A Side of Murder Read online

  I took a deep breath. “Hi, Krista.”

  “I hear from Jenny you’re back in town for a while. Something about your Aunt Ida’s house?”

  “I’m fine thanks, Krista,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Krista said. “How are you? Good. Me, too. Now tell me what’s going on.” Pure Krista.

  “She left me the house in her will.”

  Krista snorted. “Oh, jeez. Thanks a lot, Aunt Ida. That place is a dump. Unload it fast is my advice.”

  “That’s exactly what I plan to do,” I said. “I’m between jobs for the moment. . . .”

  Krista snorted again. She’d never been one for euphemisms. Plus, she knew the whole sorry story.

  “I’m between jobs for the moment,” I repeated firmly, “so I’m staying here for a few weeks while I see what needs to be done to the place so I can sell it. The house is probably a tear down, but the property is waterfront and has a view of Bower’s if you can get past the briars, so it should be worth something.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know, Jenny told me,” Krista said, dismissing the topic (as if she hadn’t been the one who’d brought it up). “Listen, I have a problem and I thought of you.” Uh-oh. Danger, Will Robinson. “Felicia, our lifestyle reporter, is off with this new baby of hers—” Krista made it sound like Felicia was just making lame excuses not to be in the office where she belonged.

  “Well, good for Felicia,” I interrupted, feeling that someone should be supporting the sisterhood here.

  “She’ll be back in a few months,” Krista continued as if I hadn’t said a word. “But in the meantime I need someone to write the restaurant reviews and food features.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re a good writer. I remember that blog you did while you were at that cooking school. You certainly know food. You know the restaurant biz. You know the Cape. You could cover for her. What do you say we give it a try?”

  “Look, Krista,” I said, “I may not be here long. A couple of weeks, maybe a month at the most.”

  “Not a problem. You do a bunch of them and I’ll bank them, space them out over Felicia’s leave.”

  Then she said the magic words. “I can pay you decent money.”

  Before I could even say yes, she’d assumed my agreement. “I need five hundred words on the Bayview Grill, that new restaurant that replaced the Logan Inn.”

  Really? I wanted to whine. This is where you want to send me for my first assignment? Back to the Logan Inn?

  “You remember the Inn, right?” Krista asked.

  “Yeah,” I said as neutrally as possible. “I remember the Logan Inn.”

  The summer before our senior year of high school, Krista and I had worked at the Logan Inn as waitresses. I have to admit that the experience had been valuable in a Alice Through the Looking-Glass kind of way. The Logan Inn had taught me everything a restaurant should not be. And everything a first love should not be.

  “Here’s the deal,” Krista continued. “Mr. Logan sold up a couple of years ago. The place was on its last legs, and I think the new owners got it for a song. Now it’s called the Bayview Grill. New look, new menu, and, according to their fancy-schmancy press release, a new direction, whatever that means. Take Jenny and Miles, whoever, try it out, write me a column. What day is it today? Tuesday?”

  Krista never knew what day it was. That’s what happens when online news gets posted around the clock and you work seven days a week.

  “It’s Wednesday,” I said.

  “I’m always a day off,” she muttered to herself. “Anyway, get a table for tonight. I need the content by Friday. We’ll put it online then and again in Sunday’s print edition. Okay by you?”

  Sure, it was okay by me. First of all, I was broke. Second of all, I was broke.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Thanks, Krista. Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Krista said. “Just write me a good piece.”

  “I will,” I said. “I absolutely will.”

  Then she did that Krista thing that she does that makes her such a good journalist. She made a connection that her victim never saw coming.

  “So, have you seen Jason Captiva around town?”

  And, just like that, all my good mood evaporated.

  “Um, no,” I managed to say. “I didn’t even, um, know he was back.”

  “Oh yeah,” Krista said. “He’s back.”

  And then she hung up.

  * * *

  * * *

  It hadn’t taken much to convince Jenny and Miles to be my guinea pigs at the Bayview Grill.

