Death in a Budapest Butterfly Read online

  I moved closer and peered into the cup, which sat next to Ava’s shiny red purse. The tea was half-gone, and just above the midpoint of the cup’s interior it looked as though Ava had scrawled something—with lipstick? Eyeliner? Something waxy, it seemed, that did not wash away. Almost the color of blood. And upon closer examination, it seemed to be a phrase or a sentence, but in Hungarian. That’s when the feeling in my gut returned—the misery—and this time I was aware of it.

  “What is this?” I interrupted. I pointed at the Hungarian words, and my mother, alerted by my tone, bent over the cup and looked inside.

  Then she stood up. “This is bad,” she said, merely affirming what I already knew, what I felt all around us. She reached for the cup and I grabbed her arm.

  “Not the cup. Touch only the saucer.”

  She nodded. We both understood that something was amiss, and that whether Ava or someone else had scrawled those words, they had been written with malice.

  My mother’s blue eyes were fearful. “Where is the woman?”

  “Her name is Mrs. Novák,” I said, my lips partly numb with sudden fear.

  “We need to find her.”

  “I’ll go,” I said, but I had to drag myself across the floor. I turned left into the little hallway where the restrooms were. I didn’t even need to enter the ladies’ room. Ava Novák was slumped on the floor, staring at the wall in front of her.

  I realized then that the tea hall had grown silent. Then I heard my grandmother’s voice, loud and horrified. “Vasorrú Bába,” she intoned.

  “No!” one of the women cried out.

  So that’s what it had said in the cup. I knew what it meant because my grandmother had told me Hungarian fairy stories since I was a tiny child. Vasorrú Bába translated to “the witch with the iron nose,” and had come to mean something along the lines of “horrible old woman.”

  This is what someone had written on the teacup that they had given specially to Ava Novák, and now Ava Novák was dead.

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Julia Buckley

  Hungarian Tea House Mystery

  DEATH IN A BUDAPEST BUTTERFLY

  Writer’s Apprentice Mysteries

  A DARK AND STORMY MURDER

  DEATH IN DARK BLUE

  A DARK AND TWISTING PATH

  DEATH WAITS IN THE DARK

  Undercover Dish Mysteries

  THE BIG CHILI

  CHEDDAR OFF DEAD

  PUDDING UP WITH MURDER

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Julia Buckley

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781984804839

  First Edition: July 2019

  Cover art by Sara Mulvanny

  Cover design by Vikki Chu

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  Version_1

  To my Hungarian grandparents,

  Julia Veronika Vig

  and

  Joseph Rohaly

  (who was “too poor for a middle name”)

  And to my father,

  William Edward Rohaly

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my father, William Rohaly, for all of his knowledge of Hungarian language and culture, shared with me over fifty years. Thank you to my aunt Maria, my Mariska néni, for her stories of the Old Country and related Chicago traditions. Thanks as well to my uncle Joseph Rohaly for sharing his stories at family gatherings over many years. Finally, I send much gratitude to my dear deceased grandparents, Julia and Joseph, who loosely inspired the tale of Hana’s grandparents.

  Thanks to Hana Somogyi Steil, a fellow Hungarian girl, for letting me borrow her name for this story; to Katinka Kallay Adams, a dear friend since college and a Hungarian American who answers my questions about Hungary whenever I have them; and to my friend Mary Karen Muehleck Reynolds, another half Hungarian who told me, long ago, that Hungarians stare at people.

  I am grateful to my late grandma Julia for all her cooking; I will never forget the smell of her kitchen. She never wrote down her recipes, just said, “A lilly bit of this, a lilly bit of that.” My mother tried to duplicate the flavors, but she could never quite do it, although her cooking was delicious, too.

  I am grateful to my father again for being a discerning editor and pointing out that, with some Hungarian words, if an accent mark is removed, the meaning might be changed to something utterly unacceptable.

  A final thanks to my siblings, four other hybrids of our Hungarian German household. Because of my parents and the traditions of their respective cultures, we five children grew up loving food, music, language, a good story, and a good joke.

  Contents

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Julia Buckley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Author’s Note

  From Hana’s Recipe Box

  About the Author

  Tea is quiet, and our thirst for tea is never far from our craving for beauty.

  —JAMES NORWOOD PRATT

  I admit I have a Hungarian temper. Why not? I am from Hungary.

