TWELVE 

No. It couldn’t be. This had to be wrong. Not that whatever was in this account was mine, but I was ripping angry. My family was in danger over this? People had been killed for this? Just a few thousand bucks? I threw the paper down in disgust. How had the lawyers blown millions of dollars that had been entrusted to them for other people?

Had it been bad investments on the part of the Attorneys MacNamara, past and present? I looked at a random page. The debits for legal fees and expenses seemed reasonable, so poor investment strategy had to be the answer. If this was an example of the care with which the MacNamaras handled their clients’ cases, it was time for me to find another lawyer for my divorce, no matter how close it was to being finalized.

I dialed my accountant. “Kim? It’s Georgie. Hey, can I hire you to take a look at something for me?”

“Sure,” she said. “Send it over.”

“Thanks. I’ll e-mail it to you in a few minutes. And Kim? Keep this between us, will you?”

“My lips are sealed.” She rang off.

It was quick work to scan and send the information. I wasn’t quite sure how to break this news to Melanie and Liza. Hello? You know those millions of dollars you thought you were inheriting? Fuhgeddaboutit! Not that Melanie or Liza was ostensibly hurting for money. But, though she’d assured me the rumors were untrue, Melanie was in one gossip magazine or another—I knew, because I read them—every few weeks under suspicion of being almost bankrupt. And Liza, well, as far as I knew, she was well off due to shrewd financial management of her business, despite having some very expensive castle repair bills coming up next spring. Still, they must have had plans for that money, and I was willing to bet that some charities were the intended recipients of some of it. The charities were probably the biggest losers here.

The bubble of anger grew in my stomach. Jim MacNamara had managed to lose almost all the money, either through ineptitude or maybe even willful misconduct, then got himself killed. Before I could go after him myself. There was a special place in hell reserved for people like him. Suddenly, I felt relieved for Old Lady Turnbull out at Silver Lake, who’d never sealed the land development deal with him. She probably didn’t know how close a call she’d had. Her granddaughter would get herself through medical school, one way or the other.

Russ Riley was sitting in jail on suspicion of murdering MacNamara. And what about Steve Murdoch? Just how many times had MacNamara screwed him over? It begged the question, of course: how many other people had MacNamara taken advantage of? People who might have wanted him dead. Even his own son didn’t seem that broken up about his father’s death.

I sat there stewing, and was just about to get up and go see if I could find something to cook to take my mind off it, when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. The display read Liza. “Hello?”

“Hey, Georgie. I just called to give you an update on Melanie and Caitlyn.”

Call me the World’s Worst Daughter. I’d meant to call earlier, but had gotten caught up with making sure Dolly got to the doctor and now this stupid trust. “How are they?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on them, like I told you I would, and there’s nothing you could do, so stop feeling bad.” She must have heard the guilt in my voice.

“Are they any better?” Please let them be on the mend.

There was a slight pause on the other end of the receiver. “Not better. But not worse either. I’ve called Dr. Phelps. He’s having one of the other doctors take over his afternoon patients, and coming over here.”

Relief washed over me. Doc Phelps would take care of them. “He’s making a castle call?”

Liza laughed. “Yes, and I’m making a rather sizable donation to his favorite charity, Doctors Without Borders.”

The charities. I felt awful and angry again. Should I tell Liza about the trust accounting so she could adjust her expectations? No, better to let Kim Galbraith corroborate my interpretation of the numbers, then break the news to her and Melanie together, once Melanie felt better.

“Should I come over?”

“As I said, nothing you can do here, and they’re both sleeping. Let’s wait to hear what Dr. Phelps has to say, then you can decide.”

“Okay,” I said tentatively. Of course she was right, but it felt . . . wrong.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure they just have the flu or something.”

That didn’t look like any flu I’d ever seen, but I didn’t comment. “I’ll talk to you later. Call me when he gets there.”

“I will. Bye-bye.” She rang off.

Now to keep myself busy for the next few hours. The recipes. That ought to do it.

I fixed myself a cup of coffee using the single-serving machine Cal had given me for my birthday last spring. When the restaurant was open, the machine wasn’t practical, since we needed full pots of coffee going all the time. Of course, there was the Bean, but it was cold outside, and it just seemed like too much trouble to get bundled up and walk down there. So today I was grateful for my little plastic cup of cinnamon-hazelnut-vanilla.

The recipes were still spread out on the prep counter, where Dolly and I would be chopping meat and vegetables and assembling Greek and other dishes come spring. But for now, it was the perfect big, flat surface to sort. I had placed a spoon over each of the piles already started, to keep the contents from shifting or blowing away. The Bonaparte House was old, and sometimes drafty, even the newer addition that housed the kitchen.

