by Julie Hyzy
“Masterpieces,” Bucky finished. “And the second thing, if you don’t mind me jumping in here, Ollie, is that we simply don’t have the staff to pull this off. Dinner will be enough of a challenge without Cyan here. To maintain our standards and create a dessert—an endeavor we’re not accomplished in—would be asking for trouble.”
Margaret took a prim sip of her water. “Sounds to me as though somebody—or a couple of somebodies—have gotten too big for their britches.”
Bucky’s face turned as red as my apple. My hand shot out beneath the tabletop and I grabbed his arm, squeezing to keep him from exploding.
“I understand how this must look to you, Margaret,” I said, doing my best to ignore Bucky’s splutters of indignation. “As a person who has no knowledge of our industry, all this must sound like excuse-making, or professional high-handedness. All my assurances to the contrary won’t make a difference to you. So I won’t even try.” I’d let go of Bucky’s arm and now used my other hand to pat hers. “It’s a wise person who can expand her mind enough to appreciate another’s challenges, even when they differ from her own.”
It took her a half second to understand that I’d mocked her. In the heartbeat in between, I turned to Bucky. “You ready? The cleaning staff should be out of the kitchen by now.”
He was already on his feet, gathering up our leftovers. “On it, chief.”
“My, my. You admit you lack the talent necessary to prepare the full dinner.” Margaret’s lips pursed. “I’ll be certain to let Mr. Sargeant know about these shortcomings of yours.”
A deep, genuine burst of laughter blasted out of me, and I could tell she hadn’t expected that. To be honest, neither had I. “Don’t bother. Peter Everett Sargeant is the one person in this world who’s fully aware of all my shortcomings. Trust me, he keeps a list.”
She returned to her liver sausage sandwich.
Bucky and I had our arms full. “Let’s go,” I said.
We were back upstairs in the Center Hall when Bucky glanced over his shoulder to make sure we wouldn’t be overheard. “Good for you, boss. Where does she get off telling us our jobs? I’d give her one day—no, one hour—in the kitchen. She’d be reduced to a useless puddle of whining goo in no time.”
My hands were too full to do more than wave my fingers, dismissing him. “I probably should have kept my mouth shut.”
“I disagree. It wasn’t like you were rude. You were almost polite in pointing out what a fool she was to make judgment calls on topics she doesn’t understand.”
I wasn’t regretting standing up for myself and Bucky, but the realization that I’d caused Margaret to go on the defensive bothered me more than I cared to admit. “My goal wasn’t to belittle her; it was to open her eyes.”
He stopped in the middle of the hall. “Why do you care, Ollie?” He shifted his weight. “She was clearly intent on belittling you. Which is something Sargeant did for years until you turned him to the dark side.” A corner of Bucky’s mouth quirked up. “Or, I suppose in this case, we’d call it the light side.”
I stopped walking, too. “I suppose that, somewhere deep inside me, I realize that I don’t want to be part of the negativity in this world. There’s too much of that. Why demean someone when perhaps the only reason they’re attacking is because they don’t understand? Why not use that moment to teach, to help open their eyes?”
“You tried,” he said. “She took it wrong.”
I shook my head. “No, this was my fault. My tone was condescending and that little pat on her hand didn’t help.” I was angry with myself for stooping to that level. Starting for the kitchen once again, I said, “Next time I’ll try harder.”
He followed me. “Ollie, you try harder than anyone else I know.”
The cleaning crew was dispersing as we arrived.
“Looks wonderful,” I said to them. “Thank you.”
The team leader walked me through the steps they’d taken and, once I was satisfied, they left.
“Hey,” Bucky said. “We never got the chance to talk about Cyan because Margaret showed up while you were moving the chocolate.”
I plunked my stuff down on the glistening countertop and shot Bucky a furious look. “Yeah, about that,” I said.
“Uh-oh.”
“It’s gone. Completely disappeared from the top shelf, where I’d left it.”
“Maybe someone moved it?”
“First of all, nobody uses that refrigeration unit but the kitchen staff.” I shook my head. “Still, I thought the same thing—maybe it had been moved. That’s why it took so long for me to get back downstairs. I started looking for it. I looked under things. I looked behind things. Nowhere.”
“You think someone took it? Deliberately?”
I held my hands up. “I hadn’t remembered to retrieve the chocolate until after we’d asked the cleaning crew to come in. It occurred to me that—unlikely though it might be—one of the team members may have thought it was garbage and tossed it.”
“They know better than to do that.”
“I know, but I asked them anyway. To double-check.”
“And?”
“I talked with all four of the crew,” I said. “No one threw anything from refrigeration away. No one even remembers seeing the demitasse cup.”
“So . . .” he began, “either one of the cleaning crew is lying, a staffer from another department snuck in and took it, or . . .” He let the thought hang.
I nodded. “Or one of our Saardiscan friends has something to hide.”
CHAPTER 20
Mrs. Wentworth met me in the hall as I made my way to my apartment that evening. “They say you were right there when that Saardiscan chef died today, Ollie.”
