Catering to Nobody

“We’ll have all this cleared up soon,” Schulz said confidently. “Trust the sheriff’s department.”

I unfolded the paper fortune in my hand.

It said, “Faith is your greatest present need.”

Like Schulz, I tossed it.

At home I noticed miserably that the leftover spaghetti mess in the sink matched the red and white decor of the kitchen. Honestly, that Patty Sue. If she could run all afternoon, why couldn’t she make a minimal effort to cook or clean? I tried to remember myself at twenty. Had I really never had the big picture of running a house before I had a child? Probably not.

The house was quiet. Before going to bed I crept down the hall to make sure Arch was safely asleep. This had been my habit since he was born. John Richard had given me the title Helicopter Mom: I hovered.

Arch was not asleep but was murmuring excitedly on the phone.

“That sounds great,” he was saying. “But what about the potion?”

A pause.

“No, you have to use milkwort for that. It’s all that’s available for lethal missions.” He listened for a moment, and then said, “You mean I’m going to have to find that, too? Don’t you know anything about getting rid of opponents?”

Another pause. I felt a tightness in my chest. Blood pounded in my ears.

“Oh, Todd!” said Arch, irritated. “I can’t believe I’m going to have to find the weapon and do the spell and put together the potion. I’m not going to have time for all that.”

I knocked forcefully on Arch’s partially opened door. Perhaps it was just the hammering in my head that made the noise thunderous. Then I swung the door open all the way without getting an answer.

He had hung up the phone.

“What is going on?” I demanded.

“Mom,” he said. He looked at me, hair disheveled, glasses askew. They seemed incongruous next to his baseball-print flannel pajamas. In his lap were a guidebook and folder for his games. “You’re home!” A pause. “Uh, I stayed up.”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling out of place. “I just came in to see if you were asleep yet. I heard you on the phone. Was it for your game?”

He turned back to the papers in his lap. “Yes,” he said impatiently. “But I’ll call him back tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. I stood by his door, unable to put words together.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

He set his mouth in a straight line and folded his arms across his chest.

“Please,” he said, “don’t sneak up on me like that again.”

CHAPTER 9

The next day I managed to book two cleaning jobs in the country club area, one for that day and one for the next. Since Fritz was back on his feet, I took Patty Sue to her appointment and instructed her to walk home while I went off to scrub, scour, and vacuum. I talked minimally to Arch before he left for school. If checking on him was considered sneaking up, then asking questions would be prying. I did elicit the promise that he would take me on a role-playing adventure over the weekend. It was time for me to find out what was going on with these games. Or at least try.

The house to be cleaned was one of those rambling ranch-style structures done in all-western decor right up to the walls hung with harnesses, cowboy hats, sombreros, and horseshoes. Maid service of this ranchette took six hours, which included polishing a coffee table shaped like a flatbed wagon. The worst part was that I kept expecting Dale Evans to pop out from behind one of the numerous bathroom doors. She didn’t, and when I was done I was very glad to receive forty-eight dollars in cash.

After making a run to a janitorial supply house in west Denver I picked up some groceries and came home to give Patty Sue her first lesson in housecleaning for fun and profit.

“I’ll do whatever you say,” she said, but it was without enthusiasm.

“Need to be safe first,” I said, as I Magic-Markered my name on the gallon bottle of phenol-based cleaning fluid I would use at the athletic club. Then I drew a skull and crossbones on the plastic bottle’s backside. Industrial-strength concentrations were much cheaper than anything in the supermarket, but they were dangerous to have around.

“I really don’t know much about cleaning or chemicals,” Patty Sue said. She wrinkled her nose at the plastic bottle.

“Look,” I said, looking directly in her eyes, “if you want to be independent, the most important thing is to be financially self-supporting. Housecleaning is a way. Not glamorous, but reliable.”

“Yes I know, but …”

“But what?”

“Oh,” she said, turning away, “just never mind. Just teach me about it, go ahead.”

Begin with proper dilutions, I began, pointing to the ten-to-one and twenty-to-one lines on the plastic spray bottles. When I finished, she gave me another wordless look, as if I’d taught her how to construct an atomic bomb in twenty minutes. I ignored it and cheerily assigned her Arch’s bathroom to practice on. This was a particularly dirty trick. But chiseling off all that dried spaghetti demanded retribution. I disappeared to answer the phone.

“How’s my little darling doing?” asked Patty Sue’s mother over the crackle of long distance. One of her regular checkup calls.

“She’s working hard,” I said truthfully. “As a matter of fact, she’s working right now, so can I have her call you back? Collect?”

“Oh yes, of course,” said the mother, disappointed. “I was just worried if she was eating and sleeping all right.”

It was difficult for me to see if I in fact overprotected Arch. But I could sure see it in other mothers. Would Arch end up like Patty Sue if I kept worrying about him? This was not a question to dwell on.

“She’s eating and sleeping fine,” I said. “In fact, she’s doing lots of both. And exercising, working, and going to the doctor, so everything’s just peachy.”

“I called the doctor’s office to see how she was doing,” she said.

“And?”

“They said she’s not improving.”

“Well,” I said, impatient, “these things take time.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to trouble you.”

“You’re not.”

Next I phoned a real estate agent.

“Kathleen,” I said breathily when I got through to the one person I knew at Mountain Realty. “I’m interested in buying Laura Smiley’s house.”

“Oh, Goldy, the kitchen is marvelous,” replied Kathleen. “You’ll love it.”

I knew darn well that the kitchen had minimal counter space and old appliances, but never mind. While Patty Sue grunted and scrubbed and rinsed in Arch’s bathroom, Kathleen and I made an appointment to go through the house the next day. She said that since Laura had left the house to her aunt it would be a while before we could close, but I told her not to worry, it would be a while before I had any money.

Next I phoned Marla and asked her to fabricate a real estate emergency for the next morning so I could be rid of Kathleen once we got to Laura’s. She gleefully acquiesced. Marla hated real estate agents.

_____

It was still unseasonably warm for October when Patty Sue and I loaded the van the next morning. Overhead the sky was a deep periwinkle blue, as if a celestial housecleaner had spilled a bottle of bluing agent to the four corners of the earth. A few aspen leaves clung to the tops of slender bone-white branches: the last stage of autumnal undress. I swung the van around a corner toward the house Patty Sue was going to clean and wondered if we would have Indian summer through Halloween instead of our usual late-October snow. After I parked, Patty Sue gingerly pulled out all the cleaning equipment while I promised to pick her up in a few hours.

“I heard your ex was getting married again,” Kathleen greeted me when I ground the van to a halt at the top of Laura Smiley’s driveway. I tried to find my tongue. If Marla had already put in her call, I would be out of luck.

Kathleen was standing beside a silver Mercedes with a REAL ESTATE FOR SALE sign emblazoned on the driver side door. Surely there were better ways of advertising than wrecking a 450 SL. A sudden beeping interrupted my stare. Kathleen slipped back into her car to answer the mobile phone. There was much heated talking. Kathleen set her fine features into a frown.

“Listen,” she said when she was back out of the car, “I’ve got a problem with an appointment from Denver showing up early. How about if I just give you the key and come back to finish showing you the house in about half an hour?” She smiled hopefully, and I blessed dear old Marla.

I knew that Kathleen knew she would get her commission as long as she showed me the house at some point, so I smiled back and nodded, seeing as how I had no intention of ever being the supplier of the commission.

“Oh,” she said over the roar of the Mercedes, “one more thing. I told that aunt I’d do a change-of-address form for Laura but things have been so crazy.” She rolled her eyes as if this explained everything. “Anyway. I’ve been taking the mail in and putting it on the kitchen table when I show the house. Take it for me this time, will you?” she hollered.

I nodded as she gunned her engine away. Would I? You bet.

A breeze lifted the black smoke from the Mercedes’ tailpipe and dispersed it into a stand of chokecherry bushes heavy with scarlet berries. Once the car was gone the wind was the only noise. It whispered and sighed through the pines and spruces and aspens of the hilly neighborhood. I put the house key into my pocket and walked over to Laura’s rural delivery mailbox, the only kind we have in Aspen Meadow besides those at the post office. It creaked open after I pulled on the rusty cover. Inside was a small assortment of bills and ads. No letters.

I looked through the bills. Here were people who thought Laura was still alive. Public Service of Colorado, a dentist whose name I did not recognize, a doctor whose name I did. I put the mail into my purse.

As I started down the sloping driveway to Laura’s house, the wind kicked up again and sanded my eyes with dirt. Dread, sudden and unexpected, throttled me. I stopped and stared at the small house with its green-stained paneling and redwood deck.

The wind stopped. Everything was very still.

I pursed my lips and braced myself, then trotted the rest of the way down the driveway. After all, I wasn’t the first Goldilocks to go into an empty house. But at the open garage I came up short again. Had this car been here before? It was familiar.

Then I remembered: it was Laura’s blue Volvo, which I had seen many times in the elementary school parking lot. It called attention to itself via its blaring bumper stickers: WOMEN MAKE GREAT LEADERS, YOU’RE FOLLOWING ONE and HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR TEACHER TODAY? and EASY DOES IT. I did not know where the car had been the day of the funeral, but someone had put it back now.

I stepped around it carefully. There were some nicks in the flat blue paint, and the wheels sported a set of new, but muddy, radials. I did not know what I was looking for, except that it did seem odd that someone who wanted to kill herself would prepare for winter with the purchase of new tires. The doors were unlocked, but there was a decal on the window that read This Car Protected by Ungo. I had had one of those alarms installed in the van, just in case a guest at a catered function tried to filch a few dozen filets. On the side window I saw the small piece of plastic with its wire lead. If a thief tried to jam his way in through the window when the car was locked, his eardrums would never survive.

We had had a rash of car thefts in Aspen Meadow over the past six months. The rumor was that a ring of teens took the cars and a smart mechanic managed to get them fenced down in Denver before the cops could catch him. This was another indication of unsuccessful law enforcement from the sheriff’s department which I would have to bring to Schulz’s attention.

I hugged myself in the cool air of the garage. Outside, the wind whipped and shot through the trees. Time to go into the house. But not yet. The car ought to be able to tell me something. I walked around to the hood. There was a smell of either exhaust or oil in the garage. Odd. If the car had been sitting here for a week, shouldn’t things be odorless and blanketed with dust?

But then I noticed that the clay-red mud was fresh and wet, and that it clung to the car’s grille as well as the tires. I reached out to touch the hood.

It was warm.

Well, well. I clenched my teeth. Catering was safer than this, and sometimes you couldn’t be sure about catering. I needed to be quiet, I knew that. In fact, I needed to skedaddle.

But my feet stayed cemented to the cold garage floor. I had come here. I was going to go into Laura’s house, and in two days I was going to go through Laura’s locker. Kathleen had left me at the top of the driveway; if there was someone in the house, that someone probably would be unaware of my arrival. I was going in. And if I saw somebody I would scream bloody murder and apologize later. I could even arm myself, the way they did on TV Unfortunately there was no .22 slung across my chest, and I was at least fifteen steps from the kitchen and the nearest meat cleaver.

I looked around the garage. There was a large workbench. Maybe the woman who claimed to be a leader had bought herself a nice heavy hammer or wrench or even a drill. My feet made gritty echoes as I tiptoed over.

The bench was large and long and had two shelves above it and one below. Paint thinner, caulking, and a tool box rested on the first shelf. The tool box yielded a small wrench. I was about to enter the house with it when I saw the edge of something else on the top shelf. I reached up.

It was a BB gun. I recognized this type of firearm from the time I had volunteered as a counselor at Arch’s Cub Scout day camp. Many local people used them to shoot bothersome blue jays or rabid squirrels. I ducked down to check the shelf underneath, but there was only a large cardboard box marked BB’s.

I was not going to load the gun. For one thing I couldn’t exactly remember how to do it. It looked menacing enough, a lot like a rifle really, and I would just have to do a good impersonation of Annie Oakley if the need arose.

I crept through the unlocked door to the kitchen but stopped short before heading through to the living room. In that room, someone was rustling papers.

My body went numb. The unloaded BB gun felt cold and inadequate. I backed up noiselessly, grabbed a long knife off a wall mount above the counter, and turned back toward the garage.

The blue Volvo was still there. I locked its doors, jammed the knife into the edge of the window and pushed down with all one hundred twenty pounds.

The alarm split the air. I jerked the knife out and ran back around to the front of the house.

The door between the kitchen and the garage banged open. After a moment the alarm stopped. Whoever was down there had the keys to the car, and wanted the alarm off so as not to attract attention.

From the top of the driveway came an unexpected female voice, followed by a robe and a head of hair neatly rolled in cylinders.

“Hoohoo! Kathleen, is that you, dear?”

The Volvo engine started and revved. From where I was crouched behind a thicket of chokecherry bushes I could not see who was driving. Worse, the driver appeared to be wearing a ski mask.

“Hey!” yelled the robed woman to the car.

The driver ignored her and gunned the Volvo back up the driveway. I wanted to stand to get a better look, but I didn’t want the driver to see that I was the one who had set off the alarm.

“Kathleen!” the woman in the driveway was calling again, now that the Volvo had gone. “Are you in there?”

“Excuse me,” I said in a loud voice over the chokecherry bushes. “Hello!”

When I had pushed my way through the underbrush and up to her, I learned the caller was Laura’s neighbor, Betsy Goldsmith. She had come out because of the noise, but did not know who could be driving Laura’s car, or why. Her husband was a pilot, she added, and since they had no children they traveled frequently and didn’t really know too much about what was going on in the neighborhood. She did know, however, that her neighbor had died, although she had missed the funeral.

“Do you know who was in that car?” she asked me. “It looked like Laura’s. Why would someone be over here with it now?”

“I really don’t know,” I said, then added, “and I sure do wish I did.”

“Well, it certainly is strange—” she said, then gave me a quizzical look.

“I’m here to see the house,” I told her, before introducing myself.

“The caterer!” she said. An embarrassed smile flooded her face, as if she had met a famous person at the Laundromat. “Well, I certainly hope you buy that house. Most people would be spooked, you know. Don’t want to live in a house where there’s been a death.”

“Did you know Laura?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, “we waved to each other. In winter my husband would help her shovel out, sometimes give her a lift into town when that car of hers wasn’t working, which was a lot.” She paused. “Maybe that’s who it was, her new mechanic. I knew she had someone new working on the car, maybe that person was looking for her.”

By looking through her papers?

“Laura and I gave each other cookies at Christmas,” Betsy added bleakly.

“She was my son’s teacher,” I put in.

“Uh-huh, well,” she said, starting back up to her house, “nice meeting you.” She turned back almost as an afterthought. “You don’t know who the new mechanic was, do you?”

“No, sure don’t. Say,” I began as if it had just occurred to me, “you didn’t see Laura right before she died, did you? I’m, just, wondering how she was.”

“We were gone that Monday the teacher came over and found her,” she said plaintively. “That last time I saw her was—” she thought for a moment “—the Saturday before.”

“But that—” I stopped. If Betsy did not know that Saturday was when the deputy coroner had said Laura was supposed to have died, I was not going to remind her and chance getting her spooked.

“I remember,” Betsy went on, “because I was out planting bulbs that day, trying to get them in before the cold weather. Laura walked out of her garage.” She stopped to point. “She waved to me as she came up the driveway. ‘Car broken again?’ I called down to her, and she said, ‘You bet.’ And that was the last time I saw her.”

“Did you know where she was going?”

“No,” said Betsy. “Errands, probably, since she taught during the week. Then later I heard a car and I figured she’d walked to the new repair place and picked it up. But I guess not if someone’s trying to return it now.”

I shook my head.

Betsy said, “Oh, well. When I was out planting the bulbs was the last time I saw her. I don’t know who her friends were,” she added and turned away again.

I tried to think of how to put the next question before she was out of earshot.

“Kind of odd,” I said to her back. “You know. You’d think that the cops would have been interested in you hearing a car on Saturday, huh?”

Betsy turned her rollered head and robed body so she could give me a long look. “How come you’re so curious? You’re more interested than the cops were. Anyway,” she said with a final sigh, “I don’t think I told them about hearing her come back later in her car. It doesn’t matter now, does it? You don’t kill yourself because you have a car that’s always quitting.” And off she trudged to her house, a two-story affair with several decks and a wide expanse of glass.

I walked quickly into Laura’s house, through the kitchen and into the living room. There was an opened box sitting on the blue rug. Its flaps stuck out at angles, as if someone had tried to close it in haste.

That’ll teach you to break in when I’m trying to break in. Lucky for me, in a way, that the cops didn’t suspect that Laura’s case was a homicide. They could have secured the house. This way all the burglars in town could drop in at a moment’s notice.

The box contained bundles of letters and postcards to Laura. I tried to read through at least one in each bundle, skimming because I knew Kathleen would be back soon. Some were from vacationing teachers whose names I recognized. Some were from Illinois, from people whose names were unfamiliar. I pulled out a pad from my purse and wrote down the names, Singleton and Carey and Ludmiller and Druckman. There was even a bundle from the aunt who had paid the funeral expenses. The first letter was full of news of nephews traveling and a house being redone. None of this was helping me with a possible link between Laura’s death and the attempted poisoning of Fritz Korman, so I piled all the letters back into the box and pushed it into a cupboard.

Above the cupboard was a shelf of books. Beside it was the wall of photographs that I had briefly noted during the funeral reception. Laura’s library reflected sociopolitical issues of the Sixties and Seventies: Susan Brownmiller’s book on rape, works of Tillie Olsen and Adrienne Rich, Pacifism in the Nuclear Age and, of course, Our Bodies, Ourselves. In addition there were some books on alcoholism, including One Day at a Time in Al-Anon. To my surprise there was also a copy of The Dungeon Masters Guide, which I removed and flipped through. No name on the flyleaf, but I made a mental note to ask Arch about it.

The photos on the wall were of grinning family groups and Laura, white teeth, skin tanned to nut brown, and hair summer-sun bleached. She was either clad in hiking gear and leaning against a boulder, or posing with the families by a lake or cabin. Some photos were signed with the same names I had seen in the box. In the bottom-left corner of this display was one picture that gave me a jolt.

It was another youthful photograph of the girl whose picture had been in the Kormans’ desk. Now I remembered why that picture had looked familiar to me—I had seen it in this house the day of the funeral. I immediately removed it from the wall and slid the picture out of the frame. On the back was written “Love to a teacher who is smiley (ha-ha) no matter what! B. Hollenbeck.”

I put this in my purse and tried not to imagine what Investigator Tom Schulz would say about taking things from Laura’s house. I trotted into the bedroom to look around there, if only to figure out where someone could stash some rat poison until an opportune moment presented itself at a postfuneral party. The bedroom was small and neat, with dresses and skirts hung in the closet and a crocheted throw folded carefully at the bottom of the bed. The bathroom was next. Its rows of Jhirmack hair products and Vitabath shower gel and body cream indicated a person who wanted to look and smell good. The medicine cabinet yielded some soap and cream samples as well as a prescription bottle announcing itself as Ornade, a cold medicine I used myself in the winter months.

A car was coming down the driveway. I hurried back through the living room to the kitchen. A quick visual check of both those areas showed no evidence of my prying. The knife was missing from the wall mount. Of course, that was because I had dropped it behind the chokecherry bushes. No point in risking picking it up now and engendering questions from Kathleen.

