there, though I had to admit the idea of pressing those men to betray one of their own made me a little queasy.
Feeling the acute need for some reassuring warmth, I went to the stove, poured filtered water into the lower half of my three-cup Moka Express. I ground the beans fine, piled them into the little filter basket, screwed the two pieces together, and placed them over medium heat.
The shimmering blue flame of the gas burner reminded me of Mike’s eyes in the firelight. I chewed my lower lip, still a little swollen from his kisses, and in the quiet of the kitchen, I felt the faintest echoes of his lovemaking still singing through my body — so sweet and slow at first then breathtaking in its intensity. I ached for him now, sorry he’d had to leave so early.
As the express water came to a boil, however, my thoughts began to turn...
“Captain Michael,” I whispered to the empty air. He truly was my best bet for a source inside that firehouse, which made me reconsider Mike’s request to stay away from the man.
Given Mike’s fire-academy story, I didn’t doubt that things had gone down badly between the two cousins.
Last night’s Quinn vs. Quinn standoff came to mind — Captain Michael smirking at his cousin in the hospital drive; Mike doing a reach around for his handcuffs.
A powerful, roasted scent suddenly suffused the air. My espresso was done. I moved to the stove, sloshed the steaming liquor into a demitasse, and sipped it so quickly it burned my tongue. I didn’t care.
Quinn was one of the best interrogator’s in the NYPD. He could effortlessly manipulate any information exchange. I thought I was hot stuff, getting him to spill, but the reverse was true: Mike Quinn had manipulated me
My fist hit the kitchen table so hard it sent the cats scurrying into the next room.
When I’d asked Mike what had started the beef between him and his cousin, he’d treated the phrasing literally: “What started it,” he’d said, emphasizing the
After downing the hot coffee, I banged open my cupboards and made a hasty breakfast — a giant popover pancake (aka Dutch Baby, Bismarck, poor girl’s soufflé): flour, eggs, milk, salt, all whisked up with more fury than Dorothy’s tornado.
I poured the batter into a preheated pan and flung it into a blistering oven where it quickly inflated like the puffy exterior of a Navajo bread; but instead of honey, I finished the whole thing in the bracing-sweet style of an espresso Romano, with a quick, tart squeeze from a lemon wedge and a generous dusting of powdered sugar.
My breakfast eaten, I went back to my cupboards and pulled out more ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt... I began throwing things together: brown sugar, cocoa powder, leftover espresso...
A few minutes later I had a batter for my Magnificent Melt-in-Your-Mouth Mocha Brownies. The manic activity made me feel less like an ineffectual sap, but only a little, so I poured the dark elixir into a square pan, set it aside, and went to the fridge once more...
Milk, eggs, butter, and a treasure from the spice rack. Nutmeg? Piquant yet soothing; exotic yet wistfully familiar. The Elizabethans believed it could ward off the plague; Charlie Parker and Malcolm X used it to get high...
I took out my electric hand mixer and assaulted the butter and sugar with glee.
I added the eggs, one at a time, ferociously beating between each addition.
Stress always did this to me. I had to bake. At times, nostalgia was the reason. Baking brought me back to those early hours with Nonna in her grocery store’s kitchen: hot ovens warming the chilly air; sticky white dough coming together beneath flour-dusted hands; battered sheet pans emerging from their transmuting fire baths heavy with the gold of fresh Italian loaves and crunchy, sweet biscotti.
On a morning like this one, however, other things drove me to the beating of the batter: a sense of reassurance for one, a reclaiming of the feeling I had control over
Measuring the flour calmed me somewhat (a different part of the brain apparently calculated ounces and grams, sifted out lumps). Then I married the wet and dry ingredients.
“I now pronounce you Doughnut Muffin batter...”
In flavor and texture, the resulting muffin would indeed taste like an “old-fashioned” doughnut. It wasn’t magic, just a culinary trick. (Most quick-bread batters called for a simple stirring of ingredients, but the dump-and- stir muffin failed to yield an optimal product. Creaming sugar into butter whipped air into the batter’s foundation, substantially improving its texture. In this batter, the technique would evoke the same airy tenderness as a classic cake doughnut.)
I filled the paper lined cups, opened the heavy oven door, then slid my pans home with the satisfied sigh of a weary body slipping into a warm bath.
I guess what I most appreciated about baking was its transformative qualities, and not simply because the end product was more than the sum of its parts. The entire process served as a much needed reminder of a simple but profound truth: the fundamentals of cooking never changed.
In a world where firebombs went off in your face and your lover held back on you, just knowing that stirring sugar into liquefied shortening would always give a different result than creaming it into softened butter was an honest-to-God comfort.
I still didn’t know how I was going to get the whole truth out of Mike, but I would find a way. In my view, family feuds were ticking time bombs
When I finally headed upstairs, I felt much calmer — less like a rube of an interrogator than a capable woman back in control. Entering the bedroom, however, my momentary illusion of calm was blown away by a brand-new storm.
The steady sound of beeping may have been weak, but its familiar meaning shot adrenaline through my body as effectively as a blaring ambulance siren.
I rushed to the dresser and saw the blinking light. Someone had left me an urgent message.
I played back the recording, and the frantic voice of my ex-husband assaulted my ear.
“Clare! Where the hell are you?”
I checked the time stamp on the message. Matt had phoned me during my lengthy talk with Rossi.
“I get off my plane at JFK, pass a newsstand, and what do I see? My mother on the front page of two tabloids! Why is she on a stretcher for God’s sake? And surrounded by firemen? What the hell happened? I can see
A robotic voice followed. “End of messages.”
Fourteen
Thirty minutes later, my hair still damp from a quick shower, I descended the back staircase to my coffeehouse. Grabbing a Village Blend apron off a pegboard in the pantry, I peered through the open archway into
