Cooking Spirits: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

by Joanne Pence

  Just then, they heard a crash from the living room.

  They gawked at each other, and then rushed inside. The vase that had been on the small round table now lay broken on the hardwood floor, its silk flowers spread around it. The vase was the one that seemed to re-center itself on the table the last time Angie visited.

  “What happened?” Stan asked, his eyes bulging.

  “Why don’t you shut the bedroom’s sliding glass door?” Angie said uneasily. “It must have caused some sort of a draft.”

  “A damned strong draft!” Stan muttered as he stepped into the bedroom to shut the door.

  Angie picked up the pieces of the white porcelain vase and the silk flowers. “I guess I’ll be looking for a replacement.”

  “That gave me a bit of a start.” Stan chuckled. Back in the living room, he sat on the green and gold sofa, his hands clasped behind his head, elbows out, feet crossed on the coffee table as he studied the room, the view, the setting. “This house is definitely not right for you and Paavo. He works with murders. Living here would be too much like work for him. Besides, you’d have to completely redecorate it. Get rid of all the frou-frou, use sleeker lines in the furniture to open the place up. Add color to the walls. I think my interior decorator friend, Ernesto, would either laugh himself to death or die of shock if he saw this place.”

  The candy dish Angie had just replaced rose up off the coffee table. Stan watched it in horror. “What?”

  He jumped to his feet. Angie froze. The two stared slack-jawed as the dish hovered, then moved back from Stan a moment before it rocketed towards him as if hurled from a sling-shot. Stan ducked just in time. The dish sailed past him and hit a wall.

  Stan let out a high-pitched, blood-curdling scream, and ran behind Angie. A book slid out of the bookshelf and now it too floated in mid-air: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, probably the biggest book on the shelf.

  “Run!” Angie cried. But she needn’t have bothered. Stan pushed her out of the way and was the first one out the door. Angie followed close behind.

  Behind them, the door slammed shut, and then the deadbolt clicked into place.

  Chapter 10

  LATE THAT NIGHT when Paavo arrived home, he found Angie in his living room, asleep on the couch. His cat Hercules lay curled up asleep beside her, a half-eaten bowl of popcorn on the floor and the TV on. “What’s this?” he asked, going to her. “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” she said groggily as she opened her eyes and sat up. “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

  Despite her words that nothing was wrong, he knew her better than that. He sat and held her.

  She said she had been stressing too much over the wedding and their living arrangements, and that she was “practically seeing things”—with emphasis on the word practically.

  He had no idea what was really bothering her, but if he was patient, eventually she would explain. For the moment, simply having her turn to him when she needed comfort meant a lot to him.

  o0o

  The next morning, as Paavo headed out the door, he found it even more difficult to leave Angie sleeping in his bed, in his house, than in her apartment. He wondered if he would feel this way after they were married, as well. He did know one thing, though. Seeing her in his home made him feel better about himself than leaving her in her father’s building. He supposed, in these modern time, such thinking was old-fashioned, backward, and macho, but nonetheless, he felt more like a man, a provider, with her there.

  Maybe she was right when she said they should find a home of their own rather than live in her father’s apartment.

  When he arrived at work, he learned the autopsies had been completed.

  Gaia Wyndom had ingested a large number of sleeping pills, enough to kill a woman of her size and weight. No other signs of struggle or trauma were found. The M.E. said it could have been suicide, but she couldn’t be certain if Gaia purposefully took the pills, or someone drugged her. The state of the body, however, was confusing.

  She had been found in a bath, so presumably the water would have been comfortably warm before she got in—not even suicides got into tubs of cold, uncomfortable water. Warm water should have sped up decomposition. The small amount of decomposition indicated she had been dead only a day or two, yet other bodily functions appeared to have ceased much earlier. The reports were confused. The M.E. said she needed more time to run tests and research exactly what had happened to the woman. The finding would make more sense if she had gotten into ice water, but that was hard to imagine.