My eye fell on the pile of old mail by the kitchen phone. I sifted through it quickly, but it was only more ads, a few bills, a postcard from the Singletons. Then I remembered my promise to Kathleen and reached into my purse for the mail I had brought in. Outside, I could hear her opening the car door. I glanced again at the three bills that had arrived that day.

The past due Public Service and dentist’s bills I ignored. The third was a bill from my ex-husband and Fritz’s office. This seemed very odd to me, given Arch’s view that Laura did not get along with the Kormans. Maybe she was John Richard’s patient. Swallowing hard, I opened the envelope. Inside was a bill for an office visit.

It was the date that gave me a start.

Laura Smiley had done errands and seen Fritz Korman on Saturday, October third.

Afterward, apparently, she had come home and killed herself.

CHAPTER 10

I need to talk to you,” I said into the phone to Tom Schulz. I was aware that I was gasping for breath, as if I had just finished running a few miles when all I had done was pick up Patty Sue and drive home.

“What about? You having a heart attack or something?”

“Did you talk to the deputy coroner?” I demanded. “Anything new?”

“Yeah, he said that corpse just jumped out of the grave and told him all kinds of new stuff.”

“Not funny.”

He sighed. “The only thing I found out that I didn’t know already was that there was a foreign substance in her stomach when she died. Looks as if she took some Valium before she did it, settle herself down a little bit.”

“Valium?” I said quickly. “There wasn’t any Valium in her medicine cabinet.”

“Oh boy.” He snorted. “Not in her medicine cabinet, she says. What else did you figure out going through her stuff? Ever occur to you that what you were doing was illegal? Her medicine cabinet. Maybe that’s not where she kept it. Think of that, Detective G?”

“Cool it,” I said angrily. “This is why I called you. I’ll tell you what I found in my search. Another intruder was there when I got there—what do you think of that? I had to scare off burglar number one before I could do my thing. So. Did your fellow check to see if she had a prescription?”

“Just a sec, back up. You just broke into Laura’s house and found someone else had broken in, too? You got a description of this person?”

“I didn’t break in,” I protested. “But the other person drove off in Laura’s blue Volvo. Wearing a ski mask.”

A groan. He said, “Great. The woman kills herself and nobody finds her for two days and once she’s buried her house is like a practice area for B and E.”

“You never answered my question about the coroner.”

“What are you getting at?” he said in a voice edged with irritation. “You have any suspects yet? No forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no evidence of second-party involvement at all, which is what the deputy coroner concluded, by the way. You think she was murdered maybe by someone driving her car? And not only that, but whoever did her in is interested in killing Korman too, is that your theory?”

“I don’t know why there was no forced entry. Gould be she invited the person in, I don’t know. Maybe it was someone she knew,” I said to Schulz’s silence. Then I asked, “Were her legs shaved? Did she have hair under her arms?”

“What?”

“The story is she killed herself with a razor blade. But she doesn’t have any razors. At least, I didn’t see any in her medicine cabinet,” I added apologetically. “And guess what else? She read some feminist literature. Lots of them, us, don’t believe in shaving.”

Schulz said, “Well, no wonder she didn’t have any boyfriends.” I tapped my foot while he laughed. “Sorry,” he said, “this job gives you a strange sense of humor. Look. You can slash your wrists with a credit card if you try. We had one guy down Cottonwood Creek do just that, had a grudge against American Express. She might have bought a razor just to kill herself. She might have kept the Valium in her purse.”

“Might have,” I said, “might have. She was happy, she was funny, she didn’t leave a note, you said so yourself.”

“Yeah, I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t,” he muttered.

“Suicide a big surprise to all,” I went on. “And then somebody, for reasons unknown, tries to poison somebody else in Laura’s house after Laura’s dead. Somebody?” I added with vehemence, “maybe the same person, goes waltzing into her house looking for something after Laura’s dead. And meanwhile my catering operation is down indefinitely.” I stopped. Schulz, after all, was not the enemy. I said, “Tell me this. What do you need to reopen an investigation?”

“What investigation are you talking about? The one into that woman’s suicide?”

“Of course.”

He said, “An investigation is never closed completely unless we get a conviction of some kind. Which of course you don’t with a suicide. But if you’re talking about exhuming the body—”

“Maybe I am,” I said defiantly. “Maybe that’s what we need to get this cleared up.”

“I wish I knew how I ever got you into this.”

“By closing down my business. By taking me out to dinner. By telling me I could help you. Tell me what you need to exhume the body.”

“You need,” he went on wearily, “some evidence you didn’t have before—”

“A neighbor heard a car at Laura’s house the afternoon she’s supposed to have died. This was after the neighbor had seen Laura walking into town in the morning. She didn’t tell the police because she thought it was Laura coming back with her car. There’s more. Laura made an office visit to Fritz Korman the same day.” I didn’t add how I’d come upon that bit of information. Surely stealing mail was a federal offense.

Schulz took a deep breath as if to signal he needed to get off the phone. He said, “I can talk to the doctor and the neighbor, but it’s not enough. You’d have to produce something like death threats against Laura. In writing, mind you. Or come up with some new physical evidence, a diary entry, a weapon, new indications somebody forced their way in. You got any of that?”

I paused. “No.”

“Okay then. Let’s go back to what we’re supposed to be worried about, and that is who put the stuff in Korman’s coffee. I found out the name of that particular rat poison. Just One Bite—how about that? I guess just one sip doesn’t work. But get this, it takes more than a bite to kill a human. In fact, you could eat ten times your weight and not die. You’d need a liver transplant, but you’d live. Your slick killer of Laura is incredibly stupid when it comes to poison.”

“I didn’t say it was the same person,” I said.

“Something else,” said Schulz. “The folks down at the Poison Center say it takes thirty to sixty minutes before somebody drinking that stuff would have a real bad stomachache.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “That it could have been anybody who was around that coffee machine? Which basically means anybody?”

“That’s right.”

I sighed. “Doesn’t exactly narrow the field.”

“Goldy? Listen. I got two other homicides I’m working on. They’re both higher priority than this. But I’m still trying to locate that guy in Illinois. I’ll talk to the doc and the neighbor. Why don’t you just take it easy for a day or so,” Schulz suggested. “Think about your parties or something.”

“I can’t,” I said. “All my parties have been canceled. Besides, tomorrow I’m going on another adventure. This time into a dungeon.”

Without explanation, I hung up.

After the excitement at Laura’s, a fantasy-adventure the next night promised to be a piece of cake. Or batch of cookies. Arch’s all-night games generally required baked goods to accompany the popcorn and soft drinks and assorted snacks he and his friends needed to fortify themselves for their forays into lands thick with polymorphs and other-worldly creatures. Todd was coming over so we would have a threesome. A bedraggled Patty Sue had come home from a make-up appointment with Fritz (since he’d been out Monday) and begged off from a party with eleven-year-olds by announcing she wanted to sleep the entire weekend. Todd and Arch and I were going to start off with a dinner of hot dogs and homemade baked beans and finish with Arch’s favorite sweet for these adventure nights, an oatmeal-raisin concoction I had dubbed Dungeon Bars.

I got out the oats and unsalted butter, then searched for brown and white sugars. Maybe I had made a mistake not to do the fantasy-role bit with Arch before. Had Laura? Had she been closer to him than I was? His behavior had gone from bothersome to worrisome, and he seemed to think I was out to get him.

I reached for the raisins and eggs and tried to remember what I knew about pre-adolescent behavior. It was normal for eleven-year-olds to distance themselves from parents. But as the single active parent, I found this hard to accept. Arch walked away while I was talking to him. He hastily hung up the phone at my approach. He refused to talk about Ms. Smiley. He never showed me his schoolwork anymore. His new teacher, Ms. Heath, was an unknown, except that she was the one who had discovered the body that fateful Monday.

I sighed and looked at my recipe card for Dungeon Bars.

That was the thing about cooking, I thought after mixing up the creamy batter and spreading it in the prepared pan. It was largely predictable. Children, spouses, and the economy were not. Maybe that was why I liked my job. When I had it.

Arch’s bus was due shortly so I set the timer and stepped out into the October sunshine to walk to the stop. The air was like cotton. Sunshine splashed over bright orange and black Halloween decorations in the Main Street store windows. After a few minutes the school bus came huffing toward its stop with a great show of black diesel smoke and blinking yellow and red lights.

“Why’re you meeting me, Mom?” asked Arch after the bus had chugged away.

“Just wondered how things, you know, if you, well, were ready to play tonight.”

He nodded and slung his backpack over his shoulder and started to march home. In earlier years we would have spent some time looking at the accordions of crepe paper in the merchants’ windows or talking about what costume he wanted for Halloween, or what candy he was hoping to get in his treats bag. Other times we would have crossed over to the creek to throw stones into the water. Now I exhaled hard to get the sour smell of diesel exhaust out of my lungs, and trudged up the hill after him.

“You know,” I said as I dug out a scoop of vanilla ice cream to put on his warm Dungeon Bar, “I’ve been thinking about—”

“Ms. Smiley,” he answered for me.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“What are we having for dinner?” he asked as he cautiously cut his first bite.

Dungeon Bars

1 cup all-purpose flour (high altitude: add 2 tablespoons)

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter

½ cup packed dark brown sugar

½ cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup raisins

Vanilla or cinnamon ice cream

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9 × 13-inch baking pan and set aside.

Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter with the sugars until the mixture is light and fluffy. Turn the mixer to low, and beat in the eggs and vanilla until well combined. Carefully stir in the flour mixture, oats, and raisins until well combined.

Spread in the prepared pan (batter will be thick). Smooth the top. Bake from 20 to 30 minutes, until the batter has puffed and flattened, is brown around the edges, no longer appears wet in the center, and tests done with a toothpick. Cool slightly. While warm, cut into 32 bars. Allow to cool completely on a rack. Serve with best-quality vanilla or cinnamon ice cream.

Makes 32 bars

“Beans and wieners. And don’t change the subject. How did you know what I was thinking of?”

“If I eat all my dinner may I have more Dungeon Bars later?” His earnest eyes regarded me.

I said, “Sure. Have you been thinking about Ms. Smiley, too?”

He shook his head and gave a muffled “No.”

“What I was thinking about,” I began again, “is that it certainly is strange she didn’t leave a note or letter or something. Especially since she liked to write letters. To you, for instance.”

Arch narrowed his eyes at me, just a little bit, but I got the message. When he had finished his bite he said, “Maybe she did.” He paused. “Leave a note.”

“Do you know if she did?”

He shrugged.

“Did you know if she was sad? Or upset? Or sick? I need to know, Arch,” I added gently, “because it may have something to do with someone giving your grandfather rat poison over at Ms. Smiley’s house. That attempted poisoning got my business closed.” I paused. “Did you know Ms. Smiley was having problems?”

“Not really.”

“Arch,” I said, “I found a D and D book over at Ms. Smiley’s. Did you ever play with her?”

He shook his head and got up to put his dish in the sink. I thought that pulling teeth had to be easier than this. Without looking at me Arch picked up his bag and started toward his room. Even though I knew, I asked him where he was going.

He turned to me. “I have to go make up your character,” he said, “for the adventure.”

“What am I going to be?” I asked.

He said, “A thief.”

When Todd arrived we ate and cleared the table for combat. We had no board, only a glittering array of multisided dice and Arch’s pile of books and papers. He also had some props—a small knife, which represented an authentic crosier for casting spells, scrolled pieces of paper, some marble eggs he had bought on a field trip to the western slope, and a glass of skim milk symbolizing a potion to control the colors of certain dragons.

Arch was in a bad mood. He had spoken sharply to Todd at dinner and yelled at me when I asked if I could help set things up. Giving me sharp sideways glances, he carefully arranged several small metal statues of knights in gallant and aggressive poses.

As dungeon master, Arch was our guide, he crisply informed us. He had created the adventure with its many possibilities. When it was Todd’s or my turn he told us what we were doing, where we were going, and what our options were. When we chose an option, we would throw dice to see what happened. It sounded complicated so I poured myself a brandy.

Our characters began in a somewhat downtrodden condition. Taxes, rents, and prices were all high, Arch the dungeon master announced. He brandished a yellowed facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, meant to represent the documentation for these new financial burdens.

“What are you doing paying taxes?” I whispered to Todd, who was a high-level cleric.

“Just play the game, Ms. Bear,” he replied.

To relieve our difficulties, Arch went on, we were going to have to go into a dangerous forest where the possibility of adventure was high. We were told that after wending our way through the dense array of trees, we had come to a cave. Inside the cave there was the possibility of finding treasure, but only if we could successfully fight the monsters.

I was thinking Freud would have a field day with this when Arch said that I had just encountered six giant water rats, and what did I want to do about it?

“What are my options?” I wanted to know as I poured another brandy.

“Fight or flee,” he said solemnly.

I thought. I wanted to ask a number of questions, beginning with “Just how big are these rats?” but then he yelled at me.

“Hurry up, Mom, you’re slowing down the game!”

I told him I would fight. This produced a flurry of dice-throwing to match my abilities against the rats’ power.

“What happens if I die?” I asked with some timidity while my hit points were being compared to the rats’ on a chart from some book. “Do I lose? I mean, am I out of the game?”

Arch said, “There’s no such thing as winning and losing in this game, Mom. You might just have a setback. If you die here, the cleric can raise you from the dead.”

I looked at Todd, who nodded. Some cleric!

“Do I have a weapon?” I asked.

Arch checked my character’s inventory sheet. “Yes,” he said, “but you can use other methods. Giant water rats eat any flesh, but the flesh of the electric eel is poisonous to it. So you can crack open a raw alligator egg, which the rats like, and then mix chopped up electric eel into the egg, and the rats will eat it and die.” With this lurid explanation, Arch passed me two marble eggs.

I said, “Gross.”

“You made that up,” Todd protested. “I never read that in any book! Besides, the thief is going to use his knife if you’re doing hit points.”

“I am the DM,” Arch announced. “I can make stuff up.”

“Cannot!” protested Todd.

“Shut up!” Arch yelled. He stood and brandished his play knife at Todd.

“What—” I said.

“Shut up, Mom!” Arch’s face shook with anger. His knuckles had turned white as he clutched the sword.

“Stop acting that way this minute,” I ordered. “Todd is your guest.”

“Yeah,” said Todd. He pulled his face into a sulk.

“Nobody around here cares about anything I say,” said Arch. He glowered at me, and for a horrible moment his eyes bulged with the same look of hatred I had seen so often in his father.

“I care,” I said. “Just sit down, okay?”

“I’m the DM,” said Arch.

“Nobody’s saying you’re not,” I said.

Fear knotted my stomach. Uneasy silence filled the room for a few moments, until finally Arch put the sword back on the table and sat down.

After some discussion I said I would prefer to use the knife to hunting up electric eels and alligator eggs. To demonstrate this I traded the marble ovoids for the knife-crosier. I was glad to get it away from Arch, in any event. Thanks to the dice I prevailed against the rats. Sheesh! I needed another brandy.

As it turned out the rats were guarding a secret entry to a cave where a princess was being held prisoner. Worse, the princess was immobilized by a spell. On the plus side we learned that the father of the princess was very rich. If the cleric and I could manage to find and free her, we would receive a huge reward in gold pieces from the local king.

Things took a turn for the worse for Todd. He encountered an amulet-sporting lich, a strong anticlerical monster.

“Surely clerics, can’t carry weapons,” I said.

“Only blunt weapons that can’t draw blood,” said Todd. “And they can cast spells.”

“Yeah,” said Arch, “no weapons for you.”

Todd ignored him and tried to get the initiative on the lich with a dice throw. He lost, and was attacked first. After sustaining some damage to his clerical persona, Todd asked Arch what the deal was on this heavy-duty monster.

Arch screwed his face into an evil expression that made my flesh crawl. He said, “This lich is seeking vengeance for a wizard whom the king killed in battle.” He paused. “It is very powerful. You must approach it from the side, so that it cannot sense your presence. Then you can cast your most harmful spell.”

Todd cast a spell of immobilization, the medieval equivalent of a stun gun. We were off again.

“You can’t go into that part of the cave,” Arch warned when Todd indicated his next move.

“How come?” Todd demanded.

“It’ll explode,” Arch warned. “It has a special warning device put in by the lich.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Arch,” I protested again, “they didn’t have explosives in the Middle Ages.”

He again wrinkled his face into a malevolent expression. “If you don’t want to play, Mom,” he said, “you don’t have to.”

My stomach was still churning, and my mind was feeling the soporific effects of the brandy. I wasn’t learning anything, and what I was seeing from Arch was not making me feel any better about his mental health. And while he was calling the plays, it would be impossible to ask questions about Laura Smiley or anything else.

“Mom’s going to bed,” I said, as if my duties could be lightened by speaking of myself in the third person. I bequeathed to Todd all the gold I had accumulated—on paper, of course—and said I would find out in the morning whether he had succeeded in freeing the princess.

“You boys sure are serious about this,” I commented with a yawn.

“Yeah,” said Todd, “my mother’s making me a thief costume for Halloween. I can’t wait.”

I turned to Arch. “What about you, son? Want to dress up as the archbishop of Cottonwood Creek?”

“No,” said Arch. “I’m going to go as a lich.” He said this without looking at me.

“I can see about a costume,” I said doubtfully, “if you want. But why do you want to be a monster?”

He shrugged. “You have a lot of power. You can do things you wouldn’t be able to do in real life.”

CHAPTER 11

The next morning, after dreaming fitfully of alligator eggs and my son pointing a knife at me, I remembered the key I had filched from the athletic club five days before. I doubted that going through Laura’s locker could be more productive than going through her house. Still, Arch had correctly role-cast me: I could be a thief.

Arriving at the club brought the horrid realization that the Saturday morning aerobics class was the one for masochists. Attending this class had always led to deep and serious regret. When I sidled into the back row Trixie was leading the pain parade in a high-step double-time run-in-place to the chase scene music from To Live and Die in L.A.

“Go! Go!” Trixie shrieked over the din. She was throwing her arms and legs out like a cheerleader fighting off a mugger.

“Best thing for a hangover!” shouted the man next to me as we switched to jumping jacks.

The mirror reflected new unwelcome pillows of flesh in the worst places. Not rushing around to cater was taking its toll. I went to the wall to stretch ligaments and wished to be dying in LA rather than exercising. Back in my spot I began to jog in place. My neighbor (hung over?) responded by increasing the speed of his jumps, which he accompanied with loud grunts.

We flapped arms and kicked legs while Trixie increased the tempo to what could only be described as frenzied. It was like an African tribal dance being filmed by National Geographic.

Abruptly the music stopped in midbar. I stopped too, although the maniacs around me kept hopping.

“What is the matter with this thing?” screeched Trixie as she punched buttons on the lifeless stereo. “What! What!”

She picked up one of the weights, a big one.

“Damn you!” she screamed, and heaved the weight at one of the wall-sized mirrors, which shattered with the sound of windows exploding in a small building.

“That’s worth at least forty-nine years of bad luck,” said Hung-Over.

Trixie ran into the locker room. Hal appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked bewildered, but quickly summoned all the masochists to the outside track. I decided to hit the showers.

