Chopping Spree

“You slipped on them,” commented Sawyer, ever the skeptic.

“Yes. I was carrying the guitar, and it was heavy, and the women had dumped the shoes in piles all over the place. Leather is slippery,” I said fiercely, giving them a glare of my own. “I stumbled, fell, and hit one of those big cabinets. One of the doors came open, and I saw what I thought was a mannequin in a tuxedo, but… it groaned. I… It was Barry. I tried to pull him out, and he groaned again, and then I saw all the blood. I took his pulse. It was weak. And then I guess I was going to do a compression—”

“You didn’t call for help?” Sawyer again.

I took a shaky breath. After a moment, I said, “No. I didn’t. I should have, in retrospect. But my theory now is that whoever was trying to kill him was right behind the cabinet, waiting to finish the job. As soon as the salespeople left, after I’d pulled Barry out of the cabinet and checked for his pulse, the killer whacked me with the guitar. He or she wanted to get me out of the way and finish the job—”

Collins held up a hand, then spoke slowly. “Did you see who hit you?”

“No, I didn’t see a thing. I didn’t hear anybody’s voice, either. One minute I had Barry’s wrist in my hand, the next my head was smashed and I saw nothing but black. After a bit, I heard Julian calling me, and someone waved ammonia in my face. Then you guys showed up, and I was carted to the hospital. And now we’re here.”

Collins said, “Did you see the weapon used to kill Barry Dean?”

There was a silence. I had not told Hulsey about this; now I wondered what in the world to say. The last thing I wanted to do was implicate Julian, Liz, or myself any further. But refusing to answer would look worse. And lying… what would that do?

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I saw it. It was… one of my knives. From a new set I bought recently.”

Collins opened his mouth to ask another question, but Steve Hulsey was too quick for him.

“That does it, gentlemen. Thank you.” He stood and motioned for me to do the same. I got to my feet too quickly and swayed, suddenly dizzy. I blinked, saw my chair, and grabbed the metal back.

“Mrs. Schulz, please don’t leave town,” intoned Sawyer, as he slapped his notebook closed. My kick-ass lawyer held the door open for me and I walked through.

“I need you to visit my office,” Hulsey told me. “Will tomorrow morning work?” His office, as it turned out, was half a mile from Westside Mall. What catered event did I have the next day, or rather, that very day, since it was now well past midnight? My beaten-up, woozy mind drew a blank. When do you need me there? I asked Hulsey. Ten A.M. sharp, Hulsey replied. And in the meantime, talk to no one.

Tom, oh dear God, Tom, was waiting for me on a plastic chair in the lobby. He walked toward me swiftly, arms outstretched. Hulsey vanished.

Enfolded in my husband’s arms, my body shook uncontrollably. I swallowed and tried to pull myself together. There was no way I was going to fall apart in the lobby of the sheriff’s department.

“Let’s go,” Tom whispered.

He gently helped me into his Chrysler, and murmured that he’d arrange for my van to be brought back to the house early the next morning. I leaned my head back and inhaled the comforting scent of Tom’s car. I wanted so badly to be in bed, to be asleep. But something was gnawing at me.

“Where’s Marla?” I asked as Tom started the engine. “Did she and Julian take both of their cars back to her house in Aspen Meadow? Or did he go back to Boulder?”

Tom let the engine idle, his hands on the steering wheel. Illuminated by the lot’s pink streetlights, his face was luminescent. Ominous. “Do you know how many cups of coffee Julian drank today? Yesterday, that is. Monday. While he was working with you.”

“What?”

“Miss G., it’s a simple question.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Just think. How many cups?”

I took a deep breath. “OK. He mentioned he’d had two four-shot lattes before he arrived. He brought two more, one for Liz and one for me.” I tried to dive back into the muck of the day’s events. “Liz didn’t want hers, so… I think Julian drank it. Then we made coffee in the kitchen, and he had dinner with Liz, so it’s probably safe to say he had about… oh, the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen cups of coffee over the course of the day. Why?”

Tom pressed his lips into a thin line and shook his head. Then he clasped my hands in his. “Julian drank a ton of caffeine. Then he found you in the department store, unconscious. He also found Barry, with your knife in him. Julian’s a good kid, he was terrified, he tried to pull the knife out of Barry Dean. Then the one security cop on duty at Prince and Grogan spotted him, and yelled at him to back off. Julian freaked out, and when the cops heard he’d had his hands on the knife, they said he had to come in for questioning. When they brought him into the department, he didn’t wait for a lawyer. He insisted on submitting to the polygraph. To prove his innocence.”

My own voice felt as brittle as cracking ice. “What are you telling me?”

“Too much caffeine can screw up a polygraph, Miss G. Julian was found with his hand on the murder weapon. Just as damning, he has no alibi for the time he was loading your van by himself, which was when you were picking up Arch’s guitar. When Julian took the lie detector test, he flunked it.”

“No.”

Tom squeezed my hands harder. “Goldy, Julian’s been arrested for murder.”

CHAPTER 7

We made it up the interstate in silence. The going was slow, as a light snow was falling. At home, our hall clock donged lightly for half past one. I checked our pets—Jake the bloodhound and Scout the cat—who were slumbering peacefully in their separate housing area. Then I stumbled upstairs. I creaked open Arch’s door. He was snoring. So was his pal, Todd Druckman. Just recently, Arch had outgrown his bunk bed, so Todd was curled inside a sleeping bag on the floor.

With a husband in law enforcement and an ex-husband behind bars, our little family had dealt with criminal activity more than most. Still, I was worried about how Arch would deal with the arrest of Julian, our cherished family friend. I also wondered if heart-attack-prone Marla would stay calm. Several years ago, in a bizarre discovery of adoption documents, we’d learned that Julian’s birth mother had been Marla’s dead sister. My old friend had passionately embraced the role of being Julian’s aunt. Would she be able to cope with his arrest?

Would I?

I brushed my teeth, shucked my clothes, and pulled on pajamas. I fell into bed, certain I’d start fretting and never fall asleep.

But I did sleep, so soundly that the creep of daylight into the bedroom, the early shriek of crows, the drone of traffic from Aspen Meadow’s Main Street—not one of these registered. At nine-thirty, Tom tiptoed in to wake me.

He sat on the edge of our bed and asked me how I was feeling. I realized I had a headache, a shoulder ache, and nausea. I assured him I felt fine.

“I took Arch and Todd to school. Oh, and I canceled you out of that wedding reception this afternoon,” he announced matter-of-factly. “Liz said she can handle it. She came over for the food and supplies, and said she’d contact some of her old staff to help. She feels really bad about Julian,” he added. “She’s going to call you later.”

Slowly, groggily, I sat up. The room whirled. “You didn’t need to cancel me out of the reception.”

“You’ve got a slight concussion and need to take it a bit easy. Also, you have Steve Hulsey to meet with today. His secretary called and said he needs to change your appointment from ten to half past two—”

“How’s Julian?” I asked, because I needed to. The fact of his arrest scalded my nerves. “When can I see him? Can he take the polygraph again?”

“It’s probably not a good idea for you to see him. He’ll be advised of charges today. And it looks as if he can take the polygraph again on Thursday.” Tom’s tone was resigned. “And there’s something else…. I heard an unconfirmed report that someone witnessed Julian driving the truck that tried to hit you and Barry.”

“Baloney!” I cried, indignant. “Who would tell such a lie?”

“Miss G., please. I’m not going to tell you things if you’re going to go off the deep end.”

I gnawed the inside of my cheek. “Did you tell Arch what happened?”

“He’s more worried about you, if you want to know the truth.”

“Arch said he was worried about me? I don’t believe it.”

“I promised him that Julian would be out as soon as we got this all straightened out.” Tom sighed. “Arch said if you got hit on the head with the seven-hundred-dollar Epiphone guitar, you must be hurt pretty bad.”

“And I’m sure he asked how badly the guitar was damaged, right?”

Tom chuckled. “Well, yes. But he felt guilty, really, that you’d tried to get something for him, and then gotten beaned with it.”

“Where is the guitar, exactly? As in, right this minute.”

Tom shrugged. “Crime lab, probably. Being checked for prints, fiber, the usual. You probably won’t have it until well after Arch’s birthday. Sorry.”

The morning felt unreal. I was still in bed at nine-thirty. I didn’t know what was going on with Julian, and I wasn’t racing to a catering assignment.

Outside, it was still Aspen Meadow in April. Our front yard pines, laden with new snow, trembled in the cold breeze. Thick white clouds chugged through an expanse of sky, dollops of meringue on a blue plate.

And Barry Dean was dead. My old coffee buddy. I saw his smiling face, heard his teasing. This could not be real.

And yet it was.

“Come on,” said Tom, mustering some cheer. “Can you manage a shower on your own?” When I nodded, he said, “I’ll meet you in the kitchen. I’m making you a Dutch pancake. Oh, forgot to tell you. Two friends of mine from the department stopped by real early. I gave them your keys, and they brought up your van. I’ve already cleaned all your dishes and platters and whatnot.”

“What would I do without you?” I murmured.

Twenty minutes later, after I’d managed only two yoga asanas and a quick shower, I dug into Tom’s warm, light Dutch pancake. It dripped with golden melted butter and genuine maple syrup from Maine. I began to feel a bit more optimistic. Tom had also fried an entire pound of bacon. The salty crunch of meat perfectly complemented the delicate pancake. I told him it was the best breakfast ever. He beamed.

“I need to take off,” he said. “Do you want me to do anything for you? Did they give you a prescription for a painkiller?”

“I’ve got both aspirin and ibuprofen,” I replied. “But thanks for worrying.”

He donned his jacket but seemed reluctant to leave. “Sure you’re OK to drive to Hulsey’s office?”

“Absolutely.” I stood to fire up the espresso machine. “I’m going to putter around here before stopping at Hulsey’s. I’ll be done in time to pick up Arch at lacrosse practice.”

“Can I bring home dinner?”

“Tom. If you don’t let me cook, I’ll go nuts.”

He kissed me and took off. As the house fell silent, I booted my computer, popped two aspirin, and pulled myself a double shot of rich, dark espresso. Because I needed to take care of myself—didn’t everyone say so?—I topped the coffee with a mountainous glob of whipped cream.

And then I thought of Julian, in jail, with no espresso and a bunch of criminals as his new roommates. Tom was off the case. Would Hulsey wait for a new polygraph before he moved forward with his own team of investigators? Probably not. But meanwhile, Julian, with no alibi, was stuck in jail. It would take a few days for the lab work to come back, but trying to pull my knife out of Barry meant, of course, that Julian’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon.

If I don’t help him, who will?

I swallowed more espresso, then tapped computer keys to open a new file: BARRY DEAN.

Tom had told me a hundred times: You have to figure out what you know before you can concentrate on what you don’t know.

I typed in everything I knew about Barry. His background at C.U. His deep affection for basset hounds. His brief work with the Longmont TV show. Business school. Marketing. His job managing Westside Mall. His status: Most Eligible Bachelor. And then I looked down at my espresso cup. He loved coffee, I typed numbly.

Both his old classic Mercedes and his rarely used BMW racing car had boasted leather coffee-compartment caddies that fit over the hump between the front seats. Dear old Honey the Hound had presided over our outings, her mournful eyes regarding us from the rear seat. When we’d met the previous week, Barry had said that Honey had passed away, but that he still loved bassets and had just gotten a new one. He’d been so full of enthusiasm for canines, I’d told him about our own hound, Jake. He’d laughed and wanted to know more. Did he howl? His new dog did.

Who was taking care of his new dog now? The cops? The pound?

I veered away from that thought and forced myself to concentrate.

Love interests, I typed. Let’s see. He’d gone out with all kinds of girls at school, but wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as he was about dogs, coffee, or cars. I knew he’d been seeing Ellie McNeely, and that she had recommended my catering company to him. Possibly, he’d also been seeing Pam Disharoon. I’d suspected he’d been seeing Liz, but realized now that their familiarity was probably based on Liz’s nervousness about catering for a fellow who’d barred her son from the mall. The rest was a blank.

Find out what BD was up to with women, I typed. Jealousy there?

My head throbbed and I pulled another espresso. Did I dare to take another couple of aspirin? No. Tom’s words came back to me: Did they give you a prescription for painkillers? My apron, I thought. What was in that prescription bottle?

I sprinted up the stairs. My head felt as if I were balancing a pine log on top of my cranium. Balancing a large pine log. Balancing a large pine log with a guy teetering on each end.

I groped in my apron pocket and pulled out a brown bottle from Westside Pharmacy. March 22, the tidy label read. Rx No. 2880. Dr. Louis Maxwell. Barry Dean. Take 1 as needed for headache. Vicodin ES tablet.

How on earth had the bottle gotten into my apron pocket? It had to have fallen out of Barry’s pocket, I reasoned. When I scooted forward to check his pulse, I must have inadvertently picked it up.

Vicodin was a narcotic painkiller. Barry had to have had some monster headaches. Was something worrying Barry to cause him crippling headaches? I typed a new question into the file: What caused BD’s headaches?

OK, let’s see… there were a few more random facts I knew about Barry. He’d just bought an older house far out Upper Cottonwood Creek, an Austrian-chalet-style dwelling with gingerbread trim à la Hansel and Gretel. A detached garage held his cars—I thought he’d told me that at one point he’d had three vehicles—the old BMW racing car, a new white Audi, and the classic Mercedes, which had been wrecked, only to be replaced by the new Saab. Behind the garage, there was a large paved area where he kept his pontoon boat. Without kids and a wife to support, Barry could afford expensive toys.

I fingered the prescription bottle. Would the cops allow me inside Barry’s house? Probably not. I need to help Julian, I thought. I need to find out what Barry was up to. I need to discover what whoever killed Barry was up to. Back in the dark divorce days, I’d become an expert at ferreting out incriminating evidence. It’s important to use your talents, right?

