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“Real estate investment scheme . . .”
“Scammed foreign investors . . .”
“Tax evasion . . .”
“Benny.” Her throat cracked on her friend’s name, and she struggled to clear it. “What am I looking at?”
“I’ll spare you the details and just give you the trumped-up headline.” Concern coated his normally confident delivery. “Mr. Buchanan, along with our own fucking head chef, was embroiled in a real estate investment scheme that turned south. They’ve been working with the CEO of a regional developer who scammed foreign investors out of millions of dollars while promising to build a new resort in the White Mountains. Instead of funding that project, however, they used investors’ money to buy vacation homes, cars, pay off loans, open more restaurants, and generally live like Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of money.”
Molly’s apron strings tightened around her waist, compressing her stomach with each breath she took. Investment scheme? Tax evasion? From the same men who threw the restaurant’s holiday parties and organized a freaking meal train for their hostess when she was involved in a car accident and laid up at home for a month?
Benny might as well have revealed that Mother Teresa hadn’t been a nun but a notorious madam of a brothel, counting her cash as well as her clients.
And then she recalled the document that drew her into this office in the first place. “Do you, um, know what a writ of seizure and sale is?”
“Fuck.” An exhausted breath cushioned the groan that swept through the phone. “I take it you’re looking at one for Serendipity?” She nodded, and as if he knew she’d gone nonverbal, he chimed in to answer her. “It’s a court order that allows a creditor, usually a bank, to take ownership of a property. It’s pretty drastic, though. A bank won’t go to those lengths unless there have been repeated nonpayments for extended periods of time. I’m talking about a year at the very least, usually longer. Shit, that means Buchanan defaulted on the building’s mortgage.”
“How?” Molly croaked, pushing past the emotion clogging her throat. “How did this happen? We haven’t had an empty table at a service in at least six months! And the reservations—” She quickly tallied the tables from when she’d last peeked at the reservation program. “We’ve got to be booked out for just as long. I’ve been here for two years, and I can’t remember closing out a service where we didn’t meet, or exceed, our profit margins. For God’s sake, we were written up by a national food critic! How the hell can there be no money? There isn’t even enough to cover the next payroll!”
“They funneled it all into their private accounts. Any assets left are going to be confiscated and frozen real soon, if they haven’t been already.”
Too many things had decided to bleed out of Molly, in no particular order. Fear for her colleagues and concern over her own finances crept toward the top of the list, sure. What sat at the zenith of her encroaching despair, however, was the culmination of countless fourteen-hour days on her feet cooking someone else’s food. It had been the promise of a dream paid in years she couldn’t get back. The excitement of being offered a sous-chef job at a barely known restaurant in a sleepy New Hampshire town, then watching in awe as all of New England beat down the door for what she could give them.
For what they were supposed to give her in another year. The role of chef de cuisine. Her own menu. A partnership in the business.
All gone.
She didn’t even have time to mourn a loss that was so new, the reality of it hadn’t reached her frontal cortex yet. Even as she clutched the phone to her ear, her legs were still itching to begin her morning rounds and check in at the prep stations. Desperately searching for a loophole, Molly grasped for another possibility, anything that could explain this all away as a bad dream or a Jupiter-sized misunderstanding. “But what about?—”
An audible thud echoed from outside the office, rattling the framed newspaper reviews that adorned the paneled walls.
“Staff meeting. Now!” The barked orders of her head chef straightened her spine instantly, though whether her response was out of fear or familiarity, she couldn’t be certain.
“Chef’s here. Got to go.”
“He’s not your chef anymore, Mol.” A note of bleak resignation colored his whispered words. “Call me when it’s over.”
When it’s over? When what was over?
Her numb fingers darkened the screen, and Molly scurried to the kitchen to join the rest of the staff. Half a dozen line cooks paused the methodical setup of their stations, seemingly sensing that whatever was to come was far more than a last-minute menu change or announcement of a guest critic at dinner service.
Chef Mark Tourneau stood beside Mr. Buchanan in front of the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the front of the house. The executive chef, who had always carried himself with an approachable yet firm demeanor, now did his best to affix that discerning gaze on anyone who wasn’t holding a knife in their hand. He wasn’t wearing his black chef’s coat or even his glasses. Instead, his thinning hair had been hidden beneath a ball cap so old that the apparel sported a team’s logo that had since been redesigned, twice. Worn flannel hung limply from sunken shoulders, and the sight struck Molly dumb. How had such a frame ever managed to carry the weight and respectability of the region’s most popular restaurant?
Turned out, it hadn’t, which meant . . . it was all true.
Her head chef’s eyes increased the torque on the vice already twisting Molly’s insides. She’d trusted this man. Trusted her career and the livelihoods of all the staff to his storied tenure and vision. For what? Cars? The proverbial extensions of what all women knew men like these two lacked between their legs? She’d have laughed at the cliché’s absurdity if the imagery didn’t starkly remind her of her newly dire circumstances. Betrayal crowded out the curious murmurs around her, until Mr. Buchanan quelled the chatter with a bracing clap of his hands.
Hands adorned with not one but two walnut-sized gold rings she’d never noticed before.
Because she never thought jewelry would be a precursor to jail time.
“Look, uh, there’s no easy way to say this, so chef and I are just going to come right out and rip the bandage off. Effective immediately, Serendipity is closing its doors. Final checks will be in the mail next week.”
The raucous uproar around her was the only thing that had adequately matched her expectations since she’d walked into the restaurant that morning. Shouts rivaled the insistent pounding of pans. Kitchen towels met the floor with resounding slaps of equal disgust. Outrage volleyed among the line cooks until it hit her square in the chest, then settled around her in a curtain of her fractured reality.
“No, they won’t,” she whispered toward the floor through quivering lips. “There won’t be any checks.”
No one heard her, and no one knew. Colleagues who’d hacked off literal pieces of their fingers cooking for this restaurant huddled around the counters, eyes pleading for any explanation from their supposed leaders, and still, they were lied to. She was being lied to.
