Murder With Ganache: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (2 page)

Worth every damn bit of sacrifice

To get a cheeseburger in paradise

—Jimmy Buffett

I’m in an open relationship with salt and butter.

—Michele Catalano

Faster than a speeding KitchenAid mixer, I scraped the freshly squeezed lime juice and lime zest into the bowl and beat the batter to a creamy pale green. Inside the oven, the first set of cupcakes rose gracefully, releasing their sweet-and-sour citrus fragrance into the tiny galley of our houseboat.

Then my cell phone bleated: Jim Snow, aka Dad.

My father isn’t big on phone conversations. My father isn’t big on conversations, period. Clients, he has to butter up because he needs something from them. But I could count on the fingers of one hand the times we’d chatted since my near arrest for murder last fall.

So when his name flashed on the screen, I set down the whisk, abandoning the “do not answer” policy I’d adopted in order to survive the week leading up to my best friend Connie’s wedding. Something had to be wrong.

“Hi, Dad, what’s up?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful, when wary was what I felt.

“Good news, Hayley Catherine Snow!” he said, with the faux heartiness he reserved for business associates. And using my full name, which he reserved for times I’d gotten into trouble. “The whole family’s coming to the wedding.”

I whooshed out a breath of relief—he was just lagging a beat and a half behind his wife. “I know. Allison RSVP’d weeks ago. You’re all set with a corner suite at the Casa Marina. You’ll love everything but the bill.” My stepmother, Allison, was organized to a fault. She had to be, as a chemist. Though why that didn’t translate into an ability to follow a simple recipe was beyond me. Hopeless in the kitchen, my mom called her, when she couldn’t restrain herself from an edgy comment.

The oven timer began to ding. I donned a red silicone mitten, pulled the cupcakes out, and slid them onto the stovetop.

“The whole family,” my father repeated. “Rory’s coming too.”

“Rory’s coming?”

My fifteen-year-old stepbrother. To be honest, I was already stressed about the upcoming week, visualizing how I might handle the family dynamics between my mother and her new boyfriend, whom I hadn’t met except on Skype, and my father and stepmother. Not to mention juggling a high-strung bride while baking two hundred cupcakes for her wedding reception. And attending her husband-to-be’s first-ever art reception.

Rory had been adorable as a toddler. As a teen? Not so much.

A surly, pimply adolescent boy would not, in any way, be an asset.

“I was hoping you could find him a place to sleep,” my dad continued. “Otherwise he’ll end up on the couch in our sitting room.” His voice rolled out ominously like the music from
Jaws
. I was pretty certain he didn’t care much for Rory in his current iteration either—only he didn’t have the luxury of saying so.

“I don’t think I can, Dad. You guys are arriving today. It’s spring break. The hotels in Key West have been sold out for months. I might be able to get a bead on a bunk in a youth hostel. But between us, I think that’s asking for trouble. You don’t know what kind of roommates he’d get or what they might be into.”

He cleared his throat. “Might there be room on your houseboat? I know he’d love to have some special time with you.”

“No can do,” I said briskly. Rory and I hadn’t lived together enough to bond quite like sister and brother. After my parents’ divorce, I spent only alternate weekends and Wednesdays with Dad. And the weekends dwindled further once he remarried and moved two towns away. Rory and I had never shared a room, or a tent, or, for that matter, a mother.

“Think Airstream trailer on the high seas. The smallest model. Between me, Miss Gloria, two cats, wedding favors, and hundreds of cupcakes, we don’t have room to spit.” Was I being uncharitable? I looked around at the common spaces of our tiny houseboat, the counters in the galley covered with cupcakes, cupcake batter, zested limes, dirty pots and pans, and Evinrude, my gray tiger cat, eyeing it all from a stool beside the stove.

My father fell silent, which made me feel awful.

“What about Eric Altman? Didn’t your mother stay in his guest room in January?”

I groaned. How did he even know this? When I moved down to Key West from New Jersey last fall, I’d assured my old friend Eric I would only ask this kind of favor in case of emergency. He’d insisted on hosting mom, because she’d been so kind to him when he was a troubled teen. It wasn’t fair to foist Rory on him.

But then I pictured messy, grumpy Rory camped out on our single couch not five feet from the room where I’d be desperate to sleep. This was definitely an emergency.