I took a moment to review the categories I’d already sorted recipes into, then reached into the shoe box for a handful. The work went quickly as long as I didn’t stop to read more than the titles. Next to the pile of cream soup casseroles I started a new one for molded gelatin salads. The definition of the word “salad” had definitely changed in the last few decades.

That got me thinking. Thousand Island dressing. Why wasn’t it Thousand Islands dressing, with an s, which would have made more sense grammatically? I stuck my hand into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out Franco’s recipe, the one his waitress had delivered, then opened it up and smoothed out the creases. Good thing it was a copy, because those creases were permanent.

Sophia’s Sauce. Written in different script at the bottom was a notation: Received from Sophia LaLonde at July 4th celebration, 1910.

I reviewed what I knew—or thought I knew—about the dressing. The most widely held belief, perpetuated from close to a century of tour boat operators, was that the recipe had been cobbled together a century ago from ingredients aboard a St. Lawrence River yacht. The owner of the yacht was George Boldt, wealthy manager of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, and the builder of the destined-to-be-unfinished Boldt Castle, which was located farther downriver across from the town of Alexandria Bay, and which remained the most popular tourist destination in the Thousand Islands. The story went that the dressing was created for Boldt, his boss, by the famous chef Oscar of the Waldorf, who also created the now-classic dishes Veal Oscar and Waldorf salad. The tourist industry along the St. Lawrence got a lot of mileage out of George Boldt, that was for sure.

But there were other origin stories. A chef at a Chicago hotel, the Blackstone, claimed he, not Oscar, had invented it. But why would a Chicago chef name a sauce after the Thousand Islands?

A restaurant owner a couple of towns over claimed he’d found the original recipe in a safe when he bought his building forty years ago.

Angela Wainwright at the River Rock Resort claimed she had found the original recipe hidden in a coffee can on a shelf in her pantry. She was now bottling the dressing on a small scale and selling it at her hotel.

And then there was Sophia LaLonde, the wife of a fishing excursion captain, who was rumored to have invented the sauce to accompany her husband’s shore dinners. When I thought about it—and I’d not ever really given this any thought before, but now it seemed like a no-brainer—Thousand Island dressing was a combination of ketchup-based cocktail sauce and mayonnaise-based tartar sauce, both of which go perfectly with fried fish. Suddenly, Sophia seemed like a pretty good candidate. And Franco’s recipe was attributed to someone named Sophia. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

I went to the small refrigerator and pulled out the bottle I’d bought from Angela the other day after my less-than-memorable breakfast with Sheldon Todd. The label listed a dozen or so ingredients. I compared the label to Franco’s recipe. There were a few differences, but the general idea was the same: ketchup or chili sauce, mixed with mayonnaise and pickle relish. The recipe we served at the Bonaparte House—no idea where that had come from originally—was similar, though we added chopped green olives in addition to the pickle relish. The Bonaparte House was a Greek restaurant, after all.

Franco’s recipe called for lemon juice, which accounted for the brighter, fresher flavor I’d tasted at the pizza restaurant. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait any longer. A taste comparison was definitely in order. I whisked up the ingredients, covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and set it in the fridge. Then I put a couple of eggs in a pan of cold water and turned on the burner.

The eggs would need to cook and cool before they could be peeled and chopped, so I sat back down at the counter and grabbed the last handful of loose papers from the shoe box.

Just as the last clipping went into its stack, a knock sounded at the back door. “Come in,” I called out of habit, then realized when the handle started to jiggle that I’d locked it. I made my way to the door, shutting off the flame under the eggs as I did so. They would sit there for six minutes, no more, no less, then go into an ice water bath, and they’d be perfectly cooked.

Someone began pounding on the back door. “Georgie!” The voice was muffled. The pounding started again.

That wasn’t impatience. Whoever it was, was in trouble.

I made it to the door and looked out the window, my hand on the knob. I could see a crown of red hair that could only belong to Brenda Jones. She looked up, and her face was dead serious. I flung open the door.

Brenda stumbled across the threshold. She wasn’t alone.

Her arm was around a man, who was leaning heavily on her. He was on his feet, but bent at the waist and holding his arm across his middle. I flew to one side of the man and grabbed, relieving Brenda of half his weight. Together we managed to bring him inside and sit him in Sophie’s armchair along one interior wall of the Bonaparte House kitchen.

Panting with the exertion, I ran back to the row of pegs near the back door and grabbed a fleece jacket. The man wasn’t wearing a coat, and he must have been freezing. I covered him. He gave a moan, then looked up. The right side of his face was covered in a bruise the color of the merlot I kept in my desk drawer, and a gash over one eye was covered in crusted blood. A single drop oozed from one end of the cut. The man groaned, then began coughing, which clearly brought on a fresh wave of pain.

Franco.