Клео Коул - Roast Mortem

“Captain Michael,” I whispered to the empty air. He truly was my best bet for a source inside that firehouse, which made me reconsider Mike’s request to stay away from the man.

Given Mike’s fire-academy story, I didn’t doubt that things had gone down badly between the two cousins. But didn’t all of that stuff happen more than twenty years ago?

Last night’s Quinn vs. Quinn standoff came to mind — Captain Michael smirking at his cousin in the hospital drive; Mike doing a reach around for his handcuffs.

There must be more to the story. I moved to sit down at the kitchen table and that’s when I realized...

There is.

A powerful, roasted scent suddenly suffused the air. My espresso was done. I moved to the stove, sloshed the steaming liquor into a demitasse, and sipped it so quickly it burned my tongue. I didn’t care.

Quinn was one of the best interrogator’s in the NYPD. He could effortlessly manipulate any information exchange. I thought I was hot stuff, getting him to spill, but the reverse was true: Mike Quinn had manipulated me .

My fist hit the kitchen table so hard it sent the cats scurrying into the next room.

When I’d asked Mike what had started the beef between him and his cousin, he’d treated the phrasing literally: “What started it,” he’d said, emphasizing the started . “I guess you could say it started a long time ago...”

Then why is it still going on? That’s what I should have asked the man!

After downing the hot coffee, I banged open my cupboards and made a hasty breakfast — a giant popover pancake (aka Dutch Baby, Bismarck, poor girl’s soufflé): flour, eggs, milk, salt, all whisked up with more fury than Dorothy’s tornado.

I poured the batter into a preheated pan and flung it into a blistering oven where it quickly inflated like the puffy exterior of a Navajo bread; but instead of honey, I finished the whole thing in the bracing-sweet style of an espresso Romano, with a quick, tart squeeze from a lemon wedge and a generous dusting of powdered sugar.

My breakfast eaten, I went back to my cupboards and pulled out more ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt... I began throwing things together: brown sugar, cocoa powder, leftover espresso...

A few minutes later I had a batter for my Magnificent Melt-in-Your-Mouth Mocha Brownies. The manic activity made me feel less like an ineffectual sap, but only a little, so I poured the dark elixir into a square pan, set it aside, and went to the fridge once more...

Milk, eggs, butter, and a treasure from the spice rack. Nutmeg? Piquant yet soothing; exotic yet wistfully familiar. The Elizabethans believed it could ward off the plague; Charlie Parker and Malcolm X used it to get high... Good enough for me!

I took out my electric hand mixer and assaulted the butter and sugar with glee.

Sell me half a story? Sure! I’ll buy it!

I added the eggs, one at a time, ferociously beating between each addition.

Yeah, you’re one crack interrogator, Cosi. Homeland Security should put you on speed dial!

Stress always did this to me. I had to bake. At times, nostalgia was the reason. Baking brought me back to those early hours with Nonna in her grocery store’s kitchen: hot ovens warming the chilly air; sticky white dough coming together beneath flour-dusted hands; battered sheet pans emerging from their transmuting fire baths heavy with the gold of fresh Italian loaves and crunchy, sweet biscotti.

On a morning like this one, however, other things drove me to the beating of the batter: a sense of reassurance for one, a reclaiming of the feeling I had control over something .

Measuring the flour calmed me somewhat (a different part of the brain apparently calculated ounces and grams, sifted out lumps). Then I married the wet and dry ingredients.

“I now pronounce you Doughnut Muffin batter...”

In flavor and texture, the resulting muffin would indeed taste like an “old-fashioned” doughnut. It wasn’t magic, just a culinary trick. (Most quick-bread batters called for a simple stirring of ingredients, but the dump-and-stir muffin failed to yield an optimal product. Creaming sugar into butter whipped air into the batter’s foundation, substantially improving its texture. In this batter, the technique would evoke the same airy tenderness as a classic cake doughnut.)

I filled the paper lined cups, opened the heavy oven door, then slid my pans home with the satisfied sigh of a weary body slipping into a warm bath.

I guess what I most appreciated about baking was its transformative qualities, and not simply because the end product was more than the sum of its parts. The entire process served as a much needed reminder of a simple but profound truth: the fundamentals of cooking never changed.

In a world where firebombs went off in your face and your lover held back on you, just knowing that stirring sugar into liquefied shortening would always give a different result than creaming it into softened butter was an honest-to-God comfort.

I still didn’t know how I was going to get the whole truth out of Mike, but I would find a way. In my view, family feuds were ticking time bombs . I’d already had one incendiary device go off in my face. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

When I finally headed upstairs, I felt much calmer — less like a rube of an interrogator than a capable woman back in control. Entering the bedroom, however, my momentary illusion of calm was blown away by a brand-new storm.

The steady sound of beeping may have been weak, but its familiar meaning shot adrenaline through my body as effectively as a blaring ambulance siren.

My cell phone!

I rushed to the dresser and saw the blinking light. Someone had left me an urgent message.

Joy? Madame? Mike? Dante?

I played back the recording, and the frantic voice of my ex-husband assaulted my ear.

“Clare! Where the hell are you?”

I checked the time stamp on the message. Matt had phoned me during my lengthy talk with Rossi.

“I get off my plane at JFK, pass a newsstand, and what do I see? My mother on the front page of two tabloids! Why is she on a stretcher for God’s sake? And surrounded by firemen? What the hell happened? I can see you standing in the background! Why didn’t you call me, Clare? Now I can’t reach her! Or you! And my battery is dying. Will you please call me back when — ”

Click.

A robotic voice followed. “End of messages.”

Thirty minutes later, my hair still damp from a quick shower, I descended the back staircase to my coffeehouse. Grabbing a Village Blend apron off a pegboard in the pantry, I peered through the open archway into the main shop.

“Good morning,” I called to the lanky back of my assistant manager.

Tucker Burton turned around, tossed his floppy brown mop, and flashed a footlights-worthy grin. “Well, hello, sleepy head! How are you?”

I avoided a direct answer, which might have resulted in a primal scream. Instead I firmly tied my apron strings and pointed to our machine.

“How’s she running today?”

“Not bad.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. Tucker already knew what to do next. He turned back to pull me a test shot, so I could judge how bad “not bad” really was.

The machine itself was a beauty, reliably stable when it came to maintaining temperature and pressure. The espresso was what worried me. Like a gifted but temperamental child, my favorite elixir had easy days and difficult days; days of generous glory with lush, oozing crema, and days of stingy infamy with thin, diluted sourness.