Scoop to kill: a mystery a la mode by Wendy Lyn Watson

Author:Wendy Lyn Watson [Wendy Lyn Watson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780451230768
Published: 2010-09-14T07:00:00+00:00

chapter 14

Emily had left by the time Bree returned to the shop with Alice. I’d sent her off with a promise to stop waiting and get a dog, and a promise to give Finn a couple of days to cool off and then call him again.

“I sent Kyle packing,” Bree said. “If that boy wants to graduate in June, he’s got to spend less time moping around this joint and more time cracking his school books.”

Kyle Mason had a long rap sheet as a general juvenile delinquent. He’d started working at the Remember the A-la-mode the summer before, just after I purchased Dave’s Dippery and relaunched it as an upscale ice cream parlor, so that he could pay court-ordered restitution for a mailbox-smashing spree. Even with the piddly wages I could afford to pay him, he’d managed to make good on his debt, and I felt confident he’d only continued scooping ice cream because of his excruciating unrequited crush on Alice. He’d never get past first base with my brainiac niece if he didn’t make nice with his teachers and graduate.

“This one,” Bree continued, jerking a thumb at Alice, “insisted on coming back to help.”

“You really can take off, Alice,” I said. “Aren’t finals next week?” She nodded glumly. “Or at least go home and get some sleep.”

“No, I want to make caramel,” she said, her lower lip drifting suspiciously close to a pout.

While I found a certain Zen pleasure in the homely act of making ice cream, and Bree just liked to sneak licks and nibbles, the process appealed to Alice on a more intellectual level. The alchemy of cold and motion transforming humble ingredients—sugar, milk, fruit—into something as decadent as our Peach Melba ice cream intrigued her.

But as much as Alice enjoyed the chemistry of ice cream, caramel was her favorite: the individual crystals of sugar breaking down into a whole new substance, through an inversion process scientists didn’t entirely understand, followed by the spectacle of the cold cream hitting the hot sugar syrup and frothing to fill the pan, and finally the Maillard reaction turning protein and sugar into golden deliciousness. She said it made her feel like one of Shakespeare’s witches.

“ ‘Double, double toil and trouble,’” I said.

A faint smile lit her face and she rubbed her hands together. “ ‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,’ ” she finished.

We didn’t technically need more salted caramel sauce, but it wouldn’t hurt to lay in some extra. “Go ahead,” I said.

The three of us worked in silence, Alice tending the caramel, Bree washing up, and me packing pints to stock the retail freezer, until Alice let forth a mighty yawn, the sort of yawn that used to herald imminent collapse when she was a toddler. It was well past midnight, a good two hours after her emotional confrontation with Emily, and the poor child had to be dead on her feet.

Bree pried the spoon from her daughter’s fingers, physically pointed her toward the back door, and gave her a little shove.

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