Healthy Place to Die

by Peter King

  “The lady” took off her hat.

  It was Janet Hargrave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I DON’T HAVE TO introduce you two, you’ve already met,” I said.

  The women were eyeing each other warily. The driver broke in to ask us where we wanted to go. Neither Elaine nor Janet responded, so I said, “The airport.” He flipped on the “occupied” light and we drove out of the village.

  “Lots of explanations are due,” I said. “Who wants to start?”

  Elaine was equal to the challenge. “I will,” she said, turning to Janet. “Why did you ask to see us?”

  Janet was pulling off a heavy scarf that was wrapped around her waist. It was partly why she had looked so heavily built when she had come in to the lobby of the Goldener Hirsch and headed up the stairs. No wonder I had not recognized her, between that and the hat, which had concealed her face.

  “First, I owe you an apology,” Janet said to me.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “When I found myself locked in the herb garden glasshouse and those toxic fumes filling the place, I thought it must have been you who set me up.”

  I was trying hard to avoid Elaine’s accusatory gaze, but it was impossible in the backseat of the taxi. The gaze was accompanied by demanding tones. “Glasshouse? Toxic fumes? What’s all this? Can one of you explain?” If a cat were able to speak, these were the tones it would use while deciding whether to have the canary fried or tartar style.

  “I was going to tell you,” said Janet to me, “about Kathleen. That’s why I asked you to meet me in the herb garden. I heard someone moving and went into the glasshouse to see who it was, just in case it wasn’t you. The next thing I knew, a spray of anesthetic hit me from behind. Before I could turn, I passed out. When the anesthetic wore off, the fumes were filling the place. I tried to get out but couldn’t.”

  Elaine’s lips were pursed tighter than a Scotsman’s sporran. “Go on,” she said icily.

  “Well, I must have passed out because the next thing I knew, a blast of cold air blew over me and I recovered enough to sit up.”

  I couldn’t wait to get in my quarter’s worth and exonerate myself at least in Janet’s eyes. “I tried to get you out of the glasshouse but I was too weak. I saw a power lawn mower among the equipment—one of those you sit on and drive. I crashed it through the glass wall—that must have been the cold air that revived you.”

  Janet managed a slight smile. “Thank you for saving my life, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. It could have been you who set me up—you knew I was going to be there. I crawled out, and when I recovered my senses I decided to get as far away from there as possible. I got my things and checked out right away.”

  I gave Elaine a meaningful “there you see—I saved her life” look. She ignored me, concentrating on Janet. “What was it you wanted to tell him about Kathleen?”

  Janet looked from one to the other of us. To Elaine, she said, “What’s your role in this?”

  Elaine was brief. She told of running across a law case concerning a murder in a restaurant and how it influenced her decision to become a lawyer specializing in cases dealing with food, “… a growing field and hardly any law firms in it yet.”

  “So why did you come here to the spa?” asked Janet bluntly.

  “I had already decided to take a few weeks off before going into practice,” Elaine said. “I thought a cooking course would give me some useful background. I checked out a few courses and several were at spas. I had no intention of starving myself on diets or having to do a lot of silly exercises. This place sounded ideal.”

  It sounded very convincing. So why did I feel a twinge of skepticism? I was about to ask a question but Janet beat me to it. “How did you meet Kathleen?”

  “In the Manhattan Law Library. I was researching this case dealing with murder in a restaurant and she was there researching something too.”

  Lights blazed in the sky across the windows of the taxi. The roar of jet engines removed any possibility of conversation as an aircraft passed low overhead to land at the airport. The driver turned in to the entrance and slowed as he turned, pulled open the window between us, and asked, as he probably asked a dozen times a day, “Which airline?”

  None of us replied, then I said, “Swissair.”

  He drove on a short distance, stopped, and we alighted. I paid him and he drove away. I watched to see if any vehicles behind him were stopping. None were.

  “Why Swissair?” asked Elaine.

