Chapter Text
After a long day at your shop, you harvest the 300 artichokes Keh told you to grow (why the heck did he need so many anyway??) and drive over to Keh’s shop. As soon as you walk in with them in a grocery tote, he approaches you, smiling that punchable smile you hate so much….
“I see you’ve been harvesting a lot of artichokes. I’m impressed, I had such low expectations for you.”
As he takes the tote from you, you mumble something under your breath. “I’m impressed your ego allowed you to have any expectations for me at all…”
“What was that, Ovenist?”
You straighten yourself up and watch what you say next. He can easily not allow you to search the shop if you give him attitude, after all. “I said thanks for that and all….”
Keh raises an eyebrow at you, maintaining his Cheshire cat grin. “I’ll let you look around my shop, even though I still don’t want you here. But before you go wrecking it, do you have anything to show me or tell me?”
As he looks down at you into your eyes, you gulp. Why is he so….intimidating? “Nope, I’m good.”
As he goes back behind the counter to look at his store’s final sales of the day on his tablet, you take a look around his shop, your pen writing down what you see in your investigation. As you look around, you feel so inspired looking at his futuristic décor and technology, and you see his menu board, with his grinning face hanging right next to it. Next you see his grinning face AGAIN holding a pizza right next to his NIT (National Institute of Toppings) degree.
You roll your eyes, and quietly scoff, with a grin. Just what someone wants to do when they eat a pizza here….stare at this man’s smug face!
You look even closer at the pictures again, and you sweat.
That well-taken care of…handsome…gor-
RING RING RING RING!
The sound of a ringing phone (almost a trendy, futuristic ringing) brings you out of your trance and Keh answers. “Keh-lifornia Pizza Kitchen; the home of the world’s most renowned pizza….ah, you’d like to place a catering order for tomorrow? Of course you do, I’m the only shop in town that can properly fulfill that kind of order…."
You multi-task between looking around his shop and listening to his conversation, and boy, Keh is as smug on the phone as he is in person. With your notebook and pen in hand, you look around. After you see the trophies on the wall and take note of them, you go behind where Keh is standing to try to reach up to pull a rope, but have trouble. It appears to be too high up, and you jump up, groaning. As Keh continues to chat with the potential customer on the phone, he notices you struggling.
“Hold on one moment…” He puts the phone on hold, and, with his 6’3 height, easily pulls the rope up and showcases what’s behind the curtain. He grins down at you. “You remind me of a cat trying to reach into a tree. Work with haste, Ovenist. I need to lock the shop up very soon."
As he returns to the phone call, you roll your eyes and look around, taking note of what you see. Special sauces in test tube bottles, fancy cooking tools imported from Italy, and some sort of group of papers (you put these in your backpack to analyze later, as they may be important for the case and cannot be read quickly). You look around for more things when some fancy envelope on top of the oven catches your eye.
What’s with that fancy envelope? Who is he writing to?
You didn’t dare ask for help again, even though it sounded like Keh was off the phone now. You jumped up really high to grab the letter and look at the front.
“To Michael…from Angelica..”
You drop your jaw, as well as the letter. You grip your notebook tight.
Angelica Bechamel?? What is he doing writing to HER??