Fatal Reservations (Key West Food Critic, Band 6) - Softcover

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Clinical psychologist Roberta Isleib, aka Lucy Burdette, has had thirteen previous mysteries published, including Death with All the Trimmings, Murder with Ganache, and Topped Chef in the national bestselling Key West Food Critic Mystery series. Her books and stories have been short-listed for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime.

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PRAISE FOR THE KEY WEST FOOD CRITIC MYSTERIES

Other Key West Food Critic Mysteries
by Lucy Burdette

OBSIDIAN

For Barbara Thomason, Donna Johnson, and Sheila Dolan, for their gifts of my furs, Yoda and Tonka

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lucy Burdette

Key West, Florida

February 22, 2015

1

Sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone.

—Joseph Tropiano and Stanley Tucci, Big Night

The first time Miss Gloria almost died, she came out of the hospital rigid with fear.

The second time, just before Christmas, she came out fighting. In spite of having been jammed into a small space for hours, with hands and feet bound and mouth taped shut, she was determined to embrace life with all the risks that entailed. For weeks, she’d brushed off my concerns about conserving her energy, going out at night alone, and piloting her enormous Buick around the island instead of calling a cab. Good gravy, wasn’t she almost eighty-one years old? And besides that, she could barely see over the steering wheel.

I took a deep breath and lowered my voice so the entire marina wouldn’t hear us squabbling on the deck of her houseboat. “Your sons will have conniptions if they hear you’re driving again,” I said. “Lots of things can go wrong—the traffic is terrible this time of year—”

She gripped my wrist with her tiny fingers. “When you look at it without your blinders on, Hayley Snow,” she said, “isn’t life just one big series of close calls? We all have to go sometime,” she added with an impish tilt to her head. “And I’ve realized that I don’t want to go feeling any regrets. And I’d definitely regret spending the rest of my life acting like a scared old lady.” She grinned and patted my hand. “My training shift at the cemetery starts at three. You’re coming for a tour at four so I can practice, right? How about we compromise and you’ll drive me home? That way you can walk over to the cemetery, burn off a few calories, and earn points with your gym trainer,” she finished with a sly wink.

I sighed and nodded my agreement. I’d been had and we both knew it.

She hurried down the dock to her metallic green car and I buried myself in my work in order to avoid watching the big sedan back and fill. When she’d extracted the vehicle from its tight parking space, she careened across the Palm Avenue traffic, tires squealing and horn blaring.

I plugged my ears and tried not to look. I had my own problem to attend to: roughing out a plan for my latest restaurant review roundup, tentatively called “Paradise Lunched.” My new boss, Palamina Wells, was turning out to be a lot more hands-on than any of us working at Key Zest had expected when she assumed half ownership of the magazine in January. Instead of the cheerleader I’d anticipated, she was watching me like a pastry chef eyes salted caramel. Like I might turn on her at any moment.

“I know I’m giving a lot of suggestions right now. I’ll back off once I get a handle on things,” she’d told us in a staff meeting yesterday. “In the meantime, let’s work on making our lead paragraphs truly memorable. Think tweetable, think Buzzfeedable, think Instagram envy. Let’s make them irresistibly viral, okay?”

Irresistibly viral felt like a lot to ask from an article on lunch.

At three thirty I put my overworked, underperforming first paragraph aside and told the cats I’d be back in an hour, lord willing that Miss Gloria allowed me to drive home. If the lord didn’t will that, I couldn’t promise anything.

By the time I fast-walked from Houseboat Row to the Frances Street entrance of the cemetery, I was sweaty and hot, which meant my face had to be its most unattractive tomato red. I took a selfie on my phone and texted it to my trainer, Leigh, as proof of my aerobic exertion. She had been on the money last week when she pointed out that my fitness program had lots of room for improvement. “Increasing your walking from zero miles per week to any positive number would be good,” she’d said, snapping her iPad shut with a flourish.

The Key West Cemetery sits in the center of the island on its highest point, where it was moved after the hurricane of 1846 washed the graves and bodies into the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the tight space on this island, many of the burials are now handled in aboveground crypts—which makes for an interesting and spooky landscape. That—along with some interesting inhabitants—makes the cemetery one of the biggest tourist attractions on the island.

I’d put off agreeing to this tour for as long as I could. It’s not that cemeteries scare me exactly. It’s that the idea of people dying makes me sad, especially people like Miss Gloria, who’s probably closer to that transition than most of the people I know. I love her like a grandmother, only more so, because she’s a friend, so our relationship is free from the baggage that family relationships can hold. And now here she was, training to be a volunteer guide at the cemetery, where the radio station would play all dead people, all the time.

She was waiting for me at the gate, positively vibrating with excitement. “How much time do we have?” she asked. “I’ve learned so much, I’d like to tell you all of it.”

I laughed. “I have to be at the city commission meeting by six o’clock sharp. And I definitely need something to eat before—the commissioners have a reputation for running hot and late. So let’s say half an hour?”

She straightened her shoulders, the serious expression on her lined face at odds with her cheerful yellow sweatshirt, which featured sweet bunnies nibbling on flowers. “In that case, maybe we’ll start in the Catholic part of the cemetery, since it’s closest.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The hinge at the left temple, still held together with silver duct tape, caught on a clump of white hair. She had gotten the lens replaced after it was crushed in the scuffle last December, but she refused to spring for new frames. “I like old things,” she’d said, laughing. “They go with me.”

She waved me forward. “So we’ll start on the right. Then we can work our way around the edges and I won’t forget where we left off.”

“How long are the tours you’ll be giving once you’re finished with your training?” I mopped my face with my sleeve and paused in the scanty shade of a coconut palm.

“It depends if it’s a special event. In that case, I could be here two hours. But most tourists don’t have that kind of attention span. They want to see the gravestone that says, ‘I told you I was sick.’ And maybe the double-murder-suicide grave.”

“The double-murder-suicide?”

“Yes.” She nodded enthusiastically. “He shot her and then killed himself. And the poor woman is stuck in the same grave site with him for eternity. What’s up with that?”

“Somebody with a sick sense of humor made that decision,” I said. “Though Eric always says you never know what’s going on in a marriage unless you’re living in that space. I guess it’s possible that she drove him to it?” My childhood friend Eric is a psychologist and, besides that, the most sensible man I know.

She cleared her throat and started to speak in a serious public-radio kind of voice....