Mousse, Moscato & Murder

by Jamie Lee Scott

  Hattie said, “This room is smaller than I expected anyway. But I would like to see the backyard and the garage before we leave.”

  Saylor looked at Ivy. “Will we be bothering you if we look in the backyard and the garage?”

  Ivy rolled her eyes. “I guess there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”

  A snotty little girl with a boatload of attitude, Ivy sure wasn’t acting like someone who had just lost her sister.

  As we walked past Ivy and out of the bedroom, I turned to her and said, “I really liked your sister. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Ivy looked at me like I was crazy. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Her response was jarring. “Excuse me?”

  “You said sorry for my loss? Haven’t lost anything.” She sounded awfully defensive.

  Hattie interjected, “Girl, do you read the newspaper? Do you go on Facebook? Don’t you know that your sister is dead?”

  Could Hattie have been less empathetic?

  All of the color drained from Ivy’s face.

  “Oh my God, what are you talking about? Becca is not dead, she just moved out.”

  “No, Ivy, Becca is dead. They found her body yesterday.” I tried to say the words as gently as possible.

  Every part of Ivy began to shake. Her chest heaved and her curls jiggled. A moment later, she collapsed on the floor.

  Saylor looked at me like, “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  I dropped down to my knees to be at Ivy’s level. “Honey, I’m sorry you found out this way. We expected that the cops had already been here and spoken with you. That you knew.”

  Ivy looked up at me, tears welling in her eyes. “How would I know? No one called me. I went back to Santa Rosa to get some of my stuff and just got back. I don’t understand why someone wouldn’t have called me.”

  She blinked and a big fat tear dropped onto her cheek, followed by another, and then another.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they have Becca’s phone or not. Maybe they didn’t know who to contact. Sometimes finding the next of kin isn’t as easy as you think.”

  Ivy looked up at me with big brown eyes. “I’m not the next of kin. My mom is. But she’s so mad at me that she’s not talking to me. Why on earth would she have kept this from me?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe her mother didn’t know yet. There was so much left to do and it was so early in the investigation.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, but I am so sorry that you had to find out this way. Would you like me to call the sheriff for you, so he can talk to you and let you know what they’ve found out?”

  Ivy looked down at the floor, big blonde curls covering her face and shook her head. “No, thank you. I’ll go down there myself and talk to them. I need to pull myself together first. Get it all straight in my head.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I asked.

  Ivy looked up at me again, blinking and wiping the tears from her cheeks. “What kind of question?”

  “Peter and I were here the other day when Becca didn’t show up for work. A young man with almost black hair answered the door and said that Becca had moved into town. Did she get an apartment in town?”

  Ivy sat up straight. “Black hair? Oh, that was Randy. He’s part of the reason I went back to Santa Rosa.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  I knew it wasn’t nothing and I decided to press matters. “I saw you get in a fight with Becca the day she disappeared. You were at The Bent Fork.”

  Ivy leaned away from me, her eyes wide. “Did you hear the argument?”

  Everyone else was winging it, so I thought I would, too. “I didn’t hear all of it, just a little bit before Becca stormed out of the restaurant.”

  Ivy put her hands over her face and talked through them, so it was difficult to understand. “I messed everything up. I mean, I really messed everything up.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder, and she tensed, but didn’t back away. “Can you tell me what you messed up?”

  She sighed deeply. “A while back, I kind of, well, I kind of slept with my sister’s boyfriend. And then he dumped her, and now he’s my boyfriend. That’s Randy, the guy who answered the door. Anyway, Randy and I had a big fight and we broke up. My mom was already mad at me because Becca had moved away, so I called and asked Becca if I could move in. And even though I had treated her so badly, she said I could.”

  Ivy had stopped talking, so I wondered if that was the end of the story. “That’s what you did wrong? That’s what you messed up?”

  “Everything was fine until Randy decided to show up. And then I let him stay the night. That’s what the fight was about. Becca was furious that she had let me move in with her, and then I let Randy in the house. It was wrong, and I know it. Becca wanted us to move out.” Ivy took a ragged breath, and I could feel her body shake again. She was on the verge of losing it.

  “We all make mistakes, honey. What’s done is done; you can’t dwell on it.”

  “But now I can’t say I’m sorry. My sister is gone. Do you know what happened?”

  And that was the question I was waiting for. I thought it strange that Ivy hadn’t asked what happened to her sister. At first, I didn’t say anything.

  “Did she get hit by a car? What happened?”

  Hattie, a little more empathetic now, said, “She was murdered. Her car was found on the side of the road near the state park two days ago, but she wasn’t in it. A search crew found her body yesterday.”

  Now Ivy’s chest heaved up and down in jagged motions as she sobbed. “No, no. Becca is the sweetest person in the world. Who would want to kill her?”

  That was my question.

  We decided not to look at the rest of the house.

  Saylor got in her car and took off as fast as she could go. Hattie was right behind her.

  I lagged behind Hattie a few steps as we crossed the lawn, and I saw the cigarette butt from the other day lying there. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and picked it up. Then I caught up with Hattie and got in the car.