In the locker room Trixie was complaining loudly to a group of women in shiny leotards and tights about the stereo system, the club, and life in general. I slipped into the welcome relief of a shower stall. When the crowd dispersed I would check out Laura’s locker. But fifteen minutes later the women were still bubbling with subdued chatter about Trixie and her temper tantrum, so I headed for the steam room. There I encountered the becalmed mirror-shatterer herself.

“Trix,” I said cautiously as I eased down onto the moist tile steps. “Guess you were a little pissed off back there.”

She groaned and turned over. “Guess so,” she said. “Hal’s secretary just came down. Breaking the mirror cost me three hundred dollars. Next time it’ll be my job.”

I muttered something about being in the same boat, a metaphoric fit with the clouds of steam enveloping us. Then I said, “Listen, I don’t know how to say this delicately, but I just found out about your baby. I’m sorry. I didn’t even know you were pregnant.”

She said nothing for a few minutes. Then, “Thanks, Goldy. It’s been really hard.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured again. In the clouded light I could just see her hand. I took it and squeezed; she squeezed back.

I said, “Want to talk?”

“Maybe sometime. I need to figure out how to break the mirror news to my husband … ha ha.” She let go of my hand.

“I didn’t see your husband at Laura Smiley’s house,” I said.

She said, “God, it’s getting hot in here.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, Martin,” she said vaguely, as if she had just remembered his name. “He was out of town. Doesn’t like the thought of death, anyway. Since … well.”

“Of course,” I said, and nodded in the dark mist. I cleared my throat and said, “I went over to Fritz Korman’s the other day. He was doing better, went into the office Wednesday.”

“Don’t mention that man to me.”

“Mad at the doctor? Why?”

“Don’t call him a doctor,” she said evenly as she swung her body around and rearranged herself on the room’s tile steps. “Don’t exaggerate.”

I needed a cold shower. In the last ten minutes heat and moisture had built up in the steam room to almost unbearable proportions. But I couldn’t go yet.

“Hey,” I said, “I called Fritz’s son a husband, and that was the worst exaggeration of my life.”

This brought a laugh. She said, “I know I’m being disagreeable. I’m just worried about the cash for the mirror.”

“I wrote the book on money worries making you disagreeable. At least no one’s asking if I’m premenstrual.”

Another harsh laugh.

“Anyway,” I added, “if that theory worked, my roommate would be the most agreeable person in the world.”

“Also the stupidest,” said Trixie acidly, “since she’s going to Fritz Korman for treatment.”

“How did you know that?”

“She told me, sitting right in here not long ago. She was talking to Laura Smiley about it one time when I came in.”

“What? I didn’t even know she knew Laura.”

Trixie let out a breath. “I’m not saying she knew her, Goldy. I’m just saying that one time she was talking to her. I didn’t even hear the whole conversation, since I came in in the middle and had to leave before they finished.”

“But what were they talking about? What were they saying?”

“I don’t know. They were talking about Fritz. Patty Sue was upset. When I first came in they stopped talking, you know how people do. When I asked them if they wanted me to leave, Laura was, what’s the word, cryptic. She said, ‘Trixie had the same doctor. She doesn’t think too much of him.’ ”

“Then what?”

Trixie said, “Patty Sue was saying she was sorry she had bothered Laura, and Laura was saying that was okay. I had already dumped all my grievances on Laura once before, and I didn’t want to hear any more about Korman. So I got out.”

“That’s it?”

“I think so. So what?”

I thought for a minute. Then I said, “Well, judging from what happened last Saturday, you weren’t the only one dissatisfied with Fritz.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Of course,” I said bitterly, “whoever was upset with him could have managed to give him rat poison someplace besides Laura’s funeral.”

“Odd that he would even come,” said Trixie.

“Why is that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. As I said, Laura and I used to talk in here. And usually not with your roommate around. It’s hard. With Laura gone, I mean.”

“What did you and Laura talk about?”

“Jesus, what is this? Interrogation time?”

“I’m sorry, forgive me,” I said. “I’m just interested because of my business being closed down from what happened at her house. Sorry,” I said again. I thought I was going to faint from the heat and humidity in the small dark room. The ambient temperature must have been a hundred and twenty. But instead of leaving I cleared my throat and said, “Have you thought any more about coming to our group?”

She moved around on the tiles.

“Tell me again when you’re meeting.”

“Next week, Thursday, and also Friday night, October thirtieth. I just thought you might enjoy it.”

“Well, at least I can enjoy the food, right?” She gave a harsh laugh. Then, “The thirtieth, I guess.”

“You’ll be glad you did.”

She said, “I guess,” and stood to leave. The door slammed behind her.

Twenty minutes later I was dried and dressed but still full of questions. While Trixie worked on her hair and makeup I tried to bring up the subject of Laura again, to no avail. When I asked if we could get together before the meeting on the thirtieth she gave me a curious look.

“Just to chat,” I said.

“No,” she said, then picked up her gym bag and swept out.

The locker room was empty. I groped around in my handbag for the key to Laura’s locker. L221. The L stood for Ladies; that much I knew. I wouldn’t get over to do the M side until I did my first cleaning job here. For that I could wait.

There was a sudden hush in the locker room. Saturday classes were over before noon. Everyone had left to chop firewood or shop for groceries. This set burgling into high relief, morally speaking.

I put the flat metal key into 221 and turned. Gooseflesh crawled up my neck. The key wouldn’t budge. I jiggled it and tried again. The door clanged open.

The inside of the locker door was plastered with homemade signs, and I began to wonder if Laura had a fixation with slogans. “You Can’t Find These Muscles on the Seashore.” Too much. The uppermost sign was a copy of the Serenity Prayer. She had underlined to change the things I can.

On the top shelf was the usual array of female bath accessories, shampoo, rinse, body lotion. Still no razor, I noticed, and made a mental note to tell Schulz. Not that he would care. My ideas didn’t seem to carry much weight with the local constabulary. Behind the toiletries was a paperback, which I imagined from its brittle condition to be reading material Laura took into the sauna. It was a day-by-day meditation book, advocating strength and courage and calm. For what?

Underneath her name in the front of the book were the words Sundays, noon, Episcopal church. Thinking of my old parish, I tried to remember what went on at noon on Sundays, after everyone had left. Several times I had stayed to clean the Sunday school room while Arch threw stones into Cottonwood Creek. One time I had gone into the ladies’ room to cry when John Richard slipped out with the choir lady. Arch had thrown enough stones into the creek to qualify him for dam construction by the time I came out, red-eyed and sniffly. And there had been a meeting going on, where I remembered several of the people had also been red-eyed and sniffly. What was it? Memory failed.

My hand slid across the cool metal of the shelf. In the far corner there was a piece of paper that was stuck. Perhaps Laura had put a wet bottle of shampoo or damp washcloth up there. It was probably just an old label from soap. Without thinking I pulled, and half of whatever it was came off in my hand.

The torn paper was not a label, and I cursed myself for not trying to extricate it more carefully. It was part of a yellowed article from an old newspaper with a scrawled note: Show P.S. and T. I tried to release the rest of the stuck paper from the shelf with my fingernail, but got only illegible bits.

The torn part read:

The upper left-hand corner said October 6, 1961.

I put the book with the notation about Sunday meetings, as well as the article, into my gym bag and headed for the front desk. In 1967 John Richard had been ten years old, so that even if he would be willing to explain this, he probably wouldn’t remember. If I could get Vonette sober, she might tell me more. Maybe Schulz had already found out what this was about, though I doubted that. Like the book of advice or the church meeting, or the fact that Vonette had said that Laura had been a nanny for them, I did not know how this fit.

At the desk I received a note telling me Arch’s teacher had tried to reach me at home and had been told to call here, and would I please call her at home during the weekend. Nothing urgent, she’d said, just call at your convenience.

You bet, I thought, but first I had some other business to attend to. I dialed the number for the office of Korman and Korman, asked for an appointment, and was informed that the doctors had left for the weekend. Would I like to see Dr. Korman senior on Monday?

“Yes,” I said. “I have to bring Patty Sue Williams in anyway; maybe you could fit me in around that time.”

There was a pause.

“I only need to see him for about ten minutes,” I said.

“Oh? And what is your problem, Miss Bear? Are you in pain?”

“Chronic. Lower abdomen. I know he’ll be able to help me.” I said, “There’s just so much I can’t digest,” and hung up.

CHAPTER 12

Show P.S. and T.

Why had Laura Smiley made that note on an article about a mistrial? It had been in her locker; one had to assume that P.S. and T. were available in the athletic club. It was an article about Dr. Fritz Korman, something from two decades before, something which, for a reason I did not know, had relevance for P.S. and T.

I put the article down and tried to call Arch’s teacher, Janet Heath, but got her answering machine instead. I stared at the article again.

Trixie (T.?) had said that she and Laura had talked about Korman in the steam room after exercise class. She also had said that Laura and Patty Sue, of all people, had had a tête-à-tête in the same steam room. Time for me to have a little chat with P.S. myself, especially since she was the only woman I knew who was a current patient of Fritz Korman’s.

But Patty Sue was out running when I arrived home. When she came back Arch was in and out with Todd so that it was impossible to ask questions. Then she went to bed after we finished the dishes. What was the point of all that exercise if it rendered you constitutionally incapable of staying up past nine at night?

Well, we still lived under the same roof. Sunday morning would do for questions. I dialed Janet Heath again and got her machine again. Another chat set aside for the next morning.

As usual I awoke early. Sunday, with its inevitable doldrums, is the bane of the single person who has been married. For couples and families it is a day of church, picnics, fishing, football games, pizza, and movies. Now the emptiness descended like one of the cold fogs that go creeping through the mountain valleys in winter. The frigid moisture is almost invisible, but you can see the way the icy clouds turn green pines to silver; you can feel the chill seep into your bones.

So I followed my routine. Cooking was the cure for loss. The candy for Arch’s Halloween party at Furman Elementary was the next order of business.

A batch of my Terrific Toffee would do for the sixth graders. The candy would keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. I buttered two nine-by-thirteen-inch glass pans and started to melt butter with brown sugar in a big pot. I rummaged through my knife drawer for the candy thermometer, then snapped its long bulb onto the side of the pan.

I stirred, and remembered when Arch was five. We had spent a lot of time playing the game Candyland. This had led to long discussions about how they made all the sweets for that place, which Arch believed existed outside of the game board. The Candyland cement mixer trucks were full of toffee, he insisted, because they could keep it moving all the time. Car engines had little blades to chop up peppermint drops so you could stir them into Christmas fudge. Two years later John Richard moved out, and two months after that dismal Christmas I found a hoard of old

Goldy’s Terrific Toffee

2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

2 pounds (8 sticks) unsalted butter, plus extra for pans

2 pounds best-quality milk chocolate (Lindt)

4 cups packed dark brown sugar

Note: A candy thermometer is essential for this recipe. Making a good toffee is tricky at high altitude, because the traditional soft-crack stage is not reached until the thermometer reaches 300°F., at which point the toffee is in danger of burning. Therefore, at high altitude, if you are close to 300°F., detect a burning smell, and stir up a darker substance from the bottom of the pan, stop stirring immediately, remove the toffee from the heat, and quickly pour it into the prepared pans without scraping the bottom of the cooking pan. If you have managed not to stir in any of the burnt candy, the toffee will still be delicious. It will be chewier than that made at sea level, but proper refrigeration will maintain a good candy texture.

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Spread the pecans in two 9-inch glass pie plates, and roast until the nuts have turned slightly darker and are well toasted, about 10 minutes. Stir once or twice during the roasting process to ensure even browning. Remove the pecans from the oven, spread out to cool on paper towels, and set aside until you finish the toffee.

Butter two 9 × 13-inch glass pans and set aside. Unwrap the chocolate and divide it between two plates. Break all the chocolate into squares and set aside. Using a deep, heavy-bottomed pan, melt the butter with the sugar and cook over medium to medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until a candy thermometer hits 285°F. to 290°F. (high altitude: 300°F.), the soft-crack stage. (Candy will be very hot; be sure to protect your skin and clothing through the cooking and pouring processes.) Pour the toffee into the prepared pans and immediately place the squares of chocolate in rows across the toffee (1 pound of chocolate per pan). When the chocolate has softened, spread It to the edges of the toffee. Sprinkle 1 cup of the toasted pecans over the chocolate in each pan. Allow to cool, then cover with foil and chill.

Using a large, heavy-duty knife, break the toffee into 1- to 3-inch pieces.

Makes approximately 6 dozen pieces

mint-flavored fudge in one of Arch’s drawers. When I asked him about it he said he just kept it there to smell it, so he could pretend he was in Candyland instead of being at home.

The thermometer hit 300°; I poured the bubbling brown stuff into the two pans. Then each pan got a pound bar of chocolate, which I had successfully hidden from Patty Sue. I pushed the bars around over the molten toffee until they melted into soft chocolate lakes. For fancy parties I would have sprinkled minced pecans or filberts on top, but kids were finicky about pimentos, olives, and nuts, so I always omitted them.

“Man,” said Patty Sue as she entered the kitchen at ten o’clock, “what smells so great?”

“Toffee for Arch’s school Halloween party,” I replied. I looked at her. Her face was wan. Her hair, like her general outlook, had dulled since she had arrived in August. She puttered slowly around the kitchen, and I wondered if more could be wrong with her than her cyclical problems.

“Patty Sue,” I began, “are you feeling all right?”

She was taking an English muffin out of the toaster.

“Sure,” she said without looking at me. “I was just tired after my run yesterday.” She spread chokecherry jelly on the muffin, then changed her mind and scraped it off.

I walked over to her and said in a low voice, “Are Dr. Korman’s treatments working at all? You don’t look very good. Is he giving you iron or any special medication?”

She said, “Yes, he’s giving me some pills and no, I’m not normal yet.” She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “He knows what he’s doing. Why would my doctor send me out here if he didn’t?”

“I don’t know. Why did you talk to Laura Smiley about it?”

She froze in midbite.

I said, “Trixie told me.”

She said, “Well, uh …” and then was quiet.

“Patty Sue, I didn’t even know you knew Laura Smiley.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“You talked to her.”

“One time.”

“When did this conversation take place? Did she say she wanted to show you an article about Fritz?”

Patty Sue pushed the plate away and began to catch her breath, as if she was about to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just so sorry.”

“For what?”

She stood up. “Please leave me alone, please, Goldy, I feel really bad.”

“About what?”

“About everything,” she said with a cough, before running out of the room. She called back, “Please leave me alone!”

“I’m coming with you to the doctor’s office tomorrow,” I yelled after her.

“Gee, Mom,” said a sleepy Arch as he shuffled into the kitchen. “What’s going on? What’s all the racket about? Are you sick?”

“No. I just told Patty Sue that I’m taking her to her appointment tomorrow, that’s all.”

He poured himself some cereal. Between bites he said, “You always take her. Maybe after her driving lesson on Friday she’ll be able to drive herself and you guys can stop yelling.”

I said, “I doubt both.”

He ate silently and then rinsed his bowl.

“Just remember,” he said in his little-adult voice, “Pomeroy has some old-fashioned kind of driver-ed cars. That’s what he told me. You’d better be careful.”

I said, “You and Pomeroy had all kinds of conversations, didn’t you?” Arch shrugged. “I think what he meant,” I went on, “is that his cars are the old driver-ed kind, because he can’t get an increase in funds from the school board to set up a more modem instructional program. I read about it in the paper.”

“Oh-kay-ay,” he said in that singsong cadence associated with Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I narrowed my eyes at him and said, “I need to make an important phone call.”

He nodded and drifted out of the kitchen while I dialed Janet Heath. She didn’t sound too happy about being called on Sunday morning, but I was not going to risk another encounter with her answering machine.

“I would like to see you sometime soon,” she said stiffly when we had exchanged pleasantries. “About Arch.”

I coughed. I said, “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“Well, that’s what I don’t know. I just need to talk to you about some things going on in the classroom. Can you come in this week?”

We settled on Friday before school and hung up. One more thing I just couldn’t wait for.

The next morning frost painted the kitchen windows and I had the usual go-round with Arch concerning his outer clothing.

“But it gets so hot in the afternoon,” he complained, “and kids make fun of me wearing my coat when they’re in sweats.”

“So let them,” I said. “You won’t be sick for Halloween and they will, which is all right because from what you say they don’t care about it anyway.”

He stomped out muttering something unintelligible.

The van was doing its cough-and-sputter warm-up routine when Patty Sue came skittering out of the house in white lace blouse, white skirt, and matching white tights. No coat for her either. It was no wonder she had health problems. But I couldn’t ask her about anything. We had been friends when she first arrived. What had happened?

When I pulled up in front of Korman and Korman, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Patty Sue gave me a puzzled look.

“Did you say you were sick?” she asked.

I sighed. “Yes and no.”

Entering K and K, I had always told John Richard, was an experience rivaled only by stepping into the big greenhouse at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Why obstetricians needed a jungle environment for an office was something better left to psychologists. Perhaps the sudden entry into leanness suggested fecundity. Freud, I had told John Richard to his immense irritation, would have hypothesized something more specific. I avoided the enfolding arms of a stand of Norfolk pine, threaded my way through oversized bamboo plants, and ducked a hanging basket of wandering Jew before arriving at the reception desk.

“Do you have an appointment?” asked the nurse-receptionist.

“Yes,” I said breezily. “You just don’t recognize me without my safari hat.”

“Name?”

“Bear,” I said, “as in Goldilocks and the Three—”

“I don’t have a chart on you,” she said without looking up. “You’ll have to fill out new-patient papers.” She handed me a clipboard filled with forms that would have given the IRS pause.

“But you don’t understand,” I said. “John Richard is my—”

I stopped as her withering glance shot through me. Perhaps it would be better not to advertise my presence in this office after a four-year absence. Nor did I feel welcome, given the Jerk’s assumption of my guilt in the rat-poison affair. In fact I had better try to avoid him altogether.

“Tell you what,” I said conspiratorially, “I’ll bet I could find my file back there. Just let me take a look.”

“Oh no—” she began, but was interrupted by an extremely distressed patient who had appeared at my side.

“I’m pregnant,” whispered a woman to the nurse. Her voice broke. She said, “Unplanned.” The patient signaled to her husband, who emerged from behind the foliage.

“You have two options,” the nurse started to say as I slid behind the counter’s side door.

“And we were so careful,” the woman complained.

I surveyed the file cabinets. Inside these formidable gray metal boxes the files were color-coded, I knew. Since more than thirty-six months had elapsed since I had been treated by my ex-husband, I would be classified as inactive. I opened the top drawer, A through I, pink files.

I saw some names I recognized, but no Bear. Were these current? The next drawer, J through S, was more helpful. There was Jackson, T., which would be Trixie, and Korman, M., which would be Marla. She had been married to John Richard more recently than I, and might still be classified as active, although like me she now went to a female gynecologist in Denver. There was also Korman, V.—Vonette. At this juncture I remembered that the last time I had been in the Korman office, I too had been a Korman, so these must be the current or only recently inactive patients.

I skipped the next drawer and opened drawer J through S in the adjoining cabinet, which bulged with green files. Inactive? The unhappily expectant patient at the desk was still bemoaning her fate; her husband was figuring out dates with the nurse. My ex-husband’s voice floated out his office door.

If only there were some plants behind the counter. I needed cover.

