The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

  By the time she bought her supplies and greeted everyone she knew and fielded their questions about the search party and whether or not it was true the National Guard was being brought in and was it true they found a mutilated corpse of a cow in one of her pastures and did she think they’d been kidnapped for ransom and did she have a ransom note yet … by the time she dealt with all of that, and then drove back home, and stopped for her mail at the front gate … and paused at Juanita’s to hear “no news” and accept a cup of cinnamon-flavored coffee and apple strudel and then drive on up to her own home …

  By that time, it was lunchtime.

  As she prepared a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich to go with a glass of orange juice and potato chips, Mrs. Potter glanced out her kitchen window to watch a single-engine, high-wing airplane traverse the air above her fields. The sign on its fuselage, when it passed close enough for her to read it, said ARIZONA AERIALS.

  Mrs. Potter was watching the plane disappear to the east, over El Bizcocho, The Biscuit, when she became aware of a small cloud of dust visible out of the corner of her right eye. She turned fully toward it, and squinted. It appeared somebody was coming up her road in a pickup truck. Maybe one of the searchers, with news.…

  Her heart was already pounding with nervous anticipation when she saw that it was a black truck with a capital C and a “lazy” capital U on its side, painted on its doors. C Lazy U.

  “Oh, good heavens, it’s Jed.”

  Her stomach did a double back flip.

  Mrs. Potter dropped the crusts of her sandwich into the sink and quickly washed them down the disposal. Her hands seemed to work—or not work—independently of her as they rinsed out her glass, put her dishes in the dishwasher, sponged down the counter, dried themselves on a towel. The towel slipped from her hands and she had to pick it up once and then twice before it stayed on the towel rack. Her hands flew to her hair to tuck in stray strands.

  She raced out of the kitchen and back down the long hallway to her bedroom to check her appearance—“Oh, dear, isn’t there any makeup to erase the years?”—and to apply a fresh dab of lip gloss. “You’d think I’d never met a man before!”

  In fact, there had been only two men in her life with whom she had considered herself to be in love, and one of them was walking up to her front door this very minute. The other one was Lew. Since his death, there’d been infrequent escorts, even a blind date now and then—usually a disaster!—and once or twice a mild romance. But none of those men had inspired in her the same depth of feeling she’d experienced with her husband or with her first love. Compared to all those good years of marriage to Lew, those few months of infatuation with Jed White ought to seem as nothing, she reminded herself. That being the case, her heart must be pounding so hard only because she’d practically run down the hall to her bathroom.

  “I wonder what he’ll look like?”

  He’d been such a slim, strikingly handsome boy.

  Was he slender still? Certainly he would have filled out in the way that men did starting in their early twenties, and it would be unfair to expect him still to boast the erect carriage and slim torso of an eighteen-year-old. Mrs. Potter touched her own hips, clad in their dark trousers, to remind herself that times pass and figures change.…

  She heard the doorbell ring.

  A terrible thought occurred to her.

  What if he’d been lifted and tucked and spa’d into skinny, golden perfection?

  “I’ll look like his mother!”

  Mrs. Potter, with her heart still doing its infuriating imitation of an eighteen-year-old in love, went to answer the door.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Hello, Andy.”

  Why, he looks like himself, she decided, having only at the moment of seeing him suddenly remembered him clearly. Tall, slightly stooped, yes, and maybe a hint of a paunch on an otherwise thin frame, and his hair a fairly even mixture of brown and gray, as her own was rather evenly blond and silver. His features were somewhat bony, just as she remembered him, and there was that lovely patrician nose, long, sharp, pinched at the end. His hazel eyes were still water-clear, sharp and keen. Those eyes were one of the reasons I first fell in love with him, Mrs. Potter thought with a start. All the boys in Harrington, Iowa—all those Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, German, and Scandinavian boys—had blue eyes. A young man with hazel eyes and with that strange and wonderful New England accent, one who had gone to an honest-to-goodness prep school, had bowled her over. He had seemed a beautiful alien being, she thought, and so he rather appeared now, standing there on her doorstep, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for his spaceship to have landed in Arizona.

