I was about seventy percent certain that about seventy percent of Judy’s stories were made up on the spot, but if my maths was right, that made me four hundred and ninety percent certain that at least some of them were true. “Well.” I gave a could-be-worse kind of a shrug. “We’ve successfully dodged that bullet.”
Judy gave a nostalgic sigh. “Apparently so. If only poor Terry had.”
“I thought you said he was decapitated,” said Oliver with barristerial attention to detail. “Not shot.”
“Well yes, but they found his head eventually and—”
Tragically, and bytragicallyI meanthankfully, we never found out what had happened with Terry’s head, because we were interrupted by a scream from the kitchen.
Chapter 26
I say a scream. It had been two screams. Both, as far as I could tell, of frustration rather than fear or pain or even really anger.
“Tell this girl,” Mum said when Oliver and I burst into the kitchen to get our parent on, “that she is the worst sous chef I have ever had. No, wait, thatanybodyhas ever had.”
“Jaz,” I said as deadpan as I could manage, “you’re the worst sous—”
“Tell this old lady,” Jaz replied, more to Mum than to me, “that she’s a fucking shitty cook.”
“Language,” said Oliver at roughly the same time that I said, “I think she already knows.”
“Shitty!” Mum sounded way more indignant than she had any right to feel, given that the shittiness of her cooking was a matter of extremely detailed public record. “Does this look shitty to you?”
She pointed at the carnage of vegetable matter strewn across her work surfaces. Unlike Oliver, I wasn’t an expert in the British legal system, but I had a feeling that evidence-wise, Mum’s case for slander was on a pretty shaky footing.
“Is that rhubarb?” I asked.
“Judy had a lot from her garden,” Mum explained, “and it’s really the same as celery.”
“And grapefruit?”
“Very healthy. A lot of vitamin C.”
“And turnips?”
Mum gave a Gallic shrug, which was, in its own way, just as expressive as one of Jaz’s. “Well, Oliver is vegan. I need to bulk it out with something.”
“I’m not eating a rhubarb, grapefruit, and turnip curry,” Jaz told me. And, honestly, I didn’t blame her.
Oliver, on the other hand, blamed her at least a little bit. “Jasmine, we are guests in Odile’s house.”
“Yeah, but that don’t mean she can fucking poison us.”
I made a doomed effort to play peacemaker. “If it helps, she’s not killed me yet, and now that she’s stopped putting meat in everything, we’re not even likely to get salmonella.”
“Luc.” Mum gave me a look of mostly play disapproval. “Do not talk about your mother as if she is not in the room.”
“You’retalking about my mother as if she is not in the room,” I pointed out. “And youaremy mother.”
Mum folded her arms and looked haughty, smearing cinnamon up her sleeves as she did so. “Your mother can talk about herself however she wants. It’s her right as a reclusive eccentric older French lady.”
Of the many adjectives Mum had just applied to herself, I thought maybe half actually applied. “You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you?”
With another scream, this time of “Why are you all so fucking weird,” Jaz retreated from the kitchen, looking like she couldn’t imagine anyone who could possibly be having a worse experience than the one she was having right at that moment.
“You know,” said Mum as the last of the dogs vanished into the hall in Jaz’s wake, “I think I like her very much.”
Despite this, Oliver still seemed to feel the need to say, “I’m sorry she was so aggressive.”
