“DID YOU GET THOSE APPROVED?” THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR WAS standing at my desk, staring critically at the daisies I’d bought at the corner deli.
Richard Phillips was the most attractive man I’d ever met. His olive skin, emerald eyes, and chiseled cheekbones gave him the languid, unshaven arrogance of a model, but he wore quirky old clothes, which softened the impact of his beauty. The smile was even more effective; I watched warmth transform his face, taking him from sexy to sweet as it traveled from his mouth to his eyes.
“Don’t you know we have rules about these things? Daisies in the Timbers Mansion …” His face was so serious, I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me.
“Rules for daisies?”
“Oh, yes. Martha Stewart has nothing on us.” He flicked his blue-black ponytail over one shoulder. “Stop looking at me like I’m speaking Martian.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you worked over at her book, you’d have to get every photograph and flower approved. You hadn’t heard?”
“Even family pictures?”
“Especially those.” Head cocked to one side, he was focused on the daisies again. “I mean, it’s true about Martha. I don’t think Jake would care if you stacked a pile of used tires on your desk. But now that you mention it”—he scribbled something on a piece of paper—“we should have standards.” He handed the paper over. “Call this number, ask for Sharon, and say you’re a friend of Sammy’s.”
“The travel editor? I haven’t even met him yet.”
“You will. He can’t stay in Marrakech forever. You’ll learn it never hurts to say you’re a friend of Sammy’s. He knows everybody, and everybody loves him.” He executed a lazy 360 around my little space; when he faced me again, he was holding the daisies. “Tell Sharon to send you something small and intriguing once a week. Put it on Jake’s expense account. He’ll never notice.” And he dropped the daisies in the trash.
“I just bought those!” I protested.
He wiggled his fingers at me and disappeared into Jake’s office. Diana had told me that everybody at the magazine had a crush on Richard, and not just because he was such a beautiful man. He was also talented and so calm that I found talking to him very easy.
But I knew he was not for me. With a sister like mine, you learn to limit your expectations. Genie had star power even when we were children, and by the time I was a teenager, every guy we ever met was so busy looking at her slanting violet eyes and curly blond hair they barely noticed me. She and Richard would make a dazzling couple; I was picturing it when the phone began to ring.
“Jake Newberry’s office. May I help you?”
“I’m looking for the recipe for my mother’s famous coffee cake,” the caller began. “I’m pretty sure it came from an issue in the fifties. It was very rich and contained a lot of nuts.”
“What kind of nuts?” I asked.
“Maybe pecans,” she replied. “And there might have been a layer of marzipan running through it? Or maybe I’m remembering that wrong. But it was a great cake, and I promised to bring it to brunch tomorrow.”
“If you tell me how to reach you, I’ll see what I can do.” I hung up the phone. “How am I supposed to find it from that ridiculous description?”
“Don’t waste your time.” I jumped; I hadn’t seen Richard come out of Jake’s office. “Most of these people are crazy. Take the easy way out.”
“I should ignore her?”
“You should ask Maggie. She knows by heart almost every recipe we’ve ever printed. I’m on my way to the kitchen. Come along; I’ll protect you.” He took my hand and pulled me out of my chair.
Sherman had followed Richard into my office, and I reached down to pet him. “Come with us, dog,” I called. Sherman made the office feel so friendly. “Maybe someone will make you a smoothie.”
With Richard at my side, I was less afraid of facing Maggie, but when we got upstairs, she took one look at us and said, with real venom in her voice, “You know I don’t like that creature in my kitchen!” I gasped; it seemed a little harsh, even for her.
“It’s not like I sent the dog an invitation,” Richard replied, and I let out my breath, realizing she hadn’t meant me. “Is it my fault if he followed me? Blame it on Paul and his magic smoothie machine.” Sherman, who obviously had no fear of Maggie, took this as his cue to go trotting off in search of sustenance. “Billie’s wondering,” Richard went on, “if you remember a spectacular coffee cake from the fifties that had a lot of nuts—”
Maggie was answering before he’d even finished the sentence. “The Fountain’s Famous French Nut Cake. October 1956. Tell whoever wants the recipe that the timing’s right; you must cream the sugar into the butter for as long as it says. If you get lazy, it’s not lethal, but it’s pretty leaden.”