  He held out both of his hands to her, and she took them.

  “I always hoped you’d look like this,” he said.

  Almost as quickly as it took her to say, “Come in, Jed,” he was seated casually at her kitchen table, one long leg crossed elegantly over the other, his hands clasped easily in front of him on the table, his well-groomed head turning as he watched her begin her preparations to make chili. It all seemed as easy as if it were, indeed, only yesterday. In that short time, she had already promised him a tour of the compound and the ranch if he wanted it—which he eagerly seemed to—but for now, she told him, she had to think about company coming, and thank goodness he was here now to keep her company!

  At first, their questions and answers tumbled over each other like clothes in a dryer.

  “I just can’t believe you’re here, Jed.”

  “My excuse really is business. But how’d you end up here, Andy?”

  “So funny to be called Andy again! Well, as to how we got here, it’s a long story, but basically we fell in love with the valley … what business is it that you’re in, Jed?”

  “Electrical design. So you bought this place, what, about twenty years ago?”

  “I’m just amazed that you know that. Are you an engineer, Jed?”

  “Yes, we design electrical systems. It’s a company I started a few years back. J. H. White Research. You know, I can’t take too much credit for the investigative work of keeping track of you, Andy. Your husband was so successful, I couldn’t help but follow his career path—as they say—in the newspapers. There were times when it seemed as if Lew Potter’s name was in the Wall Street Journal every other week. I felt awfully bad for you when I read he had died, almost sent you a note then, but I didn’t want to intrude, wasn’t sure you’d remember me—”

  “Oh, Jed, you didn’t really think—”

  “Well, I just didn’t know.”

  “What about you? Are you married, widowed, divorced? I suppose that’s none of my business, but it feels like we’re old friends—”

  “You think so too? It’s wonderful how we—how people can just take up where they left off years ago. Well, I’m divorced. About five years now. I wonder if you knew her family, her maiden name was …”

  At first she felt self-conscious under his gaze. It was equally difficult to resist the temptation to stare at him. A small point, but she liked the way he dressed. Brown flannel shirt and some kind of neat, serviceable tan trousers and good walking shoes. And what if he’d come in a plaid Western shirt, polyester pants, fancy cowboy boots, a turquoise bolo in place of a tie, all this after a few days on a dude ranch? she wondered. Would it have mattered? Soon, she was so busy cooking and chatting and reminiscing that she utterly forgot how she might appear in slacks from behind, or whether every strand of her hair was tucked into its knot, or whether either of them was recalling the lithe, firm-skinned youths of their past.

  Jed expressed astonishment at the very idea of her chili recipe.

  “How many ingredients, Andy?”

  “Twenty-seven, believe it or not.”

  “That’s amazing. And here, I always thought chili basically had about four ingredients.”

  “It usually does, the way most people make it if they’re not real chili aficionados. Chili nuts, some might say. What are your four i
ngredients, Jed? Beans, I suppose?”

  “And hamburger.”

  “Oh, good, you’re a hamburger man; not everybody is, you know. Some folks just seem to want beans and grease with crackers and hot peppers to wash it down. What’s your third ingredient?”

  “Tomato sauce.”

  “And chili powder?”

  “Uh-huh, I do like chili that’s hot enough to fire a missile.”

  “Well, I’m going to fix two batches of this, so I’ll make one pot hot enough for the likes of you, and the other pot a little milder for the rest of us. Am I getting the impression that you cook, Jed?”

  “Nothing over four ingredients.”

  Mrs. Potter laughed and he did too.

  “Here.” She walked across the kitchen and handed him her Country Friends’ Cookbook. “If you’d like to make yourself useful you can read all twenty-seven ingredients to me as I set them out.”

  Mrs. Potter practically knew them by heart, especially as she had shopped for them that very morning, but she also knew from experience that participation made cooking fun, whether your cooking partner was a grandchild or a gentleman caller.