  We are descendants of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

  —ZSA ZSA GABOR

  Chapter 1

  The Butterfly

  I sat polishing teacups with my mother and her cat. The latter wasn’t so much helpin
g to polish as he was regarding me from his chair with a stern expression that he wore only when I had disappointed him. I tried reason.

  “Major, I will feed you right after we finish. Isn’t this a pretty teacup?” I held up a beautiful specimen of pale green with pink-painted flowers. Major scowled and twitched a whisker at me—a sure sign that he was irritated.

  “It’s past his lunchtime,” my mother said mildly. “You know how he likes to keep to a schedule. Hana, hand me that dish.” I did so, still contemplating the cat.

  Major licked one of his elegant gray paws. “Yes, I know.” I paused my polishing to scratch his head. “He runs this place, and you are just under the illusion that you do.”

  With a sigh I got up, stretched, and said, “I’ll feed him, then, so I can finish up without his judgmental eyes on me.” I went to the counter and got a whiff of my grandmother’s cooking; I closed my eyes to fully appreciate the aroma.

  There is nothing like the smell of a Hungarian kitchen. The pure sensual experience is one that a visitor cannot forget, any more than she can duplicate it. If these aromas were to be compared to music, then the song would begin with bass notes of sautéed onions and paprika. (There is always paprika on the shelf of a Hungarian cook, and not the kind that you can buy cheaply at your grocery store.) Above these bass notes is the melody—perhaps the deep, satisfying aroma of chicken soup filled with kis négyzet tészta, square noodles made of only flour, eggs, and salt—or the mouthwatering fragrance of pork, beef, and Hungarian sausage stuffed into boiled cabbage, called töltött káposzta—or perhaps even the soul-filling incense of gulyásleves, known here as goulash. Above all of the wonderful scents that work on the soul like melodies floats a sweet descant known as Hungarian dessert. There is the deep-fried wonder of fánk, a bismarck-like doughnut stuffed with delicious jam; or the thin Hungarian pancakes known as palacsinta, filled with jelly and covered with sugar; or the deep, dark, and delicious plums baked into cakes called szilvás lepény. To those who have never experienced this confluence of sights and smells that somehow become a symphony, it is hard to understand why these food memories would follow you wherever you go. I closed my eyes for one second, appreciating the aromas that permeated the house, partly because of my mother’s cooking, but mostly because of my grandmother, who cooked whenever she came to her daughter’s house to “make sure you got all you need.”

  I prepared Major’s food and set it down for him. He strolled over, still glaring slightly, and began to pick delicately at the meat in the bowl. I laughed and looked back at my mother. “If we’re set up by three, that should be plenty of time, right?”

  “Yes. I told Mrs. Kalas not to arrive before three forty-five.” My mother looked serene, as always, in the domain of her kitchen, the largest and nicest room in her little house. We had set up at the long center island my father had built for this purpose, and the September sun shone on the array of teacups on the shining white surface. Soon we would transport the tea set to Maggie’s Tea House, a business my mother and grandmother had established and which I co-ran.

  “Mrs. Kalas is kind of a lot to handle,” I said. “Although she’s not much different from Grandma in that respect.”

  My grandmother, who had superhuman hearing, floated in on the scent of Odyssey, her favorite Avon perfume. “Vat did you say about Mrs. Kalas?” She picked up a teacup and began to polish it with the edge of her sleeve.

  My mother sent me a subtle but urgent glance. I said, “Oh, just that she’s getting there about fifteen minutes early and we want to be sure everything is all set. This isn’t just a regular event, right? It’s high tea for her Magyar Women group. So we want things to be just perfect.”

  She looked mildly suspicious, but then she nodded, tucking a bit of gray hair behind her ear; the errant strand had escaped from the bun at the nape of her neck. She wore our tea house uniform with a black sweater and some sparkling earrings. Although she’d been in America for almost forty years, my grandmother still clung to some traditions from her youth, and one was her preference for vintage jewelry, including the cruel clip-on earrings that invariably left her in pain after a “fancy” tea event.

  “Ya. I will go early, make sure the floors vas done properly.”

  “Were done, Mama,” my mother corrected. She, too, was an immigrant, but had been only twelve when they left Hungary, and she had mastered American grammar and intonation with a child’s resiliency. She didn’t always like her mother’s lingering accent or her refusal to adhere, sometimes, to American usage. My mother was convinced that Grandma knew exactly how to say things, but merely refused.

  My grandmother shrugged. “Ya, yes. I don’t trust that cleaning crew.” She turned to me. “Sit up straight, Haniska.”

