Banana Whip Safari Trip: A Culinary Cozy Mystery With A Delicious Recipe (Slice of Paradise Cozy Mysteries Book 4)

by Nancy McGovern

  Sometimes, when a shift had been particularly long or a difficult customer had sent back a piece of pie for one reason or another, she’d drifted away into visions of alternative lives. Perhaps she’d prefer a life in an office job, where there was a boss to answer to and she didn’t have executive control. Or perhaps she’d do like her mother and work for herself as a professional editor – though even Faith had to snicker at herself on that one, because she’d tried it for a while and she’d gotten so involved in the story she’d forgotten to utilize her Editor’s Red Pen. Or perhaps… maybe life on a tropical island would be nice? Or perhaps up in the mountains somewhere, where she could learn to ski. Or maybe teaching baking to underprivileged kids in New York, or in the country backwoods of Texas? It had been fun to dream. Life held so many possibilities.

  But standing in the tented kitchen in the middle of nowhere, in the east of the vast African continent, Faith knew where home was. Three places. One, in her precious, secret baking world. Two, in the little wooden cottage building that held her very own Slice of Paradise. And three, with Nathan. He so loved his job tending to the plants at Paradise Point. And she loved Paradise Point, too. And she loved the fact that Nathan loved it. Faith was generally happy with how things had panned out for her, but maybe it took being away from her life to realize just how magical it really was.

  She also realized something else, as she stood there, mashing bananas ready to fold into the dough Laura was mixing: that she had put Nathan on the backburner. She’d felt them slipping apart over the past few months, but she’d just put it down to them being together for a little while now. After all, life couldn’t be all sunset strolls along the coast, and stroking each other’s faces, could it? But it was slowly dawning on her why she had been pulling away from him.

  It was the land.

  That gorgeous land he’d fallen in love with. Faith had been beyond surprised when Grandma Bessie had offered to pay for it, and let him pay back in installments. And, sorry to say, Faith’s stomach sank when she realized something else: she hadn’t only been surprised, she’d been resentful, too.

  How had she hidden this so well, even from herself?

  It wasn’t that she begrudged Grandma Bessie for helping Nathan. It wasn’t that she begrudged Nathan’s happiness either – in fact, she loved to see how alive he became when nestled deep in nature, and he’d never looked more vibrant than when he was on that piece of land, dreaming of how he could, “not tame it, but help it to reach its full potential,” as Faith remembered him saying earnestly. He’d probably said it fifty times, and his eyes always lit up like a warm fire when he did.

  No, it wasn’t that Faith was jealous. It was that she was scared.

  In truth, landing at Slice of Paradise and it all turning out well, felt like a piece of extremely rare magic. And, as they say, lightning never strikes twice. For years upon years before that, Faith’s life had felt like one big dead end. She’d never met her father, who had run off with another woman, leaving Faith’s mother Diana to go through the birth – and all of parenthood, for that matter – alone. Then there was the bullying in high school. That was what had made Faith find the mysteriously magical world of baking in the first place.

  Then there had been the disastrous break up with Jeremy, who was about the only guy in the world that had shown any interest in her once she’d opened her mouth. Sure, Faith was somewhat attractive, with sandy colored wave-curl hair and equally sandy freckles that ran across her nose, but once she’d started talking about baking and shabby chic and Celine Dion binge marathons, young men’s eyes had glazed over. She had never been able to do the whole batting eyelashes, blushing, and talking about subjects-guys-liked thing. Diana had always told her that was a good thing, and she should never mold herself into something she wasn’t to please anyone. But still, it did sting when she got passed over all through high school, and for long after, too.

  Then there had been her nonexistent career. Her job as a cashier had been part time, never enough money to move out on. Her stint as a clothing saleswoman had been disastrous, as had her very brief turn trying out editing. Diana, as kind and supportive as she was, had been getting a bit sick of having to pay out for a two-bed apartment on her meager freelance wages, and Faith knew it.

  In all honesty, she had sunk down into a complete funk before Grandma Bessie had called out of the blue and practically demanded that she run the tearoom. Baking had been the only ray of hope in Faith’s world. So Grandma Bessie’s call had been the clouds parting, and the sun finally shining down on Faith.