I was impressed in spite of myself. “Thanks,” I said.
She finally deigned to acknowledge my presence. “Don’t think I’m going to answer every reader question. I’ve got better things to do. That’s why we hired you.” She stomped off before I could come up with a suitable retort, dragging Richard in her wake.
“Don’t take it personally, Gingerbread Girl.” Diana had materialized at my side. “She’s mean to everyone.” I looked down at her feet; she was short and always wore wildly inappropriate high heels in the kitchen. Today’s pair were blue suede. “You get used to it. But I’m glad you’re here; I’ve been wanting to ask about your gingerbread. It’s the best thing anyone’s made for Jake’s stupid test since that red salad of Richard’s.”
“What kind of red salad?”
“Roasted beets. Radicchio. Swiss chard. Red onions. A dollop of sour cream. Gorgeous. Brilliant. Jake put it on the cover. But what I want to know is where you got your recipe.”
“I made it up.”
The eyebrows rose in surprise. “Really?”
“Yeah. When I was ten. For my dad’s birthday.”
I could tell from Diana’s face that she didn’t believe me. “Ten?” She gave a skeptical sigh. “Okay, if you’re such a genius, tell me what’s missing in this.” She handed me a spoon. “I’m meant to be making the world’s richest chocolate ice cream.”
Yes, the ice cream was rich, but a bit cloying; the sugar was playing hide-and-seek with the chocolate. “You need a little less sugar and a pinch of salt. And I’d throw a quarter cup of cocoa powder in with the melted chocolate.”
Diana’s eyebrows did that dash thing again. She stuck her finger into the bowl and licked it thoughtfully. “I think you may be right about the chocolate.”
I dipped my finger in; I was right. “You used good chocolate, but you can get better cream, right? I bet Fontanari’s sells great cream; it’d make a huge difference. I could pick some up for you.”
Diana punched me lightly on the arm. “I guess Maggie’s got a point.”
“About what?”
“Thursday apparently told her you don’t cook, and Maggie thinks you’re wasting our time. But what you’re really wasting is your talent. Sal’s right about your palate, and I bet you’d be an awesome cook. Not my business, of course.”
How could I even begin to tell her?
“Anyway, it’s not you.” Diana had sensed my discomfort, and she looped back to Maggie. “She’s always mean to Jake’s assistants. You’d think she’d be over him by now; it’s such ancient history.”
“They used to have a thing?” Google hadn’t mentioned that. I looked to the far end of the room, where Maggie was standing next to a man I assumed was Paul, pointing down at something he was stirring in a pot. She was a lot younger than I’d thought at first, probably in her fifties, and she had great bones. If I tried hard, I could see her as one of those artsy beatnik girls who wore black turtlenecks, black tights, and black ballet slippers.
“It was a long time ago.” Diana had followed my gaze. “Back around 1980, when Jake was really hot. They even had a restaurant. I think it was called Maja. That’s all I know, but you should ask Sammy when he gets back. He knows all our secrets, and he loves to gossip. You’ll see; we have much more fun when he’s around. He—”
She broke off as someone shouted, “Taste!”
Tossing me an apologetic look, Diana joined the other cooks as they descended on a dish that had just emerged from the oven. Then they all began to talk at once.
“Have you tried roasting this beef at a lower temperature?” It was Lori, the stylist. “I’d bring it down twenty-five degrees.”
“Put more liquid in the pan, Paul.” One of the cooks was poking at the bottom of the pan. “Your onions are dry!”
“I’m not sure about the seasoning.” Diana pursed her lips. “Marjoram with beef?”
“I like the marjoram,” said another cook—I still couldn’t keep them straight—“but what’s the other flavor in there? The one that’s closing my throat?”
“Fenugreek.” Paul held out a handful of tiny rust-colored pebbles. “Too weird?”
