Spooning Leads to Forking (Hot in the Kitchen Book 2)

by Kilby Blades

  “Sorry you’re late?” Delilah didn’t spare a glance from the bunch of basil she was slicing—wise, given the sharpness of her santoku knife. “Says the woman who’s been working four days a week, three hours a day and still refuses to be paid a penny?”

  Shea put down her bag in its usual spot, doubly embarrassed by Delilah’s acknowledgment of how much time she’d put in. Shea was retrospectively unsurprised the side-gig designed to serve as a respite from crushing loneliness had become a lifeline she depended on. She needed a friendly face, especially after last night.

  “What are we on?” Shea wondered aloud, honestly having lost track. The day before felt like eons ago.

  “We were gonna brainstorm more salads.”

  Delilah didn’t need to motion to what was on her cutting board, nor did she need to rehash how the two women had revamped the Caprese. It was another one that came down to the ingredients that were used. Though the order specs had been all wrong, Silvio had impressive access to nationwide inventory. Already, the menu was transformed.

  “I’d go for a buttermilk fried chicken salad,” Shea kicked in easily, dipping into her bag for her laptop and getting ready to take her usual seat. She hadn’t stopped to make herself breakfast or even coffee and she was eager to have a bite of her bun.

  “Fried chicken is easy enough to make on short order, and bound to be a crowd pleaser. People will feel good about ordering a salad, but the salt and crunch of the chicken will make it feel like a treat.”

  Shea thought twice about sitting down, and instead walked toward the other side of the kitchen to the small fridge below a prep counter that they used for the desserts. She reached into the fridge, pulled out a carton of whole milk and poured herself a glass to have with her morning bun.

  “I cannot fry chicken,” Delilah said with emphasis. She’d lifted up her cutting board and was using the back of her knife to scrape piles of ribboned basil onto a paper towel.

  “Anyone can fry chicken,” Shea protested. “It’s seriously not a big deal, especially if you’re frying off the bone. I’m telling you—I’ve done it a thousand times.”

  Delilah’s hands stopped moving and her eyes went a little wide at the same moment Shea raised the glass to her lips.

  “That’s the first time you’ve admitted you know how to cook.”

  Shea’s glass stopped mid-sip when she realized what she’d said. It was one of her half-truths. Delilah went back to her basil.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” Delilah was quick to say. “Whatever you want to call what you know is totally saving our bacon. It’s just … I’ve always found that “no cooking” story a little hard to believe.”

  Shea couldn’t be mad at Delilah for her directness. The big, pink elephant was in the room. It had been more and more present every day in the two weeks that she’d been working at The Spoon.

  “I never said I can’t cook—I only said I don’t. Once upon a time, cooking was something I was forced to do.”

  “Your parents’ restaurant?” Delilah recalled.

  “My dad’s restaurant, really,” Shea finally revealed. “A southern food place outside of Chicago.”

  Delilah stopped again, this time to throw Shea a little smile. “Which explains why you know how to fry chicken.”

  Shea coaxed the sticker on the pastry box to open.

  “He grew up in South Carolina working in the kitchen his mother ran out of her house. Officially, it didn’t exist.”

  “And unofficially?” Delilah asked in the patient voice of somebody who was curious to hear the story.

  “Unofficially, she made more money under the table running a restaurant out of her back door than my grandfather made at his day job of twenty years.”

  Shea picked up a bun, suddenly less hungry than she had been a minute before. She hadn’t talked about her father’s restaurants—all the Lola’s Kitchens—in ten years. Between Tasha and Delilah these past weeks, she’d mentioned it twice. Her promise to Tasha about approaching her father for testimony had borne no fruit. Every time she’d come close to calling, she’d chickened out.

  “She fried catfish and chicken, served shrimp and grits, baked corn bread and rolls…she even had a barbecue pit. And her pound cake … it was legendary. The way she ran it wasn’t legal, but people looked the other way.”

  There was no way for Shea to tell the story without remembering the scores of times her own father had told it—with some mixture of anguish and pride.

