Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (13 page)

“What’s wrong? Mom, are you okay?”

“That’s her,” she wailed, pointing to a messy pink-and-white pile on the rocks below Yoshe’s balcony. A big wave sloshed against the boulders, drenching the colorful rags with salt water.

“Don’t panic. That can’t be Yoshe,” I said, crouching down next to her and gripping her hands, and then helping her to her feet. I brushed off the sand sticking to her black trousers. “We probably crossed paths on the way over here. I’m sure she’s up onstage at the conference talking about her childhood in China and how she carries those memories into every recipe. Competing like mad with the Thai lady we just heard and furious to get upstaged.” I smiled, aware I was babbling but hoping it was in the most soothing way. I smoothed her hair. “There’s no reason for her to be on those rocks.”

“That’s the exact outfit she showed me yesterday,” said my mother, wrapping her arms around her torso. Her teeth began to chatter. “Pink and white. She said
she was so tired of everyone wearing black—she wanted to stand out for this reading, look young and fresh. I swear it’s her, Hayley.” She burst into more weeping and sank back to the pavement. I looked around for someone to flag down—in this town you were rarely alone. But now, when I needed help most, there was no one.

“I’ll go take a look. If I signal to you, call 911. In fact, call them right now anyway and tell them what’s going on. Or Bransford. He’s in my contacts list.” I pressed my phone into her palm. Detective Bransford was going to love being called out because my mom saw a pile of pastel rags on the beach, but better safe than sorry.

“Oh, please be careful,” my mother croaked. “I’d feel so awful if she was in trouble and we did nothing. But it’s not worth you getting hurt too.”

I hopped over the retaining wall and began to crawl hand over hand across the rocks, which were more damp and slippery than they had looked from a safe distance. I crept a little closer, just near enough for the pale face and dark hair to materialize against the pink clothing. Yes, Yoshe. And her neck was crooked at an unnatural angle. An enormous gray gull glided in and settled on the rock next to her head.

“Get away, you stupid bird!” I hollered, imagining him pecking at her. Not wanting to imagine where he’d start. I waved my hands until he flew off. “Call the cops!” I screeched back at Mom, gripping the slick coral beneath me. “Better let Dustin know too.”

Within half an hour, the block was thick with police cars, emergency vehicles and personnel, and a fire engine. My mother and I had been stashed in the backseat of one of the patrol cars, with its engine running and the heater blasting. We’d been asked to stick around until they secured the area and had time to question us about our gruesome discovery. My hands and pants were stained green by the crawl across the rocks, and Mom was doing her best to clean my palms with a spit-dampened tissue. It gave her something to do other than stare at the scene outside the cruiser, so I didn’t object.

A rap on the window caused us both to startle. A tall woman carrying a bamboo tray of steaming mugs and
a plate of cookies motioned for us to open the door. Gripping her collar closed and breathing hard, Mom tapped on the window until the officer standing guard nearby unlocked our door.

“I’m Reba Reston, the manager here,” the woman said, pointing to the bed-and-breakfast. “I thought you might be able to use these. This is such terrible news about Ms. King.” Then she handed us each a cup of peppermint tea and slid the cookies onto the seat beside me.

Chocolate chip. Homemade or from a package? Without thinking, I picked one up to nibble. Homemade. The tiniest bit dry, though just about anything would taste like sawdust right at this moment.

“We appreciate your concern,” I said automatically.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to help,” said Reba, wringing her hands. “I was in the back office answering phone calls and confirming bookings, and before that was breakfast, so I never heard anything out of order. And then I had just gone to the restroom when you ladies arrived. Such a terrible thing to happen. Do you suppose she was a drinker?”

Mom sputtered, nearly choking on her first sip of tea. She swallowed hard and straightened her shoulders. “We have no idea what happened. Whatever gave you the idea that Miss King was a drinker?”

“Just that it wouldn’t be easy to topple off that balcony. They designed it chest-high on purpose even though some of our guests complained that it ruined their sight line when they were seated in the deck chairs. But of course, it was most important to avoid
exactly this kind of thing.” She wrung her hands again. “Maybe if you were really, really drunk you could do it,” she mused. “Or intent on doing yourself in.”

