Thirty-Five
THIRTY-FIVE
Mia
ADRENALINE POURED INTO my veins as Shani’s startled shriek joined the deafening clatter of falling pots and pans, making everyone in the kitchen whirl around to see what had happened.
The industrial-grade stainless steel overhead rack hung cockeyed from two of its four chains, all but three of its pots strewn across the floor. Shani stood in the midst of the destruction, one hand clutching her other shoulder, staring with a slack-jawed expression at the collapsed contraption.
Her chef’s hat was askew, a tiny trickle of blood visible at her hairline.
“Shani!” I cried.
Her wide brown eyes turned to me. “I... I’m all right,” she said, with the calm certainty of someone who might or might not be going into shock after a knock to the head.
“Everyone else, stay where you are!” I snapped, heading off the people who’d already started toward her. “Attend your stations. Do not let anything burn or boil over!”
“What’s happening?” Candy appeared on the other side of the pass-through, quickly joined by the other waitstaff. She froze at the scene of destruction. “Oh.”
“Watch my grill,” I told the line cook next to me, abandoning two ribeyes and a burger to pick my way around a labyrinth of scattered pots. Nat appeared at a near-run, sliding to a stop inside the double doors. “Nat, call an ambulance. There’s been an accident.”
“ Christ ,” Nat cursed, digging in a pocket for his phone.
“No,” Shani said quickly. “Seriously, I’m okay. But I don’t know what I did wrong... I was just reaching for a skillet.”
I got to her, gently taking her by the arm that she wasn’t clutching. “Shani, you’re bleeding.” I made a valiant effort to keep my tone gentle, trying to modulate the stress markers in my scent. “And your arm’s hurt.”
She blinked at me and looked down at her shoulder as though she hadn’t been aware she was clenching it. Moving it gingerly, she let go in favor of reaching up to touch her temple. Her fingertips came away stained with blood, but not very much.
“Oh,” she said blankly. “Honestly, I don’t think it’s bad. Can I go check it in the employee restroom?”
I met Nat’s eyes. My instinct was still to call an ambulance. But as long as she was conscious and rational, Shani had the right to refuse treatment.
“Of course you can,” Nat said. “I’d like Mia to go with you, assuming you’re comfortable with that. Mia, I’ll get the first aid kit from the break room for you, okay?”
“Thanks,” I said, keeping a supportive hand on Shani’s arm, just in case. “Is that all right, Shani?”
“Sure,” she said, seeming to realize that we’d become the focus of attention of basically the entire restaurant. Sheepishly, she added, “Promise I’m not about to swoon, everyone. Only tough-as-nails omegas in this restaurant!”
A couple of worried customers had joined the press of employees at the pass-through. Reassured that Shani wasn’t too seriously injured, I forced myself to take stock.
“Candy, please get the customers back to their tables and apologize for the scare. I think we can get the current meals out to them, but warn Diane that we’re closing to new customers for the afternoon.”
Nat hurried back in with the first aid kit. He eyed the destruction. “Can you work around this thing safely without disturbing it? I don’t want anyone touching the rack until we’ve investigated the... uh... the incident .”
For a split second, I wondered what on earth he thought there was to investigate. Then I remembered that we ran a business with employees who probably expected to get through a shift without heavy objects falling on them, and that things like OSHA and paperwork existed.
“As long as we can clean up the pots and pans, I think so,” I said cautiously. “Toby, get someone else to cover your station and gather up anything that’s fallen in the traffic areas, please. If it touched the floor, it needs to be washed. Make a note of anything cracked or dented and stack those in the back.”
“Yes, chef,” Toby said. He looked unpleasantly pale—probably remembering his own recent close call with the grease spill by the stairs.
With a final look around the kitchen to reassure myself that nothing was about to explode or catch on fire, I urged Shani carefully past the mess and toward the employee areas.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, once we were out of earshot of the kitchen. “I have no idea what happened.”
Alarm made me stop her in the hallway by Nat’s office and the breakroom. “Hang on. No idea, like you can’t remember what happened?”
She gave a short, self-conscious laugh. “No, no. I mean, I just put my hand on the skillet handle to lift it off the hook. I swear I didn’t pull on it or anything.”
My sudden fears of concussion and short-term memory loss eased. “It wasn’t you. That thing should be able to support a person hanging off each corner—not that I recommend that from a safety perspective. But there’s no way it should have just come down like that. All I can think of is that it’s a pretty old building. Like, maybe the joists in the ceiling have dry rot or something.”
We entered the employee restroom. Shani extricated herself from my grip, seeming steady enough on her feet as she crossed to the mirror over the sink. The fluorescent lights weren’t doing her any favors when it came to the grayish undercast to her dark skin, but she poked at the bloody spot on her hairline matter-of-factly.
“It’ll bruise a bit, but it’s just a graze, promise,” she said, with the air of a pack mother who’d dealt with a scrape or two in her time.
“What about your shoulder?” I asked. “I can go stand outside if—”
She waved off the words and started unbuttoning her white chef’s coat. “You’re fine, boss. Feels like that one’s going to be a bigger bruise. But shit—I mean, stuff —happens. I’d really rather not make a big deal about it, if that’s all right.”
She shrugged off the coat, revealing the tank top she was wearing underneath. Angling her shoulder toward the mirror, she frowned at the spreading patch of blue and black, then carefully moved her arm through its range of motion.
“Yeah, no big deal,” she concluded.
A bit more of my tension drained away as she pulled her white coat back on. “Okay,” I told her. “Thank goodness for that. Nat’s still going to need to file an incident report for insurance purposes, and you should be aware that refusing medical treatment now doesn’t waive your right to make a worker’s compensation claim, should it become necessary in the future.”
