3 tablespoons butter
1 carrot, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed through a press
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 cup dry red wine
« cup beef bouillon
1 tablespoon tomato paste or catsup
1 tablespoon cornstarch
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts (approximately 1 « pounds)
1 tablespoon flour
« teaspoon salt
¬ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
In a large skillet, melt the butter and slowly cook the chopped carrot, onion, garlic, and parsley until the onion is soft and translucent, approximately 10 to 20 minutes. Add the wine, bouillon, and tomato paste or catsup. Simmer, covered, over low heat for 20 minutes. Stir 2 tablespoons water into the cornstarch until smooth. Mix into the , wine mixture and stir until the sauce, is thick and clear. Set aside, covered, ' over very low heat, while you prepare the chicken.
Pound the chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap until they are Aproximately « inch thick. Mix together the flour, salt, and pepper, and dredge the chicken breasts in this mixture.
Heat the oil in a large, heavy skillet. Over medium-high heat, saut‚ the chicken breasts for 2 minutes per side, or until almost cooked through. Place the chicken breasts in the wine mixture, cover, and cook over medium-low heat another 6 to 10 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked through. Serve immediately.
Makes 4 servings.
I told you, stop," she rasped. "Goldy, I've hired another caterer."
My knife clattered to the cutting board. Be calm. She's a client. The client is always right.
"Weezie," I said, attempting to assume a voice of reason and patience, "you can't hire another caterer. You've already paid in full. I... I've got all the food here."
The client, I thought, is always -"I know I have to pay for the food. But, well..." She cleared her throat, as if she were reading from a prepared text and had lost her place. Behind me, Julian thumped relentlessly on the chicken. "I want a refund on the labor and gratuity cost. I have the contract ill front of me." Her voice was turning shrill. "Two hundred for the labor and ninety for the gratuity. Please send it today. If I don't receive the refund in four working days, I'll have to contact my lawyer." She hung up.
I gently put down the phone. Is your lawyer your fianc‚, honey-bunch? Julian had piled up the flattened chicken pieces and was grating black pepper onto a plate loaded with flour. He saw my face and froze. "What?"
"Weezie Harrington's party is canceled." I stared in dismay at the tomatoes. "Or rather, we're canceled. The party's still on."
"What? Why?"
"She didn't say why," I murmured. I thought of Arch's tuition that was still unpaid, of Tom's paychecks that were not forthcoming.
"Sit down, Goldy, for crying out loud. You look like you're going to keel over."
I stared around the makeshift workspace. Our dining chairs were stacked, weblike, against the far wall. Sawdust lay in heaps on the floor. Tentacles of wiring stuck out from walls with half their plaster missing. Bent nails littered the corners like so many dead bugs. The phone rang again.
"I'll get it." Julian dived for the portable. "Goldilocks' Catering. You're calling this early, you'd better have a great booking for us." He paused. "Oh. No, Goldy can't come to the phone at the moment. This is her assistant."
"Julian, stop!" I cried. "I'm waiting for a call from Sylvia Bevans! Please, it's important!"
He covered the phone with one hand. "It's not Sylvia. Just drink your coffee and let me handle this, okay?"
I reached for my espresso, which was now lukewarm. Too bad it wasn't Marla calling. I absolutely hated the IRS consuming her every minute. If hot gossip was burning through town on Weezie Harrington's motives for canceling us, Marla would be the first to hear. "I can help you," Julian insisted. As the person on the other end spoke, Julian struggled to keep his face composed. "Why?" he asked belligerently. "Oh, yeah, who?" After a moment, he said, "We'll just have to see about that," and banged the phone down.
I finished the espresso. "Weezie again? What did she want, for me to drive over with her check? If she doesn't get her two hundred and ninety dollars back in the next hour, Andy Fuller will prosecute me and demand it in equal installments of brownies? Or better yet - "
But the pain in Julian's dark eyes brought me up short. Whatever he had just learned from this caller, it was more serious than Weezie's treachery. "That was Edna Hardcastle," he said. "She's canceling us for the wedding reception Saturday. She's hiring another caterer. And get this, she wants a refund on her labor and service charge."
I pictured the bags of wedding reception hors d'oeuvre crowding our freezer. I thought of the checks from Edna and Weezie that had formed the solitary cushion in our checking account. Sometimes people hit you to be cruel. Other times, they just act viciously behind your back. "Did she tell you why she's canceling? Or who her new caterer is?"
"Craig Litchfield. His prices are much lower, she said."
Tom, freshly showered and dressed, came into the room. "Give me an apron and a knife. I want to help. Plus, I figure something must be going on, the phone's ringing so early. Is everything all right?"
I told him what had happened. He was perplexed. "They both fired you?"
"Not only did they both fire me - they both want refunds. Two hundred labor for Weezie, plus ninety in service charge. Five hundred labor for Edna, plus two hundred ten for gratuity, since it's figured on the total cost of food and labor." I glanced at Julian, who was slapping the flattened chicken in the flour, then setting the pieces aside, as if nothing had happened.
"So you get to keep the food? What have you got here," - Tom stared at my printout - "appetizers, chicken, rice, sugar-snap-pea-and-strawberry salad, greens and vinaigrette, cake that you've already made. What are you going to do with the food you have? I'm available to eat it."
But I had already reached for the phone book. It was just before seven o'clock. I looked up Merciful Migrations, punched in the buttons, got a recorded menu that gave me options and another number. I took a deep breath and called that number. A groggy Leah Smythe answered.
"Hello? This is Merciful Migrations. We can't help if you're trying to get rid of elk on your property."