The thought came to mind that she was positioning herself to defend her establishment against possible lawsuits.

“I wouldn’t have pegged her for either,” Mom said. “A drinker or a suicide. And besides, if you truly wanted to do yourself in, there must be better ways. You could count on breaking some bones—that’s about it. Unless she dove headfirst….” My mother shuddered.

A cop approached, talking into his phone. He motioned Reba away from the cruiser and slammed our door shut. She melted back into a small crowd that had gathered like vultures circling roadkill. We both sniffled a little, watching through the cruiser’s windows as the paramedics reached Yoshe’s body. After the police photographer finished taking pictures, they loaded the body onto a stretcher, silent like an old movie. Behind them, the sun slid out from its cover of wispy clouds, and the water slapped happily against the breakwater. Two policemen stayed behind, searching the area around the rocks, where the body had been. One pointed up at her balcony, where a third man was studying the railing. I put my arm around my mother, who couldn’t seem to stop shivering.

“I’m betting that woman was just trying to cover her behind,” I said.

“This makes no sense,” she said. “Yoshe was so excited about reading from her memoir. And there’s no
way she’d get drunk in the morning anyway. I’m not a dietician or a psychologist, but she was a health nut. She told me all about it when I walked her home yesterday. Why bother to eat right if you’re thinking about killing yourself anyway? And she prided herself on taking the stairs. That’s why she specifically asked for a room on the third floor. Though the view wasn’t bad either.”

“She looked like she was in good shape,” I said.

“You have to take care of yourself as you sled through middle age—that’s what she told me,” said Mom. “She said Sigrid thinks those extra pounds will never catch up with her.”

I pictured her lumbering across the stage without much grace. “They already are.”

Mom sighed. “I got the idea that she’d been nagging Sigrid about her weight. Which I don’t think you’d do with someone you barely knew. Would you? Did you notice at
La Crêperie
she tried to steer her toward a salad?”

“I noticed. It didn’t work. In fact, it backfired.”

Mom snuffled and blew her nose into a clean tissue. “Yoshe was most of the way through another cookbook. Asian-style flavors like her others, but this was going to be home cooking. She traveled around China, collecting ideas from local chefs and grandmothers and the remnants of her own family. It sounded so good. And now I’ll never have access to those recipes.”

“Mom, the publisher will make certain it gets finished. She’s a big moneymaker for them. People are
crazy about authentic family connections—especially these days when the world is in such turmoil. The publisher would no more let her recipes languish than if they found a long-buried manuscript of Julia Child’s.”

But I knew the tears were about something else altogether—the shock of losing someone she so admired and had begun to know personally. The absolute horror of finding someone dead. Two people in the span of three days in my case.

I was distracted from those morbid thoughts by the arrival of Detective Bransford. He appeared rumpled and tired, as though he’d been shorted in the sleep department the night before. But not unattractive. In fact, his unfinished appearance made him seem a little more vulnerable. Almost human. Like he could use a hug. Which made me realize that as bad as finding a body was for us, maybe it was worse for him. Because he was ultimately responsible for protecting his island and the people on it. And things were going horribly in that department.

The cop who’d been talking on his phone gestured at us. “They’re in the back of my cruiser,” he told Bransford, loud enough for us to hear through the window.

The detective came over, opened the door, and peered in, frowning. “Hayley, Mrs. Snow.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re here. I hardly know where to start.”

“Isn’t it just awful?” Mom asked. “She was such a talented cook and writer. It’s a terrible loss to the food community. Even ordinary cooks who wouldn’t
otherwise have had the nerve to try an Asian recipe adored her. She helped make foreign food accessible.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means,” I said, taking Mom’s hand, my kind feelings toward Bransford ebbing away. “I think he’s finding it hard to believe that we’ve discovered a second dead person within the span of three days.”

“It does pique my curiosity,” the detective said. “Suppose we begin with why you happened to end up here.”