At exactly that moment, I heard a burst of excited yapping outside on the dock. A black blur tore across our deck into the living area and through the galley, followed by a barking gray schnauzer. Miss Gloria’s black kitten, Sparky, launched himself up onto the stool beside the stove, chasing Evinrude onto the counter. The slavering dog yipped at the cats, who were now safely out of reach. The animal leaped higher, nipping at their paws. They sprinted across the two trays of pale green cupcakes that were waiting for icing, tipping them up perpendicular to the counter. The cupcakes crashed onto the floor and splattered into a million pieces.

“Shoo!” I shrieked.

I waved my arm at the schnauzer, knocking into the bowl of green batter, which rocked and then tilted, dumping its contents down the front of the stove.

“Gotta go right now,” I said to my father. “I’ll ask Eric.”

I hung up the phone and lunged for the cats. Evinrude slipped through my fingers and vanished down the hall after Sparky.

“Et tu Brute?”
I yelled after him.

And somewhere, a soufflé has just fallen.

—Charlotte Druckman

I grabbed the dog by the collar and marched her out onto the deck. Mrs. Renhart, our next-door neighbor, jumped off her boat and hurried down the dock to collect her. She gathered the animal up and began to nuzzle its neck.

“Oh Schnootie,” she crooned, “where did you disappear to? Were you chasing kitties, you wicked little beastie?” She broke into a wide smile—the biggest I’d ever seen on her face. “Hayley, this is our new doggie. We just picked her up at the pound this morning. Isn’t she precious?”

“Cute,” I said, gritting my teeth, trying to twist my lips back into a smile. I briefly considered describing the carnage the dog had created. But what would be the point? And my own animal was just as guilty. “You might want to keep her on a leash until she gets better acquainted with the cats.”

“Good idea,” Mrs. Renhart said as she headed back to her boat, the dog in her arms. “Schnootie was a little lamb,” she sang, cradling the animal like a baby.

I swept up the bits of cupcake which had scattered like exploded shrapnel, mourning their perfect texture and delicate green color. As I dumped them into the trash, Evinrude peered around the corner into the kitchen, his gray ears and white whiskers twitching.

“Bad kitty,” I said. “You’re supposed to be helping, not making things worse.”

He trotted over and wound his lithe striped body in figure eights around my legs, purring as loudly as the engine that had given him his name. I scooped him up and rubbed my cheek on his head, then set him back down on the banquette against the wall of our little galley kitchen. My smartphone buzzed, clattering across the kitchen table, onto the floor, and into the key lime cupcake batter.

Staff meeting at noon
, the flashing text on the screen read.

I groaned, snatched up the phone, and wiped it down. My boss, Wally, had been crystal clear about how at the staff meeting I needed to be ready to pitch story ideas for the next few issues of the magazine.

“We need more structure,” he said. “We’re getting bigger, with a bigger audience. They expect us to act like professionals and produce a professional product. We can’t continue with an editorial calendar that consists of ‘oh crap, we have an issue coming out Wednesday, what can we write?’”

Danielle, his administrative assistant, had giggled. But Wally glared back at her, looking fierce and serious. I was willing to bet the scolding stemmed from his co-owner’s pressure. Ava Faulkner had despised me ever since her sister’s murder last fall. Even after I was cleared of all suspicions, the slate wiped clean, the real murderer jailed, she still despised me. Whenever we met on the street (and since Key West is a small town, crossing paths is inevitable), she looked right past me, her thin lips drawn to grim lines, her eyes the frosty color of Arctic ice floes. If we’d been the only survivors on the island, she’d still have acted as though I didn’t exist. She blazed with a hatred based on a small but piercing connection in our past, and that memory festered inside her like an infected puncture wound.

Eric, my friend since childhood and a clinical psychologist, liked to remind me that her toxicity was eating at her more than it scalded me. I should ignore her. Challenging advice.

I zipped down the hall to change into my
Key Zest
uniform—a yellow shirt decorated with little palm trees, a pair of clean jeans, and red high-top sneakers—all the while hunting through the scattered snatches of ideas in my head to come up with a pitch. But the only thing that came to mind was the ruined cupcakes.

Cupcakes! Why not kill two birds with one stone by pitching a story on wedding desserts? At the same time, I could pick up samples for Connie and Ray to try in case replacing all these ruined cupcakes became impossible. I had no time to waste, with the wedding only four days away. The thought made my heart rate gallop with anxiety.

