“ALBA STRU.”
I was staring down at Drago, clasping his clammy hand in mine. His face was contorted with pain as he choked out his last words.
“Alba Stru…”
I sat up with a start.
“What’s that you said?” Jim poked his head out of the kitchen door. He was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the night before. Of course. Since he’d slept sitting up-if he slept at all-he wasn’t too wrinkled or mussed. Except for his hair. A thick lock of it hung over his forehead. It made him look younger and a little sleepy in an incredibly sexy way.
He was making French toast, and it smelled divine. “It sounded as if you were talking another language.”
“Not a language, a name.” I stretched and swung my legs off the couch. When I sat up, my head didn’t hurt, and the world didn’t wobble. Both good signs. “It was one of the things Drago said to me before he died.”
“And this Alba person…” Jim called over his shoulder, as I made my way into the dining room. As much as I would have liked breakfast in bed (or more accurately, breakfast on couch), I knew it was time to stop being coddled and get back to reality. I had to be at work in a little over an hour. There was no time for spoiling or shilly-shallying.
Jim brought two plates in, smiling when he saw me up and around. He pulled a chair away from the table for me and chuckled softy when he saw my eyes widen. In front of me was the most incredible breakfast I’d ever seen.
The French toast was made with cinnamon bread that I knew for certain Jim hadn’t found in my kitchen. He must have been up and out early, then back before I even knew he was gone. Each slice of bread was at least an inch thick, coated with a thin glaze that made syrup extraneous.
“It’s a sugar lover’s dream.” I dug in and was rewarded with a taste as heavenly as the aroma. “But wait a minute… what’s that you said about Alba?”
Jim was taking a sip of coffee, enjoying watching me enjoy my breakfast. “That’s right, Alba.” He set his cup on a saucer. “When I heard you say the name, I wondered. Do you know who she is?”
“Not a clue,” I admitted. “I’ve checked the phone book, traditional and the Internet white pages. No one named Stru listed anywhere. And it’s a weird name, anyway, isn’t it?”
“Foreign.” Jim sliced his French toast into neat pieces. He held his knife and fork oddly, the way the British do, fork upside down in his left hand, knife in his right. “Like I said, when I heard you say it, I thought you were speaking a different language.”
I held my own fork the regular old American way. It was halfway to my mouth when an idea hit out of the blue.
“You don’t like it.” Jim mistook the frozen fork and the look on my face for displeasure. He frowned. “The French toast. It’s too sweet, isn’t it?”
“There’s no such thing as too sweet. And I love it, honest.” He might have been more inclined to believe me if I didn’t push back my chair and race away from the table.
When he found me again, I was in my bedroom, at the computer that sat on a desk in the corner by the window.
“Looking for a new French toast recipe?”
I like the way he saidlooking. It was likecooking with that scrumptious, longoooo sound.
“Not looking for a recipe,” I told him, unconsciously adding the same longoooo. I clicked my way around the Internet. “Looking for Romanian.”
He braced his hands on the desk and leaned over me for a better look. “Because…?”
“Because I’ve been a moron!” I would have slapped my forehead if I wasn’t afraid it would make my head start hurting all over again. “Look!” I pointed at the screen. “Romanian translations.Albastru. It’s not a name, it’s a word. It meansblue.”
“Blue?” Confused, Jim stared squint-eyed at the Web page. I remembered that though he knew most of the details of our investigation, there were some things I hadn’t had a chance to fill him in on yet. Like our visit to the Angel Emporium.
“I should have known the moment Rainbow DayGlow mentioned it,” I said. When he looked as if he was about to ask who I was talking about, I waved away the question. It would take a while to even begin to explain Rainbow, and I still needed to shower and get dressed for work. We’d have to save the explanation for another time. “She said that one of the symptoms of foxglove poisoning is that everything looks blue.”
“And Drago told you. About the blue part, at least.”
“Yup. He said it.Albastru. Blue. The poison was working in his system, and he was close to death. Everything must have looked blue to him by that time. Which means I must have looked like a perfect idiot, telling Tyler that he needed to track down someone named Alba Stru. Darn!” I slapped my hand against the desk and hit my mouse pad. The cursor jumped on the screen. “I don’t care about me, but the whole point of this investigation was so that Eve could look good in Tyler’s eyes. He must think we’re amateurs.”
“You are.” Jim’s smile was wry. Still, something in his words stung.
“Think he’s figured it out yet?”
“You mean Tyler? Is he smart?”
“He thinks he is.” I drummed my fingers against the desk. “How much do you think he knows that we don’t?”
Jim could only shrug in response. I sighed as I turned back to the monitor and clicked off-line.
Little did I know that soon enough, we’d find out just what Tyler knew-and more.
SEAFOOD IS A FUNNY THING. ACCORDING TO JIM, how it ends up tasting depends an awful lot on how fresh it is, how it’s cooked, and for how long.
