by Ann Myers
“Overbaked them, did she?” Flori shook her head. “She’s not a natural cook, not like you. Even if you didn’t have your fancy cooking certificates, you’re a born chef, Rita.”
I basked in Flori’s praise and in the carefree meal that followed, which was happily interrupted every few minutes by trick-or-treaters, ranging from babies to teens taller than me. Celia and Flori joked with the little ones, pretending to be terrified by tiny pirates, ghosts, and witches. No one spoke directly of the dead.
By nine I was stuffed to the gills. Two helpings of tres leches cake hadn’t helped, but I couldn’t resist the soft white cake soaked in milk and cream. My eyelids sagged and I remembered my vow to be in bed by now.
Flori urged me to stay. “You shouldn’t be driving in your state,” she scolded.
I hadn’t had more than a tablespoon of Bernard’s homemade pear liquor, and as far as I could tell, Flori hadn’t spiked the cake. I could drive. Gabe, on the other hand, had drunk several glasses of beer and as many pear nightcaps. “We’re going to the same place,” I said, dangling my keys and confiscating his. “I’ll drive, Gabriel, if you keep a lookout for trick-or-treaters.”
He didn’t put up a fight. He sat in the front seat, leaning back contentedly. I drove like a little old lady should—as in, the opposite of Flori. I scanned the road for darting kids. I turned on my brights on dark stretches and barely pushed the speedometer over thirty the entire way.
“Thank you for the peaceful ride,” Gabriel said, gentlemanly, when we finally arrived.
“Bolt your doors,” I said, sounding like a worried mother and Linda.
“Wouldn’t want you terrorizing me in my sleep again, now would I,” he said with a slight smile. I smiled too. It was good to see him forget his sorrow for a moment.
I settled into bed after double-checking that all doors, windows, and curtains were battened down. My eyes were sagging over my bedtime reading when I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel driveway and approaching my porch. I froze, fighting back the irrational urge to hide under the covers.
The footsteps stopped at my door, as I dreaded they would. A trick-or-treater, I told myself. A big one, who doesn’t know what time it is. I didn’t believe that, especially when the pounding on the door shook the house. I reached for my phone, ready to call Bunny’s direct line. But what would I tell her? Someone was knocking at my door? I could imagine Manny’s scoffing if the visitor was a trick-or-treater looking for candy or directions.
I padded barefoot over the tile floors, grateful that the tile, although frigid, didn’t squeak like old wood. The antique door didn’t have a peephole. It did, however, have a little window the size of a postcard, covered by a tiny curtain. Through it, from the darkness of the living room, I could barely make out the shape illuminated under the motion detector light. It wasn’t Tops, unless he’d shrunk. It wasn’t some overenthusiastic trick-or-treater in a ghost costume either. I risked being spotted and flicked the curtain aside. Two eyes looked straight back at mine, separated only by glass. I yelped and jerked my head back. On the other side of the door, I heard another yelp.
“Rita, it’s me, Gabriel!”
I was so busy with apologies when I opened the door that I forgot I was wearing a flannel nightshirt with plaid moose all over it.
“I’m so sorry. You were in bed already,” Gabe said, after I ushered him in and shut the door against the cold, dark night. “I was reluctant to come over, but I had to check that you were okay.”
My heart sped up again. “Okay? Why? What’s wrong?”
He slumped onto one arm of my couch, his face sagging as much as his shoulders. “My house—someone came in and made a mess of my kitchen. Looks like it was that homeless guy. Probably has a key to Victor’s.” He shuffled his feet. “I should have changed all the locks, like you said.”
“We’ll call the police,” I assured him, shivering, and not from the cold.
I’m really tired of coming out here,” Manny griped.
I was tired of seeing him. More than that, I was tired of living in a crime scene. I had quickly put on jeans and hidden my nighttime moose attire under a long coat. Now I stood by Gabe’s French wonder stove, running a finger over its shiny blue enamel. The rest of the kitchen was not looking as sleek as the last time I saw it. Tomato sauce was spewed across the floor, just one of the casualties of the trashed fridge and pillaged pantry.
