A Catered Wedding

Book 2: Mystery With Recipes

by Isis Crawford

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Culinary Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Someone’s shot an arrow at the bride, and it isn’t Cupid…A mystery filled with “clever dialogue and an eccentric supporting cast” (Publishers Weekly).
 
Bernadette and Libby Simmons have been working twelve-hour days, and between whipping up sweet treats and catering high school graduation parties, the sisters have to fit one more event into their busy schedule: catering a high-society wedding that takes a very low turn…

Leeza Sharp is getting ready to have the wedding of her dreams. She’s got a $25,000 dress (gorgeous and made to order), a rich Estonian fiancé (head of a multimillion-dollar caviar empire) and a four-star menu (planned by none other than Bernie and Libby). Never mind that she's not really in love with her boring, bland groom-to-be.

But the dream wedding turns into a nightmare. Hours before she’s scheduled to walk down the aisle, Leeza takes an arrow to the chest. Now Libby and Bernadette have more on their minds than pouring Cristal and cutting up wedding cake: they’ve got an archery-inclined killer to find…

Includes 6 delectable recipes for you to try!

“The sisters’ playful rivalry, clever dialogue and an eccentric supporting cast make for plenty of cozy fun.”—Publishers Weekly

“Frequent humor, a couple of little-old-lady Marxists, and several delicious recipes complete the cozy picture. Recommended for culinary mystery fans.”—Library Journal

Release date: September 30, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Libby Simmons stifled a yawn as she regarded the wedding cake that she and her sister Bernie had stayed up almost all night making. She had to admit they’d done a great job. Even if the cake did lean a smidgen to the right, which, hopefully, no one would notice.

The croquembouche was beautiful, a tall, intricate tower of profiteroles, glazed with caramel, decorated with candied almonds and white roses, and balanced on a columned base of nougatine. Leeza would love it. Of that Libby was sure.

As Libby contemplated the cake she thought about how her life had changed since her sister Bernie had returned home. PB, as Libby had come to think of the years before Bernie moved back from L.A., Libby would never have attempted this cake. And she certainly wouldn’t have attempted making it while drinking Cosmopolitans.

But, although she’d never admit it to her sister, Libby admitted to herself that it had been fun staying up all night with Bernie, sipping cocktails, and giggling while they worked. It had been totally worth it—even if she did feel as if she’d crawled out from under a rock this morning.

“The reputation of A Taste of Heaven,” she’d pointed out to Bernie after her sister had mentioned baking the cake, “is founded on cookies, muffins, scones, and cheese and carrot cakes, not fancy French wedding cakes.”

“So what?” Bernie had countered. “That’s like saying Prada can’t make shoes and handbags at the same time.”

Trust her sister to mention Prada, Libby had thought. But then she’d always been a fashion magazine junkie, unlike Libby and her mom who’d bought their clothes at J.C. Penney.

“You know I’m right,” Bernie had continued.

“No, I don’t. Maybe Prada can diversify, but we can’t. We’re a shop, not a multinational company. Catering Leeza’s wedding is enough of a stretch.” Which was true. Between Leeza’s constant demands, running the store, and the high school graduation parties they’d picked up, she and Bernie were working twelve-hour days as it was.

“Anyway,” Libby had continued, “she’s got Jacques Bonet to make the cake. She doesn’t need us.” Jacques Bonet being the celebrity pastry chef of the moment.

“Not anymore,” her younger sister had gleefully informed her. “You should read the Post. He got busted for selling Ecstasy.”

“Terrific,” Libby had said. “Okay. So, Leeza will find someone else.”

“She wants us to do it. I mean how hard can it be?” Bernie asked as she’d whipped out a picture of the cake Leeza wanted. “All the thing is, is tiny custard-filled cream puffs, glued together with caramel, wrapped with some spun sugar and plunked down on some nougatine.”

“I know what a croquembouche is,” Libby had snapped, offended. “I’m not a culinary idiot.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Bernie had retorted.

Which mollified Libby slightly, even though she suspected Bernie was just saying that so they wouldn’t get into a ‘thing’. “It’s not the degree of difficulty that concerns me,” she’d harrumphed. “It’s the fact that we’re on overload as it is.”

Bernie had rolled her eyes, something that never failed to piss Libby off. “You know the trouble with you?” she’d asked.

“No. And I don’t care,” Libby had responded.

Not that that had stopped her sister Libby reflected because she’d continued on as if she hadn’t spoken. “The trouble with you is that you’re kakorraphiaphobic.”

“What?” Libby had asked. “That’s not a word. You made that up.”

Bernie had raised her right hand. “Swear it is. It’s in Roget’s Thesaurus. It means fear of failure. Look it up if you want.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“You know I’m not.”

