Catering to Nobody

More Five-Star Praise for the Nationally Bestselling Mysteries of Diane Mott Davidson

“The Julia Child of mystery writers.” —Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph

“Mouthwatering.” —The Denver Post

“Hearty fare for those who like their murder with a bit of nosh on the side.” —Publishers Weekly

“A surprisingly tart and savory reading experience.” —The Washington Post Book World

“If devouring Diane Mott Davidson’s newest whodunit in a single sitting is any reliable indicator, then this was a delicious hit.” —Los Angeles Times

“You don’t have to be a cook or a mystery fan to love Diane Mott Davidson’s books. But if you’re either—her tempting recipes and elaborate plots add up to a literary feast!” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Mixes recipes and mayhem to perfection.” —Sunday Denver Post

“Davidson is one of the few authors who has been able to seamlessly stir in culinary scenes without losing the focus of the mystery … [she] has made the culinary mystery more than just a passing phase.” —Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale

“Goldy and her collection of friends and family continue to mix up dandy mysteries and add tempting recipes to the readers’ cookbooks at the same time.” —The Dallas Morning News

Also by

Diane Mott Davidson

Dying for Chocolate

The Cereal Murders

The Last Suppers

Killer Pancake

The Main Corpse

The Grilling Season

Prime Cut

Tough Cookie

Sticks & Scones

Chopping Spree

Catering

to

Nobody

Diane Mott

Davidson

Copyright © 1992, 2002 by Diane Mott Davidson. All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the following people: Jim Davidson; Jeffrey Davidson; Sandra Dijkstra; Katherine Goodwin; John William Schenk, J. William’s Catering, Bergen Park, Colorado; John B. New-kirk, D.Sc.; William Harbridge; Charles Blakeslee; Emerson Harvey, M.D.; John Hutto, M.D.; Alan Rapaport, M.D.; Doug Palczynski, R.Ph.; Deidre Elliot, Karen Sbrockey, and Elizabeth Green; Kitty Hirs and the writing group that assembled at her house; and Investigator Richard Millsapps, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, Golden, Colorado.

INTRODUCTION

Catering a wake was not my idea of fun, Goldy the caterer reflects as she shapes dill-speckled bread dough into pillow-shaped rolls. Thus Goldy announces herself at the outset of Catering to Nobody. She has no inkling as to how the events at that wake will close down her business and force her to investigate a murder. Nor did I have any inkling that Goldy would become a member of my family, a person who speaks her mind, writes me letters, and embarks on culinary and sleuthing expeditions that I find both scary and amazing.

Some years ago, I pulled over onto the shoulder of one of our narrow mountain roads. About twenty yards away, a pickup looked as if it had vaulted into the enormous roadside meadow, and then stalled. Its front wheels were precariously perched over a creekbank. Wanting to see if the driver needed help, I approached. “Is anyone in there?” I called. “Do you need help?” When I was six feet away, a mane of frizzy blond hair came into view. The head with the hair was stuck at an impossible horizontal angle. My body chilled; I could not find my voice. I raced back to my car and hit the accelerator hard. (This was before the widespread use of cell phones.) At home four minutes later, I phoned the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department (a fabulous, dedicated group of law enforcement officers). I explained what I’d seen, then begged them to call me back once they knew what had happened. The young woman driver was okay, a cop told me later. She’d spun the truck’s wheels and lost control. She was on some kind of medication (!), and she’d blacked out.

I was relieved the woman was not dead or injured. Still, I chastised myself. Goldy, I thought, would have done much better.

Goldy’s background emerged from my years of volunteer work. Back then, I was continually startled by the number of middle- and upper-class women—women who labored beside me in volunteering—who were physically abused by their husbands. (In the years before the arrest and trial of O.J. Simpson, this demographic aspect of domestic abuse was not well known.) The idea for Goldy came out of what I call the “emotional refrigerator.” The emotional refrigerator provides ingredients for books, and foremost among these was this caterer who survives abuse, dumps her cruel husband, and thrives. When life handed Goldy the lemon of Doctor John Richard Korman, she determined to make not only lemonade, but also lemon meringue pie, lemon bars, lemon pound cake, lemon sorbet. … To the surprise of the small town of Aspen Meadow, Goldy abandoned the role of rich doctor’s wife, and put her considerable energies into starting the town’s first catering business. Goldy also does her best to raise her much-loved son, Arch, who begins the saga here at age eleven. (As I work on the eleventh Goldy book, Arch is fifteen and just beginning to come out of his emotional and physical timidity.) In Catering to Nobody, Goldy has not yet gone back to the church, nor has she figured out where her social life might be heading. But she knows what she’s good at—cooking—and she’s determined to make her new catering business a success. She doesn’t yet know she’ll be good at sleuthing… but she figures that out!

The first response to the manuscript was mixed. Scores of editors rejected it. Virginia Rich had written three culinary mysteries in the early eighties, but she had been dead for several years. Who would buy a culinary mystery in 1989? When my wonderful agent, Sandra Dijkstra, pointed out to editors that no one—not a single author—had ever had a caterer (who offered recipes!) as a main character, the response was equally negative. Even more damning, the fact that Goldy had survived spousal abuse was seen as “too dark.” The recipes were viewed as “intrusive.” I felt strongly that both were necessary to explain who Goldy was, so the excellent Hope Dellon of St. Martin’s Press, who bought the book, allowed them to stay.

Catering to Nobody, published in 1990 along with hundreds of other new hardcover mysteries, received a 4500-copy first print run. A press release was the only publicity, and so my agent urged me to do my own publicity. I balked, telling her, “Episcopalians don’t do publicity.” But she convinced me.

I printed up a card for Dungeon Bars, one of the recipes in the book, and sent it to bookstores. I went on the road with three other members of Sisters In Crime, and we did our presentations at a dozen bookstores. To each store, I took platters of Dungeon Bars. If readers liked the cookie, I figured, they might buy the book.

Twelve years after it was first published, Catering to Nobody has sold over a million copies, in this country and overseas. I was ecstatic when Bantam Books bought the rights to reprint the book in this new paperback edition. With Bantam, I am blessed to have not only the brilliant Kate Miciak as an editor, but also an entire team of diligent artists, publicists, salespeople, and businesspeople working to ensure that each Goldy book is more successful than the last. For this, too, I am thankful.

Why do people feel connected to Goldy? Despite Catering to Nobody’s original publication as a “women’s book,” the marvelous mail I’ve received about it is equally split between men and women. These readers identify with Goldy, they are pulling for Arch, they despise the Jerk, or they just love cooking … or reading about it!

And so on to the other characters and recipes.

Regarding the Jerk: Doctor John Richard Korman strode into my mind with all his arrogance, money, good looks, and apparent invulnerability intact. He is not based on any one man. He is every egotistical clergyman, nasty boss, spiteful boyfriend, arrogant doctor, cruel professor, malevolent friend, wicked husband, etc., that any one of us could ever have—all rolled into a tall, blond, glib, athletic, powerful, much-admired man—the übermensch we love to hate.

(Just please don’t send me any more mail asking me to kill him. My agent won’t let me. After hearing this, one Colorado librarian suggested, “Well, could you maim him?”)

Regarding Arch: My husband and I have three sons, all of whom have provided “Arch material” over the years. Still, not one of our sons wears glasses; they wouldn’t be caught dead in Arch-style clothes; they find his various science, art, and literary projects bizarre. Arch is just Arch.

Regarding Tom: Women frequently ask me, “Where did you get him?” No matter what my response, the follow-up question is: “Do you know any single men who are like Tom?” No, sorry, I don’t. Like Arch, Tom is a composite. He is a good, kind, knowledgeable man—in those ways, he is very similiar to my husband (who is not the Jerk … please don’t ask him anymore, it upsets him). Tom also possesses a single-minded dedication to law enforcement, like the wonderfully helpful Sergeant Richard Millsapps of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. Most importantly, though, Tom—with his charisma, his caring, his love of cooking, and his great affection for Goldy—just knocked on the door of my mind when I was structuring the first crime scene in Catering to Nobody. When I opened the door to Tom, he strode in and took charge.

Marla, Goldy’s best friend and the other ex-wife of the Jerk, did not knock on my mental entryway. She blasted through it, her ample brown hair twinkling with preciousgem barrettes, her equally ample body swathed in expensive seasonal clothes, her voice exuberant as she delivered gossip, opinions, and advice. She flopped onto an instantly imagined kitchen chair, snagged a handful of cookies, and informed me she was rich as blazes. Moreover, she announced, she was here to stay.

The only other ongoing series character, Julian Teller, is introduced in the book that followed Catering to Nobody, Dying For Chocolate. Unlike Goldy, Marla, Tom, and Arch, I had no idea Julian Teller would be such a strong presence in the life of Goldy’s extended family. But when I sent Julian off to college, I received such a barrage of complaining letters, I brought him back. Julian, like the others, is here to stay.

Regarding the recipes: People often ask me where I “get” them. The answer is, from tasting, experimenting, trials, and many, many errors. Most of the recipes are ones I’ve worked on, reworked, and experimented with since my husband and I were married in 1969. At that time, I had to start from scratch, since I had no idea of how to cook or even how to learn to cook I put our first steak into the oven at 350°—for an hour. That was what you did with everything else, I figured, so why not? And bless my husband—he proclaimed the resultant leather delicious. (I do much better now.)

With the other recipes in Goldy’s books, I sometimes will taste a dish at a restaurant, or some delicacy made by my phenomenally talented catering mentor, John William Schenk, and then try repeatedly to replicate it. This works until the family cries, “Enough!” (They finally announced, when I’d served them weeks of variations on “Julian’s Cheese Manicotti”—from Dying for Chocolate—“No more manicotti! Ever!”)

My sisters, Lucy Mott Faison and Sally Mott Freeman, and my brother, Bill Mott, Jr., have given me wonderful ideas and done much low-altitude testing and tasting, for which I am deeply grateful. Lucy has produced an endless stream of Goldy’s cookies, cakes, and muffins, and given all of them to her neighbors, her friends, and her son Will’s teachers at the Gilman School in Baltimore. In Bethesda, Maryland, Sally—herself a superb cook; some day I hope to learn to make her incredible chutney—and her sons Christopher and Bobby have been my unflagging publicists. (Some Episcopalians are good at publicity, after all!) And Billy, a tireless vice-president at Goldman Sachs, has not only given me numerous insights into the business world, he is also a fabulous cook who helps his wife, Cathie, cook for their children Torry, Gracie, Billy, and Olivia. It was Billy who came up with the terrific idea to grill “Snow-boarder’s Pork Tenderloin” (from Tough Cookie). (It’s great, try it!) Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to my siblings, their spouses, and all their wonderful children.

Finally, I wish to all you readers, that you enjoy Bantam’s new paperback edition of Catering to Nobody. Since (again, unexpectedly) the recipes emerged as one of readers’ favorite aspects of the Goldy books, four new ones appear here. I have extensively revamped the honey-spice cookie, renamed it Honey-I’m-Home Ginger Snaps, and placed the recipes in a new format. I hope you enjoy them all, and will fix them for someone you love.

Good reading, and bon appétit!

DIANE MOTT DAVIDSON,

October 2001

COLD BUFFET FOR FORTY

Poached salmon

♦

Mayonnaise mixed with wild Maine blueberries

♦

Asparagus vinaigrette with minced tomatoes

♦

Wild rice salad

♦

Herb rolls and honey muffins

♦

Strawberry shortcake buffet

♦

Vouvray, lemonade, coffee and tea

CHAPTER 1

Catering a wake was not my idea of fun.

First of all, there was the short notice. A person died. Three days later there was a funeral. In this case the body had been discovered on a Monday, autopsy Tuesday, funeral Saturday, seven days after the presumed day of death. In Colorado we didn’t call the buffet after the funeral a wake. But whether you called it a reception or coming over for a bite to eat afterward, it still meant food for forty mourners.

I dumped a mound of risen dough as soft as flesh onto the oak countertop. Eating, I reflected, was a way of denying death.

I had known her. I did not want to think about it now. My fingers modeled soft dough around dill sprigs, then dropped the little rolls onto a baking sheet, where they looked like rows of miniature green-and-white sofa pillows. This was the last two dozen. I rubbed bits of yeasty mixture off my hands and let cold water gush over them.

A professional caterer has to keep her mind on the job, not the reason for the job. October was generally a slow month for parties in Aspen Meadow. Despite the fact that Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! provided the town’s only professional food service, making a living here was always a precarious enterprise. Like it or not, I needed the income from this postfuneral meal.

Still. I would rather have had Laura Smiley alive. She had been Arch’s fifth-grade teacher last year. She also had taught him third, when he was recovering from the divorce. They had become special friends, had worked on games and outdoor projects. They had written letters over the summers. I could picture Laura Smiley with my son, her arm around his slender shoulders, her cascade of brown-blond curls just touching the top of his head.

Psychologists and social workers had come into the elementary school to work with the students after the news of Ms. Smiley’s death broke on Monday. Arch had not spoken much about it. I did not know what the counselors had said to him, nor he to them. All during the week he had come home from school, taken snack food into his room, and closed the door. Sometimes I could hear him on the phone, acting as dungeon master or playing television trivia games. Perhaps losing Ms. Smiley was not much on his mind. It was hard to tell.

But now because of her death we had this job, which would help pay the bills for October. Laura Smiley’s aunt from Illinois, acting in place of parents long dead, had ordered the food and sent me an express mail cheque for eight hundred dollars. This covered my second problem, usually my first, and that was money.

Above the steel hand-washing sink, one of several required by the county for commercial food service, the booking calendar showed only two parties between tomorrow, October tenth, and the thirty-first. Clearing four hundred dollars on each of those plus four hundred for tomorrow’s buffet would take us to the Halloween-to-Christmas season, where I made almost enough money to get Arch and me through May. Long ago I had learned to stop depending on regular child support payments from Arch’s father, even if he did have an ob-gyn practice with an income as dependable as procreation. The payments were invariably wrong and invariably late. But arguments between us were bad for Arch and dangerous for me. Peace was worth a lower income. I stared grimly at the calendar. Lots of parties between Halloween and Christmas. That was the ticket to financial security.

Problem number three after short notice and money was getting all the supplies for a job. My meat and produce supplier was doing an extra run for me because she, too, had known the financial strains of single motherhood. Her truck was supposed to be rumbling up from Denver right now bringing a salmon and out-of-season asparagus and strawberries. After she delivered them, she’d give me a lecture on going out. She’d say, It’s not that tough to have fun.

But tough was like a roll in the microwave. I didn’t have time for a harangue about my social life because in addition to needing the supplies, I’d just used the last of the honey to make the rolls. This meant the muffins were on hold. The local honey supplier was a handsome fellow named Pomeroy, lusted after by every unattached woman in the county, a fact my supplier usually did not fail to mention. Unfortunately Pomeroy had said he wouldn’t be able to get over for a while to resupply my stock. The unusually warm weather had brought out a predator that had raided one of the hives. And he had his hands full.

Of what, I had wanted to say, but hadn’t. Sugar would do for the muffins.

The phone rang.

“Goldilocks’ Catering,” I said into the receiver, “where everything is just—”

“Spare me the greeting, Goldy,” came the voice of Alicia, my supplier. “I called Northwest Seafood. Fish’s all yours.”

“You’re great.”

She mm-hmmed and then said nothing.

I said, “What is it?”

“How well did you know this Laura?”

“She was Arch’s teacher. For a couple of grades.”

“Young?”

“Early forties,” I said. “She acted young.” I paused. “I knew her.”

She grunted and said she would be up in an hour.

I opened the refrigerator, a walk-in needed for the business. John Richard Korman, my ex-husband, had found the cost of this item ridiculous. Ditto the van and the required new sinks and shelves to store food above insect level. Other purchases out of my sixty-thousand-dollar divorce settlement had included a six-burner stove, extra oven and freezer, and enough cooking equipment to outfit Sears. Retrofitting our old house off Aspen Meadow’s Main Street had not been terribly difficult.

What had been difficult was hanging up on John Richard’s alternately shrieking and pleading voice, and then finally getting the locks changed when he had shown up repeatedly to do one of two things. At first, even though we were separated, he would try to seduce me. Sometimes successfully, I was ashamed to admit. Or he would start a fight to demonstrate his opposition to my financial independence. And by demonstrate, I don’t mean like Gandhi.

In the walk-in I reached for the butter, eggs, and cream. I backed out and whacked the door with my foot, then regarded my balancing act in the mirror-black surface. Blond curly hair. Freckles on a face unbruised for three years. Brown eyes. These stared back at me, saying, Don’t think about it now, just cook. At thirty I was doing okay, single but with good friends, and only slightly pudgy from all the fancy cooking that made the living for Arch and me.

But I was preparing a wake for someone I’d known. Early forties. Also single. Had been.

For the dessert shortcakes I used an old trick: make giant scones. Another thing I’d learned in this business: involve the clients with the food. Make the spread good to look at, smell, touch, taste. Gauge action by needs. At a bridal shower, don’t give the guests much to do with the food since they’re already involved with the presents. But keeping people active at a wake was essential. Being busy, like wonting, allayed grief. By splitting cakes and heaping on berries and cream, the mourners could start to get their minds off death.

Getting one’s mind off it. Not easy.

Laura had smiled broadly and flourished papers with Arch’s drawings of mountain wildlife at our parent conferences, which I’d always attended alone, as John Richard couldn’t be bothered. Arch is so talented, Laura had said, one of the most unusual students I’ve ever had. It’s too bad he doesn’t have more friends.

The food processor blade whirred and bit through the butter and flour. Soon the kitchen would smell divine. Arch could have a hot scone when he came in from school. Maybe he would eat it in the kitchen instead of heading off to his room.

The phone rang again.

“Goldilocks’—” I began, but was interrupted.

“Shut up, it’s me!” shouted Marla Korman, John Richard’s other ex-wife, now a good friend of mine. “Arch home yet?”

I strained to see out the window that overlooked Main Street, then listened for the bus. Yellow aspen leaves as bright as lemon disks shook in the warm breeze. No children’s shouts announced the bus’s afternoon rounds. Instead there was only the roar of a motorcycle and the rushing sound of Cottonwood Creek, already frigid with October snow melt from the high mountains.

I said, “Not yet. Ten minutes or so.”

“I’ve been shopping,” Marla said, “because I don’t want to think about Laura. The stores are empty now that the tourists have gone. They didn’t leave much.”

“Maybe we didn’t have much in the first place,” I said.

“This place,” wailed Marla.

I poured a cup of coffee and steeled myself for the coming barrage of complaints. The town would be the warm-up for the ex-husband.

She said, “How demoralizing to live in a terminally quaint western village.”

I made sympathetic noises.

“Of course, I don’t know why I would need a size sixteen cowgirl dress anyway,” Marla complained, “since I’m not coming to this shindig tomorrow. The Jerk’s going to be there, isn’t he?”

“He certainly is,” I said. “But I’m leaving the rolling pin at home.”

Bad joke, but we chuckled anyway. The Jerk was what Marla had dubbed our mutual ex, for his personality and his initials, J.R.K. Marla so intensely disliked seeing John Richard that it was hard to understand why she talked about him so much. Seven months after my divorce was final, John Richard ended a fling with a married woman who sang in the church choir and wedded Marla’s bulk and wealth. They were divorced fifteen months later and she and I promptly became partners in anger. But before that point Marla’s disgust with his extramarital antics had ballooned her up another thirty pounds, weight she’d used to good advantage when he came at her with a rolling pin. She had managed to heave him into a hanging plant, dislocating his shoulder.

I looked down at my right thumb, which still would not bend properly after John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer.