  As soon as we were tucked in with our seatbelts on, I asked Hattie, “Did you believe her?”

  Hattie started the car, then looked at me. “If she wasn’t for real, she was putting on one heck of an act.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. But just in case, I took a piece of evidence.”

  Hattie reached inside her jacket and pulled out a beer bottle. “I grabbed a piece of evidence of my own, too.”

  “What’s a beer bottle going to help with?”

  “They were fingerprinting the car, right? If the fingerprints on one of these beer bottles matches any of the fingerprints on the car, then we may have a viable suspect.”

  “We?” I said.

  Annoyed, she said, “You know what I mean.”

  I showed Hattie the cigarette butt I had wrapped in a tissue. “I know DNA takes forever, but if they can match the DNA on the cigarette butt, I know Randy was smoking this cigarette, and maybe that will help.”

  I wrapped the cigarette butt back up in the tissue and put it in my pocket while Hattie grabbed her phone.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  She looked at me and grinned. “Only one way to find out if that girl was telling us the truth. I’m calling John.”

  Chapter Nine

  Hattie called John, who was surprised that we had talked to Ivy. They’d been trying to get in touch with her. He told us that her phone had been turned off because the bill wasn’t paid. Hattie let him know that Ivy was at Becca’s house if he wanted to talk to her. When John asked how she happened to know this, she suddenly had a bad connection and hung up the phone.

  I was relieved to finally get back to the Vendredi property and my studio. I had plenty to work on to keep my mind off of Becca and her sister, but the image of Randy standing in the doorway when Peter and I had left Becca’s house haun
ted me. It made me realize that even though she and I had spoken, Becca hadn’t told me the whole story. I realized I knew nothing about her after all, only what she wanted me to know. That made sense. I was a customer, not her friend.

  I looked at my calendar to see what project was next. I had to keep up with my food styling clients because they were my real income.

  The next account project on my schedule was a new soda shop opening in Santa Rosa. They needed all new POP (point-of-purchase) materials and posters of their ice cream treats. The store wasn’t finished yet, so there was no way I could go to Santa Rosa and photograph the ice cream in their store. Then again, if they saw what I did to make their treats look so yummy, they might not hire me again.

  I’m the equivalent of hair and makeup in a movie studio, but for food. My job is to take something ordinary and make it look extraordinary, mouthwatering. Make it something that you would drive across town to purchase.

  The Santa Rosa store was exclusively serving ice cream treats and had asked me to do a photo shoot with their sarsaparillas, milkshakes, ice cream sodas, and Italian ice drinks. A photo shoot like this could take anywhere from four to six hours, and sometimes longer. As you probably know, ice cream was not going to hold up. That’s where the special tricks of the food stylist came into play.

  One of my favorite tools as a food stylist was Kitchen Bouquet. The color of this must have kitchen item made it great for many things. Between Kitchen Bouquet and soy sauce, I could make just about anything that had a brown color.

  For the ice cream, I pulled out a tub of lard and a bag of powdered sugar. I arranged five different bowls on my work table. The flavors they had asked me for were: chocolate, which I’d make with Kitchen Bouquet; vanilla, which I could pretty much keep the color it was; mint chocolate chip, for which I would add green food coloring; and strawberry, red food coloring. I pulled out a can of Barbasol shaving cream that I’d use in place of whipped cream. Imagine how horrible whipped cream would look after only a few minutes under the lights.

  Let me be clear: if I was doing a photo shoot for a brand name, such as Blue Bunny or Ben & Jerry’s, I’d have used the real thing, and plenty of it, since we’d be reshooting many shots over and over, and the melting ice cream would need to be replaced. We’d never deceive the public that way. But in the case of a product, not a name brand, all was fair in the photography studio and kitchen. We were looking for the best photographs possible.

  The company had sent me all of their glassware and utensils, along with napkins, napkin holders, and tablecloths. These would be used to make sure the images looked like they’d been shot in the store. Personally, I’d planned on close ups, so the background was less important. The items they provided made the shoot more realistic.

  Their ice cream sodas were served in an extra tall, old-fashioned rib glass. It was really heavy and it was going to photograph well, making the ice cream drinks look delicious. Same as my coffee foam, I’d use foaming hand soap to make the ice cream soda look frothy.

  I gathered all of my ingredients on my workstation and started mixing the colors into each different flavor of ice cream. I had to make an extra batch of vanilla, because that was being used for not only the shakes and sodas, but also sundaes and a banana split. I would do the banana splits last, because I would be using real fruit topping and bananas.

  In case you’re wondering how I knew what their menu items looked like, the company had sent me digital photos of them. Of course, they were terrible photos, just good enough to let me know what I should be doing, not good enough for posters by any stretch of the imagination.

  I had put the first bowl on the stand of my Kitchen Aid mixer and had just about gotten the chocolate ice cream blended to perfect coloring when I heard a knock on my studio door. I wiped off the spatula I used to scrape the side of the mixing bowl and turned off the mixer.

  Most of the time, I kept the door to my studio locked so I wouldn’t have unwelcome visitors. If I was in a rush or in the middle of a shoot, I just didn’t answer the door. Besides, the only unannounced people who ever stopped by had been family.

