Miranda Bliss - Dying for Dinner

Eve agreed, and reached into her purse for a tissue.

At the same time that I instructed my computer to print the article, I started skimming.

“He’s been in this country for seventeen years now,” I told Eve, and without me even asking her to do this, she grabbed the legal pad and added the information to my list. “His mother was named Marie. She was a pastry chef back in France and he credits her for giving him a lifelong interest in food and a desire to prepare it correctly and serve it with flair. His father was Pierre Lavoie, a sommelier. That’s a wine expert,” I added, because I knew even without her asking that Eve didn’t have a clue.

“Monsieur was born in a little town in France called Sceau-Saint-Angel. The family bloodlines go back there for hundreds of years. Wow. Imagine having that kind of wonderful, rich heritage. I’m surprised he didn’t talk about it more. I’ve never heard him even mention Sceau-Saint-Angel, have you?”

“No.” Eve squinted at the screen so she could copy down the proper spelling of Monsieur’s hometown. “Maybe he had an unhappy childhood.”

I read some more. “Maybe not. He talks about accompanying his parents on trips to wineries and orchards and to the markets where they purchased the freshest ingredients for their cooking. Look, here he says something about the first time he went to Paris and ate at Lapérouse.” I added another aside for Eve’s benefit. “It’s an old, old restaurant. Very famous. Supposed to be romantic, and with fabulous food.”

“So we know Monsieur had a happy home life.” Eve rapped the pen against the pad. “Maybe something terrible happened to him after he came to this country. You know, unrequited love. Or a love triangle with another chef and a gorgeous food critic. Or-”

When Eve got this way, it was best to stop her before things got out of control. That’s why I asked her to get the article out of my printer and put it in the file folder I’d left on my desk, the one where I’d written Monsieur on the tab.

I printed out some of the other information we found out about him, too, but honestly, by the time we were finished, we still didn’t have much to go on.

Except for that information about Sceau-Saint-Angel, of course.

I checked the clock, did some quick mental calculations, and Googled the name of the town.

A couple minutes later, I had the phone in my hand.

“How’s your high school French?” I asked Eve.

AS IT TURNED OUT, EVE’S HIGH SCHOOL FRENCH WAS nonexistent.

I should have remembered that.

Eve took four years of Spanish. It wasn’t that she was some kind of fortune-teller who anticipated our current global economy. Or that she had an inkling of how valuable it would become to be truly bilingual.

The way I remembered it, there was a cute football player who Eve had her eye on back in our high school days, and since he was Puerto Rican by birth, he was taking Spanish for an easy A. While I muscled my way through French I, II, and III under the eagle eye of Sister Mary Nunzio, Eve struggled just enough in Spanish class to make sure she needed extra tutoring from you-know-who. She went steady with that cute linebacker for the better part of our junior year.

Funny, isn’t it, how even incidents like that from years ago have repercussions in the present.

That’s why I found myself with the phone in my hand, listening closely as the person on the other end spoke slowly in the hopes of getting through to me.

“Cent dix-sept?” Just to be sure I got it right, I repeated what the kind gentleman from Sceau-Saint-Angel had told me. “Êtes-vous certain?”

I nodded in response to his answer. “Je comprends,” I told him, then thanked him and hung up.

“You don’t look happy.” Eve’s comment was an understatement.

“Monsieur Brun… he’s the owner of the one and only local bed and breakfast in Sceau-Saint-Angel… Monsieur Brun has lived there all his life.” I thought back to our conversation. “I’m not exactly sure, but either he said he’s two hundred and eleven or he said he’s seventy-one. I’m guessing the seventy-one is right. Either way, he’s been there a long time and he knows every single person in town. Everybody knows everybody else in town. They know everybody’s families. And their families’ families.”

“And?” Eve leaned forward, anxious to hear more.

“And there are only one hundred and seventeen people in Sceau-Saint-Angel,” I told her. “So it isn’t hard to know what’s going on there. Monsieur Brun… he says he’s never even heard of a family named Lavoie.”

MAYBE COOKAHOLICS GET ANTSY WHEN THEIR FAVORITE shop is closed. Maybe they spend their Sundays pacing their kitchens, or poring over cookbooks and planning the meals they’ll prepare in the coming week. I didn’t have to try hard to imagine legions of them taking the seasonally color-coordinated notepads we sold in aisle one (shades of sherbet this time of year) out of the modular drawer organizers they’d bought from aisle two and scratching their lists of ingredients and the details of the pricey cookware they’d need to make their culinary dreams come true.

Maybe that’s why Monday at Très Bonne Cuisine was so incredibly busy. I couldn’t see straight much less take the time to consider what we’d learned the previous afternoon from Monsieur Brun in Sceau-Saint-Angel.

Why had Jacques Lavoie lied to us, his friends?

Why had he concocted a history for himself that didn’t jibe with the facts?

If his background was phony, what did that have to do with the IDs?

And with his disappearance?

Too bad I didn’t have a second to spend on the problem. I was so busy during the day that when five o’clock rolled around and I finally remembered it was class night at Bellywasher’s and I was supposed to supply the gadgets Jim would demonstrate that evening, I panicked.

I raced to the back of the shop and printed out the e-mail Jim had sent earlier in the day. Then, like a deer in the headlights of a fast-moving catering truck, I stood in the middle of the shop and stared at it.

“Rasp?” My voice was a little edgy (OK, it was whiny, I’ll admit it), but it didn’t matter. For the first time since I’d opened the front door that morning, I was alone. My desperation echoed back at me from the hardwood floors and the granite countertops. It was not a pretty sound. “What in the world is a rasp?”

“I might be able to help.” The answer came just after the refined ring of the bell over the front door and I turned just in time to see a man close the door behind him.

I did say man , right?

I think I might have been more accurate describing him as a mountain.

The guy was well over six feet tall and his shoulders were so wide that when he stood in the doorway, he blocked the outside light completely. He wore crisp khaki pants and a pressed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life white cotton shirt with short sleeves that showed off biceps where muscle bulged on top of muscle. His neck was as thick as the ham Jim prepared for the last week’s class at Belly-washer’s, and his chest looked to be chipped from granite.

“I’m Raymond,” he said, moving forward to shake my hand. “You look a little surprised to see me. You knew I was coming tonight, right?”

Somewhere in the back of a brain crammed with information I’d never known existed, been concerned about, or wanted to know about cooking and cookware, a memory floated to the surface, and I recalled that my new assistant was set to arrive that evening. In fact, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (actually it was right there at Très Bonne Cuisine the week before when Jim brought up the subject), I’d heartily approved of the plan. With someone else working the shop, I might be able to get over to Bellywasher’s in something close to reasonable time on nights like this, and, once I was there, I could try to clear my desk of the papers that were piling up on it like sand dunes on a windy beach.