“That rolling pin,” Marla was saying between giggles, “that damn rolling pin. You could use it to fix him green tomato pie.”

Without thinking, I looked at the menu. Tomatoes. Damn. Amid all the other grousing he had done, John Richard had been at pains to remind me of his allergies to chocolate and tomatoes. I was planning to mince some of the latter and sprinkle the red bits on the asparagus vinaigrette, for color. John Richard would have to get mushrooms if I didn’t want to make him sick. Oh, I thought as I poured my coffee down the sink and finished mixing the scones, the adjustments we make after divorce.

Marla had stopped laughing. “I have news,” she announced. “He’s bringing his new girlfriend …”

I shook my head and began to spoon mounds of batter onto cookie sheets.

“Think of it,” Marla went on, “you could poison both of them.”

“Wouldn’t you just love that,” I muttered.

“On second thought, maybe one death is enough for a while,” said Marla. “Since the funeral’s tomorrow, I guess our women’s group won’t meet tonight.”

“I’m swamped,” I said truthfully. “How about later in the month?”

“Don’t know if I can wait that long. I need to order some cookies.”

I said, “Can we talk about it later? I’m awful busy right now.” I wedged the phone between my chin and shoulder and scraped the last of the scone-shortcake batter out. It made a sucking noise before plopping on the sheet.

“The cookies can wait. My pantries are full, anyway. You’re getting upset because we’ve been talking about you-know-who. Sorry.”

“Not to worry,” I said. “If I hadn’t wanted a family so badly, I’d never have made the mistake of marrying him in the first place.”

Marla sighed. “Oh God, think of Laura. She didn’t even have the chance to get married.”

I checked inside the proofing box; the dill rolls had risen. I snapped the other oven button to Preheat.

I said, “I am thinking about it. I am thinking about her. I’m fixing all the food, aren’t I?”

“Where’s your housemate? What’s her name, Patty Sue? Can’t she help you? What about Arch? You going to draft him to serve?”

“Patty Sue will help tomorrow,” I said. “She’s at the doctor now. Korman senior. Arch is going to have to help. I hate to do that to him since he was so close to Laura. Plus the aunt decided to have this reception over at Laura’s house, all the worse. Just a sec.” I grunted. I was thrusting my free hand through my dry goods shelves. “Oh my God,” I said, “I’ve let my supplies get too low, even if this is the slow season. I’m out of honey and sugar.”

“No honey and no sugar,” observed Marla. “You’re not doing very well. And as Laura would have said, you’re not acting too sweet either, Goldy. I’ll call when you’re in a better mood. Let me know how the affair goes.” She suppressed a laugh. “Laura would think it was all a big joke, you know. She’d say, Man, this party is dead.”

“Goodbye, Marla.”

The front door swept open and let in a gust of aspensweet October air. Arch traipsed into the kitchen and threw his backpack onto one of the counters before heading for the refrigerator.

I said, “How’d it go today?”

He groaned. “Terrible. As usual.”

He turned his small, earnest eleven-year-old face full of freckles and brown hair and tortoise-shell glasses to me.

He said, “Larry and Sean attacked me. They said I was stupid for still going around on Halloween. They say I’m stupid about everything, and they’re the stupid ones. Halloween isn’t even here yet!” He shook his head, disgusted. “They said it was like believing in Santa Claus. Look, they tore my shirt.” He fingered a rip in the blue-and-red flannel.

“Hmm.”

He gave me a grim look. “And don’t tell me all that stuff about turning the other cheek because I already tried that and it doesn’t work. I’m going to have to think of something else.”

I said, “Sorry. Want a hot biscuit in two minutes?”

“Can’t.” His voice wrapped around the open refrigerator door. “Todd’s calling as soon as he gets home. We’re doing a role-playing game and then TV trivia. I’ve been reading a book about the old shows all week.” He emerged clutching a pitcher of peppermint tea, his favorite. “Don’t worry. I’ll use the other phone line in case any clients call in.”

He smiled, and I wanted to hug him, ripped plaid shirt and all. But he was at the age where this made him uncomfortable, so I just lifted one eyebrow at the tea.

“You use the last of my sugar in that?”

“I had to use something,” he said in defense. “I needed it.”

I shook my head and began to mince scallions for my Wild Man’s Wild Rice Salad, so named because men usually turn the other cheek to rice. The rich scent of baking scones filled the kitchen. Arch loaded a plate with oatmeal cookies, a sure sign he was not going to stay and chat.

“Listen up,” I said. “You remember I need you to help tomorrow?” He nodded. “Your job now, please,” I went on as I handed him two dollar bills, “is to pop on down to the convenience store and get me another bag of sugar. And don’t open it for a sweet fix on the way home. I have to have it for the muffins and strawberries and lemonade.”

He groaned dramatically and clomped out, yelling something over his shoulder about Todd calling back in half an hour.

I washed the food processor and started on Goldy’s Marvelous Mayonnaise. When Todd rang I gave him the message. Halfway through drizzling in the safflower oil for the mayo, Alicia banged through the front door. With all the

Goldy’s Marvelous Mayonnaise

1 large egg, purchased from a salmonella-free source

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

½ teaspoon dry mustard

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup safflower oil

Put the egg, juice, vinegar, mustard, and salt in a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Process until well blended, about 30 to 40 seonds.

Place the oil in a small pitcher and, with the machine running, dribble it into the egg mixture in a thin stream. When all the oil has been added, turn off the processor and scrape the mayonnaise from the bowl and the blade into a small bowl that can be tightly covered. Keep the mixture chilled. It is best to use homemade mayonnaise within 24 hours.

Makes 1 cup

Wild Man’s Wild Rice Salad

½ cup raw wild rice

2 cups chicken or vegetable broth

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar

½ teaspoon Dijon mustard (or more, if desired)

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 scallions, finely chopped

3 radishes, diced

1 small tomato, drained, seeded, and diced

⅓ cup jicama, peeled and diced

1 cup baby spinach leaves, well washed and drained, plus extra for lining platter

Salt and pepper to taste

The night before you are to serve the salad, thoroughly rinse the rice, place it in a glass bowl, and completely cover the kernels with water. Allow the rice to soak overnight.

The next morning, carefully strain the rice and discard the water. In a large pan, bring the broth to a boil and add the rice. Cover the pan and immediately lower the heat to the lowest setting. Allow the rice to cook, covered about 1 hour to 1¼ hours, or until the kernels have puffed and taste done (i.e., they are not chewy or hard). Drain the rice and measure it. You should have between 1¾ and 2 cups cooked rice. Spread the kernels out on two plates to cool completely. For the salad, the kernels must be dry and cool. Pat the kernels dry with paper towels, if necessary.

In a small bowl, combine the mayonnaise, vinegar, and mustard, and whisk well. Add the oil in a thin stream, whisking all the while, until you have a smooth, blended dressing. In a medium-sized bowl, gently combine the cool rice kernels with the scallions, radishes, tomato, jicama, and spinach. Pour the dressing over this mixture and mix very gently. Taste and correct the seasoning. Chill at least 2 hours before serving. Turn out onto a small platter that you may line with spinach leaves, if desired. The salad must be consumed the day it is made; it does not keep well.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

interruptions I’d be lucky not to end up mixing vinegar into the whipped cream.

“Let’s put it on the counter,” I yelled over the buzzing and gulping of the processor.

We heaved a Styrofoam box up next to the mountain of chopped vegetables for the salad. Inside would be the salmon, wrapped in plastic and packed in ice. I planned to poach it that night and slice the strawberries, whip the cream, and make the lemonade all in the morning. Laura’s aunt was providing the Vouvray and dishes. I was bringing the cups. Arch and Patty Sue, who had lived with us for two months, would help serve, and we would get through this.

“That’s it,” said Alicia after she’d downed the scone I’d offered. “How’s your love life?”

“No news that’s fit to print.”

She eyed me. “Something you’re not telling me?”

I said, “Maybe.” In a gossipy small town one does not discuss one’s social hopes. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get out eventually.” She sighed and left.

The silvery salmon slapped my hands as I rinsed it and wrapped it in muslin. It too had been dedicated to mating and spawning and look at how far it had gotten.

Arch marched in and lobbed a two-pound bag of sugar onto a chair before heading for the phone in his room. The opened bag snowed part of its contents onto the kitchen floor.

“The Television Trivia Championship is at hand,” Arch, ignorant of his mess, hollered over his shoulder.

The rolls enveloped the kitchen with the smell of dill. In a large ceramic bowl I sloshed oil and egg and sugar for the muffins and was about to add the flour when my business line rang again.

“Goldilocks’ Catering—”

“Stop.”

Marla again. I began to measure the flour into the bowl, but some blew up my nose and onto the floor on top of the sugar. New powder on top of packed powder. Soon we could ski in the kitchen.

“What now?” I said.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the latest.”

“How could I? I just talked to you within the last hour.”

“He is marrying this girl.”

I set the bowl down.

“Goldy, did you hear me?”

I reached for the mushrooms.

“Goldy, do you believe this?”

I said, “Hmm.”

“Well, my dear,” she demanded shrilly, “what are we going to do?”

“Feel sorry for her. Not give tomatoes to him,” I answered as I began to mince.

“Anyway,” continued Marla, “the thought of a third daughter-in-law was too much for Vonette. She got drunk, I mean really gone, and Fritz called the cops and had her hauled down to Furman County detox.”

“Not again,” I said as bits of mushroom fell from the side of my knife. “Did someone go get her?”

“Yes, she’s home, doing better. She’ll be at the wake tomorrow. Fritz, for all that silver fox routine, isn’t exactly what you’d call compassionate. Must run in the family.”

I said, “Should I try to keep Vonette away from the Vouvray?”

“No way,” said Marla with a snort. “I can’t believe that in your eight years with John Richard, you never saw Vonette’s flask. She keeps it in her purse. You must be blind.”

“I am not blind,” I replied before hanging up, “but I will be broke if I can’t finish the food for this party.”

With the mushrooms minced and wrapped and the muffins steaming in the oven, I headed down the hall toward Arch’s room, sugar bag in hand.

“Do you realize the mess you made by tearing into this?” I demanded after knocking and entering and offering the bag as evidence. He told Todd to hang on and cupped his hand over the phone.

“Please, Mom,” he said as he held up a book, something about TV facts. “Let me talk. Besides, I didn’t do that. See,” he said as he tongued forward a wet pink mass, “I had bubble gum.”

I cocked my head at him. “Arch, alibis are like food service. They have to do more than look good and hold up. They have to be palatable. And yours,” I added, “doesn’t even look good.”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “Really. I’ll clean it up.”

I wanted to open his head and look in, to see what he was really thinking, how he was dealing with everything. I wanted to say, Are you okay? And have him say, Yeah, Mom.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I swept it. Just be more careful, all right?”

He nodded solemnly and said nothing. And then I turned away. I did not know what the right grieving behavior should be from a boy whose favorite teacher ever, Laura Smiley, had only six days before slashed her wrists and bled to death.

CHAPTER 2

I’m starving,” said Patty Sue as she tiptoed into the kitchen in a ruffled pink housecoat the next morning. I finished slicing the strawberries and offered her a bowl. A lanky twenty-year-old who had a twig-like figure and the metabolism of an athlete, Patty Sue Williams had been my roommate since August tenth at Vonette Korman’s request.

“She just doesn’t have anywhere to live while she’s here, Goldy honey,” my ex-mother-in-law had said, “and she needs Fritz to treat her medical problems. Take her in for a while. Give her a job. She’s never done anything out there in eastern Colorado except live with her folks. This gal wants to learn, Goldy. You can teach her.”

This I had come to doubt, I reflected as I pushed down on lemon halves to ream out their juice for the lemonade. Patty Sue had been so sheltered by her parents that her approach to any new endeavor was timidity, confusion, or both. She had attended a local community college “for a while,” she said vaguely, as if that, like everything else in her life, had not quite panned out. When she first arrived she had told me all about herself, including the fact that she was a virgin. Dr. Fritz Korman, John Richard’s father and the other half of Korman and Korman Ob-Gyn, was treating Patty Sue for amenorrhea. Which meant she hadn’t had a menstrual cycle for the last year.

“This is a bad thing?” Marla had asked at the last meeting of Amour Anonymous, our women’s group.

“It needs to be treated,” I replied. “Her doctor out in Fort Morgan sent her to Fritz, who claims to be some kind of specialist with it. It’s serious enough that Patty Sue’s mother let her come out and live with me, although she calls once a week to make sure I’m not corrupting her.”

“Not a chance of that, I’m afraid,” Marla said. “Maybe we could bring her into the group as a special assignment.”

I doubted if Patty Sue would have recognized herself in any of the literature about love-addicted women, which the Amour Anonymous group reads religiously. Sometimes I wondered if she recognized herself as anything. She was tall, lovely, and unsophisticated to the point of never having operated a dishwasher. She wanted to learn to drive a car but was intimidated by crown roast of pork. At first she had been quite eager to learn the catering business. She had made cementlike loaves of bread and overcooked hamburgers with the brightest of smiles. But just when she started mastering the skills, she had detoured into a state of distraction.

In September she’d started avoiding my eyes and my questions. Perhaps she was thinking about her sickness. It was strange because she didn’t look sick. In fact, physical fitness was her one obsession. She had even asked that her first wages as a caterer’s helper go to adding her to my athletic club membership. Despite the mood shift, which she unfortunately could not blame on PMS, she still worked out at the gym. But her energy had become feverish instead of enthusiastic. And her cooking abilities, such as they were, had gone to hell.

“That was great,” Patty Sue said now as she licked her fingers from the strawberries. “This kitchen always smells super.”

I set the bowl aside and broke three eggs into an iron skillet, then went back to squeezing lemons until it was time for the over-easy part. These days, nothing was easy for Patty Sue until it was over. My attempts in the last two weeks to teach her to cook anything more complicated than toast, much less eggs, had not gone well. Words like marinate and braise were beyond her. I had asked if she was homesick. She’d said no, and gone on to leave the top off the food processor when she worked with flour, generating small blizzards.

So I had put her to work serving to pay for her rent, food, and right to exercise indoors. For Laura Smiley’s wake she was in charge of the strawberry shortcake buffet. This would mean little beyond keeping a platter stacked with scones and replenishing bowls with sliced strawberries and whipped cream.

“Where’s Arch?” I asked as I placed little glasses of orange juice next to each placemat.

Patty Sue said, “On the phone, I think.”

Since she obviously was not going to get him, I started down the hall to his room. On the way I glanced at the drawings of mountain flowers he had done last spring. Laura had encouraged his artwork after he’d produced the sketches of high-country animals. These delicate pen-and-ink works were of bluebell, fireweed, daisy, lady’s slipper—all part of a project on nectar producers. Arch had chewed his tongue and furrowed his brow while drawing the details of tendrils and stamens.

Arch was the other problem-in-residence. Never gregarious, he had seemed even more isolated since the beginning of school. Twice he had come home with a black eye and a note from the principal saying he had been in a fight. I knew better than to pry. Or worse, rescue. I just wanted to understand what was going on.

Since Laura’s death he had become even more withdrawn. Whenever I was near he spoke on the phone in a hushed tone. His eyes glazed more and more in indifference, as if he were taking lessons from Patty Sue. Our days of counting spoons, of telling stories, of loitering next to the hill of pumpkins at the grocery store to choose just the right one for a jack-o’-lantern—these were over. Immersed in fantasy role-playing games, he prepared and embarked on elaborate paper adventures, the purpose of which eluded me. As I edged away from the drawings and approached his room I could hear the authoritative voice he invariably used when directing one of these adventures. I slid his door open.

“… and since you have trespassed the space in front of their lair,” he announced, “you will be attacked by a low-flying straight line of stringrays—”

“Arch!” I stuck my head into his room. “Hate to interrupt. Breakfast.”

He looked up at me from his neatly made bed. He was already wearing his white shirt and black pants. Soon he would cover this outfit with one of our white chef’s aprons.

“To be continued,” he said, and hung up. Behind the glasses his eyes were inscrutable.

“You’re all right?” I said, half statement, half question.

“I’m not hungry,” he said with straight-lipped calm. “For eggs or anything. Let’s just go.”

And so we did. Patty Sue ate all the eggs. We packed the van and set out.

The air was cool but calm, quite different from the snarling frost-blowing beast an October day could be. At eight thousand feet above sea level, snow and cakes fell unexpectedly. After eleven years I’d learned how to adjust the recipes, but driving the van through storms and over ice remains a challenge. This day the aspen leaves moved languidly as the van sputtered out of the driveway’s dust. Above, the sky was deep blue and cloudless, as if nature were holding her breath before the first storms. Starting the descent to Main Street, we passed a vacant lot and had a glimpse of the far distance.

“Oh,” said Patty Sue, “what is that?”

She was pointing to the town’s namesake, the Aspen Meadow, now a large patch of gold in a green-and-brown quilt of trees about seven miles away. This patchwork of fall color nestled at the base of mountains already blanketed with white. I explained to her that that area was known as the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. There, I added as we turned onto Main Street, the forest was so thick that during dry spells even hikers were barred entry, for fear of forest fire.

“Arch knows all about the Aspen Meadow,” I announced, hoping to invite him out of his silence. “He’s done drawings as part of his school work.”

“You do?” said Patty Sue as she turned to face him. “You have?”

“Oh, I guess,” said Arch in a flat voice. “The Webelos hike in for the last pack meeting of the year,” he said. “The woods are real deep. We see a lot of deer and elk and foxes and stuff like that. But to get in you have to go down a long dirt road. Fritz fishes the upper Cottonwood in the summer, and Pomeroy Locraft raises bees.” He thought for a moment and then explained to Patty Sue, “I used to help Pom with the hives, last spring when I was studying bees.”

“And flowers,” I added.

“Did you get stung?” Patty Sue asked. “Did you catch fish?”

“I caught some trout,” said Arch. He thought for a minute. “The bees never stung me.” I looked at him in the mirror. He was shaking his head at Patty Sue, as if he were twenty and she eleven. He explained, “You learn how to be careful. Pomeroy taught me stuff like wearing white around the bees.” Arch sighed. “He taught me a lot.”

“This Pomeroy,” I said to anticipate Patty Sue’s next question, “teaches driver ed over at the high school and does the apiary in the summer. Pomeroy is also recently divorced.” I stopped at Main Street’s one red light and smiled at my housemate. “A new single person in town can be an interesting part of the landscape, too.”

“Oh,” said Patty Sue.

“Will Dad be at Ms. Smiley’s?” asked Arch.

“Yep,” I said, and pushed the van’s grinding gears into first. “Vonette and Fritz, too. Plus all the teachers from the schools.”

Patty Sue said, “I’ve never seen a dead person.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured her, “we’re not going to the church at all. Plus it’s not that kind of wake. They’ll have the funeral and the interment while we’re setting up. All we’ll see is live people.”

Patty Sue paused and then said suddenly, “I never knew anyone who killed herself.”

I did not answer but glanced again at Arch in the rearview mirror. He was looking out the window, but sensed my eyes.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “You can talk about it.”

“All I know is,” I said quietly, “what I’ve heard. She was out doing errands Saturday morning. One week ago today. On Monday she didn’t show up for school and didn’t call in. They got a substitute.” I coaxed the van into second and turned onto Homestead Drive before going on. “Apparently one of the teachers came over at lunchtime to check on her and to bring some papers that needed correcting. The door was open. Laura was in the bathtub. Dead. Razor in her hand and dried blood all over, I guess. No note, but no sign of a fight or anything. There was an autopsy.” I cleared my throat. “I think that’s routine. Anyway, the guy said suicide.” I paused. “Except that it just seems so sad. Premature.”

