Miranda Bliss: Cooking Up Murder

The pot holders came in shades of pink, from magenta to blush. They were arranged on the wall like a rainbow. They were perfect, quilted squares, and the colors were breathtaking. Suddenly, I was glad I didn’t own any.

Until I saw the pricetag.

I gulped down my horror and promised myself a trip to WalMart.

Monsieur Lavoie brushed aside the pot holder at the bottom of the rainbow to reveal a security pad. “You are the last two. Everyone else is here. You do not wish to miss a thing, yes?”

“No. Yes. I mean…” While he punched in a security code for the door that led to the upstairs school, he explained that the school door was always kept locked so that customers who weren’t signed up for classes couldn’t wander up there. The lock clicked open and I tried to get my thoughts in order. “We just wanted to make sure that you were OK. That nothing was wrong. After the way that man-”

“Wrong?” He chuckled. “What could be wrong, cherie ? The night is young, and you are about to have such a wonderful experience. Cooking, nes’t pas ?” He kissed the tips of his fingers and winked. “Except for love, this is the greatest adventure of all!”

Monsieur Lavoie waved us up the stairway, and just before the door closed behind us, I saw him bow. After a quick climb, Eve and I stepped into an airy room every bit as stylish as the shop downstairs.

I know it sounds crazy, but suddenly, I knew exactly how Dorothy felt when she took that first Technicolor step into Oz.

Along one side of the room, a floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the street. Mellow evening light poured into the room like clarified butter. The whole scene reminded me of a photograph in a slick gourmet magazine, the golden light glancing against each two-person workstation with its state-of-the-art stainless steel stove, its charcoal-colored granite cutting surfaces, and cookware that gleamed the way my cookware at home had never gleamed, not even on the day it came out of the box.

Eager students sat side by side, their broccoli out and waiting, green and dewy. Their sticks of butter and globe-shaped Spanish onions added just the right warm touch of yellow to the picture.

In fact, the only false note in the room was the woman who stood looking out the front window. Against the backdrop of gilded light, she looked like she was cut from black paper. When Eve and I walked farther in, the woman spun around. She was pretty in an exotic sort of way, with pale skin and hair as black as a crow’s wing. Her eyes were dark, too, and right then, they were wide with horror.

For one mad moment, I thought word of my cooking prowess had preceded me, and she was about to announce that if Annie Capshaw was going anywhere near fire, she was outta there.

She didn’t, thank goodness. Instead, she took one look at us, and the worry in her eyes cleared. After just one more glance at the front window, she took her place at her cook station.

Eve and I found our place, too-at the last remaining stove in the far right corner. Back of the room. Out of the line of the instructor’s eye. Just fine with me.

“I told you this was going to be wonderful.” Eve’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. She dragged in a deep breath and let it out slowly, savoring the moment and the rarified atmosphere. She pulled her assortment of ingredients-minus the cauliflower-out of her bag, and I took the opportunity to glance around the room. Out of a class of twelve, there were four men. Eve must have noticed them, too, because she elbowed me in the ribs. “What do you think, huh? Told you this would be a great place to meet somebody.”

“Except that I don’t want to meet somebody.” I made sure I kept my voice down.

“Which doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t want to meet you.” Eve’s eyebrows shot up, and I looked where she was looking-which was at each one of our male classmates.

Two of them were together, and since they were holding hands, it wasn’t much of a leap to figure they were gay. They didn’t spare me a look, but they did check out Eve’s outfit. No doubt they were critiquing her color choices. The other two I wasn’t so sure about. One of them was a nondescript guy with pleasantly bland features. When I looked his way, he pretended he didn’t notice. The last man was a middle-aged cross between a sumo wrestler and the Incredible Hulk. If he was cooking, whatever he was cooking, no way anyone was going to refuse to eat.

The wall over on the right side of the room was painted with a mural of a Parisian café. In the center of it, right under a sign that said it was the Café Jacques, there was a door. At that moment, it popped open, and the man who I assumed was the Jim who had sent our shopping list walked into the room.

This time when Eve elbowed me, I sat up and took notice.

I should explain that we have wildly different taste in men, Eve and I. She likes her guys big and hairy. Usually light-haired. Always with money to burn.

I, on the other hand, am a little more discriminating. The one and only time I filled out one of those online dating surveys (at Eve’s urging, and only because I knew she’d give me no peace until I did, and because I deleted the whole thing as soon as she left), I’d checked off all the things about a man that were important to me. Things like a good sense of humor, a steady job, a sense of self-worth that wasn’t tied to what kind of car he drove or how he made his living as much as it was to who he was way down deep inside.

I wasn’t shallow, and I was proud of it.

But, hey, I wasn’t dead, either.

I looked over Jim and nodded my approval. I smiled at Eve. Eve smiled back. For once, we were in total agreement.

Our cooking instructor was, to put it in the vernacular, one hot hunka hunka burning love.

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who recognized a cooking Adonis when we saw one. A sort of hush fell over our little crowd as Jim made his way to the front of the room where he had a stove and work surface bigger than ours, and a mirror hanging over the whole thing so that we could watch his hands while he worked.

“Good evening! I’m Jim. Jim MacDonald. I’ll be your instructor.”

“Ohmygosh! A Scottish accent! My knees are weak.” The words hissed out of Eve, and she grabbed onto the edge of the granite countertop.

Though I was (as always) a little more circumspect, I knew exactly how she felt. Jim MacDonald was tall and rangy. Long legs. Long arms. Long, lean body. He had a crop of hair the color of mahogany, and though I couldn’t tell for certain from this distance, I thought his eyes were hazel. There was no mistaking the impact of his voice, though. Deep and edged with a bit of a burr, it was one of those voices that wraps itself around its listeners. It was soothing and exciting, all at the same time. It was sexy. Oh, yeah. It was sexy, all right. And there wasn’t a woman in the room (as well as those two gay guys) who wasn’t completely enthralled.

Jim took it all in stride, giving us a one-sided smile that revealed a dimple in his left cheek.

“Now you know me, so let’s meet all of you. Let’s go around the room,” he said, “and get to know each other. Tell me your name and why you’re here. What kind of cooking do you like to do? Then tell us something interesting about yourself.”

Interesting?

My mind glommed onto that one word and froze. I swear, as my fellow classmates introduced themselves one by one, I didn’t hear half of what they said. I knew the gay couple were Jared and Ben, that they loved to grill seafood, and that they spent their weekends when they weren’t rock climbing tending to the garden behind their eighteenth-century row house in Old Town Alexandria.

The young girl and older woman directly in front of us were mother and daughter. Their specialty was pastries, petit fours, and tortes. The bland man with the pleasant face was John. He was an accountant-no big surprise there-and a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy.