Do or Diner: A Comfort Food Mystery Read online

  The Deadly Special

  My diner!

  My heart started pounding. I’m not the greatest in an emergency. My brain just sits there in my head like a lump of dough that won’t rise.

  Max and Clyde ran toward me, and I rushed to meet them. The snowflakes hit my face and eyes and melted on my contact lenses.

  “Trixie.” Max breathed heavily, and puffs of steam hung between us. “The kitchen.”

  “Oh no! Fire! Is anyone hurt?” I immediately thought of Juanita. I knew that she was single, and, oh merciful heavens, I didn’t know anything else about her or how to contact her loved ones. I didn’t even know her last name. “Juanita?”

  Clyde grabbed a chunk of my sleeve and pulled me down the path to the diner. “No! She’s okay. Everyone’s okay. Well, not everyone.”

  Either my brain wasn’t computing or Clyde was speaking Swahili. “Huh?”

  “It’s Marvin P. Cogswell the Third,” Max said.

  The name sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Huh?” I repeated.

  “Marvin P. Cogswell the Third,” they said in unison.

  Oh yeah, that helped…so much.

  “The health inspector!” Max added. “It looks like he had a heart attack.”

  Do or Diner

  A Comfort Food Mystery

  CHRISTINE WENGER

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Christine Anne Wenger, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62638-2

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  There are so many people that I’d like to thank, but this book reached publication due to the brilliance of my agent, the very special and delightful Michelle Grajkowski of 3 Seas Literary Agency, who believed in me. And to Jesse Feldman, editor, Penguin Group, who said YES! This one’s for you, ladies! Thank you so very much!

  Chris

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Excerpt from A Second Helping of Murder

  Chapter 1

  What on earth did I do?

  A thrill of excitement shot through me as I stood in front of the Silver Bullet Diner. It was still hard to think of it as my diner, but the wad of keys in my pocket assured me that it was.

  It was mid-March in upstate New York, Sandy Harbor to be exact, and the snow was falling in big fat flakes, adding to the six-foot banks around the parking lot. Still, the bright red neon of the diner’s name and the blue neon proclaiming AIR-CONDITIONED and OPEN 24 HOURS shone through the snow and lit the way for patrons arriving for lunch.

  It was my diner now.

  Maybe it wasn’t excitement that I felt, but more like anxiety. In diner lingo, maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew. Or maybe I was having buyer’s remorse.

  Probably all of the above!

  As I surveyed my new kingdom on the frozen shore of Lake Ontario, I mentally listed all the things with which I needed to familiarize myself.

  A huge gingerbread Victorian house located to the left of the diner and closer to the water had been recently vacated by my aunt Stella. It was also now mine. It had almost disappeared in the heavy snow, with its pristine white paint and dark green shutters. It had a major wraparound porch that I planned to use in the summer. I’d sit in a forest green Adirondack chair and watch the waves of Lake Ontario lap at the shore.

  I looked over at the twelve little white cottages that dotted the lakefront. It looked like the big Victorian had a litter.

  They were called—care to guess?—the Sandy Harbor Guest Cottages.

  My mind flashed back to the two weeks every summer that my family rented here. We always rented Cottage Number Six, on the front row of the first chain of cottages. My sister, my brother, and I would stay in the water from sunrise until sunset. Mom and Dad had to drag us out of the water, slather us with sunscreen, feed us, and listen to our pleas to go back in.

  Now all twelve cottages belonged to me, and I’d be renting them out to the next generation of fishermen and families who’d enjoy them.

  The Silver Bullet was the centerpiece of my little kingdom. Smiling, I saw that the parking lot was filled with cars that were frosted with a couple inches of snow. Customers entered the diner in groups, laughing and talking and looking forward to a good meal. They left the same way they came, but now sated by delicious comfort food and finishing their conversations before brushing the snow off their cars.

  The scent of baking bread drifted on the crisp winter air and mixed with other cooking scents. My mouth was watering just thinking of what I was going to order later.

  Slogging through the snow to the side of the diner, I savored every aspect of its outside appearance: the curved lines, the metallic diamond-shaped edging around the windows, and the porchlike entranceway. The Silver Bullet looked like it had just been towed into place, not like it had been there since 1950.

  I looked for the cement cornerstone, which I’d always thought was so romantic, but it was buried under several feet of snow. I knew what it said by heart: STELLA AND MORRIS “PORKY” MATKOWSKI, MARRIED 1950, TOGETHER FOREVER IN OUR LOVE.

  They were together until Uncle Porky died a month ago.

  I sighed, thinking about the two of them. Porky and Stella always finished each other’s sentences and walked hand in hand. But now Stella was alone, just like I was alone, but I hoped to change that as soon as I met more people in the community. I remembered Sandy Harbor as being a friendly place, and that was just what I needed—friends.

  Actually, Aunt Stella wasn’t alone right now. A gaggle of her friends came for Porky’s funeral and stayed at the house. They helped her through the first month of losing her husband, and now she was en route to a senior community in Boca with them. They planned on living
like the Golden Girls characters, but first they were going on a cruise around the world.

  Because she was busy entertaining her friends, packing to leave, and searching for her missing passport, Aunt Stella didn’t have much time to show me the entire operation.

  “The same people have been working here forever. They know what to do,” she’d told me several times.

  I pointed my boots toward a slushy path that led to my new house. Maybe I should unpack and get settled, but I was eager to get more acquainted with everyone and everything.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. All this was so overwhelming. Mostly because I, Beatrix Matkowski (formerly known as Beatrix Burnham), was starting over at age thirtysomething.

  I was freshly divorced from Deputy Doug Burn-ham after ten years of marital nonbliss. And, after ten years of trying to start a family and failing at it, Deputy Doug proved that it wasn’t his fault by getting Wendy, his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, pregnant with twins.

  The day after I found out about Doug and Wendy, I was downsized from my job as a City of Philadelphia tourist information specialist, a position that meant I sat at a walk-in tourist information site and dispensed heaps of tourist information.

  How things had changed in a few months!

  They say that bad things always come in threes: Uncle Porky died before my divorce and the downsizing.

  After the cemetery, where we left Uncle Porky’s ashes in the Matkowski family crypt, everyone came back to the diner for food and remembering. My mother, who had rolled into town with my father in their motor home, cried and laughed with relatives and friends who she hadn’t seen in years. My father told humorous tales of Uncle Porky, his older brother.

  My mom, Aunt Stella, and Aunt Beatrix all got a little tipsy and giggly, and they fell asleep in one of the back booths of the diner.

  When my mom sobered up, she decided that since Stella was going around the world, she and my dad should go to Key West and take Aunt Beatrix with them. I didn’t get the parallel, but early the next morning they all took off, except for Aunt Beatrix, who was taking Amtrak back to NYC because she’d been to Key West “fifty years ago, and it’s probably the same.”

  It was over the Wednesday special at the diner, ironically a Philly steak sandwich and a small chef salad, that Aunt Stella discussed selling me “the point.” “The point” is local talk for the Silver Bullet, the cottages, and her Victorian house—everything that Stella and Porky owned.

  “I’ll make you an offer that you can’t refuse,” she’d said. “And we’ll figure out a payment plan.” She wrote down some dates and dollar amounts in columns on the back of a paper place mat that advertised local businesses.

  Aunt Stella was far too generous. She was practically just handing me the whole pierogi. Almost.

  So I went back home to think about it, and then my life fell apart with Doug.

  Then the pieces fell together again.

  Doug, acting very civilly, offered to buy out my share of the house, furniture, and whatever. Apparently Wendy liked my faux–Williamsburg colonial and the school district, and she had just come into a trust fund. She wanted Deputy Doug, my house, and its entire contents enough to buy me off handsomely, on the condition that I leave town.

  I shook hands with my husband of ten years and took a last look at my beautiful house just outside Philadelphia. I had a pang of regret at leaving all the lovely antiques that we’d accumulated throughout our marriage.

  But I wasn’t going to be an antique! I was going to start over—clean slate, fresh, new, reborn.

  I stuffed my personal belongings into my boring gray Ford Focus and drove from Philly to Sandy Harbor in one day.

  Suddenly, I had a nice chunk of money for a down payment—Wendy’s “kiss-off” check—that was burning a hole in my Walmart purse.

  Aunt Stella told me that the mayor of Sandy Harbor had made a purchase offer on “the point” but she’d turned him down. He wasn’t family, she’d said, and besides, “He owns half of Sandy Harbor already.”

  She’d also turned down another restaurateur who wanted to add another restaurant to his empire because he wasn’t family either.

  Aunt Stella emphatically stated that the figures on the place mat were only a guideline…that I was her niece, and she knew that I’d take good care of what she and Uncle Porky had built.

  I’d told her that I absolutely would take care of everything and keep our family memories safe, from the smallest black-and-white picture of Porky hanging on the wall to the huge collection of recipes from family and friends.

  But the diner had me worried. As the flickering red neon sign on the top of the diner said, it was open twenty-four hours and had been since 1950. The Silver Bullet was an icon in these parts.

  Aunt Stella shook off my concern with a wave of her hand, telling me not to worry.

  Yeah, right, I had thought as I’d pushed a check for partial payment over to her and she’d dropped the keys into my hand.