I turned back to the green files and had a sudden thought. Could Laura Smiley be in here? Would she have been active or inactive? I flipped quickly back to the S pink files: Sandoval, Scalia, Sheffield, Smythe. Back to the green files I went, checking into Slacek, Smalrose, Smart, Smith. No Smiley in either green or pink. Perhaps it had been misfiled. I began with the green H’s, where I saw Heath and Hilliard, then the J’s, Jacoby, Jermaine, and so on, through K’s, where I found Korman, G., and removed it, through the L’s, Lapham, Leduc, Locraft, and Ludmiller, when the sudden swift foot of John Richard kicked the file drawer out of my hands so that it crashed into the cabinet.

“You,” he said. “What the hell are you doing in here? I mean, besides being nosy?”

“I’m not being nosy,” I said. I gritted my teeth and tried to cut him with a glance. From behind the waiting-room bushes faces appeared, like curious pygmies. “I was looking,” I said airily, “for my file.” I waved it. “Which I found.”

Whispers from the waiting room.

John Richard said to the nurse, “Why is she back here?”

The nurse looked at me and back at the Jerk, who was a large hulking blond presence in his white doctor coat.

“She was looking for her file,” she said. “I think.”

John Richard narrowed his eyes at me again. “I suppose you weaseled your way in here with an appointment?”

I murmured assent, holding my file like a life preserver with one hand, and gesturing to the appointment book with the other. John Richard hunched over the book, and I prayed his pants would split. Then he glared back at me.

“Let me tell you something,” he said in a rough whisper. His index finger stabbed the air between us. “I don’t know what you’re up to here. But you keep out of those confidential files, you little bitch. If you try to harm my father again I’ll wring your neck. And listen up. Get yourself another doctor. Don’t come back to this office or I’ll call the cops.”

“I’ve got another doctor,” I said. “But feel free to call the cops. Ah … try the one I’ve been going out with. He shoots people for assault and battery.”

John Richard gave me a look with enough steel in it to keep Pittsburgh going for a day. Then he whisked out in a cloud of anger and white coat.

“You can see Dr. Korman now,” said the nurse, avoiding my eyes. “The other doctor. Just go on back.” She knew she had screwed up.

Patty Sue was nowhere in sight. I assumed she had already seen Fritz, come back out through the plants, and gone downstairs to the pastry shop for a bite to eat. Knowing Patty Sue, it would be more than a bite. I walked quickly past the waiting-room jungle and peered around the corner into the room where they drew blood and refrigerated samples and medications. This was also where they stored all the equipment for “office surgery,” their euphemistic term for ridding the uterus of anything unwanted. My guess was that such a procedure would be the next visit for the unexpectedly pregnant patient who had preceded me.

I knew I was also unwanted in this office. I peeked around the corner, unwilling to be removed myself.

The room with the abortion equipment was empty. I walked quietly past.

“Hi, Fritz,” I said as I entered his office. “Hope you don’t mind my coming in like this.”

“Goldy.” He looked up at me with a frown. He said, “You know you’re not supposed to come in here. Let the nurse put you in one of the examination rooms. Then I’ll come see you.”

“Oh thanks,” I said, and averted my eyes from his tall frame to the office greenery, which resembled the profusion of foliage in the waiting room. There were rows of geraniums on shelves in a built-out window, Swedish and other strains of ivy hanging behind the desk and couch, and tall rubber plants hugging the frame of a door. “Tell me, Fritz,” I said, “do you have a repressed desire to be a botanist?”

He smiled. He sat in his chair and swiveled toward me. With his head tilted, his bald pate caught the light and shone like a halo. He said, “Repressed desires? That’s shrink talk. Now why don’t you go to an examination room and we’ll get on with our appointment?”

I sat on the couch, a dark, softly stuffed expanse that exuded the sensual smell and sigh of leather.

“I’m not sick,” I said.

He chuckled. “That’s not what my son tells me.”

“Did you like the cakes?”

He nodded. “Is that why you’re here? To talk about food? Because I have other patients to attend to. Ones who are sick.”

“I need to talk to you about business. Yours and mine, if that’s okay. I won’t take long.”

He grinned again. His teeth were slightly gray, from age, but when he smiled he filled the room with his aura, a sort of older-movie-star appeal.

He said, “I don’t know anything about cooking, Goldy.”

“That’s okay,” I said and looked at a wall of framed degrees and other official-looking papers, then at a table next to the couch where African violets circled some family photographs. In these Vonette and John Richard appeared with the doctor, and there were shots of fishing buddies. There was no sign of the strange girl.

“Fritz.” I eyed him solemnly. “You know I didn’t put that stuff in your coffee. But the cops have closed down my business until they figure out what’s going on. You’d think that would be simple, but it isn’t.” I told him that I was looking into the histories of some of his former patients who might have something against him.

He said, “So if the catering doesn’t work out, you’re considering a career with the cops?” Another wide smile. “You know I can’t tell you anything about patients. I heard John Richard out there screaming at you for going through the files.” He leaned toward me. “They’re confidential, Goldy.”

“Did Trixie Jackson ever threaten you?” I demanded. “She was real upset about her stillbirth.”

He cocked his head and looked at me as if he were dealing with a thick-headed child. “It’s a very difficult thing for a prospective mother to take. It’s also hard on the doctor.”

I gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sure.” I cleared my throat. “How about Laura?”

His face lost expression. “Laura who?”

“Laura Smiley,” I said, astonished. Did he really have so many patients with that first name? I said, “Laura whose funeral you attended nine days ago. Who, a long time ago, also lived in Carolton, Illinois.” I took a breath. “Who had an appointment with you the day she died.”

He shook his head. “You’re confused, Goldy, in more ways than one.” He stood up, a signal our interview was over. “Do you think Laura Smiley messed with my coffee? She couldn’t have put pellets in someone’s drink if she was dead, could she? And I told you patient dealings are not open to your misguided prying. Now why don’t you go home and cook and let the police do the investigating?”

I stood up but pressed on. “How come there’s no file out there on her, if she was a patient?” Fritz shrugged. I said, “Why can’t you tell me if or why she was here the day she died? I mean if you or John Richard told her she had cancer or something, then the cops should know.”

He stopped by the door I had come in. He said, “She killed herself. That’s what the police know. If they want more they can come and ask me themselves. Now it’s time for you to go.”

“But what about in Illinois? I’ve found photographs of a girl, a teenager, and then I found an article about you—”

He held the door open.

He said, “Goodbye, Goldy.”

CHAPTER 13

I hadn’t received any clarification about the torn article in Laura’s locker. Not that Fritz would have told me about a mistrial or anything else. He had his reasons for not divulging information. I didn’t know what they were, but I doubted confidentiality of files was uppermost in his mind. As I swept and scrubbed and scoured other people’s houses that week, I decided my financial rationale for getting information was more important than any of his reasons. Let Fritz clean houses for a while, see how it felt. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what my investigation methods were going to be. Yet.

Schulz was no help. In addition to the two homicides he was working on, he’d had another crisis. Some late-season rock climbers had found the body of a biker down Cottonwood Creek Canyon. So he was momentarily tied up sorting out the politics of rival gangs. The department clerk said he’d call me as soon as he could.

_____

The Thursday evening meeting of Amour Anonymous, postponed because of a funeral, was similarly funereal itself, complete with surprise ending.

After cleaning two houses, Patty Sue said she was too tired to attend, but that she’d make the next meeting. Two other women who were occasional attendees called and backed out, so it was just Marla and myself. I made cream puffs and coffee and put out a bottle of dessert sherry.

“I’ll eat anything you cook,” Marla said when she walked in. “The hell with the health department.”

The sight of Marla, grinning broadly and wearing an orange and black jumper—she always dressed in seasonal colors—made my heart soften. She looked like a giant pumpkin. I hugged her.

“I asked for food, not love,” her muffled voice said into my shoulder. “We can eat the former and talk about the latter.” I let go of her and she held up a package, grinning. “Where’s your little guy? I’ve brought him something.”

I called Arch from the nether regions of the house and poured coffee into two cups.

“A whole pack of Hershey bars?” Arch’s delighted voice said behind my back. “Gosh, Marla, thanks.”

I was about to scold Marla for ruining Arch’s teeth when I got a look at his face. It was painted a shiny black.

“What’s with the disguise?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

“It’s part of some work I’m doing,” he said seriously. The whites of his eyes shone as he opened them wide. “I’m trying to make our house safer.”

“By doing what?” I demanded, but he was gone.

Marla shook her head. “What’s with him?”

“Not sure,” I said. “But I think he’s still pretty spooked about Laura’s death.”

“Well, who isn’t,” said Marla. She swallowed the last of her first cream puff and started on another. “And it doesn’t help that the dear teacher was a little nutty, either.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What makes you say that? I mean, I’m beginning to think the same thing. But you get around so much more than I do.”

“Oh, you know,” she said.

“Marla,” I said firmly, “I don’t. And every time I try to ask anybody about Laura, the person either starts crying or kicks me off the premises.”

“I’d like to see someone try to kick you off any premises.”

“Just tell me why you think she was wacko. I really want to know.”

“Well, chill out. Good Lord,” said Marla. “She would get this bee in her bonnet, I don’t know.” She sucked the filling out of her third cream puff before delicately biting into it. “I’ve always wondered about elementary school teachers anyway. They’re either slightly off base when they go in or they get that way after five years of ignoring books for grown-ups so they can gobble more third-grade texts.”

I said, “Are you talking about teachers in general, or one in particular?”

“Okay, look,” said Marla as she extended one of her fleshy arms for the sherry bottle. “Here’s an example. We used to both take our cars into that foreign-car repair shop off Main Street. She had that Volvo, I had the Jag. Neither of them were cheap cars to fix, tune up, get parts for, whatever. And I guess she had a lemon or something, or the guy couldn’t fix all the problems, but they would always be arguing when I came in. When he would go to check if they’d done all the work, Laura would turn around to me, flick her lighter on, and tell me how she wished she could torch the place. Then she’d light a cigarette and go ha-ha. So I’d ha-ha back. One time she told me she was keeping a list of all the Volvo’s problems, and she was going to send it to Ralph Nader in Swedish and put the whole car company out of business.”

“Huh?” I said.

“That’s what I said, especially when she asked me how to say piece of shit in Swedish,” Marla went on. “But here’s the weird part. The mechanic comes back and she turns all sweet. I mean, a complete switch. Making jokes. And I was sitting there thinking, What the hell’s going on here? Then after she paid him and he went back out again, she said, ‘You can bet I’m never coming back here.’ She said, ‘It can’t be that difficult to find someone who really knows how to fix cars.’ And I guess she did because I never saw her there again.”

“Well,” I said, “she told Arch the President should paint his skin black and go to South Africa, see what it’s really like to live under apartheid.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Marla with a grunt. “Anyway, is that what Arch is doing tonight? African sympathy ritual?”

The lights flickered.

“I have no idea what he’s doing,” I said. “But he’s been acting odd lately, so I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“Do you have something to talk about tonight?” Marla asked. “I mean besides Laura Smiley.”

We were quiet while I tried to take the focus off Laura and put it onto myself. The lights flickered again.

“That reminds me,” I said. “What about the unrequited love you were claiming for her?”

“I’m checking around. Looking into it. Has to do with the beekeeping Ice Man, though, I can tell you that. I just have to find someone who’s been close to him to confirm the rumor.”

I said, “Nothing ever works.”

Marla wiped her mouth. “Oh, stop complaining.” She winked at me. “Tell you what, you can complain now that our two-person meeting is underway. It’s your turn, anyway.”

I said, “Already?” then sighed while I thought. “I’ve been kind of bitchy lately, I guess,” I said. Marla was silent. “At first I thought it was the business—having it closed down. Or Laura.” I looked around. “Arch is acting strange, obviously. And John Richard is getting married—”

“Again,” Marla said in disgust.

“Third time’s the charm,” I said dryly.

More silence.

“I’ve had this … I went out,” I said, as if my date had been with a mass murderer. Marla looked noncommittal.

“The last thing I want to do is date,” I said. “That’s not even the word they use anymore, is it? You go out for dinner and then have casual sex, right? Well, forget that. Except for asking Pomeroy to eat pizza with us, I haven’t looked for male companionship at all. And Pom ignored me.”

“Hmm,” said Marla, in her knowing way. “Part of what I’ve heard about him is that he is, or was, very hung up on his ex-wife.”

“Anyway,” I said, “about going out. I did want a relationship. I just didn’t want the potential hassle.” I drained my sherry glass. “And then along comes this cop. Schulz. My business is a wreck, my eleven-year-old is acting strange, the man I used to love is marrying a geometry teacher, and I’m a prime suspect in attempted murder. This cop comes along, and … he likes me! Sheesh!”

Marla said, “You’re not that repulsive, silly.”

“Fine,” I replied. “But I want to be honest, right? I mean, I was dead set against acting nice and sweet and this-could-be-the-start-of-something-great, just to get my business reopened. He’s my age, so maybe he doesn’t believe in the casual-sex lifestyle. Maybe he doesn’t even use the word lifestyle.”

I stopped to pour myself some coffee.

Marla said, “Do men brood and worry about all these possibilities the way we do? I doubt it. Anyway, what’s the bottom line here?”

“I told you,” I said. “I’m just afraid that I’m not being very nice to him because I don’t know how I feel about him. I wanted Pomeroy, but maybe it was because I knew he would give me the Ice routine. No risk there. But Schulz likes me, he likes Arch, he likes—loves—food. All good.”

Marla said, “Pomeroy is unhappily divorced. He lives out in the middle of nowhere. I think he’s got a screw loose. Negative lifestyle, babe.”

“That’s just great,” I said. “Maybe during the three months they worked together, he gave Arch the go-ahead on being weird.”

“Look,” said Marla, “don’t worry about Arch. Don’t worry about Pomeroy. If Schulz likes you, go with it. I mean I know we’re not supposed to give advice, but this is getting kind of long and involved, my dear, when you haven’t even had the second date. You—”

Before she could finish, the lights went out.

“What the hell,” I muttered.

“Bring out the candles,” Marla demanded. “We’re talking about men anyway, might as well make it romantic.”

“Hold on. They’re back here in the china cabinet,” I said, while grunting along on all fours. I felt inside the cabinet, lit a match, and then three candles. A breath of fall air from an open window made shadows move across the walls.

“Hey,” she said, “I’m looking at your next door neighbor’s house and across the street, and everyone still has power. Looks like you’re the unlucky one. I’ll take one of these candles out to the kitchen and call Public Service.”

“Wait,” I said. My own voice trailed off as I listened for another one.

“Mom,” came Arch’s voice from nearby. “Mom?”

“Arch?” I called. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“The thing didn’t work!” Arch’s voice exploded behind me. He had come into the dining room, but he was hard to see with the black face and the waving light from the candle.

“So what is this,” I demanded, “some terrorist routine?”

“Of course not!” he said. “I was trying to hook up an alarm system to our house. One of the stupid fuses blew.”

“And why is your face black?”

“That’s part of it. Don’t you see? You have to be secretive about these things if you really don’t want people to know. You get in disguise, then you wire the place up. Don’t you even care about living in a safer place?”

“Of course I do,” I began, “but—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he interrupted, and I felt bad for being cross at him. “Todd knows how to replace a fuse. I’ll call him and he’ll be right over.” He took a candle so he could see the phone and disappeared as quickly as he’d come in.

“Good Lord,” said Marla. “Maybe we should be seeking a wee bit of professional help.”

I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t think of anything.

“Oh well,” said Marla, “where were we?”

I found my voice. “You were telling me, Marla, that I shouldn’t be worried about Arch.”

CHAPTER 14

The next day was Friday. With the early conference with Arch’s teacher, one house to clean, and a driving lesson with Patty Sue and Pom, the day looked as unpromising as the ominous morning clouds spilling like oatmeal over the hills of the Wildlife Preserve. A frost had turned the streets to glass. Foreseeing slippery-road delays meant leaving early, just after I served Arch his French toast.

He talked to me briefly when the soaked bread was beginning to sizzle. I pointed out to him that I was able to cook with electric power thanks to Todd’s deftness with fuses. Arch told me he had bought the alarm system from a radio store with his own money, and he was going to return it.

“But what I can’t understand,” I said when he was pushing the last bite through a puddle of syrup, “is why you thought we needed it.”

“Oh Mom, you’re giving me such a hard time,” he said with his mouth full. He ran off to brush his teeth and gather his things, then came back to announce, “Other people have them, you know. It’s not a crime.” Then he rushed out to meet Todd before the bus arrived.

Ten minutes later the van skidded and spewed gravel at the entrance to the teachers’ parking lot. The vehicle seemed to be as apprehensive as I was at the prospect of a teacher conference.

“Miss Heath?” I asked as I pushed through the sixth-grade door festooned with construction-paper pumpkins. Bats and spiders made from black paper and pipe cleaners hung from the ceiling of the classroom: late October in an elementary school.

Globular blue eyes set in a pale triangular face caught me from across the room, and I walked obediently through the maze of pupils’ desks toward the teacher’s table. Janet Heath, fettuccine in the aerobics class, was now comfortably ensconced in a billowing black Indian-embroidered tent dress. With her pale blond hair tied up in a ballerina topknot, she had the aspect of a kindly but powerful witch.

We had agreed to a 7:45 meeting to have enough time for a long chat before the students came in. Fixing Arch’s breakfast but missing my own now brought on a wave of queasiness.

When I had finished winding my way through undersized chairs and ducking dangling spiders, I remembered something else. Miss Heath was the one who had found Laura Smiley that fateful Monday afternoon. How she had reacted to finding the body I could not imagine, and did not want to on an empty stomach.

I said, “You wanted to see me.”

She gave me an indulgent smile. “Yes.”

There was a pause.

“I’m Archibald’s mother.”

She seemed to be taking me in.

Finally she said, “I know.”

“Well,” I said, casting my eyes around hopefully for a thermos or other sign of coffee, “here I am.”

“I’ve been worried about the way Arch has been acting in class,” she said. “Some of his behavior has been very odd.”

I let out an involuntary groan, and Janet Heath gave me a sympathetic look.

She said, “Let’s get something hot to drink in the teachers’ lounge. They’re finishing up a meeting in there, so we can come back here to talk. We’ll have plenty of time.”

When we came to the smoke-filled faculty lounge, Miss Heath waved at the gray cloud with regal hand motions. I let coffee gush into the biggest Styrofoam cup I could find. Miss Heath fixed chamomile leaf tea, which she strained through a little straw basket, a potionlike beverage to match her outfit.

She took minute sips of her tea as we walked back to the room, then said, “Arch and Laura were close, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were. He used to stay quite a bit after school, just to work on projects, help around the room, so on.”

“Yes.” More sips of tea. “I have some of the drawings he did for her. They were in with the other things from her desk.”

I said, “I’d love to see them, if you don’t mind. The drawings, I mean.”

We reentered the classroom, more like a cave hung with critters, and I followed her back to her desk. She motioned for me to sit while she shuffled through the desk drawers.

“I’ve made some toffee for the Halloween party,” I said to fill the silence.

Again the ridged brow greeted me as she stopped her search.

She said, “Sugarless?”

“No, afraid not.”

She brought a manila envelope out of the desk.

“This is all there was from Ms. Smiley’s, Laura’s, desk, besides a coffee mug. Arch was helping her with a fifth-grade project on small mammals. It’s all in here. I’m sure it’s okay for you to take his work. Just leave the rest—I’ll have to give it to the principal eventually. Arch does have extraordinary artistic talent, although he rarely uses it in this classroom.”

