And with these thoughts, I fell asleep. And I had the weirdest dream. A black cat was talking to me. If only I could remember that dream the next morning...
CHAPTER FIVE
*
I TAPPED THE RECORD button and stood in front of my phone camera. Beneath my pink and green floral apron, I was wearing a comfortable purple velvet sweatpants suit. After I squeezed an unruly curl into the chef hat I was wearing, I put on my nytril gloves and smiled at the camera. I was ready to start recording my weekly pastry chef show episode.
“Bonjour Mesdames and Messieurs, I am Alysson Burke and this is the An American Pastry Chef in Paris show.”
Within the last year, my YouTube channel had become quite successful and that had brought a great amount of attention to my tiny Patisserie. In the era of social media, you could not be a successful entrepreneur without being active on YouTube and Instagram.
“Today, I am going to show you how to bake the best profiteroles you will ever taste. Look at these pastry balls. Crispy on the outside, hollow on the inside, filled with custard or cream then drizzled with chocolate. These are profiteroles to die for. Figuratively speaking.” I giggled.
“In French, profiterole balls are called Pâte à Choux; choux pastry balls. The secret to these crispy, light as air, choux puffs is the double bake of them. During the first bake, the pastry balls cook through and puff up. Then, they are pierced with a spoon and returned to the oven for a second bake. This is when they become crispy, ready for the most delicious custard or cream to fill them. Ice-cream is another fabulous option if you prefer the American way.”
I drew four pink white dotted bowls closer to me. “And you only need four ingredients to make them. Butter, eggs, flour, and water. Isn’t this incredible?”
I mixed the ingredients in a big baby blue bowl and stirred vigorously with a wooden spoon. I patted down a few peaks with my fingers before I shaped a couple of balls and place them on a white porcelain plate.
“Now, let’s talk about the filling. You can pipe vanilla custard inside the balls. Homemade vanilla custard is my personal favorite. However, cream is a quicker filling option. If you are more of an ice-cream person, then you can split the choux puffs in the middle and then stuff them with your favorite ice cream. Do you know what the most amazing thing is? These fabulous pastry balls can be made months in advance and stored in the freezer. Just throw them in the oven and you will have the most amazing golden and crispy choux puffs ready to be filled within minutes. You will be the queen of the dinner party.”
The scent of vanilla filled my nostrils as I whisked it with yolks, sugar, hot milk, and corn flour into a saucepan. When the mixture thickened, I poured it into a baby blue white dotted bowl. It sealed it with cling wrap and put it in the refrigerator.
“You are going to leave it in there up to five hours until it sets. When the custard is ready, spoon it into a piping bag and pipe into your profiteroles. Place cream and chocolate in a heatproof bowl and microwave until it is warm if you want to make chocolate sauce. Let it cool if soft chocolate is what you are aiming for. Drizzle or dip the profiteroles in it and you have created awesomeness.”
I tapped the Stop button on my phone, and I started cleaning my kitchen table off the chaos of dirty mixing bowls, drops of spilled milk, and flour lining the counters and the floors. Baking, and cleaning afterward, was the most relaxing experience to me, and I had already placed in the back of my mind the weird events that had shaken me the day before.
“Excusez-moi! Mademoiselle Burke!” A loud shrill voice rumbled from outside the patisserie.
“Monsieur Caron. Do you have anything for me?” I greeted the postman who was standing on the pavement. A cat was rubbing against his legs. “Is that your new friend?”
“Oh, no, it was wandering around here. It does not seem like a stray, though,” the postman replied. When I stepped closer to him, he handed me a bunch of envelopes.
“Merci!”
As the postman moved swiftly away, I flipped through the envelopes he had handed me, and turned to get into my patisserie.
“Jesus, man!” I yelled as I almost stepped over him. He was standing there, hands on his waist, looking around like he was searching something he had dropped down on the floor.
“Lucien, actually.”
Son of a gun, he was laughing. Detective Lucien Fournier was standing there, with his seductive blue eyes, his well-combed blond hair, his trimmed Van Dyke beard, his broad shoulders, and his small waist... Did I mention he had broad shoulders?
“Good morning. Can we have a word?” he added with his slight French accent.
“Be my guest,” I said as I threw glances around the unusually busy road.
Suddenly, an old man started yelling from behind Lucien.
“That’s the chick! That’s the chick who had a quarrel with her last night!”
That was one of the customers I had served last night. What was he doing there and why was he pointing at me? I was not sure if I wanted to know the answers to those questions.
“Are you sure, sir? Is this the lady you saw quarreling with the victim last night?” Lucien asked the student.
“Wait a minute. A victim? What victim? What are you talking about? Oh, my Gosh! Where is Louise? Is she okay?” I asked and almost collapsed at the thought that my waitress could have been hurt. She was a no-show yesterday and I had only no realized that she had not called me to explain her absence. With all that happened yesterday, I had forgotten about her.
“Calm down, mademoiselle. None of your colleagues were hurt. A dead body was recovered nearby, and we assume that it belongs to one of your customers,” Lucien explained calmly.
“Found dead? Where?”