  “Why didn’t she ever open a sit-down place? You know—make it official?” Delilah asked.

  This was the part of the story that had always made her father’s face turn dark. “It was the fifties in the deep south. No bank was gonna give a business loan to a black woman.”

  “So your father grows up and opens the restaurant your grandmother never could.”

  “Actually…” Shea hated this part. “He helped her start over in a new place after she got run out of town.”

  By then, Delilah had stopped cooking altogether, and she listened with rapt attention to the tale. Her jaw slacked a little at that last bit.

  “Suspicious fire,” Shea explained. “There were other things—smaller things and even a few direct threats. They came through when her kitchen started doing too well.”

  “Shit…” Delilah breathed.

  Shea took a bite of her morning bun a second after responding, “Yeah.”

  Shea chewed thoughtfully for a long minute. Delilah joined her in eating a bun.

  “So your dad shoved the family business down your throat.”

  Shea nodded. “Other kids hung out with their friends after school. I went straight from school to work and I stayed there until we closed. My homework didn’t get done until all the guests were gone—until the floors were being mopped and the kitchens were being cleaned. The weekends were even worse. There were times I had to wait tables and serve kids I went to school with, including boys I liked. It was awesome.”

  “So you got the hell out of there as fast as you could and swore off cooking forever!” Delilah raised the uneaten portion of her bun with a flourish. It lightened the mood with a dramatic flair that made Shea glad.

  “Yup. Moved to New York the day I turned eighteen. Got as far away as I could from that life and that town. Twelve years later, here I am.”

  Delilah went back to cooking but gave a sad little smirk. “Your reasons for leaving are better than mine. I left Sapling for a guy who promised me the sun, the moon and the stars.”

  “Uh-oh,” Shea grimaced. “He sounds like trouble.”

  “Him cheating on me in high school when I had mono for six weeks might have been a clue. But I was in love with the guy. He was a singer in a rock band and I was young and naïve.”

  “When did you figure out it wasn’t gonna work?”

  “Honestly? Pretty soon. I saw how flimsy his plan was the first month we got to L.A. Us just scraping by created problems of its own. The only thing that made it tenable was me loving California and hanging out with these cool roommates we had. But actually leaving him? That took a year.” Delilah rolled her sleeve and motioned to the badass design on her arm. “He’s the reason why I got this tattoo.”

  “It could’ve been worse,” Shea pointed out. “You could’ve married the guy. And instead of leaving after one year, you could’ve waited twelve.”

  Delilah’s jaw slacked a little as she righted her sleeve. Shea just gave a little shrug. In the name of girl talk, it had felt safe in that moment to give it away. Plus, the night before had been so bad it was harder than normal to bear the isolation.

  “Even the bad relationships have their purpose,” Delilah mused. “I never would’ve gone to culinary school if I hadn’t followed him to California. Some of my best years so far were the ones I spent living up north—it was nice, living close to Dev. And I gained perspective, too. Turns out, I missed this place.”

  “Well, you built something special,” Shea murmured, envying Delila
h more than a little bit. “Everything you bake is pure happiness.”

  “I have a lot more time for my real job, thanks to you.”

  “So where is this rock star now?” Shea wanted to know. “Let me guess—playing open mic night at the old folks’ home?”

  Delilah broke into a hearty chuckle. “Actually, he’s the lead singer for Selfish Bliss.”

  Shea blinked and shook her head as if she’d heard wrong. “For real? Adam Jinn is your ex-boyfriend?”

  “Two years ago, he wrote a song about me. Unoriginally, it’s called ‘Delilah.’”

  But if Shea wasn’t mistaken, the look on Delilah’s face was slightly pleased.

  “Word of advice…” Delilah threw Shea a look. “Never mention Adam in front of Dev. He’s still mad about a few things.”

  16

  The Bureaucracy of Things

  Dev

  “They want back in.”