I drew out drawings of raccoons, mice, prairie dogs, skunks. While I was admiring them Miss Heath got up to open a window. I dumped out the rest of what was in the envelope, a grading book, a sheaf of papers with meeting announcements, a teaching aid called “Science in the Classroom,” odds and ends. The very last was a small wallet.

I glanced up. Miss Heath was writing Bring Halloween Sheets to Music Class on the board. I opened the wallet.

It contained some pictures of students, a very old photo of what I assumed to be Laura and her parents while they were still alive, some faces signed with familiar names from the box of letters and the wall of photos in her home, and then a jolt. There was a picture of a very young John Richard Korman accompanied by his parents, the much younger Fritz and pre-red-haired Vonette. Standing beside them was the same girl, the same teenager, whose picture had been in Ms. Smiley’s living room and in Vonette’s desk.

“What’s that?” asked Miss Heath. She had returned and was again looking for something on her desk.

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t mean to be prying. It’s just a picture of a family Ms. Smiley and I both know. Knew. I wonder who gave it to her,” I said as I slipped the photo out of its plastic folder and flipped it.

An immature female hand, the same as the one on the other two photos, had written “In happier times.”

Angry hot blood flowed into my face, and I was wondering just how well Laura Smiley had known my ex-husband’s family. She had lived in Aspen Meadow, moved to Illinois, then moved back here after leaving Illinois. What her connection had been to them in that state, besides a vague reference to being a nanny, I did not know.

But questions were beginning to form in my mind. Had the friendship between Laura Smiley and my son been a fluke? Had he truly been so special to her? Had she for some reason sought him out? Or had she resisted becoming friends with him, perhaps because of some unfinished history between herself and the Kormans?

“Well?” said Miss Heath. “Someone you know?”

I stared at her, unable to remember what we’d been talking about. I gathered up Arch’s drawings and then slipped the wallet and other papers back into the envelope.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Why don’t we just discuss Arch?”

Miss Heath smoothed the skirt of her embroidered dress.

“I am really very worried,” she said, “by the way Arch is acting in class. His behavior indicates some kind of distress.”

“What kind of behavior?”

“Well,” she said as she stood and picked up another sheaf of papers, “let’s go over to his desk.”

My heart dived. Arch, who was fairly neat at home, never had been one to keep an orderly desk. During parent conferences over the past five years I had always felt compelled to sort through the scrunched-up mess of papers, pencils, crayons, mittens, and overdue library books to bring a little order into the chaos. Today was no exception. The innards of his desk were precariously cantilevered out over his seat. Miss Heath was beginning to talk again, so my cleaning compulsion would have to wait a few minutes, anyway.

“I’ve been concerned about Arch this whole month,” she said. “Of course I know all the children were shocked by the loss of Laura Smiley. Many of them had had her for a teacher. The counselors advised us to have them write about their feelings.”

She shuffled through a small pile of papers in front of her and handed me one. It was written by one Jane Ross: “I feel sad about Ms. Smiley dying because she was nice to me and she hugged me when my bird died.”

Another, from Charlie Johnson: “It’s too bad about Ms. Smiley. I feel sad the way I did when my grandmother died. She was old, though.”

Clarissa Ludmiller had written, “Today is a very unhappy day because of Ms. Smiley dying. She was funny and she always made us laugh. That’s what I will remember about her.”

Then Miss Heath handed me Arch’s.

It said, “I can’t write how I feel about my teacher dying.”

I said, “Hmm.” I knew all about how important it was to get feelings out. But if he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready.

“Then,” Miss Heath went on, “I had them write in their journals, which they hand in from time to time, about someone they absolutely hate. It could even include me.”

Now she handed me another student’s journal: “The person I hate is my sister. I was so glad when I went to visit my grandparents and she went to camp instead. Grandma bought me a Hershey’s Big Block and I didn’t have to share it.”

Another journal: “The person I hate is the Iutola Koamainee because he hates Americans.”

Arch’s was next. He wrote, “The person I hate is my grandfather. Not the one in New Jersey, even though he’s a bit strange. But my other grandfather has no respect for human life.”

“What?” I said aloud. “Fritz delivers babies, for God’s sake.”

Miss Heath sipped tea and said, “That was my reaction. But I didn’t ask him about it because the journals, although I see them, are their own reflections. I always tell them that anything goes.” She paused again. “But the most frightening thing to me is the way he’s become so involved in these fantasy role-playing games.”

I let out a breath. “He is very involved with them,” I said lamely.

She went on, oblivious, “He often will stay in at recess to work on a game, or become involved when he has free time.” She gestured to the far side of the room, where a fluorescent light was illuminating a large cluster of plants. “He says he’s growing milkwort over there for one of his potions.” Then came the dreaded words. “It’s like an obsession.”

“I know,” I said. Even the most dim-witted psych major knew that if feelings weren’t dealt with they went underground and after a proper incubation period reemerged as neuroses. But an obsession? With potions?

Miss Heath said, “I’m worried about just how serious this is. He’s drifted off from his fine school record, and he hangs around with only one friend, Todd Druckman. He’s become very touchy.”

“He’s always been touchy,” I offered.

She shook her head.

“I know he’s sensitive,” she said, “but what I mean is different. In fact what happened last week is what made me think I needed to call you.” Another pause, two sips of tea. “The first month of school Arch impressed me as a generous person. He was always there with a pencil or paper clip or whatever for any classmate. But earlier in the week John Hickles started rummaging around in Arch’s desk. He was looking for an eraser, he said later. Arch, who was tending to the classroom gerbils over there”—she motioned to a cage next to the fluorescent light—“came running over, shrieking about leaving his stuff alone.”

“That’s not really typical,” I said. “Although he did accuse me of sneaking up on him the other night.”

Miss Heath nodded. She said, “Not dealing with feelings, and now sudden outbursts of temper. What do you think about seeing if the school psychologist will have a talk with him?”

This was the second time for this particular suggestion in the last twenty-four hours.

“No,” I said, “please. Not yet. Let me try to talk to him a little bit first.”

“I really think it’s a good idea. I truly think he needs counseling.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Okay, suit yourself,” she said, “but I think you’re making a mistake not to set up something right away.” There was a long pause, during which she again smoothed her skirt. “All right. Well. Thank you for coming. The kids will be here soon.” She got up to cue me that we were done. When I didn’t move, she said, “Ah, I have to finish getting the Friday activities ready.”

“Please do,” I said in a leaden voice, avoiding her eyes. “But,” I went on, “I just want to sit here and let all this sink in.” I looked down at Arch’s paper-crammed desk. “Maybe I’ll clean out this mess. Then when Arch or somebody else wants an eraser he won’t have to have a temper tantrum.”

Miss Heath shrugged. Again she said, “Suit yourself.”

I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. The students wouldn’t be coming in until quarter to nine. I could finish by then. Arch was always grateful when I cleaned things up for him, although I tried not to do it too much. Parenting seminars beat you over the head—a term they would never use—with the injunction to let the children be responsible for their own mess.

In any event, I was wondering if there was more to the eraser story than what I’d heard. I pulled the trash can over and sat back down.

Out came the math papers first. They were stapled in several bundles, with Arch’s wobbly zeros floating across the lines like jellyfish. I smiled, remembering his first-grade habit of chewing his tongue when he wrote the numbers 1 to 100. Then wadded social studies papers cascaded out, on the subject of drugs and avoiding peer pressure. My groping hands pulled out six erasers and a clump of science worksheets on gerbils and their habitats. Pencils, a mitten, multisided dice. Spelling. Book report. More gerbil info.

And then.

A crumpled envelope. Beige stationery. Something inside, which I didn’t look at. Not from school, not from home. I looked at the envelope briefly and then, with the nonchalance that often accompanies being completely stunned, reached for my purse.

The outside of the envelope read, “For Arch, my special friend.” In the upper corner, a scrawled “October 2.” The handwriting I recognized from numerous other communications—progress reports, comments on book reports, thank-you notes for helping on field trips. I dropped the note in my purse.

The handwriting was Laura Smiley’s.

The date was the day before her death.

Perhaps she had left a note, after all.

CHAPTER 15

I walked out of the school building feeling dazed. It was essential that I avoid Arch: my eyes would give me away. Guilt riddled my conscience like bullets. The letter might as well have been burning a hole in my purse. I couldn’t read it yet. I needed time to think and I didn’t have it. My cleaning assignment on the other side of town was due to start in ten minutes; at noon the owner was having a bridge party.

Waves of children were already surging into the school building. With a growl of defiance, the van started. I slapped it into first gear and took off.

The job was in Aspen Hills, a residential area dominated by boxy contemporary houses that looked as if they’d all been popped ready-made from ice cube trays. In the assigned house I put Laura’s letter to my son, her “special friend,” out of my mind while I covered the sunken tubs and tiled floors with cleaning solution before starting on the living room. The architect who had designed this particular dwelling had obviously never washed a window in his life. I propped a ladder against the highest of three stories of glass and began to climb up with a bucket containing a squeegee and squirt bottle of ammoniated solution. Below, the ladder teetered on sculptured chartreuse and pink carpeting.

I wondered A, if dropping the solution on the rug would improve its appearance, and B, if my life insurance would be sufficient for Arch should the ladder tumble. To my vertiginous chagrin I noticed that the ceiling was covered, between its rough-cut beams, with the same pink and green carpet. The architect had been impractical; the designer, insane.

After three hours the house from Atlantis was done and I was famished. The pastry shop beckoned: Cornish pasties and tea. The van once again cut a defiant and dusty path through town, but I was thankful for both the trustworthiness of the transport and the warmer weather. Despite early-morning frosts the month was remaining summery and dry. I could do without snow for a while since the blizzard of difficulties in my life was about all I could handle.

The air in the pastry shop was filled with the scent of fresh brownies. I knew Patty Sue would be down after her appointment with Fritz, sometime in the next hour. This would allow me enough time to balance my guilt with my need-to-know, a term they use someplace like the Pentagon. But I did need to digest lunch and Laura’s epistle before the driving lesson.

I reached gingerly for the crumpled letter and smoothed it out on the table.

“Correspondence?” said Fritz Korman over my shoulder.

He met my upward stare with a conciliatory nod, then lowered himself into the chair opposite mine. His sudden appearance made me wonder if he’d been watching for me from his office window.

“May I see it?” he asked as he reached for the letter, which I quickly stuffed back into my purse.

“No.” I paused. “Why are you so interested? Did the handwriting look familiar?”

He laughed. “Still playing detective, I see. No,” he said, “it didn’t look familiar. I just thought since you took liberties with my files, you wouldn’t mind if I had a look at your letters.”

“Right.” I dug my fork into one of the pasties. The spicy meat and onion scent steamed out. “Fritz,” I said, “do you want to tell me about some mistrial you were involved in?”

“Say,” said Fritz, his handsome face suddenly cheery, “doesn’t that pasty look and smell good. I believe I’ll order something myself. My patients love this place.” He winked at me. “Some of them too much. Mind if I join you?”

I shrugged.

“Listen, Goldy,” he said when he returned in a few minutes with a plate containing two brownies, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Oh?” I said, cheery myself. “About the time in Illinois? What were the charges?”

“Well.” He tilted his head and gave his serious look. “That was all a long time ago, best left in the past. I guess that’s why I was surprised when you came barging into the office with all your questions.”

I sipped tea, waited. He wasn’t touching his brownies.

“I did know Miss Smiley,” he said. He closed his eyes and bobbed his head. “Of course. That’s why I was at the funeral with the teachers and others who also knew her.”

“What was your relationship in Illinois? And did you have contact with her here? I mean beyond the last office visit, of course.”

“Now Goldy, you know I take care of women. But that doesn’t mean I understand them.” He laughed and shook his head. “She showed us this town, Aspen Meadow, one time when we came out on a skiing vacation. She was helping us with our … family. But we weren’t close after … after we moved out here. We loved Aspen Meadow. When it came time to leave Illinois, we moved here in part because we had loved it when we’d seen it before and in part because at that time Colorado and Illinois had reciprocal licensing procedures for doctors. But Laura … she … knew Vonette—”

“Why exactly did you leave Illinois? And why did Laura come to see you the day she died? If she wasn’t a patient of yours?”

Fritz stuffed some brownie into his mouth.

“Goldy,” he said between chews, “I’ve told you everything I can. You know I can’t talk to you about office matters or anything along those lines.” He Wiped his mouth and fingers with a paper napkin and then regarded me. His eyes were steely, then soft. “Look,” he went on, conciliatory again, “I know you’ve gotten all involved in this since your business was closed down because of that unfortunate incident at Laura’s house.”

I looked at him and then puffed up my stomach and chest with air. It was a yoga breathing thing I had learned in the Seventies that was supposed to calm you down. It didn’t work.

“Unfortunate,” I said, “indeed. It happened to you, and you seem pretty indifferent. What’s worse, it just doesn’t seem to be getting solved, does it? I keep getting more questions than answers. Pretty weird, huh? Do you know if Laura had medical problems? Emotional problems?”

He pursed his lips, shook his head.

“Goldy,” he said, “I don’t. She was a troubled girl, woman, that’s why she killed herself. We just all need to put losing her behind us. And I sure would like to help you financially through this particular time of stress. Let Vonette and me give you a couple thousand until you reopen. Okay?”

I shook my head, but he ignored me.

He said, “And I would appreciate it if you would quit worrying about this rat-poison silliness. Just let the police finish their job. They’re the ones with the most information. They know what they’re doing.”

I stood up to clear my place. I said, “As I recall, that was the approach that worked so well with Watergate.”

He smiled, stood up, sat down, sighed.

“Tough as nails, that’s our Goldy. Now if I had been John Richard, I would have learned how to keep you—”

“Well now, isn’t this cozy,” said Marla as she waddled up to us. She was wearing a sky-blue sweat suit embroidered with tiny turquoise feathers. Close on her heels fluttered Patty Sue, a vision in rose mohair sweater and white wool slacks. “Is the pastry shop neutral territory? No attempted poisonings allowed? No need for hostilities, it was a joke. Let’s see. What are we having? Pasties and chocolate! But I’m interrupting.”

“You’re not interrupting,” I said as I motioned to Patty Sue that we had to leave. Marla pouted. I said to her, “Fritz was just telling me how he doesn’t understand women, and he was hoping you could enlighten him.”

“Oh Fritz, this just sounds too scrumptious a topic for words,” said Marla, seating herself beside him and eyeing his remaining brownie. “I’ve never enlightened anyone in my life.”

On that hopeful note, I guided Patty Sue out of the shop. Pomeroy had instructed me to obtain a learner’s permit for her. This proved easy enough at the local office of the Division of Motor Vehicles, because, happily, Patty Sue had learned enough from her handbook to pass the written test.

“I haven’t had any lunch,” she said, once she was done and we were on the way to the lesson. “Have you?”

She picked up a hot dog and cone at the Dairy Delight next to the high school. We started to walk to class; I held the cone while she worked on the wiener.

“Patty Sue,” I began in what I hoped was a mild tone, “could we just try chatting a little bit about Laura Smiley? Please?”

She groaned.

“That reminds me,” she said through bites. “Trixie called. From the athletic club. She wanted to know exactly when it was you were going to clean over there, and when we were going to set up the food.”

“Right,” I said. “Did you all talk about anything else?”

Patty Sue gave me a glassy look. She said, “Not this time,” and began on her cone.

“What did you talk about last time?”

“I can’t tell you, Goldy.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t. It’s too … dangerous.”

Oh give me a break, I thought. I looked around. Pom had said Driver Ed was above the parking lot, next to Dairy Delight. Why the county commissioners had permitted a small commercial zone between two areas of the high school grounds was beyond me. But as with the workings of the police department, I didn’t question it.

“No more goodies now,” I said firmly to Patty Sue as she gave a longing look back at the giant glass ice cream sculpture. “You don’t want to turn into a pillar of salt.”

“Huh?”

“You know,” I said, “Lot’s wife. She looked back when she wasn’t supposed to.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Forget it.”

One of the boys in my Sunday school class, after hearing this part of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, had said his mom looked back at their house and she turned into a telephone pole. Now I gave a longing look back at my van. I would have preferred being anywhere other than where we were going.

We clambered over a sloped concrete embankment and saw Pomeroy and his students clustered in the middle of the paved expanse ahead. Although the weather had warmed to a cool fifty degrees, the teens standing around in groups wore no sweaters or jackets, but only the uniforms of their group: preppies, punks, or jocks. No hippies, though, and no ideological messages on the shirts. Things had changed.

“There you are,” said Pomeroy as he came sauntering up to us. My heart flip-flopped, but I ignored it.

“I have delivered your trainee,” I announced. “Now may I go sit over on the embankment while you teach?”

Pom shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “I need you to stay in the car with her. Most of the other kids in the class have been learning to drive for the last six weeks. But Patty Sue here will need more supervision.” He smiled at my roommate in her pink and white outfit.

She said, “I’m glad to be learning from a real driving teacher this time.”

“You can use my driver-ed car,” Pom told me and motioned to a yellow Japanese number on the other side of the lot. “I rigged it up myself so that it’s equipped with a brake on your side. That way you can slow things down if you need to. That’s old-fashioned driver ed. This is my last class of the day, so when we’re done we can go over to Dairy Delight and have hot fudge sundaes. Sound good?”

“It sounds super,” said Patty Sue.

He winked at me. “I’ll give her the stationary instructions once we get over to the course. You can drive her over,” he said, then turned to Patty Sue. “Young lady, you’re going to be driving like a pro in no time.”

Oh, God. No time was what I had for this educational experience.

“Brother,” said Patty Sue as she opened the door to the old yellow Civic, “this car sure is little.”

“Compared to the van,” I said as I slid in on the driver side, “it is.”

The teens were trudging across the course marked with fluorescent orange cones toward the Dairy Delight edge of the Driver Ed lot. There, about half of them formed a group to one side while the others disappeared into a line of dark cars with taxi-type signs on top—CAUTION! STUDENT DRIVER!

I had noticed ours didn’t have a sign, probably because it was Pom’s. Well, who needed a warning about us? I looked at the small windshield and tried to rid myself of a mental image of going through it.

Patty Sue said, “I’m scared. Well, you know what I mean. I wish Pom was the one in here with me.” That made two of us. Patty Sue wiggled in her seat. She said, “I feel so cramped.”

At that moment Mr. Wonderful was waving and honking to us from his nice big safe-looking Saab.

“First gear!” he called back and made the wagon-ho sign. In Colorado they never let you forget the Old West.

I put the Civic into first and started across the course. I looked over at Patty Sue’s feet, which were next to the brake bar. She saw me and tapped the bar. We screeched to a stop.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “Will you just please put on your seat belt and then hold still?”

“I thought you wanted me to do it,” Patty Sue said. “Anyway, my body is top long for this little seat.”

I said, “The Japanese are small people.”

The Saab chugged along in front of us, and for a moment I had the apprehensive feeling that accompanies the slow incline on a giant roller coaster. When we came up to the class, Pom jumped out. He signaled to the driving teens to repeat the course before heading over toward us. At Pom’s request, Patty Sue and I changed places.

“Okay,” he said, as he reached across Patty Sue’s lap to restart the car. “You say you’ve had some driving experience.”

