A Parfait Crime

Book 9: Five-Ingredient Mystery

by Maya Corrigan

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Culinary Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

A granddaughter-grandfather sleuthing duo take on a perplexing new case in the latest culinary cozy mystery, sure to appeal to fans of Diane Mott, Joanne Fluke, and Katherine Hall Page.
 
At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in the freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?
 
After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at their house to get to work—and enjoy Grandad’s five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Grandad try to retrace her final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler . . .
 
Includes delicious five-ingredient recipes!

PRAISE FOR CRYPT SUZETTE

“Grandad is a hoot and his jobs as a food reviewer and part-time detective provide endless possibilities for fun and murder . . . Charming.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Release date: October 24, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Val Deniston turned down the setting on the burner and watched the blue gas flame ebb under the casserole pot. But rotating a knob wouldn’t get rid of the other fire on her mind this evening—the blaze her boyfriend, Bram Muir, was fighting.

Still in training as the newest member of Bayport’s volunteer fire department, he’d gone with the crew to minor fires they’d extinguished within minutes. But this one was apparently more serious. He’d promised to call her when he was on his way back. He’d already been at the fire for over an hour, and she still hadn’t heard from him.

Granddad came into the kitchen from the dining room. “The table’s set. How’s the coq au vin coming along?”

“I’m at step five of Julia Child’s recipe, setting the coq on fire.”

“Just don’t set the cook on fire.” He grinned.

“That’s a serious concern. The first time I flam-béed something, my eyelashes got singed. I was hoping Bram would be here to prevent that or something worse from happening when I ignite the cognac.” Worse would be burning down the Victorian house she’d shared for the last two years with her widowed grandfather.

“Your hair will catch fire sooner than your eyelashes. It’s curling down your forehead and springing out on the sides.” Granddad opened the door to the pantry closet, took out his chef’s hat, a toque with Codger Cook on it, and gave it to Val. “You can borrow this.”

Val shoved her cinnamon-colored curls under the hat. Her mother had given Granddad the toque as a gag after he wangled a job as the local newspaper’s recipe columnist, calling himself the Codger Cook. When he pulled off that ruse, he could do little more than heat up canned soup, grill burgers, and cut down on the ingredients in Val’s recipes. But by sticking to easy dishes and doggedly persisting, he’d become a decent home cook, though far from a chef. Tonight he was making a parfait for dessert, layering raspberries and cream into glasses.

“Parfait is your perfect dessert, Granddad. Easy to make ahead, pretty to look at, and . . .” Val waited for him to add his culinary mantra.

“Only five ingredients,” he responded. “How many ingredients in coq au vin?”

“Closer to fifteen than five. I’m about to torch our dinner.”

Granddad reached for the fire extinguisher on the wall. “I’ll take care of any flare-ups with this.”

But not without ruining the French dish she was making to give Bram a taste of what awaited them in Paris next month. “Please don’t, unless I yell for help.” She poured the cognac and ignited it, keeping her face averted. Once the flames subsided, she added more ingredients to the pot and adjusted the heat to a simmer. “You can hang up the fire extinguisher, Granddad.”

The doorbell rang. Val looked up from poking the chicken to test for doneness. “That could be Bram.” He might not have had time to call ahead.

“Or his mother.” Granddad hurried to the hall.

Bram’s mother had become a regular visitor since she’d moved back to Bayport six months ago. Dorothy Muir had grown up here, returned as a widow, and opened a bookstore. Bram had come along to help her set up Title Wave, an apt name for a bookstore near the Chesapeake Bay’s tidal waters. She was thrilled when he decided to stay rather than return to Silicon Valley. Instead of honchoing tech start-ups in California, he had the challenge of making a brick-and-mortar start-up successful. His mother’s shop was now Granddad’s favorite haunt when he wasn’t testing recipes for his column, fishing in the Chesapeake Bay, or watching classic movies.

When he brought Dorothy into the kitchen. Val noticed a change in the usually cheerful woman. Dorothy managed only a tight smile. She must be worried about Bram.

Granddad took a bottle of wine from the fridge. “Can I pour you a glass of white wine, Dorothy?”

“I’ll have wine with dinner.” She checked her watch and rubbed her neck under her shoulder-length silver hair. “I’d like some ice water for now.”

Granddad brought her the water and put the appetizer tray on the kitchen table, where she sat. “This should tide us over for a while.”

“But don’t hold up dinner for Bram.” Dorothy stabbed a cheese cube. “He wouldn’t want us to do that.”

