Liz could take a hint. “I’ll be at Books & Browsery by the Sea. Come by, I’d love to show you what Kate has done.”
Fenton said, “As soon as we’re finished, Elizabeth.”
Uh-oh. Liz knew that when her father called her “Elizabeth,” she was in trouble. She regretted interrupting his meeting with Pops’s ungracious, and yes, irritating grandson. What exactly was he doing, talking to her father in such a lawyerly fashion? Liz knew her father would never tell her anything confidential about an open case, but when she helped him with his paperwork, maybe she could find out. Liz was privy to where he hid the keys to his files and she knew the password to his laptop—her mother’s maiden name and birthday.
If Ryan Stone had come from Manhattan, or one of the boroughs, then he probably knew all about the infamous Elizabeth Holt scandal, likely explaining his bristly posture.
Or he could just be a jerk.
Liz walked to the back of the office and opened a door that led into her father’s apartment, then stepped inside his main living space. All four walls of the room had built-in bookcases packed with books—and not just law books, but fiction, biographies, psychology texts, and his favorite, courtroom thrillers—both fiction and true life. On the other side of the hotel was a library ten times the size of her father’s. If her father wasn’t to be found in his office, pouring over law books or with a client, he would be reading in one library or the other.
She walked through the room, loving the way her father had arranged things to be both masculine and cozy at the same time. Liz stopped next to a teak end table displaying a photograph of her father, mother, and herself at age four, standing in front of their apartment in Manhattan. It was impossible to believe that the vibrant, smiling woman with Liz’s blue eyes would die of breast cancer the next year. She had only a few memories of her mother, but at least they were all good. And she had the video that was full of love and bright smiles that her mother had left her “just in case.”
Opening a door next to her father’s kitchen that led to the interior of the hotel, she followed a narrow-tiled hallway, passing the hotel’s dumbwaiter that hadn’t been used in decades. At the end of the hallway was an ornate wrought-iron staircase leading up to a Juliet balcony facing the Indian River Lagoon. When Liz was in middle school, she and Aunt Amelia would practice lines from Shakespeare, dressed in cone-shaped hats topped with a half dozen of her great-aunt’s chiffon scarves, giving their productions, per Aunt Amelia, a Renaissance feel.
Romeo, O Romeo, leave me the hell alone, Romeo. As Liz knew firsthand, there was a thin line between passion and obsession, and once you crossed it, there was no going back.
She continued on through a curved archway that opened into the kitchen. Betty Lawson sat at the wooden farm table with Caro on her lap. Pierre stood at the stove, filling Betty’s bowl with steel-cut oatmeal. Every morning but Sunday, Betty added two tablespoons of molasses to her oatmeal to “unclog the pipes” and keep her “regular.”
Pierre wore his white chef’s toque from morning to evening, making Liz wonder as a child if he slept with it on. “Liz, darling. Can I make you some breakfast?” Pierre asked, as he handed Betty the bowl with shaky hands. “I just made Betty some eggs.”
Liz caught Betty’s usually mischievous gaze, which now looked concerned and directed at Pierre’s hands holding the bowl of oatmeal, not eggs. Liz had thought only her father and Aunt Amelia knew about Pierre’s memory loss, but Betty didn’t miss a thing. Maybe it had something to do with decades of writing teenage mystery novels.
“I wish I had time, Grand-Pierre, but I’m meeting with Aunt Amelia about the Spring Fling. I’ll try to talk her into coming back to the kitchen afterward.”
Betty motioned for Pierre to sit across from her, where his soft-boiled egg on a slice of homemade multigrain toast waited. He took a seat and smashed the egg into his toast with his fork. Yolk oozed onto the plate. Then he picked up a bottle of Tabasco sauce and shook it liberally over his egg. Liz was happy because she’d researched cayenne pepper and found it was beneficial when used in the diets of patients with memory loss.
The day’s lunch and dinner menu wasn’t on the center island cutting board like it usually was. She usually checked to make sure Pierre had everything he needed. Lately, she’d been prepping the ingredients and placing them in small bowls with numbers on top of the cellophane so all he had to do was lay them in order on the counter. “Chef, do you have today’s menu? I have a feeling our new guests, the Worths, will be expecting one of your masterpieces.”
“Of course I do, my dear.” He reached up and took off his toque. Inside was a rolled-up piece of paper tied with string. “Voilà.”
Laughing, she took it from his hand and unrolled it. Pierre’s calligraphy was beautiful, full of flourishes and curlicues he’d learned as a young boy in primary school in France. Every morning at 6 a.m., Pierre would be at his desk in the butler’s pantry writing out the day’s menu with a pen he dipped in India ink that Aunt Amelia had special-ordered for him.
Today’s menu seemed simple and elegant, but Liz doubted the poached salmon entrée he had planned for dinner would satisfy Her Haughtiness, Regina Harrington-Worth. She also knew how important it was for Aunt Amelia to impress the Worths.
In the butler’s pantry, she found the cookbook she and Aunt Amelia had printed and bound with all of Pierre’s signature dishes and had presented to him on his eightieth birthday. Liz had her own copy in the beach house that
