Diane Davidson - Prime Cut

Locusts whirred from their hidden perches in the tall grass. A breeze smelling of pine whispered down the mountains While the sun slid into the purple outline of craggy peaks. Again I found my mind wandering back to that something stolen from the museum , Winnie Smythe’s 1910 copy of The Practical Cook Book , the facsimile of which was tucked under the driver’s seat of my van.

When the Rover ground over the gravel by our curb, Julian curtly ordered Rustine to fetch her sister. Without looking at me, he announced that when he returned from dropping the two girls off, he would unpack the picnic leftovers.

A knot of sadness twisted in my chest. But I knew better than to worry about Julian’s love life. Or lack thereof.

Seated side by side on the porch swing, Arch and Lettie were speculating on the meanings of their fortune cookie prophecies. Lettie offered us her full sunlit smile. Arch narrowed his eyes at our intrusion.

“Time to groove,” Rustine informed her sister.

Lettie grabbed her backpack and asked for Arch’s e-mail address, which he wrote on the back of her fortune. On the way to the Rover, he walked slightly behind her, like an attendant to a princess. Unbidden, he climbed into the backseat beside her. I repressed a sigh.

About to step inside the car, Rustine turned. “Goldy, when will I see you again? Will you call me?”

I reflected on the mountain of work still to be done for Weezie Harrington’s party and the Hardcastle wedding reception. And yet, like Rustine but for very different reasons, I wanted to know what had really happened at the cabin.

“We’ll see,” I promised. “Hurry back!” I added belatedly, with a hopeful vagueness intended for Lettie.

“We will!” Julian assured me pointedly from behind the wheel. I don’t think he’d even looked at Rustine since her confession at the picnic table. “Unless Rustine has someone else she wants to run into!”

I checked our messages: nothing from the Merciful Migrations people about the Soiree. So maybe I still had a prayer of winning the competition from Craig Litchfield. Fat chance, the way that charming sleaze operated. … I called Marla and left a message on her machine, saying I hoped she was surviving the audit. Next I called Pru, as I’d meant to earlier, and again got her nurse. “She goes to bed around seven these days,” Wanda told me flatly. “But she seems to be doing all right.”

I assured her I would see them at the memorial service Thursday. Then I hustled out to my van and pulled out the hidden photocopy.

“I have something I want to show you,” I murmured to Tom.

Tom was proudly surveying the wreckage of the kitchen. He’d stripped the cabinets off the walls so that all that remained were the wooden studs. Looking at the way the studs marked off coal-black paper torn here and there to reveal bright pink insulation, I tried not to think of how much my kitchen now resembled an eighteenth-century prison. I sighed.

“Miss G. Here’s where your lazy Susan will go.” He motioned to the shadowy corner far to the right of the gutted sink area. “Oh, by the way, do you want a soffit above your cabinets, or do you want the cabinets to go all the way to the ceiling?”

“Tom, I don’t know.”

He whipped out his measuring tape and snapped it along the wall. “All the way up, I’d say. Have more storage space.” He frowned at the dark wall. “Do you want under-cabinet lighting? If so, we’ll need to cover it with molding. We don’t want the molding to come down so low you can’t use your food processor.”

“Agh!” I cried. “Who’s we , cop? I just need to get my workspace back!”

“Now, take it easy. I’ve set up space for you and Julian in here.” He led me out to the dining room, where he’d stacked the furniture against the wall by the hutch. In the center of the room, four sawhorses supported two four-by-eight pressboard work surfaces. Large cardboard boxes had been carefully labeled to show their contents. I read one list: Large mixer, bowls, beaters. Food processor .

“Great. Thanks.” This was not the time to squabble with Tom about my working conditions. I had to show him the cookbook facsimile and see what he thought. “Now please , may I show you something, Tom? In the living room?”

He nodded, nabbed a few of Julian’s truffles from a covered dish, and followed me to the couch. “While you were outside, I put in a call to Boyd. He’s going to get back to me tomorrow on our questions about unusual goings-on at Merciful Migrations and the Homestead. Meanwhile, I need to set up a third temporary counter for you and Julian.”

“I promise, this will just take a minute.” I handed him the thick sheaf. “It’s a photocopy of the missing cookbook,” I explained. “Check out the inscription. Also pages thirty-three and one-thirteen.”

He put the pile of paper down on the coffee table and tapped it with his forefinger. “How’d you get this?”

“The museum keeps photocopies of all the volumes they possess, Tom. I was a docent there, remember. I know how they operate.”

“And this is the museum copy?”

“Will you stop being such a fussbudget? No, of course not. I made my own copy.”

“With their permission, of course.”

“They don’t own the frigging copyright, Tom.”

“Aha!” he said triumphantly as he picked up the sheaf of papers. “So you didn’t steal it, you only borrowed it for a little bit. Who else knows the museum keeps photocopies of their volumes?”

“Well, anybody who’s worked there, I guess. Plus, André asked, remember, so he knew.”

Tom nodded thoughtfully as he went through the pile one page at a time. He took several minutes to peruse the two pages with their bewildering list of random letters. Then he shook his head. “Presumably, this is the handwriting that is supposed to make this book valuable, right? So Fuller’s guys must have already taken a look at it, and think there’s nothing to pursue.”

“And we all know how competent Fuller is,” I observed tartly.

He offered me a truffle and I took one. “So what do you think?” he said mildly.

I frowned and savored the dense, dark, velvety sphere of chocolate. But it didn’t help me come up with a theory. “I want to know why Gerald Eliot was killed. If the motive was really murder , and you wanted to make it look like robbery , why not take something really valuable from the museum? If the motive was robbery , and the object was the cookbook, the killer could have just taken the file, forget about stealing the actual volume. Forget about killing a contractor-guard.”

Tom licked chocolate from his fingertip. “Unless the robber didn’t know the photocopies existed.”

“Sheesh.”

“Tell you what: I agree with you about one thing, Miss G.—I’m convinced that Cameron Burr didn’t kill Gerald Eliot. There are just too many loose ends. Eliot was on to, or up to, something. Rustine, despite her lack of forthrightness, has convinced me of that. And whatever Eliot was up to got him killed. And got the museum messed up in the process.”

“I just keep thinking about reverse psychology,” I said. “General Farquhar used to tell me that a good burglar will always try to make it look as if he hasn’t broken in, so that it takes longer to discover the crime and longer to find him. But this burglar-killer didn’t do that.” I hesitated. “Your anonymous hiker who phoned in the tip about Gerald Eliot? Exactly when did he call?”