Speaking of John Richard, for better or worse, he had been temporarily moved to a less crowded jail in Colorado Springs. We made the two-and-a-half-hour trip on a weekly basis, so Arch could visit his father. But at least The Jerk would not be in the Furman County lockup to hassle or intimidate Julian.

Julian. My heart ached. He’d been a part of our family for only a few years, but it felt like forever. He worried incessantly about Arch and me. He helped Arch with homework and visits to museums; he even corrected Arch’s drafts of English papers, something I was forbidden upon pain of death to do. Julian brought over his signature chocolate croissants whenever he visited. And he always, always helped me out at catered events when I needed him.

If I told Tom about Barry’s pills, he’d make me turn them over to the cops. So I was tampering with evidence. But I wasn’t ready to give up Barry’s prescription bottle just yet, at least not until I ferreted out the reason for the painkillers. After frowning at the little brown bottle for a minute, I wrapped it in plastic, opened the freezer side of the walk-in, and stashed it in a place I doubted Tom or Arch would ever look: a plastic tub half full of frozen clarified butter.

I was going to help Julian, I resolved. He possessed a keen intelligence, a great willingness to help out, a love for our family, and unfortunately, a quick temper. And now his desire to help others had landed him in a load of trouble.

So, Tom had relieved me of my catering assignments for that day. Until I could gather more supplies, there was little I could do to work on other events for later in the week. Meanwhile, my psyche needed to cook.

I washed my hands, tore the leftover bacon into bits, then washed my hands again. My whisk clicked the side of the bowl as I violently beat together a salad dressing. Finally, I washed and dried head after head of tender baby lettuces.

Despite my frenzied activity, my mind kept circling back to Julian. I’d introduced him to Liz, who had introduced him to her son Teddy, whose plight had touched Julian. His sense of justice had propelled him to confront Barry Dean. Julian always tried to do the right thing. Of course, this had also included trying to pull the knife out of Barry’s stomach.

I quickly stored all the food. Even if Hulsey forbade me, I was going to go down to the jail. I was going to demand that Julian Teller be released.

Fat chance of that, I thought. I groped again in the freezer, tried to avoid the tub of butter (the hidden prescription seemed to scream at me), and clattered ice cubes into a glass. I poured heavy cream into the glass, then put that into the freezer while I searched the refrigerator side of the walk-in for something luscious. Aha—a last piece of flourless chocolate cake topped with raspberries and strawberries. I whipped some more of the cream, ladled it on top of the cake, then pulled four shots of espresso and poured it into the glass over the chilled cream and ice cubes. I took a delicate mouthful of the chocolate cake, then sipped the creamy coffee. The dark, rich chocolate melted in my mouth and sent a flash of pleasure up my back. Forget aspirin—this was a real painkiller! Then I allowed the luscious coffee to roll over my tongue. My brain felt sharper, no question.

I frowned at my computer’s blank screen, then looked outside. The sky was turning. The brilliant white clouds had darkened, which promised more snow. I turned my back on that particular gloomy prospect, took another large bite of chocolate, cream, and berries, and washed it down with the rich coffee. Think, I ordered myself, as I surveyed the kitchen and my cooking equipment.

Which reminded me. What about my missing knife? Somehow, one of my new Henckels knives had ended up in Barry Dean’s gut.

I set aside my snack and typed, Who stole the knife? How? When?

But I knew the answer almost as soon as I typed it. Anyone could have slipped into the kitchenette while Julian, Liz, and I were busy with the crowd. Sneaking in through the service entrance, once the main doors were opened, shouldn’t have been too hard either, because at that point the security guards were inside the lounge.

There ought to be some way to determine…Wait. The lounge had boasted a multitude of cameras, all poised on the party. Cameras on the walls; cameras overhead. Plus, there’d been that videographer. Surely, one of those cameras had captured the knife thief sneaking into or out of the kitchen. Or had the knife made it to the buffet, say on one of the platters, and been snitched from there? When I visited the jail, I’d have to ask Julian if he’d spotted anything suspicious. And getting back to cameras, there should have been some hidden ones focused on the Prince & Grogan shoe department, right? Wouldn’t those videos show how Barry had died?

I finished the cake and put in a quick call to Tom. Hopefully, he’d sniffed out news of the investigation. Did being off the case mean being excluded from the progress of the investigation?

“Tom,” I said to his voice mail, “could you see if the cops got hold of the security-camera videos from the lounge, and from the P and G shoe department? Oh, and if you find out anything else about Julian’s case, would you please call?”

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. I pounced on it. It was Marla.

“Goldy, what the hell is going on? Julian didn’t even know Barry Dean. I say the hell with waiting for another polygraph. I told Hulsey to get his investigators on this right away. I’m not pleased that Hulsey’s not dealing with Julian himself. He should have given you to Jackson.”

“I—”

“And what is it with you and Julian, guzzling all that caffeine? Don’t you know better than to drink so much of it?”

“Well, I’ll have to remember that,” I replied huffily, “the next time I cater a buffet for fifty on less than five hours of sleep, and can peer into one of my crystal balls to see that Julian will face a polygraph for a murder investigation that very day. Oh, and since you didn’t ask, I’m feeling just fine after being hit over the head.”

Marla rattled ice cubes, then gulped down something. It wasn’t even noon yet. I hoped whatever she was drinking was nonalcoholic.

She took a deep breath. “Sorry I yelled at you. You know how fond I am of Julian—I’m just scared, that’s all. Tell me what they’ve got on him, would you please?”

So I told her the little I did know, much of which she probably already had weaseled out of Julian or his lawyer. In addition to failing the polygraph, Julian had no alibi for the time Barry was murdered. He had also been accused—by whom, I still did not know—of being behind the wheel of the truck that had very nearly mowed Barry and me down. And worst of all, his fingerprints would no doubt show up on the murder weapon.

“No alibi? I’ll say I was with him.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m sure he was loading supplies and dirty dishes into my van, the way he said he would.” And speaking of vehicles, I wondered, where were Barry’s Saab and Julian’s Range Rover? Had the police impounded both vehicles?

“But,” Marla protested, “if I say he was with me, will they let him out of jail?”

“Funny thing about cops, girlfriend. They’re interested in the truth.”

“But we ought to be able to do something!”

“You could call Detective Sawyer, to see if they’ve impounded Julian’s car or Barry’s Saab. If not, get a couple of friends to take you to Westside, then find the Rover and drive it up to your place. Could you do that? Do you have keys to the Rover?”

“Absolutely. It was my sister’s car, remember? And I never throw anything away. How about Tom? Can he help?”

I retrieved a pie crust from the freezer side of the walk-in. I needed to keep cooking if I was going to stay even remotely rational. “They’ve taken Tom off the case, because there’s family involvement. Look, Marla, I’m going to look into this—”

“Well, thank God for something!”

“—but you can’t tell anyone what I’m doing. You can’t spill any details to your pals. If you do, Hulsey, the cops, and Tom will all have a fit. Now, tell me everything you know about Barry’s social life. Was there a Significant Other in the picture?”

She blew out air. “Of course. Barry was seeing Ellie McNeely, didn’t I tell you? Ellie hooked up with him the second she got that bank job. I heard it had become très, très serious. But Ellie had this suspicion that Barry was seeing somebody else on the side. According to her, Barry would go places and not tell her where he’d been. He wouldn’t show up when he promised. She’d see him at the doctor’s when he said he was skiing. She spotted him at the bank when he’d said he had an all-day meeting in Vail. And he skipped a dinner they were supposed to attend, claiming he’d been caught in a traffic jam west of the Eisenhower Tunnel. So I told her to hire a private investigator—”

“You did what?” Sometimes Marla’s meddling knew no bounds.

“Not too long ago, Ellie’s purse was stolen at the mall. Louis Vuitton, of course. It had her car keys in it. In her wallet, there was a picture of Ellie’s daughter, Cameron, standing beside the rear of their silver Lexus. The photo included the Lexus license plate, sorry to say. The thief found the car in the mall parking lot and tried to steal it, but instead rammed it into Barry Dean’s gorgeous old Mercedes. Totaled it, too. The Mercedes, not the Lexus.”

“What?”

“Is there an echo on this phone line? Didn’t Barry tell you why he had to buy that new Saab?”

“Not really,” I mumbled. Barry had mentioned his beloved old Mercedes had been wrecked. That was all. And I considered Ellie a friend. Why hadn’t I heard about all this? But I knew the answer, as usual. I’d been too busy catering. Finally, I said, “Sorry to be so skeptical, but if Ellie was mad enough to hire a private investigator to follow Barry because she suspected him of dallying, isn’t it possible that she faked the theft and drove her Lexus into his Mercedes herself?”

“Well,” Marla shot back, in the tone she used when the gossip became especially juicy, “there’s all kinds of speculation, of course. Maybe her bag was never stolen, but I wouldn’t sacrifice a Louis Vuitton anything to fake a theft. I’d claim someone had stolen some tote I got free with a perfume purchase. But the most prevalent theory is that that brat Teddy Fury swiped Ellie’s bag. Everyone knows that kid’s a klepto. The cops didn’t find Ellie’s LV purse when they discovered what was left of his stash of stolen goodies, though.”

“How do you know all these things?” I demanded, exasperated.

“Well, unlike you, I’m not spending all my time cooking. I’m eating lunch out and hearing all the latest. Or I’m hustling out for a bite after the midweek church service, where people go when they just can’t wait until Sunday for news. I go to the athletic club every day and wave my arms around, so I can please my cardiologist and catch up on more news that I missed at lunch or church. And when I’m not on the phone with you, I’m on with someone else, finding out stuff to share with you.”

I didn’t reply. I was still recovering from Marla’s revelations.

“So did Ellie’s P.I. find out damaging stuff?”

“Goldy, all I did was recommend that she hire someone. After all, Ellie’s older than Barry is… was. Since she finally got her divorce settlement, she has money, lots and lots more than Barry. So she had to find out if he was getting serious so he could get his hands on her money. She also wanted to know why he was lying to her about being in Vail and whatnot.” She paused and crunched on something, probably a cookie. “So. You want to call Rufus Investigations?”

After I jotted down the number, I signed off. I washed my hands and reflected a bit, then fluted, pricked, and baked the pie crust. I would make a quiche, I decided, and use up this morning’s leftover bacon. The pie would be rich, creamy, and soothing, and would go perfectly with a field green salad dressed with raspberry vinaigrette and defrosted homemade baguettes. Goodness, but I was glad Liz was doing that wedding reception this afternoon.

No one can recover from a head injury—much less investigate—on an empty stomach, I reminded myself. I would have a salad, baguette, and slice of quiche before donating the rest to the neighbors, since it wouldn’t keep for Tom and Arch. The neighbors would be thrilled.

Quiche Me Quick

7 pieces thick-sliced bacon

4 ounces Gruyère cheese, grated

8-inch baked pie shell (a baked9-inch shallow frozen pie crust is fine)

3 large eggs

⅞ cup whipping cream

2 tablespoons milk

¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmegCook the bacon until crisp, drain thoroughly, and pat with paper towels. Cut each slice of bacon into 4 equal pieces. Evenly distribute first the bacon, then the cheese, over the pastry crust. Set aside.Preheat the oven to 350°F.In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs until they are thoroughly combined. Beat in the cream and milk, then sprinkle on the nutmeg and stir until combined. Pour over the bacon and cheese, and set carefully in the preheated oven.Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the quiche has puffed and browned slightly and is set in the middle. (Check with a spoon to make sure there is no uncooked liquid in the center of the quiche.)Serve immediately.Makes 6 servings

I tucked the phone beneath my ear, started grating Gruyère, and put in a call to Rufus Investigations. I was told that John Rufus had left that morning for Africa, on an extended assignment. I swallowed hard and begged his secretary to look up something about a client of theirs. Ellie McNeely had hired Mr. Rufus to have somebody surveilled, and now that person has been murdered. The secretary let out an exasperated breath.

“Let me have the name of the victim, then,” she said, as if my call were ruining her day. Which it probably was.

I gave her Barry’s name, then testily explained that a young friend of mine had been arrested for the murder, and whatever Mr. Rufus had discovered would help this innocent young man get out of jail…. At that point, the secretary interrupted me and brusquely read the tenets of Rufus Investigations’ confidentiality policy. When law enforcement contacts us, we will be sharing information with them and them only—

I thanked her and said good-bye before slamming the phone down. Then I cracked three eggs, whacked on my big mixer, and beat the eggs with almost a cup of whipping cream. Whipping cream, so aptly named. In cooking, you could take out your frustrations by whipping, folding, beating, and smothering.

And here folks thought the home cook was so docile.

I piled the chopped bacon and grated Gruyère into the cooled crust, sloshed the eggs and cream over all, then artfully grated nutmeg on top. After sliding the luxurious concoction into the oven, I phoned Ellie McNeely.

“It’s Goldy,” I began. “Please don’t hang up. I really need to talk to you—”

“I can’t talk.” She was whispering. “There are two men here from the sheriff’s department, and they want me to come in for questioning. You see, this private investigator I hired called them from the airport when he saw the headlines this morning. The headlines about Barry.” Her voice trembled. “That bastard private eye, Rufus, told the cops I was having Barry followed. He told them all about Barry and me, and why I was having him tailed, and now Barry, the man I thought was going to marry me, has been killed—”

The line went dead. I imagined Detective Sawyer, hovering like Uriah Heep, pressing the dial-tone button while poor, wretched Ellie sought comfort from a friend. Doggone it.

John Rufus had called the sheriff’s department from the airport? I imagined a man in a trenchcoat, reading the newspaper while waiting for his jet to Capetown, then making a beeline for a pay phone. Probably private investigators were like doctors and shrinks, that is, if they had information that might shed light on a crime, they had to share it. But why couldn’t he stay in this country and help out a bit? Yet another question occurred to me. Was it possible John Rufus had been in Prince & Grogan last night, and seen who stabbed Barry? If so, would he have told the cops that? I grabbed the phone and left another message for Tom.

