Seduction (8 page)

Fortunately, I couldn’t spend that much time with them, since I had to be at school at eight in the morning. No one in the house was even awake then, except occasionally for Marie-Therèse, who would sometimes be having coffee on the balcony while I was scrambling to leave.

“Will you join me?” she asked one day.

I checked my watch. It was barely seven. I hadn’t wanted to be a bother to anyone in the house, so I still took my morning coffee at the stand-up coffee bar down the street from the school, but it was kind of her to offer. “Okay,” I said.

She called for one of the servants to bring another cup. When it came, it was gigantic, the size of a soup bowl. On the tray beside it was a pot of steaming milk and a big butter croissant. Much better than at the zinc bar.

She touched my hand. “My dear,” she said, her blue eyes crinkling. “Please don’t be offended by our ways. We are not accustomed to outsiders.”

“I could tell,” I said, sipping my
café au lait
.

“You must find us very odd indeed.”

Ya think?
“Er . . . maybe it’s a cultural difference,” I said.

“Ah. Very diplomatic, Katy.” She set down her cup with a tiny tap. “I do apologize for the way you’ve been ignored by the others. They just don’t know what to do with you, I suppose.”

“Do with me?”

She sighed. “Don’t you see, it’s all about Peter, dear,” she said. “You’re the one person who could take him away.”

“But . . .” My mind was racing. “You mean from here?” How long did they think he was going to stay, anyway?

“Oh, don’t listen to me,” she said, shaking her head
dismissively. “Such a foolish old woman.” The gesture made her look almost like a girl. It was obvious that she had once been very beautiful. She still looked good, despite her age. Her white hair was perfectly coiffed into lush waves that framed her face, with its perfect cheekbones and lovely teeth. She wore a silk robe and high-heeled slippers, and her nails were manicured and painted a delicate shade of pink.

She was so different from Gram, who dressed in long skirts and shawls and wore her hair in a bun with a doily on top of her head. But then, the witches of Whitfield were different from most people in a whole lot of ways, and beauty was probably the least of them. But fundamentally, she was like Gram. She was kind. She was gentle. She had a sense of humor. And she was willing to be nice to me when almost no one else was.

“Perhaps you would like a party?” Marie-Therèse suggested.

I groaned. Didn’t these people think about anything else? “Er . . . thanks, but parties aren’t exactly my thing.”

“Ah. For me as well. But I am old. The other women—the younger ones—adore them. They live for parties.”

Why didn’t that surprise me,
I thought.

“But soon my birthday will arrive—my eightieth—and there will be a party for me that I must attend.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “That’s different. I’ll certainly come to your birthday party.”

She smiled a little, although I couldn’t read the emotion in that smile. She didn’t look at me.

I should mention that I have a talent besides telekinesis. I’m also an
object empath
, which means I can “read” objects. I can tell a lot about where things have been just by touching
them, if I concentrate. And it’s not just objects that I can read. I can learn a lot about people, too—sometimes more than I want to—by touching them. That doesn’t happen, though, unless I concentrate on it. Otherwise, I’d go crazy feeling other people’s feelings all the time. It also doesn’t seem fair, peeking into people’s secret selves. I mean, if someone wants you to know something about them, they’ll tell you, right? It’s an invasion of privacy.

But there was something about the old woman’s smile that touched my heart. Was she sad about growing older? Was she afraid that no one would come to her party? I thought maybe if I knew her story, I could help in some way.

So I touched her hand. Gently. Deliberately.
Let me in.

Her feelings were like a car crash happening. Screeching metal, blurry images, unnamed, unspeakable horror. She was terrified down to the marrow of her bones.

I pulled away, gasping involuntarily at the shock, my own heart racing. “I need to go,” I said.

Marie-Therèse looked at me strangely, as if she knew what I’d done and was ashamed of what I’d found inside her mind.

“Er . . . can’t be late for class,” I mumbled as I picked up my knife carrier and edged out the door.

She nodded slightly, graciously. But I saw her hands. They were trembling.

CHAPTER

•

TEN

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Subject:
Hi

Hi, Aunt Agnes—

Well, we’re nearly done with Soups and Appetizers! Today we made things stuffed in pastry—baked brie en croute with a bunch of different coulis, or fruit sauces, mini Wellingtons, spinach pie in phyllo, apple strudel, and some other things. Margot the Canadian overcooked her Wellingtons and Chef Durant called her a barbarian. Then she called him a lot of things I didn’t think middle-aged women ever even thought, let alone said, and threw her name tag at Chef before stomping out. Chef picked it up between his thumb and index finger like it was a rat, and then dropped it in the twenty-gallon garbage can.

Hope you and Gram are enjoying the summer. I miss you both.

—Katy

I hit send from a computer at the nearest Internet café, then headed back to the Rue des Âmes Perdues. Back at the house, Sophie asked me—all smiles and dimples, of course—to cook dinner for twenty this weekend, as a formal welcome for Fabienne. Frankly, I wouldn’t cook a turd sandwich for Sophie, but I liked Fabby, so I agreed to do it.

“Your friend Peter—he is very busy, I think,” Sophie said, primping her hair in the ornate living room mirror.

“Uh . . . I guess.” I didn’t want her to know how much it bothered me that Peter’s schedule and mine were so different.