Looking at her sister’s expression Libby knew she was telling the truth. This, she reflected, was why she’d stopped playing word games with her.

“Okay,” she’d told Bernie, “let’s get back to the matter at hand. First of all for your information, I don’t have a fear of failure. I have a realistic view of how much we need to do. What concerns me about the cake is that it has to be made at the last minute. It can’t stay. Which means we’ll be up all night making it, and then we still have the reception to get through.”

Bernie had grinned. “It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Yes, it will. Come on. Remember the all-nighters we used to pull in high school. We haven’t done anything like that in a long time.”

“I don’t know if I still can,” Libby had admitted. Much as she hated to say it, one o’clock was late for her now.

Bernie laughed. “Of course you can.”

“Well, you should have asked me first,” Libby had persisted, trying to keep control of the situation even though she could tell that Bernie knew she was winning the discussion.

“Sorry,” Bernie had replied. “I just assumed you’d see this as an opportunity to branch out. Not to mention the fact that we’ll be making an extra twelve-hundred dollars.”

“Twelve-hundred dollars?” Libby had asked.

“Yes. Which we could use to get new ovens.”

“You have to deduct food costs.”

“So we’ll clear eight-fifty,” Bernie had said. “That’s still not bad. None of the components are that difficult to make.”

Which Libby admitted was true. She ran through the facts in her head. Okay, the ingredients were cheap enough. They had the room and the equipment, except for a decent candy thermometer, which she could really use anyway. And the cream puffs were certainly easy enough. Pâte à choux was nothing more then flour, boiling water, butter, and eggs. And the vanilla crème patissiere wasn’t a big deal either. They could make that in advance and store it in the fridge.

Libby looked at the illustration more carefully.

“They have cones you can buy to fit the profiteroles around,” Bernie had told her as she helped herself to one of the strawberries in the strainer in the sink. “Not that it matters because Leeza wants the cake constructed freehand.”

“Considering she wanted a custom-made tent,” Libby had answered, “I would have expected nothing less.”

“Me either.” Bernie popped the strawberry into her mouth, then licked her fingers. “I did some research on the net. A large cake, which is about sixty centimeters wide, is made up of between 240 and 280 cream puffs. That’s not so bad.”

Libby had to agree that 280 cream puffs were doable.

“Did you know,” Bernie went on, “that the traditional way to serve the cake is by hitting it was a sword, with the bridesmaids catching the pieces in a tablecloth. Can you imagine the mess with the custard going all over the place?”

“No. I honestly can’t,” Libby had replied. Where did her sister get this stuff from anyway, Libby asked herself as she pointed to the base of the cake. “The trick is going to be molding the nougatine into columns.”

Bernie had drummed her fingers on the countertop. “We’ll figure it out.”

Libby wasn’t so sure about that, but the more she thought about it the more she was sure that as much as she hated to admit it, Bernie’s instincts probably were correct. This was a good business opportunity, and the truth was they were so far over their head already that one more thing probably wouldn’t matter.

“Okay,” she’d finally told Bernie. “Tell Leeza we’ll do it. Except we’re not using spun sugar. We’ll decorate the cake with sugared almonds and flowers.”

“But . . .” Bernie had begun.

Libby had held up her hand. “If she insists on the spun sugar we can’t do it. I won’t take a chance on the weather.”

“Fair enough.” Bernie had popped a third strawberry into her mouth. “Sugared almonds are the traditional decoration anyway.”

She’d been right to insist, Libby thought as she continued looking at the cake. Given the fact that it was raining, the spun sugar would have dissolved into little droplets by now. The only thing she hadn’t factored in was transportation. The cake had to go from the kitchen of A Taste of Heaven to the van and from the van to the temporary kitchen she and Bernie had set up on the Raid Estate and from there to the tent where the reception was taking place.

Just the thought of having to move the cake not once but three times—in the rain no less—made Libby reach for one of her chocolate chip cookies. She was supposed to be on Atkins, but there were times when only carbs would do and this was definitely one of those times. Libby was taking a bite of her cookie when Bernie walked in to the kitchen.

“We have to go,” Libby told her. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”

“I’m ready,” Bernie said handing her a cup of coffee from the pot she’d brewed for the store. “Here. You’re going to need this.”

Libby looked at what her younger sister was wearing. She could understand the black hip-huggers and the tank top, but not the shoes.

“You’re wearing pink wedges to stand in the kitchen? Are you nuts?”

“Hey,” Bernie told her, “I don’t comment on your Birkenstocks and you don’t comment on these. How’s the coffee?”

Libby took a taste.

“Sumatran?” she guessed.

Bernie nodded. “Good isn’t it?”

“Very,” Libby agreed. The way the day was going she was going to need several pots of the stuff and a bottle of aspirin. She glanced down at her sister’s feet again. “How can you wear those to work in?”