“We were doing Dustin Fredericks a favor,” Mom said. “Yoshe didn’t show up for her panel and I knew where she was staying, so I volunteered to pop over and knock on her door. Only she wasn’t in her room. And then we thought maybe she was snoozing out on her deck or running through a few rounds of the sun salutation and didn’t hear us. And so we came out here. And that’s when I spotted her.” Mom’s composure cracked and she began to cry. I scowled at the detective, who ignored me.

“And how did you happen to know where her room was?”

My mother explained that she’d walked her home the day before after having a lovely lunch on Petronia Street. She started to describe the dishes we’d sampled, but he cut her off.

“Would you say you were the last one to see her alive?”

“I couldn’t say that and be sure it was true,” Mom said, pressing both hands to her chest. “Though no one
at the conference remembered seeing her this morning. I imagine your pathology experts would be able to pinpoint when she died. Don’t you think?” Before he could answer she continued. “We certainly don’t think she threw herself over the railing. The manager wonders if she was drinking, but again, your people could be the judge of that should you decide an autopsy is in order. Which in this case, I imagine, would be a slam dunk.”

“Was the door open when you arrived? Unlocked?” asked the detective, who seemed a little flustered by losing control of his interview to my mother.

“We didn’t try the door,” I said. “We were not interested in breaking in. We only wanted to remind her she was due at the conference.”

“Something different for you,” said Bransford.

“No need to be snippy,” said Mom. “We’re all a little tense. It’s been a terrible morning.”

At that moment, Dustin Fredericks roared up on his scooter, no helmet, thin hair wispy in the wind. He weaved through the crowd around our cruiser and wobbled to a stop, looking distraught. Like a man who saw his livelihood ebbing away, I thought suddenly. His face paled as he saw the stretcher bobbing over the rocks, Yoshe’s body draped in a silver blanket.

“What the devil?”

“It’s definitely Yoshe King,” Mom said sadly. “We found her on the rocks below her balcony.” She turned back to the detective. “It occurs to me that if I were wondering whether someone pushed her over that
railing, the question that naturally comes before that is whom she would have let in the door.”

The faces of both Dustin and the detective tightened to alert.

“Pushed over?” Dustin asked. “You mean she was murdered too?”

Once the police had finished interviewing all of us, and Yoshe’s body had been loaded into the ambulance and driven away, Dustin got back on his bike and roared over to the conference. To Mom and me, it didn’t seem right to return to listening to panelists talk about food, no matter how much we’d paid to attend. And no matter how much we’d looked forward to the weekend. The air had leaked right out of our enthusiasm. Most of the day was shot anyway. And for some reason I couldn’t quite pinpoint, Mom felt responsible for Yoshe’s death. If only she’d thought to look for her earlier, or had called to check on her the night before, or half a dozen other equally unreasonable possibilities.
So sightseeing was also out of the question. Even a tour of Hemingway’s place, former home to the most tragic and morose figure on the island, didn’t tempt her.

I could think of two things that might both calm Mom down and cheer her up. One was cooking. And eating what we’d made. After all, other than a couple of slightly dry cookies and the too-sweet tea, we hadn’t had a thing since breakfast—and for me that egg sandwich had come very, very early.

The second was a tarot card reading by Lorenzo. I offered Mom the two options. She was in favor of both.

“Lorenzo sets up at the sunset celebration on Mallory Square almost every day, and we’re a little early for that,” I said. “But he’s usually there ahead of time.”

“Let’s try,” Mom said. “I’ve been dying to meet him.”

Mom was a tarot fortune-telling addict—she rarely made a move without consulting her Rider-Waite tarot pack. Her entire divorce agreement with my dad had been negotiated by tarot. And the decision to sell her own mother’s house—same thing. Since moving away from home, I’d found myself sliding in the same direction. Only my results hadn’t been consistently friendly—the cards I’d been dealt recently scared me half to death.

“You could read for us just as well,” I said, feeling a sudden flush of trepidation. Mom wouldn’t tell me really bad news, even if she saw it in the cards. “He’s not always on target.”