Mrs. Wentworth was an Internet junkie. Times like these I longed for the good old days, when news came out only twice a day: once in the morning paper and again during the evening broadcast. “That’s true,” I said with a sigh.
“You are always in the middle of things, young lady. How do you manage it?”
Her white hair was perfectly coiffed, as always. She wore sparkling earrings in both of her saggy lobes, and her arms were folded expectantly in front of her navy cardigan vest.
“I can’t seem to not manage it,” I said. “It’s hardly an answer, but it’s the truth. How are things with you and Stanley?”
The vertical lines around her lips deepened. “He’s been having problems lately.” She leaned forward, peering at me over her rhinestone glasses and lowering her voice to a whisper. “It burns when he . . . well, you know . . . passes water. And he has to do that about four times a night.” Raising her voice as though on stage, she spoke loud enough to be heard deep into their apartment. “Won’t go to see the doctor, stubborn man that he is.” Returning to a whisper, she added, “I think he’s afraid of hearing the worst. And heaven help me, I’m not ready to lose another husband.”
“I’m sorry to hear that he isn’t feeling well. It’s important to get things like that checked out.”
“It is important to get things checked out, Ollie,” she said, again in a second-balcony voice. “You’re so right about that. Take precautions so that things don’t get worse. So that we don’t get to a point of no return where we’re wringing our hands and wishing we’d acted sooner. You’re so right, Ollie.”
“Take care of him,” I whispered back to her.
“I plan on it.” She patted her puffy-cloud hair, and dismissed me with a wave. “Have a good night.”
Delectable scents enveloped me as I stepped into our apartment. “Honey, I’m home,” I called, dropping my keys into the bowl by the front door and peeling off my fall coat.
Gav came around the corner. He was wearing a striped apron and he carried a wooden spoon. Leaning down he gave me a kiss on the lips. “Got home early, hope you don’t mind that I started dinner.”
“Mind?” I kicked off my shoes and followed him into the kitchen, marveling at how wonderful food always smelled when it w
as being cooked with love. “What’s on the menu?”
“Nothing fancy,” he said. “A little steak, a little salad, baked potatoes . . .”
As we enjoyed the meal, I brought Gav up to speed. He’d been briefed as to all that had happened and asked me, almost word for word, the same question Mrs. Wentworth had. “You were there, then?” he repeated. “When he died?”
“Right next to him. The thing is, Hector was afflicted, too, moments before Kilian collapsed.”
“You find that suspicious?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m asking you to talk it out aloud.”
“Yes, I find it very suspicious,” I said. “And yet, Hector couldn’t very well have caused his lips to go so white, nor his cheeks to go so pale. That sort of autonomic response is beyond his control. His insistence that it was all due to taking an additional dosage of medication is a valid reason, but it’s too neat. Too pat. Too similar to Marcel’s situation.”
“Okay,” Gav said. “Let’s say that it was an excuse. That he made that up. Why?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been trying to come up with a plausible reason and the only thing that makes sense is that he’s afraid.”
“To admit he might be ill?”
“Exactly. Hector seemed desperate to downplay his light-headedness. But what if he is really sick? What if there is something amiss?”
“What could it be?” Gav asked.
I raised my hands into the air. “That’s the thing: I have no idea. There could be a substance or ingredient that we’re all coming in contact with that’s knocking us out one by one. It could very well be that Tibor and Nate have both had similar incidents but that they’ve been able to hide them from me.”
“Are they ever out from under your supervision?”
I shrugged. “Occasionally. With four of them—well, three now—and two of us, we can’t hover over their shoulders constantly. They aren’t allowed onto the first floor without an escort, but they have the run of the kitchen and portions of the ground floor. No one accompanies them when they go to the washroom, or retrieve something from storage, or move between us and the pastry kitchen.”
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe both of the other men have fought off some illness and you’ve missed the signs. But then why haven’t you or Bucky been afflicted?”
“Good question.” I thought about it. “Could someone have a grudge against our Saardiscan guests?”
I could tell the thought jolted him. “Are you suggesting that someone inside the White House might be behind these incidents?”
“Why would it have to be someone on the inside? The men go back to their hotel every night. They have the run of Washington, D.C., and they don’t have a security detachment that I know of.”
Gav stroked his stubbly chin. “How do you account for Marcel’s incapacitation then?”
“I can’t,” I said. “If he accidentally ingested something meant for one of our visitors, he did it while on duty at the White House.”
“I hate to say it, but that means that we may have to look at the possibility of it being one of our own.”
I didn’t like this line of reasoning. “Someone in the White House?”
“Or at least someone who visits there regularly.”
“Aren’t American leaders supposed to be above this kind of thing?”
Gav nodded. “Supposed to be, yes.”
We were both silent a few moments. Neither of us ate.
“Poisoning, if that’s what’s going on here,” he said, “is the sort of crime one can commit without requiring the perpetrator to be present when the victim is stricken.”
“What are you getting at?”