Bernie shrugged. “Some people wear flats and other people wear heels and wedges. I am one of the other people.”

“I just hope you don’t trip when we carry the cake out to the van.”

“Have I ever tripped?”

“No,” Libby conceded.

“Well, then don’t worry about it.”

“But I do.”

But then Libby admitted to herself, if truth be told she worried about everything. But if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have a successful business. Or at least that’s what she told herself. She finished the coffee and took a deep breath. It was time to move the cake.

They’d just finished loading it into the van, when Libby heard her dad calling her name. She looked up. Her father was leaning out of his bedroom window on the second floor.

“You be careful out there,” he told her.

Libby laughed. He’d been saying that to his daughters as long as she could remember.

“We’re catering a wedding Dad, not executing search warrants.”

“I’m talking about the aunts.”

Libby sighed. “Oh them.”

How could she have forgotten about Eunice and Gertrude Walker? They weren’t really her aunts; she and Bernie just called them that. They were distant relations, old friends of one of her mother’s cousins. Or something like that. Libby could never remember.

It wasn’t that they weren’t nice. After all, if it hadn’t been for them A Taste of Heaven never would have gotten this job. No. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that they were nuts. Until she’d met them Libby had thought that Marxists were something that only existed in history books. And if that wasn’t bad enough they did things like dye their hair magenta and go back to school to study entomology.

Libby still remembered the time their locust collection had escaped. That had been bad. But their driving was worse. Both of them had gotten their licenses when they were sixty-two. Libby remembered drawing straws with Bernie. The loser got to go with the aunts. “It’ll be fine,” her mother always said. “They never go over thirty-five miles an hour.” To this day Libby could still remember the curses from other motorists as the aunts toddled down the highway. Amazingly, they’d never got any tickets. Finally, it was her father who’d put his foot down. Libby realized he was talking to her now.

“If they ask about me,” he was saying, “tell them I’ve gone to Nepal.”

“That wouldn’t help. They’d find you there. Courtney will be here if you need anything.”

“I’ll be fine,” her father said.

“Because . . .”

“Just go,” her father ordered. “I’m not a total invalid.”

“I know,” Libby said. And she did know. It’s just when she left him like this she got worried. But there was Courtney. And Rob’s mom was going to give him lunch so everything would be fine. Libby gave her father a thumbs-up sign and got in the van. A moment later she and Bernie were on their way to the Raid Estate.

“I hope this goes well,” Libby said as they headed out of Longely. At this hour of the morning, the only people out on the town street were runners.

“Well, it’s got to go better than the high school reunion,” Bernie pointed out.

When they’d catered their seventeenth annual high school reunion last year the guest of honor had been poisoned on the dais, which in Libby’s humble opinion was not a good advertisement for the shop.

Libby groaned as she remembered. “God was that awful.”

“Yes it was,” Bernie agreed. “Especially for the poisonee.” Then she pointed to a slim woman jogging down the block to the left of them. “There’s Bree.”

Libby glanced over. “I wish my thighs looked like hers.”

“If you didn’t eat anything and ran five miles a day they could.”

Libby grunted. She couldn’t even manage running half a block. She kept on saying she was going to get in better shape, but somehow it never happened.

“You know she’s invited to the wedding, don’t you?” Bernie said as Bree turned the corner.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

This was another thing Libby was not happy about. Bree Nottingham, real estate agent extraordinaire and social arbiter of Longely could spot a water splotch on a glass at fifty yards away. As her mom would have said, Bree gave her the yips and had since kindergarten when she’d spotted the smudge on Libby’s blouse and pointed it out to everyone.

“It’ll be fine,” Bernie consoled her.

“You’re right,” Libby agreed as she turned north on Ash Street. She desperately wanted to believe her younger sister. “I mean what’s the worst that can happen?”

“One of the falcons can escape and attack the wedding cake,” Bernie said. “Just kidding,” she added as Libby shuddered. “They only go after living prey. But I guess they could use the cake as a perch.”

“Why would anyone keep birds like that?” Libby asked.

Bernie tucked a strand of her hair back behind her ear. “I think they’re kind of cool in a vicious kind of way.”

“Well I don’t,” Libby said as she darted a glance in Bernie’s direction. “That’s one thing that Leeza and I agree on.”

As Bernie Simmons watched Jura Raid fishing around in the pocket of his jacket for the key to caviar storeroom, she wasn’t thinking about how upset her sister was with her for accidentally knocking the top two tiers off the croquembouche when they’d moved the cake into the kitchen from the van.

After all, it would just take a couple of minutes to glue the tiers back on with sugar cement. No. Bernie was thinking about Jura and Leeza and how Leeza was going to run this guy ragged, not to mention cost him a small fortune. Well, she’d already done that with the wedding.