When dinner was ready, Granddad sat at the head of the long table in the dining room with Val at the other end. He ate with gusto. Dorothy picked at her food as she kept glancing across the table where her son was supposed to sit.

Granddad caught Dorothy’s eye. “Bram has good folks looking after him. Our volunteer firefighters have years of experience.”

True, but Val wouldn’t relax either until she heard from Bram. Time to change the subject for her own peace of mind, and for Dorothy’s. “How are your play rehearsals going, Granddad?”

Dorothy turned to him. “I’d like to hear about that too, Don. I hope I didn’t pressure you into doing something you aren’t enjoying.”

Val suspected Granddad would do whatever Dorothy requested, like it or not. She’d coaxed him and Bram to take roles in a Readers Theater performance, a dramatic reading of an Agatha Christie play, The Mousetrap. If Granddad had suffered any qualms about making his stage debut, they vanished when he found out he wouldn’t have to memorize his lines.

He speared a piece of chicken. “I’m not sure how the show will turn out, but we all love rehearsing at Jane Johnson’s house. She serves an afternoon tea that would rival one at the Ritz. Finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and homemade jam, and parfaits. I got the recipe for one her parfaits. That’s gonna be our dessert tonight.”

Dorothy buttered a piece of French bread. “Jane’s remarkable. Not just a good cook and a tireless organizer, she volunteers at the homeless shelter in Treadwell and at the Bayport library. She’s in her early forties so she has a lot of energy.”

Val suppressed a smile. Dorothy had just started a new career as a shop owner, and she was in her sixties. “You have tons of energy too.”

“Compared to the whirlwind I was when I was younger, I’ve slowed down.”

Val sipped her wine. “How did you get to know Jane?”

“She and the cast members from the retirement village are in the mystery book club I started at the shop. Then they formed an offshoot club to read Agatha Christie’s books. The Readers Theater was Jane’s idea to raise money for the shelter.”

A good cause, Val thought, but an unusual way to raise money for it. Her best friend, Bethany, was in the Christie book club and in the Readers Theater cast, but Val hadn’t heard much about the play. “Does Jane have theater experience?”

“She had roles in high school plays, but no recent experience.” Granddad sopped up gravy with a piece of French bread. “Millicent Rilke has acted in and even directed some Readers Theater shows. No one else has performed for an audience lately. We’ll see how that plays out.”

“Are you worried someone will get stage fright, Granddad?” He certainly wouldn’t. Since moving in with him, Val had seen him assume a number of roles, though not on a stage. He’d managed to convince people he was a food guru, a private eye, and even a ghost-buster, making up the script as he went along.

Dorothy spoke up. “Reading a script probably cuts down on stage fright.”

“But you gotta know how to put feeling into your lines. The Dernes, the retired couple in the cast, need to work on that. He reads with no emotion, and she reads with too much.”

A phone on the sideboard played a tune. Dorothy put down her fork. “That’s Bram’s ring.”

Val popped out of her chair to get Dorothy’s phone for her and watched her reactions to the call. When the worry lines disappeared from Dorothy’s forehead, Val released the breath she’d been holding. The idea that Bram might be hurt had scared her. In the six months she’d known him, he’d become such an important part of her life that she had trouble imagining it without him. Now she could relax . . . or maybe not. The tension had crept back into his mother’s face.

Dorothy listened for a few moments and then nodded. “Yes, I’ll tell them.”

Granddad, too, must have been studying her expression. As soon as she hung up, he leaned toward her. “Is anything wrong?”

Dorothy hesitated. “Bram just got off the fire. He’s going to shower and change into the spare clothes he keeps at the firehouse. He says he’s fine, but his voice didn’t sound like it. Something’s bothering him that he didn’t want to tell me on the phone.”

Val wasn’t surprised he sounded different. Seeing a raging blaze would upset anyone. Having to put it out made it even more stressful. Maybe Bram was reconsidering his decision to volunteer as a firefighter.

She dawdled over her dinner, leaving half of it for later so Bram wouldn’t be eating alone. When he arrived, she read in his face what his mother had heard in his voice. He usually broke into a dazzling smile when Val opened the door for him, but tonight his lips were pressed together. His wavy brown hair, wet from his shower, was slicked back instead of tumbling over his forehead in a carefree way. His grim expression made him look older than thirty-five, though most of the time he looked younger than his age.

Val hugged him. Rigid at first, he soon relaxed and then held her tight.