  “It’s the busiest,” I said. “Let’s go in and talk.”

  By the time we all had cappuccinos on the table in front of us, Elaine had mellowed marginally and Janet was clearly glad to have allies. I opened the inning.

  “Why did you come here to the spa after Kathleen?”

  Janet nodded. “I expected you to ask that. It was the day Kathleen left. Later in the afternoon, I had a call from the credit card company. You see, Kathleen has a company card and also a personal one, both with the same company. There was some confusion over her card numbers and the company said did she really want this trip charged to the company account when all her previous trips had been on her personal account. Naturally, I said ‘All her previous trips?’ and they said they meant all her previous trips to the spa.”

  “Didn’t you know she had been here before?” I asked.

  “I knew she had been here once to do a story on them, but that was a while ago,” Janet answered.

  “She told me she had been there ‘once or twice,’” I said, “but then in a later conversation with Tim Reynolds, the golfer, she said ‘a few times.’”

  “She was here six times,” Janet said, “in the past four years. Except for that first time, she paid for the trips herself. I was very curious.” She allowed herself a tiny smile. “I don’t pay her the kind of salary for that.”

  “What was the story she did on this place?” I asked.

  “She didn’t complete it. Said it wasn’t working out.”

  “Yet she was here again on this occasion, and if it was business,” said Elaine pointedly, “then you must have known about it.”

  “She said she had new information that would enable her to pick up on the previous effort and, this time, write a major story.”

  “Didn’t you want to know more?” Elaine demanded.

  “I asked her. She didn’t want to tell me—but you have to remember that she is a well-established writer. I never crowded her. I let her run her own stories.”

  “When you contacted Elaine, why did you give her Kathleen’s name?” I asked.

  “In case I was being followed, I wanted to cause some confusion. I certainly didn’t want it known that I was still here. I had come to the airport to lay a false trail, then gone back to Obergarten.”

  “So where is Kathleen now?” asked Elaine in her unabashed way.

  Janet sipped her cappuccino. When she had set her cup back in the saucer, she seemed reluctant to answer. She suddenly looked sad and forlorn. She said in a soft voice, “I’m very much afraid something has happened to her. Because of what she knows.”

  I could feel laser beams swiveling in my direction but it was only Elaine. “You’d better tell her,” she said, and left me in the firing line.

  I told Janet the whole story of the encounter in the Seaweed Forest. She asked all the same questions that Elaine had asked—why did I think she was dead? who else was in there? did I have any idea what Kathleen wanted to tell me and all the others?

  Janet shook her head. “I’m afraid this confirms my worst fears.” She looked at Elaine and I in turn, and her voice was despairing. “But why? What could she know that someone is afraid of? And who—is it someone here at the spa?”

  “When you checked it out,” I asked her, “why did you come here to Obergarten?”

  “I was determined to find out something. I checked into the Goldener Hirsch.”

  “Have you been here all the time?”

 
“No. A woman was making inquiries about a woman she said was her cousin. It made me uneasy, so I checked into a guesthouse. I saw her again in the village and decided I’d be safer back at the hotel now that she’d checked it out, so I moved back.”

  “Good thinking,” I complimented her.

  “Oh, the inquiries may have had nothing to do with me, but I was nervous.”

  “This woman who was making inquiries,” I said casually, “did you see her?”

  “I caught a glimpse of her the first time. I saw her a little better the second time, when she was going to a guesthouse.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “I was more concerned about not letting her see me, but she was youngish, I think, tall, blond …” She broke off. My expression must have given me away. When Elaine saw this, she leaned forward and said in that chilly tone that I was beginning to dislike, “Your girlfriend, Rhoda, I presume.”

  Janet showed understandable alarm. “Girlfriend!” but I explained.

  “That does suggest that the spa is directly involved,” Janet said.

  “Some of the guests are very regular and some of them spend a lot of time at the spa,” said Elaine thoughtfully. “There is a possibility that one or more of them are involved.”