  “Free eats?” Miles had exclaimed. “Oh, girl, I am totally in. Nothing tastes as good as free eats.”

  “A night off from wife and motherhood?” Jenny had said wryly. “Please add my name to the guest list.”

  I began to think this might actually be fun. It had been a long time since we’d sat down together for a meal. On a whim, I’d also asked Helene, who’d rather dazzled me at our tea party in Aunt Ida’s ell with her wild silver hair, clothes that seem to be made entirely of paisley scarves, and opinions firmly expressed on every issue, whether requested or not. I was interested in what she, as someone from off Cape and clearly pretty sophisticated, would make of the Bayview Grill. I had a fairly good idea of what she would have made of its predecessor, the Logan Inn.

  When I was a kid, the Logan Inn was the only “fancy” restaurant in Fair Harbor. You knew it was fancy because it had white tablecloths and offered exotic fare like French onion soup and chicken cordon bleu. My parents always took me to the Logan Inn for my birthday. By the time I was twelve I was re-creating what I’d ordered the night before using an old Julia Child cookbook I’d found at a yard sale. The Logan Inn, my twelve-year-old self discovered, was not actually a French restaurant. Their salads were mostly iceberg, their stock clearly from a can. Garlic was shunned. They didn’t even offer ratatouille, probably because they would have to translate it, and “vegetable stew” wasn’t going to tempt the good people of Fair Harbor.

  I now suspected that the Logan Inn survived as long as it had because it was the only waterfront restaurant in town. The Inn had a great location, right next to Alden Pond boatyard, where in the summer sailboats bobbed at their moorings and neat rows of powerboats were slotted into berths along the boatyard dock. The sturdy four-square building had originally been a sailmaker’s loft, turning out acres of canvas to supply the sail-powered catboats used by fishermen and lobstermen back in the eighteen hundreds. It had sat empty for years before the Logans bought it. They’d turned the first floor’s dark, cramped offices into equally dark, cramped dining rooms where sad tea lights in red hurricane lamps struggled unsuccessfully to dispel the gloom. The open space on the second floor, the actual sail loft, they had turned into the “cocktail lounge,” an equally dim cavern of dark bloodred carpet and matching flocked wallpaper.

  In short, the decor was as bad as the food. And yet, and yet . . .

  * * *

  * * *

  Before leaving for my assignment, I fed and walked Diogi (kibble and leash provided by Helene) and watched, shaking my head, as he settled down for the evening on Aunt Ida’s couch. This is never going to work. I’d offered to take everyone in Miles’s mom’s truck, as I didn’t plan to drink anything, being on the job and all. The truck had coughed ominously when it first started but behaved itself the rest of the trip. The four of us had blown in through the Grill’s front entrance on a particularly strong gust of chilly May wind. While Miles struggled to close the door, I took a moment to prepare myself.

  Time to get to work, Sam. Step one, note ambience upon arrival.

  Well, I thought as I looked around at the new Bayview Grill, things had changed.

  “Niiiice,” I said.

  The two downstairs dining rooms had been knocked into on
e large, freshly whitewashed space. A small service bar with a few stools for those waiting for the rest of their party stood against one wall. I knew from reading the press release that the new owner continued to use the upstairs space as the main bar area. I hoped they’d done as good a job with that as they had with the dining room. The original pine floors, freed from their wall-to-wall carpeting, had been waxed to a deep, honey-colored sheen. The tables were well spaced and the lighting was low but not so low that you couldn’t read the menu or see your food. Small vases filled with red tulips graced every table and candles offered that warm glow so flattering to the female complexion.

  Ambience noted and approved. Next, note professionalism of host or hostess and whether reserved table is ready for party or if establishment tries to deflect said party to bar for extra drink income.

