Killer Pancake

“Look, I’m fine. I’m only in my thirties, remember, and I was just a kid during the period you’re talking about. Where’s Tom?”

“Cooking. I told him to fix something groovy from the sixties and he said the only groovy food he knew was hash brownies. That’s disgusting! How can you put corned beef hash in brownies?”

It was going to be a tiresome hobby. When I entered the kitchen, Tom was bent so intently over a recipe that I repressed the greeting on my lips. The walls had been cleaned of the cocoa powder thrown by the Jerk, and lump crabmeat glistened invitingly on the countertop next to a tall green bottle of white wine. A seasoned crêpier waited next to a wide sauté pan, where butter for a sauce sizzled in a slow, circuitous melt. Tom relished cooking even more than gardening. I happily let him do both. I’d take crapes stuffed with crabmeat in white wine sauce any day. Especially when it was made by somebody else.

As I watched, Tom leaned over the crabmeat and methodically nabbed and tossed bits of shell and cartilage. I felt a surge of pleasure. It was not only that I now lived in a household where people vied to prepare the food. Nor was it, because of the day’s events, that I’d developed a sudden appreciation for life. This unsettling joy surfaced because I still didn’t know why I’d been so reluctant to marry the man who now stood in what used to be my domain and was now our kitchen.

I watched the butter dissolve into a golden pool. Of course, my hesitancy stemmed from all that bad history of my first marriage. After I’d left the Jerk I’d come to relish those years of single motherhood and solitude. Except for the celibacy, which I kept telling myself I’d get used to, being single constituted the perfect life for me, I’d decided. Until Tom.

Nevertheless, transition from my fiercely maintained aloneness to daily companionship did have its glitches. There had been the financial questions. Years ago, the divorce settlement from Dr. John Richard Korman had paid for the expensive retrofit of my kitchen for commercial food service, and I couldn’t leave it and still maintain my business. So Tom had moved in with Arch, Julian, and me, and found a renter for his cabin in a remote mountain area. He insisted on putting the rent money into a vacation fund for the four of us. Of course, as a self-employed woman with the only catering business in town, I’d forgotten what the word vacation meant.

These and other material aspects we’d been able to work out fairly well. Our biggest problem was anxiety. Tom worried about me and I returned the favor. Tom had seen some of the damage done by John Richard Korman before our split. He knew my left thumb didn’t bend properly because John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer. Tom had examined the hutch glass I’d never replaced after John Richard had shattered it in one of his rampages, and the buffet permanently dented from the Jerk’s repeated kicking when I’d been hiding behind it. After Tom moved in, one of his first acts was to replace the hutch glass and sand and refinish the buffet’s dents.

My apprehension over the dangers of his job were legion. Whenever I heard over the radio of a shooting, whenever a midnight phone call brought him out of our warm bed, whenever that midnight phone call meant that before he left he was cinching the Velcro bands around his white bulletproof vest, my heart ached with fear. My anxiety had not been eased when a murderer had kidnapped Tom for four days this spring, just as we were about to be married. He scoffed and said that had been a bizarre event. He hadn’t even believed it himself.

Nor did Tom and I quite know how to talk to each other about our work. Tom claimed he enjoyed discussing investigations with me as long as I wouldn’t get upset. Or worse, tell anybody what he or I had uncovered. To me, Tom always appeared either in control: when he was surrounded by his team in an investigation, or in relaxed good humor, when we were together and he was telling me about bloodstain patterns or check-kiting. I, on the other hand, did not relish rehashing the trials of cooking for, serving to, and cleaning up after the rich and shameless. Occasionally I would regale him with stories about the Thai guest at a reception for two hundred who’d insisted on giving me his recipe for whole baked fish—in Thai, or about the drunk Polo Club host who fell off his horse before eating one bite of the vegetarian shish kebabs.

Reflecting on all this, I’d failed to notice that Tom had stopped cooking and was staring at the cupboard above the kitchen counter, his face twisted with pain.

“Tom! What is it?”