I glanced at Arch. He was intent on the view out the window. The van released another cloud of dust as we turned onto Piney Circle, a dirt road where wood-paneled houses peeked out from behind stands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine.

“So did you know her?” Patty Sue asked.

Alicia’s question. Why did people inquire so suspiciously about your prior acquaintance with a suicide victim? Were they trying to ascertain guilt? If you had known her better, she wouldn’t have done this? If you hadn’t known her at all, you were off the hook?

“She was Arch’s teacher last year and two years ago. I saw her at conferences,” I replied. “Sometimes I saw her in exercise class. That’s it.” I thought for a minute. “She was funny. She could make you laugh talking about how she was going to be a taxing person for the IRS, things like that. And she was a special person for Arch.”

I looked again in the mirror. My son was holding his hands over his eyes. I pulled over onto the graveled shoulder and turned to face him.

“Arch,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. Listen, we can manage with just Patty Sue and myself serving. You don’t even have to come at all.”

Patty Sue and I sat as Arch sobbed quietly. I handed him a tissue. I shouldn’t have talked about Laura Smiley, after all. Arch blew his nose and coughed as people do when they want it to look as if the real problem is sinus congestion, not heartache.

“It’s okay,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go. Please.”

I said, “You really don’t have to.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I do.”

We turned off Piney Circle and onto Pine Needle Lane. Whoever had named the streets wanted to remind us we were in the mountains. The lane was a dirt road that would take us to Laura’s house. She had lived close to the center of town, in a hilly area once peppered with log cabins. In the Forties, Aspen Meadow had been a rustic retreat from Denver for the well-to-do. Now the largest portion of residents made the hour-long commute to Denver to work. In Laura’s residential area small A-frames and wood-paneled houses built in the Fifties and Sixties were sandwiched between a scattering of remaining cabins. The resulting architectural mishmash made the area not a good investment for the commuters, but a haven for teachers, artists, waiters, and others who could not afford a ritzier neighborhood.

The van shook as we started down the steep, dusty driveway to Laura’s bungalow. The aunt from Illinois had flown in and rented a car. It stood outside the open garage, as she had planned to take a limousine to the funeral. She had left us enough room so that I could just edge the van in next to the garage door.

Fortunately the aunt also had remembered to leave the door unlocked. We pushed in with our crates, boxes, foodstuffs, bowls, and cups.

Once inside I took a deep breath. A professional service from Denver had been in to clean. Their assignment included, Laura’s aunt had crisply informed me, disinfecting and regrouting the bloodied bathroom tile. This was about the fifth time I’d done a postfuneral meal in the home where a person had died. I shivered in anticipation of any lingering smell or sense of death.

But here there was none. Large bouquets of flowers, florist’s mixtures of carnations and gladioli, snapdragons and baby’s breath, crowded the counters in the brightly wallpapered kitchen. Only the cinnamon smell from the carnations and the piney scent of disinfectant lingered in the air.

The house was small. We carted our boxes through the garage into the kitchen, which adjoined a larger dining-living room combination. The guests would be parking around the side near the aunt’s car. On that side there was a walkway to the front door, which opened into the dining-living area. I surveyed the room to figure out how to set up the tables and arrange the flowers between the plates and food. Like an investigator at a crash site, I did not want to think about the tragedy that had happened here. We had a job to do. The living had to eat.

Nevertheless, pacing off the living room for measurement, I kept expecting to feel some eeriness in the house. What was actually discomfiting was that the whole place seemed so terribly cozy. Two of the living room walls paneled in diagonal beetle-killed wood glowed green-gold in the sunlight. Shelves and cabinets dotted the other walls. There was a wall of photographs. Deep blue carpet covered the area where the floor was not wood. In addition to the photos there were painted pictures of snowy mountains and snowy fields and brooks with snowy banks. Laura’s two wing chairs looked newly reupholstered, as did the two old but not antique love seats. The fabric on the furniture and several throw pillows was a print of spring flowers—periwinkle blue, kelly green, sunshine yellow. With the blue rug and rows of wooden shelves and cabinets, the big room was lively with color. Nowhere in sight were the browns and grays and blacks, the filth or lack of care one would expect of a suicidal personality.

The three long tables ordered from Mountainside Rental lay piled like slabs of rock on the blue rug. They would all fit. We pushed the love seats and chairs into conversational groupings, then cracked open the tables and arranged them in a horseshoe shape. Arch unfurled the tablecloths while Patty Sue and I began to unpack the food.

“Listen to this,” I said a few moments later. I had just closed the refrigerator and was perusing the homemade magnets and cartoons with which Laura had festooned the door. Arch and Patty Sue were in the living room setting out silverware and plates in the areas between the flower baskets.

I read, “ ‘This refrigerator is cooler than Dave Brubeck.’ Uh-huh. ‘A woman should be more than a cute dish in the Cabinet. She should be Secretary of State.’ Very funny. ‘The only time I COOK is on the highway.’ Ha!” I turned to the dining room, where Patty Sue and Arch had begun unraveling extension cords for the coffee machine. “How could a funny person get so depressed?”

After a minute Arch said, “Oh Mom, you know. She was always making jokes. ‘A school is for fish,’ stuff like that.”

“Right,” I muttered, then read above the stove: “When is a pig a canine? When it is a hot dog.” By the sink: “I went to plumbing school and told them to make me into Farrah Faucet.”

Patty Sue joined me. Her face was paler than usual. She said, “I feel kind of spooky. Please tell me again what you want me to do. I mean, when the people get here.”

I explained her duties once more, then showed her the bathroom, in case folks asked for directions. To my relief the aunt or the cleaning service had put up an opaque white shower curtain, whose new-plastic smell was overwhelming. It was drawn across the tub. I couldn’t help it: I poked my head around the curtain while Patty Sue checked her lipstick in the mirror. The bathtub was spotless. What I had expected to find I did not know. I hustled Patty Sue out to the kitchen to show her where everything would be. Arch was busy slicing lemons to float in the lemonade pitcher.

When Patty Sue was occupied in the living room opening bottles of wine, Arch said to me, “You know Dad has a new girlfriend.”

I said, “I know.”

I was looking through Laura’s pantry for extra sugar in case we needed additional lemonade. I had brought the rest of the new bag, but the warmth of the day made me worry about the possibility of needing more. The only thing I found was some flour she had put in a canister sporting, naturally enough, a painted flower. Since I knew no homonym for sugar, I gave up.

“Maybe she’ll be here,” said Arch.

“Right,” I said. I turned to him. “The girlfriend. Do you care?”

He stared down at the lemons and I was immediately sorry. I knew his warning was meant to prepare me for not caring, not him.

“Sorry, hon,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“Will Vonette be here?” he asked. “I wanted to talk to her yesterday but Fritz said she was sick again.”

Arch did not use words like grammy or grandpa because John Richard and I had never taught him to. He had a child’s devotion to his grandmother, who doted on him. Fritz had always been too involved in his practice to pay any more attention to Arch than recognizing him. But Vonette’s “being sick” was the euphemism the adults in Arch’s life used to refer to her cocktail hour beginning at eleven in the morning. I often wondered if Arch knew, or suspected, the truth.

“Sick again,” I repeated as I scanned the kitchen. “Yes, Marla told me that.”

“They’re coming,” called Patty Sue from the other room.

“Quick, slip on your apron, kiddo,” I told Arch. “Then go to the front door and greet people. Tell them to leave coats, if they have any, in Laura’s bedroom, which is on the other side of the living room.” I hesitated. Then I said, “And show them where the bathroom is.”

His apron was in place; he raised fearful brown eyes to mine at the word bathroom.

I put my hands on his shoulders. “I checked it, and it’s all clean.”

He said, “I really don’t like this. I’m afraid.”

And so, for different reasons, was I.

CHAPTER 3

Parsley tendrils brushed the sides of the salmon and the exposed pink backmeat when I set the silver platter down on the long main-course table. I ladled the mayonnaise into a crystal bowl and placed it next to the salmon. Then I carried out the asparagus and the rest, including a packet with the mushrooms I had minced to replace the Jerk’s tomatoes. Arch had ushered the first group into Laura’s bedroom to leave their coats. The murmur of voices and click of heels on the brick walkway filtered through the air.

Backing up to the kitchen, I gave the room a quick scan before putting on my apron. Catering a reception was much like directing a play: the props and actors all had to be in place before the entertainment could begin.

My hands were shaking, my ears burning. Inexplicably, my right shoulder began to hurt. I had to take mental stock. Pull yourself together, I told myself. But the old fears welled up.

Toward the end of my marriage to John Richard, we had a fight in which I fell backward into an open dishwasher. My right shoulder was slit open by a protruding knife, necessitating stitches and a sling. While I was recovering, but before I could consciously acknowledge how bad things had become, I had a recurrent nightmare of being raped. The man in the nightmare was a famous regional tennis player named John. When the rape was over, a voice would say, “Call the plumber.” Then with great clarity one morning I realized that John in the dream was John my spouse, and that it was my life which was draining away.

I filed for divorce, then threw myself into the catering work with the zeal of a lover. Though I’d finally gone back to school when Arch was in first grade to finish a degree in psychology, the food service offered the most immediate potential for financial security. The child support payments, when they came, took care of about a third of the house payment. New recipes, new bookings, keeping accounts, working in the kitchen, and most important, being financially independent of John Richard, all these I relished. My shoulder healed; my work was my love. My nightmare now, when I had one, was that the business would be taken away as my dream of a family life had been.

I took a deep breath. My heart beat in its cavity. John Richard was going to be here and I understood why Marla was staying away. He would act charming, do his handsome guy routine with the women. Then in a few moments he would come up and make some cutting remark. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, in any event not physically, not here in front of all these people. I pressed my lips together. Go greet the guests, I told myself, but could not.

I looked through the kitchen drawers and found a pack of Kools, lit one, and inhaled deeply. Heavenly. I pondered the walls of the kitchen, which Laura had papered in a pattern of ice cream cones in Neopolitan colors. Just right for a teacher. But at least she smoked. Smoking is self-destructive. Laura Smiley was self-destructive, remember?

But she hadn’t had an ex-husband showing up to taunt her, I reminded my inner voice.

How do you know what taunted her? asked the voice.

I put out the cigarette and slipped into the living room. Maybe I would just take a look at that wall of photos during my break, see who had been the people in Ms. Smiley’s life. But I couldn’t take a break if I never started working.

“Trixie,” I said to the backside of a tall, muscled woman.

Trixie Jackson finished shaking off her coat and turned around. She was one of the aerobics instructors at Aspen Meadow’s athletic club, although I had not seen her for about a year and had put it down to a class-schedule change. She narrowed her eyes at me. I thought, She can smell the cigarette.

“Good to see you,” I said. “How was the funeral?”

“Depressing,” she replied. She raised an eyebrow at me. “Your ex-husband was there. John Richard.”

I resisted asking her if that was what made it depressing and motioned Arch over to take her coat. More people shuffled through the door and their low voices gurgled through the room like water melting a lake of ice. Trixie headed off toward the as-yet unmanned beverage table.

Vonette Korman’s shrill voice carried over from outside. “It just makes me so sad,” she was saying, “and she was so young and all. Course maybe not that young. Still, though. She was a caring person. And it is sad.”

I was caught in a dark bustle of coats, unneeded on this warm day but for the chilling effects of a funeral. Vonette’s highly made-up face and brilliant orange-red hair emerged by Trixie and the glasses of white wine. Threading my way back toward the food, I kept an eye on my ex-mother-in-law by pretending to examine the straightness of the tablecloths. And there it was, just as Marla had observed. As quickly and stealthily as any magician, Vonette drew a small leather-covered flask out of her purse and poured a clear liquid into her wineglass. It must have been vodka or gin. Unlike a magician’s, her glass contents did not change color, although I imagined it had changed into a martini.

“Mom,” came Arch’s shrill whisper from nearby. “Now what do you want me to do?”

“Go tend the drinks,” I whispered back. “Let them pour their own wine. You just do lemonade and coffee.” I looked back at the table. “And tea. That other pot has hot water in it and the Lipton bags are next to it. Sugar and cream are on the table. All you need to do is keep everything going.”

He nodded and turned away.

“Please come and have something to eat,” I said to a desultory group. And with that the show had begun. When their stomachs were full, the entertainment would be complete. I hoped.

“Well, if it isn’t the little food lady,” came the all-too-familiar voice. How he had found me so quickly I did not know. “I may not miss much,” John Richard said with a laugh, more like a snort, “but sometimes I miss your cooking.”

“Really?” I replied. “Funny, I don’t miss anything.”

I looked up at my ex-husband. Although I had not cared what clothes he’d worn when we were married—he looked like a male model in everything—I had a compulsive interest in assessing his current wardrobe. Perhaps it was the new ostentation. He wants to look younger. Or the leather, wool, occasional silk: he’s making lots of money. If I thought it was polyester, I savored an inner victory: the practice is failing. I now glanced from the hand-tooled cowboy boots past the charcoal-colored wool pants to the silk cowboy shirt and Navajo bolo tie. The bolo was held with a silver ring sporting a hunk of turquoise that matched his eyes. John Richard was tall and blond, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had more the build of a prizefighter than a doctor. Which, I reflected, was probably appropriate.

He straightened his tie.

He said, “Outfit okay?”

I took a deep breath. I was too angry to admit he looked fabulous. I closed my eyes and feigned boredom.

“Remember,” I said, “I’m from New Jersey. There, people wear cowboy clothes up to fourth grade. But suit yourself.”

He was walking away. He held his hand up in mock salute. “I’ll do that.”

I looked at the food spread out on the table, then scanned the room for Patty Sue. She was talking to Pomeroy the beekeeper. At least someone was having a decent conversation with a man. Fritz Korman was sidling up to Patty Sue himself. Didn’t he see her enough with the twice-weekly visits? I also noticed Vonette watching Fritz.

Not a student of social interaction, I put myself to work. Besides, I didn’t want to seem to be looking for John Richard.

“Come and eat,” I invited a new gaggle of people eyeing the salmon. “C’mon, Trix,” I said because she was once more near me.

Trixie’s right arm—ripped, shredded, cut, as they say in the body business—reached for a plate. I lifted salmon flesh from the carcass.

“Asparagus?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said. “But no bread.”

“Were you a friend of Laura’s?” I asked.

“I knew her,” she said vaguely, as I topped her coral-colored mound of fish with a dollop of mayonnaise. Trixie looked at me, dark brown eyes in a face framed with streaked blond hair. She said, “Not too much mayo.” She thought for a minute. “Laura used to come to class. Sometimes we talked afterward. She was funny, a little wacko, I thought, but not … She never came to the club’s parties. She was like you, didn’t really go out with men.”

I mm-hmmed and averted my eyes to end the conversation. This was not the assessment of my current social life that I wanted John Richard to overhear.

The aunt came up and asked how everything was going, then complimented us on the food, which she had yet to taste. She was a short woman with pale makeup and too-black hair cut severely short around her face.

“Thank you,” I said. “Will you be around long?”

She shook her head. “I’m flying back to Chicago tonight. The house is going up for sale Monday. She left her goods to me, but I certainly don’t know what to do with them. I’ll be back in November to finish things up.” She gave me an ingratiating smile. “Your son is just a little darling. And how nice of him to help you with the business.”

I nodded and fixed her a plate, then glanced in the direction of Arch, who was talking to John Richard, or rather, being talked to. Arch was nodding, his face full of pain. I could imagine the questions. Did you try out for soccer? Are you going to play football? Have you thought about basketball? Why not? The Jerk had never accepted the fact that his son was not destined for the NFL.

I reassured the moneyed aunt that the catering business was very important to me, as well as to Arch. She gave me a sympathetic look and slid away.

Now I could sense John Richard, hear him, see him shuffling along in what had become a fairly long food line, maybe ten people. With that kind of backup I was now preparing the plates in advance, whether the guests wanted asparagus or not. I heard him again and looked up. He was talking to Fritz. A medical conversation, no doubt. Beside the Jerk was the new girlfriend, a nondescript brunette whom my memory could only vaguely identify as a teacher.

I counted out the plates to John Richard’s. Eight. I drew out the mushroom packet. No sense in making him sick with tomatoes, thus risking more wrath, although the thought made me giggle. I sprinkled the mushroom bits on top of John Richard’s asparagus vinaigrette and kept going with plate preparation. I looked back at the line. For heaven’s sake. The girlfriend had stepped in front of the Jerk, so now she would get the mushrooms and he would still get tomatoes. I clanked the plates into their proper order, and that was my mistake.

John Richard sidled up to the front of the line and again straightened the bolo as he peered at the dishes. Then he raised a thick wrist to dramatically count the number of people in line.

“Okay, Goldy,” he said with a deep sigh, as he picked up the plate with the mushrooms. “What are you trying to feed me?”

“It’s not for you. It’s for your girlfriend. An aphrodisiac. She may need it.”

He said, “Then you won’t mind if I send this down to a lab and have it analyzed.”

“Don’t be so paranoid.” I grabbed the edge of the plate. “It’s just mushrooms instead of tomatoes, because I didn’t want you to get sick.”

He pulled the plate toward him. The salmon made a precarious slide toward the silk cowboy shirt.

“Will you stop?” I said through clenched teeth. “Just let me get you a new one.”

“Like hell,” he said. He pulled the plate as I let go. The vinaigrette splashed down the silk.

John Richard cursed.

I met his withering look and said, “Send me the cleaning bill.”

He muttered something and moved off.

I wasn’t having a very good day.

Patty Sue appeared next to me and complained that no one was ready for dessert yet.

“Take over the food line,” I commanded. “I need a break. Funerals for the wrong people depress me.”

Once she had taken my place, I stared at the wall of photos. When it was my turn at the coffeepot I let the dark liquid gush into two of the deep Styrofoam cups with my logo on them. One was for me and one was for Vonette, who probably would be needing caffeine about now. But before I could deliver it I saw Fritz Korman chatting with Patty Sue again. This meant Patty Sue had slowed down in serving the food. I strolled back.

“Well hello, Goldy,” said my ex-father-in-law with his patented toothy grin. The light shone off strands of white hair carefully combed across his bald pate. His teeth gleamed as he directed his smile back to Patty Sue, the wolf welcoming Red Riding Hood. John Richard had inherited his hulking build from Fritz, which was shown off to good advantage in yet another silk shirt with fringed vest and pants.

I said, “Fritz, you look like you just stepped off the set of ‘Bonanza.’ ”

He chucked me under the chin, unruffled. Fritz was like a man who was perpetually running for office, and he always treated me as if we were old friends or lovers or both.

“Has Patty Sue told you,” I began as I set down the cups, “that her father is a doctor, too?”

“Why no,” said Fritz, startled.

“But he isn’t,” said Patty Sue.

“Oh yes,” I continued as I again began to flick out creamy glops of mayonnaise onto piles of salmon. “Patty Sue’s father, the doctor, works in Washington, D.C. Very important fellow. Proctologist, to be exact.”

“What?” said Patty Sue and Fritz in unison.

“The Pentagon proctologist,” I rolled on, “who also gives political advice. He tells the generals working on Iran policy, Shove it up there where it hurts.”

Success. A confused look passed over Fritz’s face before he walked away. After a minute, Patty Sue started serving again.

“You need to get more mayonnaise from the kitchen,” I advised as I handed her the bowl. “Quickly.” When she returned I took the lukewarm coffee over to Vonette, who was bending Pomeroy Locraft’s ear.

“It just makes me so sad,” Vonette was saying, true to form. The sorrier and sadder she felt, the more she drank.

I said, “What makes you so sad?”

“Oh hi, Goldy,” she replied. Pomeroy, tall, dark, thirty-ish, and flannel shirted, nodded at me.