  More good news. The hostess was welcoming without being obsequious, and our table was ready for us. All good signs. I was cautiously optimistic that the evening would go well. I only wished my friends would take my job a little more seriously. Their initial reaction to my instructions had not been encouraging.

  “Please,” I begged them as the server came toward us to take our food order, “this means a lot to me. Please don’t give me away, please don’t draw attention to our table. I need to be invisible, anonymous, okay?” Like I could ever be invisible. But I could be anonymous.

  The three of them looked properly abashed and promised to behave. And to give them credit, they did. Jenny even tried Helene’s eggplant terrine and pronounced it “not disgusting” (it was excellent). She loved her hanger steak and truffle fries (which every chef knows are an easy A). Miles worked hard on being discreet, which had never been his forte, and slurped his seafood chowder with gusto. I dug into a plate of gnocchi and was transported by the lightness of the handmade potato dumplings in their tomato and cream sauce. The wine that the server had suggested, a cheerful California pinot noir, managed to work well with all the various plates. I poured myself a few delicious sips just to check it out and reluctantly handed the bottle back to Miles.

  All in all, everyone agreed that the free eats had been terrific. This was an enormous relief to me. The last thing I wanted to do was write a negative review. A fair review, yes. But I didn’t want any part of shooting down someone else’s dream.

  For most of the meal our conversation had centered around the food, but by the time dessert rolled around Helene could no longer contain her impatience.

  “So,” she said, looking straight at me and taking a sip of her double espresso (I ask you, who has a double espresso at nine o’clock at night?), “tell me about this . . . er . . . encounter with your ex-husband.”

  I knew she’d been itching to ask. I knew she’d seen the video on YouTube. Everyone had seen the video on YouTube. Miles and Jenny settled back happily. They loved this story. Absolutely loved it.

  Well, better to get it over with.

  “My husband and I hadn’t been getting along—”

  “You can skip all that,” Helene interrupted. “That part was obvious. What with the knives and all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Point taken. Well, Stefan and I were at home making dinner, a cassoulet, and arguing about his latest conquest, a new pastry chef at the restaurant where we both worked. I was used to his wandering eye, but this one really annoyed me. He’d break her heart and then we’d lose the best pastry chef we’d ever had.”

  Miles sniffed dramatically and touched his napkin to his eyes. “This is so moving.”

  “So,” I continued, ignoring him, “just to get Stefan’s goat I might have said, not entirely truthfully, that I was having a little fling with the sous-chef.”

  “Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander,” Miles put in gleefully. “To use a culinary metaphor.”

  I ignored him again.

  “Stefan didn’t take it well.”

  “Understatement,” Jenny said.

  I ignored her, too.

  “He started screaming and waving his knife at me. He’d never done anything like that before, so it freaked me out. Chef’s knives are razor sharp and he’d been drinking, so I turned and ran out of the apartment.”

  “Taking your own knife with you,” Jenny put in.

  “Right,” I admitted. “Taking my own knife with me. I’d been chopping leeks. I didn’t even know I had it in my hand until I got out on the street.”

  “Good thing you did have it though,” Miles said. “Better notorious than dead.”

  Helene shushed him. “Just let her tell her story.”

  “Yeah,” I said, glaring at Miles. “Just let me tell my story.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “The next thing I know Stefan is chasing me out onto the sidewalk and backing me into the alley where the garbage cans are kept, screaming he’s going to fillet me like a fish.”

  “I saw that part on YouTube,” Helene said with some satisfaction.

  Of course she had. So had about a million other people, thanks to a passerby who’d videoed the whole encounter on his cell and immediately posted it online. Within hours it had gone viral. You know the kind of thing: He Threatened to Fillet Her Like a Fish—You Won’t Believe What She Did Next.

  What I did next was I parried Stefan’s thrust wildly with my own—and neatly sliced off the top joint of his pinkie finger.

  The digit then arced into the air toward the battered aluminum garbage cans and landed on one dented lid with a tidy little ping.