  Aunt Stella had patted my cheek and said that Uncle Porky would’ve been very happy. They hadn’t had children of their own, and they had often wondered what they’d do with their property.

  Owning my own diner was heaven-sent. I just loved to cook. It had been my salvation on those lonely nights when Deputy Doug wasn’t home. I made comfort food, and heaven knew that I needed comfort. As a matter of fact, I comforted the whole neighborhood with stews, pierogi, mac and cheese, pot roasts, chili, and hip-enlarging desserts.

  Perfect diner food.

  I decided to savor my first trip to the Silver Bullet as its owner and save it for last on my list of places to visit and observe.

  Or maybe I was procrastinating. I could cook; I knew that. I grew up in the Silver Bullet kitchen and waitressed there when I was in college, but I didn’t know if I could handle the business aspect of it all. I’d learn, however. My first step would probably be ordering food and supplies and how to do payroll.

  I headed to the bait shop on the other side of the boat launch. It didn’t belong to me, but there was someone there that I needed to visit. It’d been a long time since I’d seen Mr. Farnsworth.

  Opening the front door of the bait shop, I walked in. Smiling down at me from a high ladder was Mr. Farnsworth. He hadn’t changed a bit since I was a kid…well, maybe a bit. His hair was as white as the snow falling outside, and I noticed a few more lines to his face, but he was as slim and as friendly as ever.

  “If it isn’t little Trixie Matkowski!” He slowly climbed down the ladder and pulled me into a bear hug against his red flannel shirt. “Stella told me that she sold to you. Wanted to keep it in the family, she said.”

  “Well, Mr. Farnsworth, I’m not so little anymore, but, yes, I’m the new owner.”

  He dropped his hands and stepped away. “You’re the spitting image of your aunt Beatrix. She’s a looker, that gal.”

  Aunt Beatrix is my dad’s older sister and like my fairy godmother. I could never predict when she’d surface from her penthouse on Fifth Avenue in New York City and appear, but she always seemed to know when I needed her the most.

  So, Aunt Beatrix (and don’t call her Trixie!) should be arriving any time now.

  I walked over to look at the cement tubs that usually contained minnows and the like. They were empty, and the familiar gurgling of the water pumps was absent.

  Way back when, my sister, brother, and I, along with a bunch of friends, would hit the bait shop at least once a day to watch the bait swim around.

  It was almost better than TV.

  “Mr. Farnsworth, are you getting ready for trout season? Getting worms?” I expected a big fishing season when the lake defrosted. The more fishermen, the more business I’d have.

  “Sure. I’ve ordered worms for those who use natural bait, but I’ve also ordered poppers, spoons, plugs, and jigs. And for the fancy fishermen types, I’ve ordered buzzes, blades, cranks, tubes, and vibrators.”

  Vibrators?

  “Is ther
e anything I can do to help?”

  “Not a thing, Trixie. I’ll be fully loaded and ready for trout season.”

  “Good. Thanks, Mr. Farnsworth. I’ll help you stock the shelves if you’d like.”

  He shook his head and grinned. “No way. It’s my favorite part of my job.”

  I half expected him to hand me a lollipop and send me on my way, as he’d done when I was a kid. Mr. Farnsworth always had an ample supply of them. Then I noticed a fishbowl on the counter by the register. It was full of colorful lollipops.

  As if he’d read my mind, he walked to the bowl, pulled out a grape one—my favorite—and handed it to me with a slight bow.

  It had been years since I’d had a grape lollipop. I tore open the plastic wrapper and popped it into my mouth.

  I pulled out the lollipop. “You remembered?” I asked, stunned.

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Of course.”

  I heard a thumping noise from the side of the shop. From what I could recall, the stairs led to a storage area above. The noise got closer, then stopped.

  Then at the bottom of the steps, by a display of army green waders, was a…cowboy?

  He tweaked the brim of his hat to me. “Howdy, ma’am.”

  This guy seemed like a bona fide, real cowboy. Museum quality. Now, he was something you didn’t see every day in little old Sandy Harbor.

  His black cowboy hat and boots made him seem about six foot four. He had on a pair of dark denim jeans that he was born to wear. A crisp-looking white shirt was tucked in, and a brown leather belt with silver conchos surrounded his waist. A belt buckle the size of one of the Silver Bullet’s platters sat on his flat stomach. His boots were spit shined—maybe snakeskin—and he wore a brown suede bomber jacket.

  I managed to pull the grape sucker from my mouth.

  “Hi.”

  I noticed that his sky blue eyes traveled down the length of my body, taking in my red, puffy knee-length parka, my shin-high hiking boots, and the purple scarf draped around my head and neck like a mummy. I wondered if he noticed how my purple mittens and purple scarf matched my grape sucker.