Vonette went on. “Did I hear you talking to Fritz about Iran over there? Honey, Fritz doesn’t care about foreign policy.” A swig. “He didn’t even vote for Bush last time.” Another swig. “Hell, he’s still mad about Nixon going to China.”

“What?” said Pomeroy.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, you know how mad he gets,” she said with a roll of her eyes, “and those Red Chinese, I mean in addition to being Commies”—another swig—“have this forced abortion policy.”

Pomeroy shook his head, stood up, and walked away.

“I’m still out of honey,” I called after him. He turned. I handed Vonette her coffee and walked over.

Pomeroy was and always had been an enigma to me. Apparently he also gave that impression to the other women in town, who had given him the moniker Ice Man. He had none of the flirtatious mock shyness that John Richard used to such advantage with women.

Arch, on the other hand, adored Pomeroy. Something about his aura of quiet, his life in a remote cabin, his way with the bees, had magnetized my son. Through a whole year of teaching Sunday school I had only rare clues that Arch was absorbing any of the study-of-saints curriculum. Nevertheless, after his spring project working out at the hives, Arch had said Pomeroy was like Saint Francis. He loves all the animals, Arch had said; he understands nature.

So I was interested in Pomeroy in a way that was more than curiosity. I had been unwilling to discuss my interest with Alicia, as I didn’t know what kind of chance I had with an icy-tempered beekeeper.

“You walked away from that conversation awful fast,” I said to him.

He shook his head. “I don’t have to listen to her when she’s like that, or when she’s talking about that … subject. No one has to.”

“Oh, well. Besides Vonette, how’re you doing?” I asked with a bright smile.

He said, “Why do you care?”

So much for social interchange. I said, “I don’t know,” and walked back to my ex-mother-in-law.

“How’s your coffee, Vonette?” I asked. It was on the table, and it looked untouched. Under the table was the purse that held the flask.

“Think I need it?” she asked, her voice still full of self-pity. Her head of wild red hair shook slightly. I waved my hand at the dessert and beverage tables, where Arch and Patty Sue were now feverishly trying to keep up with the flow of people finished with the main portion of the meal.

“No,” I said, “but everyone’s lining up for shortcake now, and they’ll be wanting coffee, too. I brought you some so you wouldn’t have to get up.” But of course she needed it. This day was upsetting enough without another trip to detox.

Arch was looking frantic by the coffee machine; I joined him.

“Mom,” he said, “I need more lemons. I don’t know why everyone wants lemonade all of a sudden.”

“I’ll do it. Just keep them going with the coffee and wine, if they want it.”

Out in the kitchen, I located my manual squeezer and extracted the juice from a dozen lemons, then cut paper-thin slices from two more using a knife from a wall mount. After a few moments Arch came in.

“Now what?” I asked. He was opening cupboards and looking through them.

“Well,” he said as he pulled over one of the kitchen chairs to climb up for a better view, “now somebody wants herb tea. All we’ve got out there is that Lipton stuff.” He strained to look in the high cupboards. “So I have to find some.”

I left the lemons and joined Arch in his search. In the process I finally found Laura’s sugar in a canister with a magazine picture of Sugar Ray Leonard taped on the front. But there was no herb tea.

“See if whoever it is will try this,” I said as I handed him Postum. “I’ll be out in a minute with the lemonade.”

He left. The running water foamed up over the sugar and juice. When I brought the pitcher into the living room, Arch had disappeared again, and there were only a few people left in the food line. I hoped the lemonade shortage would be our last crisis of the day.

Within twenty minutes people were nearly finished with the last of their plates. Conversation settled into small pockets around the room. Quietly I began to gather plates and ashtrays to take out to the kitchen. Clients do not like to have dirty plates around at a party, but they don’t want to hear you wash them either. Luckily there was a door between the kitchen and the main room, and I could begin the cleaning unobtrusively.

Hot water and suds were just churning over the silverware when I heard a sound that made me shudder. Someone was moaning.

I turned off the water. From the living room came the same loud sound, the kind of deep groaning you associate with…

Associate with…

I didn’t even want to think. If someone vomited at a function I catered, that would be the end of the business. Or close to it.

I pushed through the door to the other room. The groan became a howl. There was a crowd gathered around the sound, and several people were walking quickly toward me uttering names of things they wanted.

“Water—”

“Phone—”

“Towel—”

My face was suddenly cool with the sweat of fear, as I prayed, Please not Arch, please let him be all right. I made my way past tables and chairs as if in slow motion. Please let my child be okay. At the outskirts of the crowd I could hear Vonette’s high whine, words like What is it, honey? Oh what is it, honey?

“Let me through,” I begged the people I was elbowing past, darting my head all around to find Arch. The first thing I saw was the jar of Postum on the coffee table. Let him not be hurt. Let him not be in pain. The guttural groan of agony did not quit. It was too deep for a child.

I gasped and pleaded to be let through, then at the front of the crowd asked, “What is it?”

Fritz Korman was on the floor. His large frame was writhing on the blue rug. He was holding his stomach. Horror and distress surged through me—Fritz was family, or had been. And he was in terrible agony.

“Get back, get back!” my ex-husband was yelling above the general buzz and the groaning from Fritz, which continued unabated. John Richard was waving his hands to move people away from around Fritz, who was now curled up on his side like a fetus. Arch was tugging on my apron. I clutched him to me.

“What is going on?” I asked into the general melee.

John Richard started screaming as soon as he saw me. “You did this, you bitch! You poisoned my father! Did you mean it for me and then do him by mistake?”

I could feel my mouth come open, my head shake from side to side.

John Richard shrieked, “You did it, and I’m going to have you nailed!”

CHAPTER 4

At first, I thought some kind of shock had made John Richard accuse me. But after his outburst; he turned his back and refused even to acknowledge my presence. What was worse, debonair, ever-in-control Fritz was not getting any better. All around, people were turning their heads away and murmuring. Someone was phoning for help; others were applying damp cloths and asking questions. Was it the mayonnaise, the cream, the fish? There was nothing for me to do. That was a good thing, since I couldn’t have done anything anyway. I felt terrible, and dizzy with a vague sense of guilt … Did Fritz have a food allergy, too?

I herded Arch back to the kitchen, found the pack of Kools, and smoked one after another until Patty Sue came out and said Fritz was on his way to the hospital. She added, hesitantly, that John Richard had called the police and they were coming over. Now that my ex-husband had left, I went into the other room. That he would call the police was incredible. What could he possibly have told them? Was he even remotely convincing? Would they believe that I was trying to poison anyone? I, who had, earlier in the afternoon, tried to keep an abusive ex-husband from suffering an allergic reaction to tomatoes? Would they believe me, a caterer? Or would they believe him, a doctor?

I wondered what the food would be like in jail.

Investigator Tom Schulz of the Furman County Sheriff’s Department was introduced to us by another cop, whose reverential tone said, Here’s God. Schulz loomed large in height and bulk. When he came striding through the door of Laura Smiley’s house, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he looked like one of those old-time movie heroes who use sword and cape to threaten villains, to keep skeptics at bay, to summon up an imposing sense of self-importance. Only the investigator needed neither sword nor cape. He had his size.

In general, I felt powerful with hefty people. They held me in great esteem because I was an expert cook. But within five minutes of watching Investigator Schulz scan the tables, glasses, coffee cups, and the bevy of trembling faces, my confidence melted. He consulted a guest list given to him by Laura’s aunt. Then he cocked an authoritative thumb at the first person to be questioned and hiked up his belt as if it were a holster before he banged through the door into the kitchen, the improvised interrogation chamber.

John Richard had insisted on accompanying Fritz in the ambulance to Lutheran Hospital, I had heard. Lutheran was located in Wheat Ridge, a suburb west of Denver that was forty-five minutes from Aspen Meadow. The Denver Poison Center had recommended this course rather than ipecac or any other treatment. The person who had called the Poison Center had made an announcement: within an hour of Fritz’s entering the hospital, blood and urine tests would indicate the source of distress.

Vonette sat slumped in one of the wing chairs, overcome. I wanted to go and comfort her, tell her maybe Fritz had stomach flu. But the two uniformed policemen who had arrived with Schulz had commanded us not to touch anything and not to talk to each other.

“Us” at that point was the forty mourners for Laura, now witnesses to exactly what, I still did not know. But I was going to have to find out. I felt sorry for Fritz, anxious for him. He was in pain and possibly in danger. But there was something else. This incident could pose an acute threat to my business. Unfortunately, I could not determine anything when all of us were sitting around looking guilty and being silent, as if this were Adult Detention Hall. One policeman took me aside to say Investigator Schulz had ordered him to call the Colorado Department of Health so that all the food could be seized and analyzed.

Marvelous. What microbes might the Health Department detect? Before I could worry about that, Investigator Schulz called a second person to be questioned, then a third. Some people came out right away: they hadn’t seen anything. Patty Sue went in and came out looking confused. Arch and I were last. When it was Arch’s turn, Tom Schulz’s thumb indicated that he wanted me, too.

“I thought you wanted us individually,” I muttered, once we had settled into Laura’s red wire kitchen chairs, the kind you used to see in ice cream parlors.

Investigator Schulz adjusted his backside on the too-small chair. He was, I noticed somewhat reluctantly, good-looking as well as charismatic. The other room had been filled with men trying to look macho in their western attire. Tom Schulz was the real thing. Despite his coat, sweater, and tie, he had the commanding aura of a ranch foreman. In the caramel-colored October light filling the kitchen, his hair shone gold-brown. It was cut short, parted on the side, and combed at a jaunty angle above bushy eyebrows. These thick triangles of hair climbed up and dropped down his forehead when he listened or talked. He had a sideways smile that came easily and suggested a sense of humor. His green eyes beheld everything just a moment longer than necessary, as if by concentrating hard enough, he could see through things and people. He grinned widely at me. Fear froze my face.

“Your boy’s a minor. Got to have you here when I talk to him.” The green eyes regarded me. He added, “By law.”

I nodded, but felt sick.

Schulz reached a fleshy palm out to Arch.

“My name is Tom Schulz,” he said as he shook Arch’s small hand, “and I need to ask you a few questions about what happened here today.”

Arch sat in one of the red chairs and straightened his glasses. He said, “Okay.”

Schulz took our full names and address. He showed some confusion over my name, Gertrude Bear. I told him with two other Mrs. Kormans in town I had thought my business would do better under my maiden name.

He said, “What’s Goldy short for?”

“Nothing, really,” I said, feeling my cheeks get hot. “No one’s called me Gertrude for twenty-some years. When I was little I had blond hair—”

“Still do,” observed Schulz.

“It was just a nickname that stuck. I liked it better than Gertrude, anyway.”

He nodded.

I said, “I use Goldilocks for the business. You know, like the story, everything is just right. It’s just an ad, connecting me with the food service.”

Schulz nodded again. He said he would ask Arch only a few questions before he could leave and it would be my turn. Then he put his notebook away.

He asked, “What grade are you in, Arch?”

“Sixth, sir.” Arch’s voice was trembling slightly. He crossed his legs and looked down in his lap before raising his eyes to Schulz.

“Do you play soccer?”

The inevitable subject of sports. A look of pain passed briefly over my nonathletic son’s face. This tack for putting Arch at ease would not work.

“No, sir,” Arch said.

“What do you like to do? Do you like to play any games?”

“Oh yes,” said Arch, brightening.

“Such as?”

“Fantasy role-playing. Have you heard of them? Like Dungeons and Dragons and Top Secret? Do you know about those?”

“A little bit,” said Schulz, leaning back in the chair. “How do they work? Do you play them with your friends?”

“Well, you roll different kinds of dice,” Arch began with characteristic enthusiasm, “like ten-sided, twenty-sided, or thirty-sided, see, to figure out what character you’re going to be. Then you decide on the attributes. Well, I mean, you roll the dice again to see about that stuff. There are charts and things for the different abilities. For the characters, I mean.” He looked at Schulz sympathetically, not unlike the way he had looked at Patty Sue on the drive over. “It can get pretty complicated,” he said.

“Mm-hmm. Then what do you do?”

“Well,” said Arch, “then you, like, go on adventures.”

I thought this must be boring for a police officer, but he repeated, “Adventures.”

“Yeah,” said Arch, “with the other characters. You can play with up to five people. Usually I just play with one. One guy will make up the dungeon or whatever it is you’re going to do, and then you go through it to see what happens to your character. You use the dice for that, too.”

Now Arch was relaxed. Good work, Schulz.

“Do you play with the kids in your class?” asked Schulz.

“Some of them,” said Arch. “It’s really pretty hard. Most kids aren’t interested.”

Schulz shifted in the small chair. He reached down and flicked invisible bits of lint off his oatmeal-colored sweater. He asked, “Did you ever play with your grandfather?”

“Oh no,” said Arch. “He’s much too busy.”

“Your grandmother?”

“No. She’s sick a lot.”

“Your mom? Any other grownups?”

“No.” Arch raised his eyes to me apologetically. “My mom’s really not interested in it. Neither is my dad. Usually just kids like it. Like my friend Todd Druckman. He’s in sixth grade, too.” He thought for a moment. He said, “Ms. Smiley was interested in playing.”

“Ms. Smiley,” said Schulz, “whose house we’re in.”

“Yeah. She was my teacher last year. She’s dead.”

“Right. And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because Ms. Smiley died and everybody misses her.”

“I guess.”

“Do you like to help your mom with her food business? To work on parties like this one?”

Now it was my turn to cross my legs. I couldn’t imagine where this was going.

“Well,” said Arch slowly, “I don’t exactly like it. But I do it when she asks me.”

“Like today.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think you’re good at helping her?”

“Oh yes,” said Arch confidently. “I know all about serving.”

“What was your job at this party?” Schulz asked.

“The drinks. Coffee, tea, and lemonade. Not the wine,” he explained as he pushed the glasses back on his nose, “because I’m too young.”

Well, thank God he added that, I thought. At least I didn’t break that law.

Schulz gave me a brief smile.

“Did you stay over at the coffee machine?” Schulz asked. “The whole time, I mean.”

“No. I had to do the lemonade too, see, and we only had two pitchers. So sometimes I had to come out to the kitchen to fill those up.”

“Did you see what your grandfather was eating or drinking?”

Arch thought. “I guess Fritz had some of the food, because he came over for a glass of wine. But I didn’t see him eat. Later he wanted a cup of coffee. I don’t think he likes lemonade.”

“Fritz.”

“That’s what I call him,” said Arch. “My grandfather.”

“He’s always called his grandparents by their first—” I started to explain.

Schulz held his hand up to me.

“Did you see Fritz drink the wine?” asked Schulz. “Did you see what he did with his glass?”

“No,” said Arch, “I didn’t see either.”

“Before Fritz got sick, did he drink anything else?”

“Let’s see,” said Arch. “Okay, now I remember. We were out of lemonade and my mom was making some in the kitchen. A lot of people had been asking for it. Fritz was, let’s see, he was talking to Trixie, the woman who teaches the exercise class, you know? And when she came over for coffee …” Arch paused to think. “No, wait a minute, she doesn’t drink coffee. I remember now because she wanted lemonade. We didn’t have any yet so she asked me if we had any herb tea.”

Schulz drew his eyebrows together. He said, “Herb tea.”

“Yes, she asked me if we had any herb tea. I said I didn’t think so. Then Fritz came over and laughed and said Trixie thought coffee was bad for you. He was, like, laughing and saying Trixie thought a lot of things were bad for you. But he said he would have some anyway. Coffee. So I poured her some hot water and him some coffee. And then Trixie said, Well, could I check and see if Ms. Smiley kept any herb tea in her kitchen. So I came in here to check.”

Schulz leaned ever so slightly toward Arch. “Where was Fritz’s coffee then? Did he take it from you and start drinking it?”

“No,” said Arch slowly. “I put them both, the cups of coffee and hot water, next to each other on the table. Then I came out here to look for the tea.”

“The two cups were just sitting there?”

“Right,” said Arch. “I thought I’d just be gone a minute, and they had started talking again.”

“Did you find any tea?”

“No. I was looking and looking, and Mom was helping me.”

Schulz said, “So your mother was in the kitchen then?”

“Yes,” said Arch, “she was busy making lemonade. We looked for some tea/Finally she gave me some Postum instead. And then Patty Sue ran out of strawberries and I helped her with that for a while. And then I saw my mom emptying ashtrays and picking up dirty dishes … I guess I just forgot about the tea. Anyway, when I came back to the table somebody asked me again for lemonade.”

“So how long was it from the time you gave Fritz, or rather, put down Fritz’s coffee and the woman’s water for tea, and then got back to do lemonade?”

Arch shrugged. “I don’t know. A long time, I guess. Twenty minutes? I can’t remember. Toward the end of a party, Mom says, you don’t have to pay as much attention to the guests. But I did forget the tea.” He looked at me. “Sorry.”

Schulz stared at Arch. “When you went back out, who asked you for lemonade?”

“Vonette, I think. We still didn’t have any, so she said, Well, never mind, she’d have coffee.”

“What was the next thing that happened?” asked Schulz.

“I went to the bathroom.” Again he looked at me apologetically.

“Did you see Trixie again?”

“No, she was gone before I decided to go to the uh, you know. She never even got the Postum.”

“Know what happened to the hot water?”

“What hot water?” Arch wrinkled his nose. “Oh, Trixie’s. No.”

“Then what?”

“Well, I heard Fritz sort of like moaning. So I came back out to the living room.”

“Uh-huh. Now this is important, Arch. Was there anyone else around the drinks table when you came out to the kitchen to look for the tea?”

Arch closed his eyes. “There were lots of people.”

“Anybody’s face come to mind?”

Arch thought. He said, “No.”

“Okay,” said Schulz, “now just a few more questions. Besides Trixie, do you remember your grandfather talking to anyone else?”

“Vonette, I think. And my dad.”

“Was Fritz arguing with anyone, anything like that?”

Arch sighed. “No. Everybody was just talking about Ms. Smiley, saying how nice she was. That it was really weird that she had killed herself because she was such a, you know, funny person. Nobody was arguing.” Arch looked at me from behind his glasses. He lowered his voice. “Except my mom and dad. They were arguing.”

I groaned and walked over to the cabinet where I’d put the cigarettes, took another one, and lit it.

“I know about that,” said Investigator Schulz. “Do you know what your mom and dad were arguing about, Arch?”

Arch looked back at Schulz. “No. My dad had his new girlfriend here. I think that upset my mom. My mom and dad are divorced, you know.”

“I know.”

I inhaled deeply on the cigarette and looked through the window at the aspens shaking in the breeze. I imagined dirty laundry hanging out there to air.

Arch said, “May I go now?”

“Just one more question, Arch. Do you know if anyone was mad at Fritz? Mad enough to try to make him sick, say?”

Arch hesitated. “Well, the only person I know who sort of didn’t like Fritz … well, this sounds kind of dumb. I’m really not sure …” He furrowed his forehead and looked at me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just tell Mr. Schulz whatever it is.”

“Well,” Arch said again, “I don’t think Ms. Smiley liked him very much. I don’t think she liked Vonette either.”

I coughed on the cigarette smoke. This was news to me. I said, “Ms. Smiley? Didn’t like Fritz Korman? Or Vonette? How’d she even know them?”

Schulz said, “Mrs. Korman. Miss Bear. Goldy. Please.”

“That’s what I mean,” continued Arch. “I told you it sounded dumb.”

“Do you know what she was mad about?” asked Schulz.

“No.”

“When did she tell you she didn’t like the Kormans?”

Again Arch closed his eyes. “I can’t remember. I’m not even sure she was the one who told me.”

Investigator Schulz stood up. “Arch, thanks a lot. You’ve been helpful. I’ll give you a card with my number. You keep it in your pocket. If you think of something else, call me.”