  I had thought I was sitting up straight; my parents had always been sticklers about posture. Sometimes Grandma just said things on autopilot because she felt it was her job as matriarch. These comments included her feelings about my posture, my hair, my makeup, or what she considered swearing (these were especially reserved for my brother, Domo).

  My mother said, “Are you reading tea leaves today, Mama? The ladies always like that. Why don’t you set up your table, and we’ll do it after Mrs. Kalas’s raffle.”

  Grandma shrugged. She loved the whole theatrical event that reading tea leaves had become for her, but she always wanted to be coaxed into it. “I suppose,” she said. “If they vant. Mama would do it better.”

  At the mention of her, we turned toward the picture of my great-grandmother on the sideboard. She looked, in the photograph, just as I remembered her from childhood—sweet, smiling, wearing her favorite green sweater and sitting in a lawn chair under the large elm in our backyard. My favorite memory of her, distant and lovely with the fog of time, involved me at five or six, standing next to her knee beneath that same tree while she showed me a monarch that had landed on her veined hand.

  I leaned forward. “The ladies love it when you do it. Even the American guests like it when you read the tea leaves. Everyone likes to think they can get a glimpse into the future. And it’s free, which they like even better,” I said.

  She moved closer to me to examine my hair, as she had done throughout my life. I knew that she was secretly fascinated by my hair, but she pretended to be critical of it. When I was a child I had overheard her telling my mother what a remarkable shade of reddish-brown it was, how thick and glossy. “Like the color of autumn,” she had enthused. “Prettier even than mine used to be.” I had been surprised and pleased at the time, having never thought much about my hair at the age of eight or nine. As I grew up, though, I remembered her words and developed a special pride in my auburn tresses.

  “Do I see split ends?” my grandmother asked, pretending to study the lock in her hand.

  My mother sniffed. “No, you do not. Why do you obsess over that child’s hair?”

  I laughed. “This child needs to get to work. And I’ll remind you both that I’m turning twenty-seven next month so you can probably lay off thinking that I am perpetually twelve.”

  Both women looked somewhat disappointed. I said, “Hey, Grandma! If you’re setting up the leaf-reading teacups on your table, I’ll give you a special centerpiece: my Budapest Butterfly!”

  “Ooohh,” my grandmother said, clapping her hands. “Can I see it?”

  “Yes. I just brought it to Mom’s this morning.” I moved to the counter, where a teacup sat in a box, tucked into tissue paper. This had been a recent find, and a spectacular one. Since I had grown up in and around Maggie’s Tea House, I had of course developed an interest in all things tea, especially teacups, which to me were like jewels, tiny treasures, and individual pieces of art. I had done a great deal of research on teacups, and some of my favorites were from Hungary (I suppose because of my family origins). The great Herend Porcelain company was located in Hungary, the makers of exquisite pieces of china that dated back centurie
s; I also loved the work of Zsolnay porcelain and Hollóháza porcelain, and I scoured china shops, antiques markets, and eBay for affordable pieces by these makers that I could add to my currently small collection.

  The Butterfly, though, was my jewel of jewels, and a recent acquisition. I frequented a little antiques shop called Timeless Treasures, and the proprietor, Falken Trisch, knew of my predilection for European china. He had come across a single piece with the maker’s mark of Anna Weatherley, a porcelain artist in Budapest. The cup, normally listed at about five hundred dollars, had a tiny chip in the plate, barely visible, but still an imperfection, making it hard for Falken to sell it for what it was worth. He had called me in to look at it, and we both marveled at its beauty before he gave me the good news: he would sell it to me for seventy-five dollars.

  This was an outrageously low price for a piece of art like this, and I had pounced on his offer and borne home my treasure in a collector’s euphoria.

  Now I took it out and showed it to my grandmother, who looked no less enamored than I felt. Perhaps I had inherited my love of beautiful things from her.

  She scrutinized the piece like a scientist with a specimen. The handle of the cup was the butterfly itself, with wings of vibrant blue, purple, and yellow. The white china was edged in gold, and the front was dominated by a large painted orange flower—the butterfly’s destination—with bright green leaves flourishing on a trailing vine. Another butterfly, Persian blue and lavender, graced the plate itself, along with two more leaves trailing along a green swirling vine tucked up against the gold trim. Beauty, color, and fragility combined to make a lovely objet d’art.

  “Oooh,” my grandmother said, lightly touching the butterfly handle.

  “Isn’t it amazing? We can put it at the center of your tea table, and I’ll get down the bag of nylon butterflies and greenery.”