Page 52 of Sexy as Sin
They’d do her ice blocks as well, she decided. She’d made three new batches a few days earlier, and she finally had the green ones sorted. A layer of yellow was the secret: putting a strip of mango/lemon puree into the top of the mold, then pouring in the spinach/lime mixture. The bridal couple was sporty, spontaneous, and fun, it was another warm day, and the ceremony was being held at the beach and the reception at the Yoga Center. Definitely ice blocks.
“You said the kitchen inspection was complete,” Amanda told Eyebrows. “I don’t understand why you’re still here. Surely the rest of this can wait until tomorrow. We have an event in a few hours, and I’ve earned five stars from the Food Authority during every inspection for over four years. Your cotton swabs are going to turn up nothing no matter where you stick them, because they always turn up nothing.” PR skills near nil and falling fast.
“Of course we want to cooperate, though,” Willow said, beginning to fill tart shells as she talked. Amanda still looked murderous, but that was tough cheese. This was Willow’s business as well, and she wasn’t risking it being closed because they’d been short with the inspector. “With two people still in hospital? We want to get to the bottom of this at least as much as anybody else. I cooked the meal yesterday, so I’m sure you want to talk to me. I want to tell you, too. I need to know what happened.”
“Maybe you can enlighten me, then,” Eyebrows said, “as to where the dishes and the food you made last night are. Nobody else seems to know.” She cast a dark eye around the kitchen as if she expected a cupboard door to open and a pile of incriminating unwashed stainless-steel bowls to fall out.
“Crockery, silverware, and glasses washed up and put away again, I’m sure,” Willow said, which the others would surely have said as well. “They came from the catering supply firm anyway, not here. Prep dishes went through the dishwasher long ago, and are put away again as well. Any leftover food not eaten by staff on site was binned as the first stage of cleanup, as per usual, then brought here and disposed of.”
“We should be able to find something by testing the food,” the inspector said. “I’d like the rubbish bags, please.” Like a woman with a career or a point to make, out here on a Sunday.
“It’s a disposal, basically,” Willow said. “An enormous version of the thing in your own kitchen. It’ll be down the sewer. What did the lab results show, do you know?”
The woman seemed to be deciding whether to answer, but finally said, “No listeria, no E. coli, no salmonella. Staph in three samples, but not in the others, leading me to believe that it was naturally occurring in those individuals. They’re running more tests as we speak.”
Willow took a breath and said it. “I’m glad you’re here, then, because as far as I can work out, that only leaves one possibility. The mushrooms. I’d like to go with you to ask about them.”
The Food Authority woman’s name, it turned out, was Katherine. She didn’t talk as they bumped over the narrow, rutted, single-lane road that led up toward Nightcap National Park, and Willow didn’t, either. In her case, because she was having trouble with her stomach again. She hadn’t even considered that. Mistake. She breathed through her mouth, tried to think non-winding-road thoughts, and kept her eyes glued to the road’s edge. Pity it was too narrow to have a center stripe.
The sedan made the turn into Ben Bankside’s drive at last, though, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Three dogs came bounding across the yard, scattering chickens along the way, and Katherine said, “Right,” like a woman who was trying to convince herself.
Willow had never been so thankful to get out of a car. She gave Zeus, a black Labrador mix, a pat, told Hera, a bouncy young pointer, “Sit,” and thumped Hercules, a dignified white Great Pyrenees, on the shoulder. “They’re friendly,” she told Katherine. “They’ll lick you to death, that’s all.” Katherine didn’t look one bit convinced, or one bit excited about stepping in chicken droppings, either. She was probably imagining salmonella that would creep straight through the soles of her shoes.
Ben’s house didn’t look any more flash than it had the last time Willow had been up here, months ago. A ramshackle wooden affair, it was never tidy, but his mushrooms were the best, and that was what mattered. Meanwhile, the birds were loud in the trees, the gum trees were tall, their leaves rustling in the breeze, the air was warm and humid, and Ben himself had come out to stand on the porch in shorts and work boots, pulling his stained kangaroo-hide bush hat over his shaggy head of gray hair. You’d think “full-on Aussie bogan,” until you saw the hint of shyness in his eyes and met his lovely dogs.
Willow led the way, trusting that Katherine was following behind and hadn’t made a dash for the dogless confines of the car. “Hiya, Ben,” she said from the base of the porch. The dogs flopped down behind her in the dust, since the entertainment was sadly over.
