A Scone of Contention

by Lucy Burdette

  “It’s all been done,” said Gavin, from his place on the other side of Helen. “No one wants a quiet book anymore. And that’s why we’re expanding our horizons.”

  “He does have a point,” said Ainslie, glancing at Vera with a pleading look on her face. Which made me realize that I’d hardly seen Vera’s friend all day.

  “And I must say everyone at the press is thrilled with the way the final photography for the book is shaping up,” Martin said. “Ainsley shared the proofs from the Peebles parade and Glencoe—magnificent!”

  The waitress made her rounds, and I wavered over what to choose—steak and ale pie or fish? In the end, I ordered the fried fish and chips with mushy peas that had been calling to me since Vera had mentioned them earlier. Raised voices from the other end of the table snapped my attention back to our party.

  “It makes no difference how lovely your photos are, what you are doing with the goggles and the bar codes and whatever else you might come up with is wrong.” Vera was hissing now at Gavin, her face red with outrage. “It is not right to capitalize on the tragedy and hurt of other people’s ancestors for the purposes of your financial gain and reputation.”

  “Can we defer this discussion until after dinner, please?” Ainsley asked, her voice pleading. “It’s going to give us all indigestion. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement that will be satisfactory to everybody.”

  “I hardly think that’s possible,” said Gavin. “Some of us believe the book should be quiet and boring in order to sell as few copies as possible, and others of us want to separate this book from the slavering pack of wannabes.”

  Martin held up his hand, as if to intervene, as the waitress came around with a bottle of red wine in one hand and white in the other. She filled all of our glasses, and the publisher proposed a toast.

  “To my fiery team, and the magnificent product they are in the process of producing. Slàinte mhath.” He raised his glass and then downed half of it in one swallow. Between Helen and me, we were able to steer him into talking about the other titles his company published and what it was like where he lived and worked in Glasgow.

  Not long after, our dinners were delivered, saving us from more possible unpleasant discussion. I focused on tasting the tender white fish, wrapped in its thick batter crust, and the crispy potatoes piled all around it. I snapped a few photos and made notes in my phone. Situated as it was in the middle of the ocean, Key West was well known for seafood, though the preparation was not often fried. This was something special, and iconic to Scotland.

  “You should at least taste the mushy peas,” I teased Miss Gloria, who had eaten very little of her dinner. “As vegetables go, they sound awkward, but they’re actually the perfect addition to the fried food.”

  She gave me a tremulous smile and pushed the green mush around with her fork. The waitress returned to clear our plates and announced that dessert would be served in the lounge, where the musicians would entertain us.

  Miss Gloria leaned over to whisper to me: “I’m beat. I’m going to bed early.”

  “No dessert? Really?” It wasn’t like her to turn down a sweet, but it also wasn’t like her to pick at her dinner. I worried about the lasting effects of the incident in the glen and whether all this tension among the publishing team was taking a toll on her, maybe even amplifying her trauma.

  “Too much food, too many scones, too much excitement,” she said. “Plus, I cannot wait for Iona, and I have to stay rested.” She stood up from the table and excused herself.

  Helen watched her leave the room. “Is she all right?” she asked me.

  “Just tired,” I said, not sure I sounded convincing, because I didn’t believe it myself.

  “Is there a problem?” Martin asked.

  “My friend tried Gavin’s goggles today and found the experience disconcerting.” Which was to say the least, but I didn’t know him well enough to go into detail about her trauma. And it should be her call how much to tell him. “You headed off the conflict at dinner rather adroitly,” I added. “How did all these folks end up working with you? They don’t seem to have an easy fit.”

  He laughed heartily. “I’ve known Glenda’s father for years. He’s been involved with a number of projects. She insisted on showing me her husband’s photography portfolio, which was spectacular. And the goggles were ingenious. Exactly the boost the project needed.”

  “Ainsley and Vera were happy with this?”

