Searching For Jenna novel Chapter 21

"Wow," Elliot said with a shake of his head. "So what can I do?"

Mark looked around the room and saw the host hovering around the greeting desk. He turned back to Elliot. "Sandy needs a good cook."

Elliot's eyebrows shot up, and he stared wide-eyed at Mark. "You want me to give up my job here to go cook in some small town grill? Do you know how hard I worked to get on here? I can't just give this up?"

Mark shrugged. "Well, that's up to you, but we're trying to get to your dad before he goes after Cara. Our sources tell us that the guy who runs the Cobras is a big fisherman and hunter and likes to eat wild game. They say he takes all his kills to a place in Cincinnati that prepares it for him. We're banking on this guy taking an interest in a restaurant that specializes in fresh game, especially freshwater fish that are considered a specialty food like Muskie."

"I don't know," Elliot said and leaned his forehead into his hands, his fingers raking through his short hair.

"You would be the head cook," Dana said. "I'm sure Sandy would give you plenty of room to experiment and create interesting dishes."

Elliot ran his hands down his face, steepling them in front of his lips as he thought over the offer. "So, are you trying to draw the main guy, or group, to the restaurant, or just get enough people in place to bust them when they get there?"

"Both," Mark admitted. "Plus, you may have met some of the men your father hunts and fishes with. Did he ever bring home any of his hunting and fishing buddies?"

Elliot spent several minutes trying to remember the people his father brought to the house. "There were a couple of guys that came from eastern Kentucky to go fishing with him at Kentucky Lake. He said they were the same guys he fished with over here." Narrowing his eyes in thought, Elliot said, "Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that he said they had fished at Cave Run Lake."

"We're pretty sure about that too," Mark said. "In fact, we think this may be where he met the man they call C1, or Cobra One. We'll need you to get with a sketch artist and give us some descriptions of what you remember."

Nodding in agreement, Elliot said, "I think that may have happened about six years ago. He'd always been secretive and a jackass, but it wasn't long after a trip over here that he bought that freezer. He said it was for his kills. No one thought he meant killed people; we assumed it was deer, turkey, or bear. I always thought he kept it locked because he was hunting animals during the off seasons and hiding what he'd killed."

"Hey, Elliot! You coming back to work, or what?" Russo yelled from the kitchen doorway.

"Yeah," Elliot said as he stood and turned. "Can we get together in the morning?"

Sandy had been doing a lot of the cooking as well as running the restaurant. She had already built an impressive amount of regular customers, who were a little peeved that the restaurant had to be closed for almost a month while they redesigned the kitchen.

The grand re-opening last week had been a considerable success with several of the regulars trying some of the new menu items Elliot had created. Sandy was thrilled that she no longer had to do most of the cooking as well as trying to make sure everything else was running smoothly.

Sandy had bought an old building and renovated it into the restaurant. When Elliot started working there three months ago, he realized that the kitchen design was poorly planned out. Sandy had let the contractor talk her into making the kitchen small, so there would be more seating room. Elliot convinced her that giving up some of the seating for a bigger and better-organized kitchen would be worth the trouble because of the clientele his new menu would draw.

Elliot was surprised how relieved he was to no longer be under Russo's thumb. He had been worried that Russo was nosing into Elliot's backstory. Even if Dana and Mark had not offered him this opportunity, he would probably have had to leave Russo's and Mayfield if Russo kept digging into Elliot's past.

Here, he wouldn't have to worry about Russo snooping in his business, and he was free to let his creative style flow. Besides mastering cooking standards, like fish frying and making biscuits, Elliot was also getting to get to experiment with cooking wild game; something Russo would never have considered.

The building Sandy bought was on U. S. Highway Sixty, which is part of the historical Midland Highway that travels from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Brenda, Arizona. Sandy had the restaurant fashioned in the historic tavern style similar to the Talbott Tavern in Bardstown and named the place the Midland Stone Tavern. Partially because of it being on the Midland Highway, and partly because the building was built with local limestone. Fortunately, it was just within the Morehead city limits so she could offer alcohol, which made it even more popular.