Miranda Bliss - Cooking Up Murder

Grouper was the second item on the menu. Sauteeing a fillet after it had been soaked in milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, dredged in flour mixed with parlsey, then encrusted with thinly sliced potatoes… that was a whole different ball game.

I struck out.

Not to worry. Every cloud has a silver lining, and Fabulous Fish and Shellfish night was no exception. When Jim sampled my mussles and told me how much he enjoyed them, he leaned in close and whispered that he’d let me make him a batch of the yummy mollusks for dinner one evening very soon. Silver lining number one: a night dozing on my dining room chair hadn’t made him change his mind. He wanted to see me again.

And number two? Well, I’m not one to toot my own horn. Usually. But the minute Jim said that we were going to try an experiment in class and adjust standard recipes for larger and smaller quantities, I knew I was home free.

I am, to put it bluntly, smarter than the average bear when it comes to numbers.

He asked us to double recipes.

No problem.

He asked us to halve recipes.

Piece of cake.

He told us to pretend that we were hosting a dinner party and that at the last minute, Aunt Margaret decided to bring Cousin Henry and the kids. We’d need to triple, then add a wee bit more (I loved when he said that!), and just before dinnertime when Henry called to say the kids had the flu, we were forced to cut back again.

I sailed through the exercise as easily as I cruised through the legion of numbers I faced at work each day.

“Aunt Margaret plus Cousin Henry, plus how many kids?” Eve wrote a long line of numbers on a legal pad, scratched them out, and started again. She pulled at her hair with one hand. “And how many ounces in a cup?”

I was way past that. “Sixteen cups of chicken broth,” I whispered the answer to her, feeling like I was cheating on a math test. I shot up a hand to give my answer to the class.

“Sixteen cups of chicken broth.” Beyla answered before I could.

“Very good.” Jim went over the calculations for those who weren’t as quick. “And how many pounds of chicken?”

I’d figured that out already, too.

Beyla’s hand went up before mine. “Ten,” she said, as confident as I would have been if I had a chance to answer.

“And the whipping cream?” Jim glanced my way to give me the perfect opening, but Beyla was on a roll.

“Four and three-quarters,” she called out, and from the way she did, I could tell she was feeling mighty satisfied with herself. “Four and three-quarters cups.”

Considering that she came from a country that used the metric system, I should have been impressed. I would have been if I wasn’t so busy being envious at being shown up at my own game. Not only had the woman outsmarted us enough to stymie our investigation, not only could she cook to beat the band, she was also as much of a math whiz as I was.

I tamped down the jealousy that reared its ugly head. It was unworthy of me, and besides, maybe that painful fact was really silver lining number three in disguise.

“I think we know more about Beyla than we used to,” I told Eve, who gave me a blank stare in return.

“She’s good with numbers. Really good with numbers. I wonder what that means.”

AS IT TURNED OUT, WE NEVER HAD A CHANCE TOdiscuss Beyla’s mathmatical talents. We had more important things to think about.

Eve was as anxious to talk to me about her adventure the night before as I was to pump her for information about where she’d gone and what she’d seen. There was no use doing it in class, and we both knew it. Every time we looked at her, Beyla was talking quietly with her cooking partner, John. We couldn’t take the chance of them overhearing anything we said. Besides, there was nothing we could do about our own mystery while we were busy trying to solve the mysteries of cooking fish.

The moment we got out of class, though, was another story.

Jim had agreed to come with us, wherever we were headed, but unfortunately, Monsieur Lavoie waylaid him on our way out the door. From the looks of the list of things the little Frenchman had to discuss with him, I knew Jim would be detained for hours. He gave us a reluctant wave as Eve and I continued out the door.

I had my extra set of car keys in my hand as soon as we hit the sidewalk. I looked around to see if my car was parked anywhere in sight. “Let’s get moving.”

“Not that way.” Eve headed in the other direction. “And you won’t need your keys.”

“Because you have the other set.”

She waited for the light to change, and when it did, we crossed the street. “Because we’re not driving,” she said.

“You mean…” Eve’s strides were long, and I hurried to catch up. “She came here? To Clarendon? Within walking distance of the school? That’s bizarre.”

“You have no idea! Wait until you see where we’re going.”

She turned the corner and continued three blocks up from Très Bonne Cuisine.

At this point, I should probably say a little more about the geography around here. Most folks hear Arlington , and they think that it’s a city in Virginia. Not true. Arlington is a county. There is no city of Arlington. But the neighborhoods within the county all have names. And the one we were in, as I’ve mentioned before, is called Clarendon.

The Clarendon neighborhood is nice. Really nice. It’s also a little quirky. That, and the fact that there’s a Metro station for the commute into D.C., are what give it its charm. And its sky-high real estate prices.

Million-dollar condos stand side by side with neighborhood bars. Trendy eateries that attract the movers and the shakers from across the river are next door to everyday places, like hardware stores and tanning salons.

The entire area is a jumble of old and new, chichi and downright odd. The farther we got from the bright lights and action of the fashionable spots, the quieter and quainter the neighborhood became. I would like to say seamier , because that would add a dash of adventure to our investigation, but I won’t get carried away. If the neighborhood had been seamy, I wouldn’t have let Eve set foot in it. And I wouldn’t have been there, either.

I’ll go with colorful, instead. Just like the wash from the pink neon sign glowing from the nearest storefront.

Miss Magda’s Tea Room: Fortunes Told, Secrets Revealed.

Eve stopped right outside the front door.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. “You mean Beyla came here? To a fortune-teller?” I stood on the sidewalk, staring at the picture of the giant hand in the window that showed the life line, the love line, and something called the mound of Venus. “Why?” I asked Eve and myself. “Of all the places she could have gone, why here?”

Eve shrugged and pointed across the street. “She parked over there. I know for sure it was her because I watched her like a hawk all the way from Georgetown. I saw her go inside this place. A couple minutes later, she was back in her car. I followed her after that, too, but the only place she went was an apartment building over on Ballston. I checked the class list Jim gave us the first day of school. That’s where she lives.”

I chewed on my lower lip and stared at the neon sign in the window as if just concentrating hard enough would force Miss Magda to reveal all her secrets right then and there. “So Beyla was here, but she didn’t stay long. When she left, was it with or without what she’d found at Arta?”

Eve shrugged. “Beyla wasn’t carrying anything. Going into the tea room or coming out of it. Maybe the alarm went off too soon. Maybe she didn’t find anything at the gallery after all.”