  It was Peter at the door.

  “What have you gotten my mother into?” Peter said, still standing outside.

  I stood with my hand on the door handle ready to shut the door on him. “What are you talking about? What did I get your mother into? I didn’t get her into anything!”

  Before I could shut the door, he stepped inside. I contemplated my attitude for a moment and decided being defensive was not the best approach. I closed the door and went back to my workstation. The chocolate was thoroughly mixed, so I removed the bowl and set it off to the side. I grabbed a clean spatula and beater blade, and set up to mix the strawberry ice cream. I turned the mixer on low.

  “I just talked to her and she said that you two are investigating Becca’s murder.” Peter was just about to stick his finger in the chocolate ice cream when I slapped it away.

  “That’s not ice cream, Peter,” I scolded. “You should know better than that.”

  “Oh, it’s another one of your concoctions. I forget your kitchen is not like my kitchen. Everything I make is edible.”

  “Keep up the snide comments and I’ll let you eat a recipe that I’ve used WD40 on.”

  He took a step back. “Fine, whatever. Back to my mom.”

  “And as for your mom, I went with her to Becca’s house because she wanted to look around. It wasn’t my idea, it was hers.”

  Peter said, “She said the house was for sale. Do you remember seeing a for sale sign when we were there? Or a lockbox on the door?”

  I started mixing the vanilla ice cream by hand to keep myself from losing my temper. “If your mother already told you all of this, why are you here?”

  “You know how my mother is. I’m just here for corroboration. I’m not accusing you of anything.” Peter finally stopped roaming around and stood on the other side of my workstation.

  He looked so handsome in his vintage wine bottle patterned chef pants and white jacket. The only thing missing was his toque. But I preferred him when I could see his messy head of salt and pepper hair. Most men his age would kill to have a head of hair that thick.

  “I don’t know what you want me to corroborate. She met with me at the bakery and told me that she wanted to find the killer before Chief Hicks did. Then we proceeded to Becca’s house and when she saw the for-sale sign, she made me call Saylor to get us in the house.”

  Peter nodded. “Okay, that’s pretty much what she said. But then she said that Becca’s sister, Ivy, showed up while you were in one of the rooms.”

  “That’s right, we were looking in the house, Ivy showed up and I stuck my foot in my mouth.”

  Peter furrowed his eyebrows and looked at me. “You stuck your foot in your mouth?”

  The strawberry was mixed perfectly and I removed the bowl, then went back to mixing the vanilla ice cream by hand. I had the spatula in my hand and I shook it at Peter. “Yes, I put my foot in my mouth. I thought that Ivy already knew that her sister was dead. She didn’t.”

  “Yep, that’s what my mom said.”

  Now I was really frustrated. I stirred the vanilla more than it needed to be stirred, then moved on to the mint chocolate chip. I contemplated adding the miniature chocolate chips now or later. For the moment, I decided on later. “You already know everything and I’m not going to rehash the entire story, so why are you here? Don’t you have to work?”

  “I worked lunch because Oleg had an appointment. He’s covering my night shift.”

  We’d had virtually no time together since the holidays, and with Valentine’s Day coming up, there would be even less time. Maybe he’d suggest a night out.

  “And?”

  He leaned over the counter to get just a little closer and said, “Are you busy tonight?”

  I’d finished stirring the ice cream flavors, and was now rummaging in one of my drawers for an ice cream scoop. “It depends.”
/>   “I thought we could go with one of our old favorites, pizza and beer, and spend an evening together.”

  I had to think about it for a minute. I was starving so everything sounded good, but I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for pizza. “Make it calzone and beer, and you have yourself a date.”

  Peter clapped his hands together like he was performing magic. “Calzones and beer it is. Ice cream for dessert?” He looked at my bowls.

  I stuck my tongue out to say, Blech. “Absolutely not ice cream. How about crème brûlée from your place?”

  “That sounds like the perfect dinner. I really didn’t want to go back to the restaurant tonight, but I’ll grab a couple of crème brûlée and put them in our fridge.” He turned and walked back towards the door. “See you around seven?”

  “Seven it is.”

  I wasn’t sure why I was so excited to be having calzone and beer with my ex-husband, but the rest of the time that I was scooping ice cream into bowls and topping it with Barbasol shaving cream, I had a smile on my face. The smile lasted long enough to get me through making the chocolate ice cream soda. I had scooped the chocolate ice cream into the soda glass and added the foaming soap before my mind drifted back to Becca.

  Something told me that there was more to this story than what I had seen or heard. Hattie was all too happy to give the beer bottle and the cigarette butt to John for me. And now I wished that I had done it myself, so I could have asked him a few questions. And then I thought about it: maybe John would be up at the house tonight. Even though Hattie had been short with him that morning, the phone call after being at Becca’s house was a lot more cordial.

  I looked at my watch and tried to decide how long the actual photo shoot was going to take. If everything went completely smoothly, I could finish this session by five o’clock and have time to go talk to John if he was at Hattie’s house. I’d be back at the house in plenty of time for dinner with Peter.