Death by Chocolate Read Online Free PDF Page B

simply, fed up with
Lady Eleanor.
    “Maybe you’re right. Maybe
I don’t need the hassle right now,” she said, feeling a cloud lift from her
head and shoulders, a cloud that had been floating around her since that rude
2:00 a.m. phone call.
    “Good.” Tammy crunched on
her celery. “I think that’s wise. Let Eleanor find another flunky to guard her
royal heinie.”
    Savannah thought a few
seconds more, weighing all factors. “Did you pay the bills this morning?” she
finally. asked.
    “Some of them.”
    A long, heavy silence
stretched between them.
    “How many of them?”
    Tammy sighed. “I paid last
month’s electricity. The phone from the month before last.”
    “The mortgage?”
    “Nope.”
    “Insurance?”
    “Uh-uh. The electric and
phone tapped you out.”
    “When’s the last time you paid
yourself?”
    “Last March.”
    “That long, huh?”
    Savannah drained the last
of her coffee. Tammy finished off the celery stick and started on the carrots
before she said, “So, when do you report for Eleanor Guard Duty?”
    “Tonight at eight P.M.
That’s when she starts taping.”
    “A taping. Hmmm. That
should be interesting. Youknow... kinda nice.”
    “Gr-r-r-r…”

Chapter

3
     
     
     
    ”G ee,” Savannah whispered to
the maid, who she had recently found out was named Marie, “somehow I thought
the show was filmed in her actual kitchen, like she says it is on TV.”
    ”A lot of people think
that,” Marie said as she walked around the set with a garbage bag in hand,
picking up the plastic cups and paper plates left behind by the film crew. “At
first we taped in the kitchen in the house, but it was so much trouble setting
up and breaking down each time. So a year ago they built this studio here in
the barn. Well, it used to be a barn, but they got rid of the animals and....”
    Marie’s voice trailed away,
and so did she, leaving Savannah standing on the periphery of a bustle of
activity that she knew absolutely nothing about. Half a dozen people, wearing
strange headgear, T-shirts, and shorts, scurried around, some of them carrying
notebooks or stacks of papers, others handling microphones, lights of all
different sizes and colors, and other terribly technical looking meter-type
equipment that Savannah didn’t recognize.
    But even more foreign than
the taping set in front of her was the transformation of Eleanor Maxwell. Gone
was the disheveled, slovenly woman of the afternoon. Standing behind the
kitchen counter, dressed in a high-necked ivory lace blouse, wearing an auburn
wig of perfectly coifed ringlets, twists, and rolls, was the Lady Eleanor of
Gourmet Network fame.
    Speaking with the distinction
of a diction coach at a British school for young ladies, the woman stirring the
wonderfully fragrant chocolate mixture on the stove seemed to be from another
world, far removed from the gal in the muumuu, shoving bagels and lox into her
face, washing them down with Bloody Marys.
    For half a second, Savannah
allowed herself to fantasize about this gracious lady’s evil white-trash twin
who kept the real Lady Eleanor imprisoned in some sort of dungeon beneath the house
and allowed her to come out for air only during tapings.
    “A bit more what you were
expecting?” asked a female voice behind her.
    Savannah turned to see the
woman who had earlier been introduced to her as Kaitlin Dover, the show’s
producer.
    From the moment she’d met
her, Savannah liked Kaitlin. Petite, slender to the point of looking underfed,
the thirty-something Kaitlin looked as though she had inherited her red hair
and golden freckles from some Irish ancestor. And maybe a bit of Irish charm,
too.
    From the way her large
brown eyes met Savannah’s openly and honestly, to the perpetual half-grin she
wore that seemed to be bravely covering some sort of personal pain, Kaitlin
Dover came across a genuine person. And after spending the better—or rather, the
worst— part of the afternoon with Eleanor, genuine seemed