“My turn?” I asked.

Investigator Schulz looked at me with those penetrating green eyes. An unexpected and unwanted wave of sexual something rolled over me.

Schulz said, “You bet. Just begin by telling me if you saw anything suspicious with the food.”

Before I could begin the long explanation about John Richard’s tomato allergy, one of the uniformed policemen interrupted us.

“Schulz, you’d better come take a look at this.”

Tom Schulz stood up and walked out of the kitchen. This reminded me of the many calls John Richard had received at home, always from females in one sort of pain or another, and only rarely, I found out from the hospital, actual patients.

I shook this off and went out to the living room. The guests had left and two fellows, presumably from the Health Department, were labeling everything and packing the containers into boxes. Schulz was in consultation with his man, their voices lowered.

Outside I could hear Patty Sue laughing, so I went to investigate. She was seated on a wooden bench next to the cluster of aspens in Laura’s front yard. Next to her was Pomeroy Locraft.

He was grinning. Seeing him with Patty Sue did not make me feel great. Last spring I had dropped several hints that Pom and Arch and I all go out for pizza or a movie after their worktime. Perhaps I was too subtle. Perhaps Pom was dense, uninterested, or both, which was the way he had acted today. Now he was engaged in a lively conversation with Patty Sue. I had the uncomforting thought that she was at least ten years too young for him.

I walked in their direction through the long dry grass, which the summer heat had burned to gold. Here and there bushes reduced by the fall sun to thorned sticks snared my stockings. Above, fluffs of cloud sailed across a deep blue sky. The air was thick with the sweet mixed smell of decaying aspen leaves and smoke from a wood fire, probably built during the early morning chill. But the day had turned out warm and beautiful, and the calm was disorienting after the turmoil in the house.

“Hi, Mom!” yelled Arch from somewhere I couldn’t see.

“Where are you?” I called back.

“Here!” he hollered triumphantly from the middle part of a lodgepole pine near the bench. I absolutely hated seeing Arch climb those feeble-branched evergreens. As if in answer to my worries, he let out a shout.

“Help!” he cried. “I’m falling!”

I could see his body toppling, hear branches snapping. I was too far away but my feet darted forward anyway.

With startling swiftness Pomeroy ran to the bottom of the tree, where he caught Arch by the arm and broke his fall. By the time I got to the pine, the two of them were laughing. I was not amused, as this was the second time in one day that I’d come close to coronary arrest worrying about my child’s welfare.

I said, “Thanks, Pom.” He had handed Arch his glasses and was brushing bits of bark off Arch’s formerly white shirt.

“It’s okay,” he said, as much to Arch as to me. “Can’t blame a kid for wanting to climb a tree, right?”

“No,” Arch said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, Arch and I are buddies,” said Pomeroy with that half smile. “Right, bud?”

Arch nodded and started toward the chokecherry bushes that lined Laura Smiley’s driveway.

“Thanks for being nice to him,” I said. “Thanks for being a good catcher.”

“I like kids.”

“So I see.”

Pomeroy gave me another embarrassed look—not the pink-red of shyness, but a black-red that glowed from underneath his skin. I could not imagine what was bothering him, so I let it go.

Pomeroy sat back on the bench, then turned to me and smiled. He had recovered his composure, and the impish smile and splatter of freckles over his pale cheeks gave him the look of a child. But the dark good looks and brown mustache were unmistakably adult, as was the lanky body that spilled over the bench’s slats. His brown eyes held mine, and I could not think of what to say next.

He said, “Before we were interrupted, Patty Sue here was telling me she can’t drive.”

“She’s made a few attempts with her father’s pickup, I believe,” I said.

Patty Sue groaned.

“I was thinking,” said Pomeroy. “Maybe she could come to one of my driver-ed classes. At the high school.” He gave a slight grin. “There’s not much money from the county for this type of thing, and some of my cars are pretty old, but she could still learn.”

“Sounds marvelous,” I said with false cheer. My ex-husband might have been able to mine the high school faculty for dates. But with Pomeroy stuck on my housemate, it looked as if my chance to find social life from the same place was collapsing with the rapidity of a souffle. Schulz appeared at the end of the driveway and motioned me back down to the house with that thumb.

I said, “I have to go.”

“I’ll check on the liability and what not,” Pom called after me. “Are you all free Friday afternoons?”

I turned around and put my hand on my hip. “What do you need me for?”

He grinned again, wide and sheepish, and I felt some of the frost in my heart melt. Maybe there was hope. He was still good-looking and single. Perhaps his ability to get along with children, witness the relationship with Arch, was merely extended to Patty Sue.

He leaned toward me and said, “Somebody’s got to get her a learner’s permit and bring her to the high school.”

I nodded and traipsed back toward Schulz, who had gone inside.

“Look familiar?” he said as he pointed to one of my Styrofoam cups. “Don’t touch,” he admonished. “Just peek inside.”

I did as ordered and saw an almost empty coffee cup with what looked like about twenty little green pellets on the bottom.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Schulz grinned at me, a wide face-breaker.

“Miss Goldy,” he began. “Excuse me, Miz. Your business is closed down until further notice. You served this coffee, you’re responsible until I find out otherwise. I wonder if I could come over and ask you some questions tomorrow? I’m a little tied up right now.” He motioned to one of his underlings to come retrieve the cup.

“For God’s sake,” I protested, “what’s in the cup?”

He had begun to walk away, but at my question turned back. “Oh,” he said, “you just flunked Detection 101. Dr. Korman drank that coffee, but he didn’t know what was on the bottom. Looks to me like whoever tried to do him in was using rat poison.”

Saturday ended with a whimper after the day’s bang. When Pomeroy left, I outlined our suddenly disastrous finances to both Patty Sue and Arch. Patty Sue’s rent was her ability to work for the catering business, and without the business both of us would have to do whatever work we could find just to buy groceries and make the November house payment. Arch accepted the suspension of his allowance with a grim silence.

Even our dinner that night was-a problem. I reminded Patty Sue and Arch of this as we pulled into our driveway. After a job, we usually feasted on leftovers and odds and ends. Now the leftovers were being analyzed down at the Department of Health.

Arch offered to heat chili in the microwave. I didn’t think things could get a whole lot worse until he pointed to an enormous bouquet of dried flowers on our deck. Damn. One of the arrangements for the funeral or reception had been delivered here by mistake.

But no. The envelope was addressed to me. Inside was an unsigned message.

“Don’t worry about Fritz, sweetie pie. He deserves it.”

CHAPTER 5

How’d you do it?” my ex-husband demanded over the phone the next morning, Sunday. “Get your dumbass roommate to drop the stuff in? You tell her they were sweetening capsules?”

“Oh stop,” I said. “Just tell me how Fritz is.”

“Not until you answer my question.”

“My roommate is a patient of your father’s,” I reminded him, “and she is living here at your mother’s request. She’s a lovely girl who respects your father, and does not deserve to be maligned by you.”

He started to yell, and I held the phone away from my ear. It was only seven o’clock, but John Richard and I were both early risers. The first year of our marriage this had meant lovemaking and fresh sweet rolls as strokes of sunlight swept the walls of the house. Later the fights merely started earlier; accusations came at sunrise followed by the recriminations and my learning to dodge the frying pan full of hot bacon and grease.

In fact, I thought as I looked around the kitchen while still holding the screeching voice at arm’s length, the first thing I had redecorated after he moved out was this room where I now made my living. I slid my foot against the slick black and white tile that had replaced the brick-colored vinyl flooring. The walls and curtains now glowed with a muted red and white checked print. Think of something else, I told myself as John Richard continued to shriek. Breakfast.

“You there?” the Jerk was saying.

“If you’re not going to tell me how Fritz is, then I need to fix breakfast,” I said dryly. “Tell me something else, though. Why don’t you ever blow up like this in public? Then people would know why we got divorced. Look. You called me. What do you want, anyway?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a damn thing.” He hung up.

I rubbed my temples, removed rolls, bacon, and coffee beans from the freezer, and put my mind on the day ahead. Probably the best thing was that the Broncos were due to play Green Bay, which promised to be an easy win. It was good to have the regular season underway. I disliked the preseason, with its mandatory shrinkage of team size. Getting cut was probably a lot like getting divorced.

During the time before kickoff, I needed to make calls canceling parties and food supplies on order. Talking to the Jerk was like waking up and not being able to shake a nightmare. Even worse, I realized as a sharp pain grabbed my chest, was that the more recent nightmare had come true: my business and I were separated.

I needed to think. Get things in perspective. For openers, there was figuring out what it was the flower sender thought Fritz deserved. Was the flower sender the rat poisoner? The impending questioning from Schulz was another dark cloud on the day’s emotional horizon. If the Broncos didn’t win, the day would be a complete loss.

First things first. Patty Sue and Arch were still asleep. I steeled myself to make the first call. It would largely determine the tone of the day.

“Vonette,” I said brightly to her foggy greeting, “Goldy. Tell me how Fritz is doing.”

“Just fine, honey. My God, what time is it?” She groped and muttered. “Yeah, Fritz. Can’t imagine what happened to him.”

I was sorry to awaken her, but it was the only way I could be sure to catch her sober. I said, “How was the hospital? Did they give him anything?”

“Oh yeah, something. He put up a fuss, good heavens. Don’t know what it was he drank after that funeral. Like D-Kon, they said. Does the same thing, or whatever.”

“Does what same thing?”

She yawned. “Causes internal bleeding or such like that. But don’t worry, he’s not bleeding anymore. That stuff hit his ulcer and made him hurt, but he’s fine now. You’re bigger than any old rodent, I told him. It won’t kill you. Goldy, let me call you right back. I need to go make some coffee.”

I hung up, ground espresso beans, and filled the cappuccino maker. Vonette’s tone was strange. Maybe she was just tired. The machine steamed and gasped. When I was sipping the result, she called back.

I said, “Is he still sick? Is he upset?”

“Aw,” she said with a yawn, “he’ll stay home today, watch the game, you know, maybe rest for a couple more days. They wanted him to take it easy for a week and I laughed. Lord, I laughed. You know how important that practice is to him, I told those guys down at Lutheran. No way he’s going to stay in bed for a week. Doctors can be stubborn, I said.”

“Arch was saying something about how you all had known Laura.”

“Little Arch,” she said. I could feel her smile come over the phone. “I told Fritz to be sure and speak to him but I don’t think he did. And then all hell broke loose.”

“Did you and Fritz know Laura Smiley for a long time?”

A pause. She said, “A long time ago, we knew her.”

“How?”

“Oh,” she said, “she kind of worked for us one time. She was a … teacher and then a … a … what do they call it these days? Like a nanny one time. When we went on a vacation.”

“When was that?”

There was a longer silence. “You know, Goldy,” Vonette said, suddenly perplexed, “I don’t want to talk any more right now. I do feel one powerful headache coming on.”

This was bad news. The effects of chronic headaches on Vonette had led her past aspirin through Darvon, Valium, Librium, and whatever was the latest miracle cure. She occasionally had such pain, she had told me, that Fritz gave her shots of Demerol. This was in addition to the substantial amounts of alcohol she put away on a daily basis. Why she had not died from these combinations long ago was beyond me; I figured she possessed an incredible tolerance for drugs. I heard her gulp something down, and I knew our conversation about Laura was finished, at least for the moment.

“Let me help out,” I offered. “Let me bring your meals over. I mean,” I added hastily, “if you want.”

“I would, honey,” she said in a lower tone, “but you know John Richard is just in such a state about that food from yesterday. Lord! What does Goldy have against Fritz, I asked him. Exactly nothing, that’s what.” Another yawn. “I said to John Richard, Well, you know, son, there’s lots of women thought your daddy was a rat.” She giggled. The painkiller was taking effect.

“Vonette,” I said before the conversation degenerated further, “I’m coming over on Tuesday, and I’m going to bring Fritz some things to eat I know he likes. Okay?”

She giggled again.

“You can even test them,” I said, “and I want to visit with you, anyway. Make sure there are no hard feelings with old Fritz.”

Vonette inhaled. She said, “Goldy, honey. Thanks. That would be sweet. I’ll taste them if you want. Hell, nobody cares if I die. Just kidding, of course. Laura Smiley had that kind of attitude and it did her in, didn’t it? Well, who knows. And you know what else? John Richard will be taking over the whole practice for Fritz for a couple of days anyway, so he won’t be around to bother you. You know.”

Did I ever. Maybe I should have adopted Marla’s attitude and actively avoided John Richard. My life might have been a lot easier. It would be good to have the son out of the way when I chatted with the mother. Though I hated to use Vonette, I needed information she might have. I didn’t know what in the world was going on. I had to start somewhere.

“Guess what?” I said. “Those cops are going to close down my operation until this is all cleared up. Maybe you can help me out a little.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’ll give you all the cash you need. It’ll just be our little secret.”

“No no no. I mean, thanks, really, but I don’t mean money. All I want to do is talk to you, about some of the possibilities. Of who could have done this to Fritz.”

“Goldy honey, I keep telling you. Fritz is fine, Just let the police handle it.” She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Do you know what? Maybe nobody did it to him. Maybe somebody did it so’s your catering business would be busted. Ever think of that?”

As a matter of fact, I had not. Besides John Richard, who hated me? The flowers from yesterday seemed to indicate I was not the target. No need to confuse Vonette with that, however.

I promised to see her in two days, rang off, and phoned Marla.

“You’ll never guess what happened to Fritz Korman,” I began.

“Pfft!” she answered. “Old news, sweetie pie. The way I hear it, you’re the one tried to do it.”

Wait a minute.

“Well, sweetie pie,” I said, “as a matter of fact, I was wondering if you had anything to do with it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Marla. “I wasn’t even there, for God’s sake.” She began to chew something. “Trixie said the guy from the sheriff’s department was good-looking in an oversized mountain-man sort of way. That skinny bitch. She thinks anyone who doesn’t look as if they just came out of a refugee camp is overweight.” More chewing. “So tell me about this guy.”

“What guy?”

“The cop.”

“Marla,” I said in a voice full of vinegar, “tell me why you called me sweetie pie.”

“I don’t know. Does it bother you? Think I’m sweet on you? I just asked you about a policeman. Schulz, she said his name was.”

I gave her a brief description of the investigating officer and then told her about the flowers and their message, with its “sweetie pie.”

“Weird,” she said.

“Is that all you can think of to say? My whole life’s falling apart, for God’s sake!”

“Well, I didn’t send them,” she protested. “Did John Richard ever send you flowers?”

“Only when he felt guilty about some fling he was having,” I said. “You?”

“No, not after I served him edible nasturtiums.”

I said, “Could the Jerk possibly have sent them? I mean, is this guy cracking up or what?” I told her about the tomato allergy, about my innocent substitution of the mushrooms. “When Fritz got sick John Richard had a fit and blamed me. Because of the mushrooms, if you can believe it.”

Marla said, “Okay, okay. You are still my good buddy and I am still yours. Everything is going to be all right. Let’s think.” She stopped to drink something. “The Jerk is pissed off with you. So what else is new? But look at it this way. Maybe he did it. He blames you, makes it look like you, raises a stink. So nobody says, Well now, who spends the most time hanging around Daddy? Catch my drift?”

Another new angle. Everyone had a theory. I couldn’t wait to try them out on Schulz. On second thought, I could wait.

“Get him sent to jail, will you?” Marla begged. “I’m getting tired of avoiding him.”

After hanging up I considered. Would Schulz have thought of these possibilities? Perhaps not yet.

I spent the remainder of the morning calling the clients whose parties I was supposed to cater in the next month. Canceling felt like pouring money down the drain. Worse, and to my surprise, my clients were all eager to try Denver caterers. Bad news traveled fast. Then I balanced the checkbook. Three hundred ninety dollars. More bad news, even if the November child support payment came on time, which was unlikely. I calculated what it would take to make the next house payment and pay the bills.

I should have majored in math, I’d decided within a week of being single again. The degree in psychology had not only provided the depressing evidence that I had married a violent egotistical narcissist, it had also failed to help in making money.

My fallback during dry periods with the catering business was housecleaning, which paid a reliable eight bucks an hour. If I could book the jobs, Patty Sue and I each were going to have to do three houses a week just to make the November house payment and buy groceries. Luckily, finding needy clients whose houses were a mess was never difficult.

The only questionable debt was monthly dues for the athletic club. Missing this payment meant starting over with the four-hundred-dollar initiation fee, and I certainly didn’t want to do that. But the club was a place I needed to get away from the kitchen. Arch enjoyed the pool in summer. I called and got, of all people, Trixie Jackson.

“Oh Trix,” I said casually, “I need to speak to Hal.”

Hal owned the club; I knew he was the only one in a position to let me barter for the dues.

“He’s gone down to the game,” she replied. And then, “I can’t get over that mess yesterday. Fritz writhing on the floor like a woman in labor. Makes him know what it’s like,”

To the best of my knowledge, Trixie had no children. How did she know what it was like? “Just tell me when Hal will be back,” I said.

“Oh, not until tomorrow. Why? You have a problem with something?”

“Look, Trix,” I said, “tell him I want to do something for him to take care of my dues this month. Clean or whatever. Just see what he says.”

She agreed. We decided to talk more the next day at the morning aerobics class, which she had taken over from another instructor. After that I called Alicia and canceled all my food for the upcoming month. Arch and Patty Sue began to wander into the kitchen and litter it with cinnamon roll crumbs, cereal boxes, and grease-soaked paper towels from draining the bacon. At one o’clock the doorbell rang.

Investigator Tom Schulz.

He sauntered in. Sensing his first question, I took him silently into the kitchen to look around. He smiled politely at Patty Sue and Arch, nodded at the pots and pans, walls and floors, cabinets and counters, said “Mm-hmm” and “It sure smells good in here,” and scanned everything with those green eyes. Next I led him out to the living room, which I had redecorated postdivorce in a riot of yellows and oranges. The eucalyptus in the mysterious dried flower arrangement perfumed the room.

“Nice arrangement,” he said.

“A bizarre arrangement,” I said, and told him of its sudden appearance and anonymous message. He asked to see the card. I gave it to him and he pocketed it. Then he made a silent visual check of the entire room before settling himself on the lemon-colored couch.

“Miss Goldy,” he began, “why don’t you start by telling me about your husband? About this allegation of his?”

“My ex-husband,” I said, suddenly angry, “is a—” I stopped and looked at my hands. “John Richard Korman,” I began again, “is an abusive man. He frightens me. I was trying to give him mushrooms instead of tomatoes, to which he is allergic.” I looked at Schulz. “Believe me,” I said, “I don’t have that much interest in Fritz Korman. He’s just an old charmer whose wife is an ale—” I paused. I said, “Not under my jurisdiction, as you cops would say.”

Schulz pulled his mouth into a small o. He leaned toward me and raised the tentlike eyebrows.

He said, “Just calm down.” He leaned back again. “Let’s start over. You can begin by offering me a nice cup of espresso and some of those rolls they’re eating out in the kitchen. I don’t ordinarily take refreshment at a suspect’s house, but I’m going to make a large exception, since it smells so good in here.”

I complied. Somehow the fact that he was hungry for something I had fixed, and that he trusted something I would fix, was encouraging.

He smiled at me between sips and bites.

“This is really nice, this place,” he said. “I like this old neighborhood. Has a lot of charm. So do some of the residents.” He gave what appeared to be either a judicious wink or a left-eye tic.

What in the world was going on? After a moment I said, “Are you going to ask me some questions or not?”

“Okeydoke.” He laboriously wiped each of his fingers on the napkin I had given him. “Just take it easy, okay?”

I nodded.

He said, “Did you put a foreign substance into Fritz Korman’s food to make him sick or kill him?”

