Free Final Fondue (A Five-Ingredient Mystery) by Maya Corrigan Page B

toward the front of the booth, “you have another customer.”
    She stood up and stifled a groan when she saw the sneering man with a mustache. She’d try to be civil to him. “Would you like to order something, Henri?”
    “Certainly not. One of your former colleagues told me you planned to write a cookbook. I thought, That can’t be true . You don’t have a restaurant or a TV program. Now I see you do have a restaurant. Très elegant. Dining al fresco.” He pulled a phone from his pocket. “I shall immediately send a photo to Monsieur Michelin. Perhaps he will come here and give you a star for this restaurant. Or maybe two stars.”
    “If you weren’t too vain to put on your glasses, you’d know this isn’t a restaurant.” She gestured with an open palm toward the booth. “No stove, no refrigerator, no running water.”
    He squinted at the food listed on the whiteboard. “Ah, but you have a menu. Let us see what is on it. A peanut butter sandwich. How quaint. Fruit and cheese, but not French cheese, I’m sure. And hummus.” He pronounced it hyoo-mus so it sounded like dirt.
    “Hummus.” Val corrected him through clenched teeth.
    “Ooh-la-la! You make salads too. You are part of the raw food movement, perhaps. Now let us look up the meaning of the word cook .” He punched buttons on his phone and held it up triumphantly. “Aha! To cook means to combine ingredients and heat them. So it is not a cook book you will write. You will write a chop book.”
    His tirade was attracting onlookers. She couldn’t let him claim center stage unchallenged. She scuttled outside of the booth. She wanted to say, for the benefit of the crowd gathered around him, that her booth sold food she’d cooked not just chopped, but it took all her energy to control the steam rising inside her. An inner voice warned her against provoking a man who might want to kill her, and may have already tried.
    “Your recipes will explain how to take something big and make little pieces of it.” Henri mimicked chopping movements. “You think you know anything about cooking? Why? Because you promoted my cookbook? You didn’t do a good job of it.”
    She erupted. “You can’t cook without a brigade of helpers, the sous chef, the food prep team, the station cooks, and the pastry chef. You yell at them and chew them out. Is that what you call cooking? I call it the reason you don’t have a restaurant anymore.”
    Henri raised his index finger and jabbed it toward her. “ You destroyed my business.”
    Gunnar loomed behind him. “Scram, buddy.” He had the kind of face that no one wants to see in a dark alley. With a crooked nose and a craggy complexion, Gunnar could answer a casting call for a hit man.
    Chef Henri, however, wasn’t cowed. He looked up at Gunnar the way most people look down on another person, as if he’d encountered a worm. “And whom are you?”
    “ Who , not whom,” Val muttered.
    “I’m her friend.” Gunnar cocked his head toward Val, his voice quietly menacing. “Leave her alone, or you’ll regret it.”
    For an amateur actor, he wasn’t doing a bad imitation of a thug.
    Henri’s face turned puce. “You are threatening me?”
    Gunnar stared down the chef. “I have not yet begun to threaten.”
    A man in the crowd applauded. “Great performance art. It wasn’t even on the festival schedule.”
    “It isn’t a performance,” a tall gray-haired woman at the edge of the crowd said. “It’s real. This man knows what he’s talking about. He’s the celebrity chef who’ll judge the cook-off tomorrow.”
    Val might have known that Irene Pritchard, her former rival for the job of managing the Cool Down Café, would jump at the chance to criticize her and curry favor with the cook-off judge.
    “Thank you, Madame.” Henri bowed to Irene and extended both arms to the crowd. “I invite you all to watch my cooking demonstration tonight at eight at the Harbor Inn.” He turned back to Gunnar and rose to his