A Recipe for Murder

One — The Smell of Cardamom and Trouble

There are two smells I have never once known to lie: bread proving, and a person about to ruin my afternoon. By half past six that Thursday in May, my kitchen had both.

The bread was honest. Cardamom buns, eighteen of them, swelling on the proof tray under a damp cloth while the ovens ticked toward heat. Outside the back window the fog was peeling off the harbor in long grey ribbons, and the first ferry hooted somewhere past Gull Rock, a sound so woven into Kalmar Cove that you only heard it when you went looking. I had flour to the elbow and coffee in the pot and a cat the size of a footstool asleep across the cookbook section, and for about four minutes the morning was perfect.

Then Vivian Thorne knocked on my locked front door with the brass head of her umbrella, and the second smell arrived.

I should explain about the door. The Saltwater Shelf does not open until eight. The whole point of the Shelf — bookshop on the left, café on the right, a wood stove between them that I keep going from October to June — is that it does not run on anybody's schedule but mine and the tide's. My husband Lars and I bought the building when it was a failing chandlery, knocked through the wall ourselves, and filled it with secondhand novels and the smell of butter. Lars has been gone three years now. The shop kept me upright that first winter the way a bannister keeps you upright on ice. I do not open early for anybody.

I opened early for Vivian, because not opening for Vivian cost more in the long run than the coffee did.

"You've changed the window," she said, before I had the bolt all the way back. She came in on a draft of cold salt air and Shalimar, umbrella first, and stood in the middle of my floor surveying it like a building inspector. "The Du Maurier display. You've put paperbacks at eye level. People will think you don't have the hardbacks."

"Good morning, Vivian. Coffee?"

"Half a cup. Black. I can't have what you do to it with all that cream." She set a tote bag on my clean counter with the particular thump of a woman who wants you to ask what's inside. "And not in one of those buckets you serve the fishermen. A proper cup."

I gave her a proper cup, which is to say my second-best, because my best lived on a high shelf and I am not a saint. Vivian Thorne was somewhere in her late sixties and wore it like a weapon — silver hair lacquered into a helmet, a camel coat that had never been near a boat, reading glasses on a chain she used as a conductor uses a baton. Twenty years ago she had been the most feared restaurant critic in San Francisco. She told you so within ten minutes of meeting her, and then again every time after, in case you'd recovered.

Now she was retired to the Cove, where she ran a blog called Thorne's Table that nobody admitted to reading and everybody read, and where she had appointed herself, by a process I still don't fully understand, the editor of our community cookbook.

"It's at the printer," she said, and lifted a single bound proof copy from the tote with both hands, the way you'd lift a baptismal gown. A Taste of Kalmar Cove. Recipes from Our Harbor, Compiled and Edited by Vivian Thorne. The lighthouse on the cover was rendered in tasteful watercolor. My name was inside somewhere, in eight-point type, attached to a recipe she had "tidied."

"Saturday," she said. "The launch. Here, of course. Six o'clock. I'll need the long table cleared, the good linen, and your buns — the cardamom, not the cinnamon, the cinnamon photograph like doorknobs. The mayor's coming. The Gazette is sending the boy with the camera. Two hundred copies sold in advance, Marit. Two hundred. Every cent to the lighthouse fund." She let that land. "You're welcome."

"You're very generous with my Saturday," I said.

"Somebody has to be." She sipped, winced, set the cup down half-full. "This town would still be photocopying recipes for the church bake sale if I hadn't taken it in hand. Do you know what Pernilla Strand submitted? Tuna hotdish. With the crushed potato chips. I cut it. I cut a great deal." Her glasses came up, swung toward the bookshelves, the conductor calling for the brass section. "I have standards. It's exhausting, having standards in a place like this, but somebody must."

Henrik chose that moment to wake.

I have not properly introduced Henrik. He is a Norwegian Forest cat, a skogkatt, which is a polite way of saying he is built like a draft horse and shaped like a cushion, with a ruff in winter that makes him look as though he is perpetually mid-sneeze. Lars named him for Ibsen — Lars thought that was hilarious, and three years on I still hear him laughing every time the cat does something dignified and absurd, which is hourly. Henrik came off the cookbook shelf in one liquid pour, crossed the floor, and sat directly on Vivian's left shoe.

"Get it off," she said.

"He likes you."

"He does not. Animals are honest, that's the one thing to be said for them." She shook her foot. Henrik did not move. He looked up at her with the flat yellow regard of a creature who has read your whole file. "I'm allergic," she added, which was a lie; she'd eaten my smørbrød with the church cat in her lap last Christmas. What she was, was unsettled. People often were, under that look.