I looked Investigator Schulz square in his X-ray vision eyes.

“No,” I said. “I did not.”

“Did you put a foreign substance into John Richard Korman’s food to make him sick or kill him?”

I said, “I did not. It would harm my business, which is my sole source of income—”

Schulz chuckled. “It has already harmed your business. It may be the end of your business. Please assure me they weren’t funny mushrooms.”

“They were the regular kind.”

“Good. Health Department report’ll be in tomorrow or the day after. That spread sure looked good, too, hated to waste it. Poached salmon. Strawberry shortcake.” He took a deep breath and leaned back to hike up his belt. “I’ve never been to a party you’ve catered.”

“So?”

“Now Miss Goldy, I’m just saying you seem to be a good cook. You’ve got a reputation to protect.”

I said, “The way you say it, it sounds like soliciting.”

“There you go again.” He closed his eyes, then opened them to look around the room. He stopped to gaze at a bright orange All Saints’ Day drawing Arch had done at the beginning of Sunday school class, the one I’d taught. Since Arch did not at that point know about any actual saints, his picture was a cluster of Mom, Dad, Vonette, Fritz, and Mother Teresa. I explained all this to Schulz when he asked about it.

“Interesting,” he said. “Now look. You don’t need to get uptight. About your business. I’m just saying a good cook is hard to find. You make great cinnamon rolls.”

He stopped and worked his jaw for a few moments.

“Now tell me why a good unmarried cook with a reputation to protect would get so upset talking to a cop who’s trying to help her out?”

I shook my head. I said, “Sorry. Talking about my ex-husband gets me upset.” I took a deep breath. “That’s what our argument was about, anyway. The Jerk and no tomatoes. That son of a bitch. Nothing even happened to him.”

“Something happened, though.”

I looked at Schulz. “I didn’t do anything to John Richard. I thought it was inappropriate for him to bring a new girlfriend, his fiancée, mind you, to a reception after the funeral of one of his son’s teachers. Plus he walked over and insulted me. Then we fought over the dish with the mushrooms. But that’s it.”

Schulz swung his body around to the side and crossed his legs. He was wearing tan corduroy slacks and a gray sweater and tie: preppy clothes over his mountain-man body. He lifted his eyebrows and shoulders, opened his hands in question.

I said, “The guys down at the Health Department aren’t going to find anything in that trash bag.”

“Let’s hope not.”

I was suddenly exhausted. Worse, I did not like the way Investigator Tom Schulz was making me feel. He made me want to trust him, which did not come easily.

I said, “So am I going to jail or what?”

He shook his head and smiled. “No. But the other incident is something else. We have a policy about attempted poisoning. Sorry, your business will have to stay closed down. For a while. Until we find out about the rodent poison, who did it and why. That’s it.”

“Please don’t do that to me,” I begged. My eyes sought his. “My busy season is coming up. Arch and I depend on the November and December income to make it through the next year. The longer I’m closed down, the worse things will get for us financially. I can’t make it on housecleaning alone.”

He shrugged. “Have to, sorry. At least until this mess with Fritz Korman is cleared up.”

“How long will that take?”

“That depends.”

I leaned forward. “I can help you. Really. I’m already going over there day after tomorrow to talk to Vonette.”

Schulz lifted an eyebrow, tilted his head.

He said, “To talk to Vonette. Listen. When I want help on this case, I’ll ask for it.”

It was my turn to shrug.

He said, “Okay, Goldy. Do you know who didn’t get along with Doctor Korman? Sounds as if you know a lot of people.”

“Oh, well,” I began. I felt a wave of sympathy for Vonette. How could I be disloyal to her? What could I say? I shook my head.

“Look,” I said, “everyone in this town knows Fritz. Most of the people under twenty were delivered by him, for God’s sake.”

“Know anybody who thought he wasn’t a good doctor? Anybody at the party?”

“No.”

“Were any of his patients there yesterday?”

I thought. “I think Trixie Jackson is one of his patients. The aerobics instructor.”

“Yeah,” said Schulz. “I used to see her over at the athletic club. She married?”

“Yes,” I said, “she is, I think. I remember seeing her in the Kormans’ office. But that was a long while ago, when I was still married.” I frowned. A guilty knot tied itself in my stomach. It wasn’t up to me to give Trixie’s ob-gyn history to Schulz. After the divorce I’d changed doctors; I now went to a female gynecologist in Denver. I didn’t keep up with the Kormans’ practice.

Schulz said, “Who else?”

“Why don’t you just subpoena his records or whatever it’s called?” I could hear the exasperation in my voice. A minute ago I had offered to help him. Now I just wanted him to leave.

“Okay,” I went on wearily, “Patty Sue Williams. My roommate. He’s treating her for amenorrhea. It’s in the dictionary. Anyway, her doctor from eastern Colorado sent her out here to be treated by Fritz.” I switched to a lower tone. “Believe me,” I said, “Fritz might as well be the governor, the way Patty Sue looks up to him. She’d have an anxiety attack before she’d put poison in his coffee.”

He tapped his fingers on the mahogany coffee table. “What about the wife?” He looked at the ceiling as if he-were turning things over in his mind. “Vonette.”

“Look,” I said, “you can check all this in your files somewhere. Vonette’s an alcoholic. Fritz got her tossed into detox a few nights ago. It happens now and then. But that doesn’t mean she tried to do anything to him.” I paused. “She doesn’t operate that way. When she’s upset with Fritz she takes it out on herself. She drinks.”

“I’ll do the interpreting around here, if you don’t mind.” He smiled. “What about this Laura person? What’s this your son said about her not liking Korman?”

“I’m going to see what Vonette knows about that,” I replied. “All I know about Laura is from our teacher-parent conferences last year and two years before, when she was Arch’s teacher.”

“How did your son feel about Ms. Smiley?”

“They were very close. They used to tell each other jokes, write letters.” I paused. “He’s very upset about her killing herself. At least, he seems that way.”

Schulz cleared his throat. “I’ve read about those fantasy games,” he said. “Some kids can get awfully involved in them. Think they’re real.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Your son was in charge of the coffee and whatnot. He was friends with Ms. Smiley and for some reason thought Fritz Korman was her enemy. He’s having trouble dealing with her death, but puts great stock in fantasy games where they use potions and the like. Any chance that could spell trouble for his grandfather?”

I stared at Schulz with my mouth open.

I said, “My son is not a liar.”

“He didn’t tell me he didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t ask.” I felt my ears burning. “Arch!” I called toward the kitchen door. “Arch, the policeman wants to ask you another question!”

Arch stuck his head into the living room.

“What?” he said.

Schulz said nothing. He only looked benevolently at Arch.

“Hon,” I said gently, “did you put anything into Fritz’s coffee?”

“Huh?”

“Did you”—I began again and opened my eyes wide at him—“put something into Fritz’s coffee to make him sick?”

Arch reddened. “No,” he replied. “Why? Do you think I did?”

“No,” I said in relief, and glanced back at Schulz, who was studying Arch’s face. “You can go. Unless Mr. Schulz here has any more questions.”

He shook his head. Arch left, and I stood up.

Tom Schulz gave me a long look. This time I felt that the X-ray vision was not directed to seeing what was in my mind. I felt he was looking for something else, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

He said, “Let’s keep in touch.”

CHAPTER 6

Monday morning arrived gray and chilly. From my bedroom window a nimbus of fog was just visible shrouding the far mountains. Gray fingers of cloud drifted down to caress the yellowed treetops of the Wildlife Preserve. The wooden window stuck in its track when I pulled; eventually it shuddered open and let in a flood of air as cold and sweet as the cherry cider Colorado farmers sell off the backs of their trucks this time of year.

Arch was out of school because it was Columbus Day. Since Fritz was home recovering, Patty Sue would not see him until Wednesday. As the sole person awake, I did not want to have to face the possibility of another first-strike telephone call from John Richard. I closed the window and slipped into a turtleneck and jeans before heading out for the warmth of Aspen Meadow’s pastry shop.

The fresh air hit my face like a slap. Perhaps it was not such a good idea to spend money on someone else’s cooking, I reflected as my boots crunched over the frosted gravel of the driveway. I headed down Main Street past the Grizzly Bear Restaurant and Darlene’s Antiques and Collectibles. But the lure of hot rolls and coffee won out. The walk took twenty minutes. To my relief the small shop held no one I knew.

“Sorry about your business,” was the mournful greeting from Murray, the master baker.

I said, “I love living in a small town.”

Murray looked puzzled. “Listen,” he said defensively, “it’s gonna hurt me, too. Somebody kills that doctor, I’ll lose half my customers.”

I nodded. The shop was on the first floor of a long two-story wood-paneled building. Upstairs, Fritz and John Richard practiced obstetrics and gynecology. It would be a couple of hours before John Richard came in. But within fifteen minutes of his opening, the pastry shop would begin to fill with pregnant women. I knew the pattern: they would eat nothing before weighing in for their appointment. After seeing the doctor they’d waddle down the wooden staircase outside the building and burst into the pastry shop, starved. I often wondered if that was why Murray had located his bakery-haven in this particular spot.

“Don’t worry,” I said before ordering, “he’s going to be just fine, and so is your business.”

Soon I was dipping one finger of that western oversized baked good, the Bear Claw, into coffee and reading in last week’s Mountain Journal of Laura Smiley’s death. The new issue would not be out until later in the week, and it would undoubtedly cover the postfuneral fiasco. That was something I could wait for. Now I read of Laura Smiley, the much beloved teacher at Furman Elementary, who had been born in Denver and raised in Aspen Meadow until she went to the University of Illinois. After that she had become an elementary teacher in Carolton, also in Illinois. There was something familiar about that name, that place. After Laura’s parents were killed in a drunk driving accident on Highway 285 near Conifer, she had moved back to the family home, and had been a teacher at Furman Elementary ever since.

I stared at the picture. Between the black dots of newsprint, Laura was caught in a sunny grin. Suddenly, the dots clouded.

You’re depressed, I told myself. Drink some coffee. I looked up at Murray, who gave me his best version of a sympathetic wink. I held the paper in front of my face. Ms. Smiley, the Journal went on to say, was found by fellow teacher Janet Heath, autopsy ordered, new deputy coroner performing. Funeral Saturday, in lieu of flowers, donations to Pacifists United or the National Organization for Women. But some people had sent flowers anyway. And not only to her.

The rest of the article was what I already knew. But the words “came as a great surprise to her students and those who had known her” were difficult to handle. I thought once again of the cheerful punning magnets and paintings of serene landscapes in Laura’s small home.

Out the pastry shop’s picture window old wooden storefronts broke the cloudy view of distant snow-capped peaks. Most people moved to the mountains for this vista and for the slower pace. Now Homestead Drive and Main Street were silent. The only noises were the gentle gushing of Cottonwood Creek and the occasional ding-ding of cars announcing their presence at a nearby gas station.

Maybe Laura had been looking for serenity when she stayed in Aspen Meadow after her parents’ death. She had taught third grade at Furman Elementary. Arch had been in the class; it was the first time I felt a teacher had appreciated him. The beginning of their friendship, she had related at the first parent conference, had come from a technological advance.

He had come to her shyly one snowy November morning before school. A neighbor with a new car had driven Arch along with his own kids to avoid a late bus. At school Arch had asked Laura how a door could be a jar. A voice in the neighbor’s car had said, “Your door is ajar!” Then she’d told him once she’d eaten a strawberry moose. Kindred spirits. They’d written little jokes and poetry verses to each other, and later letters, and they were partners in laughter even after he went on to fourth grade. The next year, in one of those moves peculiar to elementary school administrations, Laura was transferred to teaching fifth grade. Arch had ended up with her again.

Sometimes I had thought they spent too much time together. He had come home with some peculiar stories. Ms. Smiley had made fun of the President. Well, who didn’t. But with a fifth grader? Then when her street wasn’t plowed, she told Arch she was going to hire dump trucks to leave a ton of snow in front of the county commissioners’ office. When I asked her about these stories, she just laughed them off. It never occurred to me that Laura Smiley was truly off-balance. With the suicide, of course, I had begun to wonder.

And poor Arch. This year he had slammed into the hostile environment of a large sixth grade. He had reacted by becoming more secretive and serious, more committed to the complex fantasy games, more rebellious in the slide to adolescence. He had no teacher who could talk about dumping fantasy snow on newly cruel peers.

I looked down at the newspaper on the table, then back out the window. The sun had burnt off the fog and shone now in a liquid expanse of blue. It was hard to imagine someone looking at the Colorado sky before making that last trip into the bathroom.

Marla broke the silence by plopping into the chair across from me.

She hummed as she spread out her fare, two buttermilk-glazed doughnuts and a cream-filled Long John—the western version of an éclair—and a cup of coffee, which she immediately began to douse with sugar and cream. She stopped humming to give me a baleful look.

“You shouldn’t eat alone,” she warned. She shook pillowy jowls that resembled the Pillsbury doughboy’s. She had on a sequined sweat suit. Half of her brown frizzy hair was held by a ponytail. The rest spilled out every which way. Her face, however, was perfectly made up. She bit carefully into one of the doughnuts so as not to smear the scarlet lipstick,’ then went on with her mouth full. “It’s like drinking alone. A bad sign, very bad.” She dabbed around her mouth with a napkin. “Especially in the morning.”

“Then why are you here?” I asked. I took a sip of coffee before biting off another Bear Claw finger.

She narrowed her eyes and munched thoughtfully, then tongued a small glob of cream that had oozed out of the center of the Long John.

“I’m used to eating alone,” she replied. “You’re not.” She looked at the paper spread out in front of me and shook her head again. “Good God. Eating alone and reading about suicide.”

“Give me a break, Marla.”

“Hey! I’m trying to cheer you up.”

I smiled and looked down at her doughnuts. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked. “I thought your larder was full.”

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’re not going to believe this, but I can’t eat at home. Mice.”

“Mice?” I said, staring at her.

She gulped her cream-colored coffee again and touched her free hand to the frizzy mass of hair. “Yeah, so what? It’s getting cold outside. The mice come in. They’re hungry. They scare me. I call an exterminator. Is there something wrong with that? You sure seem to be on edge this morning.” She gestured at the paper. “Stop reading about Laura. That’ll only make you feel worse.”

I frowned at her. She was my friend.

I said, “Whoever tried to do in Fritz Korman used rodent poison.”

Marla closed her eyes, then opened them. “I didn’t do it, Goldy.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

She leaned across the table. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t even care about Fritz. And neither should you. The more involved in this you become, the more depressed you’re going to get. It’s like hanging around John Richard. It just makes things worse. Let the police do their job.”

“I have to help them,” I said. “My business and livelihood arc on the line.” This would not have occurred to Marla, of course, since she’d made her money the easy way: she inherited it.

She shrugged and tapped a fat finger twinkling with sapphires on the newspaper picture of Laura. “Here’s a mystery you should be working on,” she said. “Why’d she do it? I have a theory.”

“What’s that?”

“Unrequited love.”

I looked at her blankly. “What?”

Marla returned the blank look and started to mumble vaguely about not being completely sure when the shop door flew open, banged against our table, and sent the coffee into a tidal wave across the Formica.

“I figured you were here,” Arch announced triumphantly as he marched in with Patty Sue in tow. “You always come here when you don’t have any work.”

I gave Marla a rueful glance and dropped a pile of napkins on the table’s lake of coffee, then got up to refill our cups and pay for whatever Arch wanted. He ordered a sugar twist and juice. Patty Sue, after noticing she hadn’t brought any money, ordered a Long John, a cheese Danish, and two cartons of milk.

“How do you stay so thin?” demanded Marla. “I mean didn’t they feed you out in eastern Colorado, before you had to come out here to see Fritz, or what?”

“They fed me. And I’m trying to learn to cook,” said Patty Sue in what I viewed as extraordinary understatement. “One time Dad was sick for a long time and then I had to do the cooking because Mom got sick, too. I fixed frozen stuff like Banquet chicken and Sara Lee.”

Marla said, “What did she have, scurvy?”

There was no answer. Patty Sue and Arch were staring at Laura’s picture in the paper. Patty Sue put down her Danish and looked out the window. I reached for the paper.

“Guess what,” I said to distract Arch. “Marla has mice.”

“Oh, cool,” he said with genuine admiration. “Do you have gerbils, too?”

Marla turned her look of distaste on me.

“Arch,” Marla explained as she gestured with her remaining doughnut, “there are good mice and bad mice. Good mice live in cages and children’s stories. Bad mice bite and spread disease after they get into your best cookies and crackers and make a mess. Not to mention that after all your cookies are gone, you have to go to local pastry shops and listen to your best friend ask if you’re using rodent poison on humans.” She paused to swallow some coffee. “And no to the gerbils, too.”

Arch nodded. “Did you call the Division of Wildlife to get rid of them?”

Marla and I both found this amusing. The furrows of confusion in Patty Sue’s forehead deepened. I was not sure, but it looked as if she was about to cry.

“Arch honey,” I said in a voice I hoped was not patronizing, “you call the Division of Wildlife if you have a problem with a bear or a raccoon or a mountain lion. Not for mice and common animals like that.”

Arch said, “I don’t think you’re right, Mom.”

Marla glanced at her watch. “Oh,” she said, her mouth full of doughnut, “the irony of it all. Time for exercise class.”

I nodded. I still needed to find out if Hal was interested in my cleaning offer, so I hustled Patty Sue and Arch along. As they were getting up to leave, I turned to Marla.

“So what’s this about Laura?” I asked in a low voice.

“I’ve seen and heard this and that,” Marla whispered.

“Well, tell me.”

“Not now,” said Marla. She thought. “Let me ask around at the club. That’s where I saw something that made me wonder.”

“Made you wonder about what?”

“Let me call around, will you, Goldy? I hate to gossip.”

Untrue, I thought, as I hastened after her. Marla adored gossip.

We took off for the Aspen Meadow Athletic Club, which occupied the bottom two floors of a streamlined brick building full of glass and sharply angled walls. The other four floors of this incongruously contemporary edifice housed First Bank of Colorado, realtors’ offices, even our own branch of Merrill Lynch. The building and its residents were a sign of the urban future coming to our little town, a sign that was none too welcome to the small population that had moved here to get away from all that.

Inside, the athletic facility was about as close to yuppie heaven as one could find in Aspen Meadow. Plexiglas walls enclosed clean white racquetball courts; an advanced sound system boomed in the exercise room; Nautilus equipment and weights were judiciously spaced in another room, which had the look of a museum exhibit of modem sculpture. For postworkout relaxation there was a steamroom, sauna, and hot tub in a locker room that would have given pause to the architects of the Roman baths.

A cook feels more comfortable putting fat into things than taking it out or off, so belonging to a fancy gym had always felt strange. As I pushed through the glass door and shuffled across the beige-and-burgundy striped carpet, it was Marla’s comment that reminded me of the other reason for feeling out of place here. The club was the one spot in Aspen Meadow where, as if by agreement, all the single people who did not want to resort to either bars or church groups could meet.

I only felt duty bound to exercise, and that not too much. My business had kept me going until a few days ago. Besides splashing in the pool, Arch enjoyed puttering around on the racquetball court, so I also rationalized paying the dues for his sake. But unless some work materialized soon, we would have to quit. I hated to feel poor. It made me resent John Richard even more than usual.

Needless to say, I hadn’t taken advantage of the social life available at the club. There was a small voice of uncertainty in my gut, not unlike the interest in Pomeroy. Over the years some of the muscle-bound fellows had asked me out. I had replied in the negative, claiming to myself that I wasn’t ready.

But I belonged to the club, and like the woman on a diet who stares at the frozen desserts, I had my wild thoughts.