“The corpse was found in a private garden around the corner. There are indications suggesting that the victim was a woman who was last seen in your bistro,” Lucien said.
“Patisserie. It’s a patisserie, not a bistro,” I corrected him. “I thought you would know the difference since you were here last afternoon, too. Excuse me but why are you asking these questions?”
A bunch of officers and agents appeared out of nowhere and in a blink of an eye, Le Coeur looked like a busy beehive. Still with the closed envelopes in my hand, I stood by the glass door, looking around puzzled and trying to understand what was going on. I did not want to use telepathy in crowded places, or I would have gone bananas.
“I’m telling you, man, the bitch killed that lady,” the man was now in front of me, pointing his finger to me, yelling in a high-pitched note.
“Hey, watch your mouth,” I hissed. “Detective, what is this man talking about?” My voice cracked as an uneasy sense of foreboding overtook me.
“Detective, ask her where she was last night when that woman got murdered,” he insisted without lowering his voice.
Detective Lucien Fournier put his hand on the man’s shoulder to calm him down. “Please step back and let me do my job,” he said quietly looking the old man straight in the eyes and then turned to me.
“Now, mademoiselle, first things first. What is your name?” he asked.
“I am Alysson Anderson and I am an American citizen. I have rights, I come from a free country and you cannot just throw accusations at me,” I said as I nervously tapped my foot on the floor.
“Relax, mademoiselle Anderson, no one is accusing you,” Lucien took a small notepad out of the inside pocket of his suit and, while he was searching in his pockets, he asked me rather indifferently, “Where were you last night, miss?”
“I was here, working, but you know that, you were here, too.” My foot was still tapping on the floor, an uncontrollable reaction of my nervous system, afraid as I was for the direction the conversation was taking.
“I know I was here; you know I was here, no one else should know I was here,” Lucien’s voice sounded clearly into my mind.
“Wh-what?” I stammered.
“Here it is. For a moment I thought I had lost it,” Lucie
n said out loud this time, waving a mechanical pencil that he just had pulled out from one of his suit’s pockets. “It’s my lucky pencil. Well, what were we saying?”
“I... I’m... not sure,” I hesitated. I did not intend to read his mind, but his thoughts were so powerful I could not resist.
“I hate that this is happening, but I have to follow the lead.” His voice intruded again into my mind, but this time I was ready to play his game. “I’m willing to trust you, but what about this guy?”
“But he has not said anything against me besides that I was fighting with someone?” I tried to send him a telepathic message, but it was useless. Lucien could not receive the telepathic message I sent him.
“Who is the victim?” I asked instead out loud. A part of me hoped that the victim they were talking about was that awful man who had nearly assaulted me. However, they had mentioned that the victim was a woman. But why did Lucien say that his presence here had to stay a secret?
“They must not find out that I was here last night. If they found this out, then they will also know that I followed you until you got home.”
“You did what?!” I yelled out loud, interrupting the telepathic intrusion into his mind. “I mean, you want to know what? I am sorry, I did not catch that. Could you repeat the question?” I was convinced that the smile I faked looked pretty silly to "les flics" who had turned around alerted by the small cry I had accidentally let out.
“I asked where you were last night, miss Anderson,” Lucien replied calmly as he gave me a piercing glance with his warm green eyes.
“I was here working, and then I went home,” I finally said.
“Can anyone confirm your alibi?”
“Err... No, I live alone and as soon as I went home, I went to bed. I was that tired.” I bit my lip.
“You have an alibi though. I saw you talking to a man on your way home. For your own sake, you should mention that.”
“What!” I yelled and a passerby turned and looked at me.
“Miss Anderson, please keep your voice down,” Lucien scolded me.
“I’m sorry.” I lowered my eyes.
“Oh, miss Anderson, you are so beautiful.”
“I met a man on my way home. His name is Favreau and he is a Private Détective. I am sorry, I do not remember what his first name is,” I said keeping my voice low. “And what is wrong with him?” I whispered as soon as I realized that the old man who was accusing me was still standing beside us, with a blank look on his face, like he was frozen.
“He is suffering from dementia. In a couple of minutes, he will come back to us again and he will not remember why he is here and what is that he is doing here.”
“And you let him accuse me of whatever is that he is accusing me of?”
“I let him say his story. That does not mean that I believe him. Besides, he has lost a person of whom he was very fond.”
“What do you mean?”
“The victim was a person he loved,” he said while scribbling some notes on his notepad.
“And why on earth are you writing on a paper notepad? Don’t you have a smartphone, a tablet, or whatsoever? We’re in the 21st century, not in the Dark Ages.” I suppressed a burst of laughter.
“I’m old fashioned.” He smirked. “Do you have any other questions to ask me?”
“Yes, I have. Who is the victim?”
“Madame Guillaume. Do you know her?”
He knew that I knew who Mrs. Guillaume was. He had seen her insulting me. And that was the reason that I was now on his list of suspects.
“How did she die? Was she killed?”
Of course, she was killed. If she had died from natural causes, the Paris Police would not have been involved.
“She was poisoned. And now, I would like to know what you served her yesterday?”