She shot me an amused, slightly fond look through the medium of the mirror. “I’ll keep it in mind, boss. Have you two got a reliable contractor to get that thing fixed and check the, what was it? The joists?”
“That’s Nat’s responsibility, but I expect so,” I replied, handing her a gauze pad and some antiseptic to clean up her temple.
She took it and nodded, leaning forward to dab at the little cut. “Let me know if not. Three of my co-mates are in the construction industry.”
She slapped an adhesive bandage over the graze and straightened.
“I will,” I promised. “Now, talk to Nat to see if he needs anything from you right now in terms of paperwork, and then head on home. I don’t know yet if we’ll be able to open up this evening for the dinner crowd, but I’d feel a lot better if you’d take the rest of the day off regardless.”
“If you say so, boss,” Shani said. “But I’ll be in tomorrow as usual—don’t you worry.”
“I’m really sorry this happened,” I told her. “We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Once we got all the lunch customers fed and sent home the staff, it was just me and Nat, staring at a hunk of metal framing hanging half off its supports.
In the confusion, I’d been wrong about my assumption of what had happened. All four of the steel chains at the corners of the rectangular frame were still firmly attached to their large lag bolts installed in the ceiling.
“Wait,” I said. “If the joists weren’t rotten, how did this fall?”
The rack itself was welded—there were no bolts or nuts to come loose. The chains terminated in hooks that were every bit as thick and solid as the links they were attached to, and the hooks went through holes drilled directly through the corners of the rack’s frame. Again, there was nothing to come loose or get unscrewed.
Nat was perched on a stepstool, holding the end of one of the loose chains. “I’m not entirely sure.”
He plucked one of the S-shaped hooks from the end of its chain and handed it down to me. Rather, it had been S-shaped. It wasn’t now. One of the curved ends had bent like it was on a hinge.
“Does that look like it has hacksaw marks in it to you?” he asked.
My head shot up. “ What ?”
“Mia.” He removed the other bent hook and stepped down from the ladder. “You must have thought about it, too. First the grease spill, and now this?”
I stared at him, appalled. “You think someone did this purposely ?”
He gave the hook in my hand a significant look. “Hacksaw marks?”
I returned my attention to the little hunk of twisted metal. “How should I know? What do hacksaw marks even look like?”
The idea that this might have been sabotage—that someone would do something like this knowing people could be seriously injured—roiled in my stomach like bile.
“I can’t be certain.” Nat examined his own hook. “But if someone sawed, say, halfway through both of these, and one of them randomly gave way, the sudden strain would take out the other one, too.”
This couldn’t be happening. Not in my restaurant. Our restaurant.
“What do we do?” I asked blankly.
“Quietly installing surveillance cameras in the kitchen is top of my list,” Nat muttered. “Guess I should have done that a while ago.”
“But... today?” I pressed. “What about the dinner service? What if there’s more damage we don’t know about? My god, Nat—there are gas lines to all the cooktops.”
“I think we’re going to have to go over the place inch by inch before we let anyone back in here,” Nat said grimly, looking around the kitchen as though he half expected something else to crash down on us. He held up the metal hook. “On the positive side, S-hooks are cheap. I’ll pick up replacements in the morning and get this thing fixed, anyway.”
I nodded dumbly, aware of just how little we could afford to miss dinner services when we were barely making ends meet to start with.
I finally got back to the house in Ladue around one a.m., after having fired off a text to Luca to let him know I was going to be in late.
We hadn’t found a single suspicious thing during our careful search of the restaurant. The remaining two hooks on the overhead rack had been fine, and neither of us could be one hundred percent sure that the other two hadn’t simply had some kind of manufacturing defect. Nat planned to replace all four just in case.
I let myself in the front door as quietly as I could, not certain if anyone would still be up. Emiel always seemed to disappear up to his room early, while Luca and Byron had gotten way less sleep than I had last night. I tiptoed down the hall, only to pause when I saw a light coming from the kitchen.
When I peered around the doorway, it was to find Zalen slumped on a stool, staring morosely at an empty glass with the white remains of almond milk clinging to its sides. He glanced up at me, dredging a half-smile from somewhere.
“Hey. Luca said you’d be late tonight. Everything okay?”
Giving into the temptation for a sympathetic ear, I came in and dropped my bag on the counter, taking up another stool. “Let’s just say that it’s been a day.” I sighed. “Workplace accident. No serious injuries, thank goodness... but I’ve got an employee with bruises, and I really don’t like that .”
Zalen’s dark brows drew together. “I’m sorry to hear that. Paperwork?”
“Out the wazoo,” I agreed. “Thankfully, most of that is Nat’s department.”
I debated telling him about Nat’s suspicions of sabotage, but it was one in the morning, and I couldn’t quite decide how paranoid that would sound.
Instead, I asked, “How about you? You were staring at that milk glass like it personally betrayed you.”
He let out a breath. “Oh. Just... I got another visit from Tony’s mother this afternoon. The cops told her they’ve checked all his known friends and relatives’ addresses, and they haven’t found him. In the absence of new information, they aren’t pursuing it any further.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, appalled.
He shook his head. “Honestly, I was a bit surprised they devoted as many resources to the case as they did. No one in St. Clair County cares about runaways when people are getting shot in the street every day.”
My heart sank for these four men who’d devoted themselves to making a difference, despite being confronted every day with their failure to do so.
“I’m so sorry, Zalen,” I told him. “Are you doing okay?”
“Not really,” he admitted, gesturing at the clock on the wall. Its hands pointed accusingly at both of us—one-fifteen a.m. “Drink?”
“Sure,” I said, resting my elbows on the table as he went to get us something stronger than almond milk.