I cleaned up the kitchen. Then I went back to my file.

Find out if Private Investigator Rufus was in the department store, I typed. Find out what Ellie knows. Find out if Rufus told the cops anything that could help Julian. Did B.D. have another girlfriend, say, Pam Disharoon? If so, how jealous was she? For that matter, just how jealous was Ellie? Why did Barry lie about a meeting, and go to the bank instead? Why did he say he was skiing, and then hustle off to the doctor?

And most importantly: Is there any information that can clear Julian?

The quiche emerged puffed and golden brown. I cut myself an enormous slice and smiled after the first bite. The bacon gave the pie a lovely crunch, the Gruyère added tang and substance, and the eggs and cream gave the whole mélange a texture like velvet. I awarded myself points for concocting such a dish in the midst of stress. Next time, I would omit the bacon, and make one for vegetarian Julian when he got out of jail. With remarkable discipline, I dutifully carried a newly tossed salad, warmed baguettes, and the rest of the quiche to my next-door neighbor, Trudy. She swooned with joy and complimented me extravagantly. I actually felt happy for the first time in twelve hours.

Back at home, my answering machine was blinking. I had three messages. Murphy’s law of answering machines: Leave the house for less than ten minutes? You’re going to miss your calls.

The first was from Tom. His reassuring voice warmed me, but what he had to say turned my blood to ice. The cameras in the lounge had recorded Barry schmoozing with a number of guests, first Ellie, then several others, including Pam Disharoon. Unfortunately, the tapes also showed that Julian had had not one, but two squabbles with Barry. And by the way, none of the cameras captured my knife being transported in or out of the kitchenette. Except for the eight cameras focused on the display cases, there had been only two others, and they had recorded nothing regarding the murder weapon. The only tape the cops hadn’t checked was the one from the roving videographer; the detectives were tracking that fellow down now.

The cameras on either end of the P & G shoe department, Tom went on, were focused on the cash registers to keep tabs on the employees, and the chairs and couches, where women might be tempted to slip a pair of shoes into another shopping bag. No camera had been focused on the cabinets by the wall. Moreover, with the way the cabinets had been placed, there had been enough room behind them for a person to hide while I was struggling to help Barry. In any event, no videotape showed the murder, me coming in, or Julian finding us.

Tom concluded by saying he was hoping that his friends in the department would continue to share information with him. That data-sharing would dry up instantly, however, if Julian flunked the second lie-detector test.

The next message was short and bittersweet. It was from Liz Fury.

“Goldy, I’m hoping you’re OK. The Grigsons just started their wedding ceremony. Everything looks good for the setup, food, service. I added six dozen frozen spinach appetizers, by the way, from my freezer. Don’t know if Tom told you I got two of my former staffers to help.” She paused. “I, um, really hope you’re feeling better.” Her voice became apologetic. “Goldy, I’m sorry I ever introduced Teddy to Julian. I just thought if Teddy could have a role model, a strong kid like Julian, that he might want to try to turn his life around. I had no idea that Julian would turn violent toward Barry.”

“Oh, shut up,” I muttered.

“And,” Liz went on, “I certainly didn’t think that with all those people there, Barry would order Teddy to be escorted from the mall, especially since he was just looking for me.” She let out a harsh laugh. “If you can imagine, the cops wanted to know where I was while Barry was getting himself stabbed. I told them I was looking for my son. After being dragged forcibly out of the mall, he’d gone to his usual haunt, the nearest McDonald’s. That’s where I found him. Look, I have to go. Let’s talk when you feel better.”

Or even sooner, I thought grimly, as I pressed the button for the final message. Lo and behold, the husky voice of Ellie McNeely burned through the wire. Her tone was of someone trying to get a grip on a situation spiraling out of control, and failing.

“Goldy. I’m…at the sheriff’s department. Sorry we were interrupted. Do you… did you know…is it true that Julian saw…”She snuffled. “Did you know anything about what the cops found in that runaway dump truck? They were… They were supposed to be a gift… besides, I was having a facial wrap, and I don’t even know how to drive a damn truck! I—”

And then the message ended.

Had Ellie once again been cut off? Or had she lost her nerve? No matter what, I now knew another data nugget: That Ellie McNeely had knowledge of the cuff links. So Ellie and I needed to have an extended chat.

It was almost one o’clock. I typed the contents of all three messages into my new “Barry Dean” file, reread the entire file, and created a list of places I wanted to visit or call, with questions. Rufus Investigations, or somebody who has access to their data. Ellie McNeely. Westside Mall—Barry’s office. Barry’s coworkers. Would Barry’s colleagues be helpful, or as difficult to deal with as everyone else in this case? I knew there was an assistant manager for the mall, but I had no idea what his name was. Find out what Barry was being so secretive about. Why had he wanted to talk to me right away, then changed his mind after the truck incident? And why was he taking painkillers?

I imagined Hulsey reading this file, and becoming apopleptic.

I thought of the Vicodin in the freezer and frowned. Not only was I, by keeping something from the crime scene, engaging in evidence-tampering, I was also guilty of possession of a controlled substance without a prescription. There seemed to be many things I needed to avoid telling Hulsey, as well as Tom. My breaking the law would make them both apopleptic. I wondered if the medical examiner would find narcotics in Barry’s bloodstream.

I had too many questions, and very few answers. I glanced all around the kitchen, as if any of my fancy new paraphernalia—laser printer, copier for menus, plain-paper fax, new standing mixer, new multibladed food processor—could help. My equipment was mute. That’s the problem with technology. The ads promise you’ll be able to improve your life with complicated new machines. But if improved life looked like figuring something out, you were in trouble. Marketing claims to the contrary, machines couldn’t come up with good ideas.

Still, there were possibilities. Our new printer could create logos, spreadsheets, and all kinds of cool stuff. To find out about Barry’s health problems, I reasoned, I would have to have a logo, an address, and a fax number.

From my files, I dug out my contract for the Westside Mall events. I always keep a photocopy of the initial check, including the client’s driver’s license number, and—key for my developing investigation—Barry Dean’s Social Security number. Although the client for the Westside events was the mall owner, Barry Dean had been their representative. In the remote event of a bounced check, a collection service tracked the check-writer through the SSN. Sheesh! I’d learned from Tom that there were lots of uses for that good old Social Security number.

I switched computer programs and began to play. Ten technology-packed minutes later, I was ready. I didn’t want to imagine what Hulsey or Tom would think of what I was up to. If I ended up getting caught, the consequences would probably involve prison garb.

Once more I reached for the phone.

“This is Doctor Gertrude Shoemaker,” I announced firmly and matter-of-factly to the receptionist at Dr. Louis Maxwell’s practice of general medicine. Although I’d hated filling in for secretaries who’d walked out on The Jerk, I’d at least learned how doctors who wanted information behaved. Brusquely. “I’m with Aspen Meadow Neurology. A patient of yours is here. He’s paying for his own CAT scan. Diagnosis is chronic headache. I’m not sure he’s telling me the truth as to how and when he first contracted symptoms, and I need a copy of his records. The patient has authorized the release.”

“Fine, Doctor,” Maxwell’s receptionist replied. “Fax us the standard release form on your letterhead, and we’ll fax his records back to you as soon as possible.”

“When would that be?”

“No later than four o’clock today, Doctor.”

I hung up and prayed that Maxwell’s receptionist had not read the morning paper, which would have told her that Barry Dean was not sitting in my fictitious doctor’s office, but lying in the morgue.

I quickly put together a standard release form, then wrote a cover letter on my new fake letterhead for Aspen Meadow Neurology. (As if backwater Aspen Meadow would even have a neurologist! But we did boast nine chiropractors.) I entered Barry’s Social Security number, stared hard at the contract Barry had signed with me, and then carefully forged his signature. Then I faxed the whole thing off to Dr. Maxwell’s office. This was a very long shot, and the diagnosis would probably come back, “Patient claims headaches are stress-related.” Still, if you were going to let no stone go unturned, you had to start upending every rock…and hope there wasn’t a rattlesnake under one of them. And, hope that all the laws you were breaking didn’t come back to bite you.

And speaking of laws, it was time for me to visit the jail. After that, I would stop by the office of my own criminal defense attorney! Life’s little ironies.

I stopped first at our town’s drive-through Espresso Place, and ordered and paid for a four-shot latte. Of course I wanted to bring Julian one, but I knew from experience that there would be glass between us, and we’d have to speak to each other via phone. Plus, I didn’t want him to screw up another polygraph. The attendant handed me the drink, and my skin turned cold. Latte had been one of Barry’s favorites.

Overhead, fast-moving, dark clouds thickened and roiled. An ominous gray nimbus stretched eastward from the Continental Divide. As my window hummed closed, the unmistakable smell of snow drifted into the van. Would I still be catering the next day’s luncheon for the Stockhams? There had been no message, no apology from them for their eruption at the mall. I wasn’t going anywhere close to their huge house near the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve without working things out.

Despite the rising storm, or maybe because of it, the number of tractors moving dirt around in the new section of Flicker Ridge had doubled since I’d noticed the area the previous morning. The trucks and tractors chugging hither and yon looked like a military operation. Two We Got Dirt trucks rumbled past the Topsoil $70/load sign, which now stood next to a revised sign: Only 2 home sites left! First come, first served! The price had been crossed out, and a new sign taped over it: Open to bidding. Uh-oh. If they’d written Make offer, that would have meant sales were slow. Open to bidding meant folks were scrambling to buy the sites, perhaps because the developer had priced them too low. The trucks growled and swooped over the mounds of dirt. Nothing like avarice to get a job done.

Half an hour later I was gripping a phone and staring at Julian through a scratched Plexiglas panel. His handsome face looked haggard and weary, and his unshaven cheeks gave him a grizzled appearance. The too-large orange prison suit did not flatter his muscled body. Worst of all, he looked as if he’d neither slept nor showered since the arrest.

“This is crap!” he exploded into the phone. “I don’t belong here! It’s crap! Can’t Tom help me? I came looking for you, and the next thing I knew, some cop was slapping handcuffs on me. And now this lawyer says—”

“Julian, please,” I urged. “I’ve got a lawyer, too, an associate of the guy who’s helping you. My guy will probably tell me not to come talk to you, because it would look bad. But I’m here to support you. So, please, please don’t be angry with me. I know you didn’t kill Barry.”

Julian’s shoulders slumped in dejection. “I was trying to help him.”

“Begin at the beginning and take me through the time after I left the lounge. Minute by minute. I especially need to know if you saw anyone—anyone—with one of the new Henckels knives.”

And so Julian took me through it. It was almost exactly as I’d thought. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that he hadn’t seen the knife disappear. After I’d left with Barry Dean’s note—the one Barry had handed off to a musician, the note Julian had read—Julian had finished packing up the dirty dishes and equipment. He had been surprised that I hadn’t shown up by the time he’d completed the loading and cleanup. The security and jewelry people were gone, and the mall was closing. He’d locked the lounge and come looking for me.

“I wonder why Barry didn’t have one of his security guys lock up the lounge, and take the key.”

Julian rolled his eyes. “I wish I knew, because then I wouldn’t have had to say I don’t know fifty times to the cops. When they asked me and asked me about the kitchenette key, I kept telling them that clients often ask us to lock up when we leave. And no one’s been robbed or murdered yet. Or at least, not until last night.” He groaned.

“It’s OK,” I murmured. People who aren’t caterers have a very romantic view of what we do. They think it’s all intriguing recipes, chic food, and glam presentation. They have no clue about, and certainly don’t want to hear about, the ordering, prepping, dealing with clients, dishwashing, cleaning, locking up, and other drudge jobs associated with food service.

“OK, let’s get through this,” Julian said wearily. “I forgot to tell you that when I finished, about five after nine, I made myself another cup of coffee in that kitchen. Everybody was gone. The coffee was instant, but I didn’t care. I knew I had to drive back to Boulder, and I was afraid I’d fall asleep at the wheel. When I finished it and you still hadn’t come back, I started to get worried. I went to the mall office and no one was there. So I went looking for you.”

“You remembered from the note to come to Ladies’ Shoes?”

“Yeah.” His voice was morose. “I saw the store was closing fast, so I hurried over to Shoes. And there you were on the floor. Barry, too. I didn’t think. I turned him over, and when I saw the knife, I just pulled on it. How could I be so dumb?”

I tapped on the scratched plastic shelf in front of me. “So, no one saw you during the last ten, fifteen minutes before you came into the shoe department?”

He sighed in despair. “Nope. I saw a few cashiers inside the stores that were closing, but nobody looked out at me, ’cuz they were all busy counting the cash in their tills.” He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Anyway, I had just tugged once on the knife, when this department store security guy started hollering at me to move away. He called the cops and eventually I was hauled off. Of course I wanted to take the polygraph, why wouldn’t I? I didn’t do anything! I had no idea Marla was calling a lawyer, and he didn’t show up until the cops were through with me and it was too late. Now I’m behind bars on suspicion of murder. I was advised of the charges today. And—ready for this—even if I pass another polygraph, it might not help, ‘cuz polygraphs are inadmissible. Those cops are gathering evidence to charge me with murder. Unless something turns up, they’re going to hold me until the next regular arraignment day. My damn prints on the weapon are the worst….”

I shook my head, mute. The unreality of it all was dizzying. Julian had Cleve Jackson plus a team of Hulsey’s investigators working to clear him. But somehow I didn’t trust Hulsey’s people to find out who had really killed Barry Dean.

I’d known Barry. I’d taken the job he offered me. I was the one who’d found him after he was stabbed. At that unforgettable moment, Barry had uttered a deep, shattering groan. Then the real killer had whacked me with the guitar and, presumably, finished the job on Barry. Not only had I not been able to help my old coffee buddy, I was wondering what in the world I would be able to do for poor Julian.

Not for the first time, my mind hollered at me that I had to do something. My heart agreed.