I scooped him up — twenty pounds, all opinion — and he draped over my arm and kept watching her.

"Saturday," Vivian said again, gathering her tote, her proof, her umbrella, her sense of grievance. At the door she stopped. From her coat pocket she produced a small amber glass bottle with a dropper top, the kind you'd keep tincture in, and tapped three drops into the half-cup of coffee she hadn't finished, swirled it, and drank it down with a shudder of virtue. "Gut bitters," she said, catching my look. "Petra blends them. Dreadful. But one doesn't reach my age on cream and sugar, Marit. One reaches it on discipline." She pocketed the bottle. "You might try it. You've thickened, since Lars."

The door swung shut behind her on a gust of fog.

I stood holding my cat and my unsaid reply, which is the cheapest thing a widow owns and the one she spends the least.

"I could put foxglove in her bitters," I told Henrik.

It is a thing people say. I want that on the record, later, because of everything that came after. It is a thing people say in a kitchen at half six in the morning, to a cat, about a woman who has just called you thick. I said it and I rinsed her cup and I did not mean one word of it, and three days later Vivian Thorne was dead on my café floor with the launch cake half-cut beside her, and I had said it where Pernilla Strand, arriving early for her shift, could hear me through the open back door.

But that is Saturday. On Thursday I only buttered the proof trays, slid the buns in, and set the timer, and let the smell of cardamom paper over the other thing, the way it always does, for a little while.

---

The cookbook had made enemies. That much I knew before anyone died; everyone knew it, the way you know which planks on the public dock are loose.

Sven Halvorsen knew it best. Sven ran the Anchor, the diner down on Front Street, three generations of Halvorsens and the best clam chowder on the Sound, and last autumn Vivian had reviewed it on Thorne's Table under the headline A Chowder That Should Be Tried for War Crimes. Tourists read it. The Anchor's Saturdays went thin. Sven, who is the size of a refrigerator and twice as warm, had stood up at the Grange meeting where the cookbook was approved and said, in front of forty people, that he'd see Vivian Thorne in the ground before he saw his grandmother's chowder cut from a book about his own town. She'd cut it anyway. Insufficiently elevated, she wrote him.

And there was Saskia. Saskia Vandermeer foraged the headlands and the tide flats and sold what she found at the Saturday market — sea beans, nettles, chanterelles in autumn, the bright blue borage flowers I scattered on my cakes all summer. Vivian had run a piece in March titled Eating Dirt: The Foraging Fad That Could Kill You, and named Saskia in it, and after that the county health officer had come around, and Saskia's stall had stood empty for a month while it got sorted out. It got sorted out. The damage didn't.

There was Constance Velure, who chaired the Lighthouse Restoration Society and had organized the whole cookbook as a fundraiser, and who had spent the spring looking like a woman holding a door shut against weather. Constance and Vivian had been thick as thieves over it for a year — and then, around April, something had soured. I'd seen them on the harbor walk, Vivian talking, Constance gone white and still, and after that Constance flinched whenever the cookbook came up, which for the chair of the fundraiser was a problem.

And there was Petra.

Petra Lindqvist was Vivian's assistant, though assistant did not cover it. Petra tested every recipe, photographed every dish, drove Vivian to her appointments, blended her dreadful bitters, and absorbed her moods, and got, for all of it, her name nowhere on the cover of a book she had essentially built. She was perhaps thirty, quiet, watchful, with flour permanently in the creases of her knuckles and the deftest hands I'd ever seen on a person who hadn't trained in a real kitchen. Except I thought she had. You can tell. There's a way a trained baker holds a bench scraper, the way a sailor holds a line.

She'd come into the Shelf in March, the week the foraging piece ran, and asked if she could use my big oven now and then for testing, since Vivian's range was electric and "Miss Thorne won't have the smell of frying in the house." I'd said yes. I'd liked her at once, the way you like someone who notices your books before they notice you, and who reshelved the Ngaio Marsh I'd left face-out without being asked.

One afternoon that spring she made a tart. Pears and brown butter on a base so short it shattered like good ice, and a smear of salted caramel underneath that I am still thinking about. I ate a slice standing at the counter and had to sit down.

"Where on earth did you learn that," I said.

She didn't look up from the second tart. "My father." A beat. "He's gone now."

"He taught you well."

"He taught me everything." And she'd smiled, and the smile had not reached anywhere near her eyes, and I'd put it down to grief, because I know what grief does to a smile. I should have looked longer. I had a shop full of books about people who don't look long enough, and I shelved them and dusted them and did not learn the lesson in any of them until it cost a woman her life.