This feeling did not diminish when Patty Sue, Marla, Arch, and I retrieved our locker keys from Hal, a shaggy-haired jock who had metamorphosed from surf bum to club owner without losing his beachboy gestalt. He was on the phone and whispered he would talk to me later. The place was crowded since it was a holiday. Glancing into the Nautilus room the first person I saw, of course, was Pomeroy Locraft. Not teaching today because the high school was closed, no doubt. He gave us a hearty wave which, since I had never received it before, was probably meant for Patty Sue. She waved back while Arch sauntered over to chat, probably about beekeeping.

In the locker room Marla said, “I don’t know if I’m ready for this after two doughnuts and a Long John. What an unfortunately phallic name for an éclair, anyway.” She was struggling into peach-colored tights that made her look even more round and fuzzy than she already was.

“Okay, girls,” shouted Trixie after we had stretched calves and assorted ligaments, “let’s go get ’em!”

This, coupled with the sudden booming of the theme from Top Gun, meant the war on cellulite had been declared. I had not had a class from Trixie in quite a while. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

Within the first minute of activity it was abundantly clear that too long a time had elapsed since my last trip to class, no matter who the teacher was. The ruthless bank of mirrors in front of us pointed out every fatty pouch. My thighs, next to Patty Sue’s long slender ones, looked as if they were plastered with rice pudding. My stomach was a bombe glacée.

“Come on, girls!” exhorted Trixie. “Get that energy up!” She balled her hands into fists and punched at the air below the ceiling. “Go! Go!”

Beside me Patty Sue was lunging and jumping. Pomeroy and Arch were out of sight. I surveyed the rows of women. I did not want to do this, did not want to do this.

The women were like pasta groupings, I decided. The back row of overweight newcomers wiggled laboriously, manicotti in hot water Next came lasagne, wide-looking one way and thin when they turned. The linguini in front of them possessed the same thin/wide dimensions, only in not so dramatic proportions. Then onward to spaghetti and finally to vermicelli, thin tall tubes like Patty Sue and Trixie. How Patty Sue could eat so much and stay so thin was beyond me. I was an incidental misfit on this row, short and round. An elbow macaroni, maybe.

After class I stretched out on a towel in the steamroom, where I was soon joined by Patty Sue, Marla, and Trixie.

“Glad you’re back,” said Marla to Trixie.

“Oh,” Trixie said loftily, “I’ve been back for a couple of weeks.”

“In fighting shape,” I said as we all settled in the dark room with its swirls of steam.

Trixie said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not a damn thing,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

“Not a damn thing,” she said. After a moment she sniffed.

I said, “Did I say something wrong?”

Trixie nipped over. She said, “Just shut up, Goldy.”

I said, “What are you so angry about?”

Trixie said, “Since when are you a shrink?”

“Be cool, girls, be cool,” said Marla.

I let a silence go by. Then I said, “Would somebody please tell me what is going on?”

“Not now,” said Trixie.

There was another uncomfortable silence, in which Patty Sue cleared her throat several times.

“I’ve been thinking, Trixie,” Marla said finally. “Maybe you’d like to come to our group. Tell her about it, Goldy.”

I did, but I didn’t know why I was doing it. I explained that we ate dessert and talked. If she was having some problems, I said delicately, it sometimes helped to talk them out.

“I’ll think about it,” said Trixie. “When do you meet?”

“We’re meeting on Thursday the twenty-second,” I said. “Then we’ll meet again on Friday night the thirtieth.”

“Um,” said Patty Sue, “can I come too?”

“Sure,” I said. “Trix?”

“I teach Thursday nights and Saturday mornings,” she said, “so maybe the one near Halloween. Martin’s going out of town at the end of the month—it’s a possibility.” She was quiet for a minute. “I’ll think about it.”

“Such enthusiasm,” said Marla. To me she said, “I’m glad the last one’s near Halloween. I’ll need a heavy sugar fix right before all the little neighborhood goblins arrive and I actually have to give candy away.”

After dressing I hunted for and found Hal. We stood in back of the desk to talk while he continued to dispense keys. I told him we were desperate for money to pay our dues, and that I had spent some time doing cleaning in addition to cooking, so I was qualified to do both. And he couldn’t beat my prices.

“Tell you what,” Hal said as he reached down for a key under its tag, “we usually have a Halloween party the thirty-first and just get all the food from a grocery store. Chocolate cookies, pumpkin cake, same old stuff every year. And one of the problems this year is that our cleaning crew comes in only on Sunday when we’re closed. Halloween falls on a Saturday, so we need someone, who I thought was going to be me, to clean up after we close on Friday. If you can do the munchies and punch and decoration, plus clean up beforehand, then that’ll take care of your dues for October and November.”

I told him the county had forbidden me to do catering. For a while.

“Hey,” said Hal, as he screwed his tanned face into indignation, “who cares what the county thinks? You’re doing this for me. And I’m doing something for you. Ever since I burned my draft card, I haven’t worried about the law.”

“Just don’t advertise the fact that I’m doing it, or I’ll catch hell.”

“It’s a favor,” he said. “Don’t worry so much! It’s bad for your heart.”

I did feel sick, but put it down to too many abdominal exercises. We settled on how many people and what kind of food he would like to have—mild Chinese, hot Mexican, and sweet American.

“Sounds like three girls,” he said.

I told him the cash flow problem was severe. He trundled off to get me fifty dollars from the cash register for my supplies.

While I waited for him I glanced down at the board with its rows of glistening keys. Keys to lockers were like keys to inner selves, solutions to outer and inner mysteries. But the one enigma in my current life—who had poisoned Fritz?—was not dangling on the board. Or if it was, I couldn’t see it. Whoever did hold the key to the pellets also determined my business future. Why had someone done it? I noticed Fritz’s key and my ex-husband’s hanging under the K. Why poison someone after a funeral? Especially after the funeral of a suicide?

What had Arch said? That Laura hadn’t gotten along with Fritz and Vonette. Carolton, Illinois, the paper had said.

Carolton, Illinois. John Richard and I had driven by that town once on a summer trip. The highway was near where his father had had a practice a long time ago.

I looked around for Hal. He was caught in conversation with a person carrying some weights.

What about Laura and the Kormans’ lives before Aspen Meadow? Who knew? Unless …

Unless the attempted poisoning of Korman had had something to do with Laura’s death. Which would explain why someone would go to the lengths of trying to do him in at her house, after her funeral, with her spirit or whatever there.

And what about Laura’s death, anyway? How indisputable was the determination by the coroner’s office, I wondered. With no note, what made them say it was suicide?

This wasn’t even a theory. This was an insane idea. The police were looking into the coffee poisoning. They had already decided about Laura Smiley’s death by her own hand.

But the police would still get their salaries whether or not they were right about a woman’s death, whether or not they figured out who was playing pellets-in-the-coffee. The solution to that question directly affected my livelihood. Was I ready to trust Arch’s and my income to someone else’s intelligence and perseverance?

I was not. Sweat dimpled my scalp. My fingers shivered.

Hal was still talking to the guy with the weights. I would not be able to follow up on this inclination right away. I would have to wait. Wait until the club was silent, empty. Still, it would be a start.

With one swift movement I reached down to the keys marked S, and removed one from its hook: Laura Smiley’s.

CHAPTER 7

At home that night I stared at the key and wondered if I’d committed a crime. So far, detection was neither enjoyable nor productive. The Grand Marnier I usually saved for cheesecakes gurgled when I poured some into one of my grandmother’s liqueur glasses. The taste like smoke and oranges burned all the way down.

I picked up the key and felt its edges bite into my hand. Think. I would have to wait to search Laura’s locker, wait for a time when the athletic club was deserted. It would raise more questions than it was worth to be caught pilfering the goods of a dead woman. This was Monday. The best bet would be Saturday, five days away. Given the choice, most folks would rather shop than sweat on a Saturday morning.

The liqueur did nothing to prevent another fitful night. Like most insomniacs, I fell into a deathlike sleep just as the sun was coming up. To my chagrin two interruptions shattered what could have been restful slumber.

The first was a barely remembered encounter with Arch. Before the bus came he had been banging around the house looking for some seeds for … milk? That was what had been confusing, what had sent me back to bed. He’d said he needed it for a potion for unbelievers, which seemed even more incredible.

The second rude awakening was from the phone.

“What is it?” I demanded into the receiver.

“Oh-ho, it’s the good-natured caterer, I see,” said Tom Schulz. “Resting up for housecleaning somewhere? Or do you have time to talk?”

“What can you possibly want at this hour?”

“It’s nine o’clock, Goldy. I could want a lot of things.”

I sat up in bed, feeling groggy and uncomfortably warm. Either this guy was flirting with me or my paranoia was taking a turn toward the delusional.

“Listen,” he was going on, “I was thinking about something your son said. Funny thing about your kid. He ended up being a cooperative and polite person in spite of his parents.”

“Schulz,” I said. “Please. It’s just that I have some cooking to do.”

“Really? Who’re you cooking for?”

“I am going, as I told you before, over to visit my ex-in-laws. I am taking them a basket of things to eat. This has nothing to do with my business, either, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just—” I groped for words. I did not want Schulz to know of my plans to snoop around as well as ask questions. “Just because I am a nice person after all. And this way, if poison turns up in the coffee cake, you’ll know I was the one after all.”

“Uh-huh. I’d say more like you’re going snooping to figure out what’s going on by yourself. Spite of what you say, you don’t trust the police to do their job. Goldy wants to get her business opened without benefit of law enforcement agencies, is what I’m hearing.”

“I could be more helpful than you think.”

“Really,” he said again, unconvinced. There was a pause. “You’re a suspect, you know.”

“Yes, but you know I didn’t do it. In your heart of hearts.”

“My heart of hearts, she says. About which she knows so much.”

“Come on, Investigator Schulz.”

Another pause. Then he said, “Well. You want to be in on the investigation? I’ll give you a chance to do just that.”

“Okay, what?”

“A chance, I said. That means we work together. Within the law.”

“Uh-oh. Can’t take my Uzi when I question witnesses.”

He sighed. “There’s something you might be able to look into. What your son said about Laura and Fritz and Vonette not getting along? Turns out they all lived in the same town for a while. Fritz and Vonette moved here from Carolton, Illinois, in 1967. Ms. Smiley came out about a year later, when her parents died. Not that that tells us anything, it’s just a strange link.”

“They knew each other,” I said. “I already asked Vonette. Laura babysat for them during a vacation. But that was twenty years ago.”

“Still,” he said, “it’s a link. I’m going to call out there to Carolton and see if I can do a little background checking on Laura Smiley, maybe on the Kormans, too. Ask if there was anybody else from that town who moved here. See if we get any more strange links.”

“Like if anyone had a rodent problem twenty years ago.”

He chuckled. “One of these days I’m going to tell you why you’re so tough.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek and didn’t answer.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I thought you were itching to help out. You could do just that in your little chat with your ex-in-laws today.”

“Will do,” I said. “And there’s something I want to find out. I was wondering if you could talk to the deputy coroner or whoever it was that said Laura was a suicide. I’d like to know why he said it was suicide.”

“We’ll see.” He harrumphed. “I am letting you in on all this,” he went on, “because I want to help you. And of course because I care about you. As a taxpayer, of course.”

“You care about me because you’re a taxpayer or because I’m one?”

“As a taxpayer, you help pay my salary, Goldy,” he said with a grin I could hear. “With no income, your taxes will be lower and there goes my salary. Tell you what. How about if we talk more about this over Chinese food tonight? We could compare notes, my treat. Six o’clock at Aspen Meadow’s finest Oriental restaurant.”

“You mean Aspen Meadow’s only Oriental restaurant.”

“Aw,” he said, “you take all the fun out of everything.”

I thought. It would probably be a long time before I had another chance to be taken out to dinner. Still, I wasn’t used to it. I might flunk social adeptness.

“It’s just dinner,” he said. “Come on.”

I could make spaghetti for Patty Sue and Arch. I could even walk to the Dragon’s Breath, since it was just off Main Street.

I said, “Six o’clock,” and hung up.

Nothing equals mixing and baking to clear the head, I thought after I had showered and downed a quart of coffee. Patty Sue had decided to go for a long run, she told me with an unusual amount of explanation, to get in shape for skiing. Fine. The next few hours of cooking in a quiet house stretched out like a dry road after a storm.

The components of Goldilocks’ Cheer-Up Basket usually were the following: three different kinds of baked goods, fresh fruit in season, at least two kinds of fancy cheese, a soup or dinner that could be frozen, and a bouquet of flowers.

For the soup I was in luck. I had already made up a quantity of Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup and frozen it. This recipe had actually derived from a miscalculation in making Julia Child’s entrée crêpes stuffed with spinach and mushrooms. Trying to help Arch with some fourth-grade math homework while making the crêpe filling, I had ended up with quadruple the amount I needed for the crêpes. After the initial distress, I had thinned out the cheese and vegetable mixture with chicken broth, and the result had been brilliant. The success pleased customers no end. Periodically I made great quantities of the stuff, without crêpes, just to keep on hand. So Fritz and Vonette could have some.

The senior Kormans were also partial to coffee cakes. I sometimes saw Fritz in the Aspen Meadow pastry shop indulging in an iced cinnamon roll. Unless I phoned her, Vonette never got up early enough to have a normal breakfast, but she loved my cakes anytime. So I hunted up the buttermilk, took some cream cheese out to soften, and made a New England crumb coffee cake flavored with ginger and nutmeg.

The pièce de résistance was Goldy’s Dream Cake. This, too, was a cookbook recipe that I had messed up in the most fortuitous manner. I pulled out the ingredients, made a fingerprint in the cream cheese to make sure it had softened, and then peered at the card.

Vonette and Fritz were not going to get one made ahead. Patty Sue and Arch could have the other one for dessert tonight after their spaghetti. Good thing they were both so thin.

I began to measure and mix. It was all like a cake, I thought. This mess with Fritz, the unknowns about Laura. It was like having a large group of ingredients and not knowing how they were all combined.

And what about Schulz? He wanted to trust me, wanted me to help him with the case. After John Richard, I’d grown suspicious of men and their motives. In Amour

Goldy’s Dream Cake

Crumb Mixture:

4½ cups all-purpose flour

1½ cups sugar

1½ cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-tablespoon pieces, well chilled

Cake:

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon bakng soda

½ teaspoon salt

6 cups reserved crumb mixture

2 large eggs, beaten

1½ cups sour cream

2 teaspoons almond extract

Filling:

1 pound (two 8-ounce packages) cream cheese, softened

½ cup sugar

2 large eggs, beaten

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup red raspberry preserves, sieved to remove seeds

Topping:

⅔ cup raw whole almonds

2 cups reserved crumb mixture

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter two 9- or 10-inch springform pans and set aside.

In the large bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade, blend the flour and sugar until well combined, about 5 seconds. With the motor running, quickly drop the butter pieces through the chute, blending until the mixture resembles small, sandy crumbs, less than a minute. Measure out 6 cups of this mixture for the cake. Measure the last 2 cups of the mixture for the toppng and set aside.

For the cake, gently stir the baking powder, soda, and salt into the 6 cups of reserved crumb mixture. In a separate bowl, mix the beaten eggs with the sour cream and almond extract, stirring until well combined. Pour the egg mixture over the crumb mixture and stir until smooth and thick. Spread the cake batter over the bottom and up the sides of each of the prepared pans.

For the filling, beat the cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract in the large bowl of an electric mixer until smooth. Spread half of this mixture over the cake batter in each of the prepared pans. Top the cream cheese mixture in each pan with 1/2 cup of the sieved preserves.

For the topping, whirl the raw almonds in a food processor fitted with the steel blade until chunky. Mix the almonds into the 2 cups reserved crumb mixture and sprinkle half of this mixture over the preserves layer in each pan.

Bake the cakes for 45 to 55 minutes. Test with a toothpick for doneness. (All that should adhere to the toothpick is cream cheese and preserves, not cake batter.) Cool the cakes thoroughly on racks, then cover with foil and refrigerate several hours or, even better, overnight. Serve in the morning with coffee, if desired.

Makes 2 large cakes

Anonymous, we sometimes joked about being addicted to hate. We worried that hostility-for-guys was what drew us together I wanted to be social again, didn’t I? I wanted someone to care about me.

Didn’t I?

I was just sprinkling on the crumb-and-almond mixture when the buzzer sounded the completion of the crumb cake. After placing it on a cooling rack I saw myself briefly in the reflection of the black refrigerator door. I was actually going out tonight. I would have to do something with my hair and find some garment besides a corduroy skirt. I was going to have to be sociable, and it wasn’t even for a client. I was going out with a man I knew liked me. All of a sudden, I felt sick.

Four hours later the van was grinding its way up the steep entrance to the residential area surrounding Aspen Meadow Country Club. To call this club with its halfhearted golf and tennis offerings a country club was an overstatement. The A.M.C.C. never would measure up to any of its eastern counterparts, and migrants from Rumson and Chevy Chase and Lake Forest were quick to point this out. But then again, this was the West. Even the idea of a country club had been imported. Eastern snobbery gave Coloradans no end of psychic pain, and the natives produced a multitude of bumper stickers to express their attendant disgust. The most impudent declared, LOVE NEW YORK? TAKE HIWAY 40 EAST!

I looked down at the basket on the seat next to me. The cakes and container of soup glistened in cellophane wrap tied with bows of yellow and orange and brown. A small arrangement of flowers dried from my own garden last year echoed the fall colors. And speaking of bouquets, maybe I’d be able to find out this afternoon what it was Fritz deserved.

“Well now, Goldy honey,” Vonette greeted me after the doorbell on the massive front door to their contemporary wood home had bing-bonged à la Big Ben. “Don’t you look cute! You got a date or something?”

I winced. Was the fact that I was showered and coifed and sporting a seldom-worn black wool dress so very unusual? So very new?

Vonette’s brilliant red hair was more disheveled than usual, but it just might have been the way it clashed with the purple Ultrasuede hostess gown.

She said in a confidential tone, “I got a batch of margaritas going. Want one before you see Fritz?”

I was tempted. I was about to see a doctor whom half the town thought I had tried to kill, and yet who merited something, according to an anonymous flower sender. Moreover, in a few hours I was going out on my first date in five years with the cop investigating the case. If I succumbed to the buzz from the first hit of salt, lime, and tequila, then it would be numerous margaritas later before the thirst left and the headache began. By that time I’d be knee-deep in egg rolls and moo-shu pork with my head swimming like the shreds of yolk in egg drop soup. This dismal prognosis made me ask for coffee.

Vonette, on the other hand, professed no worry about either Oriental cuisine or the hangover to come. I followed her out to the cavernous kitchen. She waved her free hand gaily as she beeped microwave buttons to heat water for coffee. After a long swig of greenish liquid she started to talk.

“I just don’t know what to do with him being home. He’s fussing and yapping all day about Lord knows what. That John Richard can’t see all his patients. That they need him over there. The practice, the practice. Yappety yap. That some doctor on TV is an idiot. Lord! I wished they’d have given him an injection to make him shut up!”

“I know he’s dedicated to his work,” I said, thinking of Patty Sue and her mandatory twice-weekly appointments. “How soon before he’s back in shape?”

“Tomorrow. Thanks be to God.” She paused and looked at my basket for the first time. “Now look what you’ve brought. Aren’t you just so sweet.”

I explained the basket’s contents and opened the refrigerator to put in the cake with cream cheese. The food of a noncook littered the shelves. Fancy sliced deli ham and smoked salmon, herring in sour cream, and little nibbled packages of Brie and Samsoe and Port Salut vied for space with beer and wine and every imaginable kind of mixer. It again occurred to me, as it had so many times, that John Richard had married a woman who could cook because he had been raised by one who could not.