He released her and inhaled deeply. “It smells wonderful here. Breathing in smoke from a house fire is nasty.”

“Here you can breathe in chicken cooked in wine and garlic.”

“Only chocolate chip cookies in the oven can beat that.” They went into the dining room.

Bram hugged his mother, greeted Granddad, and sat down. Val dished up Bram’s dinner from the pot on the stove and reheated what was left of her meal. By then Granddad and Dorothy had finished their dinners and were sipping the last of their wine.

Granddad gave Bram time to take a few bites and then said, “Where was the fire you were on?”

Bram answered without looking up from his plate. “On a country road outside Bayport.” He consumed his food steadily and silently.

The fire was obviously not a topic he wanted to discuss. To prevent more talk about it, Val asked Dorothy one question after another about the bookshop—which new books were selling well, which would she recommend, what the book clubs she hosted at the shop were reading this month.

Bram finished a glass of wine and poured another. After sopping up the last of his gravy with bread, he saluted Val. “Kudos to the chef.”

Val was happy to see even a ghost of a smile from him. Food and wine had worked their magic and relaxed him. “We have two chefs tonight. Granddad made a dessert.”

After clearing the table, Val put on the teakettle. Granddad took the parfaits from the fridge and arranged them on the silver tray he’d recently polished. She was glad the tray and Grandma’s china were no longer gathering dust as they had for a few years after her death. Ever since Dorothy’s return to Bayport, Granddad entertained more often, showing off his new culinary skills.

Val poured the tea while he delivered the champagne flutes filled with layered red-and-white parfait.

He sat down. “It’s a raspberry and cream parfait, same as Jane made for us last week.”

Bram recoiled, and his face turned pale.

Val’s first thought was that eating his dinner too quickly had given him indigestion. “What’s wrong, Bram?”

“The fire was at Jane’s house.” Bram sounded hoarse. “Most of the damage was in the kitchen. That’s where we found her. Too late to save her.”

Val’s stomach clenched. No wonder her mostly upbeat boyfriend was depressed. In his first big test as a volunteer firefighter, he’d battled a blaze that had killed a woman he knew. “I’m so sorry, Bram.”

He sighed. “Me too. I met Jane only a few weeks ago, but I liked her a lot.”

Dorothy shuddered. “What a terrible way to die.”

“If it’s any consolation, Mom, the fire chief thinks she was dead before any flames got to her.” Bram coughed as if smoke still irritated his lungs. “My first assignment when I joined the volunteer fire department three months ago was to check smoke detectors for people who requested that. I personally checked Jane’s. They were working.”

Val grasped the point he was making. “So if she was conscious, she’d have run out of the house when the smoke alarms went off.”

Bram nodded. “Only an autopsy can tell for sure if she was dead before the fire started. Anytime a body is found at a fire scene, the medical examiner, the homicide detectives, and the arson investigator are called.”

“Arson!” Granddad ripped off his wire-rimmed glasses, making the white tufts that curled around his ears stick out. “The fire mighta been set to destroy evidence of another crime—burglary or even murder.”

Val recognized that scenario from a case that had been in the news recently. “Covering up a crime isn’t the only explanation for the fire. Jane could have died of a stroke or a heart attack while she was cooking. Then the food could have burned, starting a blaze.”

Granddad folded his arms. “Jane was in her early forties. People that age might die of heart attacks or strokes, but it’s not common. And just ’cause she was in the kitchen doesn’t mean she was cooking. It’s a big room with a sitting area and a large table. Eight of us sat at that table yesterday to read through The Mousetrap. Her killer mighta sat there today.”

Dorothy shook her head. “But who’d want to kill Jane? She was cheerful and kind, a lovely person.”

Bram cleared his throat. “We only saw Jane’s public face.” He stopped and looked down, as if deciding how much more to say. “Behind closed doors, her life might have been unhappy.” He paused again and took a deep breath. “In the storeroom adjacent to her kitchen was a chest freezer the size and shape of a coffin. It had only one thing in it—a dead body.”

Granddad gaped at Bram. “Lordy, lordy. While we rehearsed a play with a dead body in it, a corpse was in the next room.”

Questions popped into Val’s head. “Whose body was in the freezer, and how did it end up there?”

Bram shrugged. “No one seems to know. I heard the man had been on ice for a while, possibly for years.”

After a long silence, Dorothy said, “Hmm. ‘Fire and Ice.’ That’s the name of a poem by Robert Frost.”