CHAPTER 8

I promised Julian that Tom, Marla, and I were working hard to get him out. Marla would be coming to see him later in the day. But Julian, his skin grayed by the fluorescent lights, appeared even more discouraged and disheartened. He asked about Arch. I put effort into sounding enthusiastic, but I knew it didn’t ring true. Arch was doing well, I related, forcing a smile. As usual, my son was keeping mum in the social department. He enjoyed lacrosse and was impatient for Julian to come home. After all, Julian needed to bake his fifteenth birthday cake! The family party was set for this Friday!

“That’s the arraignment day,” Julian said joylessly.

I swallowed and reassured him again that this nightmare would be over soon and that everything would turn out fine.

“Yeah, yeah,” Julian said, as if he had not heard me. “Look, please don’t call my parents, OK?”

I looked at him in surprise. Julian adored his adoptive parents, and trekked down to Bluff, Utah, a couple of times a year to visit them. “Don’t you want them to know—”

“No, I don’t,” he interrupted me. “It’ll give my dad a heart attack. If it goes to trial and all that, I’ll call their neighbors and have them go over and break things to them gently.”

“Well—”

Julian shrugged, offered a dispirited wave, and got up to leave. I plastered a grin on my face and gave him a thumbs-up.

On the inside, of course, my frustration was reaching fury level. I left the jail and raced to Hulsey’s office, frantic for good news. Funny thing about good news. You shouldn’t go to a criminal-defense attorney looking for any.

Steve Hulsey’s office was decorated in a palette of oxblood leather, ultradark mahogany, cranberry glass, and maroon wool. Maybe this was some deranged decorator’s vision of a bloodbath. Hulsey sat, statuelike, behind the vast mahogany desk, which was the size of a ten-person life raft. And oh boy, I could just imagine desperate clients clinging to it. Hulsey would be telling them what he could and couldn’t do for his fee, which a former client had informed me was a twenty-thousand-dollar retainer, plus eight hundred bucks an hour after that. Hulsey, the very image of a westernized Buddha, was wearing another silk suit, a shimmery silver-gray pinstripe. I wondered if he also wore silk underpants à la Al Capone. One fact was clear: Steve Hulsey might represent desperate hooligans, but they were desperate rich hooligans.

His terse greeting was followed by: “You said you wanted to talk to me about your innocence, Mrs. Schulz.”

“Absolutely.” But where to begin? Not at the end, for I knew the Buddha would berate me if I told him I’d just visited Julian in jail. I fidgeted while reminding myself that Barry Dean’s Vicodin and all my machinations over the prescription also needed to go into the don’t-tell-your-lawyer category. Eight hundred bucks an hour! my conscience screamed. At least tell him something!

Hulsey’s eyes were piercing. I was sure he was reading my thoughts. His face turned thunderous; one of the black eyebrows rose. Will I ever be able to put this guilty-looking woman on the stand? he seemed to be asking himself. Probably not.

I took a deep breath, then told Hulsey I’d first met Barry in school, where we’d had a class together. I’d lost touch with him after I got married and he graduated. He’d called me this March, though, to book a couple of parties. Hulsey frowned. I explained that Barry had heard about me from a mutual friend, Ellie McNeely, whom he had either proposed to or was about to. So he’d hired Goldilocks’ Catering to do the cocktail party accompanying the jewelry-leasing event. I was doing another event for him, or at least I was supposed to, this Thursday, a lunch for potential tenants in the mall’s addition… I faltered.

“Did Dean talk to you about his business? Mall business?”

“He told me he’d been working at Westside Mall for the last six months. He’d always been…My suspicion is—” I hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Well, I just thought that if I were the person hiring Barry, it would be not so much for his expertise, even though he might have been super at what he did. But his real assets were his charm and… enthusiasm. They were contagious.”

Hulsey’s brow furrowed, so I plowed on: “Barry was trying hard to jump-start sales and establish shopper loyalty to Westside before any more new malls opened in the Denver area. He loved to talk about shopping, about all the goodies that were available, especially at Westside. He was frustrated that the new mall addition was taking so long, but he perked up when I gave him some chocolate.” Hulsey’s scowl deepened. I was obviously blathering. “Look—Barry really didn’t share very much with me about his job… or his personal life. I’m sorry.”

“Tell me everything about the hours leading up to his death.”

And so I did: Barry asking to chat with me, the truck incident, Barry’s unwillingness to stay and talk to the cops, Barry craving a drink, the jewelry-leasing party with its bewildering conflicts—Liz, her son, Barry, Shane and Page Stockham—and through it all, the hectic catering. Barry had left without saying good-bye, I told Hulsey, then returned and dropped off the note about the gratuity. Or at least I thought it was about the gratuity, but maybe that word tip had meant something else. The next thing I knew, I was slipping on a pile of shoes in Prince & Grogan. When I tried to regain my balance, I fell onto a cabinet. The doors swung open, and I saw a man’s legs, shoes, tuxedo… it was Barry. He groaned, I tried to pull him out, and then something struck me—

“So he wasn’t dead at that point?” Hulsey interrupted. “Before you were hit?”

“No. I thought I felt a weak pulse.”

Hulsey scribbled a few notes, then locked those impenetrable eyes on me once more. “You know the police have arrested Julian Teller. But I’ve got to warn you. From the way the detectives were questioning you, they’re obviously considering you a viable suspect—”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you found the corpse. Because your knife was in Barry Dean’s gut. And that’s just the beginning. The cops say they wanted that note so they could analyze the handwriting and compare it to Julian’s. But they’ll compare it to yours, too.”

“Barry gave the note about the tip to a musician,” I protested. “Julian only read it before he gave it to me.”

Hulsey waved this off. “Here are the charges they might be thinking of making against you: First-degree murder. Conspiracy to commit murder. Accessory to murder, or accessory after the fact—say if you asked Julian to pull the knife out of Dean. And then there’s tampering with evidence, in case there’s something from that scene that you’re hiding from them.” He lifted both eyebrows.

I was right. Hulsey could read minds, after all. I shrugged and lifted my hands in a helpless gesture.

“Mrs. Schulz, you’re my client. I don’t want you talking to anyone about this case. Do not see or speak to Julian Teller. Doing so would strengthen the DA’s conspiracy case, if he has one. Do not go to that mall and start asking questions about Barry Dean—”

“As I told you, Mr. Hulsey.” It was my turn to interrupt. “I have to go to the mall on Thursday. I’ve signed a contract and I’ve been paid. The food supplies have been ordered. I have a catering commitment to honor, and my reputation depends on not backing out of events.”

“What kind of party is this, exactly?” His voice had turned patronizing.

“Westside Mall is running scared at the prospect of new Denver malls wiping them out. Or undercutting them. This second event Barry hired me to do is a gourmet lunch for potential tenants in the mall addition.”

Hulsey gave me that get-to-the-facts expression again. So I got to them.

“The owner of Westside, Pennybaker International, is sending out a high-powered team to secure leases for the vacant portion of the new addition. On Thursday, they’ve invited twelve of the hottest companies in the Westside area to hear the official pitch on why any retailer who wants to make big money needs to have a store in the mall addition.”

“What are you serving?” Hulsey said unexpectedly.

“He-man food,” I replied with what I hoped was a high-class sniff. “Oriental dumpling soup. Prime rib. Mashed russet and sweet potatoes. Strawberry-rhubarb cobbler. Barry ordered that food hoping that once they ate it, all the retailers would feel rich enough to afford Westside.”

Hulsey sighed. “If you do the event, I want you to concentrate on food. Not crime. Understand?”

I nodded. He told me that he would get in touch with me if he needed to, and I should do the same. I took my leave, and noted we’d been together half an hour. For Marla’s four hundred bucks, I’d been told stuff I either didn’t want to hear or was planning to ignore. If Julian was still in jail on Thursday, did Attorney Hulsey really think I’d concentrate on food and not crime?

If so, he was sadly mistaken.

Since Hulsey’s office wasn’t far from Westside Mall, I drove over there. If anyone asked, I’d say I was looking for Julian’s Range Rover, which was sort of true. In any event, as long as I was going to violate Hulsey’s instructions, there were two people I wanted to talk to: Pam Disharoon and Ellie McNeely, the two purported girlfriends of the deceased Barry Dean. I knew Ellie had been taken to police headquarters. Now she was probably back at work at the bank. But Pam worked for Prince & Grogan, in the lingerie department. I could always use a new nightie, couldn’t I?

I followed the route Liz and I had taken just the previous day—which seemed an eternity ago—along Doughnut Drive. Where yesterday only a handful of workers had been visible, now there was activity everywhere. I passed a crew raking and smoothing the cavernous hole in the berm made by the errant dump truck. Near them, another gang of laborers dug holes in the topsoil. Flats of spruce bushes stood nearby, ready to be planted. Did the crews work alternate days, or had someone lit a fire under them? Had Barry’s murder somehow accelerated the slow-as-molasses construction of the new addition? Hmm.

To my further surprise, the construction lot was more than half-full of trucks ranging from tractor-trailers to pickups. Workers diligently transported sheets of plywood, spray-painted drywall, or pointed high-powered hoses at freshly laid concrete pavers. Diesel-powered cranes lofted yet more workers onto the roofs of almost-finished stores. Those guys scampered up and over the pitched surfaces as if they were playground equipment. A newly painted banner floated overhead: Boutiques Opening Soon!

Oh, yeah? When?

Another surprise: The construction gate was open and unattended. Management must have decided that sparing a worker to be gatekeeper was not possible, especially with the heightened level of construction bustle. Still, in light of the truck incident, you’d think they’d at least be a bit more careful.

I ignored the new No Trespassing sign and sailed the van into the construction lot. The drainage pond, now with chunks of ice floating in it, was slick with oil. Workers driving Caterpillars were digging and smoothing the layer of rutted dirt over which the dump truck had lurched toward us. Which one of those workers had claimed he’d seen Julian piloting that truck? I wondered.

I slowed and surveyed Westside Mall’s main parking area. Compared to the usual crowd of vehicles, the number of cars was anemic, no more than a third of the previous day’s. Apparently, the newspaper articles on Barry’s death had discouraged shoppers. For those who hadn’t caught the news and had ventured out, driving past the yellow police ribbons surrounding Prince & Grogan would have sent them packing.

What had Barry said? Nothing clears a mall like a security threat. Or a murder, apparently.

I parked near one of the Skytrack cranes. Victor Wilson, excavator-turned-construction-manager, was nowhere in sight. I headed toward a cluster of workers standing near a Dumpster. They were leaning over a drop cloth dense with paint cans. Something must have been wrong with the paint, because the workers were having a heated discussion.

I sauntered up and asked them where their boss-guy was. The painters exchanged guarded looks.

“I’ve just got a quick question for Victor,” I improvised hastily, “about the construction. I’m the caterer for the tenants’ lunch later in the week, and they asked me to find out when Victor was going to give the go-ahead to occupy the new stores.”

Several workers shook their heads and backed away. It was clear they weren’t going to help me. I turned to the remaining workmen.

“Anybody know when the new stores are going to be ready?”

Silence. A short, heavyset Hispanic man carrying two paint cans ambled up. I smiled at him and he grinned back, more than I could say for any of the other fellows. Before I could repeat my request for info, a long, lanky crew member, perched on one of the ladders by the new Il Fornaio, yelled in a Southern accent that Victor wasn’t coming in that day. I exhaled and told myself to be patient.

I lowered my voice and addressed the remaining workers. Had anybody seen the accident with the truck yesterday? One or two nodded. That was going to set back the construction schedule for sure, I said, shaking my head. Ah, I asked, had anyone seen who was driving that truck? No, no, they shook their heads and avoided my eyes. We didn’t see. Not a thing. Uh-uh.

The workers began to disperse around the Dumpster. I felt suddenly desperate. “Do any of you know who told the police that my assistant was driving the truck?”

The heavyset fellow grinned. The name Raoul was embroidered on his workshirt.

“Yeah,” said Raoul, “I know who told ‘em and—” Raoul registered that the few remaining workers were staring at him. Abruptly, he closed his mouth.

“Who was he, though? Who told them?” I demanded. My voice had become shrill.

“He weren’t nobody, lady,” said the lanky fellow, as he stepped down the ladder. He had sand-colored hair and skin the color of a pecan shell. He moved in my direction and spoke like someone in authority. “He was a temporary worker. He just quit.” He jest quee-at.

“But who was he?” I persisted. “He told the police that lie, and now a friend of mine is in jail.”

“Lady, that guy is gone. Does anybody remember his name?” Pecan-shell turned to the remaining workers.

No, no, no, came the chorus of denials. No lo conosco. Don’t know him.

What was going on? Were these guys covering for a buddy who stole big trucks and tried to mow people down with them? They clearly had lots of sympathy for him, even if his quitting had left them a worker short.

This project is cursed, I asserted silently. The workers, avoiding my eyes, picked up their cans and walked away. These guys, I decided, are not happy campers. First their construction manager walks out, then one of their trucks is swiped and run into a fresh berm, then a worker lies and vanishes, and now nobody knows the whereabouts of the boss-guy who is supposed to be running things. Emphasis on the supposed to. Maybe some answers would be forthcoming if the Furman County attorney could get here and serve a handful of subpoenas, but it was unlikely that I would be able to extract any more information.

I reached into my purse, pulled out a handful of cards, and handed them to Raoul. At least he’d graced me with some kind of answer. His paint-stained fingers closed around my offering.

“Look, Raoul,” I implored, “if you do happen to remember the name of the guy who told the cops who drove the truck, I’d really appreciate a call. Please—it’s very important.”

I made my way across the rickety makeshift bridge that spanned the icy drainage puddle. At the glass-prismed doors, I glanced back at the construction crew. To the amusement of his coworkers, Raoul was flinging my cards one by one into the Dumpster.