Now there was a greeting. "It's Goldy Schulz, the caterer." Leah groaned, and I took a deep breath. Was I ready to step into Andr‚'s job? Probably not. But I was going to give it a go, anyway. For Andr‚ and for myself. "Listen, Leah, I have a lot of wonderful food here, and I was wondering if you were still looking for meals for the shoot."
"Goldy," interjected Tom. "Forget it."
I ignored him. On the other end of the receiver, masculine-sounding mumbling stopped Leah from responding immediately. She covered the mouthpiece, then came back. "This is just like the other guy," she said drowsily. "He'd do free catering for me if I'd vote for him for the Soir‚e. I told him I didn't have a say in it. The votes belong to Marla, Weezie, and Edna. I don't have a vote, Goldy."
My skin went cold. "I would never try to bribe you, Leah. Nothing I do is free, but my services are reasonably priced. You need a caterer and I'm already familiar with the site and setup. The food will be ready when you need it. How many more days of shooting do you have?"
"It's Wednesday," she said with a yawn. "Two, if nothing goes wrong. Today and tomorrow. Stretch into Friday if there's a screwup." She sighed, as if what she really wanted was to go back to sleep. "All right, you can have the booking. But you'll need to abide by Andr‚'s original contract."
"I may not be able to provide the exact food he was offering to you. Only the price."
She yawned again. "Just a minute." More muffled conversation. "If you can be there by ten to do a breakfast-type coffee break and then lunch for fifteen people, that would be great."
"No problem."
"I'll call Rufus and have him open the gate for you. What time should he be there?"
"Eight-thirty. And, is that Ian Hood with you there, by any chance? I'd like to talk to him later today about the voting for the Soir‚e."
Leah covered the phone, then returned to say Ian could chat with me after the lingerie shots today. Super, I thought, hanging up. If they wanted coffee break during the lingerie shoot, I had just the recipe for the occasion.
"We're on," I informed Julian and Tom. "Coffee break and lunch. There's fresh fruit in the walk-in we can slice. We'll pick up yogurt on the way, and I'll make cakes on the griddle when we get there. In Scotland they call a griddle a 'girdle,' but it's really just pancakes. Girdle cakes for a lingerie shoot. Pretty cute, eh?"
"I don't like this," Tom commented as he pulled out strawberries to slice. "I don't want the two of you going up to that cabin unaccompanied."
The phone rang again and we all looked at it. "It might be Sylvia," I said. The way this morning was going, she would be calling to say Litchfield had won the tasting.
"I'll let you know if it is," Tom offered as he hugged the strawberry bowl to his chest and snagged the phone from the sawhorse. After a moment of silence, he put down the bowl and pulled out his ubiquitous spiral notebook.
"Go ahead," he ordered. He wrote furiously. "Thanks. You free today?" A pause. "Think you could , go out to Gerald Eliot's former workplace? A cabin in Blue Spruce. Goldy's catering up there and it'd make me feel better if you'd stay with her." I shook my head furiously; Julian groaned. Tom raised an eyebrow at me and grinned. "Sure. Come by our place about seven forty-five. Oh, wait. Could you pick up a couple of gallons of fat-free vanilla yogurt on the way?"
"I'm going to the cabin, too," Arch announced from the doorway. "Lettie might be there. I want to talk to her about my radio equipment."
"You are not going," I said firmly. Why was everyone in this house up before seven on a summer morning? How were Julian and I going to get the prep done with all these interruptions? "They're doing a lingerie shoot today, and Lettie's too young to wear lingerie. And if she isn't and she is in the shoot, it would not be appropriate for you to be there."
"Call her up and invite her over for lunch," Tom interjected wisely, while Arch was still trying to puzzle out what I'd just said. "I'll be working on the kitchen. You can have sandwiches on the deck. Eleven-thirty."
"I sent her an e-mail about my ham radio equipment, and she can't wait to see it," Arch said earnestly. "Get this - her dad taught her how to put an antibugging device on her phone."
"Wow," the three of us said simultaneously. Arch vanished up the stairs to shower and agonize over his clothing for the day.
Thick, sweet slices of strawberry fell before Tom's ex- pert knife. "That was Boyd," he announced. "He told me I passed the lie detector test." When we exclaimed our congratulations he held up the knife to stop us.
"That only means I wasn't consciously compromising an investigation. But I did get the background we were looking for." He deftly cored the pineapple. "First off, Boyd interviewed that cabdriver you talked to, Goldy. The one who drove Andr‚ out to the cabin Monday morning. Nothing unusual about the chef, just a lot of grousing about how he was serving more gourmet dishes for skinny people who wouldn't understand or appreciate his food. No complaining of tightness in the chest, pain down his arm, anything."
I could just imagine it. "Did he talk about the food being done for that day? Or why he was coming early?"
"Yup." Tom frowned, gripped the juicy pineapple, and began carving the sides. "According to the cabbie, Andr‚ insisted the food was already done. But the chef had some 'other work' to do that meant he needed to get to the cabin early. He just didn't say what kind of work. As to Merciful Migrations and the historical society? The society's in pretty good shape. They've got a few big donors who keep 'em going. Ian Hood's group is another story, though. He supports most of their work with the fashion photography, but he's been losing bookings because he's so hard to get along with, and so many photography studios are opening in Phoenix. Leah Smythe? She's land-rich only. Plus she works for the studio and for the charity for very little remuneration. Donations and the money from the Soir‚e make up the rest of the budget. According to Boyd, if Ian stopped supporting the organization, the elk would be on their own."
"Hmm." Would it be so bad if the elk were left to fight developers on their own? Probably, my inner voice replied.
"I asked Boyd to find out just how land-rich Leah was. He said he'd have to check - "
The phone rang again. "Fourth time's the charm," I announced, and politely gave my greeting into the receiver.
"This is Sylvia Bevans, returning your call."