  “Ahem.” Jed cleared his throat in an amusingly officious manner. In a dramatically sonorous voice, he announced, “One pound of dry pinto beans.”

  “Check! Actually, they’re not dry any longer. I soaked them overnight, and then I cooked them this morning until they were tender.”

  “Why”—Jed feigned an impressed astonishment—“that’s just what it says to do with them, right here.” He thumped the open cookbook with the flat of his hand—which had, Mrs. Potter couldn’t help but notice, the same long, thin, aristocratic-looking fingers she had admired so when she was eighteen years old. “It seems to me,” he said, reading on, “that calling water an ingredient is stretching this ‘twenty-seven’ thing a bit far.”

  Mrs. Potter laughed again, and thought what a pleasure it was to have the company of an intelligent, amusing man in her kitchen. “Just read the ingredients, Jed. There’ll be no editorial comment, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Half a cup of butter or margarine.”

  “Check.”

  “Which?”

  She glanced up at him. “Butter.”

  His pleased smile was its own editorial comment.

  “Two medium onions, chopped.”

  She murmured “check” to all the next twenty-three ingredients, and then doubled all of them in order to make two batches.

  “One seven-ounce can of diced green chilis.

  “Two cloves of garlic, minced.

  “Three pounds of chopped sirloin.

  “One pound of pork sausage.

  “Two tablespoons of flour.

  “One one-pound can of baked beans.

  “Why do you need two kinds of beans? The beans in baked beans are pea beans, aren’t they?” When she affirmed that, he said, “Do they really taste all that different from pinto beans?”

  “You are a research scientist, aren’t you? I don’t really know, Jed, but I don’t believe I care to run that experiment today.”

  “One four-ounce can of pimiento.

  “Two thirty-ounce cans of tomatoes.

  “Three quarters of a cup of chopped celery.

  “A half pound of sliced fresh mushrooms.

  “A half cup of chopped sweet red pepper.

  “A half cup of chopped green pepper.”

  As she listened and “checked,” Mrs. Potter decided that he had just the nicest voice for reading aloud, one of those voices of which it was said the owner could read the phone book and be entertaining.

  “One nine-ounce can of pitted ripe olives, chopped.

  “A half cup of minced parsley.

  “One twelve-ounce bottle of chili sauce.

  “One tablespoon of salt.

  “One tablespoon of garlic salt.

  “Two teaspoons of black pepper.

  “One tablespoon of chopped cilantro.

  “What’s cilantro, anyway?” Jed inquired.

  “Funny you’d ask.” Mrs. Potter smiled to herself. “It’s coriander.”

  “I see. What’s coriander?”

  “An herb. Here, smell.”

  She held a leaf under his nose, and he sniffed. Then he took it out of her hand and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it.

  “Hot,” he commented. “But cool.”

  Mrs. Potter handed him a napkin so that he could spit it out, but then saw that he’d swallowed it. She rushed to the sink to fill a glass of water, which he gratefully accepted and drank. This was fun, she thought, and wasn’t it amazing that his curiosity seemed to be snagged on some of the same odd little edges of life that amused her?

  “One tablespoon of oregano.

  “Two to four tablespoons of chili powder, to taste.

  “One pint sour cream.

  “Sour cream?”

  “Yes, I’ll spoon a dollop onto each helping when I serve it. It cuts the spiciness and the heat, and adds a lovely tang. You’ll be surprised how refreshing it is.”

  “I’ll be surprised all right.”

  There was a little silence as each of them seemed to absorb the rather natural fact that she had apparently just invited him to stay for supper and he had apparently and just as easily accepted.

  Mrs. Potter said, or rather, blurted, “You’ll try it, though?”

  “I don’t know.” He acted doubting, teasing. “Sour cream?”

  “I tried steamed clams, remember.”

  “Certainly an act of greater courage.”

  “It seemed so at the time.”

  He closed the cookbook with a decisive slap. “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “There’s a brave lad. But don’t close that yet, Jed, we’ve only put the ingredients out on the counter. We still have to make this chili.”

