Toast Mortem (2 page)

Bernard LeVasque stormed into the kitchen at La Bonne Goutè Culinary Academy in his usual way: his left hand thrust palm out to smack open the swinging doors, his right clenched around his favorite butcher knife. “
Hola!
You collection of
stupides
!” he shouted, by way of greeting.

The academy’s five chefs were assembled in the large, airy space.

Despite the fact that M. LeVasque had announced his presence in the same insulting tones for the past three months, all of them reacted with a range of very satisfying behaviors: Pietro Giancava (sauces and wines) hissed like a snake. Raleigh Brewster (soups and stews) let out a muffled shriek. Mrs. Owens (fruits and vegetables) growled like the mastiff she resembled. Jim Chen (seafood and fish) scowled, clenched his fists, and balanced himself evenly on both feet, as if readying to charge his employer.

The only person who remained unruffled was the young and pretty pastry chef, Clarissa Sparrow.

M. LeVasque was pretty sure he could fix that. Mme. Sparrow, he recalled, was the fond owner of Bismarck, the enormous orange-and-yellow cat glowering under the prep sink. Without a word, he strode across the terrazzo floor, grabbed Bismarck by the scruff of the neck, and flung the startled animal out the back door.

Then, with an insincere grin that bared his yellowing teeth, he said,
“Bon matin.”

—From
Brilliance in the Kitchen
, B. LeVasque

 

 

“That Mr. Levaskew’s going to end up with his butcher’s knife buried smack in the middle of his back one of these days,” Doreen Muxworthy-Stoker predicted. “You mark my words.”

“Well, it won’t be soon enough for me.” Meg Quilliam sat curled in the lounge chair farthest away from the outer deck of the gazebo and bit her thumb with a cross expression. Her sister, Quill, sat on that part of the deck that faced the waterfall tumbling into Hemlock Gorge. Doreen, their housekeeper, perched on the sturdy gazebo railing like a broody hen. Jackson Myles McHale, who was going to be two years old in less than a week, climbed up the shallow steps to the gazebo floor and climbed back down again.

Quill kept a careful eye on her son and wriggled her bare toes in the soft moss that edged the decking.

It was a perfect August afternoon. Sunshine flooded the emerald green lawns surrounding the Inn at Hemlock Falls. Roses and lavender scented the soft air. Flowering clematis, shouting crimson, climbed over the old stone walls of the sprawling building. The breeze that came up from the gorge was cool and smelled of fresh water. Quill didn’t want to talk about the horrible Mr. LeVasque. She wanted to roll over in the grass with Jack and tickle him until he collapsed into giggles. But she was a loyal friend and loving sister, so she said: “What’s he done now?”

“What’s he
done
?” Meg shrieked. “What hasn’t he
done
!? He’s built a whacking huge cooking academy smack in my backyard and stolen all our customers and you’re asking me what’s he
done
?!” She wriggled out of the lounge chair, put her hands on her hips, and glared across the gorge.

La Bonne Goutè Academy of Culinary Arts sat on the opposite side of the ravine. It was three stories high. Practically everyone in the village of Hemlock Falls thought it was gorgeous. The building was cream of cream clapboard with hunter green trim. The roof was smooth copper. All three stories were surrounded by clear pine decking. The place was surrounded by apple trees, peach trees, figs, and a vegetable garden that looked as if it belonged outside a French chateau with an army of gardeners at the
duc’s
command.

Quill had gone to the open house three months before. Like all the other villagers in Hemlock Falls, she hadn’t been able to keep away. She knew that the inside was as serviceable and elegant as the outside. The floors were wide-planked cedar, buffed to a perfect shine. The tasting room was big and dark and cool, and the antique wine racks that covered the walls had come from M. LeVasque’s own vineyards in France. As for the kitchens . . . Quill sighed. The biggest classroom had twenty dual-fuel Viking ranges. Four were arranged in each of five stations complete with prep sinks and all the knives, spatulas, graters, sieves, choppers, bowls, measuring cups, ladles, spoons, and whisks an aspiring student chef could ask for.

Hemlock Falls was pleased with the addition of all this glory to their picturesque cobblestone village. Its proprietor, M. Bernard LeVasque, was the author of the best-selling cookbook
Brilliance in the Kitchen
. His television show
The Master at Work
had a successful five-year run on network TV. He attracted tourists in droves.