“Yes,” Patty Sue said hesitantly.

I thought, If she’s lying, I’ll kill her.

“Do you remember to press in the clutch each time you need to change gears?” Pomeroy was asking. She nodded and he went on. “Then you go a little faster. Do you know how to change gears?”

She nodded again. “I’ve done it in our driveway at home. Neutral to reverse.”

Pom frowned and said, “Why don’t you move this seat back a little, Patty Sue? But watch it. When you go back, Goldy here’ll come forward. I did it that way for teenage drivers with shorter legs and adult instructors with longer ones. You all are sort of the opposite of that.”

I hated it when people referred to my being short. To make up for the coming lack of legroom I put Patty Sue’s purse in the back next to Home Beekeeping and Fifth Grade Science in the Classroom, Teachers’ Edition.

Patty Sue grunted and brought her seat back. My face made a sudden spring toward the windshield.

“Not so much!” I howled, but Patty Sue was off.

“Let me know if I’m making you nervous!” she yelled as she gunned the accelerator while we were in first gear. We spurted forward. When I was trying to get comfortable she veered right.

“Gosh, this steers so easily,” she cried, as we tilted on two wheels and my door swung open.

“No, no!” I shouted. But she veered left and then right again. Only my seat belt kept me from falling out.

“Brake!” called Pom. “Brake!”

With another screeching turn I was back inside the car and pressing with both feet on the brake bar.

“Damn you!” I yelled at a surprised Patty Sue. “I’ve got a kid at home to take care of! And at my age I don’t care for an extended trip to the hospital and a set of dentures! Now will you calm down, for God’s sake?”

“I guess I’m not very good at this,” she said, contrite at my sudden rage.

Pom trotted up to us and leaned in on her side.

“Take it easy now, girls.”

“Oh shut up!” I said. “Why don’t you get in here with Mario Andretti in first gear? See what it’s like.”

Pom again gave Patty Sue gentle explanations about the gears, clutch, accelerator, and, most important from my point of view, brakes. Getting Patty Sue into a comfortable distance from the steering wheel had meant that my feet were only inches from the brake bar on my side. The students, still standing around in groups, giggled and pointed at us.

“Sorry,” Patty Sue said once Pom had sauntered off again. “I guess I just screw up everything.”

I felt bad in spite of myself.

“You don’t screw up everything,” I reassured her as she bumped us along, still in first, to the short middle track of the drivers’ course. When she did not answer I surveyed the cones and fences, which had looked like a miniature golf course when we first climbed over the embankment. Now they presented themselves as large and unyielding. Dairy Delight and the cars in the high school parking lot, on the other hand, looked like pieces from a Lionel train set. Laughing, blase teens zoomed by on both sides of our Honda, downshifting and upshifting and steering around the obstacles as effortlessly as toddlers on trikes.

“I do screw up everything,” she said while we were waiting our turn.

“Come on, Patty Sue,” I said with false enthusiasm. “You’re going to learn to drive, the business is going to be reopened, everything is going to be okay.”

“If I had learned to drive when I was supposed to, then we wouldn’t have to be doing this today. And if it weren’t for me, your business would be reopened.”

Now she really had my attention. We were still stopped, so I said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, my talk with Laura,” she said plaintively. “If she hadn’t died, then that thing wouldn’t have happened at her house.”

It was finally our turn, so Patty Sue inched and jerked the Honda along while teens in the passing cars shouted derisively at us. She catapulted us into second and we picked up a little speed.

“Give it a little more gas,” Pomeroy called.

Patty Sue obeyed and then said, “I just think if I tell you about it, something bad will happen. Now do I go to fourth?” she asked as she swerved to avoid a cone.

I was gripping the sides of my seat.

I said, “Third. Just concentrate on your driving. We can talk about the rest later.”

But she was off and running. “I’m afraid to tell you about Laura!” she wailed. “I’m afraid of what will happen!”

Preoccupied with these thoughts, she pushed the Honda into neutral and the engine gasped. Then she put it into fourth and the car sighed until she stepped on the accelerator again.

“No!” I yelled, as we whizzed by our first set of startled teenagers.

“Downshift!” came Pomeroy’s remote voice.

“If I tell you what I told Laura,” Patty Sue shouted as her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, “you might die! That’s what happened to her!”

“Don’t worry about it now!” I shrieked over the rushing sound the wind was making in our car.

“I don’t know how to downshift,” Patty Sue called out the window.

“Look out!” I howled as a Volkswagen loomed before us.

Patty Sue swerved wildly and shattered a headlight of the VW. As she turned again my body fell forward, then back, and my feet became jammed underneath the brake bar. I looked out at the timid VW driver, who was stepping gingerly from her car.

I yelled, “My feet are stuck!”

We were speeding headlong toward the ice cream place.

“I can’t brake!” yelled Patty Sue. “I’ll crush your feet!”

“Take your foot off the accelerator!” I shouted.

She screamed, “Is the accelerator this one?” She pushed down again on the gas.

“No, no, no, no!” came voices far behind us.

Suddenly before us was Dairy Delight, where the tables and chairs were lined up like so many bowling pins. A worker came running out waving a knife. I let go of the dashboard long enough to honk. He leaped out of the way. We hit the plastic chairs and tables with a solid thunk thunk thunk. I tried to loosen my feet but could not.

“Why don’t you steer?” I cried.

“Where?” Patty Sue screamed. She wrenched the wheel to the left, then gunned the engine again.

We came up behind Dairy Delight. Two attendants were disgorging the remains of three huge ice cream barrels. Before us was a mountain of slop. On the other side of that, I knew, was the cement embankment.

The Honda hit the edge of the ice cream puddle like a water skier going full tilt; the wheels spewed a muddy wave of glop over the attendants. We skidded wildly toward the embankment.

“Oh God,” I cried, “no!”

“Help!” called Patty Sue. She began to shriek wildly, then pressed the accelerator again.

I am going to die, I thought as we hit the embankment. But we didn’t stop. The Honda climbed. We vaulted the concrete. Below us were the cars in the school lot. Patty Sue passed out.

Unfortunately, I could see our trajectory only too well. We were aiming for a roof, a car roof, that I tried to imagine being soft. A cloud. A trampoline.

But no. When the Honda landed on my van, it collapsed like a beer can.

CHAPTER 16

I really get off on women in hospital gowns,” Investigator Tom Schulz said as he patted my knee beneath the white sheet.

The room was slightly fuzzy, but then cleared to pale institutional green walls and a window luminous with the apricot light of sunset. I said to Tom Schulz, “Are you here because I broke a law?”

He gave a low whistle.

“And here I was trying to be sweet and pay you a nice visit. Look. What’s wrong with this picture?”

He handed me a photograph, whether made by the police, the school, a bystander, or the Mountain Journal I knew not. It showed the yellow Honda perched atop my van. Someone had attached the caption DRIVER ED?

I handed it back to him. “Where are the mountains in the background? There ought to be something pretty about this.”

“Your friend didn’t try to ski the car, Miss Goldy, she tried to fly it.”

A nurse swished in and I checked her name tag. I was at Lutheran Hospital. “Am I all right? Is Patty Sue Williams—”

“You’re just banged up,” she said. She checked my vital signs and shook her head. “You’re lucky you’re not dead. And that nothing’s broken. Want some pain medication?” I nodded and she went on. “You’ll probably only be here tonight. We’re just watching you.” She smiled. “They said it looks like you’ll be discharged in the morning.”

Schulz winked at me. “Why don’t you let me watch her?”

She ignored him and left.

I closed my eyes and made a mental journey through my body. My head throbbed and my back and hips hurt.

“Do you know about my son?” I asked Schulz. “What time is it?”

“He went to your friend Marla’s house. When I heard about an accident at the high school, and that you were in it—” He stopped to shake his head. “I went by your house. Your son had already come home and left you a note. On the door, very bad. Tells criminals you’re not home. Anyway, I called the place where he said he was. Talked to that yakkety-yak woman Marla, who says Arch can stay as long as you’re in the hospital.”

“Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t just touched by his effort. I was overwhelmed. I said, “That’s my ex-husband’s second ex-wife you’re talking about.”

“Well,” he said while studying the view out my window, “except for his first wife, the guy shows no taste.”

I said, “How’s Patty Sue?”

“She got here and asked for your ex-father-in-law. To treat her broken arm.”

“But he just does ob-gyn.”

“Pardon me, Goldilocks, but your friend isn’t very smart. Not to mention that her driving needs a whole lot of work.”

“Forgive me for failing to see the humor in this,” I said to Schulz. “I do appreciate your efforts, but why are you here, anyway? I thought you were investigating bike gangs.”

“I get around,” he said. “Radios are a wonderful invention. Not to mention that I was supposed to call you.”

I avoided looking at the closet, which I hoped held my purse with Arch’s letter from Laura Smiley.

“So you want to talk, or not?” he asked, tapping the sheet.

I said, “I have no job, no car, no helpers, my son is at a friend’s house, and I don’t have the faintest idea how I’m going to cover the cost of this hospital visit. I’m really not in the mood for talking about the so-called poisoning incident right now.”

He clucked his tongue. “Spare me. You were going to check out your ex-mother-in-law and your little friend Trixie and get back to me, remember? I was kind of hoping it would be over pizza tonight. In fact,” he went on cheerfully, “I could even go out and get us some right now. Have a supper date right here in the hospital. You like pepperoni?”

My head began its internal thunder again. As if on cue the nurse swept in with a small tray containing what I hoped was an extremely potent narcotic.

“Oh thank you,” I said extravagantly, and then to Schulz, “I haven’t gotten much out of Vonette. But I will. Trixie, Patty Sue, and Laura Smiley had a conversation in a steamroom close to when Laura died.” I took my pill, thought for a minute. “I found an old article about a mistrial back in Illinois. Involving Korman senior. You might want to see what you can dig up. The torn article is by my phone at home. It’s what I’ve been trying to reach you about all week. I’ll get it for you as soon as I get out.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s all I’ve found out. I don’t feel too great,” I said honestly. He had been kind to me. And he cared about Arch. I met his gaze. “Thanks again for checking on my son. And on me.”

“No sweat,” he said. “I’ll want that article. Now, have you found out anything about someone named Hollen-beck?”

“I saw the name on a photograph.”

“I got the name of the high school in Illinois where Laura Smiley did her internship,” he said. “Called out there and talked with the one teacher who was there when our departed friend was there. She remembered a student of Smiley’s named Bebe Hollenbeck.”

“Can we talk to this student? Can she tell us something?”

“She’s been dead for twenty years. But apparently Laura and this gal were very tight.”

I said, “Laura kept pictures of her.” I thought. “I’ll ask Vonette, maybe she’ll talk about that time in Illinois.”

“Okeydoke.” He gave me a wide grin. “You still not sure about going out with me? It’s one way for me to keep tabs on you, to make sure you stay safe.” He smiled. “If that’s possible.”

I returned his smile, which was difficult because pain was still knotting up my back. I said, “The athletic club Halloween party. Trick or treat. We can go together, if you’d like.”

The nurse gave Schulz an ominous stare, and he left. But not before he had nodded to me. And winked.

“There was another fellow who wanted to see you a little while ago,” the nurse said when we were alone. “He went away when he saw you had a visitor, but I imagine he’ll be back.”

“Please don’t tell me it was a doctor.”

“I don’t think so,” said the nurse. “Tall? Good-looking? Claimed he was the one responsible for this mess.”

Great. I couldn’t wait to throttle that stellar driving instructor, Pomeroy Locraft. Perhaps my window was high enough off the ground so that I could ask the nurse to throw him out.

The nurse was saying, “Do you have someone to pick up you and Miss Williams tomorrow?”

“I’ll work something out,” I assured her. “Just let me deal with one crisis at a time.”

I called Marla; Arch was fine. They were on their way out for burgers after Arch used the last of her Brie to finish constructing an elaborate trap for the resident mice.

Next I called Vonette Korman. It was past five, but she was still coherent. I reminded Vonette that I’d taken in Patty Sue at her request, that Patty Sue was a patient of her husband’s, and that it was her son who had treated me so rottenly in the first place that I had to do catering and cleaning in a van that Patty Sue had wrecked. And furthermore, I added before she could do more than make sympathetic murmuring noises, now the two of us were at Lutheran Hospital and we needed her to come and pick us up tomorrow morning. Early.

“That’s awful,” said Vonette.

“Right,” I said. My door was opening again; I needed to get off the phone. “And may I borrow one of your cars, Vonette? I’ve got to get around somehow.”

She mumbled something about seeing what she could do and I hung up.

A sweet-smelling Persian violet preceded Pomeroy Locraft into my room. He held the plant like a shield, which was probably a good thing. Patty Sue was in a cast, but my arm was in good shape. I looked around for a suitable projectile. Luckily for Pomeroy, there wasn’t one.

“Bees may like the smell of Persian violets,” I said sharply as I whacked the pillows behind my back, “but I don’t. Even if my nose isn’t broken.”

He smiled. “Actually, bees prefer wild daisies and clover. Patty Sue thought you’d like these.”

“What’d you bring her, fudge?”

“Honey candy.”

“I should sue your ass for negligence,” I snapped, “or gross incompetence as an instructor, or something along those lines.”

He placed the plant, a pale purple-and-green cloud of fragrance, op the movable tray near my head. Then in one slow motion he unfurled his lanky body into the room’s only chair. His face was pinched with stress. His hand cut wavy furrows through his dark hair. Finally he looked at me.

“Goldy, I’m sorry. The school insurance ought to cover the repair to your van. Patty Sue, I don’t know. I really didn’t think she’d—”

“Be naive and reckless at the same time? Would you even recognize naive if you saw it?” I plopped back on the pillows. “Tell me, Pom. Do your students ever say, You are driving me crazy? You are driving me up the wall?”

He blushed, but for once I was impervious to the charm of vulnerability.

I said, “And while I’ve got you to myself, tell me what Laura Smiley’s science text was doing in your backseat.”

Now he turned really red. My guess as to the ownership of that book had paid off.

He said, “We used to work together sometimes.”

“You were friends, or what?”

He let out breath that was deeper than a sigh. “What difference does it make?”

“A lot.”

He said, “Friends, yes. We’d started working together on that spring project for fourth and fifth grades. Some of the students enjoyed working with the bees. Answer your question?”

“She and Arch were close,” I said. “You know that. He’s taking her death real hard. You know anything else about her?”

He paused. I waited.

“It doesn’t matter now, I guess,” he said. He looked out the window. “We were in Al-Anon together. You know what that is?”

Sundays, noon, Episcopal church. Of course. I nodded. “Sure. It’s the support group for relatives and friends of alcoholics. Can you tell me what she said in there?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me anything about her?”

“Like what? I don’t want to betray her—whatever you’d call it—memory.”

“She’s dead. I don’t believe it was suicide, mainly because things just don’t fit.” I adjusted myself on the pillows. It felt as if the pain pill had turned my bed into a kind of boat floating in a big tub the size of the room. I said, “Do you know anything about her relationship with or to Fritz Korman?”

“Why?”

“Because of that mess with the rat poison, I’m suspected. The health department closed me down. No cooking, no income.”

“Aren’t the cops looking into it?”

“For heaven’s sake, Pom, they’re slow.” I stopped talking long enough to take a whiff of the plant. “I’m trying to get myself cleared before the holiday season. Here’s this nice teacher gone, my catering operation down. I’m trying to open a cleaning business instead, needing for Patty Sue to learn to drive … and then Patty Sue does one of her spaceout routines and my van gets destroyed. So yes, I’m interested in knowing as much as I can about both Dr. Korman senior who somebody tried to kill and Laura Smiley who somebody may have. Which includes anything you might know,” I finished, again out of breath and with my head swimming inside the bed-boat.

Pomeroy said, “What are you looking for, background?”

“Anything.”

He said, “Laura Smiley’s father was an alcoholic. It’s what killed him, finally. He drove himself and Laura’s mother into the back of a pickup over near Conifer. Alcohol level in his blood was three times what they consider to be intoxication.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“Just hold on a sec,” he said and readjusted himself in his chair. “By that time Laura was long gone. She had moved to Illinois to go to school. She had some family, that aunt who was at the funeral, there. She taught high school when she finished at the U. of I.—that’s how she met the Kormans. She came out with them one time on a ski vacation, while they were friends, to be their sort of guide and babysitter, even though she was only twenty-one or -two.

“Not long after,” he went on, “the Kormans left Illinois. Moved to the spot Laura had shown them.”

“Did she know they were here?”

He shrugged. “She knew they had moved to Colorado. She didn’t know they’d moved to her hometown. When her parents died they left her their place, and she moved back. A big coincidence which probably didn’t feel too great to anybody.”

“When she moved back here,” I said, “did she see the Kormans? Have contact with them?”

“Not socially, as far as I know.”

“What do you mean?”

He thought, then said, “Laura avoided the Kormans because there was bad blood between them.”

I said, “Bad blood from what?”

He was still looking out the window. After a minute he said, “That’s something you’d better ask Vonette, I think.”

“Great. What about Patty Sue?” Tasked. “Apparently she and Laura had at least one earth-shattering chat.”

“Yes,” he said, “they did.”

“About what?”

“You talked to Patty Sue?”

“I tried, Pomeroy, but that’s not saying I got any answers.”

“Yes, well.” He shrugged again.

“Why would Laura avoid the Kormans?” I asked. This was the real puzzle to me. “It’s too small a town to try to do that. Did she actually use that word, avoid?”

Pomeroy’s head turned. His brown eyes met mine. He said, “You asked what she was doing in Al-Anon. She had a lot to work through, her parents dying in an accident, her relationship with the Kormans going from closeness to alienation. She had sorrow, a ton of it, and a lot of grieving to do. She, yes, said that she needed to avoid these people, that being involved with them in any way caused her pain. She said that for her mental health she needed to keep her distance.”

I stared at him. I said, “Okay, first, she belonged to the athletic club, to which they also belong. Second, she became very close pals with, their grandson, who just happens to be my son. Third, right before she died she went to see Fritz Korman. She made an appointment, Pomeroy. She had an office visit the day she died. The office sent her a bill, for God’s sake. Explain how all this adds up to avoidance.”

Pomeroy was quiet for a minute. “You know, I don’t have all the answers.” He shifted his weight in the chair and crossed his arms across his plaid flannel shirt. “It seems to me,” he said thoughtfully, “that if you really want to know who would be wanting to get Korman out of the way, you ought to think of who would benefit from his being gone.”

“I’ve already thought of that.”

“In a will, it’s usually the next of kin who inherit.”

“You mean like my ex-husband?”

“Or his mother.”

I said, “Vonette would never have the guts to do the old guy in. Besides. I saw her at that reception. She was as drunk as a skunk.”

“She had a flask.”

“Aren’t you the observant one.”

“Korman was cheating on her.”

I said, “Why, you’re just a fount of information. With whom?”

“I shouldn’t be the one to say.”

“Do it anyway.”

He stopped talking and looked out the window, then he seemed to have an idea.

“Goldy. Didn’t you say you were out of honey?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Why don’t you come out to my place in the Wildlife Preserve and get some. Next week.” He stopped to think. “On Wednesday.”

“Why Wednesday?”

“You come on Wednesday. If the weather’s still warm, you’ll get answers to some of your questions.”