  If she had been alive all week, where had she been prior to her death? What had she been doing? The time of death inconsistencies made it difficult to determine what had happened to her.

  Taylor Bedford’s autopsy results were much clearer. He had been killed by a knife at least seven inches long in the shape of a chef’s carving knife. It entered under the ribcage and jabbed upward, piercing the heart. A second stab in the same area assured his quick death.

  Whoever did it apparently took his wallet and cellphone. They weren’t found in or near the dumpster or in the garbage truck.

  The autopsies were interesting, but didn’t tell Paavo much he didn’t already know. No matter when Gaia died, she had been alive at the time of Taylor’s murder. He knew that because Taylor’s death happened Saturday night, and Gaia called in sick on Monday morning. People at work had indicated she had a crush on him. Did she try to act on it and he spurned her so she killed him and then herself out of remorse and guilt?

  When he returned from discussing the autopsy results with the M.E., he decided to look more closely into Thomas Greenburg, founder of Zygog.

  Greenburg bothered him. He seemed uninterested in anything about his two dead employees, while everyone else in the building worried that Zygog could be somehow involved, perhaps with a madman targeting its employees for some crazed reason.

  Paavo quickly discovered a slew of online magazine articles and Internet sites about Greenburg. All talked about Greenburg as cold, nerdy, and aloof, a man who lived in his own world, unhampered and uninterested in anyone else. He started out as a game creator and quickly moved into online hacking. By the time he was twenty, he claimed the ability to hack into any database, anywhere. Ten years ago, at age twenty-five, an anonymous angel gave him $300,000 to put his skills to useful purposes and start a business.

  He started slow with an innovative inventory system set up for people whose inventory all looked basically the same to the unskilled eye, but where the slightest error in calibration could mean the difference between success and disaster of a project.

  In time, he expanded to other products and within three years, he established Zygog Software. Its profits doubled every year for the first five years, and now it hummed along at a fine clip.

  The information was interesting, but it didn’t bring Paavo any closer to figuring out who killed Gaia and Taylor.

  Chapter 11

  YOU’VE TOLD ME many times that Nana Cirmelli knew all about ghosts and spirits and demons,” Angie said as she sat in her mother’s kitchen with a cup of coffee and some hard, round Italian cookies with white sugary icing on top. The cookies were Angie’s favorite, but could only be eaten by dunking them into hot coffee to make them soft enough to avoid breaking a tooth.

  “Not only that.” Serefina Teresa Maria Giuseppina Amalfi, all 5’1”, 150 pounds of her shuddered as she said, “She knew about the evil eye!”

  Serefina put her forefinger below her eye and pulled down the lower lid—her family’s signal for the evil eye, or malocchio. Angie learned on a recent trip to Italy that old ideas like the evil eye, brought to the US by Italian immigrants in the early 1900’s and still talked about here, were pretty much laughed at in Italy. Not around Serefina, however, despite her refusal to say she believed in it.

  Stories of old women who could give the evil eye had terrified Angie as a child. Simply receiving a compliment from a jealous person could cause the evil eye to de
scend on the one being complimented. Mothers had to be especially careful that their babies weren’t cursed. If someone praised a cute baby’s looks, the mother had to be sure to say, “God bless her (or him)” to ward off the attack.

  When eight-year-old Angie heard that salt warded it off as well, she put thimble-size amounts of salt into plastic wrap and held them shut with rubber bands. She put the packets on doorframes and window frames in the bedroom she shared with her sister Frannie. One day, Serefina hired a painter, and more than a little fuss was caused when he found them. Serefina leapt to the idea that one of her older daughters was doing drugs. She yelled at Bianca, Caterina and Maria, threatening terrible things would happen to all of them if the culprit didn’t confess. Finally, Angie piped up that it was salt, and she did it to protect the family.

  Serefina tasted it. Angie told the truth.

  Neither Angie nor Serefina ever talked about the evil eye again after that happened. Until now.

  “Did Nana believe in ghosts?” Angie asked, knowing her mother, who tried to act modern and practical, would never admit to such a thing about herself.

