Cook the Books

by Jessica

  “That building is condemned, young lady. Can’t you read? I ought to call the police.”

  “Sorry to bother you. We’re just . . .” I scowled at Josh and corrected myself. “I’m just leaving.”

  “Hey!” Norris snarled. “What’s that?” he said, pointing to Digger’s messenger bag. “Are you stealing now? Looting? Jesus Christ, that damned chef is causing as much trouble now that he’s dead as he did when he was alive. All I want is peace and quiet. No noise, no smells, no women, and no robbers! Get outta here!” Norris pulled his head back into his apartment and slammed the window shut.

  I started to walk quickly to my car but could hear Josh clamber down the front steps and follow me. I kept walking.

  “Chloe? Chloe? Come on. Please talk to me,” he said as he caught up to me. “Slow down, would you?”

  “You want to talk? Talk to yourself all you want. I’m going home.”

  “Digger,” he said. “At least talk to me about Digger.”

  I stopped but kept my back to Josh. Okay, I could do that. “How did you hear?” I asked sadly.

  “Snacker called me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Yes, I figured it didn’t have anything to do with me.” I gripped Digger’s bag more tightly. “So what were you doing in his apartment?”

  “This story about Digger causing the fire just isn’t credible. Digger was a pro, Chloe. He was careful, and he’d never just leave something on the stove and forget it.”

  I faced Josh. “Is that what they’re saying? All I heard is that the fire was an accident.”

  Josh nodded. “Yeah. It doesn’t make any sense.” He dropped his head. “Why didn’t you call me and tell me about Digger?”

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t my place to anymore. I knew someone would get in touch with you, and obviously someone did. It didn’t have to be me.”

  “It would’ve been nice if it’d been you.”

  “Yeah, Josh? A lot of things would’ve been nice,” I spat back.

  He bit his lip and stared at me. “So what were you doing here? What’s in the bag?”

  I continued walking. “I came to get Digger’s recipes.” I briefly explained about helping with Hank Boucher’s cookbook and saw Josh’s eyes widen at the mention of the celebrity chef’s name. “I thought it would be good to include some of Digger’s work, and his girlfriend, Ellie, seemed to agree. Well, at least she did at first. . . . Anyhow, I need to get home and start sorting through this stuff. Kyle will be expecting to hear from me.” When we reached my car, I got in without glancing at Josh. Then I rolled down the window.

  “Who’s Kyle?” he asked.

  “Kyle is . . . It doesn’t matter. Do you, uh, do you need a ride?”

  “No.” Josh shook his head. “I have Snacker’s car.”

  “Good. Tell Snacker I said hello.”

  “I’m staying with him in my old room until I find out what’s going on here. The couple I work for was really understanding. They told me to take as much time as I needed.”

  “How nice for you,” I said sharply.

  “I’m not going back to Hawaii until I find out how Digger died. I think he was murdered, Chloe.”

  I gripped the steering wheel. I had no idea what to say. Something was off about Digger’s death, but I wasn’t jumping to the conclusion that he’d been deliberately killed. There was no reason to think so. Or was there?

  “Listen, can we talk sometime?” he asked.

  I started the engine. “I have to go, Josh.” I rolled up the window.

  “Chloe, come on!” He had the audacity to sound annoyed.

  I took off, leaving Josh standing alone on the curb.

  I flew down the street, my heart pounding and my brain full of four-letter words. I was positively bullshit about the run-in with Josh. I’d been completely unprepared. With no defenses at the ready, I’d fallen victim to my visceral reaction to Josh and had totally made out with him in the heat of the moment. If I’d been braced for an encounter with him and had been thinking rationally, none of that hot-and-heavy action would have occurred. At least, I didn’t think so. It was some comfort that I’d yelled at him. If I’d been the reason he’d come back, maybe I’d have felt differently. I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t fault him for the reason he’d returned. His close friend had just died, and he wanted to know how and why. Still, it had been easier to have Josh in Hawaii than it was to have him in Boston, that was for sure.

