And she ate first, there, standing β visible, unhurried β while he watched her over the rim of his glass with an expression she had never seen on him before.
It looked, impossibly, like the beginning of hunger. Not for the food.
For the company.
Chapter 14: The Framed Chef
Enzo had been gone from the house for eleven days, suspended without pay and without a hearing, and the kitchen ran wrong without him β like a song missing its bass line. Everyone on the staff knew the official shape of it: the poison had been found in a sauce built on Enzo's station, from Enzo's pan, finished with Enzo's spoon. His knife roll, opened in front of witnesses, had held a small vial in the lining. A vial. In a man's own knife roll, where any fool would find it.
Mia had not stopped tasting that night in her memory since it happened. And on the eleventh day, in the small kitchen, shelling peas with the Nonna asleep in the chair by the stove, the whole flavor of it finally assembled itself in her mind like a chord resolving β and she sat up straight with her hands full of peas.
She went down to Luca's study without asking anyone's permission. Marco was there, and two captains, and the door guard looked at her flour-dusted apron and let her pass because by then the whole house knew the taster walked where she wanted.
"Enzo didn't do it," Mia said.
Marco exhaled like a man whose patience had been taxed once too often. "The vial was in hisβ"
"In his knife roll. Yes. Which is the one place in this house Enzo would never put anything he wanted to keep." She turned to Luca, because Luca was the one who decided things, and Luca was watching her the way he watched everything, still as deep water. "Enzo is a sous-chef. He's proud. His roll is his altar β I've watched him. He unwraps it like a priest. If Enzo wanted to poison you, he would never carry the poison in the most searched, most personal, most obviously-his object he owns. Somebody put that vial where it would be found. Somebody wanted it found. That's not evidence, Mr. Moretti. That's a signature. That's somebody framing him and signing it with his own name."
"Cooking wisdom," Marco said. "Forgive me if the family requires more."
"Then let me give you the rest of it," Mia said, "because I have been tasting that night for six weeks and I finally heard the whole of it." She took a breath. "The poison rode in the sauce, but it wasn't built there. Poison like that β bitter, masked β you don't stir it into a ragΓΉ on the stove, it blooms and turns and any cook would catch the smell off the heat. It went in cold, at the end. At the pass. And what touches a plate at the pass, after the kitchen is done with it?" She let it land. "The wine service. The pairing. A few drops in the glass that's poured tableside, or drizzledβ no. In the glass. The sauce just carried the taste of it up from the plate where the wine had already been splashed by a careless pour. I tasted the sauce, so I blamed the sauce. Everyone did. It was never the sauce. It was the pour."
The room was very quiet.
"Who pours?" Luca said, though they all knew.
"Salvatore," Mia said. "Salvatore pours everything in this house and tastes nothing. In six weeks I have never once seen him taste β not the wine, not anything. A steward who never tastes is either a recovering drunk or a man who knows better than to swallow what's in the glasses he carries. And the mask, Mr. Moretti. The thing that hid the bitterness. I told you the first night: a rare bitter liqueur, herbal, almost like gentian. I've thought about it every day. That liqueur isn't in your cellar book. Mrs. Ricci let me see the cellar book β there's no bottle of it in this house. Except one. His. Salvatore keeps a private stock in the steward's cabinet, his own bottles, his own key. The liqueur that masked your poison exists in this house exactly once, and it's his."
Marco stood up slowly. "That's a throat-cutting accusation, waitress."
"It's a tasting note," Mia said. "Test it. Don't take my word β take the bottle. Send his private stock to whatever laboratory you use and test the gentian liqueur against what was in the boss's glass that night. If I'm wrong, I'll walk out of this house myself and you'll never see me again. But I'm not wrong. My grandmother used to say a palate is a witness that can't be bribed. Mine has been telling me this for six weeks. I just finally learned how to listen to it."
Luca had not moved. Now he spoke, and his voice was quiet in a way that made both captains straighten.
"Enzo," he said. "Where is he now?"
"Home, sir," said one of the captains. "Suspended. Waiting to hear if he's β finished."
"Bring him back." Luca rose, and buttoned his jacket with the care of a man dressing for a ceremony. "Tonight. His pay doubled for the eleven days, and my apology with it β I will make it myself, in the kitchen, in front of the staff. A man was framed in my house, under my roof, by a traitor at my own table, and I let the frame stand because it was tidy." His eyes went to Mia, and held. "And Salvatore's bottles β all of them, his cabinet, his rooms β are to be taken and sealed. No confrontation. Not yet. A man who pours poison and passes notes is worth more to me alive and ignorant than frightened and gone. We will know what he carries before he knows we know."
"And Enzo?" Marco asked, grudging, but with something new in his voice β respect, arriving the way weather arrives.
"Enzo comes home to his kitchen," Luca said. "Mia. Walk with me."
In the corridor, away from the men, he stopped. "Six weeks," he said, "you have been tasting that night. You might have brought me this fear on the first day, half-formed, and I would have acted on it β badly. You waited until you were certain. Until it was true, and not merely convenient."
"People's lives," Mia said. "Enzo's. Salvatore's, even. I wasn't going to point at a man on a maybe."
Luca looked at her for a long moment, and she watched him file that away, the way he filed everything β some new entry in the ledger of what Mia Callahan was.