CHAPTER 17

With Pomeroy gone the room was temporarily quiet. Privacy in a hospital, like silence in a library, is what one expects but only rarely gets. I looked out the window, now filled with the gray light of dusk. Had Laura been involved with Pomeroy? What difference would that make, anyway? I shook my head, which felt as if it was filled with the somber light of painkiller. It was hard to make sense of the whole thing.

The note!

When I leaped out of bed my body buckled. Soreness climbed my legs. My arms felt and looked as if they’d been stretched on a rack. The pain pill had apparently only entered my head. I hobbled across the room, reached into my bag, and found the letter.

It was crumpled, leading to the conclusion that Arch had read it before stuffing it in his desk. The beige stationery crackled. Inside were perfect, looping, black letters, the writing of a teacher. It read:

Dear Arch,

Thanks for your latest idea, dungeon master! I do like the idea of being a troll. Does that mean I can cast spells? I can’t wait!

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to play this Saturday as we’d planned. I have something very important I have to do. In a way it’s like the thing you talked about in your last letter. Remember how you said most of the kids in sixth grade didn’t seem to care about Halloween anymore, how they called that and your role-playing and trivia games kids’ stuff? I remember how bad that made you feel. And now you don’t know what to do? I have something like that in my life, too. And Saturday I have to do something about it.

How about next weekend for our game? That’ll give me a whole week to get ready! Let me know on Monday, okay?

Hugs,

Ms. Smiley

But he had not let her know on Monday. Nor had he let me know that he’d had plans with Laura Smiley for Saturday, the day the deputy coroner had indicated she had died.

October the third was beginning to look quite complex.

There was a gnawing in my stomach not brought on by the van accident. I felt uncomfortable with, jealous and suspicious of, the relationship between Arch and Laura Smiley. She had been too close to him. And perhaps to the other student that Schulz had mentioned, the deceased Hollenbeck girl. These relationships smacked of impropriety, somehow. The note brought Arch into a world of adult problems, even if the reference was vague. This in turn might account for his inability to talk about the letter or to deal with Laura’s death in an appropriate way.

I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. On Saturday, October 3, something had gone wrong after Laura had walked into town to do something, and then returned by car. But what? This letter raised more questions than it answered.

Arch. I could imagine him cycling over to her house and ringing the bell. Hearing no answer, he would have come back home. But why had he mentioned none of this to me or to Investigator Schulz? What was he afraid of?

Maybe Laura Smiley hadn’t been all there in the upstairs department, after all. Maybe this desire to help students she liked had flipped her out. The problem was, whatever this drama was we were involved in, it wasn’t over.

“My little Goldy,” Vonette said after she walked in the next morning and gave me a smooch on the cheek. She smelled of Estée instead of gin: a good sign.

I said, “Thanks for coming, Vonette. Another meal of hospital food and I would have taken over the kitchen by force. Patty Sue know you’re here?”

“Oh yes,” Vonette replied as she checked her creamy orange lipstick and curly same-hue-of-orange hair in my bathroom mirror. “Got that arm set and everything. She’s going to be great. Six weeks she’ll be out of that thing, good as new, able to help you with the catering.”

“Cleaning, Vonette,” I corrected, “until we or the police figure out what happened to Fritz.”

Vonette sauntered out of the bathroom. “Let’s not get into that again. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.”

“Tell me,” I said while gingerly pulling my slip over my head, “since I’m still mulling that funeral over in my mind. Did you get to know Laura Smiley well when she was your vacation nanny?”

Vonette sat down in the room’s only chair, brought out a pack of Kools, and inserted one in the newly lipsticked mouth. So much for the hospital’s No Smoking policy.

“Yes and no,” she said. She paused to light and inhale. “Anyway, I can loan you a car. That old station wagon of ours. Used to use it to pull the boat down to Lake Powell. Before the engine gave out. Boat engine, that is. I don’t know about the wagon, probably been a year or more since it’s been started, might need a jump.”

“Do you know if Laura Smiley had any enemies?”

She laughed quietly and took a deep drag. “More enemy talk.”

“Do you know someone who just plain didn’t like her?”

She said, “Well, there again, yes and no.” She raised one thin penciled eyebrow at me. “I did know her for a long time, though. I mean not that we were close. Nothing like that. You know.”

Dressed by then, I sat down on the bed. “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“Well,” said Vonette. “Well, well.” She stood up. The cigarette drooped from her mouth. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

“According to Fritz,” I said, “John Richard would inherit the practice if he died. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You sure?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t really know either, I guess. I thought if something happened to old Fritz, like he had a heart attack while he was doing an abortion, God punishing him, y’know…” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Vonette!”

“Well? That’s still a hot issue in the church, after all.”

“It’s too bad they worry about that more than they do adultery,” I said evenly.

“Now, now,” she said. “Don’t start in on John Richard. Let’s not get into that again, please. I’m beginning to feel a headache coming on. Anyway.” She crushed the cigarette underneath one of her open-toed sandals. So much for hospital hygiene. “You know his daddy isn’t much better. I try not to think about that. Although,” she said as she felt around in her purse, “I have to admit, sometimes I’ve thought about killing the old lech myself.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.” She eyed me sadly. “But you know I don’t mean that. What the hell, I’ve made it this long, I can take it, right?” She gave me a confused look. “Oh yeah, the practice. I thought in that kind of situation, it was split between John Richard and me. I mean the Accounts Receivable. I don’t know what happens to the equipment and the patients. Who’d want to kill him to get his patients?”

I had been putting on my makeup; I paused to look at her.

“You mean, the good ones are all gone?”

She sighed. “Well, you always lose a few. You know babies die sometimes before they’re born. The patients blame Fritz. Now and then they sue, if they can stand all that agony.”

“Anybody sue lately? That you know of?”

“Nope.” She looked around the room. “My head hurts. S’pose they’d give me something here?”

“What are you taking for your headaches now, Vonette?”

She said, “Demerol.”

“Demerol? With your orange juice?”

“Don’t laugh, Goldy. You don’t know how bad the pain is. I have to have injections when I just can’t stand it.”

“Sorry. I know how much you’ve suffered.”

In truth I did not know the extent of her suffering. But I was determined to find out.

The hospital wouldn’t give Vonette any oral meds, as they called them, so she contented herself with something out of a prescription bottle that she fished from her voluminous purse.

We drove up 38th Avenue in silence. Patty Sue was hushed with what I hoped was contrition. Vonette wasn’t talking because she was deep in thought or pain or both. I was quiet because I was trying to figure out what Vonette was thinking.

“Gee, you guys,” Patty Sue said thinly into the silence, “my hospital breakfast was awful.”

“Mine was better than the other meal I had there,” I said truthfully.

“You girls want to stop and get a bite to eat?” asked Vonette. “My treat. I could use something myself, anyway.”

“Goldy,” Patty Sue said in a husky voice, “are you mad?”

I said, “What? With no business? No car? No money? Me, mad? Yes. Mad as in angry. Heading toward deranged.”

“Now, girls,” came Vonette’s soothing voice, “let’s not get all upset. We’ll have a little brunch. Couple plates of huevos rancheros and you’ll both be doing a lot better.”

She signaled to turn right. Her Fleetwood, which maneuvered like a road-bound yacht, glided into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant built in the shape of a sombrero.

Vonette invited me to join her in a margarita, but I opted for a fruit smoothie. Patty Sue ordered a Coke. She asked the waitress if it was true that the Mexicans had chocolate sauce on their eggs and if so, could she? The waitress gave Vonette a questioning look.

“Oh, sweetie pie,” Vonette assured her, “don’t you worry about my girls here. Just bring the three of us your huevos and we’ll be fine. Oh yes, and make that a pitcher of margaritas. Okay?”

Fine and dandy. It was clear I would be taking the helm of the Fleetwood after lunch. Which reminded me.

I said, “Where is the station wagon you’re loaning me, Vonette?”

The pitcher of margaritas had materialized in front of us along with Patty Sue’s Coke, my smoothie, and a single salted glass.

“Now remember,” Vonette said as she poured and then took a long swig. “We haven’t used it as our family car for a long time. We bought it a few years after we moved here.”

“Moved here?” I asked. Information might come after Vonette’s first drink but before her fourth. I said, “You know, John Richard never talked to me about his life before Colorado. About how you and Fritz met, what your early life was like in Illinois.”

My ex-mother-in-law pondered the crust of orange lipstick she had left on her margarita glass.

I said, “Please tell me.”

Finally Vonette said, “Oh, well.”

She began slowly. “We used to work together,” she said. “I was Fritz’s secretary. Sometimes he’d take me out in the country to help with a delivery. We became very close, but it was all proper, I wanted it that way, being a divorcee and all.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’d been married before, right out of high school in Corpus. My first husband was in the navy. Then I got pregnant, had my baby, and the navy moved us to Norfolk, where Joe was from anyway. You know, in Virginia. There Joe got involved with first one call girl, then another. Then he left for good. I was awfully young, just twenty when Joe moved out.” She sighed. “So when I met Fritz I’d been on my own for a while anyway, trying to make do for myself and my little baby girl.” She sloshed a large measure of the green stuff into her orange-and-salt-lined glass. “Just breaks my heart the way people don’t care about marriage these days. Or those days either. Anyway, there were hundreds of navy wives looking for clerical work in Norfolk, so off I went with a girlfriend and my three-year-old little daughter to Carolton, Illinois, because my friend had kin there.” She paused for a few swallows. “We had some tough times, let me tell you, living in first one and then another trailer court, men always thinking I was available, as if I was … loose.”

I said, “So how did the doctor fit in?”

“Oh, he was so nice to me when I was looking for work,” Vonette gushed. “Treated me so nicely. It was my first regular job. Then after I had worked for him for six years, well, his wife died of cancer. A few months later he asked me to marry him and it took me about two seconds to say ‘You bet.’ ”

“Colorado is a long way from Illinois,” I mused.

“Yes, well.” Vonette took out her mirror to do a little damage control on the lipstick. “Let me tell you, being a doctor’s wife is not all it’s cracked up to be.” She thought. “We got married in a little chapel and then started to try, no matter what, to be a family. After I had John Richard I thought everything would settle down but it didn’t.” She stopped to look out the restaurant window. “My daughter, she, well, she had some problems in school. Not too bad at first, but things got so much worse when she got to be a teenager. John Richard was just about ten then, and I guess I wasn’t paying as much attention to her as I should have. She had started out liking Fritz, but their relationship … sort of got bad, if you know what I mean.”

Patty Sue excused herself to go to the bathroom. Vonette let out a very long breath.

“My daughter … got involved with a fast sort of gang. She had gone through a lot, and she was only seventeen.” Another swallow. “Then one night, she drank too much. The kids dared her, is what came out afterwards. She drank a whole bottle of Southern Comfort, then keeled over dead. Seventeen years old, and everything to live for. It was just awful.”

I reached out and held Vonette’s hand.

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well,” she said, “you wanted to hear this story and now you’re hearing it. Just let me finish, maybe it’ll do me good to talk.” She gripped my hand. “Anyhow,” she went on, “that’s when I started getting my headaches real bad. Life wasn’t good for Fritz then either; he was, well, he couldn’t really practice, so we decided to make a clean break of things and move out here.”

“Couldn’t really practice?” I said. “Why? From grief?”

“Oh, no,” said Vonette. She ran her finger over the orange lipstick on her glass.

“Couldn’t practice,” I prompted.

Vonette signaled the waitress for another pitcher of margaritas. She touched her fiery hair and began to talk slowly again. “It was such a mess.” She sighed. “You keep asking why we left Illinois, Goldy. I’ll tell you, but the beginning of it goes back even farther, to when my daughter was sixteen. It’s awful, so please, don’t go around talking about it.”

I nodded, although I certainly didn’t like the idea of keeping whatever bad news was coming to myself.

“We had to leave,” Vonette said in a voice just above a whisper.

The huevos arrived; we ignored them.

After the waitress left I said, “Had to.”

“Yes.” She drained her glass. “The year before my daughter died, a couple of Fritz’s patients reported him to some state board. Not only that, but there was a trial coming up. That’s when Laura Smiley first got involved. Oh, hell.” Another sigh. “My daughter… said they’d had relations.”

“Who had?” I asked.

“Fritz and my daughter,” she said, just above a whisper. “She was sixteen.”

“What?” said Patty Sue as she returned to the table.

Vonette’s voice turned fierce. “I thought about divorcing Fritz then, when John Richard was nine. But he kept saying how much he needed me, and I already felt so guilty about my daughter. Well, I just couldn’t leave my son without a father. I felt so confused, and then my daughter began to run with that fast gang and to drink a lot—I thought, you know, to forget—and then she passed away. I was having these terrific headaches, and Fritz was so helpful with that pain. He was so eager to make amends. It was real tragic. He said he could get certified in another state with no problem, so a month after my daughter’s funeral, we came out here.”

We were all silent for a moment.

I said, “What was the trial going to be about?”

Vonette shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, does it? He helps so many women with their babies, and with their problems. I don’t like to think about the bad.” She nodded benevolently in Patty Sue’s direction. “He does seem to be such a good man that usually I just don’t know what to think, so I don’t. You know.”

She gave me a helpless look.

She pressed on, “I don’t want to know. It gives me too much of a headache, having a lot of hate inside me.” She stopped talking, then started again. “Sometimes I think, Vonette, just leave. I hate staying. But then, I don’t know.”

Patty Sue and I looked at each other. Her bottom lip was trembling.

The new pitcher of margaritas arrived. Vonette gave the waitress a grateful look.

Vonette said, “I don’t want to burden you girls with this.” She picked up her fork and leaned over her plate.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Patty Sue slowly began on the cold eggs. I started to do the same but stopped when I saw tears falling onto Vonette’s plate.

“Vonette,” I said, “listen. Come over to my house on the thirtieth, after dinner. I’m having some friends over to talk and have dessert. We can talk some more then. You might feel better.”

She sniffed and said, “The thirtieth? I don’t know. Call me about it.” Patty Sue reached over with her good arm and patted her on the shoulder.

“Oh girls,” Vonette said, “it’s okay. It was all a long time ago. I’m all right now.” As if to demonstrate how all right she was, she lifted her glass in a mock toast.

I said, “Just tell me one thing. You never told us your daughter’s name. What was it? I’m curious. John Richard never mentioned her.”

Vonette put her glass down and looked at me. Her cheeks sagged; her mouth turned down at the edges. Her eyes were solemn and tired and indicated a sadness belied by the wild orange hair and made-up face.

She said, “Joe and I had thought since my name was French we should give her a French name. She was such a cute baby, that’s what we called her. Baby. Only in French it’s spelled different. So she was our Bebe. That’s what I had put on her gravestone, too. Bebe Hollenbeck, 1950 to 1967.”

CHAPTER 18

Who said a little learning was a dangerous thing? Was knowledge dangerous, too? If so, what was a lot of knowledge, more or less dangerous? And if the knowledge was related but disconnected, what good was it at all?.

I clutched the keys Vonette had given me and slumped behind the wheel of the Kormans’ old green Chrysler station wagon, trying to put things in place. Vonette’s first child had been Bebe Hollenbeck. Bebe had also been a student of Laura Smiley’s when the Kormans and Laura had lived in Illinois. According to Vonette, Fritz Korman had seduced Bebe when she was sixteen. And Bebe had drunk herself to death.

Then, Fritz Niebold Korman had moved to Colorado, bringing with him Vonette and a young John Richard. Was the practice the reason? According to the torn newspaper account in Laura’s locker, there had been a mistrial. I had to get home to get the article and give it to Schulz. He’d be able to follow up on it. Whatever Laura’s involvement had been in all this, it had ended in her feeling alienation that had not subsided in twenty years of living in the same small town. But why had Laura overcome her alienation—or had she? This was the most puzzling aspect of all. What did she have to say to Fritz Korman that morning? And even if hostilities had erupted, how could she have put rat poison in Fritz’s coffee after she was dead?

And how and why had Laura died, anyway?

“Um, Goldy,” said Patty Sue. “What are we waiting for?”

I stared at the keys. It looked as if the only thing that was going to go into place was one of them. Vonette said she had cables if we needed a jump. I had had my share of bad luck with American cars and thus had no hope for a Chrysler. I thrust the key into the ignition, pumped the gas, and turned the key.

It started right up. For once, something went right.

Our first stop was Aspen Meadow Drugstore. The hospital had given me a prescription for pain medication. George Morgan, the pharmacist, looked as old as Gabby Hayes in his last picture. He was reputed to have been in Aspen Meadow since the gold rush in nearby Central City. I noticed with some satisfaction that he finally had hired a new female assistant. As I handed George the prescription I had a thought.

“George, did you fill any prescriptions for Laura Smiley?” I called after him as he was about to disappear between shelves. He turned and shook his head at me like a wise gnome.

“This’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he said.

I went off to call Arch, whom I had missed more than I would have thought possible. One night away from home felt like weeks. Worse, the doctor had recommended that I spend the rest of the weekend in bed, and that Arch stay elsewhere at least until the end of school Monday.

“Not to worry,” Marla assured me over the phone. “He loves it here. He keeps telling me how cool all the insects are in my greenhouse. He wanted me to help him with this crazy Halloween costume, but you know sewing’s not my thing.”

“What Halloween costume?”

“Oh, something from one of those crazy games. Sounds like leech. Wait. Lich. Anyway, I told him to forget it, his mother could handle the seamstress routine. If you pick him up Monday afternoon when the bus comes, I can tell you all the latest news. And not just about bugs.” She laughed and hung up.

Back at the prescription counter the new assistant eyed me vaguely. She said, “Did you say your name was Laura Smiley?”

I blinked. “Did you hear me say that?”

She wrinkled her nose at me and looked through the S prescription box. Then she punched some keys on a computer. “Penicillin?” she asked. “That’s what you had last time.”

“Really,” I said, “what did I have the time before that?”

“Can’t you remember what your prescription was for this time?”

I shook my head.

This soul sister of Patty Sue punched some more buttons. “Organidin? You had a cough?” I shook my head. “Ornade?” she asked. “Colds?”

“Don’t have one now.”

More punching.

“Looks like that’s all you’ve ever had. Let me go find George.”

“No, no,” I protested, backing away. “Let me call the doctor. He’s sure to clear this all up. I’ll have him give you a ring.”

She shrugged. Of course, it was not the doctor who would be able to clear any of this up. Maybe now Schulz would listen to me, even if it had cost me my own prescription to relieve pain.

_____

Monday morning I had the article in my hand and dialed Schulz. He was away from his desk; the clerk took a message.

“Don’t forget I have a doctor’s appointment today,” Patty Sue reminded me.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I replied. “How’s your arm? You sure you want to keep up with this other treatment when you’re in pain?”

She said, “It’s not too bad.”

I looked at poor, thin Patty Sue and felt a surge of pity. “How long’s he going to treat you for not getting your period?” I asked. “I don’t understand why pills don’t work.”

“He says they will,” said Patty Sue. “It just takes time. I don’t question him. He is a doctor, you know.”

I shook my head. Several hours later I revved up the wagon and drove over to Korman and Korman to deposit my charge. Indian summer weather was holding, and already the sun was lightening a deep blue sky. I did not see the doctors’ twin Jeeps, with their license plates that said OB and GYN, when we arrived in a cloud of dust. Patty Sue might be in for a long wait.

When I warned her of this, she said, “It’s okay, since it’s warm enough to sunbathe.”