  “Which brings us back to the question, involved in what?” I said.

  There was a brief pause, then Janet asked, “Do either of you know anything about the Glacier Caverns?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS Friday and the final sessions of the course. After breakfast, everyone milled around, deciding which ones to attend. I was on the list for the session where favorite dishes, as requested during the week by the attendees, were to be prepared.

  The previous evening we had eaten freshly caught trout after the cappuccinos. It was prepared in that carelessly brilliant way some chefs have, in this case with a sprinkle of herbs, a spoonful of cream and a shaving of shallot.

  During the meal, Janet had told us that in one of her clandestine visits to the spa disguised as a portly old lady, she had seen the same blond girl who had been making inquiries in Obergarten, going up the trail that led to the Glacier Caverns.

  “The brochure tells all about these,” said Janet. “Several such glaciers can be found in various parts of the world, and there are a few in Switzerland.”

  “I’ve been in the glacier that is halfway up the Jungfrau from Interlaken,” I contributed. “Rooms and chambers have been hacked out of the solid ice, right inside the glacier. It’s an eerie experience.”

  “Isn’t it freezing?” Elaine wanted to know.

  “Surprisingly, no. It’s cool but not excessively so. Ice is an insulator, so the interior stays the same temperature all the year. Outside it, though, seasonal changes and natural earth movements cause temperature shifts so that glaciers like that one and the one here are sliding downhill at several inches a year. These things are massive—several miles long and weighing millions of tons.”

  “The caverns here are temporarily closed,” said Janet. “They are monitoring the slide, which they say shows signs of change. So they should not have been open the day I saw that girl going there.”

  “Could the Glacier Caverns have something to do with the mystery of whatever is going on here?” Janet asked.

  “An illicit casino inside it?” I suggested facetiously, but neither of the women thought that funny.

  “If something illegal is going on inside the caverns, would they still be having cooking classes at the spa?” asked Elaine skeptically.

  “Today’s the last day to find out,” I said. “There are sessions all morning. If we’re going to learn anything, it will have to be this afternoon.”

  “Let’s talk—say, in the library at the spa,” suggested Elaine. “Before lunch.”

  “I was on the phone to my office,” said Janet. “I told them to go through Kathleen’s files.”

  “Did they find anything?” asked Elaine.

  “No, but one of the files needs a password, so I told them to bring in a computer expert to work on it. I’m calling in again this morning, so I may know more by lunch.”

  We saw Janet safely back to the Goldener Hirsch and listened to the large iron key turn in the lock, and then the assuring scrape of a bolt.

  I was there early to prepare for my portion of the morning. I was finishing when the first of the eager students came drifting in.

  Leighton Vance was first out of the starting gate in the sessions where I was to follow. As had been agreed, that perennial Swiss favorite, fondue, was the dish he was to demonstrate. He seemed pleased to be doing so, though I had thought that such a relatively simple dish would have been beneath him. His somewhat superior attitude suggested to me that he might have preferred to be cooking a more complex dish, but it could be that I was wrong about him. He went some way to proving that with his opening statement. …

  “Fondue is widely known as a Swiss specialty, and we have had a great many requests for a practical demonstration on how to prepare it. It is a simple dish, but as with so many simple dishes, they are not always prepared properly. Here is the—the way to cook fondue.” He picked up a large half-wheel of cheese and reached for a grater.

  “I am taking cheese—Swiss cheese, naturally—and grating it finely,” he began. “I am sprinkling flour on it and mixing,” he went on, still grating. Then he took a heatproof earthenware pot, cut several garlic cloves, and thoroughly rubbed the inside of the pot with them.

  “I pour in white wine—a Swiss white wine, naturally—and put it on this gas burner. I am heating it until it begins to bubble.” He sprinkled in the cheese-flour mix, doing it very slowly and blending a little at a time. He kept stirring and adding until all the cheese was in. He then poured in kirsch, the cherry-flavored liqueur that is very popular in Switzerland and Southern Germany.