  “Sì, of course. Everyone believed such nonsense back in the old country.”

  “What did they say about them? Are they dangerous, harmful, scary, or like Caspar the Friendly Ghost?”

  “You have to know why they’re still in this world. Some good, some bad. But mostly bad.” Serefina quickly added, “Or that’s what I been told. I don’t believe in such things.”

  “Of course not,” Angie said.

  “But many, many people I know have experienced the spirit of someone close to them visiting them soon after dying. Maybe to say goodbye, or to see them one last time.” She took a deep breath then said, “It’s hard to believe, but that may have happened to me once.” Serefina turned her head and looked out the window at the sky as the memory filled her. “I’m not saying it did. And many times, I told myself it was just a coincidence, a dream, but sometimes, I wonder. Anyway, one night—you were very young—I was sleeping, and suddenly woke up. There, at the foot of my bed, stood my father. I hadn’t seen him in many years because he lived in Italy, and with five children, your father and I didn’t have the money to visit him very often.”

  “Go on, Mamma,” Angie said when Serefina stopped talking.

  “I swear to my dying day, on the Madonna herself, I was awake and saw him looking down at me. He smiled. ‘Papà?’ I said, I was so surprised! ‘Ti amo, gioia mia,’ he told me. It was his voice, I’m sure of it. He looked at peace, and then he said for me not to be sad.

  “At that, your father woke up and asked why I was sitting up talking to myself. What could I say? I saw that I was all alone now. So, I said I had a dream, and told him to go back to sleep. Not an hour later, early in the morning, I received a call from Nana. She told me that my papà had died about three hours earlier. I knew, then, he had come to see me one last time. That he loved me so much…it still warms my heart.”

  Angie clasped her mother’s hand. “Of course he did, Mamma. You’ve told me so many stories about him. He loved you very much.”

  Serefina sighed deeply as she dunked another cookie in her coffee, then took a big bite before going on. Cookies helped the sadness go away. “Anyway, that’s not what most people think when they talk about ghosts. They think of miserable souls, stuck on this earth because something bothers them or is unfinished and they can’t rest.”

  “Stuck here,” Angie murmured. For some reason, the idea resonated within her. Not that she believed in ghosts. She and Stan, as they sat quivering with coffee and brandy in her apartment after their scare at Clover Lane, convinced themselves that bright sunlight had bounced off the candy dish in a way that made them think it moved, that their running had caused the book shelves to shake and topple a book, and that they had simply managed to scare themselves with their jokes. Of course there were no such things as ghosts!

  “That makes sense,” she said after a while.

  “What makes sense?”

  “Nothing.” Angie gulped down the rest of her coffee and stood up.

  Determination filled her. If she was tempted to believe in ghosts, this house nonsense had gone too far. Time to cease and desist! She needed to forget all about the house in the Sea Cliff and its self-propelled books and candy dishes.

  She didn’t care how cheap, beautiful, or anything else it was. And she especially didn’t care what kind of creatures did or did not live in it, or if they had issues that caused them to be ‘stuck’ on this earth. None of it meant anything to her any longer. She had a wedding to plan. “Thank you, Mamma. You’ve been a big help.”

  “Aspetti! Wait!” Serefina stood and followed Angie to the door. “I don’t know why you’re asking about such things, and I’m not saying I believe in them, but remember, Angelina, the words of Sant’Agostino. He said that evil always tries to disguise itself as good. There is evil in this world. You’ve seen it, I know, and if you get involved with dark forces, it is not easy to tell which are good and which are bad. It is best to keep away from them, all of them. Be careful, Angelina. And be wary.”

  Angie nodded. Her mother’s words only confirmed her decision. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine now.”

  o0o

  Connie was stunned to see Stan Bonnette walk into her gift shop. “What a surprise. Are you looking for a present for someone?”

  “I’m worried,” he said, taking a chocolate mint patty from the tray by the cash register. “It’s about Angie’s fixation with the house that’s for sale in the Sea Cliff. I need you to tell me everything is really fine.”