  I vacillated between anger, desire, and depression as I drove home. My brain and my heart felt ready to explode. Even when I had reached the safety of my apartment, I was still agitated. I rushed through the living room and into the bedroom, where I simultaneously turned on my laptop and lifted the phone from the cradle to scan caller ID. No new calls. At the computer, I unblocked Josh’s e-mail address from my message program and hit Send/ Receive four times in a row. No new messages. Good, right? I didn’t want Josh calling or e-mailing me, I told myself. That was why I’d changed my cell number and blocked his e-mail address in the first place. Of course, I’d kept my old landline number. There was that. Still, he was now in Boston, and how was I supposed to move on with him right here? I could practically feel his presence in the city, and my awareness that he was right nearby was going to make it almost impossible to block him out of my consciousness. Here I was, right now, poised by the phone and computer, waiting for some kind of contact from him! And if Josh did call or e-mail me, it would probably be to ask about Digger. On that topic, why was Josh so sure that Digger had been murdered? God, it was tragic enough that Digger had died in the fire. But murdered? I shook my head. Maybe Josh’s suspicion was his way of trying to deal with the loss of his friend.

  No matter where Josh was or what was going on with him right now, I had to focus on the rest of my life. School, for instance, still required a lot of work, and I had plenty of cookbook activities to distract me. Plus, the money was pretty damn good. I decided to take a quick look through Digger’s bag in search of material for Hank Boucher’s book.

  I opened the messenger bag and cringed. The fabric of the messenger bag reeked of smoke, and the contents smelled equally foul. They consisted of exactly what I expected from a chef: large notebooks filled with scribbled recipes, a few typed pages with notes scrawled on them, and two small notebooks with more recipes, as well as permanent markers, a kitchen thermometer, and some inventory pages. God, he was worse than Kyle! This kind of chaos must be a man thing. But as I’d hoped, the disorganized bag was filled with mouthwatering menus and recipes. Everything about the contents of the bag was so Digger that I teared up as I deciphered his writing. What’s more, I knew that Kyle would be as eager as I was to put some of Digger’s recipes in the cookbook. There was a stromboli recipe that looked delicious. Digger had written, Family recipe, good comfort food. Restaurant possibility or no? Digger hadn’t been sure that the stromboli would fit in at the Penthouse, but he’d clearly liked the homemade dough stuffed with fresh mozzarella and herbs. I’d have to copy this and make it myself. I could practically smell the dough baking just thinking about it!

  I was feeling good about honoring Digger’s memory when I came upon some of Josh’s recipes in Josh’s own handwriting. Running my hands over the familiar script, I felt terribly sad. The consolation I’d found in the thought of including Digger in the book suddenly vanished, and everything about the smoky bag felt heartbreaking, as if there were nothing left of Digger’s life except some smelly recipes. I felt more or less the same way about my relationship with Josh. Corny as it sounds, it was as if what we’d shared had also gone up in smoke, and all I had left was this ugly, stinky mess.

  The phone rang, and my stomach dropped. I glared at the caller ID as I waited for the number to appear. It could be Josh, I told myself. Did I want it to be Josh or not? I wasn’t sure.

  Instead of my ex, the caller was Kyle. I wanted to sound completely nonchalant and to behave as though I had never assaulted him, but instead of staying cool, I found
myself rattling off ideas at an auctioneer’s pace. “Kyle! Oh, good! Listen, I got ahold of Digger’s recipes, and there are tons here that would be perfect for the book, and I really think that we need to use some of them, which reminds me that we absolutely have to start testing the recipes we do have, because you can never trust a chef, and just because a recipe came from a chef doesn’t mean that the amounts and proportions of ingredients are right and—”

  “Breath!” Kyle demanded with a laugh. “Stop and take a breath! But you’re right. We should test the recipes. Why don’t you pick out a few, and we can get together and do some cooking.”

  Obediently, I took a slow breath. Kyle was behaving normally, and I should follow suit. “Great. I have some ideas already.”

  “Would you mind if we cooked at your place? The apartment I’m renting has a really small galley kitchen, and we’d have a tough time here. I know your place isn’t gargantuan, but it’s the better of the two options.”