  “They had no choice,” he said flatly as he folded his napkin and got to his feet. “Between her money and his talent, their book was able to come off life support.”

  We followed the others to the section of the bar where the musicians had set up. I slid onto a banquette next to Helen and turned down the waitress’s offer for another drink. “What about dessert?” she asked. “Our local specialties are the cranachan which is made in a tall glass with raspberries, toasted oats, and whipped cream, or the sticky toffee pudding. Though we also have apple pie and ice cream.”

  “I’ll take the two specialties, please.” I thought about explaining that I was a food critic, not a glutton, but smiled instead. She had surely seen worse. She continued along the table, taking orders, as Jack and Alan began to play Scottish folk songs with the easy repartee of old friends. Though I loved the music, my mind couldn’t stop worrying about my friend. Once the dessert was delivered, I leaned closer to Helen.

  “I’m going to check on Miss Gloria. It’s not like her to skip her favorite part of a meal. Be back in a jiffy.” I picked up the plate with the cake floating in what looked like a caramel sauce topped with a generous blob of whipped cream, and grabbed two forks. At the end of the hallway, I tapped on Miss Gloria’s door.

  “Come in if it’s Hayley,” I heard her say.

  The room was dim except for a beam of light from the bathroom, and my friend was rolled up in a ball under the covers. “I’m fine,” she said, her eyes blinking open. “Please don’t worry. Go back to the party.”

  “But I am worried,” I said, putting the cake on the nightstand. “You never miss dessert. I’ve never seen that happen, ever. And this looked too good not to share.”

  She sat up and straightened her flowered flannel nightgown, then turned on the bedside lamp.

  “I’m a little tired, that’s all.” She took a bite from one side of the cake, as I dragged my own bite through the caramel on the other side. “Tasty,” she said, depositing the fork back on the plate and returning to her bedcovers.

  This was not right. At home in Key West, she was my top taster, game especially for eating anything sweet and a fan of almost anything I made or served. And a card-carrying member of the clean plate club. “Do you feel like talking to me about what happened today?” I asked. “You don’t have to, of course, but I’d be happy to share the load.”

  “If you insist. What I was hoping to do was sleep it off.” She heaved a great sigh and fingered the satin edge of the blanket that was wrapped around her.

  “Take your time,” I said, “but I really won’t be able to enjoy anything unless I know you’re okay.”

  She nodded. “Don’t laugh, but I was feeling my people the minute we arrived at that visitor center.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “It was like I had a rope tied around my waist, and they were reeling me in. That’s why I couldn’t wait for you when you were in the shop. Those women and children and animals and men were calling to me.”

  I nodded in return and took her hand in both of mine. “That part sounds very special.”

  Her eyes looked a little glassy, but she continued to talk. “At first, maybe because I was alone on that walk, I felt that I was walking on sacred ground. I was sensing the quiet spirits of those who had gone before. You remember how sometimes I feel that way in the Key West Cemetery? If I’m quiet and centered, it can happen. I hear the deceased people talking. Or even see them in a gauzy way.”

  I stroked her fingers. “You and Lorenzo have special spiritual connection
s that most of us don’t.”

  She looked across the room, her eyes not focused on anything I could see. “I had no feelings of fear or panic at that point. It was almost like they were explaining that this was where they lived and worked and raised their families. I felt a sense of sadness yet quiet acceptance from these spirits that echoed in the whispering of the leaves. It was emotionally overwhelming and a memory that will always remain with me.”

  She sighed and frowned. “But then he came tromping along with those damn glasses. And you know me. Of course, I asked if I could try them. I was so curious about how they could possibly change my experience.

  “And once I put them on, I could see those awful soldiers staying with my relations, sleeping in their homes and eating around their fires and patting their dogs and flirting with their daughters. That morning, well before dawn”—her voice had dropped to a whisper now—“there were gunshots and a clash of swords and blood everywhere until the snow turned red. I hardly know how to explain it because it makes me sound like a kooky old woman, but I felt every moment of that massacre. And I was screaming at them to watch out, run to the mountains, they’re coming after you. But no one could hear me.”