  Brody’s phone talk was efficient, though it had taken Dev weeks to decode. The man skipped information. He also had a flair for drama and never used a paragraph to say something if he thought a sentence would do.

  “The insurance adjusters?” Dev clarified.

  “Affirmative,” Brody said. “They need more time at the scene.”

  It was code for them needing more time to find loopholes in their obligation to pay the claim on Number Eight. Dev had a low opinion of insurance companies in general. But even he had to admit—it was right for them all to be suspicious as hell.

  “When do they want to come out?”

  Dev threw his pen down on the counter and ran his fingers through his hair. All week, he’d managed his time so he could leave The Freshery early today and head out on a hike before he had to be back down the mountain for Silvio’s delivery to The Big Spoon. And tomorrow was out, supposing the forecast was right in predicting a 90% chance of afternoon rain.

  “Today,” Brody confirmed. “I think it’s best you handle this one. Packard’s boys are down there, too. Last time things got a little hot.”

  “Shit,” Dev waited until Brody hung up to curse the ruination of his plans. Dev needed this hike to clear his head. He was starting to suspect what happened at the mills was an inside job. He still hadn’t been able to get a call back from Packard’s business offices from anyone willing to hear his proposal, and he was still pissed off about his conversation with Delilah about Shea.

  As Dev wended his way through town, his thoughts remained on the latter. Word had gotten around that she was behind all the good changes at The Big Spoon. Locals rarely invested much time in getting to know newcomers who no one expected to stay. Shea wasn’t the first New Yorker to come off-season to live in one of the mansions on Elk Mountain. But she was certainly the first one to take a job on Oliver Street and entrench herself in the life of the town.

  Everyone who was getting to know Shea was also getting to like her, which should have made Dev happy. He didn’t like to think of her all alone. Only, her working at The Big Spoon meant he saw her less. He didn’t like being under the watchful eye of his sister whenever he saw her there, either. And for some reason, she’d all but stopped her morning drop-ins at the store.

  If he had any time for it, he might like to show up for happy hour one day at The Big Spoon—he’d heard Shea was there at least twice a week. He could ignore Delilah’s attitude and heckle Shea by filling up on his Pinot Noir. Either that or impress her—he’d been studying up on how to pair wine. The other day, she’d texted him out of the blue and he’d hoped she’d done it to be playful. Turned out, she’d only wanted to know whether he considered the wine list fair game for fixing.

  All thoughts of Shea were pushed out of his mind when he pulled up to park in front of the lobby. He’d called Cliff with a head’s up when he was five minutes out. The man waited out front, arms crossed and scowling with a red face Dev could only guess wasn’t from too much sun.

  “Hey, Cliff,” Dev greeted, knowing already what had him in a twist.

  “If I fly off the handle and kick someone’s ass, I plead temporary insanity.” As Cliff badged both of them into the building, he continued to grumble. “You can be my character witness. Vouch for the fact I’m usually an okay guy. This shit makes me unstable.”

  Dev surmised the adjustors had beaten him to the mill. Insurance inspections always started at headquarters—the site of the first mill that Packard had built, also known as Number One. The building that had singularly housed all mill operations and Don Packard’s original office—notably outdated, compared to the others—still stood.

  Full-scale business offices to support all of the plants were built later, on the same parcel. Cliff’s team sat in the newer building. But Cliff held on to some nostalgia for the original, for the big, old second floor office, its wide windows and the view it had over the plant floor.

  “You and me both,” Dev murmured under his breath as they walked a labyrinthine route through the plant.

  “I can’t keep answering their same set of questions for the fifth fuckin’ time. I’m another plant down. I’ve got orders to fill. Now, on top of the insurance guys, I’ve got Don Packard Jr. sniffing around and wasting my damn time.”

  They’d just reached the bottom of the staircase that would take them to Cliff’s office, but his comment about Don Jr. made Dev stop.

  “Sniffing around, like, how?”

