A Deadly Feast Read online

  Trusted inmates at the Stock Island jail, called trusties, were allowed to assist in community service projects such as the book sale setup. I had absolutely no problem with that. At this point, I wasn’t really listening to the details of who was nervous or mad at whom; I was studying my tortured list and trying to figure out how I could say no to my darling roommate rather than fill the only empty slot in tomorrow’s calendar. The slot during which I was planning two extra hours of luxurious and desperately needed sleep.

  I glanced up at her hopeful face again. The no forming in my head stood no chance.

  “How about an hour; will that help?”

  She heaved a great sigh of relief and nodded vigorously. “So if we buzz up to the library at seven thirty, you’ll be finished by eight thirty, and then you can get on with your day.”

  My phone sang out and Analise’s name popped up on the screen. I suspected this meant trouble, because it wasn’t a text. None of my friends call anymore, because everyone in my generation knows that nobody wants to talk on the phone.

  “I just got back from the hospital,” she said, her voice grim. “My customer isn’t doing well, to put it mildly. Her pulse and blood pressure shot sky-high, and now she seems to be in major organ failure. The family’s been called in.”

  “That is absolutely horrible,” I said. “Devastating in every way. I’m so sorry. And I’m especially sad for her husband. They seemed devoted to each other, didn’t they?” As a bride-to-be, the idea of losing one’s spouse hit me hard, especially because it hadn’t been easy to find the right guy in the first place. “Did they find out what’s wrong?”

  “Well, it’s bad news all the way around. They think she had a stroke, but they haven’t ruled out the possibility that it’s related to some type of food poisoning. If she dies, not only does that ruin that poor woman’s life—and her family’s—it decimates my business, and it could ruin the reputation of every restaurant we visited.”

  “Don’t panic until they find out what actually happened,” I said, my own stomach churning sour at the very mention of food poisoning. “Maybe she had a food allergy she didn’t tell you about, or a bee stung her—there are lots of reasonable possibilities that would have nothing to do with you.” Although why those would cause a stroke, I had no idea. I was just trying to make my friend feel better at this point. “And maybe she’ll recover, right? Hope is always a good option.”

  “I’m not feeling hopeful,” she said. “In fact, I’m on the way to the police station right now so they can ask me questions about where we were and what we ate and everything else under the sun. Apparently one of the possibilities is food tampering. Though everyone assures me that’s unlikely.” She paused. “I hate to ask, I know you’re so busy …”

  I assumed she was wondering if I minded contacting one of my cop friends. Or Nathan. Which I didn’t really want to do, because it would appear meddlesome and probably not glean any more information than what she would get during her visit.

  “Would you mind terribly checking in with Nathan? He might tell you something they’d never tell me.”

  I gnawed on my lower lip. She would certainly help me out if I was the one in trouble.

  “Call me when you finish with your interview. Maybe it’ll all be sorted out by then, fingers crossed.” I held up my hand with the digits crossed, and Miss Gloria held her arthritic fingers up, too. “If you get the sense they’re not telling you anything but they seem to suspect something serious, I’ll do a little poking around. Best case of all, this poor woman rallies and it can all be laid to rest.”

  Chapter Three

  My ex wife ruined blondes for me—like getting food poisoning after eating shrimp. You never want shellfish again.

  —Roberta Isleib, Deadly Advice

  Nathan texted me right before my mother was scheduled to arrive at our boat.

  So sorry. There’s a situation. Probably be up all night. Have to reschedule, lunch tomorrow at noon? I’ll let Torrence know.

  Once married to him, I knew I’d have to get used to these mysterious cancellations, but I still felt worried—and a tiny bit annoyed. Shouldn’t he be able to trust me with more details than saying it was a “situation”? Last time he’d told me they were expecting a “situation,” a gruesome murder occurred.

  I quickly decided it was better to tackle that complaint in person rather than by text. After a few messages back and forth, we agreed that he would pick me up outside Key Zest just before noon and drive us over to Camille’s together.