Furious, I marched into the mall. My injured right side rebelled and shot an arrow of pain into my lower abdomen. I clutched my side, leaned against one of the marble walls, and took a hacking, uneven breath. The few beautiful people shopping that day passed me by.

What was I doing here? I was supposed to be resting; I’d promised the doctor and Tom that I would. Worse, I was at one of the two places—the other being the jail—that Counselor Hulsey had ordered me not to go. Could my lawyer refuse to represent me if I didn’t do what he said? Might the construction workers call the cops and say the caterer from Monday was bothering them with her nosy questions? Didn’t she have enough catering work to keep her busy?

I gripped my side and soldiered on, trying not to think of the wedding reception I’d been booked to do that day, trying not to think of Liz and her crew working while I was here at the mall. I also veered away from reflecting on the work-intensive events I was scheduled to cater over the next two days.

And then, suddenly, I was trying not to think of Julian. Someone had set up our old family friend, of that I was sure. But who? And why? This person was violent, no question about it. Paranoid, I looked all around. Nobody appeared to be following me. I limped forward and tried to ignore the image of Shane Stockham’s enraged face as he’d rushed forward in attack mode.

Oh, my God. Shane Stockham. He was Elk Park Prep’s lacrosse coach. Arch’s lacrosse coach. As I hobbled along, I punched in the numbers for my son’s cell phone.

“It’s Mom,” I said into his voice mail. “Don’t go to lacrosse if Shane is there. Call Tom or me instead. This is very important. One of us will come and get you. Call me on the cell. Arch, this is important.” I blocked out an image of my son making a disgusted face when he listened to the message.

My first stop was the Prince & Grogan lingerie department. No, Pam Disharoon was not working that day, a scarlet-haired clerk informed me. Pam’s only in on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, or I could leave a message…. On another one of my business cards, I scribbled a note asking Pam to call. I hoped this card wouldn’t get tossed, but with my luck… No, better not reflect on that, either.

I pushed past an exit sign and headed down the narrow hall that led to the mall manager’s office. If I couldn’t get any answers there, this trip was going to be a complete bust.

I spotted Westside’s assistant manager, whose name I now remembered was Rob Eakin. He was behind the glass surrounding his office by the tiny reception area. I’d met Eakin once. He was a short, wide fellow whom I judged to be in his forties. Now, his brow glistened with sweat as he listened to two people whose raised voices penetrated the glass separating them from me. With Barry gone, Rob Eakin must have been named acting mall manager. He didn’t look too good.

I nodded to the receptionist and moved to the chair closest to Eakin’s office. Right before I filed for divorce, I’d overheard The Jerk boinking a nurse in an empty hospital room. After that, no amount of righteous eavesdropping bothered me. Still, try as I might, I couldn’t quite make out what the people in the office were squabbling about.

I sighed in frustration.

The plumply padded receptionist—whose name I struggled to recall—watched me intently. Her cheeks were puffy and mottled, her eyes bloodshot. Her French-twisted blond hair resembled an unkempt haystack. Crumpled tissues lay scattered across her desk. A multibuttoned phone blinked and buzzed. She ignored it.

“I remember…you,” she told me. Her wobbly voice indicated she’d been weeping. “You’re the… caterer. The one who solves crimes.”

“The very one,” I replied amiably. “How’s it going?”

“Awful.” It came out like a sob.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? Poor Barry. Um, why didn’t you take today off?”

She pressed a tissue to her eyes, unable to respond. Two of the blinking phone lines went dark.

“Sorry,” I said gently, “but I do have a catering question that needs an answer. It’s about the lunch event Barry hired me for, this Thursday, the one for the potential tenants.”

The receptionist—her name was Heather, I finally remembered—stifled another sob. “I wish you could find out what happened to him!”

“I do, too,” I said softly. “I… I miss him. Barry and I used to be friends, back in our college days.”

“Really? Way back then? That’s sweet.”

I bit down on telling her that less than two decades—not glacier-forming epochs—separated me from my college days. Instead, I waited while she reached daintily for more tissues. Truth to tell, Barry’s and my friendship had lasted only a semester, which was four months. Then, after years of silence, he’d hired me to cater at the mall. We had been friends; then we’d gone our separate ways.

So, I thought suddenly, why the great push to be friendly again?

Heather blew into one tissue, then dabbed her eyes with another. I realized I was staring at her. Something was bothering me.

“Uh, Heather? How do you happen to know I’ve been involved in crime investigations? From that article in the paper about Hyde Castle? Did Barry show that to you? He told me my friend Mrs. McNeely had urged him to hire me. How does the article fit in?”

“Oh, yeah, Barry told me all about it.” She pulled a miniature compact from her bag and patted powder on her nose. “He told me how you dived into this pond to look for a murderer—”

“It was a moat—”

“—and how you always were able to find out what a criminal had done, and how good you were, and stuff like that. He was looking at you and about four other caterers, and then he read the article and told me to call you! To see if you could do the jewelry party and the potential tenants’ lunch.”

The phone buzzed again; this time Heather decided to answer it. I rubbed my temples. This was not what Barry had told me when he’d called. While Heather talked into the phone, I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct.

In March, Barry had phoned me out of the blue. He’d been brimming with the charisma and gusto that had made him, well, Barry Dean. We had a friend in common! he exclaimed. His dear friend Ellie McNeely, who knew me so well from our church work together, had recommended Goldilocks’ Catering to him! Where had I been all these years? Why hadn’t I called him? I’d been astonished to hear from my old coffee buddy. I’d offered a précis of Life Since College; Barry had listened patiently. Then he’d poured on the charm and informed me that he wanted to hire me, the famous caterer, for his “lavish” mall parties, because, because, because…

Heather hung up the phone and snuffled. Then she touched up her lipstick and answered the intercom buzz. I struggled to remember that first call from Barry Dean. I want to hire you… because Ellie recommends you! Because you’re this famous caterer who gets written up all over the place! Then he’d faltered and laughed again, as if overwhelmed by my renown. Because of… of our history, he’d burbled. Because I always prefer hiring a friend, especially a close personal friend like you, Goldy. His flattery, his flair, his sudden intimacy had so befuddled me that I’d never thought to say, But I haven’t heard from you in more than fifteen years. Yes, we like coffee and canines, but… when were we ever close personal friends?

Heather took another call. If the truth be told, Barry Dean and I had never been close personal friends. But Barry, a mall manager and effervescent marketer, had heard about me from Ellie, yes. He’d been looking at a handful of caterers until he cut out an article on my involvement in an Aspen Meadow homicide investigation. Then he’d told his secretary, to call me so he could book the mall events.

I blushed to think of my naïveté. Close personal friends, indeed.

I was willing to wager a side of beef that Barry had hired me because he had a problem. A crime problem, undoubtedly, one he would not or could not share with his bosses at Pennybaker International. A problem that, for whatever reason, was not something he could entrust to his own security people. Maybe he’d been afraid of the publicity, of the sudden truth of his credo nothing-clears-a-mall-like-a-security-threat. Then again, maybe he couldn’t afford to look like a failure.

He hadn’t done very well with his problem, had he? After the incident with the out-of-control dump truck, Barry I-knew-this-would-happen Dean had refused to talk even to me. Instead, he’d rushed back to his office. This office. He’d gone to the jewelry event, which had involved ejecting a shoplifting teen and dealing with a potentially violent conflict between the feuding Stockhams. At some point, he’d scribbled a note about having a tip for me, and needing to meet up in the P & G shoe department. But I’d arrived too late.

“Heather,” I asked cautiously when she hung up the receiver, “did Barry leave me anything?”

To my horror, a fat tear splashed down her cheek. “You mean,” she said, as she again started to sniffle, “like in his will?”

“Oh no, of course not! Just… like a letter or note or something.”

“You mean about the tenants’ lunch? Or about one of his little hunts that he likes, liked to send people on?”

“Little hunts?”

“Like the one for Mrs. McNeely and her engagement ring?”

“Yes, like that.” I was intrigued. Ellie had not mentioned a quest, much less one that involved an engagement ring. “Were they engaged?”

“Well, no,” said Heather. “She hadn’t found the ring. The riddle or whatever it was was too hard.”

“The riddle.” Had he sent Ellie in a convoluted pursuit of her ring, as he’d sent me searching for those long-ago psych notes?

“I don’t know anything about it, it was some kind of game.” Heather frowned. “And in terms of him leaving something for you, I haven’t found anything. But the filing today is like, pfft, forget it. I haven’t been in Barry’s office since the police went through everything.”

“Of course. Well…” I was thinking furiously. “Heather, if you should come across anything, even something small and seemingly insignificant, would you call me?” When she nodded, I went on: “I need to know about tomorrow’s lunch. When will Mr. Eakin be available?”

Heather cut a sideways glance at the glassed-in office. “Nine people have already asked to see him, besides those guys. You’re probably looking at two hours or more.”

With parties to prep, calls to make, and Arch to check on, I didn’t have two hours to spare. I quickly wrote Rob Eakin a note expressing my sympathy for the loss of Barry and asking for someone to call if the potential tenants’ lunch was not still on for Thursday. Mr. Dean had already paid for the food and labor, I added. Heather placed my note on top of an unpromisingly large stack of paper and swore she’d deliver it as soon as possible. Seeing my worried look, she told me that if Mr. Eakin couldn’t handle my request, she’d let me know herself about the Thursday lunch. Meanwhile, from the glassed-in office, the raised voices were suddenly audible.

“You need to do some damage control, Eakin! We don’t figure this thing out, we’re going to lose half our tenants!” howled a male voice.

“I’ve got two-thirds of them already screaming!” shrieked a young woman in a white shirt, black blazer, and black bow tie. Her face had turned scarlet; her brown hair, pulled into a tight bun, strained at its riggings. “They want twice as many security guys as we’ve already got!”

Eakin closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.

Heather’s eyes widened. “Look, I promise I’ll call you if I find anything Barry left you,” she stage-whispered. I nodded, not hopeful. If the cops had been through everything, it was unlikely there’d be anything left for Heather to find.

I thanked her and started to leave. Then I turned back. “Where is Victor Wilson today? I went out to the site. I had something to ask him, but he’s not there.”

Heather clucked disapprovingly. “Not a clue. Not that I would care about that asshole,” she added.

“You don’t get along with Victor? How come?”

Once again we were interrupted by arguing from the inner office.

“You’ve got to get the cops out of here!” the bunned bow tie lady squealed. “They’re driving customers away!”

“They can’t leave until they figure out what happened!” Rob Eakin yelled back.

Heather waved her hand. “Victor Wilson orders me around like I’m his secretary not Barry’s. He hires and fires workers whenever he feels like it, which gets us into a real mess with the worker-comp people and the unemployment-benefits people. And the Civil Liberties guys claim he treats Hispanic workers badly and pays them less than we do the other workers. For our office, the worst thing is that he keeps everyone dangling about when these stores are going to be finished. Victor’s a major-league asshole.”

“Did Barry get along with him?”

“Well,” Heather said with a sniff, “would you, if you were mall manager? Victor makes fourteen tons of paperwork for us, gives us a bad name in the Hispanic community, and won’t tell us when the damn stores are going to be done.”

“Were he and Barry enemies, then?”

Heather snorted a laugh, the first time she’d looked amused all morning. “You are bad, girl. Is this how you get crimes solved?” She giggled some more, then slid her eyes over to the contentious meeting. “The cops asked me about each and every person who worked closely with Barry. I looked up everyone’s schedule, even the security guys’. For Victor, I called Westside Community College. He teaches a class there on building your own house addition. Every Monday. Last night, Victor was giving a test.” She giggled again, unable to control herself. I began to worry about the hysterical tone creeping into her voice. “I tried to take that class and gave up. Victor said, ‘While the little woman’s making you an apple pie, you can be the big man building her a brand-new kitchen.’ So I said, ‘I am so out of here.’”

My eyes strayed to the glassed-in office, where all of the participants in the altercation were talking into cell phones.

“Did, uh, Victor try to order the previous construction manager around?”

“Lucas Holden? Noto? He was the last construction manager.”

“Was that his name?” I asked. “Lucas? Who’s Noto?”

“That’s just what we called old Lucas. No-toe. On account of a girder that fell on his big toe once, so he lost it. I’m like, Call a toe truck, yo! But nobody thought that was funny.”

I sighed. Heather definitely needed some time off.

“So what happened to this Lucas Holden?” I asked resolutely.

“He quit. Another asshole,” she declared vehemently.

“And where did Lucas go?”

“Oh, the letter he wrote us said he was going to Arizona someplace. Nobody ever called him Lucas, though. Strictly No-toe.”

“Do you have an address for… Holden?”

Heather swiveled in her chair toward her files. “I’ll look, if you’d like. But you don’t want to get mixed up with No-toe, trust me. He’s the reason we’re in the mess we’re in, with the new stores not ready, construction loans to pay, a drainage mess to clean up, a shortage of workers, blah, blah, blah. Don’t get me started on No-toe.”

I didn’t, even though I was increasingly eager to find out if Lucas Holden, aka No-toe Holden, had gotten along with Barry and everyone else at the mall.

Heather frowned over one file, then stuffed it back in the drawer when she read the concern in my face. “Look,” she said. “I’ll try to get No-toe’s phone number for you. If I can’t find it, I’ll ask Victor if he has it somewhere.” She grabbed for her tissue box and muttered, “Victor. What an asshole.”

Since we’d already traveled that particular loop, I nodded a good-bye. From the inner office, the voices rose again.

“If you can’t hire more security, then maybe we need a new acting manager!” the first man howled at Rob Eakin.

“Great idea!” screamed Eakin.

“Find out who killed Barry, would you?” Heather implored, as she crumpled her latest tissue and dabbed her eyes.

“I’m trying,” I said gently, over the noise of the office fight. “Take care of yourself, Heather.”

Then I backed out the door.