“I’d like to bomb the place,” Meg said through gritted teeth. “I’d like to dump a billion tons of cow manure on that copper roof. I’d like to throw five hundred gallons of brindle brown paint all over that perfect siding.”

Jackson Myles McHale glanced up at his aunt, a slight pucker between his feathery eyebrows. The sunshine made his red curls glow like a new penny. He seemed to debate a moment. Then he bent over, grabbed the red plastic shovel Quill had bought for him so he could dig in the dirt like Mike the groundskeeper, and presented it to Meg. “Frow this!” he said, with a pleased expression. “Frow it
now.
”

“Thuh-row,” Quill corrected gently. “Thuh-thuh-thuh. Thuh-row, Jack.”

“Frow,” Jack said ecstatically. “Frow, frow, frow!”

“Give it here, Jack,” Meg demanded. “And I’ll throw it right up M. LeVasque’s . . .”

Quill cleared her throat noisily, then extracted the shovel from her son’s chubby grasp and sat on it. “No throwing,” she said firmly. “Either one of you. And M. LeVasque is undoubtedly a grouchy guy, Meg, but let’s not talk about this kind of stuff in front of Jack, okay? And for God’s sake, don’t encourage him to throw things. You’ll have to admit,” she added, fondly, “that he’s the smartest little boy and he picks up on everything.”

“Phooey,” Meg said.

“Phooey,” Jack echoed. He made a determined effort to extract the shovel from beneath Quill’s cotton skirt.

“There, you see?” Quill said. She held the shovel up in one hand. “Darling, you can only have the shovel if you promise not to throw it, okay?”

“Phooey,” Jack said. He grabbed the shovel, gnawed at the handle for a bit, and threw the shovel down the steps.

Quill beamed at him. “Get the shovel and bring it back to Mommy, please.”

“Phooey,” Jack said. “Phooey-phooey-
phooey
!”

“That’s enough, young man.” Doreen jumped down from the railing and brushed herself off briskly. She wore her usual work uniform of denim skirt, cotton blouse, and canvas shoes. Her gray hair frizzed around her face and the tip of her nose was red from sunburn. Her hands and wrists were gnarled from arthritis and Quill marveled, as she occasionally did, at the toughness in her friend’s wiry, seventy-eight-year-old frame. She’d outlived four husbands. Stoker, the last one, had died peacefully in his sleep and left Doreen a comfortably wealthy woman. “That’s it. Nap time. Come here to Gram.”

“Nap time,” Jack said. “No. No. I don’t think so.”

Doreen bent over with a slight grunt of effort and picked him up. “Say night-night to Mommy.” For a long moment, the two pairs of eyes regarded each other; Jack’s bright blue and thoughtful, Doreen’s black and beady. “Night-night, Gram,” he said meekly. Then, suddenly, he yawned widely, put his head on Doreen’s shoulder, and went to sleep.

“Amazing,” Meg said. They watched the two of them cross the lawn to the Inn. With one hand supporting the toddler’s back, Doreen opened the French doors to the Tavern Lounge and disappeared inside.

“It is, isn’t it?” Quill sighed. “How come that never works for me?”

Meg turned her head. “You mean Jack and Doreen?” She scowled. “Because you turn into a sap every time you see him. He could stick beans up your nose and you’d think it’s adorable. Doreen’s over being a sap about kids. She’s got how many grandchildren of her own?”

“Twenty-two, last count,” Quill said. “And that includes Jack, she says. Furthermore, I am not a sap.”

“Yes, you are,” Meg fumed.

Quill decided not to argue the point. Her sister was the world’s best fumer and she’d made it a long-standing practice to ignore the explosions.

Meg clasped her hands behind her back and began to pace. The gazebo was large. Its radius was twenty feet, which Quill knew because she’d designed it herself. And Meg was short, no more than five feet two, even when she was standing on her tiptoes in rage. But the place was too small to accommodate her sister’s agitation.

“Here’s an idea. Let’s go to the beach.”