  “Hello!” my mother’s lilting voice called from the deck outside. I hurried out to greet her and we hugged, then I held her at arm’s length to look her over. Her Key West life seemed to totally agree with her—today she looked almost like a teenager, in body-hugging jeans, a ball cap with a ponytail of auburn hair sticking out the back, and a spray of sun-enhanced freckles across her nose.

  “Want a cup of coffee while we wait? And maybe a mojito cookie?” I grinned. All the Snow women have a sweet tooth. And besides, I had decided that part of my role as wife would be to always have something delicious on hand for Nathan. Even to my ears, that sounded like something a retro housewife from the fifties might have endorsed. Still, it felt like one concrete way to show him how crazy I was about him. My mother had taught me well that food is love. Good food, that is.

  “I’m trying them out for Christmas and would love your opinion.” I ducked into the kitchen for mugs of coffee and a small plate of pale-green cookies studded with flecks of mint and lime. “Let me know if they taste too summery, or if you think they’d be better without the frosting.”

  She bit into one. “Mmmm. These are perfect exactly as they are. Especially on a platter paired with some more traditional choices—maybe the sugar cookies with the candy-cane frosting? I think you need the sweetness of the icing, because the cookie itself is slightly tart.” She swallowed and sipped her coffee. “How’s it going with the wording for the ceremony? You guys are scaring me a little bit, waiting until the last moment to finish the details.”

  I just laughed. “We have seven whole days before the wedding. This isn’t the last moment. You should’ve seen me turning in papers during college. That was a little harrowing.” I pushed my shoulders down—honestly, I would have felt better having all of this stuff done way in advance, but I didn’t want to complain to my mother. Some things were better kept between me and my guy. “Nathan’s been so darn busy. We were supposed to meet right after we finish here, but he thinks he’ll be up all night with a ‘situation.’ ”

  “Isn’t this supposed to be the quiet season on this island?”

  I shrugged. “You know if it gets too quiet, the Tourist Development Commission invents a new event to bring people down to the Keys. Don’t worry, we’re having lunch with Steve Torrence tomorrow and I’m sure we’ll get it squared away. Which is more than I can say for this reconstruction project.” I pointed to the pile of trash next door.

  I couldn’t help sounding glum. We had hoped to have the newly purchased houseboat in move-in condition by early December. I understood there were many more pressing problems than my houseboat renovation. Two and a half months post-Irma, people only miles up the Keys from us were still living in tents and motels in the areas where the hurricane’s eye had crossed over the string of islands and flattened their homes. And plenty of others had lost their personal belongings when the storm surge backed up and swept through their property.

  Still, I felt a little sad about the fact that we had planned our wedding date based on the contractor’s estimate for the completion of the renovation. We wanted to be able to move in together as soon as we were married, as long as the work was far enough along to make the space livable. Right now, livable it was not.

  I glanced at my watch. “We should probably head over there so we can be waiting for him when he arrives.” We hopped off Miss Gloria’s houseboat and walked the few yards to what was soon to be our home.

  “Watch your
step on the rubble,” I said.

  She picked her way past the pile of paneling and insulation that Nathan and I had stripped out of the boat last weekend. We figured we could save the contractor some hours by chipping away at the grunt work. Inside the place, with the kitchen counter and appliances gone and some of the walls stripped down to studs, it looked as though this might have been hurricane ground zero.

  My mother put her hands on her hips and twirled slowly, taking in the full picture. She finally turned to look at me. “Honey, I hate to be a downer, but I don’t believe this will be finished in nine days or even nineteen. Have you thought about where else you might live? You’re welcome to the upstairs bedroom at our place.”

  “You’re sweet,” I said. “But I’m not sure Nathan could handle starting married life living with my mom.” I snickered. Just the idea of it felt like a terrible karmic joke. “Though he’d have a lot to learn from Sam.”