I Googled
wedding cakes Key West
and came up with a list of possibilities that I tapped into my smartphone: Key West Cakes, Amazing Cakes and Creations, and my old standbys for cupcakes and cookies, the Coles Peace Bakery, the Old Town Bakery, and the bakery department in the Fausto’s supermarket. How would I ever have time to do all this? I texted Connie.
Cats destroyed cupcakes. Don’t panic. I have a plan! Meet me at the houseboat later this afternoon to taste cakes?
Then I packed up six of the lime cupcakes that had survived the onslaught of the cats as bribes for the staff meeting. Even Ava Faulkner might weaken when she saw these beauties.

Finally, I scribbled a note for my roommate, Miss Gloria. “Had a CAT-astrophe in the kitchen, will clean up later. Could you possibly pick up cupcakes for me?” I pinned the list of bakeries to the fridge with a Fast Buck Freddy’s magnet, yet one more Key West shopping landmark that had bitten the dust since I’d arrived in town. It was not that easy to make a living here, whether you were a restaurant owner, owner of an upscale souvenir shop, or especially, a writer. I jogged down our finger of the dock to the parking lot where my silver scooter was parked, and bungeed the box of goodies into the basket behind my seat. Then I slid my helmet on, revved up the little engine, lifted the bike off its kickstand, and chugged over the Palm Avenue hill that led into town.

Once I got to our office, the attic “suite” above Preferred Properties Real Estate on Southard, I dashed up the stairs, stopping at the door to finger-comb my curls and take a calming breath. Which didn’t do much for me, especially once I pushed the door open and heard the not so dulcet tones of Ava Faulkner, already ensconced in Wally’s office. Danielle, sitting at the front desk, rolled her eyes and tapped her watch.

“Better hurry,” she whispered.

I glanced at the clock—only two minutes late. But late was late in Ava’s book, and I should know better. After stuffing the cupcakes into the minifridge, I swung around the corner into Wally’s office.

“Morning, everyone,” I said, my voice quavering with faux cheeriness—I was my father’s daughter after all. I slid onto the metal chair close to Wally and pulled a pen and paper and my phone out of my backpack. Danielle appeared at the door, poised to take notes too.

“Nice of you to join us,” said Ava, tossing a strand of pale golden hair over her shoulder but keeping her gaze pinned on Wally.

“We were about to start with the editorial calendar,” he said, tapping a finger on his computer keyboard. He read off the notes on his screen. “Off the Beaten Track—How to Avoid the Spring Break Crowds.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked and then laughed.

No one joined me.

“That subject’s been done by every publication on the island,” Ava said.

“How about ‘
Key Zest
Dishes on Cats—Hemingway’s Other Legacy’?” Wally tried. “Everyone talks about his writing, but not about the cats. And there’s been that whole controversy about increasing the height of the fence and whether the cats should be allowed off the property.”

“I heard that story on NPR!” Danielle exclaimed.

“Imagine the great photos we could take to go along with the text,” Wally added, his head bobbing.

Ava shrugged. “It’s a little goofy, but fine.”

Wally jotted my name beside the new article’s title. I could only hope he didn’t need the draft this week. “I’ll let Hayley speak to the food features.” He nodded at me.

“I’ll be reviewing 915,” I said, mentioning a casual restaurant at the far end of Duval, almost at the Atlantic Ocean. “Small plates, reasonable prices, a comfortable window on the Duval Street zaniness.”

“I don’t want small plates for this issue,” said Ava, again looking at Wally. “Especially from a restaurant that’s been here since the stone ages. What else have you got?”

“I’ve been meaning to try Paseo,” I said. “It’s Caribbean food—on Eaton Street where Paradise Cafe used to be?”

She sighed and rolled her shoulders away from her ears, which I took as a yes—the closest thing to enthusiasm I would get from her.

“And maybe I can pull together a sidebar about breakfast on the go. I had the most amazing sticky bun from the Old Town Bakery this week.”

“OMG—those are heavenly!” Danielle said.

Ava delivered her a look that would have melted a weaker woman to a puddle of caramel.

“Let’s go with the sidebar. What else?” Wally asked briskly.

“My bigger feature will be a review of wedding cakes. I was thinking I could include a couple of bakeries plus Fausto’s, Coles Peace—the regulars. Kind of focusing on how you can pull together a gorgeous pièce de résistance even if you’ve decided to get married at the last minute.”

