Cooking Up Trouble (8 page)

Paavo hated seeing
the hurt look on Angie’s face as she went upstairs alone. But there was too much about this crew that made him suspicious. They knew or at least suspected a lot more than they’d admit to. He wanted to see what would happen when Moira came back—if she and Running Spirit would get into it like they had earlier, maybe say more than they would otherwise.

Moira carried a teapot and cups into the room and set them on a table. She, Martin, Bethel, and Running Spirit were the only ones besides Paavo remaining in the room.

They were night people, people who lived and thrived in shadows. At night, men and women like them opened up, put aside the wary alertness of the day, and relaxed in the company of like beings. The sunny daytime people like Angie wouldn’t begin to understand them or the dark side that made up their world. He did. He worked in it. At times, he lived it. He knew how interesting, and how ugly, it could be.

As much as he could, he would keep Angie away from it.

“So what do you think has become of our Finley, Inspector?” Bethel asked.

“You tell me. I’ve never even met the man.”

Bethel laughed. “That’s right. Aren’t you the lucky one? Allakaket said I shouldn’t trust him. But Martin wouldn’t listen to me. Isn’t that right, dear?”

“Oh, now this is all my fault, is it?” Martin asked. “Wasn’t it you who kept saying something about your big chance for a comeback?”

“Comeback? I never
left
.”

Martin stood. “I’m going to bed.”

“It’s too early.” Bethel turned her back on him. “Moira, do you have any rune stones?”

“She’ll read my tarot or nothing,” Running Spirit said.

“Who made you lord and master?” Bethel asked indignantly.

Running Spirit put on a CD of Yanni. “Moira, why don’t you bring out something to help us enjoy the music?”

She glanced at Paavo. “I don’t do that stuff anymore, Greg. I gave it up years ago.”

He laughed. “What do you mean? Are you worried about him?” He pointed at Paavo. “He’s your cook’s boyfriend. He’s not going to turn us in. I’m not talking heavy stuff. A little pot. A little hash. That’s all. Hey, I know plenty of cops who are real cool about that.”

“I meant what I said. No more, Greg.”

“The name’s Running Spirit.”

Martin placed a bottle of whiskey on the table. “Looks like this’ll have to do. It sure as hell’s been good to me all these years.”

Moira put out glasses along with soda, ice, and Stolichnaya straight from the freezer. Somehow they all ended up talking about the nature of magic—black magic
as well as white. Each had delved to some degree into the black side of it. Paavo wasn’t surprised.

He didn’t talk much. Instead, he listened and asked questions. But whenever the talk veered toward the inn or the strange occurrences here, someone artfully turned it away again. It was always a different one, nothing Paavo could put his finger on.

Moira sat between him and Running Spirit, but she faced Paavo. She spoke of her belief that spirits, good and evil, coexist in this world. She had nothing new to say, but then, what did he expect? It wasn’t as if she could present him with proof.

Running Spirit interrupted, telling Moira why she was wrong in everything she said. He bored Paavo. The man was like a barking dog, so pleased with the sound of his own voice he’d cock his head to listen, not realizing it was nothing more than noise.

Paavo put down his empty glass. There’d be no more tarot tonight. He was wasting time here. They were all too aware of his being a cop to open up any.

When he reached the stairs, instead of going up to bed, he crossed the dark living room and stepped out onto the porch. Standing under the shelter of the roof, he watched the rain. There was no breeze and the crisp air felt good after the stuffiness of the library.

He enjoyed the soothing sound the rain made and tried hard to let the peace it offered wash over him.

But the jolt that had hit him when he first arrived at the inn and saw Moira still prickled whenever he looked at her. Not because of her, but someone else. It’d been years since Sybil’s name or anything about her had crossed his mind.

Seeing Moira, though, brought it all back again.

Sybil. A strange name for one of his generation. But
then Sybil wasn’t like others of his generation. Maybe that was why he’d been so taken with her.

They’d met after his discharge from the army. He’d gone back to San Francisco to look for a job and an apartment, and was staying with Aulis Kokkonen, the elderly Finnish man who took him and his sister in after their mother abandoned them.