  Sam was my mother’s second husband and a sweetheart of a man. He totally supported her desire to own a catering business, even to the point of giving up his law practice in New Jersey to move south and serve as her sous-chef. Without any training or experience, he was like a sponge, fascinated by how ingredients melded together to make something more delicious than any individual item on its own. And he had a way of calming my mother down when she approached hysterics, which was bound to happen from time to time in the catering business.

  “And me from you,” I added quickly with a big grin. I opened up the two webbed lawn chairs Nathan and I used occasionally at cocktail hour, role-playing living our dreams.

  “How was the seafood tour?” my mother asked.

  “I totally forgot to tell you.” I described how the woman had fallen ill during the last stop of Analise’s tour.

  “Could it have been a heart attack?” my mother asked. “People don’t take care of themselves and then they’re surprised when they get sick. Although to be fair, bad things can still happen even if you do all the right stuff.”

  “Unfortunately, on the one hand they’re saying she might have had a stroke. But Analise got the impression that they might be suspecting foul play.”

  “Oh no,” my mother said. “Not again. Did you see this happen? Or notice anything unusual before she took ill?”

  “I didn’t see what happened before the woman keeled over, but as I was coming back from the ladies’ room, she slid to the floor, clutching her head and moaning. I called 911, and then the fire department showed up and took her away. Up until then, she seemed perfectly perky and healthy. Maybe even too perky.”

  “Awful,” she said. “Life can be so harsh sometimes.” She glanced at her watch. “Are you sure this contractor is coming? He’s twenty minutes late already. I don’t mean to rush you, but Sam is starting to panic a little about Thanksgiving. You’re coming by tomorrow to review the menu, right?”

  My mother had insisted that the two of them would prepare the main part of the dinner if I could handle dessert. All that by itself was really no problem. I had been helping her with a lot of big events as her business took off, including catering a major weekend of meetings between Havana and Key West last winter. We billed ourselves as catering professionals, quite capable of handling most events.

  The problem came with the guest list, which included my father—Mom’s ex—my stepmother, Allison, and my stepbrother, Rory. They’d decided to fly in early and enjoy the island for a few days instead of rushing down at the last minute for the wedding. Hearing that, my mother had insisted they be invited for Thanksgiving dinner. My parents could manage a civil conversation for a couple of hours, or even a couple of days. But Sam hadn’t met my dad, nor had Nathan. Even if the day went perfectly, the room would be pulsing with stress. I texted the contractor for an update. The reply whooshed back in.

  Sorry. Emergency. Same time tomorrow?

  Chapter Four

  My boss’s appearance, while not entirely unhandsome, evoked an icebox crowned by a cauliflower.

  —Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  Miss Gloria’s co-conspirator, Mrs. Dubisson, met us at the parking lot at quarter after seven. Since there were three of us, we decided that I would drive Miss Gloria’s old Buick to the book sale. And when I was finished “volunteering,” I would walk to the office, which was close enough to the library that it would be a pleasant stroll. Nathan would pick me up at the office right before lunch. All of that would leave me a few quiet hours to work.

  Mrs. Dubisson was a carbon copy of my roommate in terms of liveliness and energy, though a little taller and with a mane of perfectly white hair that she kept wrapped in a knot at the back of her head. Rather than donning the sweat suits that Miss Gloria favored, she dressed to the nines in trim trousers or capris paired with ironed blouses or sweater sets, and always her string of pearls.

  “You look so pretty today,” I told her as we got into the car, me in the front with Miss Gloria and Mrs. Dubisson in back.

  “I don’t have a daughter,” she explained, “and no sign of any grandchildren either. So I might as well get as much use out of the darn pearls as I can while I’m still kicking.”

  Miss Gloria snickered. “Maybe I should start wearing mine. Do pearls go with bling?” She gestured at her Thanksgiving sweatshirt, the cartoon turkeys outlined in brown and orange sequins.

  “We’re at the age where anything goes,” said Mrs. Dubisson. “Say, I was reading Facebook this morning while I put myself together and ate breakfast. Apparently that lady who fell ill on the food tour yesterday didn’t make it.”

