Page 4

CHAPTER FOUR

AGENT KING ESCORTED HARPER BACK into the hotel. He had a hand on her arm, and he looked pissed.

Harper, contrariwise, looked happy. That was a startling expression for her. I suppose she was deriving a sense of satisfaction out of the situation. It wasn’t often that the Will of the Town’s determination to keep us all here in Haigton had a beneficial effect.

“Back so soon, Agent King?” I asked, with as pleasant a voice as I could muster.

He nodded, looking around the hotel, up the stairs, and then at me. “I’ve changed my mind,” he declared. Even his cheeks were flushed. “We’ll conduct the investigation from here.”

The other agents were filing into the foyer. They didn’t look pissed. They were wearing neutral expressions. It was probably part of the training. Stoic Facial Styles 101. Maybe I was just imagining that they were hiding their bafflement.

“I’ll need your dining room, thank you.” King strode to the archway and into the dining room without waiting for an answer. Perhaps it was a good thing I didn’t get to respond. I don’t think he would have liked my answer.

I hurried to get ahead of him. “Lunch has just finished. Let me clear the table—”

“We’ll all need meals, thank you,” King said, heading for the round table that was farthest from the archway. It was in the corner between the front windows and the high mullioned window by the kitchen door.

I know my mouth dropped open. I halted, as King pulled out a chair and put Harper in it, then pulled out a chair of his own. His agents were stripping the other tables of their cloths and pulling them closer to King’s.

I glanced back at the archway. I think I was looking for support, or a clue about how to handle this.

Ben was the only one standing there. He nodded and tilted his head toward the kitchen.

I got the message, but I didn’t like it. “That’ll be seventy dollars a head,” I told King’s back. “In advance.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Give me an invoice. It’ll be settled later.”

“I need the money now to buy the food. Everyone in Haigton pays for the month ahead.”

“I don’t have a cash fund.”

“I accept all credit cards, PayPal and e-transfers.”

He turned in the chair to look at me.

I crossed my arms.

King glanced at the agents setting up the tables. “Give her the credit card, Mooney,” he said shortly. “And book six rooms for tonight.”

Six !

I spoke without thinking it through carefully. “Rooms are doubles, and they’re three hundred a night.”

King stared at me for a long time. Behind his swiveled shoulder, I saw that Harper was smiling. It was a grim, highly pleased expression.

King smiled, too. His expression held no humor. “Make it four rooms,” he told Moody.

Moody was one of the women, a brunette with a severely short hairstyle. She dug a wallet out of her inner jacket pocket and came toward me. She wore no expression. “You do vegan, I hope?”

For seventy dollars a head I would serve meals to her in a bikini if she wanted it that way…except that would ensure she and everyone else in the room instantly lost their appetites. “I do vegan,” I told her, with a flat tone that matched her lack of expression. “I’ll get the machine.”

·

Olivia, Trevalyan, Ben and Frida were hovering around the kitchen door when I entered. They coalesced around me, a tight circle of concern.

“You have to let them use the dining room,” Ben said.

“We can keep tabs on them if they’re in there,” Olivia added.

“They want rooms,” I said flatly. “You’re not getting rid of them. Frida, they want four rooms for tonight. Can you manage?”

She nodded, her natural ringlets bouncing, and scurried to the back door that emerged under the stairs.

I turned and grabbed the credit card terminal off the shelf. I didn’t ask why they wanted to keep tabs on the feds. I wanted to know what was going on, and I didn’t even like Harper all that much.

“If you’re going to stay in here,” I told Ben, Trevalyan and Olivia, “then start up the deep frier over there. Four hundred and fifty degrees. These guys want a meal, pronto.”

“What are you going to serve?” Olivia asked, looking around.

“The quickest and least healthy meal I can think of,” I told them. “Bacon cheese burgers and fries. Turn the griddle on, too. Hottest setting.”

All three of them looked as though I’d asked them to conduct open heart surgery.

“I’m not asking you to be line cooks. Just turn equipment on. Go!” I moved back out into the dining room. Mooney stood where I had left her. I added the line items to the terminal…and felt a little faint when I saw the bottom line. I mentally added a salad to their meals, and I would dig out one of the frozen apple pies and make a custard to go with it.