CHAPTER 9

As I gunned the van toward Aspen Meadow, Julian’s face stayed in my thoughts. He was emotionally and physically strong; anyone who knew him knew that. Surely he’d be able to handle whatever the jail experience offered, from bad cellmates to horrid food. When Julian did get out of jail, he’d probably start a campaign to bring fresh vegetables to inmates.

I tried to smile, but couldn’t. The memory of Julian’s haggard face and downcast spirits was too strong.

Barry, I reminded myself, as I raced onto the interstate. Barry is the key. My thinking was getting clearer in this department. My assumptions began with the theory that Barry had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. Ellie McNeely and I had been friends for a long time. When Barry was looking for a caterer, Ellie had told her boyfriend-who-hadn’t-given-her-a-ring-yet about me. But Barry hadn’t decided on a caterer until he’d read the article about the debacle at Hyde Castle. Somehow, that article had clinched it. Barry’d figured if he hired his old pal, amateur crime-solver Goldy Schulz, she could straighten things out. But his attempt to fill me in on his dilemma—or even tell me what the dilemma was—had gone terribly awry.

The snow-capped peaks and plum-purple shadows of the Continental Divide came into view. I pressed on the accelerator.

Barry’s dying and Julian’s arrest were not my fault. Still, I felt responsible. If only I had tried harder to make Barry talk to me… If only I had been less obsessed with my catering event….

Barry had tried to reach out to me. But he had been too proud, too scared, too something to just blurt out what was bothering him. And now he was gone.

Ringing from my cell phone made my heart jump. It was Alicia, my supplier. Was I ready to receive this week’s food order? Yep, I replied, you bet. Alicia promised to be at our house in thirty minutes. So much for stopping by the Bank of Aspen Meadow to see if Ellie could visit. I called the bank to try to set up an appointment with her, but was told she was being questioned again by someone from the sheriff’s department. A detective had taken Ellie to the bank’s conference room, and had asked not to be disturbed. Yes, I was told, a message would be left for Mrs. McNeely, asking her to return my call.

Barry might have thought I was an ace amateur sleuth, but it looked now as if my reputation was becoming a drawback. Maybe I was paranoid, but Pam Disharoon wouldn’t or couldn’t see me; ditto Rob Eakin, Ellie McNeely, and Capetown-bound John Rufus. Well. No matter what, I was going to find a way to get Julian out of jail.

And then—surprise!—my cell phone rang again.

“Goldy, it’s Page Stockham.”

“Uh, well. Yeah.” I couldn’t even stammer out a proper greeting. “What’s up?” I asked feebly. “How are you and Shane, uh, doing?”

“I really, really want to apologize to you.” Her breathy voice cracked. “So does Shane. He’s going to call you later. Look, it’s all my fault. I started the fight at the party. I’m sorry. Oh, God. Please, please say you’ll cater for us Wednesday. We need this lunch wicked bad.”

“I don’t know what to say. Maybe we should think it over,” I murmured. Excuse me, but it was Shane who’d started to attack his wife. Page had prodded and ridiculed him, yes. But instead of charging her, Shane could have walked away. In fact, they both could have. But Page hadn’t rung me up for marital advice.

“Don’t abandon us,” she pleaded. “Marla told me you’d probably cancel, and I needed to call you and eat dirt. Please, please don’t cancel on us. We’re under terrible stress financially, and we’re going to a counselor, because money is, the lack of money is, well, killing us.”

I turned off on the Aspen Meadow exit and tried to think of what to say.

“Let me think about it,” I said to Page.

“Please, Goldy. I’m really, really sorry. We both are.”

“We’ll talk later,” I promised. We signed off.

The first thing I did when I slammed into the kitchen at home was check the fax machine. Empty. The voice mail, though, announced that five folks had called.

The first message was from Tom. He was swamped, so could I pick up Arch today after all? Please call him if I could not, and he’d shuffle things around. I smiled. Of course I would get Arch. By the way, Tom added, Marla called and demanded that he look into Shane Stockham, to see if Stockham had any reports of, or arrests for, domestic or any other kind of violence. No, Tom said. Shane was clean.

The second message was from Arch, who’d checked his cell phone voice mail between classes—strictly forbidden at Elk Park Prep—and was calling from the boys’ bathroom. Flushing sounds punctuated the static as Arch sullenly announced that Mr. Stockham was not coaching lacrosse anymore, and had I gotten him fired? My son went on to say that he would be going to practice no matter what, and Tom wasn’t coming to pick him up, so he needed me to be there right at five o’clock. And please don’t tell him when to go to practice and when not to go. I sighed as his phone slammed shut.

The third call was in a husky voice. “Find out why Barry Dean had headaches, lady. Then you’ll get all your answers.” I sat up straight, taken aback. The caller had hung up without leaving a name. I played the message four times, but could not recognize the voice. My caller ID said the number was unavailable. I saved the message and moved on.

Shane Stockham’s contrite tone was next. “I am so sorry we had a problem yesterday, Goldy. It was all my fault. And by the way, I’m quitting coaching at Elk Park Prep. We’re just having too many problems. Anyway, I hope you won’t press charges against me for coming at you yesterday.” He paused, and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “If you’re not too mad at me, Page and I are still hoping to have this party tomorrow. At our place, at noon. Come by whenever you need to set up. Goldy… I hope you can forgive me.” He signed off.

Shane Stockham was doing really badly. Well, this I knew from Marla, Page, and now him. But he had quit coaching? Just because he and his wife had had a tiff at the jewelry event?

The final call was from Pam Disharoon. “My friend phoned and said you wanted me to call, so here I am. But you’re not there. I’ll be at P and G tomorrow, Wednesday, from ten to six. Same on Thursday and Friday, and ten to ten on Saturday. OK?” She didn’t sound pleased, and she didn’t bother to say good-bye.

I put on my apron and reflected. Arch was mad at me, Shane was sorry as hell, and Pam was miffed. And I wasn’t sure why any of them were feeling the way they were. But it was the third call I’d received that had me the most bewildered. Find out why Barry Dean had headaches. Well, I was trying to find out. And who had made that call? Raoul, the construction worker? Rob Eakin, the mall’s acting manager? Victor Wilson? The caller had been a male, I was pretty sure, and not like anyone I’d heard before.

A knock on the front door derailed that particular train of thought. My peephole revealed strawberry-blond Alicia, my supplier since I’d opened Goldilocks’ Catering. She hauled in baskets of fresh wild mushrooms—stunning arrays of everything from chanterelles to Portobellos—plus marbled slabs of standing rib roast, lusciously flavorful greenhouse-grown strawberries and rhubarb, and the rest of the supplies for the next two days’ parties. As she was leaving, she handed me a brightly wrapped compact disc.

“It’s for your kid. I can’t understand this music,” she said with a wink, “but the guy at the store told me this is what they’re listening to these days. Tell Arch happy birthday from me.”

I thanked Alicia profusely, gave her a check for the supplies, and got to work storing the food. Once done, I stood immobilized in the middle of our kitchen. Frustration gnawed at my brain. I needed to cook. Working with food always helped put things in perspective.

On my new computer, I pulled up the menu for Shane’s luncheon party. Yes, I was going to do it. He had apologized; his wife had apologized. Besides, he was the one who’d flown through the air and landed on the lounge floor. Maybe he was quitting coaching lacrosse because he was black-and-blue. Maybe he was quitting because he’d been thrashed by a mom.

I felt my mouth curl into a smile. Finally, finally, I was beginning to look forward to doing the Stockhams’ lunch. I tried to recall the layout of their place. The house itself was a gorgeous log dwelling in a stunning development of executive homes near the entrance to the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. As my printer spat out the menu, recipes, and schedule, I called Shane back and left a message thanking him for his apology. All was forgiven, I said, while making a serious mental note to bring a can of Mace to the party, just in case he lost it again. In my message, I enthusiastically concluded that my crew and I would start setting up around ten tomorrow.

I searched for and found my Mace, then slipped it into my purse. As I scanned the menus, I tried to recall everything I’d heard from Marla about Shane and Page. According to Marla, Shane’s store, The Gadget Guy, had received an eviction notice from Westside Mall. This notice had to have come from Barry. Complicating Shane’s problems were 1) Westside wanted a million bucks’ worth of back rent from him, and 2) his wife Page had a compulsive shopping problem, an addiction severe enough to warrant antidepressants and group therapy. Moreover, Page was locked in a to-the-death competition with her sister Pam, for stuff.

But how had Shane and Page Stockham felt about Barry? If either one of them had been on bad terms with him, why had they come to the jewelry event? Ah… but I knew the answer to that. More than anything, Page craved whatever big-ticket items sister Pam managed to land. Apparently, Page hadn’t gotten what she wanted. No doubt that was why she and her husband had fought. I’d have to ask Tom if the videotape had shown anything else about the whole Shane-Page-Pam-Barry situation.

I made myself a perfect cup of espresso to wash down a couple of aspirin and two homemade caramel brownies that Alicia had thoughtfully left on the kitchen table. Oh, boy, I thought, as warm fuzzies spiraled through my veins. Nothing like chocolate and coffee to kill pain.

I switched files and typed all I’d learned that day into the “Barry” file. Sipping the last of the coffee, I added my new crop of questions and licked my fingers. Then I read over the file. Why did the image of grasping at straws come to mind? I ignored the image, washed my hands, and rinsed the strawberries and rhubarb.

My fax rang. Since Arch’s short-lived foray into quantum physics had taught me that, indeed, the watched pot never boils, I was sure the same principle applied to fax machines. So I trimmed and halved the juicy strawberries, cut the crunchy emerald-and-ruby rhubarb into tidy widths, and mixed both of them with a judicious combination of cornstarch and sugar. Yum.

I carefully set the bowls of glistening fruit aside, then grabbed the spill of faxed pages. The brief cover letter was followed by a photocopied page from Barry Dean’s medical records. Ha!

I read the doctor’s notes and then, stunned, sat down to read them again.Pt. fought with a friend, who pushed him down. Pt. lost balance, fell into deep ditch, landed on back of head. Headaches ever since. Pt. v. stressed. Thinks he may have tumor. Pain excruciating. Vicodin script, follow in 2w.

I swallowed hard. Doggone it. If only, if only, Barry had told his doctor who this belligerent “friend” was. Finding out why Barry had headaches might be the key, but it looked as if I’d have to wait for Mr. Anonymous Phone Call to elucidate that particular datum.

Then again, maybe Barry had told his doctor the identity of the pusher. My girlfriend, who set a P.I. on my tail. My other girlfriend, the lingerie saleswoman. The owner of The Gadget Guy, after he slapped my face with his eviction notice. The construction manager, before he suddenly quit. And those were only the folks who immediately came to mind. Poor Barry.

I nibbled on the brownie crumbs and puzzled over the fax. This fight-with-a-friend tidbit had to get to the cops. Once they knew this, they could question Dr. Louis Maxwell. So how did I pop this information over to law enforcement without getting myself into big-time hot water?

I started working on the Stockham lunch. Shane and I had done the contract at the end of March, when he’d shown me his sumptuously furnished home, including a damask-and-chintz dining room and glassed-in garden room. Did he know back then that he was about to be evicted from the mall? I didn’t have a clue.

I stared at the list of dishes.

Shane had wanted at least some of the food to be in the shape of electronic equipment, he’d told me. He’d shown me a few gadgets, and I of course knew what Arch’s collection of electronic marvels looked like. No matter what the thing did, I decided, it either resembled a remote control or a pancake. For this reason, we’d decided on a first course of Asian dumpling soup, with the dumplings in the shape of portable compact disc players. As I was also set to serve wonderfully flavorful soup at the potential mall tenants’ lunch on Thursday, I’d already made and frozen batches of the oddly shaped dumplings during one of my recent fits of insomnia. I would defrost them early tomorrow before floating them in the boiling broth. The broth, however, still needed to be made.

From the refrigerator side of the walk-in, I pulled out three vats of homemade chicken stock that I’d begun defrosting before starting on the jewelry event. As it heated, I sliced onion and gingerroot, packed fragrant Chinese parsley into measuring cups, and carefully added them to the steaming stock. Within ten minutes, rich scents of the Far East wafted through the kitchen.

Shane had also requested three gourmet salads, to be served plated. I groaned. I needed to talk to Liz Fury, to make sure she could work the lunch with me. As we worked, we could visit about all that had happened. Since I knew she would still be working the wedding reception, I put in a call to her home. “Please give me a ring about the Stockham party,” I implored.

While I was cooking the shrimp for the Today-Only Avocado-Shrimp Boats, Tom unexpectedly showed up.

“I thought you were swamped,” I exclaimed with more surprise than I intended. I turned off the whirring food processor and gave him a hug. “It’s only four o’clock.”

He chortled. “Afraid I’ve been fired, Miss G.? And that’s why I’m home? Actually, I…just decided to delegate that work. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about cutting back to half-time, since my wife is making so much dough with her catering business. And this way, I can go get Arch, if you want.”

I smiled in spite of myself, pulled away, and poured the sweet-sour dressing for the shrimp into a large jar. “I… I went to see Julian,” I confessed. “I know you and Hulsey both said not to. But I was too worried.”

“See what I mean?” Tom replied, with a grim smile. “If you’re not in a mess, you make one.”

“He looks awful,” I continued. “Plus, I was wondering if the lounge videotapes showed any conflict between Page Stockham and her sister, Pam Disharoon, or between Shane Stockham and Barry Dean…” I stopped talking, suddenly suspicious. “Tom, won’t you please just tell me why you’re home so early?”

“We-ell, since I shoved my work onto others, and since I’m not assigned to the Dean case, I got to worrying about my recently injured wife, and wanted to see if she needed help—”

I turned back to the shrimp, now a tantalizing pink in their lemon-and-herb bath. “I’m fine.”

“Touchy, touchy. Maybe you don’t want to hear this, either, but I think that even though I’m home, you should still go pick up Arch today. He’s worried about you.”

“About his new guitar, you mean. Now wrecked and in police custody.”