Actually, Bernie decided, she felt a little bit sorry for Jura, even though she normally didn’t feel bad for older guys who married younger women, figuring that they got exactly what they deserved. But Jura wasn’t a player like his younger brother, Ditas, who’d hit on her two minutes after he’d met her. Okay. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe it had been ten. Bernie made a face as she remembered how Ditas had shaken her hand and then pressed his thumb into her palm and wiggled it around while he told her how good she looked. I mean how skeevy can you get?

In any other circumstance she would have smacked the guy really hard, but given how Libby felt about confrontation she’d managed to keep her hands down by her sides and not punch him out. She would have probably split his lip with her silver and onyx ring anyway, and he looked like the kind of guy who would have had her arrested and brought up on assault charges.

Unlike Jura, who she couldn’t imagine hitting anyone, let alone hitting on them. As she watched him continue to fumble around in his pocket she wondered if he’d ever even been out on a date. Probably not. So when someone like Leeza came along it must have been all over for him. Of course, if the story in the Times was to be believed it was a mutual thing.

Yeah. Right, Bernie thought. Mutual my ass. It was mutual once Leeza realized how much money Jura was worth. No. As her dad had said, Leeza getting Jura had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, which Bernie agreed with even though she didn’t agree with her dad’s phraseology. When she’d pointed out the fundamental illogic of the expression he’d used her father had groaned and reached for the remote. But it was true.

“Think about it,” she’d told Libby. “You can’t shoot fish in a barrel. You’d have to net them instead. If you shot into a barrel you’d have bullet holes and all the water would run out onto the ground and the barrel would be useless and barrels are expensive.”

Libby hadn’t looked up from the scones she was making, let alone answered. Even her boyfriend Rob, whom she could usually count on when it came to things of this nature, had told her to get a life. Oh well. It wasn’t her fault that no one else she knew was interested in things like this.

But even Libby had agreed with her about Jura being ill at ease around women. How could she not? The two times Jura had met with her and Libby he’d been uncomfortable around them to the point of not being able to look either one of them in the eye. At first Bernie had thought it was them but Jura had been like that with his administrative assistant too. In fact, the only female Bernie had seen him relaxed with was Leeza, who’d cooed and batted her eyelashes at him like she was in some fifties movies.

It was weird. Jura was a big guy and big guys usually own the room. But this guy’s posture was stooped which emphasized his narrow shoulders and big ass. Couple that with his pale complexion, and grayish, blond hair and he looked totally ineffectual.

But he couldn’t be that ineffectual, Bernie reasoned. Ineffectual men don’t run caviar empires that are worth millions of dollars. But maybe he was one of those guys who are better with numbers and figures than with people. Maybe his brothers handled that end of the business while he stayed in the office and emailed instructions to everyone.

Looking at Jura, Bernie wondered if all Estonian people were big and blond with prominent cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. Somehow, she had thought they were short and dark and Jura was some sort of an anomaly, but his two younger brothers, Ditas and Joe looked exactly like him, except they were much better looking.

When Libby had announced that they’d gotten this job, Bernie had dragged out her old atlas and, ignoring Libby’s eye rolling, looked at a map of the Baltics. It seemed that Estonia was quite close to Finland. For some reason, she’d pictured the country as being near Russia—maybe because it had been occupied by Russia until recently.

Bernie was trying to remember exactly what she’d read when she saw Libby dart a glance at her watch and start to nibble on her lower lip. Then her sister brought her hand up to her mouth and switched to biting her nails, which Bernie couldn’t help noticing were in desperate need of a manicure.

Libby is flipping out, Bernie thought as she and her sister exchanged looks. And she could understand why. They still had an enormous amount to do. And if she, Bernie, was concerned she could only imagine how crazed Libby was feeling. And being tired and hung over certainly didn’t help. In retrospect the Cosmopolitans might not have been such a good idea after all. Next time she’d make chocolate martinis instead.

For openers, she and Libby and Amber, who was coming in her own car, still had to drive the van loaded with all the linen, plates, silverware, and crystal that they were using for the dinner down the embankment to the tent, and offload everything. Which should be lots of fun.

Driving down that embankment was a pain in the ass when the grass was dry. But now the grass was wet and slippery and given that the van was top heavy—well, Bernie didn’t want to think of the breakage if the van rolled over. The crystal alone cost fifty dollars a glass and they were using how many of them? Leeza was spending more on tableware for one afternoon than the store made in a whole year.

At least the tables and the chairs were in place. And hopefully the florist would be on time with the centerpieces—white roses and calla lilies. And at least she and Libby and Amber had folded the napkins into swans yesterday. . .