Who was I to argue?
The good news was that the first recipe we tried in class that night was for steamed mussels, and surprisingly, mine were pretty tasty. Even Jim said so.
The bad news was… well, there were really two bad things. The first was that Eve was late for class. She got there just as we were sopping up the last of the mussel broth with thick slices of crisp-crusted Vienna bread. I’d worked all day. She’d worked all day. We’d taken our breaks at different times.
In other words, I hadn’t had a chance to find out where she’d ended up when she followed Beyla from the gallery the night before, and I was dying to know.
The other bad thing wasn’t related to our investigation. It was all about cooking. No big surprise there.
I hated to burst Jim’s bubble, especially when he saw the mussels as a sign from the cooking gods that I had turned a corner. But throwing mussels in a pot, dumping water on them along with a little chopped garlic and a bit of lemon juice and turning on the heat, that was one thing.
Grouper was the second item on the menu. Sauteeing a fillet after it had been soaked in milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, dredged in flour mixed with parlsey, then encrusted with thinly sliced potatoes… that was a whole different ball game.
I struck out.
Not to worry. Every cloud has a silver lining, and Fabulous Fish and Shellfish night was no exception. When Jim sampled my mussles and told me how much he enjoyed them, he leaned in close and whispered that he’d let me make him a batch of the yummy mollusks for dinner one evening very soon. Silver lining number one: a night dozing on my dining room chair hadn’t made him change his mind. He wanted to see me again.
And number two? Well, I’m not one to toot my own horn. Usually. But the minute Jim said that we were going to try an experiment in class and adjust standard recipes for larger and smaller quantities, I knew I was home free.
I am, to put it bluntly, smarter than the average bear when it comes to numbers.
He asked us to double recipes.
No problem.
He asked us to halve recipes.
Piece of cake.
He told us to pretend that we were hosting a dinner party and that at the last minute, Aunt Margaret decided to bring Cousin Henry and the kids. We’d need to triple, then add a wee bit more (I loved when he said that!), and just before dinnertime when Henry called to say the kids had the flu, we were forced to cut back again.
I sailed through the exercise as easily as I cruised through the legion of numbers I faced at work each day.
“Aunt Margaret plus Cousin Henry, plus how many kids?” Eve wrote a long line of numbers on a legal pad, scratched them out, and started again. She pulled at her hair with one hand. “And how many ounces in a cup?”
I was way past that. “Sixteen cups of chicken broth,” I whispered the answer to her, feeling like I was cheating on a math test. I shot up a hand to give my answer to the class.
“Sixteen cups of chicken broth.” Beyla answered before I could.
“Very good.” Jim went over the calculations for those who weren’t as quick. “And how many pounds of chicken?”
I’d figured that out already, too.
Beyla’s hand went up before mine. “Ten,” she said, as confident as I would have been if I had a chance to answer.
“And the whipping cream?” Jim glanced my way to give me the perfect opening, but Beyla was on a roll.
“Four and three-quarters,” she called out, and from the way she did, I could tell she was feeling mighty satisfied with herself. “Four and three-quarters cups.”
Considering that she came from a country that used the metric system, I should have been impressed. I would have been if I wasn’t so busy being envious at being shown up at my own game. Not only had the woman outsmarted us enough to stymie our investigation, not only could she cook to beat the band, she was also as much of a math whiz as I was.
I tamped down the jealousy that reared its ugly head. It was unworthy of me, and besides, maybe that painful fact was really silver lining number three in disguise.
“I think we know more about Beyla than we used to,” I told Eve, who gave me a blank stare in return.
“She’s good with numbers. Really good with numbers. I wonder what that means.”
AS IT TURNED OUT, WE NEVER HAD A CHANCE TO discuss Beyla’s mathmatical talents. We had more important things to think about.
Eve was as anxious to talk to me about her adventure the night before as I was to pump her for information about where she’d gone and what she’d seen. There was no use doing it in class, and we both knew it. Every time we looked at her, Beyla was talking quietly with her cooking partner, John. We couldn’t take the chance of them overhearing anything we said. Besides, there was nothing we could do about our own mystery while we were busy trying to solve the mysteries of cooking fish.
The moment we got out of class, though, was another story.
Jim had agreed to come with us, wherever we were headed, but unfortunately, Monsieur Lavoie waylaid him on our way out the door. From the looks of the list of things the little Frenchman had to discuss with him, I knew Jim would be detained for hours. He gave us a reluctant wave as Eve and I continued out the door.
I had my extra set of car keys in my hand as soon as we hit the sidewalk. I looked around to see if my car was parked anywhere in sight. “Let’s get moving.”
“Not that way.” Eve headed in the other direction. “And you won’t need your keys.”
“Because you have the other set.”