Sybil was a couple of years older than he. Tall like Moira, with long, straight blond hair and gray eyes that looked into your soul and beyond, her features were beautiful, delicate, and her body close to perfection. She was interested in the occult and spirits, and fascinated him, especially since she was more than a little fey. She seemed to always call just a second after he thought of her, or to show up at his house whenever he felt the need to see her. They were young and, he thought, in love.

Then he decided to join the police force. Something about the rough time he’d had as a youth, and the discipline and order he’d enjoyed in the army, made the police attractive to him. He liked what the force stood for and what it meant to do the job well.

Sybil said she understood, that she approved. But she moved deeper into the occult, to the dark side, while his days and nights were taken up by the police academy and his studies. He tried to convince her that many of the people she was spending time with could be dangerous. She didn’t listen.

He grew tired of their arguments and stopped calling. Twice she tried to see him, but he was too busy for her and her problems.

Eventually there was no more contact between them. He’d heard she fell in with a group that called themselves witches and warlocks, but in fact were no more than street people, wandering the city slums. He saw her
once, about four years later. She was on a street corner begging for money as he rode by, a uniform in a squad car. Her beautiful hair had been shaved off and she wore a ring through one eyebrow and another through her bottom lip. Her skin had a sickly pallor and she’d aged so much it was frightening.

He didn’t even stop.

Some months later he went back to that area a few times and cruised around trying to find her, but he never saw her again.

Over the years, he often thought that if he had spent time with her when she had tried to contact him, or had stopped and spoken to her on the street that night, he might have made a difference. He might have been able to help her.

Guilt…that was the feeling he carried over Sybil, and that was the feeling that struck him when he looked at Moira. He’d turned his back on Sybil, but he’d been close enough to her, close enough to her type, that he could see and understand that Moira Tay was also a woman who was hurting and alone.

He wouldn’t turn his back on her. If she needed help, he’d do what he could. As a cop. No more—but also, no less.

Paavo stood over the bed and watched Angie sleep. He’d gone out with a number of women after Sybil and before he met Angie, but not for very long, and never with much emotional involvement.

Why should he? After a mother who left him, a sister who died, and a girlfriend who decided she was a witch, he’d written off women in his life. His was not a sterling track record.

Angelina was clearly too young and too naïve to know what a bad bargain she’d made with him. Not that he hadn’t told her often enough. But she was too stubborn to listen. Someday she’d figure it out. Of that he had no doubt.

In the meantime, though, to be able to simply stand here and watch someone as beautiful and good-natured as she sleep in his bed was a kind of wholesome pleasure he never expected to have in his life. To know that, if he’d ask her, she’d say she loved him, and would open her arms to him, was more than he’d ever believed could be his.

If he lived to be a hundred—although he often doubted he’d make it to forty—he’d hold these few months with Angie forever in his memory. These few months when Angie loved him.

He sat on the bed and lightly touched her hand. “Time for you to get up, Angel.”

She opened her eyes.

“Time for breakfast. We already did our morning exercises.”

“What time is it?” She sat up. The alarm clock read 7:30. “Haven’t you been to bed?”

“Not yet.”

“You stayed up all night with those people?”

“So it seems.”

She threw back the covers, got up, marched to the dressing room, grabbed an armful of his clothes, then went to the door to their room and threw the clothes out into the hallway. He followed her from one place to the other. “What are you doing?” he asked.

At that point, she grabbed him and shoved him out the door as well. “Angie!”

“You like being with Moira Tay so much, you can just
room with her!” As he took a step toward her, she slammed the door in his face.

So much for his gentle, good-natured Angie, he thought.

Angie cooked soy cheese omelets. She was too irritated with Paavo and with being here to take the trouble to come up with anything more imaginative. She served light, airy muffins on the side.

Breakfast was a snap. Moira and Reginald Vane were the only ones who showed up. Did the woman ever sleep? Angie wondered. She wasn’t surprised that Martin wasn’t there. He must have been nursing a hangover. Bethel, she learned, rarely rose before ten each day. She figured Running Spirit and Patsy were out having their OBE, rain or no. And Chelsea, after last night’s tarot session, was probably sitting in her room waiting for Jack Sempler to show up.