  “Good gravy, that poor woman died? This is already all over Facebook?

  “You have to be careful about the Internet,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at my backseat passenger. I pulled out onto Palm Avenue. “A lot of that stuff ends up falling into the real fake news department. And there are lots of evil trolls who want to suck you in and steal your stuff.”

  She waved her hand, shrugging me off. “I never take it too seriously, especially the Key West locals group. They love to gossip. Though I did get a heads-up when Kenny Chesney gave an unscheduled concert a couple years ago at the Hog’s Breath Saloon. I arrived ahead of the young people and nabbed a front-row barstool.” She beamed, looking extremely pleased with herself. But then she straightened and frowned. “In this case, there was one of those six-degrees-of-separation things; the woman who died was related to somebody’s mother-in-law’s sister. They’re already starting a GoFundMe campaign to pay for her funeral expenses.”

  “Those campaigns are overdone these days, in my humble opinion,” said Miss Gloria. “People asking for other people to whiten their teeth and send their kids to language and tap-dancing lessons and lord knows what else. Whatever happened to people taking responsibility for their own lives?”

  “What do they think was the cause of death?” I asked. This would make a huge difference for Analise and all the restaurants on her tour.

  “I didn’t get that,” Mrs. Dubisson said. “But I’ll check in later and let you know what I find out.”

  At 7:30 on a Saturday morning in Key West, pretty much the only vehicles you see on the roads are the great rumbling street cleaners that roll through Old Town to clean up the party from the night previous. So we reached our destination in under ten minutes. The library, a one-story pink stucco building, sat quietly three blocks off the main Key West drag, Duval Street. The front gates to the palm garden, located to the left of the library, were still locked. I backed the car into a spot in the lot behind the building so Miss Gloria would be able to pull straight out and have the smallest possible chance of nicking someone else’s finish when she drove home later on.

  “Maybe we’ll be able to get the lowdown from one of the prisoners working the sale,” said Miss Gloria. “Without cell phones and iPads, you wouldn’t think they would know anything about the outside world, but they always do. I think my pal Odom will be here.”

  I eased the keys out of the igni
tion and got out of the car. Sometimes it felt like I was dealing with a couple of naïve teenagers rather than ladies in their eighties. “Be careful with those guys,” I said. “Don’t get too friendly. You know they ended up in those orange uniforms for a reason.”

  “It could happen to anyone,” said Miss Gloria breezily as she trotted toward the back entrance with Mrs. Dubisson in her wake.

  Library volunteers and trusties in orange jumpsuits from the county jail were already busy unloading boxes of books from the storage room and moving them to the tables set up in the garden. Miss Gloria showed me where to sign in at the table by the back gate. By the time I’d turned around, she was hoisting cardboard boxes of hardcovers onto the table marked MYSTERY.

  One of Miss Gloria’s cronies directed me to the children’s table, and I began to lift boxes of picture books onto this tabletop and arrange them so they could be easily viewed. I drooled over a complete set of hardcover Hardy Boys mysteries that I found at the bottom of the pile, though I resisted setting them aside because I couldn’t think of anyone to give them to. And there was absolutely no spare room on our boat for poorly considered purchases. When I finished that chore, I was sent to the cookbooks and travel section, where I worked steadily until eight fifteen. Shoppers had already begun to line up on the sidewalk outside the black metal gates.

  “We don’t open until nine thirty!” called out a cheerful woman whom Miss Gloria had introduced as Marsha Williams, the president of the Friends’ board. “If you’re finished,” she said to me, “you can start applying the stars to the spines of all the titles that don’t have a circle on them. If they’ve been recycled through all the sales for the season and no one’s been tempted to buy, we cull them out,” she explained.

  By this time, all the books had been unloaded from the storage shed and the jumpsuited trusties bundled off to their next job. Miss Gloria took the spot next to me, and we applied the star stickers in tandem.