  Bowls of crusty Italian bread cut into one-inch squares sat on the bench, and alongside them were long-tined fondue forks. “Now everyone take a fork,” Leighton said, “while the fondue gets hot.”

  The aroma of the kirsch wafted through the air, for he had been very generous with it. Gradually, the cheese mixture began to simmer, large bubbles popping.

  “Now when you spear a bread cube,” warned Leighton, “be very sure that you penetrate the crusty side first—it stays on the fork that way. Some people keep the fondue melted over a hot-water bath, but a direct flame is much better as it forms a crust on the bottom of the pot, which greatly improves the flavor.

  The rich smell of hot cheese had now devoured and replaced the aroma of the kirsch, and the large class was getting impatient to taste.

  “Is the Italian dish that they call fonduta similar to this?” asked a voice.

  “Not really,” Leighton said. “The Italians add egg yolks and milk—no liqueur—and they spread it on toast squares.”

  The fondue was superb, and Leighton was complaining that it was eaten so fast that not enough time had elapsed to allow the buildup of a crust on the bottom of the pot. Now it was my turn, and I decided I had been too hard on the maestro. I was going to cook cheesecake, and surely it was not a dish to be snobbish about.

  “We associate cheesecake with New York,” I began, “and in New York, the famous Lindy’s on Broadway always held the reputation of making the best. It was a great loss to the world of dessert lovers when the restaurant closed down, but I was among the fortunate few who managed to get the recipe.

  “The moist chewy texture of the filling of Lindy’s cheesecake was perfect, and the light golden crust was bursting with butter and sugar. If you like a cake that is light and airy, fluffy and spongy—you don’t want this cheesecake. Lower-calorie and lower-cholesterol versions of cheesecake are plentiful, but they are not authentic. I am going to show you how to make the genuine Lindy’s cheesecake, and you can introduce your own variations from there.”

  Faces looked expectant, and a few notebooks were poised.

  I made the dough
first, using only butter, sugar, vanilla, lemon rind, flour, and egg yolk. “Ideally, the dough should now be chilled for at least an hour,” I pointed out, “but we’ll chill this one just while I make the filling.” I rolled the dough, spread it on a pan bottom, and put it in the refrigerator. I set the pastry oven at four hundred degrees.

  I made the filling, combining sugar, flour, cream cheese, grated orange and lemon rind, and vanilla, and beat it well in the mixer. I added eggs and extra egg yolk, stirred in cream, poured the mix into a previously baked crust, and put it in the oven.

  “I am baking at five hundred and fifty degrees for twelve minutes,” I explained. “One of the secrets is to bake a further hour at low temperature—not over two hundred degrees. However, you don’t want to wait that long to taste it, so I prepared one in exactly the same way earlier this morning. It’s in the cooler and I’m taking it out now.”

  It was a magnificent sight. Rich and firm, dense but silky, and it was obvious that it was going to be indescribably delicious. “You will be able to smell the citrus flavors released from the orange and lemon rinds by the cooking,” I said. “Inferior cheesecakes can be detected at once by their weak aroma.”

  “You can put other toppings on it, can’t you?” came a question.

  “Cherry, strawberry, pineapple, blueberry are among the fruit toppings, yes. Though the dyed-in-the-wool cheesecake fanatics insist that those are just for tourists.”

  I had baked a large cake, large enough that there would be a good-size slice for everyone, and the consumption of this precluded any further questions. Millicent Manners was loud in her praise for a dish she said she never ate. Marta was near the front of the line and insisted on “only a half a slice,” but while I was answering another question, I noticed her slipping back for “just a half.”

  By now, Michel Leblanc was there, making sure that everything was ready for his demonstration of how to cook cassoulet. It too was a great success, and the Frenchman had clearly had a lot of experience in preparing the dish, for he did so with great aplomb. Caroline de Witt came in near the end of Michel’s session, and when he concluded she rapped on the table for attention.