  “Everything is really fine,” Connie said. “Now, what’s this about?”

  “Ghosts.” He unwrapped the patty. “I’m sure she thinks she’s seeing them.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “It’s true! She’s obsessed with them. She should be thinking about other things, such as, does she really want to marry a cop? Personally, I have my doubts, but that’s just me. Anyway, I think she’s got so many pressures with her upcoming wedding and her lack of a good job, and now worrying about where she and Paavo will live, that instead of dealing with everything, she’s seeing spirits!” He bit into the chocolate. “Mmm!”

  “She hasn’t said anything like that to me,” Connie insisted. “Frankly, I think you’re the one who’s delusional! And that’ll be fifty cents.”

  “I was with her at the house. A gust of wind came through because we had the doors open, and you’d think she saw Banquo’s ghost from Macbeth. It was ludicrous. She actually ran screaming out of there.”

  “She ran screaming?” Connie asked.

  “Yes! It’s true,” Stan confided. He tossed the wrapper into the wastebasket, but didn’t reach for his wallet.

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran out after her. What else could I do? I had to make sure she was all right. I think she’s losing it.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Paavo,” Connie said.

  “Hell, no! I’m the last person he’d listen to.” He reached for another mint and she slapped his hand. “Ouch! Anyway, he knows how Angie feels about me, and I think he resents our relationship. Leave him out of it.”

  Connie knew the real reason Stan didn’t want to talk to Paavo. Stan was intimidated by him and turned into a babbling bowl of gelatinous goo whenever Paavo was near. “All right,” Connie said. “If we don’t talk to Paavo, what can we do?”

  “That’s obvious,” Stan said. “We need to convince Angie that she doesn’t want to live in that house. She’s perfectly safe and happy in her apartment. She should stay there.” He didn’t say, but mentally added “Alone.”

  He then took a dollar out of his pocket and put it on the counter.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But that’s the price for two. I’ll get you change.”

  “No need.” He picked up two more patties and walked out of the shop.

  o0o

  While Paavo continued to track down
anyone who could give him information about the shadowy Gaia Wyndom, Yosh pursued leads on Taylor Bedford. He gained no information other than “Taylor wasn’t himself lately,” from friends, family and co-workers until he found a bar three blocks from the crime scene.

  “Sure I remember Taylor Bedford,” Donny Petrollini, the bartender at Harrigan’s said. “He had to go on the road all the time for his job, but when he was in town, he stopped in every night after work. He would drink and get pretty well lit, then call a cab. I think he didn’t want to face his wife.”

  When drinking, Taylor would tell Donny about his miserable life. “He spent two weeks in town at a time—two work weeks. He told me he hated his home life so much, he’d leave the city on a Friday night for his business trip, and not return until Sunday, two weeks later. Finally, I asked him, ‘Taylor,’ I says, ‘I never heard of no one leaving home early and coming home late from a business trip.’ Well, he had drunk enough that he says, ‘Who says I’m spending my weekends working?’” Donny chuckled.

  “Did he ever explain?” Yosh asked.

  “He didn’t have to. He had a woman on the side. Sounded like love, if you ask me. I mean, he’d spend three weekends with her. I’m surprised his wife didn’t kill him. Hey, maybe she did.”

  Donny went on to say that the last couple of months, Taylor wasn’t as happy as usual. He told the bartender that he had decided to leave his wife. He was crazy about ‘my girl,’ as he called her, and he couldn’t stand that when they were at work, she pretended there was nothing between them.

  “Wait…he said he worked with the other woman?” Yosh asked.

  “That’s right.” Donny explained that Taylor told him the company had a very strict no-fraternization policy, and his girl insisted that they act like complete strangers at work. They could both be fired—or more likely, she would be. Taylor kept telling her he wanted to marry her, but she kept saying no. He wanted to tell his wife, tell his company, tell the whole world, that he loved her.