The first order of business the next morning was to drop by my landlady’s office with my deposit and rent for the month, then to visit Chef Gamling. It shocked me to find that Chef Gamling was well and truly retired. Like most of his students, I believed he would die with a spatula in one hand and an unruly saucier’s collar in the other. Now he ambled around his house all day in yoga pants while George taught chemistry at the community college. He was taking up gardening and painting abstract watercolor landscapes that looked like extremely depressing Rorschach blots.
George, a sweet man with fading cornsilk-colored hair and shoulders as broad as a barn, insisted I was too skinny from the moment I walked through the door of their cute little ranch house. Before ushering me to the back porch, George loaded me down with a bowl of something called monkey bread (a local specialty, I assumed). It was basically blobs of biscuit dough shoved into a Bundt pan and doused in caramel syrup. I don’t believe monkey was an actual ingredient. I didn’t want to ask.
I think this lump of sucrose-soaked carbs was supposed to serve as a comforting buffer for when Chef lowered the boom on me. It did not work.
“Any proper student of mine would know better,” Chef growled without preamble, glaring down from his easel, a paintbrush hanging loose in his hand. Chef was a stocky, mustachioed bull of a man with salt-and-pepper hair and deceptively steely gray eyes. And because I knew he loved me and I deserved the ass chewing, I contritely sipped iced tea, trying not to feel like an ill-behaved third-grader called to the principal’s office. The hint of a German accent made the admonishments seem even sterner than he intended.
“A chef must be sharp, reacting to a multitude of crises with calm and confidence. In order to do that, you need rest and proper meals. Did I not tell all of my students that ignoring your body’s basic needs was a one-way ticket to addiction, exhaustion, and disaster? How are you to maintain quality and prevent mistakes if you can’t remember orders? What good are you to your staff if you have run yourself down like a soggy dishrag? How are staff to respect you if you are singing and dancing like the puppet show—what’s it called, with the chicken and the vampire?”
“Sesame Street?” I suggested.
“Yes, Sesame Street.”
“I don’t think Big Bird is a chicken,” I grumbled petulantly.
“Yes, I’m so sorry. You clearly have the expertise in performing figments of one’s imagination. And sassy-mouthing your mentor.”
“You’re going to make me peel potatoes again, aren’t you?” I groaned.
Chef Gamling did not, in fact, make me peel potatoes, as he would have when I made a stupid mistake in school. He gave me several Tupperware containers full of his special maultaschen, a German dumpling dish that he only made for me when I was sick in school.
His eyes softened as I bobbled the containers. “I worry about you, süße.” My throat caught at his rare use of a German endearment. He pinched my cheek gently, as if gauging how much weight I’d lost over the last year. “I don’t hear from you in months, and you show up at my door looking like this? Pale, skinny, big dark circles under your eyes. You look like you’re going to drop at any moment. And George is no good with first aid.”
“You wouldn’t be performing mouth-to-mouth on me in the ‘dropping’ scenario?” I asked, squinting up at him.
He shook his head and hugged me fiercely. “I have heard the foul words that mouth is capable of producing. Lips that dirty shall never touch mine.”
“Hey, you were the one who told the female students that professional chefs ‘often season the food with salty language,’ so we couldn’t afford to become ladylike and offended.”
“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to embrace the concept so wholeheartedly.” He sighed.
And so I was instructed to go home, sleep, eat, and then sleep again. If I didn’t finish the maultaschen within three days, he was going to add malted milkshakes to my “regimen.” Also, I was supposed to meet him at the HMH First Baptist Church the next Saturday. The last time I’d seen the inside of a church, a funeral was involved, so this was not a good sign.
—
George caught me on my way out of the house and gave me a tire-sized chunk of monkey bread to call my very own. I couldn’t help but accept it, because the gesture was so sweet. So very, very sweet.
George was a veritable font of information about local quirks and perks. When he heard where I was staying, he’d clapped his hands together like a little kid and demanded to know all of the details. When I gave him nothing but a confused smile, he told me that “the Lassiter place” had quite a reputation. “Everybody knew” that the house was rife with ghostly lights and strange noises. Before Lindy’s husband bought the place, teenagers used to sneak out to the property and dare each other to knock on the door and call out for the original owner, John Lassiter.
“You’re saying my house is haunted?” I asked.