He held up a finger. “First of all, keep in mind that we don’t know that anyone was poisoned. What I’m about to suggest is purely speculation on my part.”
“Got it,” I said. “Go on.”
“The Saardiscan government has made a lot of enemies over the years. It’s possible that there are people—American, homegrown terrorists—who will act against the Saardiscans, and do their utmost to see that their trip is cut short.”
“I don’t like that,” I said.
“It’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
I knew that. I also knew that, despite the fact that it made me seem naïve, I wanted to believe that no true-hearted American would stoop to such measures. To target visitors who couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be held responsible for the actions of their government, visitors who may have even disagreed with their powerful regime, was simply wrong.
“What you’re saying, then,” I began, slowly, “is that the person who poisoned Marcel, Kilian, and Hector could be anyone. Could be one of the laundry ladies. Could be one of our Secret Service agents.”
“Ollie,” he said, and there was a warning in his voice, “we can’t even begin to think along these lines until we find out how Kilian died.”
“And it still doesn’t explain Marcel.”
He made a so-so motion with his head. “Unless, as you said, Marcel ingested something by accident—something that was intended for one of the Saardiscans.” He tapped the side of his fork against the table, staring at it as he did so. “It bothers me that the chocolate is gone. Another mystery. I admit that at first I doubted Marcel’s theory, but after today, I’m not so sure.” The two vertical lines between his brows deepened, and he looked up at me. “Having that chocolate tested might have helped us out. Now, we have nothing.”
“I don’t like it,” I said again. “Not one bit.”
“I’ll talk with Tom about it in the morning. Let’s see if there’s any light he can shed on the subject.” Gav reached across the table. “I know you’re smart, and alert. But I also know that you have a tendency to be in the middle of things. Promise me you’ll be on guard every minute.”
I squeezed his hand. “I promise.”
“One more thing,” he said as he dug back into dinner. “I’m part of the team heading up security for Kerry Freiberg’s visit.”
Gav hadn’t received any field assignments since he’d been hurt.
“And?”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s a step forward,” he said. “I won’t be the agent in charge this time, though. They prefer to ease me back into action via a subordinate role.”
“Will that be tough for you? I mean, you’re usually the one issuing orders.”
“Hardly the sort of assignment I’m accustomed to,” he said, “but it’s an important evening, and I’m happy they’re giving me the chance to remind them of what I can do. Baby steps, I guess. You know how conservative the department can be.”
“Have you worked events at Blair House in the past?”
“Couple of times,” he said. “You?”
“I’ve toured the kitchen—part of my orientation when I took over as executive chef—but no, I’ve never prepared a meal there.”
We both fell silent again and I knew that he was reluctant to bring up the subject that hung like a weight between us. I took another bite of my steak, sipped my water, and took a breath.
“I know this is hard for you,” I said.
“Not being the agent in charge, you mean?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Erma and Bill’s decision about the winery.”
He put his fork down, rested his elbows on the table, and brought his interlaced fingers up, covering the lower half of his face. “I never expected such a thing,” he said.
“I know.”
“I can’t even imagine how hard this must be for you. We came into this marriage with certain understandings and now, after being together for less than six months, we’re discussing fundamental changes.”
I wanted to reach across and touch him, but he held his hands tight to his mouth.
“This is utterly unfair to you, Ollie.”
“You told me that these changes might not happen for years.”
He nodded. “Might not. Probably not.” Blinking, he loo
ked away. “What if Bill and Erma are really hoping for me to learn from them personally? To spend time with them? They want the winery to continue, sure, but I’m beginning to believe it’s more than that. What if they’re looking for me to take on a more meaningful role in their lives? The more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I’ve come to realize that if we continue down this path there will be expectations.”
“Like what?”
“To become the son they want me to be,” he said, simply. “If I’m to learn the business, they would want to teach me themselves. They’re going to want to show me how they do things, so that I’m fully prepared to take over, if that day ever comes.”
“I hadn’t thought about that. You’re right.”
I didn’t know what to say. He was clearly so distraught on his own that any of my concerns would only serve to make things worse for us both.
“What do you want, Gav?” I asked again, truly wanting to know. “This has come as a surprise to both of us, but I need to know if there’s a part of you that wants to walk away from the danger and constant pressure you face in your job.”
He studied the tabletop between us. “Truth is, I don’t mind the danger and the pressure. I like feeling as though I’m making a difference in the world.” He met my eyes. “I crave that.”
I nodded. “I feel the same way.”
“Erma and Bill have been there for me in ways my real parents never were.” He rubbed his eyes with both hands. “For the first time, they’re asking me to be there for them. How can I let them down?”
I reached across the table and waited until he placed one of his hands in mine. “You have been there for them,” I said, “and no matter what your decision, you can’t possibly let them down. They care about your happiness too much for them to want anything other than what’s right for you.”
“So if my happiness means that I’m likely to sell the winery, you think I should tell them that?”
“No,” I said. “I think the issue is too new, and our future too important, for us to make a snap decision. Erma and Bill are good people. Let’s take the time we need to think about all this.”