Val had heard Bram say of his mother, Once an English teacher, always an English teacher. “What’s the poem about, Dorothy?”

“I can recite it. It’s only a few lines long. ‘Some say the world will end in fire, /

Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. /

But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice /

Is also great and would suffice.’ ” Dorothy sighed. “Desire and hate are behind a lot of violent deaths.”

Val wondered if desire or hate had led to Jane’s death. No one spoke for a moment.

Granddad broke the silence. “Jane told me she never wanted to move away from that house. She had a good reason to stay put. If she had the freezer carted off, moved to a new location, or left there, the body was bound to be discovered.”

Dorothy frowned. “You’re assuming she knew about the body. But someone else might have dumped it there when she wasn’t around—a maintenance worker, a neighbor, even a stranger passing by.”

Unlikely, but so was the idea that Jane had died of natural causes, as Val had assumed until she heard about the freezer’s contents. “The fire, Jane’s death, and the body in the freezer are probably related.”

Bram put down his wineglass. “Yes, but how are they related?”

Granddad stroked his chin. “Jane musta known something about the frozen guy’s death or even caused it, maybe by accident. She couldn’t handle the guilt, so she started the fire. Then she took a fast-acting poison like cyanide.”

Dorothy shook her head. “Jane isn’t the sort to commit suicide, but even if she were, the timing makes no sense. Bram said the body had been in the freezer a long time, so why would she decide to kill herself now? She was rehearsing for a show she’d worked hard to put together.”

Val thought of a reason. “Maybe the Christie play touched a nerve in her and brought on remorse. It’s been a few years since I saw The Mousetrap, but I remember that the murder victim had a connection to a death in the past. Was Jane playing the part of the victim in the show?”

“Nope,” Granddad said as the doorbell rang.

Val crossed through the sitting room to the hall and opened the door to her best friend. Bethany O’Shay huddled under an umbrella with multicolor dinosaurs on it, a design chosen to appeal to the first graders she taught. Still in her twenties, a few years younger than Val, Bethany often wore bold patterns in vivid colors. Tonight the umbrella was the only cheerful thing about her. Her usually bouncy, strawberry-blond hair hung down listlessly, and she looked on the verge of tears.

She closed the umbrella and came inside. “I have terrible news.”

Bethany must have heard about Jane. As a member of the Agatha Christie book club and The Mousetrap cast, she’d known Jane longer than Bram or Granddad had.

Val hugged her friend. “I’m really sorry. Bram told us what happened. He was with the firefighters at her house.”

“Ryan called me with the news. He’s on duty tonight and responded to the emergency call.”

Bethany’s boyfriend, Officer Ryan Wade, was the youngest member of the Bayport Police Department. She’d coaxed him into joining the Readers Theater cast, so he knew Jane from the rehearsals. He must have been as shaken as Bram was by the scene at Jane’s house.

“Dorothy and Bram are here.” Val led Bethany to the dining room. “We were just talking about the fire.”

Granddad pulled over a chair for Bethany between Val and Dorothy. “How about some parfait and tea or coffee?”

“The parfait looks delicious, but I’ve already had dessert. I wouldn’t mind some tea, though.” Bethany sat down as Val brought her a cup and saucer from the china cabinet. “Before I left home to come here, I phoned Millicent and told her about Jane’s passing. The first words out of Millicent’s mouth were: ‘Oh, dear. Who’s going to take Jane’s place in the cast?’ How heartless can you get?”

Val remembered that Millicent was directing The Mousetrap.

Dorothy patted Bethany’s arm. “What sounded like a cold response could have been a defense mechanism. For all we know, Millicent is crying her eyes out now. She probably didn’t have words to deal with the shock of Jane’s death.”

Bethany stirred her tea. “If so, I’m glad I didn’t give her another shock by talking about what was in Jane’s freezer. That’ll be all over town soon enough. Millicent’s going to tell the other cast members who live at the Village about the fire.”

The Village was the shortened name of the retirement community near Bayport. “How many cast members live there?” Val said.

“Four. Millicent and her sister Cassandra, who’s the stage manager, and Nigel and Nanette Derne. Millicent wants us to get together for a rehearsal as planned on Monday afternoon, but it’s still up in the air where the rehearsal will be. She’s going to try to reserve a conference room at the Village.”

“No, let’s meet right here.” Granddad gestured around the room. “This table’s as big as the one in Jane’s kitchen. I’ll keep up the tradition she started . . .