  Since then, life had only gotten better. She’d been given little cuddly Nimbus and boisterous Cirrus, fluffy gray kittens who were now well on their way to being fully grown cats. She’d met Laura, the only girl who seemed to accept Faith just as she was – and now they would be best friends for life, Faith was sure of that. Then she’d fallen in love with Laura’s cousin Nathan, who turned out to be the sweetest, goofiest, funniest guy ever, who loved plants as much as Faith did cupcakes, and encouraged her in following her passions. Then she’d completely redesigned the crumbling shack that had been the tearoom, and turned it around into a healthy profit. Then she’d won a cupcake competition and still had a few thousand dollars sitting in the bank from her winnings. She lived in Florida, right by the ocean, where tropical fruit grew and exotic flowers bloomed. She didn’t even own a coat, just a few light jackets. Most of the year she lived in beautiful sundresses and sandals.

  This all seemed too good to be true somedays. Way too good to be true.

  As Faith mashed the bananas into the smoothest mix bananas had ever been mashed into, she realized how much fear was stored in her body. She could feel her shoulders tense and tight. She could feel her calves were like a rubber band stretched to capacity. Her head always had a slight ache, even when she was happy.

  But why?

  Surely it didn’t make any sense to be scared of goodness? Wasn’t goodness… well, good?

  Faith realized, with a horrible jolt, that she was happier when she was in the midst of a murder investigation than she was when everything was running smoothly. She felt in her element. She’d been practically ignoring Nathan. He’d been trying to get close to her all week, telling her to relax and enjoy and just be, but Faith hadn’t been able to stop her mind racing, thinking about the murder. Even when they were out in the most beautiful, picturesque nature scenes, she found her mind twisting into the maze of the dark and tragic mystery.

  Why?

  Faith stirred the bananas ever harder, beginning to feel frustrated. Sweat was springing up but she couldn’t have cared less.

  Laura giggled. “What have those bananas ever done to you?”

  But Faith wasn’t in the mood to laugh. She tried a smile but she could tell it came out mournful. Suddenly exhausted, she flopped down on one of the stools.

  Laura paused her stirring and frowned at Faith. “Are you okay, babe?”

  “Yeah. No.” All Faith’s thoughts and feelings were like a bundle of multicolored thread knotting up in her head. “I don’t know.”

  Laura spooned the banana mixture into the batter, and gave her a knowing, slightly teasing smile. “Come on, now. Tell Auntie Laura.”

  Faith didn’t even know where to start. “Ah, it’s nothing.”

  “Yes, it is.” Laura’s voice was light, but she wasn’t about to give up, Faith could see that.

  Faith considered telling her everything, but it was so hard to explain. How could she say that Nathan branching out into his passion made her so nervous she sometimes couldn’t even be around him? How could she complain that her life was so beautiful that it was scary? It was like guarding the most gorgeous watercolor painting. Totally irreplaceable. A treasure she’d had to go to great lengths to find, over many years. But it was totally uncovered. Anyone could just walk by and throw a bucket of sludgy green-brown-purple paint over it, ruining it forever. Someone could slash it right through with a knife. And there was nothing
Faith could do about it. How could she complain her life was more gorgeous than it had ever been? How could she complain how happy she was that she, Laura and Grandma Bessie had all found love? How could she complain that she was, finally, contented? It would seem so ungrateful.

  Yet the fear that it might all be taken away just wouldn’t budge. How to dislodge it? How to pry those fear-filled gripping fingers off the ledge of worry Faith clung to, and fly free? How could she ever articulate any of these feelings? She could barely even articulate them in thought, as they mixed up and swirled and got lost in each other like marble painting she’d once done in high school.

  What she eventually came up with – after a long sigh – was this question. “I know this sounds weird, right, but…”

  “But?”

  “But, how do you get over the fear that life might suddenly change? That all the good things in your life get taken away and you… end up worse than you ever were before?” Faith practically choked the last words out, and swore she could actually feel all her nerves standing on end.