“Why make such a mess?” Gabe muttered.
Why indeed? Gabe might not have noticed a few missing items if Tops had simply sneaked in and taken a few nonperishables. I surveyed the mess. “What’s missing?” I asked Gabe.
“What, you’re looking to make a midnight snack, Rita?” Manny asked. “Want me to put an APB out for chocolate cake?”
I ignored him.
Bunny shot Manny a frown. “Ms. Lafitte asks a good question,” she said tersely. “Sir, please inspect your refrigerator and cupboards and tell if anything has been taken.” She gestured for an underling officer to come and take notes.
Gabe wearily obeyed. “Milk,” he said. “But it was almost out of date, since I haven’t wanted to shop. Who’d want old milk?” He continued listing, making his way through tuna fish and granola bars and canned chicken broth.
Through it all, Bunny nodded. “We may need the bloodhounds,” I overheard her telling Manny.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “A tuna robbery for some mangy stray cat can wait until morning. We have enough to worry about with Halloween. Anyway, I have a date.”
My eye had developed a thumping tick, surely a symptom of too much late-night exposure to Manny and stress and crime scenes. I needed some air. Slipping by a police photographer snapping shots of spilled rice, I wandered down the hallway to Gabe’s serene foyer of art. The Indian woman in the gilt frame seemed to gaze at the door to Victor’s wing. I imagined that she was guiding me, like a sign from one of Dalia’s readings. I was thinking about Dalia having her head in the stars when I noticed that the door was open a crack.
I mentally apologized to Dalia and thanked the Indian woman on the wall. This was definitely a sign, a path I should follow.
Making my way down the hallway, I steeled myself to enter the living room. I hadn’t been in this part of the house since Victor’s death. I expected the wave of sadness that struck me, yet I felt something else too, something good. Was it Victor’s comforting spirit? The lingering scent of spiced cookies?
Flipping on a small table lamp, I scanned the room, trying to determine if anything was missing. In a house so laden with artwork, I had little chance of spotting a missing ornament or saint. The only obvious gap was the glaringly clear spot where Victor’s life had ended. A cleaning crew had bleached and scrubbed, but the emptiness might as well have had a chalk body outline on it. I forced my eyes up to the altar. There were Victor’s dad, mom, great-uncle, and a bunch of people I didn’t recognize. The unlit candles made me sad. Would the spirits Victor cared for find their way here? Even if they did, there was no one to greet them.
I was staring at a mosaic of fading color snapshots encircled by skulls when a finger tapped me on the shoulder. I imagined a skeleton beckoning or Tops about to grab my neck and drag me off. My knees buckled and I let out a scream to wake the dead.
Chapter 28
Shhhh . . .” My presumed attacker wore a red-hooded coat and smelled of freshly baked pan de muerto. “With all that yelling, you’ll summon the spirits and the police, Rita.”
“Flori!” I thumped my hand on my pounding heart. She didn’t take the hint that she’d terrorized me. Her eyes were squinting at Victor’s altar.
“Mmm . . .” she said, sounding grumpy. “Too bad his recipe box isn’t here. Let’s go search the kitchen.”
I managed to grab her Little Red Riding Hood hood before she made it past the kitchen threshold.
“Hold on. How did you get in here?”
She turned to grin at me. “Through the front door, of course. I saw that the police were occupied in the kitchen, so I guessed you were over here. Now let’s get a move on. We won’t have a chance to look around if your ex, Detective Spoiled Sport, gets wind of us.”
“Bill Hoffman’s out of the hospital, I take it?”
“Right as rain and back at his police scanner. I called that Indian restaurant and told them to reroute any of his chicken korma orders straight to me. That oughta keep him safe for a little while, and I do love korma.”
I followed Flori toward the kitchen. “And how did you get the Indian place to agree to that?”
“Free meal at the café anytime they foil him. The code word is Bombay Bill.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said, rolling my eyes, a gesture that Flori also missed. She was pulling on knitted gloves and talking about finding Victor’s will and recipe collection. While she peeked in drawers, I scanned the room, my nerves overriding my helpfulness. The police would soon check on Victor’s place. I imagined Manny bursting in, gun drawn. Or Bunny’s disapproving scowl. Worse yet, what would Gabriel think about us, snooping in his brother’s sacred kitchen?