I listened, thinking how lucky I was to have landed in the one place on earth where recipes were taken this seriously. The cooks tested these dishes almost to absurdity, redoing them again and again, using a pinch more of this or a tiny bit less heat, trying to make each dish as perfect as possible. They were all dedicated to getting it right, and when I was here among them, it made me wish I were cooking again. But although the panic was letting me be for now, I knew it wasn’t gone. I could sense it out there, always waiting, and I was not about to invite it back into my life. For now, just being here was enough.
“Okay.” Maggie took control. “Try it again, Paul. Lower temperature. More liquid. Reconsider your seasonings. Got it?”
The taste was winding down. I whistled for Sherman, who trotted toward me, tail waving like a flag. No point in giving Maggie another opportunity to attack.
BACK ON THE SECOND FLOOR, I went into Jake’s office, trying to decode his expression. Irritation? Should I not have taken Sherman to the kitchen? Maybe I’d been away from my desk too long?
“I was just asking Maggie for help with a recipe.”
“Good idea.” Jake nodded. “She’s a font of Delicious! information.”
“But wouldn’t it be easier if you gave me the key to the library? Then I could look things up.” And stay away from Maggie.
Jake shook his head. “Not going to happen. In the old days, they had a full-time librarian. But long before I got here, that position was eliminated. The place was a shambles: People’d been taking books and not returning them or just leaving them in piles on the floor. It was such a mess we decided to lock it up. And it’s going to stay locked until we can afford another librarian. Which,” he added gloomily, “is not likely to be anytime soon.”
“I’d put everything back where I found it,” I said.
“I’m sure you would.” Jake gave me a conciliatory smile. “But if I let you in, I’d have to let everyone else in too. So, no, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to depend on the database.”
“And Maggie,” I said glumly.
“That’s not what I want to talk about. You’ve been here two weeks,” he began, so hesitantly that I got nervous. Was he about to tell me the trial wasn’t going so well? “And it’s time you tackled one of the most important parts of your job. What do you know about the Delicious! Guarantee?”
“ ‘Your money back if the recipe doesn’t work’?”
Jake nodded. “So you’ve heard of it.”
“I always assumed it was a gimmick.”
“Oh, it’s real. When the first Arthur Pickwick started the magazine, he wanted to make a splash. It was a hundred years ago, and back then everybody was trying to make recipes more efficient. But nobody’d ever come up with the idea of guaranteeing them. The New York Times called it one of the most brilliant public-relations ploys of all time. Everybody assumed Young Arthur would put an end to it when he took over, but he decided not to mess with success.”
“Don’t you end up refunding an awful lot of money?”
Jake shook his head. “The truth is, we rarely send anyone a refund.”
“So it is a trick!”
“Not at all. The offer’s real. But most people can’t follow instructions. They think they’re making our recipe, but what they’re really doing is inventing their own. What you have to do is go through the recipe with them, step by step, and try to figure out where they went off the rails.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“I hope you’re still saying that a week from now.” Jake handed me a pile of letters. “But that’s highly unlikely. As you can see, most of the people who write in don’t even own computers, which says a lot about who they are. My last assistant loathed the Guarantee.”
I picked up the first letter, which was from a Little Rock matron who’d sustained a severe risotto disaster. Jake was right: When I called, it turned out she’d used Minute Rice. Mrs. Amanda Bienstock had substituted baking powder for baking soda in her cake (“Really, what’s the difference?” she complained). As for the woman whose batter had overflowed, causing enough smoke to bring out the fire department, she’d seen no reason why a recipe for a dozen cupcakes wouldn’t fit into a six-inch cake pan.
John Kroger of Boulder, Colorado, was a different case. In a calm voice, he told me he’d followed the instructions to the letter. “When it said to toss the salad,” he said earnestly, “I did just that. And, believe you me, it wasn’t easy getting all that lettuce into the bowl from the other side of the room.”
I couldn’t dispute his point. I promised him a refund and picked up the next letter.
“I am absolutely furious about the scallop mousse in the current issue,” wrote a Mrs. Cloverly from Cleveland. “It is simply vile.”