  “Absolutely. How about Tuesday night? I should be home from my internship by five thirty.”

  “Why don’t you do the food shopping, and then I’ll reimburse you in your next check. Oh, and have your friend Adrianna come over if she wants. I’m sure we could use the help, and she seems like she’d give us some honest feedback about the dishes.”

  “I bet she’d be thrilled. I’ll give her a call.”

  I hung up, started a shopping list, and immediately realized that I was going to blow my entire last paycheck on ingredients. I would get my money back, of course, and I’d charge for every second I spent at the store, but I’d have to go shopping tomorrow night so that we’d have everything we needed for Tuesday. I called Adrianna and Owen, and left a message inviting them over to cook and taste the food with Kyle and me. I was sure they’d take me up on the offer, especially because money was super tight for them these days. In fact, I was seriously worried that they weren’t eating well. In particular, since she was still nursing, Ade needed all the sustenance she could get.

  Going through recipes and planning Tuesday’s cooking projects helped to distract me from dwelling on Josh. Helped. Somewhat. A little. In addition to being broke, I was still a jumpy, frazzled mess, and I gave in to the compulsion to keep checking my e-mail every ten minutes or so until I went to bed. Tomorrow, I assured myself, I’d be at my internship all day and nowhere near my computer. Maybe my supervisor would let me use hers, and I’d be able to check my e-mail from work? No, no! Josh does not exist. Josh does not exist, I repeated uselessly.

  ELEVEN

  I shifted my weight in the uncomfortable armchair and forced myself to look sympathetically at my client Alison. She was exceedingly beautiful, there was no doubt about that, but nutty as a loon. I was midway through my day at my internship—pardon me, my field placement—at the community mental health center and was listening to one of my regular clients drone on about her love life. Alison was a twenty-one-year-old college student who could have had practically any man she chose, yet she had a pattern of falling for unavailable older men. The woes of the young and beautiful, huh? Most of our counseling sessions centered on my trying to get to the root of her relationship issues so that we could figure out why she kept setting herself up to fail in her romantic life. So far we hadn’t made much progress, and I increasingly believed that Alison really wanted me to tell her that, yes, it was a brilliant idea for her to devote herself to the married workaholic who thought she had a great ass.

  Alison twirled a long spiral curl around her manicured finger and crossed her mile- long legs. She had changed her eye color this week and now flashed violet eyes in my direction. “Ms. Carter?”

  “Yes, Alison?”

  “I really think that I found the right guy, this time.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself.

  I nodded, waiting for her to go on. One of the lessons drilled into us social-work students was that it was sometimes best to say nothing, to wait and see what a client did with silence. Alison usually used these moments as opportunities to announce new affairs.

  “Don’t you want to hear about him?” she asked eagerly.

  “Do you want to tell me about him?” Another social-work strategy: answer a question with a question. If I’d been allowed to be honest, I’d have screamed that hell no, I didn’t want to hear about Alison’s latest unavailable interest and that I wished she’d just enjoy the normal, loving, college-age boyfriend she had. Then I’d have run screaming from the room. In other words, I desperately needed to work on my patience and to focus on the goal of helping this young woman straighten out her life. Not that I felt like a particularly good role model, having spent the past two days jumping every time the phone rang and daydreaming about fooling around with Josh in the condemned apartment. . . .

  “Okay!” Alison sat up straight and clapped her hands. “His name is Keith, and he’s totally gorgeous. Older than me, obviously, because you know I have a thing for mature men. But he’s not, like, ancient or anything. I think he’s about forty-five. Totally suave and sexy. He was a guest lecturer in my friend’s college class, and he’s written books and makes awesome money.” She rubbed her fingers together and lifted an eyebrow. “I met him through my friend after he took a group of students out to dinner, and he invited me along because I was outside talking to her when he asked. I think she might be a little into him, but he obviously is much more attracted to me. I can tell we like each other, even though we haven’t said anything.”

  I cleared my throat. This story was not screaming appropriate . A middle- aged man taking young college students out to dinner? Please. “You do already have a boyfriend, though. Tom. How is that relationship going for you? And do you think this new man, Keith, is the kind of man you could have a relationship with?”