Meg scowled at the gorge. It was a wonderful afternoon, warm, but not sticky, and the air coming up from the Hemlock River smelled like freshly cut grass. The water was a clear greeny brown. From where she stood in the gazebo, Quill could see it lapping peacefully against the little sandy beach she and Mike the groundskeeper had designed together and then installed that spring. Mike had built a sturdy pine staircase on the steep slopes that led down from the Inn, too. The whole thing was quite a hit with the guests. Quill was trying to encourage wisteria to grow around the railings. She’d planted several of the new hybrid hydrangeas at the foot of the stairs, and they were blooming like anything.

On the beach itself, which was small but smoothly sandy, two of the Inn’s guests sunned themselves in the pair of Adirondack recliners. Both had sunhats over their faces, but from the brevity of the bikini on the one and the color of the Speedo on the other, it was Mr. and Mrs. Anson Fredericks.

“You mean go swimming? You’re trying the change the subject. It’s not going to work.” Meg started to pace again, her gray eyes narrowed to tiny, glittering slits.

Quill had been trying to change the subject ever since the Bonne Goutè Culinary Academy had thrown open its oversized oak doors in April. Meg came back to it as if scratching at a case of poison ivy.

“You know how many bookings we’ve got for dinner tonight?”

Three,
Quill said silently.

“Three!”
Meg roared.

Far down the slope of Hemlock Gorge, Mrs. Fredericks sat up, looked around in a dissatisfied way, and poked her husband in the stomach.

“And it’s the
height
of the tourist season. Last year at this time, do you know how many bookings we had the ninth of July?”

Forty-six,
Quill said to herself.

“Forty-six!”

Quill sighed.

“And don’t you dare try and tell me it’s the economy!” Meg stamped to a halt and raised her fists over her head. “If God and the twelve apostles drove up to the Inn in a bus and wanted a room, what would we have to tell him?”

“We’re
full up
!” Meg flung herself into the wicker rocker next to the little refrigerated bar and pushed herself back and forth with a furious foot. “Oh, no,” she said bitterly. “People are coming in droves to the Inn. You and Dina have to beat them off with a stick. But they’re not coming for my food. They hate my food. They hate my recipes. They hate me! But the food made by that little jumped up pompous French son of a bi . . .”

Mrs. Fredericks shrieked. It wasn’t her breakfast shriek. (“Oh, ew! This is cream? Do you know what kind of fat content is in cream? Don’t you people have any soy? Ew!”) Or her allergy shriek. (“Oh, ew! Do you know what roses
do
to my sinuses? Ew!”)

This was a shriek of terror.

Quill crossed the short distance to the head of the beach staircase in two leaps and was halfway down its length before she pulled herself up and assessed the situation.

Mrs. Fredericks teetered precariously on her Adirondack chair. She waved her hat frantically at a fine, healthy clump of hydrangea. Anson Fredericks had backed into the water. He faced the clump of hydrangea, too. Quill was on the other side of the hydrangea, and from this vantage point, she could see a long, furry orange tail, a plump set of furry orange hindquarters, and two furry ears. The ears were pinned flat against a round hairy head. An ominous, continuous growl had replaced the cheery sound of birdsong.

It was a cat. A very large cat, and it had a bright red bandanna tied around its neck.

Quill started down the steps again.

The hindquarters bunched and the muscles under the glossy coat rippled. Mrs. Fredericks shrieked, “Anson! It’s going to jump me!”

After ten years as an innkeeper, Quill was an expert soother. “It’s just a cat, Mrs. Fredericks. You can’t see him, her, whatever, from here. But I can, and it’s just somebody’s pet.”

“Cat, my ass!” Muriel Fredericks screamed. “It’s a god-dam panther.”

“Bring a gun!” Anson shouted. “We need some kind of gun!”

“A gun?” Quill said, startled.

“Don’t move, Muriel! It’s probably rabid!” Anson splashed a few feet farther into the river.

Muriel teetered on the edge of the chair and regarded her husband with undisguised contempt. “A fat lot you care, you, you
coward
.”

“It’s not going to jump,” Quill soothed.

The animal crouched, and its already flattened ears flattened some more. It wriggled its belly into the mulch and flexed its long, sharp claws.

“And if it’s going to jump, it’s because you’re waving your hat around. It thinks you’re inviting him to play.”