Since breakfast was so lightly attended, Angie decided to prepare a good-sized lunch.

Quickly she searched through the cupboard and shelves of the kitchen and pantry, trying to figure out what to cook.

Finley’s larder was running low. For sure, he hadn’t planned on eight guests being stranded on this hilltop.

Behind a door in the kitchen a staircase led to the cellar where Paavo had moved Miss Greer’s body. The last thing Angie wanted to do was go down there—she’d read too many mysteries with gory descriptions of days-old dead bodies not to know the horror that must be down in that cellar. But she also knew that many people put preserves or other foodstuffs in cellars.

She opened the cellar door, then flicked on the light
over the stairs. “Hello, down there,” she called, feeling foolish. If Miss Greer had answered, she would have fainted dead away.

She tiptoed down the long, straight flight, expecting to see the sheet-covered body lying on the floor. Cold chills raced up and down her back. She wouldn’t look at it. One glance, that’s all. But if that sheet started to move…She never did like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

The body wasn’t there. What was there, back in a corner, was a big freezer chest. Had Paavo and Running Spirit folded Miss Greer up and put her in there? How horrible! She guessed it was better than having the body liquefying on the floor…but not by much.

A small, ancient refrigerator stood against a wall near the stairs. She could tell by the hum that it was plugged in and running. Curious, she opened it. Inside were cheeses—cheddar, jack, provolone, even a wedge of Brie. Most packages had been opened, but some weren’t. There was a cube of real butter, a quart of plain old-fashioned fattening milk, and in the tiny freezer compartment, a pound each of bacon and hamburger and a half-gallon of Dreyers Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. “Finley Tay, you old fraud,” she whispered.

She piled all the food she could hold into her arms—she didn’t want to come down here again—and ran back up the stairs as fast as her quivering legs would carry her. Her one regret was leaving behind the ice cream.

The thought of Miss Greer down there was too creepy to deal with, and she didn’t want to stay another minute alone in the kitchen. After stuffing the food in the upstairs refrigerator, she grabbed a yellow rain slicker and went outdoors to the garden.

She took deep breaths of the crisp air, trying to concentrate on the one thing she could understand in this
wretched inn with these strange people—food and its preparation.

In the garden she found ripe artichokes and asparagus. Some old places like this had root cellars where dried vegetables and such were kept. She’d have to ask Moira.

She picked some vegetables and carried them into the kitchen, concentrating hard on what to do with them instead of thinking about death.

From her studies of vegetarian cooking, she knew that, for the most part, it was simply a matter of substituting something for meat. The biggest problem was that there were so many different levels of sensitivity. Some vegetarians would eat almost anything short of a T-bone, rare, while others wouldn’t even eat a cheese pizza since cheese was a dairy product. Some ate fish, some didn’t.

Dead fish, each with one eye staring upward from an ice-filled chest…much like the one downstairs…came to mind.

Vegetarianism, she told herself firmly, could stem from religious, moral, or health convictions, and lectures for the unenlightened carnivores differed accordingly. As far as this group went, she had no idea where their sensitivities lay. But something told her they probably weren’t very deep or profound.

And if one of the vegetarians was a murderer…the thought boggled.

Eventually she managed to concentrate on food long enough to hit upon a good luncheon item—crêpes. She would make a stack of thin pancakes and two kinds of fillings. Then it’d be a simple matter to ask each person their choice, and while they were eating their salads, she could assemble the crêpes. If anyone objected to the eggs in the thin pancake batter, they could eat the filling without the crêpes.

She began by figuring out a Finley-fanatic filling, mixing together soy cottage cheese, minced mushrooms, peppers, green onion, thyme, and marjoram. For the sauce she used flour, soy butter, soy milk, pepper, and—she couldn’t resist—a dash of nutmeg.

For the others, she combined jack cheese, chopped spinach, and sliced mushrooms with an egg, green onions, salt, and pepper. To go with this, she decided on a Mornay sauce of flour, butter, milk, grated parmesan, and more jack cheese, since there was no Gruyère. As she cooked it, she added salt and a dash of cayenne.