  Tears were streaking down her cheeks, and she began to shiver, almost as if I was watching her experience a rerun of her trauma earlier in the day. I didn’t want to stop her—Lorenzo had warned me against this, but I hated seeing her so distraught. I tucked the blanket around her shoulders and held her hand, praying that encouraging her to talk was the right thing to do.

  “And the worst of it was knowing the marauders had been taking advantage of the MacDonald hospitality for almost two weeks before the massacre,” she said. “Can you imagine that? People that you had welcomed into your fold and cared for turning on you in a most vicious way. Only the night before, those soldiers had sat around the home fires, dining on mutton stew and homemade bread and drinking the wine of my people. And yet now, there were bodies everywhere, with blood on their nightshirts. I’m not sure I will ever recover from seeing all that.”

  “That sounds so terrifying,” I said.

  “On top of all that noise and horror,” she added in a very small voice, “I felt so very, very cold.”

  That detail made me remember the story of what happened after the massacre, as told on the video we’d seen in the welcome center. It was winter then, and the few survivors escaped into the surrounding mountains, into the snow and frigid cold. Some made it to the next village, but most perished in the blizzard. That matched exactly what Miss Gloria was saying she’d felt. I had to believe she had really seen this because where else would that level of detail come from? But what had she seen? Was it something in the goggles? Or real spirits from the past lurking on that site of carnage?

  “Anyway,” she said, shuddering deeply, “I feel so tired, and I simply cannot sit through another evening listening to those people fighting.”

  “Would you like me to stay in your room tonight?” I asked. “I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed. You don’t take up as much room as a cat.”

  A quick smile flickered on her lips. “Nope. I’ll be fine tomorrow. I promise. This helped a little, talking to you. And you know how I bounce back once I’ve got my beauty sleep. Leave the cake right there. I’ll probably be starving in the middle of the night.”

  I smoothed the covers over her shoulders, pretty sure she was giving me a whitewashed version of how she felt. And guessing that she wouldn’t be up in the night snacking, like the old Miss Gloria.

  “Text me if you need me,” I told her. “I don’t mind anytime, night or day. Promise?”

  “I promise,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed.

  I turned off the light and shut the door quietly so I wouldn’t jar her awake. I started down the dimly lit hall and nearly screamed when a black-clothed figure popped out of the shadows.

  Chapter Twenty

  An unhappy chef will make unhappy food. That’s simple science.

  —Juliet Blackwell, The Vineyards of Champagne

  “Shh,” the person whispered. “It’s only me—Grace. The cook? I have to talk to you. Can you meet me down by the dumpster at the bottom of the driveway in ten minutes?”

  I hesitated. What in the world was she doing all the way out here in the wilderness? Did she mean to harm me? That seemed melodramatic. But WWND: What would Nathan do?

  “Honest to gosh, it’s urgent,” Grace said. “Please? I don’t know what to do.”

  “Okay, give me ten minutes.” Nathan would kill me if I went off with her alone in the darkness without telling a soul.

  I returned to the bar, where the musicians were wrapping up, telling our little group what an honor it was to perform and how they had one last song that they thought would be familiar to the Americans in the company.

  “Not very many people realize that this song was based on a poem written by our own Robert Burns,” said Alan as he played the opening notes on his keyboard. Jack stood behind him and they began to croon “Auld Lang Syne.” Several of Vera’s group, who by now had consumed a river of whiskey, joined in.

  I tapped Helen on the shoulder and leaned in to whisper. “I’m stepping outside because Grace, Ainsley’s chef, drove all the way here to talk to me.”

  “Wait, what? No way you’re going out there alone.” She bolted to her feet, her eyes flashing, and I beckoned her to follow me to the far end of the room.