On the phone, her querulous voice conjured up white hair and a pasty body muffled in a voluminous apron. “I have made a great many dishes in my life,” she informed me, “and this was, without any doubt, the vilest of the lot.”
I tried to sound sympathetic. “I’m so sorry, let me find that recipe.” I punched it into the database and up it came, along with ecstatic four- and five-star reader comments.
“I would never have believed,” a reader wrote, “that scallops, cream, a couple of eggs, and a splash of wine could make anything so divine.”
Mrs. Cloverly had indeed gone off the rails.
“This is the first complaint we’ve had about that recipe—”
“Most people are just too lazy to call!” I pictured her shaking a finger at the phone. “But that is a dreadful recipe, and I consider it my duty to warn other cooks away. A magazine that once employed James Beard has no business running such trash. And I’d like to point out that those ingredients were very costly. I expect you to honor the Delicious! Guarantee and refund the money that I spent!”
“Let’s see where the problem might lie,” I began. “Let’s start with the scallops: What kind did you buy? The large sea scallops or the little bay kind?”
“Oh, really!” Her voice was chilly now. “I would never purchase scallops. They are far too expensive. I substituted canned clams.”
“Any other substitutions?” I inquired. “Perhaps you used half and half in place of heavy cream?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Now she was cross. “I never have cream in the house; it is far too rich. I always use powdered milk.”
“Of course.” I could almost see her kitchen as she talked. It would be small—maybe a double-wide trailer, with one of those half refrigerators and a tiny stove. She sounded so sad. “I don’t imagine you had any wine on hand?”
“I used water. But I did add a bit of lemon juice to give it some zip.”
Trying to imagine how this bizarre amalgamation might have tasted, I suffered a complete failure of the imagination.
“It was vile,” she told me. “Simply vile. Will you stand behind your Guarantee?”
What was I supposed to do? “May I put you on hold?” I asked. “For a moment?”
“You must be new.” Her voice had grown suspicious. “That other girl never put me on hold.”
“Never?” Just how often had Mrs. Cloverly called? “It will be only a moment,” I said.
“Never mind.” Her voice filled with weary resignation. “I know what you’re going to say.” A bitter note crept in. “One more institution that lies to the public and refuses to honor its promises.”
She sounded so lonely, so filled with despair. “Send us your receipts, Mrs. Cloverly,” I blurted out. “We want everyone to be satisfied with the recipes in Delicious!”
“Really?” She sounded shocked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.” But as the words came out of my mouth, I suddenly saw the truth: Mrs. Cloverly was one of Jake’s decoys. I had fallen into another trap.
“Why, thank you very much, dear.” She sounded so triumphant that for a moment I almost believed she was for real. “It’s good to know there are still people who believe in honoring their promises. You have yourself a blessed day.”
“You too, Mrs. Cloverly.” She’d overdone it with the blessing bit.
“Cloverly?” Richard had come in to inspect the new flowers, and he reached out an elegant index finger to pet a hydrangea. “Did I just hear you offer her a refund? Big mistake.”
“That’s what I figured,” I sighed. “I totally blew it, didn’t I? She’s another one of Jake’s tests.”
Richard looked puzzled.
“You know, like the Sal Test,” I prompted. “Another way to find out if I’m right for Delicious!”
Richard’s face cleared. “Not even Jake could dream up Mrs. Cloverly. What I meant was that now she’s going to call twice a day. And all I can say is, good luck to you.”
Jake appeared, leaning his long body against the doorframe. “Did I hear ‘Cloverly’?”
“Yes.” Richard was laughing. “Billie offered her a refund.”
“You did what?” Jake looked horrified.
“I didn’t know what else to do.” I repeated the conversation, and Jake laughed so hard that Richard had to pound him on the back.
“Oh, Billie,” he gasped when he could finally breathe again, “I’ll be eating out on that story for weeks! Worth every penny that we’ll pay her.”
“But we can’t refund everybody’s money!” I said.
“Why not? Do you have any idea how much cheaper this is than hiring a PR firm? And I told you, the Guarantee is all about public relations. But you’ve just encouraged our most incorrigible caller, and, believe me, you’re going to regret it. The woman is relentless.”