“Hurry,” I urged Flori, now regretting that I’d started this snoop. To calm myself, I studied Victor’s colorful tile countertop and admired his paintings of San Pasqual. In Victor’s renderings, the kitchen saint wore the brown robes of a monk and sported a monk’s haircut, bald on top with a bowl-shaped cut below. His peaceful, benevolent expression reminded me of Victor. So did the pies, cookies, and strings of red chiles the saint stood beside.
“Woo hoo!” Flori followed this whoop with the announcement that she’d found the recipe box. She hefted a tin the size of a loaf of bread down from an open shelf crowded with carved saints. “Aha!” she exclaimed, lifting the lid. “I see several bizcochito recipes here. Ooo, and his nana’s peach pie. She won a contest in Pie Town with that one.”
She had the box on the kitchen table and was leafing through the recipes, some on yellowed recipe cards, others written out in Victor’s scrawled script on folded sheets of drawing paper.
Snooping in Victor’s house had already felt wrong. Pawing through his secret recipes seemed way too personal, worse than rifling through his underwear drawer or medicine cabinet. I reached for the box and gently closed the punched-tin lid. “We should look at the recipes later,” I said, keeping my hand on the lid. “After we get permission from Gabe.”
Flori made a huffy sound.
I held firm, both to the lid and my principles. “These are Victor’s secrets, Flori.”
She didn’t look convinced until I added, “And we have to get going before the police notice we’re in here.”
Flori tore her eyes from the box. “Fine. Then I have a surprise for you. Turn around and don’t look until I tell you.”
I wasn’t in the mood for surprises but turned around anyway. The happier she was, I decided, the sooner we could leave.
“Bingo!” she cried and told me I could turn back.
I twisted around to see her half engulfed by the fireplace. My cries of alarm brought happy, echoing laughing from the chimney.
“Don’t worry,” she said, scooting out. “It’s not that dirty. Victor never used this chimney. There are swallows’ nests up at the top and he told me that he couldn’t bear to disrupt them.” Her cheeks were rosy and her nose sported a black smudge, like a Christmas elf burglar.
“Why the ‘bingo’?” I asked.
She opened a grimy hand to reveal an old-fashioned key. “Now we look for what this opens.”
I wondered aloud how she’d known to search a chimney. Maybe she really did have a sixth sense. Who sticks their head up a birdy, sooty chimney and comes out with a secret key?
The answer wasn’t quite so impressive. “Victor told me,” she explained as we hurried around the house, trying the key in any trunk, door, or desk with a keyhole. “Well, he didn’t actually tell me, but it was easy enough to guess. See, I was telling him that I keep my safe deposit key frozen in a tamale, and—”
The absurdity of this was enough for me to momentarily forget my nerves. “Wait. You have a key frozen in a tamale? What if someone eats it?” I added a Lindalike worry for emphasis: “Bernard could choke.”
She tapped her forehead in a good thinking kind of way. “That’s why I label the tamale ‘Ida Green’s vegan.’ No one in their right mind would eat it, see? Not even Bernard.”
Ida Green ran a notoriously awful restaurant and bail bonds business out by the police station. Only the desperate would eat her cooking or pay her bond fees. As far as I knew, she’d never embraced the vegan trend, as meat was said to be her only saving culinary grace.
Flori continued with her story. “And that’s when Victor told me that he keeps his secret key where only St. Nick would find it. See? Too easy.”
We checked a china cabinet and writing desk before finding the key’s proper place.
Flori slid it into the keyhole of an old metal-framed steamer chest and twisted the lock open. “Prepare yourself for the truth,” she said dramatically.
I couldn’t help it. I held my breath as she opened the lid. The result was kind of a letdown, not as bad as Al Capone’s empty vault, but not an instant revelation either.
Flori removed a patchwork quilt and some lace doilies.
“This is good,” she said, stubborn in her conviction that we were on to something. “Look, here, paperwork. See what’s in this folder while I keep digging.”
She handed me an accordion folder marked Important Papers. This was the kind of filing system I used, namely throw everything in a folder and hide it away. I dug out insurance policies for the house and for Victor himself. “Life insurance,” I reported. “But it’s an old term-life policy.”
“Who’s the beneficiary?” she asked from neck deep in the trunk.
My heart sank when I found the right page. “Jay-Jay.” Hopefully, the policy had expired. I kept looking and in the very last accordion fold found a manila envelope marked Will.
I told Flori, and she watched as I opened the envelope with trembling hands. As soon as I saw the typewritten words, I knew what they would say.
Flori took the paper from me and sighed. “Jay-Jay. Don’t worry, Rita. We’ll find the right one. These look like his old files anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said, not feeling consoled. I stuffed the folder back in the trunk and leaned against the wall. It was then that I registered the squawk of a police radio, a sound that seemed to be coming closer.
“Flori,” I whispered. “Did you hear that radio? We have to put this stuff back. If Manny finds us snooping in here . . .”
Flori was sitting on the floor holding a shoe box of old snapshots on her lap. “Just a minute more,” she said, flipping through photos. She held up one. “These bring back memories. Look, this is the boys and Linda and their gang of friends.” She smiled. “Inner tubing on the Pecos, picnicking on Mount Baldy.”
My fear of discovery was reaching panic levels when she grunted in disgust and snapped the shoe box closed.
“You’re right, Rita. Let’s get out of here.” She held out a hand and I helped her up, noting the limp in her knee as she tottered down the hall.
Manny’s voice boomed across the house. “Police! Who’s in here? Identify yourself!”
“Quick, to the kitchen,” Flori said, glancing back at me. “We’ll tell him that we came in to look for recipes.”
This was partially the truth, and a good idea too. Manny would write off recipe snooping as typical behavior by Flori and me. I told Flori that I’d be right behind her. I would be too, but not before I peeked in the shoe box. The color photos had faded to chartreuse and yellows, but I easily recognized a young Linda, standing by a river with a boy. He looked som
ewhat familiar. Had I seen his photo elsewhere? His arm was around her waist and they were both smiling. Linda and David, ’68, read Victor’s slanted scrawl on the back of the photo. No wonder Flori had been upset. That smiling, redheaded boy would soon break Linda’s heart. I shut him back in the shoe box, closed the trunk, and ran to join Flori.
“Freeze!” Manny bellowed. His supercop aspirations were ruined by Flori throwing up her arms and releasing a shower of recipes onto his shoes. To her chest, she clasped the tin box. Manny hopped back, cursing.
“Stop yelling,” she chided him, as if he was a misbehaving child. “Look what you made me do.”
Bunny and a policeman barely older than Celia jammed through the doorway, with Bunny demanding to know what was going on.
“Your partner nearly scared me into a heart attack, that’s what’s going on,” Flori said in her most indignant voice. “No respect for the elderly.”
“I have no respect for snooping old women,” Manny sputtered.
“Don’t call me old!” Flori waved her finger at him. “Rita and I have half a mind to call her hot lawyer and have you cited for harassment.”
Manny’s face was turning the color of San Pasqual’s wreath of chile peppers.
Turning to Bunny, I told her, truthfully, that we’d been drawn into the kitchen out of sentiment and nostalgia. I neglected to mention the sleuthing.
Bunny shook her head as if extremely disappointed. “Please leave this to us,” she said. “Please. We have enough trouble already.”
“Absolutely,” Flori said agreeably. “We’ll leave as soon as we clean up this mess your partner caused.” She pointed to the recipes. Manny stalked off, followed by the patrolman and Bunny, who instructed us to turn off the lights and leave the door as we’d found it.
When they were gone, Flori gave me a sly look. “We’re lucky they left. Now we can take these. I can stuff the box under my coat.”
I helped her pick up cards and shove them back into the overflowing recipe tin. Despite myself, I glanced at some. Recipes for sour-cream apple pie, red-pork tamales, Miguel’s secret mole, and Navajo lamb stew tempted my resolve, until my midwestern rule-following guilt kicked in.
