McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [160]
I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible suspect, particularly now with the poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous on the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.
“The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate, which she handed over to me.
“Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”
“Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model union. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt—she intensified the existing flavor—and he was pepper—he added a new angle—and that every fine table needed both.
“In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”
“No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.
She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and before I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”
“Did you have any reason to dislike them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”
“Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”
“Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”
She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself in the photo album, serving plates of cake with a full head of very brown hair, “and salt and pepper shakers were their gift to each other every single anniversary.”
She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.
I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years. . . .”
“Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.”
I waited.
“What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew allergic to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.
“After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”
“Truly?”
“From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”
I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.
“And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”
“We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.
She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.
“I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped