The Secret Ingredient Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery by Virginia Nancy; Rich Pickard Read Free Book Online Page A

smiled at him again. “Your best talent.”
    He nodded, looking sage. “And one I have nurtured over a lifetime.”
    “Why those particular people, Stanley?”
    “You don’t like them, Genia?”
    “I like them fine, Stanley, although I can hardly say I know them well, except for Donna and Kevin.”
    “Well, I know them very well.” From underneath his thick white eyebrows he gave her a look she couldn’t decipher. “Better than they think I do.”
    “Are you up to something, Stanley?”
    “Who, me?” He’d pulled back in a patently false show of wounded innocence. “Why Eugenia Potter, what a thing to say to a poor, feeble old man.”
    “If you’re feeble, I’m Betty Grable,” she’d retorted.
    “Much prettier,” said the old man, gallantly.
    Genia blew him a kiss. “For that, you get your guest list.”
    “You won’t be sorry, my dear.”
    The old man started to get up from the chair where he was sitting in her kitchen, but then he sank back down again, after a wince crossed his face.
    “Stanley, forgive my asking, but are you feeling all right?”
    “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “All right, if you say so.”
    “And who better?”
    “You’d tell me if you weren’t?”
    “Probably not. Why should I tell anybody but my doctor?”
    “ Is there something wrong, Stanley?”
    He glared at her like an old buffalo. “There’s a saying that’s popular with the younger generation these days, Genia Potter, and it goes like this: ‘What is there about the word “no” that you don’t understand?’ ”
    She held her tongue and reserved her opinion.
    That same day, she wrote out and mailed six invitations to seven people: Donna Eden, Kevin Eden, Celeste Hutchinson, David Graham, Lawrence Averill, Lindsay and Harrison Wright .

      4
T HE M AIN C OURSE
    One after another her guests came, bearing hostess gifts and the secret ingredient recipes she had asked them to bring. And still no Stanley, and even Janie had not returned yet with Genia’s car and a report on him.
    She took off her apron and forced a smile to her face.
    “David, how lovely!”
    Genia accepted a bouquet of coral roses from David Graham and held them carefully in front of her. Behind him, raindrops still lightly sprinkled the driveway, and the sky looked darker than mere twilight should have made it. She hoped her other guests would beat the storm.
    “It is you who looks lovely,” was her guest’s gallant reply.
    Her smile felt suddenly less forced. He was a handsome, courtly man with an expression of sadness in his gray eyes and an air of brave bonhomie about him. She knew from her niece Donna that the women in town were already after this man, even though his wife had been dead less than a year. Genia smiled kindly at him and hoped he realized he had nothing to fear from her in that regard. She already had a beau, and not all that far away, either, in Boston.
    David Graham wore a boutonniere, a coral rose to match those he had given her. It was an affectation Genia had rarely seen in Arizona; it amused her to think of any of her cowboys appearing for dinner with a rose in his lapel. Here it seemed appropriate, however. She appreciated the obvious care with which David had prepared himself for her dinner. It was almost a lost art, Genia thought nostalgically, the business of making oneself an ornament whom a hostess could display with pride at her dinner table.
    “All this and a secret ingredient, too?” she asked him.
    He swept a typed card from the pocket of his beautiful dinner jacket and stuffed it down among the roses.
    “This was a favorite of Lillian’s.”
    “I will treasure it, David.”
    A quick glance showed her it was for a dish called, “Pepper Cheese Soufflé.” The secret ingredient was listed as “ground white pepper.” In his own handwriting, apparently, David had noted, “Secret, because it disappears into the cheese.”
    “Would you be so kind as to man the bar