Ava laid her silver pen on Wally’s desk, her perfectly painted lips curling in disgust. “Wedding cakes in March? You’d have to be insane to plan a Key West wedding in March. The island is thick with spring breakers. The streets are disgusting by morning. I won’t even mention what I saw puddled on Duval on my way over. No one in her right mind would choose that for the biggest day of her life. And no one would be interested in reading a piece like that.” She slapped her notepad on the desk next to the silver pen. “Unacceptable.”

I felt my neck and face flush a deep, hot red. My mother and I share the reddish curls and pale skin of her Irish grandmother—and it’s never pretty when we get mad or embarrassed. Now I was both. Wally’s lower lip twitched. He couldn’t side with me directly—he’d spent too much capital simply insisting that I remain on staff.

“If you don’t like weddings, let’s brainstorm,” he said. “What do you think of when you think spring break? I think beer. Wet T-shirt contests. Portable meals on the cheap. Battle of the bands.”

I glanced over at Danielle, who hovered in the doorway, where Ava couldn’t see her. “Wet T-shirt contests?” she mouthed, twirling a finger around the side of her head. “He’s lost his marbles.”

Then I thought of all the samples Miss Gloria was collecting this afternoon and scratched a note on a scrap of paper. “Excuse me a second,” I said to Wally. “I’ll be right back.”

Out in the hallway, I passed the note to Danielle. Then I grabbed the cupcakes from the minifridge and arranged them quickly on a white plate that Danielle used for occasional snacks and various celebrations. They looked gorgeous—cream cheese frosting the pale green color of early-summer leaves with a sprinkle of lime zest on top. I delivered the goodies to Danielle and motioned to her to slide the plate onto Wally’s desk, in between him and the fire-breathing dragon. Then I returned to the office and took my seat again.

“How about ‘Take a Sweet Break with a Cupcake: Find the Best of the Island’?” Danielle read off the note I’d given to her.

Any idea would have a better chance of surviving coming from her mouth than mine. She passed out napkins with dancing hearts on them, left over from our Valentine’s Day party. Which had been a tad morose since we’d had to produce a whole magazine issue aimed at lovers when none of the three of us currently had one.

Wally’s face brightened. “Everything could be key lime. Or maybe some coconut thrown in. That makes the piece obviously tropical and Key West–y for the tourists, but Hayley would of course hit places that aren’t on the tourists’ radar.”

He peeled the paper liner off the cupcake nearest to him and took a bite. “These are amazing. Where did they come from?”

“Fausto’s,” I lied. Ava would never eat something I’d baked. She’d be certain I’d laced it with poison. Or a purgative. And by god, that was tempting.

She picked up a knife from the plate, cut one of the cupcakes in half and then in quarters. She dipped a finger into the frosting and nibbled. “Hmm, pretty good. Though I like mine a little sweeter.”

She’d probably prefer the icing on a chain supermarket bakery cake, chock full of artery-clogging trans fat and overloaded with powdered sugar. I managed to force a smile and say nothing.

A few minutes later we’d agreed on a list of articles including breakfast on the go, the Hemingway cats, Paseo, and the spring break cupcake roundup—all due at the end of this week. Although how in the world I would manage that with my family arriving this afternoon . . . and Connie’s wedding . . . I couldn’t begin to imagine. A tiny bubble of hysteria rose up my throat.

“One more thing,” Ava said, laying her palm flat on the folder in her lap. “We’re way over budget on the meals and entertainment line. This month, I want that number cut in half.”

“I can explain that,” I said. “I like to try to visit each place I’m reviewing three times—twice is my minimum.” I leaned forward, grinning foolishly, and tried to meet her eyes. “I feel like I give the establishments a fair shot that way.”

Ava looked at Wally. “We don’t have the funds for multiple visits. If your restaurant critic needs to eat three dinners to make up her mind about whether the food is any good, I’d suggest you advertise for a new employee. Besides,” she added as she slid her papers and her iPad mini into a purple leather case, “a restaurant should always be on its game. After all, if a customer has a lousy meal somewhere once, chances are they aren’t going back.” Now she smiled as my grin faded. “And besides that, negative reviews are good for our traffic. Conflict brings in readers. Even novice journalists know that.”

My jaw dropped in disbelief. How could I count the ways she was wrong? This time, I couldn’t keep quiet.