“May I see Fritz?” I asked.

She nodded. “Just wait here a sec,” she said. “Let me go see if he minds. He probably won’t, but you know how ornery he can be. He was talking about taking a shower, so it might just be a little bit.”

“I’ll wait in the study,” I announced, and slipped into the paneled room off the kitchen.

When Vonette had padded off, I slowly opened the drawers of the study desk. Take your shower, Fritz. My heart was knocking loudly and I felt cold. Vonette was not returning immediately. The business has to reopen, I said to myself. Schulz doesn’t need to know about this. Start investigating.

Apparently Vonette liked to organize as little as she liked to cook. Letters and papers and photographs were crammed into each of the small drawers like dressing in a too-small turkey. I could feel blood pounding in my throat and ears. I did not know what I was looking for or how I would know when I found it.

There wouldn’t be time to read any letters or study any bills, but perhaps I could get some names, something like that. Threats, I told myself, people who don’t like him. That’s what you’re looking for. But would something be here? Would a doctor even keep that kind of thing at home? What about his office?

I came to a box of what looked like old photographs. There was my unmistakable ex-husband, charming in a sailor suit at about age six. And there he was again in front of a birthday cake, about to blow out four candles. Behind him in the picture was an adolescent girl—a babysitter? Then there was another picture of the same girl, by herself this time in one of those old-fashioned stiff photo portraits done in high schools. She wore a bouffant hairdo with the ends of her hair nipped up. In large looping feminine handwriting were the words “Dear Mom, No matter what, I’m still your baby.” And unsigned. As I stared at the photo I thought there was something familiar about it, something I couldn’t quite place. The girl was not someone I knew or had ever known. It was not Laura Smiley. But I had seen a picture of this face before somewhere, maybe from when I was married to John Richard. Fat chance I’d have of him telling me who it was.

I crept quickly into the kitchen and slid the picture into my purse. I was heating up a fresh cup of water for instant coffee when Vonette wobbled back and leaned on the counter before pouring herself another margarita.

“He’s just on the phone right now with John Richard,” she said. “Let’s give him a couple more minutes. You know how he hates being interrupted.”

I nodded and looked at Vonette, whose coppery too-poufed hair shone in the afternoon light. I really knew little about her. When we got together with the senior Kormans at holidays and other times, John Richard had silently ignored his mother as she began to drink and make outrageous statements. Fritz never seemed to be paying much attention to her either. I felt like a one-woman listening team, saying “uh-huh” and “I know what you mean,” and wishing I could get her into a residential treatment program for alcoholics. But she had never told me much about anything personal. Her diatribes were against people in the church she didn’t like, or what was wrong with the school system, the highway department, or the Republican party.

“Vonette,” I said, “do you know who put that stuff into Fritz’s coffee?”

She turned away and opened the freezer door of the refrigerator. “Nope,” she said without looking at me. “Just like I told that cop.” She brought out a can of frozen limeade and started to peel off the plastic tab.

“But you must know who his enemies are,” I persisted. “You must know who at the funeral didn’t like him.”

She dug hard into the frozen concentrate with a metal spoon and said, “Enemies? C’mon, honey. What do you think this is, a war?”

“What about his patients? Please, Vonette,” I begged, “help me with this. I can’t make enough money to support Arch and myself without the catering business, and the police have shut me down hard. You must know something.”

Finally she turned to face me. “Goldy,” she said, “I don’t. Well, leastwise not that much. And after all that’s happened—”

She shrugged and began to run water to dilute the lime concentrate. She said, “I don’t really want to know.”

“After all what has happened, Vonette? You mean Fritz and the rat poison?”

She threw the can of water against the side of the sink. “Goddamn but I’ve got a headache. If you want to see Fritz, Goldy honey, just go on back. You need money, call me later. But I gotta go lie down now.” And she tottered out of the kitchen before I had a chance to say anything.

Great. Something had happened. Thinking about it gave Vonette a headache. And now I had to face Fritz alone. I picked up my basket.

“Well hello, Goldy,” said Fritz after I had knocked and been admitted to their enormous bedroom suite done in pink, green, and white. “Or should I say Little Red Riding Hood?”

I didn’t know where Vonette had gone to lie down. Fritz was propped up with at least half a dozen pillows behind him. His almost-bald head shone like a baby’s bum in the gray light from the television, which had a picture but no volume. The newspaper, a tray with dishes and cups, and the remote control for the television were spread out around his lap. He was wearing pale blue pajamas covered with tiny dark blue fleurs de lis. A French king in repose, sans wig.

I stared at him. He was a good-looking man. There are people who age badly and people like Fritz, who age beautifully. The silver chest hair peeking out from the V of his pajama top matched the silver hair above his ears. His face was radiant with the fine-boned handsomeness that had been inherited by the man I had loved for eight years.

“Just pull up a chair,” he said, “and look, you’ve brought me something. Now John Richard would say I shouldn’t eat anything you bring me.” He winked after I had settled stiffly on the side of a chaise longue. “You know what I said to him? I said, Son, don’t you worry about it. Goldy and I get along just great. Don’t we?”

I nodded, described the various things in the basket, and told him about the cake in the refrigerator. He thanked me and then there was a pause while soap opera characters ranted silently on the flickering screen.

“Well,” I lied, “Patty Sue says hello.”

“Does she?” His eyes sparkled. “Great gal. Marvelous patient. She must be such a help for you.”

I didn’t want to appear difficult and disagree. “Well,” I said finally. “Well, well.” I had to get out of here. I was beginning to have a headache myself, and I was meeting Schulz shortly. I smiled at Fritz and said, “So John Richard still thinks I did this to you?”

Fritz sat up straight in bed and screwed up his face into a menacing grimace. He shook his head. His eyebrows formed a bushy line just above his nose, and his mouth was set downward over the clean-cut jaw.

“Don’t you worry about this, Goldy, you hear?”

“Okay,” I said, moving my knees back and forth. The wool was making them itch. “I really am sorry this happened to you. I still do think of us as being sort of related.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Maybe I’d better go.” I stood up to leave. “Hope you feel better,” I said as I opened the bedroom door.

“Don’t fret about John Richard,” Fritz said with a smile, full of charm. I nodded, speechless again. Fritz’s face relaxed suddenly, and he gave a slight laugh. “After all, son,’ I told him, ‘you’re the only one standing to gain if I go.’ ” He laughed again, somewhat wildly.

“Well, bye now,” I said as I started down the hall.

“I said, ‘Son, look here!’ ” he yelled after me. “ ‘Get Goldy out of your mind, will you? If I die, she doesn’t inherit the practice. You do!’ ”

CHAPTER 8

Despite its name, the Dragon’s Breath Chinese Restaurant was not strictly Szechuan. In a small town a food place could not afford to alienate those with milder tastes, so the proprietor offered Cantonese dishes in addition to those made with vinegar and mustard and red pepper. This was good, since my own feeling was that spicy cooking was better left to the Mexicans. Whether Tom Schulz had mild tastes I did not know. Asking me out to dinner indicated something to the contrary.

The restaurant’s entrance was carved in the shape of a dragon’s head. Coming through the mouth-door with its solid inverted-pyramid teeth, I always had a feeling of sympathy for Jonah. During the restaurant’s remodeling, so the story went, a local sculptor had created this monstrosity in exchange for a year’s free Chinese food. Poor man, I always thought, he must have been terribly hungry.

Inside, sparkling polygonal lights flashed and winked off ornately framed mirrors, pots of glass flowers, and shiny red plastic booths. From the kitchen came the beckoning sizzle of stir-fried meat. The Dragon’s Breath, I remembered while threading through the tables, also served wonderful shrimp-stuffed egg rolls and homemade almond cookies. Two years ago I had begged for the almond cookie recipe and received it once the smiling cook understood my question. Then I had pressed candied cherries in the centers instead of almonds and served them to clients at Christmas.

Christmas parties, perish the thought. Much work, more income. And it was in the power of Investigator Tom Schulz to say whether I would be able to start planning for them.

“You’re frowning,” he said when I slid into the booth opposite him. He smiled with irrepressible pleasure, and did a respectful half stand. Seated again, he sighed.

“Mad already,” he said. “That’s a bad sign. What’s making Miss Goldy irritable now?”

I couldn’t help noticing how his gray houndstooth jacket hugged his shoulders, how deftly he moved his bulk around. There was something comforting about his large presence. He unfurled an enormous white napkin to cover a nubby burgundy sweater. It was, I reflected, an unexpectedly attractive outfit for a cop.

“Thinking about the Christmas parties I may not be giving,” I said while he poured tea. “Unless you, we, get this poisoning incident cleared up. Maybe you can pinpoint my ex-husband.” I told him about the inheritance configuration.

“Don’t you think if a doctor really wanted to poison somebody, he’d do it right? And not in front of a bunch of people?” He went on, still grinning. “Tell me about your Christmas parties, so I can work up an appetite. Maybe talking about food will cheer you up.”

I described the almond-turned-cherry cookies as well as the fragrant gingerbread houses I modeled after the hostess’s own home. I told him I made a lot of money on these affairs, money that I needed.

He said, “I have never seen a woman so worried about her livelihood.” Ordinarily I would have taken offense at such a statement, but his green eyes were soft and kind, the tilt of his head sympathetic.

“I have to support Arch and me,” I said. “My ex-husband’s willingness to pay child support on time is tenuous at best. I need to give parties to survive.” I fingered the thick jade-colored glass leaves of the table’s centerpiece. “There’s something else, though.”

“Something else.”

“Well.” I felt suddenly uncomfortable, as if I were offering an explanation when none was needed. “I love my job. It fills a hole. It’s hard to have it taken away. It’s like the hole’s ripped open.”

“It won’t be for long,” he said in a low voice. “I just have that feeling. Go on about the parties.”

“One time,” I said, “I actually did do a Christmas party for free. For the church. I was still teaching Sunday school, trying to carry on this normal life. Then John Richard started seeing a soprano in the choir. He even nuzzled up to Miss Vocal Cords during the coffee hour. It was sickening.” I stopped talking, sipped tea. “I remember the Sunday school party, though. Making miniature baby Jesuses out of meringue kept me up half the night. The kids loved them.”

“So you’re a churchgoer?” he asked, surprised.

“Not anymore,” I replied, picking up my menu. “Let’s get on with this, okay?”

“My goodness, you make it sound like being with me is torture.” He smoothed out his sweater and perused the menu. “Why don’t I order and surprise you? Give you a break from being in charge of the food.”

The sleepless nights, the worry, the cooking for and visiting with the Kormans—all these had made me too tired to argue. About the meal, anyway. The waitress arrived and I asked for sherry. Tom Schulz ordered scotch. Then our food waiter appeared and Schulz ordered egg rolls, a pu pu platter, hot and sour soup, steamed trout, pork with broccoli and bamboo shoots, moo-shu shrimp, and red-cooked chicken.

I said, “How many more people are coming to dinner?”

Schulz looked at me silently for a minute, then stuck his chin out.

“Just relax. Okay, Goldy?” The perpetual grin. “We’re going to have a nice meal. We’re going to talk. I like you, but you sure don’t make it easy. Try to remember we’re trying to help each other.”

“Is that so? Well guess what, I wouldn’t give you a nickel for the entire Furman County Sheriff’s Department.”

The drinks arrived and Schulz sipped his scotch.

“Well,” he said, “now we’re all clear where we stand.”

“It’s Tuesday,” I replied, “and this thing happened Saturday and what have you found out? I need my business reopened and all you have to offer is strange links and barbecued pu pu.”

“Take it easy,” he said. “Remember our chat with your son saying the Kormans and Laura Smiley didn’t get along? I made that call out to Illinois. Turns out Korman senior was not exactly your universally loved medical man. Before he left twenty years ago, that is. Guy I talked to said there’s more, but I need to talk to the fellow who was involved in the investigation, and he’s gone to a department in another town. Happens to cops in small towns, you know. You arrest a city councilman’s son for drunk driving. The next day you start looking for a new job.”

I grunted as the banquet of appetizers arrived.

“What was the investigation about?” I asked.

Schulz offered me the plate of egg rolls and I took one. He dipped one in brown sinus-clearing Chinese mustard and crunched his way through it before starting in on the skewered beef.

“Don’t know that yet,” he said as he pulled his eyebrows into a line. “Files twenty years old are put on microfilm, then into storage. Have to have clearance and a microfilm operator to look them up. They’re working on it, don’t worry. They’re going to call me back. Our friend Laura Smiley was involved somehow, though. That’s all this guy could remember.”

“Is that it?”

“Listen. When you do this kind of research, you’ve got to talk to the detective who worked the case. Even if they read me that file over the phone, it won’t tell as much as the cop involved in it could. And I’m going to find him.” He ladled out the soup, then said, “There’s something else that may be related. Your little friend Trixie has a record for assault. A recent one.”

“What?”

He shrugged and swallowed some soup, then gestured with the porcelain spoon. “She was fighting with a neighbor over a dog or something. He, the dog, was barking and driving her nuts. That’s what she claimed. So she hauled off and threw one rock after another at the animal until it ran under its owner’s deck. Then the fellow who owned the dog came flying out shrieking at Trixie and she beaned him with a hunk of quartz the size of a football.” He chuckled. “That woman must be damned strong. Poor bastard had to have eighteen stitches.”

I had stopped eating. “What in the world happened?”

“Eat your soup before it gets cold. She pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence. No priors, and she said because she was pregnant she was on edge or some such.”

“Pregnant?”

“Her baby was stillborn a month later,” he said. “You said you hadn’t seen her around for a while and that’s why. I talked to her husband. She had high blood pressure, in spite of all that exercising. High blood pressure, excitable temperament, high-risk pregnancy.”

So that was what Marla had meant by You’re back. And Trixie’s mood. I wished I’d known. Poor Trixie.

“That’s as far as I’ve gotten,” he said. “But I am working on it, just wanted to let you know. Oh look, here comes our waiter,”

I sighed. At this rate, we might have the answers to what happened last Saturday by Valentine’s Day.

Our food arrived. Schulz astonished me by ladling enormous amounts onto my plate. Then, muttering something that sounded like “wimps,” he waved away the chopsticks proffered by the waiter. He nodded to me before attacking his trout. I smiled, remembering John Richard’s selfishness with food. If he ever did serve me first, it was always in small portions. Usually, though, he served himself large quantities and then passed me what was left while he started eating.

I looked from my plate to Schulz’s.

A look of worry crossed his face. “What’s the matter,” he said, “don’t you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said, attempting to get up some pork with chopsticks. “It’s great. Really.”

He chuckled between mouthfuls. “I’ll bet you just cook so much you get tired of food, don’t you?”

“Oh no,” I said. I speared the pork. “Honestly, I’m just preoccupied.”

We ate in silence for a while, making occasional comments on the size and freshness of the fat shrimp, the perfect seasoning of the trout. Again I felt an odd—because unused—trust melting my resistance.

After a while I said, “When I went to visit Fritz and Vonette today, I kind of looked around. I thought I might be able to figure out who their enemies were if I sort of went through their desk.”

He washed down his bite with some tea and said, “You sort of went through their desk? When I said you could help, I didn’t say you could burgle the place, for God’s sake.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Well, listen up, copper,” I went on. “I’m going to go through some of Laura Smiley’s stuff, too.”

“Christ.”

“Look,” I said, “I appreciate your making long-distance calls to find people who have moved and files that are on microfilm.” I smiled. “You even got over your reluctance to bring me in on the case. But I need more if we’re going to go forward.” Then I asked, as much for myself as for him, “Why do you think I’m having dinner with you?”

“Miss Goldy,” he said while pouring me some more tea, “excuse me. I thought we were here at least partially for social reasons.”

“Dating a suspect? Is that legal?”

He held the teapot in midair. My face was warm.

He said, “Tell you what. Let me worry about what’s legal. I don’t go breaking into folks’ desks and stuff, for instance. But I wouldn’t have brought you in, as you call it, unless it was legal. I can share information with you about what the department is doing, if I think it’ll aid the investigation.”

“So what you’re saying is that being with me is social and helpful.”

He nodded. “Investigators can get information from any source within the law. Which does not include breaking and entering, I might add. It might include keeping closer tabs on your son, however.”

I gave him an absolutely sour look.

He finished a bite of pork and shook his head. “Just precautionary. Find out if he’s really nuts about these games. Most kids aren’t. But maybe there’s something he’s not telling me, or not telling you.” He thought. “There’re people involved in this who might talk more easily to you, is all.”

“What kind of information do you expect to get from me?”

He shrugged. “Don’t mean to offend you, Goldy, but you know how women talk—”

“You’re offending me.”

“Tell you what,” he said, “let me try to make it up to you by taking you out to dinner again.”

“No, I don’t think so …”

“The movies?”

“No…”

“Bronco game?”

I hesitated.

“They’re looking awfully good this year. Beat Green Bay last Sunday. Department has a pair of tickets. Let me know which Sunday. When you’re free, that is.”

“Wait,” I said. I felt my head swimming. I wasn’t ready for all this. I needed to talk to my group. “I am not looking for a social life,” I told him. “For now I just want to solve this crime and start making money again.”

“Then let’s solve it.”

“How? We’ve, I’ve, got a huge problem, and you’re acting like getting some information on this is some long-term project.”

He waved to the waiter for our check.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. A, someone tried to poison Fritz. B, that same someone did it in Laura Smiley’s house after Laura Smiley’s funeral. C, nobody seems to know why Laura killed herself and she didn’t leave a note to tell us, and D, Laura and the Kormans didn’t get along. Now E, you’re telling me, this history between them goes way back. So maybe the two events, Laura dying and Fritz being poisoned, are related.” I closed my eyes and nodded. It sounded logical, didn’t it? “I told you before, it might help to know what that deputy coroner said about Laura Smiley’s death. If she didn’t leave a note, why are they calling it suicide?”

“My dear,” said Schulz as he looked at the bill, “a note doesn’t mean squat. I’ve seen suicide notes that were photocopied, for God’s sake. With blood all over the room. I called the deputy coroner. She slashed her wrists, and there was no sign of a struggle, no burglary, nothing. That’s what I know. We treat a suicide like a murder until we know differently. In this case, suicide was the deputy coroner’s conclusion. Now granted, the guy is new. And before this he was out in some small town on the western slope.” Schulz rubbed his temples.

I said, “Well, would you be willing to look into it some more? I mean if you really want to cooperate on this thing. And I’ll work your women’s angle. Talk it up, find out about Trixie and if the reason she works out with weights is so that she can exercise her aggression on people. Deal?”

He nodded.

“By the way,” I said, “did the Health Department find anything?”

“No. It’s probably like sending it down to the crime lab.” When I looked puzzled, he said, “You’ve got to tell them, look for this, look for that. If you’ve got some white powder that’s cocaine and you say, Check for heroin, they’ll send your coke back to you and say, It’s not heroin. Same principle.”

I smiled. “Thanks for dinner.”

He said, “Hey. Something else. I need to know more about Vonette. Something’s wrong there, I don’t know what. And you’re welcome. Let’s do it again soon.”

I nodded, although eliciting more information from Vonette was unappealing. I took a fortune cookie from the tray that held the check.

“Look,” he said as he ate his cookie and tossed away the fortune, “we may have a bigger problem. Especially if whoever put the stuff in Fritz’s coffee is really trying to kill him.”

“Why is that?”

“Because,” he said patiently, “if somebody’s trying to kill him, they’re going to try again.”

“At least they’re not going to do it at one of my catered functions,” I replied, then remembered the Halloween party in three weeks. I wasn’t actually being paid for it, just getting my club dues. Still. Better not mention that to Schulz, stickler for legality that he was.