Page 57
This time, Margaret quietly ground her teeth. The Lièvre was a complex dish for sure, but at least it centered on rabbit, which she knew pretty well by now. She was praying that her assignment would at least be something in her wheelhouse.
Gestard took a step closer and handed Margaret the final card. “For you, Bouillabaisse de Neptune!”
Mandi and Stacy actually gasped.
Margaret stared at Gestard and blinked in disbelief. She looked at her card to make sure she’d heard him correctly.
Was he kidding?
Marple had heard of the dish, of course. She had read about it. But she had never even tasted it. Few people had. The dish named on her card was a complex seafood stew from the South of France. Almost nobody had the nerve to make it.
Because it was considered to be the most complex version of bouillabaisse ever conceived.
“Yes, Chef,” said Margaret numbly. You bastard, she thought.
CHAPTER 57
TEN MILES AWAY, Virginia was on another secret mission, this time in broad daylight.
She was still trying to shake off the mystery of the long-dead family and wondering if her so-called psychic visions were really a gift after all. Sometimes they scared the hell out of her. Sometimes they made her question her sanity. And sometimes they gave her disturbing nightmares about things she would rather not think about. Like three bodies in the snow.
This morning she desperately needed a distraction, and this was it.
She was driving Poe’s Hummer again, making a slow pass by the aluminum-sided field house outside Archer’s Branch. This time there were a bunch of pickups and heavy-duty trailers outside. She turned into the parking lot and drove to the far end. She parked facing out behind a dumpster and climbed down from the cab. She’d left Baskerville back at the lodge today. The huge dog tended to attract a lot of attention, and Poe had given Virginia concise instructions: “Be stealthy.”
As she approached the building, Virginia could hear loud engine sounds reverberating from inside. She passed the main entrance, which had a sign saying CLOSED TO SPECTATORS TODAY. She tiptoed around the snow piles to the back of the building, where a set of factory-sized garage doors were pulled shut, with snowy tire tracks leading underneath. On one side, she spotted a standard metal door with DELIVERIES stenciled on it. She stepped up and gave the handle a tug. The hinges creaked. Unlocked!
She eased the door open just enough to slide through and stepped into a back room filled with pallets of motor oil and bins of grease-covered engine parts. The supplies were vibrating from the noise inside.
The back room opened directly onto the arena. Virginia crept forward, then stood at the edge of the doorway and peeked through. What she saw made her neck hairs stand up in excitement.
The entire surface of the arena was covered in a thick layer of raw dirt, bulldozed into a round track and piled up in spots to form ramps and mounds twenty feet high—like an oversized obstacle course. The whole place was lit up like the stage at a rock concert. The roar was coming from a half dozen monster trucks, some in factory colors, others embellished with wild airbrushed designs: mostly fanged animals and buxom females. Some of the trucks were revving on the sidelines. Others were making practice runs around the course, bouncing and fishtailing on tires five feet tall. A cluster of young men in coveralls whooped from behind orange cones in one of the pit areas.
Virginia could smell the hot rubber and diesel exhaust in the air. She felt like she could almost smell the testosterone.
The trucks weren’t going full-out. But still, the noise! All that horsepower echoing against the metal walls was almost deafening. As if that din wasn’t enough, massive PA speakers were blasting thrash metal from the rafters.
All the drivers and mechanics Virginia could see were young men, late teens, early twenties. Lots of muscle. Lots of ink. The few females in the arena seemed to be hangers-on. The uniform for the girls was skintight jeans and logo T-shirts. In spite of huge NO SMOKING signs everywhere, a couple of the groupies were holding lit cigarettes. Virginia recognized one of them from a distance. It was her fellow Pisces, the scrawny clerk from the general store.
Virginia tucked herself behind the doorframe and pulled out her phone. She turned it to landscape format and tapped Record. Holding it out to the side, she panned the whole arena from end to end, capturing the track, the trucks, the sounds, the whole Mad Max scene. As she monitored her screen, she saw a few of the guys from the pit heading her way. She did a quick zoom on her camera. Shit! It was the same three dudes who’d hassled her in the parking lot the other day.
She wasn’t looking for an encore.
Virginia tucked her phone away and ducked back into the storage room.
“Hey!” one of the dudes shouted through the noise. “What the hell do you want?”
She bolted out past the supplies and through the metal door. Outside, she grabbed a length of two-by-four and braced it against the outside door handle. She kicked the other end hard against the frozen pavement until it bit and held.
As she made a dash for the Hummer, she heard pounding from inside. They were wiry guys. Virginia knew they’d break through eventually, or get smart and come around from the front.
Either way, she’d be long gone. She’d seen all she needed to see. And she couldn’t wait to tell Poe.
CHAPTER 58
AFTER CHEF LUC GESTARD left the kitchen and headed downstairs, Margaret Marple hung back to commiserate and celebrate with Stacy and Mandi. No doubt their final assignments were daunting—nearly impossible to pull off. But they all agreed that, pass or fail, the class had been worth it. Stacy smiled. Mandi was practically in tears. Hugs all around. After what they’d been through together, they were now a band of sisters.
Marple said her good-byes and headed for the parking garage. The rusty pickup was on the ground level, near a large pillar. The garage had been just about empty when Marple arrived at dawn. Now it was packed.