  Laura laughed for a moment. “And there I was, thinking you were going to ask me a nice, innocuous question about baking. No, what am I thinking? You answer questions about baking.” Then she paused her mixing and turned quite serious. “I don’t know. I guess… I guess we all have that fear sometimes. That things might go wrong.”

  “Right.” Although Faith was comforted that she wasn’t alone, it wasn’t quite the response she was looking for. Her whole being was desperately clawing for some kind of real answer. Something she could actually do.

  “I think… maybe there’s three ways to deal with it,” Laura said. She set down the spoon entirely. “One, like some of the kids I work with, you can make your life bad for yourself, so you don’t have to deal with those kind of fears. You don’t have to fear rejection if you reject everything, do you? You don’t have to fear things going bad if you’re the one who makes them bad. That’s what a lot of my kids do, I think. Destroy their lives because they’re afraid of their lives being destroyed. Sounds like it makes no sense, but I guess they retain some kind of control. At least their lives are being destroyed on their own terms.”

  Faith had never thought about that.

  “People call it self-sabotaging,” Laura said. “It’s not deliberate. But anyways, you don’t want to do that.”

  “No,” Faith agreed.

  “I guess another way is to help people less fortunate than you,” Laura continued. “Like, I think helping these kids makes me feel really good about my life. Like, I know that…” She paused, deep in thought. “I know that I’m helping people out of bad situations. So if you’re in a bad situation, you know there’ll be people to help you out, too. And maybe it helps you see that no situation is the end of the world. You can always rise. Always.”

  Faith nodded, drinking in Laura’s words. She really did like the idea of helping people. When she had taught baking to a small group of kids, it had lit up her world. Even on such a small scale, Faith had felt its power. But she was curious to know the third way. “What’s the last one?”

  Laura took a deep breath in, then puffed out. “This is something I’m working on just now. And it’s not easy.”

  “What?”

  Laura looked her right in the eye. “You need to believe that you’re worthy to have a good life. That you have the right to be where you are, in the good situation you’re in, and to enjoy it.” She went back to mixing. “In all honesty, that’s a lot easier to feel when you’re helping others. A lot easier.”

  Faith blew out a long stream of air, just like Laura had done. “Wow. That’s heavy.”

  “It’s not easy,” Laura agreed. “But I’ve been focusing on that for a little while. We have to teach the kids that, you know, that they are capable and worthy of having goodness in their lives. Apparently most of us have blocks to that, on one level or another.”

  “Gosh,” Faith said. She’d never even thought about that. “So how do I start believing that? Like, really properly believing it all the time?”

  Laura grinned then. “Well, you’re really stubborn, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Okay, imagine I told you that I thought I didn’t deserve a good life. What would you tell me?”

  “I’d tell you that you did, of course,” Faith said.

  “Right. And every time I got scared of bad things happening, or every time I pushed progress away, you’d tell me the same thing right?”

  Faith nodded. “Yes.”

  “So tell yourself that. Every single day. Every single time that fear crops up. That’s what I try and do.”

  “Okay,” Faith said, trying to take it all in.

  Then Laura turned and winked. “And I’ll tell you, too. Because there’s no way my best friend is going to go in self-destruct mode. You’ve got a good life ahead of you, Faith Franklin, and not even you are going to ruin it.”

  *****

  Chapter 19

  The passionfruit-banana bread was a disaster. Perhaps they’d stirred it too much, or they’d forgotten an ingredient, or the ratio wasn’t quite right. In any case, what came out of the oven was dry and hard, and Faith tipped it into the trash. Normally she’d have been annoyed, but she felt too inspired to care.

  She also felt too inspired to be intimidated by the police chief, who entered with his gun-toting colleagues just after Faith and Laura had tidied the kitchen. He set up shop in one of the bedrooms and called everyone in one by one, and Faith felt quite blissfully brave.

  Meanwhile, Faith decided that enough was enough. She wasn’t going to go prying and poking about into the murder cases anymore. After all, it was not her job. She was merely a tourist taking a safari trip in Kenya, not any kind of police officer or investigator. So a tourist she decided to be.