But Mooney just swiped the card without comment. She also didn’t tip. Huge surprise.

“You might want to put one of those tablecloths back on the tables,” I told Mooney. “Cutlery is on the sideboard.”

I moved over to the long table and swept up as much of the dishes and cutlery as I could carry and headed back into the kitchen.

Only Olivia was left. Also, not a huge surprise. Neither Ben nor Trevalyan liked to cook, although Ben would bake occasionally and Trevalyan was a master chef when it came to spell ingredients.

“What can I do to help, Anna, dear?” Olivia asked. She stood by the griddle. Olivia was our default mayor, and she often looked as though she had stepped out of a 1930s movie. She wore glamor the way I wore jeans. Her collar-length brown hair was bobbed and waved with a smooth gleam that promised it felt like silk. Her lips were a ruby-red, perfect bow. Her skirt stopped just below her knees, and she always wore loafers with heels, which made the most of her slender ankles. Perhaps she had bought the shoes in the 1930s, and they had simply not worn out. They were classically styled.

I was tempted to tell Olivia to just stay out of my way. I would be moving fast. But I’d just been bitching to myself about a lack of help. I said, instead, “Stand over by the end of the prep table, huh? I’ll call as I need things.”

Olivia stepped over to the end of the steel table while I adjusted the dials on the griddle. It came up to temperature fast. Then I started calling out ingredients.

Olivia scurried, I prepped, then cooked. Frozen, partially cooked French fries, prepared burger patties, a salad that always looked good as long as the ingredients covered the color spectrum. Bacon and patties on the griddle. Fries in the deep fryer. Apple pie in the microwave, then into the oven to finish warming it up. I had Olivia stir the custard, which could thicken beyond use if it wasn’t watched.

While everything was cooking, I sliced pickles, tomatoes, onions and shredded lettuce. I piled them in one of the divided steel trays and sent Olivia out to the dining room with the tray of condiments – mustard, relish, ketchup, mayonnaise.

I even had black bean burgers that I usually made for Wim. I fried one of those up for Mooney. I dug out the vegan mayonnaise and sent Olivia out with instructions to place it directly in front of Mooney.

“What are they doing out there?” I asked when Olivia returned.

“Listening. Agent King is asking Harper about Gouverneur.”

“Was that where Calloway was killed?” I asked.

“I don’t know, my dear. I couldn’t linger. It would have looked suspicious.”

I glanced at her, the chef’s knife lifted so the tomato juice dripped onto the chopping board and not down my sleeve. Something I’d learned the hard way. “If you all want me to keep the feds here so you can spy on them, you need to, you know, spy on them.”

“Oh, we are ,” Olivia said placidly. She returned to the pot of custard and picked up the spoon.

Barely ten minutes later, I took four plates out to the dining room. Olivia carried two.

King stopped talking as we entered and looked around as though he wanted to get pissed all over again at the interruption, but we were carrying the meal he had demanded.

We placed the plates on the round table. I put Mooney’s in front of her. Each plate had a heaped serving of salad, still steaming fries and a burger bun with a burger inside.

The rest of the burger ingredients, including chopped avocadoes, sizzling bacon, slices of Havarti cheese, shredded carrot and slices of mini peppers, along with the usual tomato and onion slices and lettuce, were in the divided steel trays, which we placed in the center of the table.

“Dessert is on the sideboard. Don’t let it get cold,” I warned them. The agents’ eyes all got larger as they looked from the round table to the sideboard and back.

King got to his feet. He looked at Harper. “Don’t leave the hotel.”

Harper got to her feet. “I’m getting a drink,” she declared.

“Sure. Get drunk, if you want,” King told her. He didn’t quite smile.

Harper did, though. “So I can stupidly talk myself into confessing to something I didn’t do? Dream on, King.” She stalked out of the dining room. But Harper always stalked. I didn’t think anything of it.

King apparently didn’t, either. He sat at the round table with his agents. None of them looked up. No one said thank you.

I left. I had spying to catch up on, apparently.