“Washing walls? Maybe you’d better try connecting me to the jail kitchen,” Joanna said. A few moments later, Frank Montoya came on the line.
“What’s my chief of administration doing was washing walls?” Joanna asked without preamble.
“Putting out fires,” Frank answered, “but I think we’ve got this little crisis pretty well under control.”
“What crisis?” Joanna demanded.
“The cook crisis,” Frank Montoya answered. “I wrote you a memo explaining the whole thing. Didn’t you get it?”
“Not yet. My father-in-law picked up the packet a little while ago, but I won’t get it until later on tonight. What’s going on?”
“As soon as the cook figured out I was on his case, he took off, but before he left, he cleaned out the refrigerator.”
“Good deal,” Joanna said. “He cleaned the refrigerator, and now you’ve got a crew washing the walls. Sounds like the place is getting a thorough and much-needed housecleaning.”
“Not really,” Frank Montoya returned wryly. “When I said cleaned out the refrigerator, I meant as in emptying it rather than making it germ-free. When I came in to work this morning, we almost had a riot on our hands. The cook didn’t show and the inmates were starving. I thought maybe he just overslept, but when I tried calling him, his landlady said he left.”
“Left. You mean he moved out? Quit without giving notice?”
“That’s right. Not only that, when I went home last night, there were a dozen frozen turkeys in the walk-in cooler waiting to be cooked for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Today they’re gone, every last of them.”
“Gone? He took them?” Joanna asked in disbelief. “All of them?”
“That’s right, the turkey. He left town under the dark of night without leaving so much as a forwarding address.
This was just the kind of crisis someone like Marliss Shackleford could turn into a major incident. “Somebody should have called me,” Joanna said. “That settles it. I’ll call Eva Lou and tell her not to come up. I can cancel the hotel reservations and be home in just over four hours.”
“No need to do that,” Frank reassured her. “I already told you. It’s pretty well handled.”
“What did you do, cook breakfast yourself?”
“Are you kidding? I don’t have a valid food handler’s permit. Besides, I’m a lousy cook. No, Ruby did the whole thing.”
“Who the hell is Ruby?” Joanna demanded crossly. “Did you already hire another cook?”
Frank paused momentarily before he answered. “Not exactly,” he said.
“What exactly does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Joanna asked.
“Ruby is Ruby Starr. I think I told you about her. She and her husband are the people who leased the Sunset Inn. She’s the one who did the actual cooking.”