  Cliff looked even more annoyed than he had a second before. “Like, asking me to pull land deed records for every site—all the topographical maps and the construction records with all the utility lines, and a whole bunch of other shit he doesn’t need. We keep that stuff in offsite storage. Took me half a day to drive to Evergreen and pull records on Number Eight. Now I gotta go all the way back there again.”

  “Why does he want to see so much?”

  “He’s not the kind of man who gives explanations. He’s the kind of man who gives orders. And I’ve had just about enough of those out of him, too.”

  Cliff’s scowl grew darker and he quieted his voice, all the better to whisper shout his tirade.

  “He spends how many years ignoring these mills? Ignoring what we need, forcing us to fend for ourselves and take all their corporate shit, and now he shows up just to boss people around?”

  “Why do you think he’s doing it?”

  Cliff looked at Dev like he was crazy. “Why do rich people do anything? Because they can.”

  Cliff started climbing the steps again, still on his tear about people who were wasting his time.

  “And these bean-counters…” Cliff groused, sounding like he wanted to substitute the word “bean-counters” with “assholes,” which spoke volumes about the insurance adjusters they were about to meet. “They’re interrogating me like I’m a goddamned criminal rather than the one trying to save this place.

  “I’m sorry to pull you out of whatever you were doing to deal with this. I know Brody would’ve given it to ‘em, and good. I just thought they might finally put an end to this if the one applying pressure was you.”

  Just as they came within earshot of the people behind Cliff’s office door, Dev nodded, motivated to help. Nothing in Sapling ran smoothly when Cliff was pissed off.

  “Gentlemen,” Dev greeted as he walked through the door. He’d suited up, so as to look official. He never did for everyday town business, but he found it helped for these sorts of things. It involved wearing his uniform shirt and his badge, clipping on his service belt, and holstering his weapon. This was Colorado and he was the sheriff. People got nervous when you didn’t do at least that.

  “Sheriff Kingston,” one of the insurance guys Dev had met before stood.

  Wanting to maintain an air of gravitas, Dev nodded and kept quiet as he shook the man’s hand. Dev could tell the man respected the law.

  “I understand you’ll be needing more access to the site?”

  “Specimen collection,” the man explained. “We like to be able to take some of the forensic evidence to our ow
n lab. We trust your process, of course. But our timeline might be a little different than yours.”

  “Not just that,” a second one, who had a shiny, new look about him chimed in. It was clear he was the most junior person on the team. “If we want to get samples, today’s the day. Tomorrow, it’s forecast to rain.”

  “Look,” Dev started in. “I understand you’re doing your jobs. And I want you to get what you need. But this is a small town and you’re asking for a lot of resources. He’s got a job.” Dev tipped his head toward Cliff before continuing. “I have a job, too. How can we support you to make sure you get everything you need, today?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dev was back in his truck leading a caravan of cars to Number Eight. Ten minutes after that, he stood by the locked gates next to Cliff as he let them all in. Ninety minutes after that, Dev was sitting next to Cliff in the back of his truck, having the inside of his cheek swabbed. The younger adjuster had taken an insane number of samples, and they finally seemed ready to wrap it up.

  “Can I make one more request?” the adjuster asked as he screwed the swab he had taken firmly into a plastic tube, then pulled a sticker with a bar code on it off of contact paper before wrapping it around.

  “Anything,” Dev deadpanned, trying and certainly failing not to sound sarcastic. He still couldn’t believe he’d had to trade hiking for this.

  “Can you have your lab send over the samples you collected from the Packard executives? We need them for our rule-out DNA. They’ve been a bit difficult to get hold of directly, for the investigation.”

  “I thought you said the investigation for Eight was closed.” Now, he had Dev’s attention.

  “Oh, it is. This is for Number Five. I saw them on the property last Thursday. I was on the outside of the secure area, inspecting the perimeter. And it wasn’t just the three. There was one more guy.”

  “And they were unescorted?” Dev wanted to know, throwing a sidelong glance at Cliff.

  “I assumed they weren’t,” the man said. “But come to think of it, I didn’t see any police.”