She waited for the light to change, and when it did, we crossed the street. “Because we’re not driving,” she said.
“You mean…” Eve’s strides were long, and I hurried to catch up. “She came here? To Clarendon? Within walking distance of the school? That’s bizarre.”
“You have no idea! Wait until you see where we’re going.”
She turned the corner and continued three blocks up from Très Bonne Cuisine.
At this point, I should probably say a little more about the geography around here. Most folks hearArlington, and they think that it’s a city in Virginia. Not true. Arlington is a county. There is no city of Arlington. But the neighborhoods within the county all have names. And the one we were in, as I’ve mentioned before, is called Clarendon.
The Clarendon neighborhood is nice. Really nice. It’s also a little quirky. That, and the fact that there’s a Metro station for the commute into D.C., are what give it its charm. And its sky-high real estate prices.
Million-dollar condos stand side by side with neighborhood bars. Trendy eateries that attract the movers and the shakers from across the river are next door to everyday places, like hardware stores and tanning salons.
The entire area is a jumble of old and new, chichi and downright odd. The farther we got from the bright lights and action of the fashionable spots, the quieter and quainter the neighborhood became. I would like to sayseamier, because that would add a dash of adventure to our investigation, but I won’t get carried away. If the neighborhood had been seamy, I wouldn’t have let Eve set foot in it. And I wouldn’t have been there, either.
I’ll go with colorful, instead. Just like the wash from the pink neon sign glowing from the nearest storefront.
Miss Magda’s Tea Room: Fortunes Told, Secrets Revealed.
Eve stopped right outside the front door.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. “You mean Beyla came here? To a fortune-teller?” I stood on the sidewalk, staring at the picture of the giant hand in the window that showed the life line, the love line, and something called the mound of Venus. “Why?” I asked Eve and myself. “Of all the places she could have gone, why here?”
Eve shrugged and pointed across the street. “She parked over there. I know for sure it was her because I watched her like a hawk all the way from Georgetown. I saw her go inside this place. A couple minutes later, she was back in her car. I followed her after that, too, but the only place she went was an apartment building over on Ballston. I checked the class list Jim gave us the first day of school. That’s where she lives.”
I chewed on my lower lip and stared at the neon sign in the window as if just concentrating hard enough would force Miss Magda to reveal all her secrets right then and there. “So Beyla was here, but she didn’t stay long. When she left, was it with or without what she’d found at Arta?”
Eve shrugged. “Beyla wasn’t carrying anything. Going into the tea room or coming out of it. Maybe the alarm went off too soon. Maybe she didn’t find anything at the gallery after all.”
I remembered the flash of Beyla’s smile that I’d seen before I took that misstep and landed in a heap on the pavement in the alley. “No. I know she found what she was looking for. Maybe it was just something small enough to tuck in her pocket. Like a computer disc.”
“And maybe there’s only one way to find out.”
I eyed the hand in the window suspiciously. “You don’t think I’m going to have my fortune told, do you?”
Eve tugged my arm. “It says Secrets Revealed. What have we got to lose?”
Did my pride count?
I swallowed it down and went inside.
Pink neon sign aside, Miss Magda’s Tea Room was a bare-bones kind of place. The room we stepped into was a nine-by-nine square, with walls painted a particularly unappealing shade of pumpkin. There was a faded rug in the center of the floor with a table set in the middle of it, two chairs facing each other on either side. The window with the hand and the neon sign was at our backs, and to one side of us was a battered wicker settee. On our right was a long, low table where mountains of flyers and out-there newspapers extolled everything from the study of alien landings to the latest techniques in mediumship.
There was no sign of tea. Or of Miss Magda, for that matter.
In the center of the table was a crystal ball and a small brass bell. I rang it.
No answer.
“Maybe we need to make an appointment,” Eve whispered.
I didn’t have that much respect for the paranormal. In fact, I didn’t have any at all. “The sign on the front door says Open, Come In,” I pointed out, not whispering just to prove how unintimidated I was. “Miss Magda must be communing with the spirits somewhere.”
“Don’t make fun.” Though Eve had started out in front of me, she hadn’t ventured as far into the room as I had. She leaned over my shoulder. “Some people have gifts we can’t possibly understand.”
“Yeah, the gift of talking people out of their hard-earned money.” A door on the far wall caught my eye. Ignoring Eve’s protests, I walked over and rapped on it.
Nobody responded, but the door hadn’t been shut all the way. It swung open.
The light was off in the back room, but even so, I knew right away that something was wrong. There was a window on the far wall, and the bit of light that seeped through it outlined something lying on the floor. Something bulky and as big as a-
I felt for a light switch, and the when I found it, my worst fears were confirmed.
Miss Magda was communing with the spirits, all right.
Firsthand.
She was lying on her back, her eyes bulging and her mouth open in a silent scream of horror. She’d been strangled with her silk head scarf.