Ben didn’t invite them up, and he didn’t come down and give her the usual awkward cuddle, either, much less a handshake. Ben didn’t trust new people, outside the confines of his weekly stall at the farmers’ market, which was where she’d met him. She went on, “This is Katherine McGill with the Food Authority. Come to talk about mushrooms.”
Ben’s mountain-man gray beard didn’t bristle, but his dark eyes were wary. “Why would that be?” he asked. And still didn’t even invite them up the stairs.
“We have eighteen people down with a food-borne illness from a dinner last night,” Katherine said, like a woman who’d never heard the phrase “ease into it” in her officious life, “some of whom have required hospitalization, and we’ve narrowed it down to the mushroom pizza. I believe you supplied the mushrooms.” She pulled her iPad out and hit the button as if she needed to consult it. Or as if she were using it as a shield. “Chanterelles, is that right?”
Ben had his arms crossed over his skinny chest, and he wasn’t backing up. “That’s right, and every bloody one of themwasa chanterelle.” He shot a look at Willow. “It was something else. I’ve been collecting mushrooms for fifty-five years, since I was a wee lad going out with my mum and dad up here, and I’ve been supplying them for thirty. You know that. I can’t make a mistake like that. It’s not possible.”
“That’s the problem I’m having as well,” Willow said. She passed a hand over her brow. “Can we sit, Ben? I got it myself, whatever it was, and I’m still a bit crook. Would you have a glass of water?”
He hesitated, then said, “Come up, then,” backed up a pace, hauled the screen door open, and banged it shut behind him. Willow sank down on one of the dirty, mismatched chairs, a couple of which had rungs broken, so you had to be careful. Katherine, after some visible hesitation, joined her on another, grimacing as her narrow bottom hit the dusty surface. She’d be grimacing more if she fell through the cane seat, which was entirely possible. Willow cheered up a bit at the thought.
Ben came out, banged a tin cup of water down in front of Willow, and took a seat. “They were chanterelles,” he said again.
Willow took a cautious sip of water, then another, mindful of Brett in hospital, drinking too fast. The last thing she needed was to be spewing over Ben’s log railing. That would look professional. “I sliced them,” she said, “and I’d swear the same. Caps like chanterelles. Pale-yellow color like chanterelles. And most of all—that heavenly apricot smell. Iknowthat was there. I’ve kept thinking, since last night—how could I have mistaken any of that? How could I have missed the difference in the edges? The timing’s right, though, and so are the symptoms. People began feeling ill a couple hours after dinner, but not everybodywasill, not even everybody who ate the pizzas. So it wasn’t something uniformly toxic, and it certainly wasn’t anything deadly. Gastrointestinal upsets, that’s all. Bad enough.”
Ben gave a long sigh. “False chanterelles, that’s what you’re thinking. Nearly the same color, late-summer growing and in the same places, and they’d make some people ill and hardly bother others. If you’d bought them from somebody else, that’s what I’d say. Easy mistake to make. But you didn’t buy them from somebody else. You bought them from me. They’d all have the wrong gills, they’d have downy caps, and they’d have a different edge. I wouldn’t make that mistake. I couldn’t have at ten. At sixty-five? Not possible.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dunno know how else to say it. I couldn’t.”
“I believe you,” Willow said. “I’d have sworn it. And yet it happened. When I ate three of those little pizzas for my dinner, after the trays came back to the kitchen too full, they didn’t taste as good as I expected. Not enough sweetness, too much woodiness. I thought my taste was affected, the way it can be after you’ve been cooking all day, or that I was tired. But I think...” She had to say this. No choice. “They were mixed. Looking back—tastingback—they were mixed. It never occurred to me, because it’s what you said. It wasn’t possible. But it happened.”
Ben’s gaze was piercing. “You sliced them, then you put them on the pizzas?”
“No. I sliced them, put them in the fridge, and did the rest of the prep in Nourish’s kitchen. I finished the pizzas at the hall where the event was being held.”
“You took them there in what?” Ben asked.
“Paper bag. Same as always.” You didn’t put mushrooms in plastic. It made them sweat and go limp. “I had the bag in the fridge at the venue while I patted out the crusts. I put the lamb and veggies in one oven to finish, and did the pizzas in the other, just at the end, as drinks were being served, so they’d be hot and the crust would be right.”
Ben shook his head. Slowly. “It can’t be.”
“Except,” Katherine said crisply, “that it is. We’ve eliminated the impossible, which leaves us with the improbable, however unlikely you two think it. Do you have any of those mushrooms now?”