“Er... she had tea. You do not really believe that I put something in her tea?”
“It is not what I believe that matters, but what really happened to her. We must search your shop, miss Anderson. Here is the search warrant.”
He handed me a piece of paper. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold it in my hands.
“And I have to ask you to follow me to the Police Station. I have a few questions to ask you.”
A strong wind blew abruptly behind my back and got my hair fly into the air and into my face.
“She is not going anywhere!”
It was Favreau, Private Detective Favreau, that had stood between me and Lucien.
“Where did he come from? And how can he move so fast?”
“Here we go again,” Lucien said. “Who is this man, miss Anderson? Your attorney? Or your bodyguard?”
“I do not know him. I had not met until last night.”
“I am telling you, detective. Miss Anderson has nothing to do with the murder you are investigating.”
“Let me decide this. Please leave,” Lucien said and pulled Favreau’s hand away.
That was not wise of him. Private Detective Favreau punched Detective Lucien Fournier in the face. Lucien’s nose started bleeding and a flock of forensic investigators surrounded us.
“Come with me,” Favreau told me as he grabbed my hand and carried me away from the crowd as if I were a feather in the wind.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Lucien looking at us moving away dumbfounded, holding a bloodied white handkerchief on his nose while two policemen ran behind us.
However, it was something else that caught my attention. The black cat was now standing beside Lucien’s feet licking her paws before she raised her eyes to me and mouthed to me, “Help!”
What the heck?
CHAPTER SIX
*
“I WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING when we get to my place,” Alexandre said as he grasped my arm. “Let’s get to my car.”
“Wait!” I yelled. “I am not going anywhere with you, let alone to your place.”
“Please, Alysson, we have no time. They must not follow us there.”
“Who are they? Les flics?” I asked.
“It is not the cops I’m concerned about.”
“What is it then?”
“Those people, the man at the patisserie, the one who I ‘took care of’ yesterday, was a murderer. His people will come after you. So, that is why you must follow me. I need you to trust me.”
I tried to read his mind, but he had blocked me out. How could he keep doing that? However, my gut was telling me that following him to his place was not such a bad plan.
“Okay, detective.”
“Alexandre.”
“Pardon?”
“Alexandre. Call me Alexandre,” he repeated as he opened the door of the passenger seat for me. One minute later, we were both sitting in his car.
He fiddled with the radio and we silently listened to classical music as he drove to his home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. After a short ride, we passed by the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the church that had given its name to the posh quarter.
“Do you know that this is one of the oldest churches in Paris?” he asked. “It was built at the outskirts of medieval Paris, and it was the burial place of the Merovingian kings. At that time, the Left Bank of Paris was prone to flooding from the Seine, so the Abbey was built in the middle of meadows, or prés in French, therefore its name.”
“Really?” I said indifferently. A sight-seeing tour in Paris was the last thing I was interested in right now. But he wanted to lighten the atmosphere, I got it.
He drove around it until he reached an underground garage and parked. An inner elevator brought us to an inner entrance. He opened the door and we got inside a luxurious hall of an Art Deco two-story building, decorated with gold and pink marble. It smelled of fresh-cut roses and jasmine.
“Wow!” I exclaimed after a quick look around the full-of-antiques hall.
I followed him in a spacey living room, decorated in a more modern style, in contrast to the hall which resembled an antiquar
y. Across a wall of windows, there was an exposed brick wall, in front of which there were a red couch, a huge flat-screen television and a bar trolley placed in the middle of the room. After we passed a marble staircase, we reached a modern brick-and-stone kitchen.
Once there, Alexander took a couple of bowls with creamy crayfish soup, a Tupperware of green salad and a bottle of red wine from the refrigerator. After he placed the bowls with the soup in the microwave, he opened the bottle of wine.
“I did not expect we would have lunch.” I felt awkward.
“I want you to feel comfortable because right now, the safer place on earth for you is in here.”
“Why do you believe that I’m in such danger? I do not feel that I am in trouble,” I scrunched up my face.
“You are in danger. Believe it,” he said cutting his food. “The man I killed last night was trying to kill you.”
“What!” My mouth dropped open. His mouth spread into a wide grin.
“Exactly,” he said calmly. “If I were not in the right place at the right moment, you would not be alive now.”
“But why? Why would he want me dead?” My hands were shaking so bad that I could not hold the spoon anymore, so I placed it back beside the table.
“Because he thought you had something that belonged to him,” he said. “They came for you once, they will come for you again. And I want to be sure that they will not hurt you. That is why we are going to come up with a plan and stick with it. All I want from you is to trust me. Will not you finish your food?”
“I do not feel hungry,” I said trying not to give away the state of shock I was in, although I was sure he already knew. There were so many questions I wanted to ask him that I did not even know where to begin.
“Do not try to read my thoughts. Not without my permission,” he scowled me.
“What? I ... I ... I do not ... How?”
“How do I know that you are a telepath? Because I am one, too. And I can block your way into my mind. So do not try to read my mind again.” He filled his glass with red wine.
Death toll and profiterole: A paranormal cozy mystery (Fangs and psychics mysteries Book 1) Page 3
