest bachelors in the county." I mock-buffed my nails on my apron.

She wrinkled her pert little nose. I sent up a silent prayer that she would never be moved to pierce it. "Ew, don't say things like that about my dad."

I wondered what took Kyle off limits but made Jones fair game. Probably the whole blood-relation thing. This was North Carolina, but still…ick. "You have to admit I have stellar taste in men."