'Til Death Do Us Part
Mary and Phillipa returned to their work, Peyton turned and swung open the door of one of the Sub-Zeros. It looked morgue sized, big enough to hold four or five cadavers. She emerged, instead, with a tart covered with plastic wrap, and she cut a wedge for each of us. Then she led me to a wooden farm table at the far side of the room, away from the kitchen staff and near the fireplace, where a stack of logs burned and crackled. There was a coffeepot already on the table, and after we sat down, she poured us both a mugful, adding a smidgen of milk to mine. That was Peyton. As self-absorbed as she seemed, she always remembered little details about you, like how you took your coffee and the nicknames of your siblings.
    “So how are you doing?” I asked once I’d slipped off my coat and taken a sip of coffee. Despite the extra pounds she was as pretty as ever—the pale, flawless skin lightly dusted with freckles, the pink cheeks, the perfect small nose.
    “Like I said on the phone, it’s been a big mess,” she said, digging into her tart. “I threw my back out, which always happens when I’m stressed. We thought about closing the shop for a few days, but that seemed fairly pointless.”
    “Ashley thinks the two deaths could be connected somehow. What do
you
think?”
    “Not simply connected. She thinks someone
killed
Robin and Jamie. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? She wanted you to investigate things.”
    “She’s pretty upset, so I said I would make a few inquiries.”
    “Well, I know Jamie and Robin had become friends, but it all seems like an awful coincidence to me. Robin apparently ate food she wasn’t supposed to. She was on some kind of medication that required a restricted diet, and she ignored the rules. Jamie had some senseless accident. I don’t know as much about her situation, though—we’d had a bit of a falling-out in the summer. I hadn’t spoken to her for weeks before she died.”
    Had Jamie reached her limit with Peyton, just as I had? I also wondered if a falling-out might explain why Jamie had decided to give the wedding photos to Robin.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “She was hoping to open her own gourmet food store in New York—in the East Village. She was having trouble finding investors and getting things off the ground, so I offered her some advice. And she acted indignant, as if I were totally out of line. To be perfectly honest, I think she was jealous of me. I hate to say it, but that’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem for me these days.”
    She glanced toward the kitchen work area.
    “Could you excuse me for a couple of minutes, Bailey? I need to make sure they’re not destroying anything over there.”
    After she walked away, I took a black-and-white composition notebook out of my tote bag and opened it. Whenever I write an article, I make notes in a composition book—tidbits of information, observations and impressions, questions to myself. I do the actual writing on my computer, of course, but I find that jotting down notes with a number 2 pencil gets my brain working in a new way, helps me see the facts from a different angle. And sometimes when I’m rereading my notes I’ll see a connection or something significant that wasn’t apparent when I first put pencil to paper. I’d used this tactic with the murder investigations I’d been involved in, and I was going to do the same thing with my research now. It all might amount to nothing, but I liked the ritual of tracking my findings and impressions in a clean, no-frills notebook, and I harbored the vague hope that it would impose clarity and order on a puzzling situation. As I worked, I kept one ear partially cocked toward the kitchen. Watching Peyton’s staff interact with her—asking questions about ingredients and cooking times and garnishes—I realized that they moved around her as if they were walking on eggshells.
    Suddenly I heard Peyton’s voice rise in anger. “You never use
aged
goat cheese with
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