“And so Fabienne’s dinner will be good for you.”

“Oh?”

“But of course. Peter should see your talent, your skill.”

What he would see, most likely, would be my food-encrusted clothes and sweaty face, but I understood her point. Peter hadn’t tried my cooking since I’d started at the Clef d’Or, and I was kind of excited that he would be at my big meal.

“It is important to use the assets one has.”

Oh. Meaning that I couldn’t rely on my
beauty
the way she could, because, according to her, I didn’t have any. What a piece of work. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll give you my grocery list as soon as I’ve worked it out.”

She waved me away. “Give it to the cook.”

I decided on a menu of clear soup with chanterelle
mushrooms, beet salad with Roquefort cheese and pears,
turbot en papillot
with remoulade sauce, potatoes Lyonnaise, asparagus in browned butter, candied tomatoes, and little cheesy pastry balls called
gougères
, followed by an eight-layer, mousse-filled chocolate cake covered in chocolate buttercream and a parti-colored bow made of rolled fondant. It was a pretty ambitious menu, especially since I hadn’t gone past Roasts and Braises at school, but I’d learned to cook most of the other things from Hattie, although she hadn’t used the French names for them. At Hattie’s Kitchen, we used terms like “fish cooked in paper” and “baked fried potatoes with onions.” We’d made the cake together for Peter’s brother Eric’s eleventh birthday.

Maybe I wasn’t learning that much new stuff at the Clef d’Or, after all.

The mansion’s cook, whose name was Mathilde, was fine about my making dinner and even offered to help me, except that Sophie gave her the night off. Actually—surprise!—all of the servants had been given the night off.

So I found out on the day of the dinner that I’d be preparing meals for twenty people absolutely by myself. I was so nervous, I thought about asking the general populace of the house if anyone felt like helping me, but I could guess what the response to that would be. Not that they’d have been much help, anyway; most of these women couldn’t tell the difference between a kitchen and a library, since they never set foot in either.

I was putting the finishing touches on the cake—had to make that first—when a miracle happened. Fabienne tiptoed downstairs into the kitchen with her finger over her mouth.

“Shh,” she whispered. “I’m here to help you.”

I looked around. “Is this a secret?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Well, okay, thanks,” I whispered back. “Er . . . can you tell me why we’re whispering?”

“My mother,” Fabby said. “She has forbidden me to come into the kitchen. She says it’s a dangerous place.”

Normally I wouldn’t give any credence to any thoughts Sophie had about food preparation, but in this case she was right. A kitchen
was
a dangerous place, especially if you didn’t know what you were doing. Even professional cooks got hurt all the time. So I asked Fabby if she was afraid, and she said no, although I knew she was lying. That’s something only a friend would do, lie so they could help you.

“You’ll be fine,” I reassured her, “as long as you do exactly what I say, okay?”

She nodded, swallowing.

“It won’t be that hard, I promise. Just a little hectic. And I really, really appreciate your help, Fab—”

I blinked. She was gone.
WTH
?

“Fab—” I gasped. She was back. Or something.

“
Zut alors
,” she said groggily.

“Where’d you go?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I was just so . . . nervous about cooking, that I . . .” She blinked. “It felt like Hawaii.”

“What?”

“I thought I was in Hawaii.”

I looked at the tomatoes in my hands. However weird Fabby’s behavior was, the dinner party would take place in five hours, and there wasn’t any time to waste.

“Well, you’re here now,” I said. Whatever had happened, we’d have to figure it out later. “Cut these in half and then take out the seeds with a spoon,” I said, handing her the tomatoes. “Go as fast as you can. We’ve got a lot to do.”

An hour later, we were doing pretty well, considering there were only two of us. Fabby set the table in the dining room upstairs and got out ingredients for me while I tried to keep everything moving on schedule. She was pulling bones out of the turbot when we heard Sophie shriek outside the kitchen.

“Fabienne! Are you in there?” she shouted as I heard her high heels
clack-clack
in the hallway. “How dare you—” Sophie appeared in the doorway like Darth Vader in a black pleather dress. “Where is she?” she demanded, stomping around the kitchen. “Where is my daughter?”

I was ready to protect Fabby by saying I’d forced her into K.P. duty, but then I noticed she wasn’t there at all. “Nobody here but us turbots,” I said, but Sophie didn’t hear me because she was busy slipping on a fallen beet skin and hollering like a banshee.

“The
Américaine
is trying to kill me!” Sophie screamed as she ran out, limping on a broken stiletto heel.

“Sheesh,” I muttered as I picked up the offending beet. She hadn’t even hit the floor. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I sing-songed. “Fabby?”

With an almost indiscernible
ping
, someone appeared on my prep counter. But it wasn’t Fabby.

“Aunt Agnes?” I asked, astonished.

Agnes is an astral traveler. She works in California, at Stanford University, and commutes there via magic.
“Grandmother felt you were in some kind of difficulty,” she said. “She sent me to you.”

“I’m just kind of busy,” I said as I ran my fingers along the turbot checking for pin bones. “But I’m glad you came.”

Agnes frowned, annoyed. “I knew she was overreacting,” she snapped, looking at her watch. “Well, I’m here now. May I help?”