  “Too late to take up that game of cards with you, Arthur?” she asked cheerfully. Jasmine had been summoned into the makeshift questioning room first, so everyone else crowded in the lounge, disappointed by the lack of cake, but making up for it by visiting the bar perhaps a little too frequently.

  “Not at all, Faith,” he said warmly. Faith liked Arthur more and more each day. He was becoming a father-grandfather type figure. It had been a long time since Grandma Bessie had been married, and Faith had never had a father of her own, so his gentle and kindly manner certainly filled a gap. She internally begged Grandma Bessie not to flip into her overbearing mode and scare him away, out of all of their lives forever. He was certainly a calming, steadfast presence she didn’t want to lose, and he softened Grandma Bessie like butter. “Who else is in?” he asked the room.

  Grandma Bessie said, with uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm, “I might as well.”

  Arthur put his arm around her. “That’s my girl.”

  Faith still half-expected Grandma Bessie to push him away, and rebuke him for calling her a girl when she was a fully grown woman, but she didn’t. She actually snuggled into his arm and smiled. Faith realized perhaps things didn’t always go wrong after all.

  Laura and Yale said they’d join in, too.

  Faith looked over expectantly at Nathan, but he was picking at the fabric on his chair and looking downcast. Faith felt her heart lurch, in sympathy for his. She went over to him and perched on the chair arm. “Babe, will you play with us? Please?”

  He looked up, and Faith saw the hurt in his eyes. Perhaps it had been there for a little while, but she’d not allowed herself to notice it. “Are you sure you want me to play?” he said, an edge to his voice.

  Faith didn’t back away, hurt, as she might have done before. Instead, she smiled. A genuine, warm smile, that came from her heart. Rather than feeling full of nervousness, which she often did when everything wasn’t fully well between them, which it hadn’t been for a while, she felt full of love for him. She wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes. It wouldn’t be the same without you, Nate.”

  Nathan watched her for a moment, then a smile spread over his face,
too. He interlinked his fingers with hers, like they always used to. She realized just then that they hadn’t done that in a long time. Too long. Her heart felt so full.

  “All right,” he said casually, but she could see the joy in his eyes.

  Sophie and Greg, who were equally loved up, decided to join in, too, sitting next to Faith and Nathan. Richard looked reluctant, but found a small smile and said, “Oh, go on then.”

  Mary was talking to the other police officers outside, so they began their game without her. Arthur shuffled the cards and dealt everyone two, face up on the table.

  It was then that she walked in, clutching a fan of passports in her hand.

  “Care to join in, Mary?” Arthur asked. “We haven’t started properly yet.”

  “Oh, thank you, but I can’t,” Mary said. “After this questioning, we’re leaving for Nairobi, and I’ve got to organize everything before we leave. I have everyone’s passports here.” They’d been advised to hand them over for safekeeping. Everyone had handed them over, except Roy, who ‘could take care of his own stuff, thank you very much’, and Greg, who said he’d lost his passport once and was paranoid about it, so he always kept it on his person. Mary gave him a teasing smile. “Where’s yours, Greg? Lose it yet?”

  “Aha,” Greg said with a wicked smile and a gleam in his eyes. He withdrew it from his top pocket and put it on the table, then gave it a little tap. “Right here.”

  Mary smiled back. “Okay, forgive me.”

  Greg laughed. “Oh, don’t be so serious, Mary.”

  Mary handed out everyone’s passport. “Keep them safe, everybody.”

  “Yes, mom,” Yale joked.

  Mary looked genuinely touched to be called that. “Well done, son.”

  Laura took her passport and opened it to check she had the right one. “Ugh, my picture is awful. No one, and I mean no one, is allowed to look at it.”

  Of course, Nathan leaned over and swiped it right out of her hand. He laughed at the picture, though he was just teasing. “You look like a disenfranchised Tinkerbell.” Then he showed the picture to Faith. Laura had her trademark little blonde bun on the top of her head. Her ears stuck out, and she had her usual fairy-pixie look. What made it so funny, though, was her miserable expression.