“Go right ahead,” I said, “just be ready after I pick up Arch. I need you to look after him while I try to do a little more digging on this thing with his teacher.”

“Oh, no. Not more school trouble.”

“No. His other teacher. Laura.” I looked at her. She frowned back. I said, “Just sun yourself on the benches outside the pastry shop until I come back.”

She nodded and turned away.

I headed toward Marla’s, down Ponderosa and up Blue Spruce, roads named for the tall trees whose velvet-green arms hugged the occasional bright gold stand of aspens. I rolled down the window. No early snow had trampled down the thick, rebellious field grass or stripped the blood-red chokecherry bushes of their summer splendor. Soon the little kids in town would be dressing up for Halloween and traipsing from house to house demanding sweets. So Arch was not too old for a costume this year, after all. I remembered the lich only vaguely from our role-playing night. Researching the costume might be a pain, especially if the sewing was either complex or expensive. As it was I would be tied up getting ready for the athletic club party and molding my caramel-corn balls for the trick or treaters. The balls were wrapped in cellophane, labeled GOLDILOCKS’ CATERING for advertising purposes. I knew how irresistible Halloween bags were to adults.

My eyes avoided the brass plate on the door of my ex-husband’s other ex-wife. Marla and I had become allies in our dislike of John Richard, but not in our decorating taste. The plaque read Chez Marla.

“Darling,” she said expansively when she came to the door. “I have just made some coffee. Until your son arrives we can have the solarium to ourselves to enjoy it. Then he’s bound to run us off so he can study those damn bugs. Honestly, Goldy, I don’t know how you take the strains of motherhood.”

Tires of flesh rolled and swirled beneath her peach satin robe as she padded in front of me toward her sun room.

“How’d it go?” I asked after we had flopped onto overstuffed green-and-white cushions covering what I hoped was sturdy wicker. Around us were all manner of sweet-smelling plants that Marla took great pride in cultivating. “Did Arch behave himself?”

“Listen here, Goldy,” she said as she handed me a china cup and saucer and poured from a sterling pot next to a Rosenthal dish heaped with sticky buns. “He was great. Bugs and all. He’s so easy to get along with, it’s hard to believe he comes from a long line of bastards. Sweet roll? I took Arch to the pastry shop for breakfast and stocked up.”

I shook my head and glanced at the china dish Marla had filled with goodies. Next to it was a crystal pitcher bursting with stems of fragrant Cape Jasmine. Apparently John Richard had not had as loose a hand with Marla’s breakables as he had with mine.

Marla, resplendent in her queen-size robe, settled back into her cushion.

“Well,” she said, “I’m just going to have one of these.” She paused for a dainty bite. “So,” she went on, “the rumor is that your new roommate is this great driver.”

I said, “Don’t. Don’t even start.”

“Obviously you’ve managed to get other transportation.”

“The Kormans’ old station wagon.” I changed my mind and took a sweet roll. “Politics may make strange bedfellows. But it’s nothing to what poverty makes.”

She grunted and leaned forward to slice another roll.

I said, “I’m dying to know what you’ve learned about everybody I’ve been trying to track down lately. What have I missed? I’d rather have you than the paper.”

“Well. Trixie is making noises about looking for a new job. She called and asked if I knew a lawyer, and I said what for and she said never mind and I said criminal or civil and she said criminal, I think. So maybe Hal is doing more than just making her pay for the mirror. She asked about Friday night, were we still going to meet, and I said of course, if you’re not in jail, and the bitch hung up.”

“Hard to believe that club has put up with her for so long,” I said.

“It’s hard to believe the athletic club puts up with a lot of other stuff.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, you know,” she said. She picked dead leaves from a plant. “I really hate to gossip.”

“Bull.”

“Speaking ill of the dead, you know.”

“Laura Smiley?” I asked. “What did she do at the athletic club? You were going to check out some theory of yours.”

“Last month I stumbled, and I do mean it was by accident, into her having an intimate tête-à-tête with Pomeroy Locraft, in the hot tub, no less. Talking in hushed tones, mind you, so that I made a crack about it being too bad we had to wear suits in the hot tub, it being coed and all.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

She said, “I just figured, you know, that she was trying to put the moves on him. He didn’t appear to be responding, so I thought, Unrequited love. She killed herself. Tragic.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “He and Laura were friends, that is a fact. But as far as I can tell, it was friends, period. And maybe they were talking in low tones to avoid some of the gossipy people in this town.”

“Yeah, well. After he’d gone, Laura started talking to me about the Jerk, like all of a sudden we’re pals in hating him. She said, ‘Did he ever go after girls?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

Good God. “Did she mention any names? Like Fritz, or someone named Bebe, for example?”

“No. I told her John Richard and I were divorced and I didn’t think about him anymore, which was a lie, but I didn’t really want to get into it with her. Her eyes were bugging out, like it was more than just being nosy. More like—”

“More like …?”

Marla said, “More like she was furious.”

I said, “But about what? It sounds as if she was wickedly furious.”

“Please don’t use that kind of language,” said Marla, as she poured us more coffee. “With Halloween coming up and all.”

_____

One hour and a dozen pastries later the sound of Arch’s raised voice came through the solarium windows.

“Oh, yeah?” he was screaming.

Two boys bigger than Arch were squaring off against him.

“Wimp!” yelled one. “Faggot!”

One of the big boys pushed Arch’s shoulder and Arch swung back. The boy ducked, and the other boy gave an underhand punch to Arch’s stomach.

“Hey!” I yelled through the glass. No one turned around. “Hey!” I yelled again.

“I’ll show you,” Arch was hollering. “I’ll hit you with a fatal curse!” He was bent over, holding his stomach. With his free hand he was feeling along the ground for a rock to throw.

“Hey, stop!” I yelled again and looked around wildly for Marla, who had gone into the kitchen for more coffee.

The boys fell on top of Arch. The three of them squirmed and punched and thrashed. I turned, hit my head on an ivy geranium, then tripped over an exotic orchid, and cursed being lost in an indoor jungle for the second time in a week. Finally I made my way out to the front door.

“Arch! Arch!”

“You’ll see!” he was yelling. “Just wait!”

“Na-na-na-na-na-na!” the boys mocked back. They disappeared down through the evergreens.

“What in the hell—”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Arch said without looking at me. He dusted off his shirt and rubbed his knee where his pants were torn.

“Just tell me why you’re having so much trouble,” I said.

“I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “They hate me. I’m small, so they can pick on me. Can we go home? I need to call Todd. It’s very important.”

After hasty thanks to Marla, we swung down toward Korman and Korman where I prayed Patty Sue was waiting on the pastry shop bench engaged in the peaceful activity of sunbathing. No luck. I went into the shop. No Patty Sue and they hadn’t seen her. We drove back up to the front of the building and the office entry.

“I’ll go in and get her,” Arch volunteered.

He returned in a few minutes with the look of a young canary-swallowing cat.

“No Patty Sue,” he announced.

The nurse-receptionist whom I had disrupted when I went searching for the files came charging out the front door of the office.

Arch and I both groaned. I said, “Patty Sue’s probably dead.”

“I hope she is,” muttered Arch. “Then she won’t be able to wreck any more cars.”

The nurse banged on my car window.

“I want to speak to that young man,” she said. “I want him to give back what he took.”

Arch moaned and climbed out. He and the nurse stepped away from the car and began a low-pitched but heated discussion. Then Arch withdrew a packet from inside his shirt and handed it to her. The nurse stomped off and Arch skulked back to the car.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said in a bored tone, “I just wanted to borrow one of those surgical packs from Dad’s office for Halloween. Big deal.”

“Why?”

“I thought I could use one of those tools for, like, a weapon. Not to really do anything, but to scare people. That dumb nurse wouldn’t let me take it. I even told her my father was one of the doctors but it didn’t work.”

“Judas priest,” I said, “that nurse is going to think we’re a bunch of nuts.” I got out of the car and went into the office, demanding to know from the loony-detector if Patty Sue had finished her appointment.

“I don’t know,” she said crisply. “Here’s her bill. If she went out I didn’t see her.” She gave me a withering look and I left.

“Damn that Patty Sue,” I said when I slammed back into the car.

“Why don’t you check around the other side?” asked Arch.

“I already did,” I said. “You were just thinking so hard about what you were going to lift from your father’s office that you didn’t notice.”

“Not down below,” said Arch. “On the deck on the other side. By the back door.”

“Where, smarty-pants? I’ve only been coming to this office since before you were born. There is no back door.”

Arch gave me his exasperated look. He said, “Mom, you can drive to it.”

“How?”

He pointed. “Don’t you even know where Dad and Fritz park when they get here early? There’s a little paved part over on the right side that goes through to the back.” He laughed under his breath. “Dad says sometimes he plays hooky that way, going out for a snack or something while a patient waits.”

A snack or something. I started the car. All this time, and I had never known about this other parking area. Perhaps the Jerk had not wanted me to know how he got out for his snacks. I pointed the Chrysler in the direction Arch had shown me.

The OB- and GYN-plated Jeeps glistened in the sunlight. And there was Patty Sue sitting on a bench, her chin lifted to the sun.

“You could have told the receptionist you were leaving,” I said as I walked up. “You haven’t even paid your bill.”

“I don’t have any money to pay a bill,” she answered me. She got up.

I said, “How’d you get out here, anyway?”

“Through there,” she said. She waved a hand at the back doors of the office.

“Well, how about that,” I mused softly as I studied the exits. There were two doors, one coming out from John Richard’s side, one from Fritz’s. I remembered now from my visit to Fritz’s plant-bedecked office. There had been a back door, but it had been draped with ivy.

“He usually lets me out that way,” Patty Sue offered. “It’s like a secret.”

So that explained how Patty Sue could get down to the pastry shop without my seeing her, as had happened a number of times before. I looked at the doors. A secret. I wondered who else the doctors might have escorted out this way.

CHAPTER 19

Pluto to Mom. Come in, please.”

We were home. How long I had been pressing the button on the coffee grinder I did not know. The beans were pulverized, tit to make hot mud.

In the distance Patty Sue was running a bath.

“You okay, Mom?” came Arch’s voice again. “I need to talk to you about Halloween.”

I looked at the would-be surgical-pack thief.

He said, “You want me to make you some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Arch dumped out the dust I’d made of the beans, measured more, whirred the grinder, lined the filter with paper, ran fresh cold water. Then I remembered that I had not talked to him about what I had taken from his desk. He had been to school today. Had he noticed anything missing? And what was the bigger picture of my son and Laura Smiley, anyway? I studied him.

“Arch. Halloween. I heard you,” I said. “I need your help to do the party at the athletic club that night.”

“You look half-dead, Mom.” He grinned. The coffee maker bubbled and popped. He said, “Coffee will be ready in a sec. Raising the dead is my favorite spell.”

Right, with surgical packs. I said, “You’re not going to go stealing my knives, are you? For some curse or something?”

“No.”

“Did you ever play raise the dead with Laura Smiley?”

“Mom!”

“Well?”

He looked out the window. Then he said, “You’re hassling me again.”

I opened the cupboard. John Richard had given me one of those mugs that said BITCH BITCH BITCH on it. Why I had kept it all this time I did not know. I dropped it into the trash and picked out one decorated with rainbows. Then I turned to my son. His gaze was fixed on the pine trees outside.

“Well,” I began as I filled the mug, “you wrote letters to her. You’re into those fantasy role-playing games. You were her special friend, her special student … I just thought maybe she would be interested in your game spells, especially if she had someone important to her who had died—”

I stopped to sip coffee. Arch turned slowly from the window to face me.

“Mom. What do you think she was, weird?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.” We were both silent. Then I said, “I found the note she wrote you before she died.”

Arch snorted. “Great. You get mad at me about borrowing something from Dad’s office, and then you go snooping through my desk.”

“Arch, this is different. Your teacher called. She’s worried about you, writing stuff like your grandfather has no respect for human life. Why would you write such a thing?”

He shrugged.

I said, “You’re too involved in these games, you’re not getting along with your classmates, you’re getting into fights—”

“You know how you’re always telling me to say what my feelings are? Okay. Now I’m telling you.” He eyed me fiercely and dug his hands into his pockets. His voice broke with the promise of tears. “You’re making me angry,” he cried.

“Arch. It’s just because I’m worried about you—”

He turned to walk out of the kitchen.

“Now where are you going?”

“To the car. I left the rest of my game stuff out there.”

“Please don’t leave. I don’t want us to have a big fight.”

He turned and glared at me. “You don’t want to fight?” I nodded and he went on. “Just make that costume I marked for Marla. Okay? It’s in here.” He riffled through a book of fantasy characters he had left on the kitchen table. “Then after Halloween we can talk about worrying. Okay? I just need to finish this thing that I’m doing right now.”

“Look, just sit down and cool off for a sec, will you? Tell me why you’re so angry.”

He sat, then crossed his legs and arms.

“Mom, why is it okay for you to go through my stuff? I thought you only cleaned for people who wanted you to do it for them. And I don’t.”

I dropped three ice cubes into a Coke glass for Arch.

“Archibald,” I said, “listen to me, would you, please?”

He stared at me from behind the rimmed glasses.

“You can help. It’s like being a detective. After this we can talk about Halloween, I promise. Maybe we could get your Dad to buy a costume.”

“Oh, sure.”

Arch poured his soft drink and slurped the bubbles that climbed the sides of the glass. He wrinkled his nose, brought the glass down with a bang. Upstairs Patty Sue was splashing and singing in her bubble bath.

“She invited you over that Saturday,” I began, “and then said she couldn’t get together after all. Did you go anyway?”

He said, “Yeah, I rode my bike over later. She had company.”

“How do you know?”

“Her blue car wasn’t there. She was having it fixed. She was always having trouble with that stupid car. Anyway, somebody else was there.”

“What kind of car? Foreign? American? Pickup? What?”

“I don’t remember. I just, like, heard the engine.”

“Arch.”

“I don’t. And don’t ask me what time it was because I don’t remember that either. You’re just like that policeman, acting as if I’m guilty of something.”

“Sorry.”

“I got the Good Citizen award in fourth grade, you know.”

“Okay, okay. You went to her house. Did you see anything unusual?”

“No, Mom,” he said, exasperated. “I don’t even know what was usual.”

I paused for a minute. “Do you know about a student of hers named Bebe Hollenbeck?”

“No. Can I go now?”

“Bebe was her special friend,” I said, “as you were.”

“Right.”

“Maybe,” I went on, “Bebe was shy, like you.”

“Maybe they wrote letters,” he said, “and maybe they played D and D. Who cares? I wish you would just stick to cooking.”

“If you want to eat supper, mister, don’t be difficult. I can’t cook until I get this figured out, and I can’t make any money cooking until I get myself cleared in this rat poison mess.”

Arch sighed.

“In her note to you, she said she had something important to do. Do you know what it was?”

He chewed his bottom lip. “Not really.”

“What?”

He looked out the window again.

“Arch,” I said slowly. “Maybe she didn’t commit suicide. Maybe she was—”

“I gotta go, Mom.”

I looked at him, and pain filled the area behind my eyes. How much adult eccentricity could he take? From a screwball grandfather, an alcoholic grandmother, a philandering father, a suicidal teacher, and a demanding mother? Poor Arch.

He stood up and gave me his most bored look.

He said, “Can I go?”

“No.”

He let out a gust of air and flopped back into his chair. “Now what?”

“Just tell me if you know whether for some reason you think someone wanted Laura Smiley dead.”

“No.”

The phone rang.

“No,” I said, “no one wanted her dead, or no, you won’t tell me?”

The phone kept on ringing; Arch glared at me.

“Arch!”

A sob exploded from him. Then another. Tears sprouted from his eyes.

“Leave me alone!” he yelled. “I don’t want to talk about Ms. Smiley anymore! Can’t you see that, Mom? So just stop this! Stop!”

The phone insisted on ringing. I reached out for Arch’s shoulder only to have him whack my hand away. He ran out of the kitchen.

I grabbed for the phone receiver and yelled, “What is it?”

“What is what?” asked Tom Schulz.

“Sheesh.”

“Well, well, Miss Goldilocks, I can see you’re in your usual sunny mood.”

“Why are you calling?”

“Man,” he said, “it is a good thing that I am such a patient kind of guy. I mean, a very good thing. And that I can inquire how you’re coming along on talking to your mother-in-law—”

“Ex-mother-in-law.”

“Sorry there. Ex-maw-in-law. Tell me what she said about her daughter who died. The one who drank.”

“How did you know about that?”

“I’ve been on the phone to Illinois; Finally getting some answers around here.”

I could hear Arch thrashing about in the nether regions of the house.

I said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”

“I thought you were interested in solving this.”

“I’ll call you back,” I said. “I have to work something out with my child.”

I followed the noise from Arch.

He had not gone directly to the car to get his equipment, as he had indicated he needed to do. I had heard him clomping down the stairs to the basement, which was the laundry and storage area. Now with the door cracked I could hear him rummaging through boxes and papers. After a few moments he came traipsing back up and I darted into a bedroom I used for filing, sewing, and storing table linens for banquets. On the bed I spread out several yards of unbleached muslin for the costume, in case he came in. Then I heard him clattering around in the kitchen. The noise sounded like the clank of butcher knife blades.

I prayed. After a few more minutes of racket he slammed out the front door. I crept back to the kitchen and counted my knives, every one of them. They were all there. Whatever it was he wanted, he apparently hadn’t found it yet.

I hurried to the front of the house and scanned the driveway. Arch had left the station wagon door open and was throwing the books and bags of stuff he had amassed at Marla’s onto the ground. He was closing the door when he stopped and bent in again, as if he’d seen something he’d forgotten. His head emerged from the car. He looked in all directions to see if he was being watched. I leaned back from the front window. After a few seconds I looked back: he was reemerging from the car, tucking something underneath his shirt. Then he gathered up his paraphernalia from the ground and started back toward the house. I trotted out to the kitchen, picked up the character book, and slipped into the sewing room.

After a few minutes I had the bobbin filled with beige thread and I went to knock on his door.

“I’m getting started on your costume,” I called in. “Want to take a look at it?”

“No, Mom,” he said. “Just go away. Please.”

CHAPTER 20

It certainly is a good thing you’ve got a crack civilian detective working on this case,” I greeted Tom Schulz when he answered his phone. “Although she can be difficult, she comes up with remarkable info.”

“Goldilocks? ’Zat you? Must be.”

“Such enthusiasm.”

“Hey,” said Schulz, “besides close you down, what did I ever do to you? Except be nice? Don’t give me a hard time. Let’s start over.”

With as much patience as I could muster, I told him about my conversation with Vonette. Then I asked, “What did you find out from the neighbor and the doctor? About the day Laura died?”

“Not a whole lot. She saw the doc when she went into town.”

“What did he see her for?”

“Routine visit, so he says. Not much more I can go on than that. The neighbor heard a car, not a gunshot. But I did find some things out from Illinois.”

“Such as.”

“I found the guy who worked the case. Twenty years ago there was this huge brouhaha over Korman.”

I said, “But it all ended in a mistrial.”

“Did you call Illinois, too?”

“No, it was in this article I told you about. I found it in Laura’s locker, but I ripped it trying to get it out.” I read him the fragment.

“That’s what I like about you, Goldy—you’re not bothered by technicalities like search warrants.”