  Miles calls it the ping heard round the world.

  “You saw what happened,” I said, looking at Helene uncertainly. I really didn’t want to put it into words. Plus, I never knew what someone’s reaction was going to be to this series of unfortunate events.

  “I did,” Helene said and reached across the table to pat me on the arm. “Well done,” she said. “Very well done indeed.”

  This woman, I thought, is my friend for life.

  Which was a good thing because in about ten minutes, I was going to need all the friends I could get.

  FIVE

  By this time it was almost ten o’clock, which for off-season Fair Harbor was practically the wee small hours. I was exhausted, but it seemed that Miles, Jenny, and Helene were just getting started.

  “The kids and Rolly are asleep by now,” Jenny pointed out. “Why should I rush home? This is the first night off I’ve had in months. I’m not going to waste it.”

  “Here, here!” Helene said, lifting her empty wineglass in salute, then staring at it in dismay. “It appears we are out of wine.”

  “Garçon, more wine for the ladies,” Miles said to me grandly.

  “I’m not your garçon,” I pointed out. “And the Clarion’s expense account does not run to another bottle of wine.”

  “Okeydoke,” Miles said agreeably. “Ladies, will you be my guests for after-dinner drinks upstairs at the bar?”

  I took care of the bill (with Jenny’s help determining the tip) and followed my dining companions upstairs. The new owner had ripped out the bloodred decor and again gone with the airy, whitewashed look. Small groupings of comfy chairs kept the vast space cozy and intimate. I stood chatting with the friendly bartender as she expertly mixed Miles’s old-fashioned. The summer that Krista and I had worked at the Inn, the Logans had decided to draw in a younger crowd by making the deck off the second-story cocktail lounge a beer and oyster bar. If the tide was high, the water came all the way up to the concrete breakwater down below and you could be forgiven for imagining you were on the prow of some wonderful yacht heading out to sea. But now I could see that the door to the deck had been nailed shut and asked the bartender about that.

  “Yeah,” she said, as she put the old-fashioned and two glasses of ice-cold dessert wine on the server’s tray. “The building inspectors say it’s not up to code. The plan is to put in sliding glass doors at some p
oint, once they get the deck rebuilt. Until then, no go. It’s too bad, since it’s got a great view of the pond.”

  I agreed and followed our server back to the rest of my party, who settled happily into their cushioned wicker chairs with after-dinner drinks in hand. But I couldn’t relax. Something was bothering me, something more than the natural jitters of starting a new job. Whatever it was, I was determined to ignore it.

  “I’m going out for some fresh air,” I said. “I need to clear my head.”

  I trundled back down the steps, out the front door, and walked around the building toward the boatyard and the path along the edge of the pond. I hadn’t bothered to stop for my coat, and I wrapped my arms around my torso in a vain attempt to keep warm. To my right, shrink-wrapped pleasure craft lined the shore in their jack stands, waiting patiently for summer. The only illumination came from the yellow safety lights lining the dock and the moon rising over the pond itself. To my left, rickety wooden steps led up to the quiet, deserted deck that had once been loud with college kids drinking Sam Adams Summer Ale and slurping freshly shucked oysters.

  Moonlight guided my steps to the sandy path along the concrete breakwater under the deck. The tide was high, almost to the top of the four-foot wall, but beginning to recede, and the water, rippling in the fresh breeze, sparkled in the moonlight. But even with the moon, the overhanging deck created a cave of dark, enfolding shadow.

  The past tried to thrust itself forward. I tried to push it back. The past won.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Krista had told me her crackpot idea about working at the Inn that summer, I was skeptical, given that we had literally no experience waiting tables. Krista did not consider this a problem. She simply pointed out to the notoriously cheap Mrs. Logan that they could call us interns and just let us work for tips.

  Krista had assured me that we’d make a killing. “We’re young,” she’d said. “The wives will think we’re charming and the husbands will think we’re hot.”