  “I know she’s not dangerous. But I’m telling you just to be safe. I’ll meet you back here in fifteen and we’ll chat? I would really love to have another ear and another mind to help me sort through everything that’s going on.”

  “I still don’t like it. I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “We’ll scare her off,” I said. “How about you watch from the front porch, and I’ll scream if I need you?” She finally nodded, making me glad I had asked. I felt absolutely certain that if I didn’t reappear in minutes, she would send out the dogs.

  I walked down the short, steep driveway toward the dumpster, located next to a clothing collection box similar to our Goodwill and Salvation Army boxes; though out here in the sticks at a small hotel frequented by tourists seemed an odd place for the box. Grace stepped out of the shadows again, causing my heart to leap. I clutched a hand to my chest.

  “What are you doing here? How did you get here?” I asked. “Has something else happened?”

  “Blair drove me up. Not exactly. I felt like I needed to tell you this in person.” Grace bit her lip, and a quick puff of wind brought the scent of rotting vegetables and fish wafting by from the garbage bin. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since our arrival, or so it felt to me. I rubbed my arms briskly and waited for her to continue.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to reconstruct what happened at the dinner. You know the police found traces of digitalis in Glenda’s food?”

  “Yes, you told me that before we left. You said that you had no idea how that happened because you’d already scraped the plates into the trash.”

  She sucked in a breath of the bracing Highlands air and let it out in a sigh. “I’m pretty sure that the problem was in the salad. Remember how we served a green salad at the end of the dinner?”

  I remembered. We had eaten and drunk so much by then and were also woozy with jet lag. I wouldn’t confess this to Grace, but I’d been grateful to reach the end of the offerings at that point. “The salad was lovely, but I was kind of full and you’d mentioned cheese was coming.”

  A smile flickered over her face. “It was a lot of food, wasn’t it? But Ainsley insisted we serve the salad because it acts as a kind of palate cleanser before dessert.” The smile fell away, leaving a pinched look in its place. “Those plates were still on the kitchen counter after Glenda fell ill. I hadn’t had time to scrape them because I was busy serving dessert. I suspect that salad carried the poison.”

  “All the salad? Why didn’t everyone get ill?” I waited in silence because it looked
as though she had more to say, even if reluctantly. “Wouldn’t someone have had to come into your kitchen and poison a specific salad plate? And what did they use? And why wouldn’t they worry that this would be discovered?”

  Finally, she shook her head, seemingly overwhelmed by my questions. “Not all of the plates contained the substance. I’m wondering if it’s possible that Ainsley switched some of them around before I delivered them. And that would mean that she was the one who either put the poison leaves in Glenda’s plate or made sure that she received them.”

  “Ainsley?” I felt shocked with this new information. “She tried to kill Glenda right at her own dinner party?” From the pain on Grace’s face, I thought she must have been horrified to even imagine that her boss would be capable of such a thing, because she obviously thought highly of her. “What exactly did you see when you returned to the kitchen? Tell me every detail that you can remember.”

  Grace pressed her palm over her eyes for a moment. “Ainsley was in the kitchen when I returned from clearing the dinner plates. She pointed to one of the dishes and said something like ‘Make sure Glenda gets the one without the celery. She’s allergic. Or so she says.’ Glenda had come into the kitchen a few minutes earlier, fussing about what she could and couldn’t eat, and I assured her that we remembered and that would not be a problem.’”

  “Both Ainsley and Glenda were in the kitchen while you were clearing dinner plates?”

  “Not at the same time.” She paused. “I can’t be sure I remember everything correctly. Definitely not at the same time, though. And then I finished putting the nasturtium garnishes on all the plates and brought them into the dining room.”

  I tried to make sense of this new information. Ainsley had the opportunity to set up the poisoned plate, but what about the motive? Even if her friend was the most annoying person in the world—which she possibly was—murderers didn’t usually try to bump someone off because they were a pain in the neck. “Why would she want to poison Glenda? And why do this in her own kitchen?”