“I know,” I told him. “But first, we have customers to serve.”
I hefted the evidence box under the counter, out of sight but decidedly not out of mind. As I turned to greet the Methodist ladies, I caught Dottie watching me from her table. She raised her teacup in a small salute—a gesture that somehow said she understood perfectly well that boxes full of old murders had to wait their turn, but that they would not, under any circumstances, be forgotten.
The lunch rush was about to descend upon The Perfect Steep like a plague of polite locusts, all wanting their specific teas prepared just so, their sandwiches cut in certain ways, their scones warmed to precise temperatures. For the next three hours, I would be Mabel McCoy, tea shop proprietor, dispenser of Earl Grey and sympathy in equal measure.
But tonight, after I’d completed whatever culinary adventure I’d promised Dash, after the dishes were done and Chowder was snoring in his bed, I would open that box. I would read about Ruby Bailey and Reverend Pickering, whose affair had scandalized the island. About two people who’d died at Turtle Point in a violence that spoke of rage and twisted love and secrets worth killing for.
The door chimed again. More customers. The lunch rush had officially begun.
Forty years was a long time for secrets to ferment, like tea left too long in the pot—growing bitter, darker, impossible to swallow. But secrets, unlike tea, couldn’t simply be poured down the drain.
I smiled at the Methodist ladies and reached for my order pad, as if there weren’t a box beneath my counter holding the story of two people who’d loved unwisely and died violently.
As if the truth hadn’t been waiting all this time, patient as the tide, for someone to finally care enough to look.
CHAPTER
TWO
The cognac erupted into flames with an enthusiasm that Julia Child would have called “marvelous” but which I found mildly alarming. The blue fire leaped toward my kitchen ceiling with the kind of ambition usually reserved for escaping prisoners or social climbers at the yacht club.
“Julia said to let it burn off naturally,” I muttered to myself, gripping the pan’s handle as flames licked upward. “She did not mention ceiling height requirements.”
The back door opened just as the flames reached their crescendo, and Sheriff Dash Beckett walked in to find me wielding a flaming pan like some sort of culinary Viking preparing for battle.
“Should I call the fire department?” he asked, that half smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Or is this dinner and a show?”
“This,” I said with as much dignity as one could muster while potentially setting one’s kitchen ablaze, “Is a classic French technique.” I smoothly slid the pan off the heat, and the flames began to subside, leaving behind the rich scent of caramelized onions, wine, and what might have been slightly singed eyebrow.
Chowder watched from his kitchen bed, wearing his Friday evening attire—a small velvet smoking jacket. He regarded the flaming pan with the kind of detached interest usually reserved for watching other people’s children have tantrums in grocery stores.
“Coq au vin?” Dash asked, moving closer to inspect the pan’s contents. He’d changed out of his uniform into jeans and a dark henley that made him look less like Grimm Island’s sheriff and more like someone who might actually have a life outside of law enforcement. I tried not to notice how his shoulders filled out the shirt and seemed to mold to every muscle in his arms and chest. I said I tried not to notice, not that I was successful at it. Dashiell Beckett was a pleasure to look at.
“The Julia Child version,” I confirmed, returning the pan to the heat at a more reasonable temperature. “I found the recipe this morning at Dr. Morrison’s office, of all places. Clarissa had left last month’s Southern Living splayed open on the wrong page—she’d been looking at ‘Ten-Minute Dinners for Busy Moms’ but the magazine had fallen open to Julia’s four-page manifesto on proper coq au vin. Sixteen steps, each one more elaborate than the last. Step seven actually used the phrase ‘a good, vigorous flame’ as if flames came in varying degrees of enthusiasm.”
“Sixteen steps?” Dash pulled out one of my kitchen stools, the one that had developed a personality disorder—it either squeaked like a dying mouse or sat silent, depending entirely on whether you hit the sweet spot three inches from the left edge. He found it immediately, settling into silence with the kind of precision that made me wonder what else those observant sheriff eyes had catalogued about my kitchen. About me.
“My cooking involves two steps—open container, apply heat.”
“That’s a lie and we both know it,” I said, stirring the chicken to coat it in the now-flameless but beautifully aromatic sauce. “I saw you julienne carrots last week. That’s skilled knife work.”
“YouTube University,” he admitted. “Amazing what you can learn at two in the morning when you can’t sleep.”
I wanted to ask what kept him awake—was it the job, the adjustment to island life, or something deeper that had driven him from whatever life he’d lived before Grimm Island? But I’d learned that Dash revealed things in his own time, like a cat deciding when it wanted affection. Push too hard and he’d retreat behind that professional façade that fit him like armor.
Instead, I poured two glasses of the wine I’d opened for the recipe—a decent Burgundy that Patrick had laid down years ago. I’d finally started working through his wine collection this year, each bottle a small goodbye I hadn’t been ready to say until recently.
“Needs forty minutes to finish properly,” I said, handing him a glass. “Julia was very specific about the timing.”
“To Julia, then,” Dash said, raising his glass. “And to flames that don’t require fire departments.”
We were just settling into the comfortable rhythm of conversation—he was telling me about Lois Goodacre’s latest complaint about her neighbor’s wind chimes being “aggressively musical”—when his radio crackled to life.
“Sheriff, we’ve got a situation at the harbor.” The dispatcher’s voice carried the tone of someone trying to maintain professional calm while dealing with the absurd. “Multiple calls about something huge in the water.”
Dash set down his wine glass with the resignation of someone who’d learned that Grimm Island’s definition of emergency could range from actual danger to Mr. Fredericks losing his emotional-support iguana again.
“Define ‘huge,’” he said into the radio.