“More like cursed,” George told me. “Ever since poor John Lassiter built it for his wife-to-be in 1900. He was one of those confirmed bachelors who suddenly decide to get married in their fifties. His fiancée was young and fickle. Elizabeth Early didn’t really want to marry John, so she kept finding reasons that the house wasn’t ready. She wanted the kitchen to be east-facing, she wanted a water closet, she wanted gingerbread and bits of flotsam all over the eaves. Finally, her father put his foot down and told her to quit stalling and put poor John out of his misery. The morning of their wedding, they woke up to find Elizabeth had run off with a peddler.”
“Tacky.”
“But effective,” George conceded. “John never heard from her again. He died a few years later, alone in that little house. He could have sold it. There were plenty of young men who would have given him good money for a pretty house to offer their brides. But he wouldn’t budge. He didn’t want a happy couple living in his house when he was so alone. And ever since he died, any couple who has lived together in that place has either died or had a marriage so miserable they wished they were dead.”
“So there’s no such thing as divorce in backwoods ghost stories?” I deadpanned.
“Laugh all you want, smartass. The only reason you’re renting the house is that Lindy Clemson’s husband died unexpectedly. It’s cursed, I tell you.”
“Lindy told me she was getting a divorce.”
George blanched, as if he regretted revealing the information. He cleared his throat. “Well, in her case, it’s a little bit of both.”
“How could it possibly be both?”
“Things are different here, honey. This is Kentucky.”
“Oh, fine, so my house is cursed.” I sighed. “What are the terms?”
“Terms?”
“Every curse has terms. You know, sleep a hundred years and kiss a prince, you’re in the clear, that sort of thing. So what did John want from the couples who lived in his house? How can they get back in his good graces?”
“I don’t think he set any terms.”
I sniffed. “Well, then it’s more of a jinx than a curse.”
“Semantics.”
“I will try not to provoke the spirits of the epically lovelorn while I’m in town,” I promised.
“See that you don’t, sweetie.”
The Travel Wok—When Pepper Spray Just Won’t Do
2
There it was again!
The soft thump down the hall had me sitting up in bed, blinking into the black quiet of my room. My sleep-blurred brain tumbled to George, his stories about poor, lovelorn Mr. Lassiter, and the possibility that said deceased bachelor could be wandering around my house in spectral form.
This was what I got for going to bed so early. My internal clock was all wonky. Thoroughly chastised and toting Tupperware and a bowling-ball-sized chunk of monkey bread, I’d found myself back in my house with nothing to do. No dishes to prep. Nothing to chop or sauté. No pans to wash. No knives to sharpen. The highlight of the evening was tripping and falling flat on my face as soon as I walked into the living room. The coffee table seemed… off. I remembered it being a little farther away from the couch. Then again, I was still adjusting to, well, everything, so who was I to think I’d already mentally mapped the living room?
I settled for more sleep. It seemed the more I slept, the more I needed to sleep. My body had been running on fumes for so long it was as if it was soaking up all the rest it could because I couldn’t be trusted to sleep decently again when I went back to my life. The house was so quiet, a far cry from the traffic noises and sirens that bounced around my city apartment. I didn’t need a white-noise machine here. The silence of the house seemed to wrap around me like a sweet cocoon, helping me ignore my ailing stomach and table bruises.
The only hitch in my “sleep the month away” plan was that the extreme quiet made every creak, every groan, of every board echo like a gunshot. I didn’t know much about old houses, but it seemed this one spent a lot of time settling. At times, it almost sounded like footsteps falling softly against the hardwood floors—ridiculous, as I’d triple-checked the locks myself, a habit I’d carried with me from Chicago.
The Clemsons’ debris was strewn across the house like broken toys. Lindy left a bunch of men’s plaid flannels and Clemson Construction T-shirts in the closet. A manly bar of plain yellow Dial still occupied the little soap dish in the master bath. When I opened the coat closet, I had to dive out of the way to avoid the avalanche of blueprints and graph paper that came tumbling from the top shelf.
And now, on top of these depressing relics, I had to deal with things that went bump in the night? I tilted my head, like a dog listening for its master, and it happened again. The weird noise echoed down the hall. It didn’t sound like the house creaking. This time, it really did sound like footsteps, distinct movements on the floor. As if someone was walking around in the kitchen.