“I can see we’re all ears,” Derek said, his lips twisting sardonically as he looked straight at me. Was there anything better than having a man in your life who knew all your foibles and loved you anyway? He pulled a chair away from the dining table and sat.
The confession was juicy indeed. Kevin revealed that when Peter first opened his restaurant in London, he worked with a partner who tried to cut corners everywhere possible. Peter was too busy keeping the kitchen running at the highest possible level to pay attention to his partner’s bad habits. That is, until the day the knucklehead went out and purchased a large order of fish that wasn’t quite fresh. When a number of Peter’s customers came down with food poisoning, the restaurant was almost closed down by the health department.
Peter disbanded the partnership and cleaned up his act immediately. He took control of his business and reestablished relationships with all the vendors the partner had alienated.
“Baxter must have found out somehow,” Kevin said, “and was able to use that information to extort money from him.”
I suddenly remembered my conversation with Peter the other night when I happened to mention poisoned fish. No wonder he had turned so pale. He must have thought I was either psychic or just plain evil.
Savannah sighed. “The last thing a chef wants is a reputation for making people sick.”
“But it wasn’t even his fault,” I said. As a blackmailable (if that was a word) secret, it was pretty slim. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. There had to be hundreds of chefs around the world who’d had the misfortune of buying tainted fish at least once in their careers.
“It was his restaurant, his responsibility,” Kevin said morosely. Then she began to chew her lower lip nervously. “But there’s more.”
“More? Good grief,” Savannah said.
“Now, I doubt this had anything to do with why Baxter was blackmailing him,” Kevin admitted. “But I might as well spill the entire jar of beans. I’m sick to death of all the secrets.”
“Spill away,” I said, trying not to sound too eager. I was curious, I admit it. And seriously? I needed there to be more to Peter’s deep, dark, secret past than a bad partner who bought old fish.
“All right,” she said. “It’s just that Peter used to be a bit of a…well, a kleptomaniac.”
“What?”
Savannah glared at me. So maybe I’d shrieked the word, but honestly? A kleptomaniac? It was positively Dickensian. In other words, oddball weird.
“I know it’s quite odd,” Kevin admitted. “But Peter grew up in a wretchedly poor family. He never had much of anything nice. I’ve always had a feeling that was the reason he was attracted to shiny things. When he was very young, he would find little bits of glass and pretty shells and keep them in a cigar box. He showed them to me once. But as he grew older, he started to take things that belonged to other people. Small things, like a brightly colored pen or a Christmas ornament.”
“Doesn’t sound too awful, I suppose,” Savannah murmured aloud, although she looked at me as if to say, She has got to be kidding.
Good to know my sister and I were on the same mental pathway. I mean, come on. Peter? A kleptomaniac?
“I don’t even know if he considered it stealing,” Kevin said. “And if a friend mentioned that something had gone missing, Peter would return it, simple as that. It usually happened around a special occasion when he wanted a memento to remember it by. Or when he was under quite a bit of stress.”
“Does he still do it?” Dalton asked, and I noticed he didn’t sound as amused as Savannah and I did.
“He finally went to therapy to overcome the problem. But to be honest,” Kevin said on a sigh, “I’m afraid he might still do it once in a while. Not often, but again, stress plays a big part.”
“I’m not sure he would want us to know this,” Derek said softly.
“Oh, the entire village knew about it,” Kevin said matter-of-factly. But she was biting her lip again, so I wondered if Derek’s comment had upset her. “If anything went missing, the townspeople always checked with Peter first. He was quite casual and open about it. And honestly, it was harmless for the most part. He never took anything significant or expensive.”
Derek’s smile was reassuring. “In that case, I don’t believe you’ve betrayed any confidences.”
Savannah said, “Maybe this was why Baxter was blackmailing him. He might not have known about the rotten fish.”
“It’s possible,” Kevin said. “But if this was Baxter’s reason for threatening him, Peter couldn’t have taken it seriously. Honestly, there were a hundred different people back home who already knew about it.”
“And when you think about it,” I added, “since he was a world-class chef, even if his secret got out, it would simply make him appear, you know, eccentric.”
“Right,” Kevin said. “So if he did give Baxter any money over it, Peter might’ve considered it simply a way to help out an old friend.”