  She shrugged happily. “Keith is well traveled, smart, sexy. . . . Did I already say sexy? Well, he is. A real gentleman, too. He holds doors open for women, and he’s really nice to all of my friends. Tom is such a bore compared to him. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with him, but he’s not what I really want. I wish Keith would just whisk me away to some tropical paradise where we could lounge around and sip cocktails and get massages.”

  I was hoping to guide Alison toward the realization that her choices in boyfriends usually led to disastrous results. Who knew if this older man was even interested in her? There was a strong possibility that she’d conjured up the romance. It was even possible that the man existed entirely in her head.

  I spent another forty minutes questioning Alison about her attraction to this man and making notes as we talked. A has expressed interest in older, suave gentleman K and is considering abandoning current relationship, claiming relationship is a “bore.” Impressed with K’s world experience and has fantasy that he reciprocates her attraction.

  When my session with Alison was over, I grabbed a quick lunch and checked my voice mail on both my cell phone and my home phone. No calls from Josh, but one from Kyle confirming our night of recipe testing.

  My next client, Danny, was someone I really liked. He was my age, twenty-six, and worked long hours in construction. His father owned the company and, according to Danny, was a real bastard, a demeaning, tyrannical man who subjected his son to one harsh criticism after another. Claiming that it was for his son’s own good, the father demanded that Danny work twice as hard as the other workers to prove himself to his father. In my opinion, Danny was no more than a slave to his father, yet Danny killed himself to live up to his father’s standards.

  Today my client showed up with his entire left hand wrapped thickly with gauze. “Danny, what happened?” I asked.

  Danny smiled and waved away my concern. “Ah, it’s nothin’. I just got hurt a few days ago.” He leaned back in his chair and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. His curly black hair was damp with sweat, and his ruddy cheeks were flushed from working outside in the cold all morning. To get to our appointments, Danny told his father that he was taking a business class. He’d ne
ver have let his father know that he was going to therapy. “Therapy is for sissies,” the father had told Danny.

  I eyed Danny’s hand. “That looks serious.”

  “Nah. I cut myself with an electric saw. Just a nick really. My dad had me wrap it up, and I went to the ER after my shift.”

  “What time did this happen?”

  “First thing in the morning. Can you believe it? What a way to start of the day, huh?”

  “And you usually work from six in the morning until four thirty in the afternoon?”

  Danny nodded as he looked at his bandaged hand.

  “So your father wouldn’t let you go to the emergency room for what? Eight hours?”

  Danny nodded again. “I needed fourteen stitches.” He hung his head. “But I wanted him to know that I could tough it out. That I’m the son he always wanted. And it’s not like it didn’t stop bleeding or anything. I wrapped it myself and it was fine.” He laughed softly. “It’s nothing new, though. I get hurt all the time. You know, when I was a kid, there were two bullies who lived up the block from us. One time they beat the crap out of me. I was ten, and these kids just pummeled me. For no reason whatsoever. Just because they were assholes. And they thought I was a loser. I mean, I was a scrawny, funny- looking kid, but I never did anything to them. The older one broke my cheekbone, he hit me so hard.”

  I never would have guessed that Danny had ever been less than the strapping, handsome man who sat in front of me. I wished that I could sic him on those bullies today. “What was your father’s response when you came home so injured?”

  “He smacked me on the back of the head and told me it would make me a man.” Danny paused. “And he said I better not cry or he’d finish what the kids started.”

  “Oh, Danny.”

  “When my Dad went out later that afternoon, my mother took me to the hospital. But I didn’t cry once.” He forced a smile. “When I was healing and all black- and-blue, my dad would point out my bruises to his friends and act all proud of me. Like I was worthy of being his son because I’d been in a fight. Not that I’d done much fighting back, but he didn’t know that. Look, I’m making it sound worse than it was. My dad really wants the best for me. And he’s right that I need to be motivated. I can be really lazy, and I need to be pushed sometimes. He wants me to be big-time, you know? Take over his company one day.”