  Mrs. Potter melted butter in her favorite cast-iron skillet, then sautéed the onions, chilis, and garlic until the onions were soft. She added the chopped sirloin and cooked it all over a moderate heat until the meat browned.

  In a separate pan, she browned the sausage and poured off the fat.

  She added the sausage to the steak and vegetables.

  Over that, she sprinkled the flour, and stirred to blend.

  “The best chili tip I ever heard came from a friend of mine on Nantucket, of all places,” she told Jed. “She said to add a little fresh grated orange peel to chili con carne, so now I always do. Most people seem to like it.”

  “And that’s the twenty-seventh ingredient?”

  “It is. All good cooks add a mystery ingredient to their best recipes. So when somebody asks for the recipe, they somehow neglect to include that one little extra ingredient. Which means, of course, that nobody can ever exactly duplicate their successes.”

  “So that’s why I always hear people say”—Jed mimicked a woman’s voice so well that Mrs. Potter laughed out loud—“Why, Julia, I made lemon meringue pie from your recipe the other night, but Claude said it just didn’t taste as good as Julia’s. I know I followed your recipe exactly. What do you think I did wrong?”

  “To which Julia will innocently reply, ‘Why, I can’t imagine, Gertrude, I’m sure I wrote down everything that goes in it! I know I’ve never had a bit of trouble with it myself.’ ”

  “Trade secrets.”

  “Industrial espionage,” Mrs. Potter rejoined, in a stage whisper.

  Jed held up his right hand, palm forward. “I swear not to tell about the orange peel.”

  “Unless you’re tortured, of course.”

  “Well, yes, if they stick needles under my fingernails, I’ll squeal.”

  “That’s what I used to say to Lew when he’d talk to me about his trade secrets.”

  “He was a lucky man, Andy.”

  She turned her back to hide her pink face, and transferred the meat mixture to a cast-iron Dutch oven into which she poured the pinto beans, along with the remaining ingredients, except the sour cream. She brought it all to
a boil and then left it to simmer for a half hour.

  “Come on, Jed, you can help me put things out, if you will. Let’s see, we’ll need bowls for the chili, and we’d better stack those in the kitchen, along with the soup spoons, and we’ll need my extra-large napkins. I have some that my friend Susan made especially for me, and they’re big enough even for cowboy-size laps …”

  He followed her into the dining room as she thought out loud.

  “Serving bowls for crackers, tall glasses for beer and iced tea, iced tea spoons, mugs for coffee, creamers and sugar bowls, salt and pepper, and we might as well go ahead and set a couple of extra bottles of Tabasco right out on the table, along with a bowl for extra jalapeno peppers. I know it’s hard to believe, but some of these men will want their chili even hotter than I made that pot for you, the missile-launcher pot.…”

  Soon they had Grandmother Andrews’s trestle table in the dining room and the round table in the kitchen all set for a buffet.

  And through it all they talked …

  And talked, and laughed, and talked, and there were a few moments when Jed said something so amusing or so interesting that he almost made her forget about her worries and her fears.

  “Cynthia,” he told her, when Mrs. Potter asked him to repeat his ex-wife’s name. “Her maiden name was Satherwaite, an old family from Boston. Remember when things like that used to matter?”

  “Do you mean the ‘old family’ part or the ‘Boston’ part?”

  Jed laughed. “Both, I suppose.”

  “Yes, there was a time when things like that impressed me, and I guess they still might if I were still eighteen.” She paused, in the laying out of her friend Susan’s gigantic print cotton napkins, and smiled at him. “You, for instance, seemed so very sophisticated to a little girl from Iowa. Your accent, your appearance”—Mrs. Potter raised her eyebrows dramatically—“your prep school.”

  “I’m afraid I was a little overimpressed with that myself.”

  “It didn’t show, Jed.”

  “Oh, you were just blinded by love, Andy.”

  She smiled at him again. “I was, it’s true.”

  “So was I. For my part, I was bowled over by your Iowa farm girl honesty and your openness, not to mention your big innocent blue eyes.” He smiled back at her. “Never quite got over it.”