“Look, I called down to Westside Music, and they’re going to phone their other stores to see if we can get another one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Miss G., would you come back over here, please?” I drained the first batch of shrimp, put down the sauté pan, and walked into his open arms. He gently held me as he asked, again, how I was doing.

“Not so hot.”

“Explain.”

“I feel responsible for Julian.” My voice wobbled treacherously. “I feel—helpless, and you know how I hate that.”

“Excuse me, Wife, but I’ve never seen you helpless.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Husband.”

He glanced over my shoulder at the counter. “How about if I make us enchiladas? Would that make you feel better?”

I actually laughed, then pulled away from his embrace. “Sounds wonderful. But Tom, there’s something I need to tell you first.”

“You mean besides the fact that you visited Julian against orders? I don’t think I should hear this.”

I began shelling the shrimp while he washed up and readied the enchilada ingredients. Had I turned over the faxed pages so he wouldn’t see them? I couldn’t remember. “Well, it’s like this. I’ve sort of been looking into this whole thing—”

Today-Only Avocado-Shrimp Boats

10 ounces thoroughly washedchilled inner leaves of a head of romaine lettuce

3 ripe avocados

30 cooked, shelled small to medium-size shrimp, chilled

9 ripe cherry tomatoes, chilled

1 cup Champagne Dressing (recipe follows)Prepare the salad just before serving.Tear the romaine into bite-sized pieces and make a bed of them on a serving platter.Carefully peel the avocados, discard the pits and skin, and cut the avocados into halves. Trim a small disc from the bottom of each avocado half so that each one sits flat. Arrange the avocados, cut side up, on the bed of greens. Arrange 5 chilled shrimp in a sunburst pattern in the hollow of each avocado half. Halve the cherry tomatoes and arrange them around the avocados.Generously pour the Champagne Dressing over the shrimp-filled avocado “boats” and tomatoes. Serve at once.Makes 6 servings (1 “boat” per person)

Champagne Dressing:

⅓ cup sugar

⅓ cup best-quality champagne vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

½ teaspoon ground celery seed

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

½ medium-size onion (3 to3½ ounces), cut into eighths

¾ cup canola oilInto the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade, place the sugar, vinegar, mustard, celery seed, salt, pepper, and onion. Process until the onion is completely pulverized, then slowly dribble in the oil, processing until thoroughly emulsified. The dressing should not be kept more than 3 days.

“Yeah, so I gathered. Sounds more like you’ve been snooping around. Maybe I don’t want to hear this—”

“Somebody called here a while ago, didn’t leave a name. Said I needed to look into why Barry Dean had such terrible headaches. I saved the message. Anyway. Then I, uh, learned that a friend of Barry’s pushed him down a while back. After the fall, he had such bad headaches that he had to take prescription painkillers.”

Tom considered the pan in front of him. The corn oil he’d heated to soften the tortillas sputtered. He lowered the first golden disk into the pan, flipped it, and laid it in a nest of paper towels.

Finally he asked, “And a prescription for painkillers after having fallen during this fight with a friend is significant because…?”

“Well, I just thought if you cops could find who called here, or who the friend was that pushed Barry down, you might find out who killed Barry.”

My ever-observant investigator-husband swept his eagle eyes over the kitchen. Then he washed his hands, moved down to my computer, and turned over the pile of faxed pages.

“Kee-rist. How in the hell did you get these from a—” he raised a bushy, sand-colored eyebrow at the letterhead, “from Barry Dean’s doctor?”

“That’s one thing you really don’t want to know.”

He groaned, then said, “OK, Miss G., I will pass this on to the guys working the case—”

“Please don’t give them those other pages, OK?” I imagined Hulsey’s furious face as he thrust the faxed report in my face, demanding to know how long I’d fraudulently worked under the alias of Dr. Shoemaker.

“Don’t worry,” Tom reassured me. “But I have to warn you, whoever shoved Barry down probably was not a ‘friend.’ People lie when they go to the doctor. ‘How many cigarettes do you smoke a day?’ ‘Oh, doc,’ says the pack-a-day smoker, ‘maybe two or three.’ ‘Who pushed you down and caused these headaches?’ ‘A friend.’ Yeah, right. And especially with our Mr. Dean being as secretive as he was, he’d lie more easily than he’d tell the truth.”

“Oh-kay,” I said, as I peeled fresh Bosc pears for the next salad. “I just thought knowing more about that fight and those headaches might help Julian.”

Tom listened to the tape with the anonymous message several times. He did not tell me what he planned to do about it. After that, he and I worked side by side, but mostly in silence, for the next half-hour. When I finally asked if he had found out any more about the Dean case, he shook his head. He did remind me, however, that because Julian’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, he would face arraignment no matter what.

“How can they charge him on so little evidence? Who made that nine-one-one call alerting the police to Barry’s murder, anyway?”

“They’ve listened to it a hundred times. It was from a pay phone outside Prince and Grogan. They can’t even tell if it was a high-voiced man or a low-voiced woman.” He shrugged. “If something comes along to clear Julian, he’ll be out.”

“Somehow I don’t feel reassured.”

“Miss G. What we do know is that someone tried to mow Barry Dean—and you—down, and didn’t succeed in killing him, and then someone knifed him, and did succeed in killing him. And that person left evidence of himself or herself somewhere. We just need to find it,” he concluded. I was thankful he hadn’t added a comment about needles or haystacks. “That’s we meaning the sheriff’s department, Miss G. Not we as in Goldy, Marla, and Tom. OK?”

“Of course,” I replied sweetly. He groaned again.

CHAPTER 10

I finished the pears, dropped them into a simmering, barely sugared syrup, and gave directions to Tom for the poaching and finishing. Then I grabbed my coat and announced I was off to pick up Arch. Tom grinned and swore he’d have dinner ready when we got back.

In the gathering twilight, I held my husband’s smile in my mind as I zipped toward Elk Park. Maybe he wasn’t too mad at Dr. Gertrude Shoemaker, impostor neurologist, after all. I knew it irked him when I tried to insert myself into his cases… but I never did it when I didn’t have some kind of personal stake in solving the crime. Someone shoots out our window, poisons a client at an event I’m catering, or kills a fellow and exults when our family friend is arrested for the crime—yes, I was going to get involved. As they used to say in my native New Jersey, Whaddayathink I’m gonna do?

Darkness blew in along with charcoal clouds from the west. The high hills covered with pine trees turned to black velvet. A whirl of snow fogged the windshield; I flipped on the wipers. I thought of the scantily clad, hapless lacrosse players. Welcome to springtime in the Rockies!

I turned through the massive stone gates and gunned the van up the winding driveway that led to Elk Park Preparatory School. A caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles, their lights on, sped down the driveway in the opposite direction. The kids must have been dismissed early. A lot of parents actually watched the practice, then called the coach later to offer unconstructive criticism. I wondered if that was why Shane had quit.

Snow swirled into the parking lot. Half a dozen Lexuses and BMW’s, their engines running, clustered by the pathway that came down from the fields. High above the lot, by the portable toilet at the edge of the fields, a few camel’s-hair-clad parents stamped their feet and clapped with mittened hands. Arch would die of embarrassment if I even showed my face at lacrosse practice, so I stayed put.

And that was how I saw Shane Stockham threaten a woman. Again.

The two figures first attracted my attention when they whacked open the thick wooden doors of the headmaster’s house. They paid no attention to the resultant crash or echoing bang of hinges. Shane Stockham I recognized instantly: His stocky body, rigid stance, and distinctive gait were unmistakable. He wore a ten-gallon hat and a sheepskin jacket—de rigueur Colorado wear for the upscale wannabe cowboy. Raised voices indicated things weren’t going well between him and his companion, a fashionable-looking woman wearing a mid-calf trench coat and leather boots. A twisted Burberry scarf held her blond-brown hair in place. She walked swiftly and gave off an assured, regal air. At one point, she stopped by an electric lantern to listen to Shane. After a moment, she reached out to touch his shoulder. He slapped her hand away and vigorously told her to shut up. The woman, momentarily thrown off balance, recovered and yelled at Shane to back off. I squinted to see her face in the gloom.

It was Ellie McNeely.

I groped through my bag for the Mace. I clutched it with my right hand and vaulted from the van. Shane might apologize on the phone all he wanted, but if he thought he was going to hurt my pal Ellie, he had, as my mother used to say, another think coming.

As I tore across the snow-dusted lot, I tried to imagine why those two had even been in the headmaster’s house. Meetings of all kinds were held in the luxurious residence, with its real Oriental rugs and antique furnishings. But if they’d been at a meeting, where were the other folks? Ellie’s daughter, after recovering from her parents’ brutal divorce, was one of the handful of sophomores in the National Honor Society; Shane’s airhead twin daughters were freshmen. I couldn’t imagine that both parents had been called in by the headmaster because the girls had somehow gotten into an argument. When I was ten yards away from them, I ducked behind one of the Lexuses.

“… trying to tell you that circumstances have changed,” Shane ranted, “and you’re not listening!”

“I am,” Ellie retorted, “but you know very well that all of the financial commitments of the school are made on the basis of those pledges. We offer teachers positions with fixed salaries…Oh, Goldy? What on earth are you doing here?”

The two of them stopped in their tracks. Both looked at me curiously as I stepped out from the shadow of the Lexus. As the snow drifted down, I tried to think of what to say. The freezing can of Mace was making my right hand ache.

“Uh,” I said, “uh, I just saw you two…” I fumbled about for words and squeezed the Mace can. Shane had backed well away from Ellie, and I was unsure of what to say or do. At the far edge of the lot, someone in a silver SUV honked.

“Well!” said Ellie. “That’s my daughter, honking my horn at me. I have to go. Talk to you later, Goldy.” With that, she turned with a sweep of trench coat and walked delicately across the snow to her van.

“Ellie,” Shane called after her, his tone suddenly apologetic—hmm—and calm, even cajoling. “Please, Ellie. Please think about what I’m saying—”

“No-o!” she called, making her voice sweet. She didn’t turn back.

I tried to give Shane a look that was both punitive and sympathetic. I was itching to know about their conflict. Shane rubbed his eyes, tilted his head back, and groaned.

“Goldy, so, did you get my message about tomorrow?”

His question startled me. I shivered as if unexpectedly chilled, tucked my hands hastily into my pockets, and let go of the Mace. Only then did I give him a bright smile. Even if I did have more reason to be wary of him than ever, Shane, after all, was a client.

“Yes, and I left one for you. We’ll be there at ten—” I stopped. My God, I’d forgotten something. In the bustle of last week’s events and the commotion of the last twenty-four hours, I had neglected to obtain Shane’s final payment for the lunch. I emphatically had not received the last six hundred dollars he owed Goldilocks’ Catering … which should have been paid five days ago, before he’d gone on a jewelry-leasing binge with his wife. This was not the gratuity, which I would be picking up after the event. This was the second payment for the food and service. It was just the sort of detail that I’d feared would slip between the cracks, now that I’d become so busy. My heart sank.

“But,” I continued with another blinding smile, “I’ll need the second installment before we can do the party. I’ve got all the food ready.”

“Look, Goldy, I am extremely sorry for what happened yesterday. My wife is… on medication…. Things just sort of fell apart. We’re very enthusiastic about this luncheon party, believe me.”

“I need the check, Shane.”

“There are so many things I need to talk to you about,” he countered nervously, cutting his eyes from side to side, as if looking for someone or something more important to do. “So many things that I don’t know where to begin…”

My hand slipped back into my pocket and I gripped the Mace. As Shane rattled on about how successful the luncheon was going to be, I wondered where he was going with this conversation. Make that, where Shane was going, period. Tonight he’d flailed at Ellie, then he’d asked me whether I’d received his message. Then he’d refused to address the nonpayment issue, and hopped back to yesterday’s event. My skin broke out in a chilled sweat. The only other person who jumped from topic to topic like that—to keep you off guard—was The Jerk, my ex. And he usually started leaping around verbally before he punched me in the face.

“I’m enthusiastic, too, Shane!” I said as I edged away. The last bunch of lacrosse players was straggling down the steep path from the now-deserted field. It was an idyllic scene. Street lamps brightened the parking lot. Slow-drifting snowflakes resembled feathers shaken from a pillow. Behind the gaggle of athletes stumbled Arch. He might be bigger and stronger than he’d been at eleven, but he hadn’t given up his permanent place at the back of the line. “Gotta go, Shane. Remember the check tomorrow, OK? First thing, before we set up.”

To my dismay, he bolted toward me. Should I shriek and make a run for it? I tightened my grip on the Mace.

“Look, Goldy. Don’t run off, please. ‘Cuz I… really want to talk to you. It’s important, I promise.”

If he was going to tell me that he didn’t have the money for the party, that he’d pay me next week, next month, or next year, then I was going to punch him in the face, future clients be damned.

“It’s about the mall, you see,” Shane persisted. “You’re such a great person, Goldy, I feel as if I really could tell you—” He hesitated.

“Shane, please. I’m getting cold. Tell me what?”

He lowered his voice. “It’s about Barry Dean.”

I stopped short. I had to restrain myself from grabbing Shane by his sheepskin lapels and shaking him.

“What about Barry Dean?”

“Well, it’s just that…I don’t know how much you know about the way a mall works—”

“Look, can you just get to the point? My son’s waiting for me, Shane.”

He gulped, then brushed melting snow off his handsome, square face. His brown eyes shone with worry. And guilt? I wasn’t sure.

“I got into trouble. I… did a bad thing, but Barry made it much worse. I… cooked the books of The Gadget Guy. The reason I did it was that once we broke a certain level of sales, the amount of rent we owed Pennybaker International, according to the terms of our lease agreement, went way up. With… Page’s shopping problem, and our current level of debt, we just couldn’t pay more rent. Just could not. So… Barry, who had done next to nothing in terms of his promised promotion for mall tenants, offered to do a deal. He wouldn’t evict me if I paid him fifty thou up front in cash, off the books, and another fifty thou at the end of the year. But…I couldn’t. So he pulled the plug on me. There, I said it.” He paused to take a raspy breath and fixed me with his sad stare. “I know you’re going to ask me did I tell the police about this. The answer is no, I couldn’t do that either. Risk going to jail for cooking my own books? Forget it. So I’m trying to get into online ordering now, out of our house. But if any of my potential backers—the people who are coming to lunch tomorrow—find out I messed with the figures at the store, they’ll run away faster than a herd of elk. I didn’t cheat anybody, Goldy, I just wouldn’t pay that mall their extortionary demands. And I couldn’t afford to pay Barry his bribe. I don’t have that kind of money.”

In the near distance, a car honked. This honk came from my van. Arch was honking at me.

“Shane, why are you telling me all this?”

He ran his fingers through his tousled hair. “Because I know your young friend has been accused of Barry’s murder. I didn’t want you to think I killed Barry, in case Barry had told you about our… conflict. I can’t afford negative publicity at this point. And I’ve read how you sometimes get involved in these cases—”

“OK, OK. Is this accounting crime what you were just talking to Ellie about? Because she was close to Barry, too?”

Shane snorted. “No, we have an issue…with the school. But being in that mall, I saw the way things went. I mean, in addition to not doing the promotion he promised, Barry was not the most moral of guys, you know? He had a woman problem, and I think that’s why he wanted the payoff. To keep up his woman habit. Otherwise, he’d have to stay with old stick-in-the-mud Ellie McNeely. For a while, anyway.”

“Mom!” Arch shrieked. “Come on! Let’s split! You’ve got a cell call! I’m starving! It’s cold! Mom!”

“I have to go.” My thoughts were tangled from all the new information. Did I believe Shane, or not? I wasn’t sure. “So you think this fifty thou was for him, then, not the mall?”

“Of course it was for him! What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you here?”

“Shane, tell the cops all this.”

“You mean your husband?”

“No, no, Tom’s off the case. Anything you can tell the cops about Barry will help them get the big picture. If you have any documentation of what… Barry did, show it to them.” I did not say, Documentation of what you say Barry did. But I thought it. “Maybe Barry pulled this blackmail stuff with other store owners. Just call the department and get connected with the assigned investigators. Please? Believe me, it will look much, much better for you if you tell the cops what happened. If they find out elsewhere, they’ll come after you.”

“Mom! Goldy Schulz! Come on!”

Shane pressed his lips together, then backed away. Somehow, I didn’t think he was bolting to a phone.

My stiff, chilled fingers wrenched the driver door open, and I was confronted with my son’s stiff, chilled face. His fingertips pressed hard on the mouthpiece of the cell phone.

“I am so mad at you!” he hissed furiously. “First you get my coach to quit. Then you come to pick me up, only you don’t pick me up, because you get in a long conversation with my former coach. Which is what you always do. Talk, talk, talk. So I sit in here. Cold. Waiting. Starving. And now we won’t be able to go home, because you’re going to have to talk to this person.” He thrust the phone at me.

I gritted my teeth. When Arch acted like this, I didn’t know if he was showing the dark side of teenage temperament—which seemed to be all dark, come to think of it—or if he was following a more troublesome path on the way to behavior similar to that of his Jerk father. The amazing aspect of this little speech from Arch was how articulate he was when he was enraged. Since this was the opposite of his suave father, who became obscenely incoherent when he was angry, I fastened my seat belt and put the car into gear. I was not, I decided, going to respond to Arch.

“I’m so hungry,” Arch growled, as I put the phone to my ear.

I pressed the phone into the front of my jacket to cover the mouthpiece. “Tom is making enchiladas, and—”

“I don’t care!”

Give up, my inner voice counseled, before I reminded him how much he loved Tom’s cooking. So I did. I piloted the van toward the edge of the snow-frosted parking lot. Into the phone, I purred sweetly, “This is Goldy Schulz of Goldilocks’ Catering. May I help you?”

“You must be making a lot of money, to put someone on hold on a cell phone for seven minutes!”

I sighed. Just what I needed today, one more crab. Tomorrow night I would make crab dip.

“How can I help you?” I suddenly remembered the anonymous call I’d received earlier. This voice was deep, too… but I was fairly sure I was being bawled out by a female. Still, you can’t be too careful. “And who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“You can come pick up this puppy. Barry Dean’s basset hound. He’s late.”

“He’s dead,” I countered bluntly.

“I’m looking right at him.”

I paused. Maybe I needed yet more caffeine, even if it was almost dinnertime. “Who is calling, please?”

“Goldy, fer chrissakes,” growled the husky voice. “It’s Darlene Petrucchio. You useta come into my store, and that kid who useta live with you useta come in, too. Darlene’s Antiques and Collectibles. And what do you mean, he’s dead? He’s sitting on my kitchen floor, drooling.”

“Barry Dean is dead,” I said, speaking very slowly and distinctly.

“Well, I know that!” cried an exasperated Darlene Petrucchio. “Otherwise, why would I be calling you? Barry called yesterday and said he was leaving you his dog. He’s late.”

OK. I was driving, one-handed, down the slick, snow-covered curves of the Elk Park Prep driveway. I couldn’t stop to talk sense with chain-smoking, raspy-voiced Darlene of Darlene’s Antiques and Collectibles, or my son would explode. I needed a time-out. I needed to get out of this Abbott and Costello routine about dogs and dead guys.

“I can’t take care of this hound another night!” Darlene shouted, coughing. “He howls and cries and he’s driving Gus and me nuts! Come and get him, will you? He’s late.”

“Who is late?” I tried again, with deliberate loudness, like an American bellowing English at a European.

“Jesus H. Christ, Goldy! The puppy is late! That’s his name! Late! How many times do I have to tell ya?”

“Thanks, Darlene!” I sang into the phone. Studiously avoiding the word late or its cognate, later, I said, “I’ll be over… after dinner… say, half past seven. Where do you live?”

“Where do you think?” she shrieked, as a dog howled mournfully in the background. “Next door to Barry Dean, fer chrissakes!”

To save us further miscommunication, she slammed the phone down and broke the connection.

Maybe I could bring Darlene and Gus a box of chamomile tea. She seemed to need it.

Regarding the central question now running my life, who murdered Barry Dean, I now had new input. Barry Dean had left me his dog. No question, that would really clarify my thinking on this case.

CHAPTER 11

Ia met Tom’s hearty greeting at our front door by falling into his arms. “I need help!” I gargled. The reason I didn’t add “My son’s driving me crazy!” was that Arch was right behind me.

“I’ve got a glass of sherry waiting for you in the kitchen,” Tom replied, without missing a beat. “Driving to Elk Park Prep can be awfully demanding.”

Arch grunted before announcing: “I’m starving!”—in case I hadn’t recalled that crucial information.

“Dinner’ll be ready in less than five!” Tom replied, his voice jovial.

Arch hefted up his backpack, lacrosse stick, and bag, and vaulted up the steps two at a time. The door to his room slammed resoundingly.

“I can’t drink sherry,” I told Tom as I plodded into the kitchen. “I have to drive somewhere tonight.”

“Tell me you didn’t take on another catering job. Tell me you’re going to stay and enjoy these enchiladas.”

“After dinner, I have to go get a dog. His name is Late. Wait a second. I’ll tell you all about it later, while we eat.”

Tom smiled, winked, and wisely decided not to ask me how I’d become ensnared in canine rescue. Instead he peered into the oven, nodded approvingly, then removed a large pan of fat enchiladas. A thick layer of melted Cheddar cheese bubbled over the dark, pungent enchilada sauce that in turn smothered the rolled and stuffed tortillas. Tom called upstairs.

“Hey, Arch! The enchiladas are done! In fact, they’re overdone! Next time don’t let your mother take so long!”

Arch roared with rage.

When Tom turned back to the kitchen, chuckling, I said, “Don’t start. He already blames me enough for… oh, everything. And please don’t use the word late. It has to do with the dog that I need to go pick up.”

Tom ignored me, which was a good thing. Two minutes later the three of us were digging into sour cream-topped enchiladas bursting with Tom’s mélange of spicy beef, beans, onions, garlic, black olives, and picante. I moaned with pleasure. Arch shot me a disapproving look which said Even at home, Mom can embarrass you!

My mind returned to the parking-lot confrontation between Shane Stockham and Ellie McNeely. Later, when Arch had gone upstairs to do homework, I would tell Tom about it, to get his ideas. In any event, I was back to feeling uncomfortable about catering at Shane and Page’s mini-mansion the next day. Maybe I’d feel better if I could talk to Ellie and find out why she’d argued with Shane.

When my inner mind shrieked, You’re so damn nosy, I forked in another delectable bite.

“Anybody talk to Julian today?” Arch demanded.

I recounted the high points of my visit to the jail. Tom had also dropped in on Julian, but had left when the defense lawyer showed up. My son then asked when he could go see Julian, and I said probably this weekend. Arch’s mood lightened a bit. This made me think that perhaps the cause for his anxiety had not been my usual mom-misbehavior, but his worry about Julian, who was like a big brother to him.

“I’m wondering,” I ventured at length, “does anybody mind if we adopt another dog for a while?”

“Uh-oh,” Tom groaned.

Arch, however, brightened. “Sure! I can help. What kind of dog is it?”

“It’s a basset hound.”

“Miss G.?”

“OK, it’s Barry Dean’s basset hound. Barry left it to me.”

“He left it to you?” Tom echoed. “We’re just now getting his lawyer to talk about the will. How could you know about what he left and to whom?”

“His neighbor called. Darlene, the woman who owns that used-stuff store on Main Street. Apparently Barry called her yesterday before he died. Said if anything happened to him, I was supposed to take care of his dog, who is really a puppy. Darlene’s going to have a conniption fit if she has to have him another night.”

Somehow, my wonderful husband absorbed and translated this. “Miss G., why do you think Barry would ask you to take care of his dog? Are you saying he had a premonition that he was going to get killed, and called his neighbors to make provisions for his puppy?” he asked mildly.

Arch, his curiosity piqued now that he’d chowed down five enchiladas, raised his eyebrows. He’d wanted a second dog ever since we acquired Jake, a bloodhound who’d been mistreated before we took him in. Now Arch saw his chance coming. I did not want to ponder what Scout the cat would think of another dog adoption, however. Things could get ugly.

“I don’t know why Barry wanted me to have his puppy,” I told my family truthfully. “But I really think I should go get him.”

Tom mumbled something about letting the cops know what I was doing. Also, the department would need to find out if Barry had said anything else to Darlene. I told him the cops could talk all they wanted to Darlene, to me, and what the heck, to the dog.

We finished our meal thrashing out logistics for the week, who would be where when, how the driving would work, and so on. Such are the joys of contemporary domestic life. Arch and I thanked Tom for the fabulous dinner. Tom offered to do the dishes, and I accepted with gratitude.

“I’ll come with you, Mom,” Arch piped up unexpectedly as he finished loading the silverware into the dishwasher, a job he had done without being asked. “I got most of my homework done in school. While you’re driving, I’ll take care of the dog.”

“Why, thanks, Arch. I’d love your help.”

And so off we went.

“You’re late,” Darlene announced ungraciously as she swung open the door of her log cabin. Short, slender, and about sixty, Darlene wore an emerald green turtleneck and a fashionable-ten-years-ago black velvet skirt and vest. Her salon-dyed light orange hair was meticulously arranged in an Annette Funicello bubble, and her impeccable-but-heavy makeup glowed in the light from an overhead chandelier made from antlers. She looked like a perfectly preserved dried apricot.

“Very late,” she added, with the quirk of an arched, red-penciled eyebrow.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself to be pleasant. I smiled and said, “Let’s not use the dog’s name, OK? Darlene, you remember my son Arch? He loves dogs and will help me get Late home.” From inside the cabin, Barry’s hound howled so loudly I suspected he’d heard me.

O-woo! O-woo! Get me out of here!

“C’mon in, he’s waiting for you!” Darlene closed the door behind us. She added, “He’s in the kitchen. I had to pile some stuff by the door to keep him in.” A prolonged crash preceded a spill of cardboard boxes out the kitchen door. A streak of black, gold, and white hurtled toward us. “Late!” Darlene shrieked, in a voice that would have started an avalanche.

Late paid no attention whatsoever. Arch had dropped to his knees as the dog rushed us. The bassett bounded up, tongue extended, slathering Arch’s face with kisses. My son, overwhelmed, toppled back on his behind. Late howled with exultation. Darlene screeched a torrent of commands that the puppy ignored.

“Darlene!” I called over the general confusion. “Can you tell me exactly what Barry said? You know, when he called to tell you about his puppy?”

Darlene was headed toward the kitchen. I followed, and managed to trip over only one box upended by the puppy.

“Here’s his food dish, water dish, and vitamins,” she said, as she dumped mismatched plastic bowls and other canine paraphernalia into a grocery bag. “He was outa Puppy Chow.” She whacked the bag down beside me on the counter. “All’s Barry said to me was, ‘If I have to go on a business trip allova sudden, I want Goldy Schulz t’have my dog.’ Then he asked if I knew who you were, the caterer who helps her husband solve crimes, and I said yeah, and he asked me to go get the puppy right then. I said, ‘So yer goin’ on a business trip, then?’ And he says, ‘Maybe.’ So I went and got the puppy. That was yesterday. I’m tellin’ ya, I can’t go through another night listening to him howl and whine. I mean, I used to watch Barry’s house and the puppy when he had to be out of town for a coupla nights, but it’s not like he left me any cash to take care of the hound for the rest of his life. I am sorry Barry died, though. He was a nice neighbor, if a little—Well, you know. Overdosing on the social life.”

Out in the hallway, Late’s piercing yip was giving me a headache. Arch was egging him on in Boy’s Dog-Speak: Yeah, boy, c’mon boy, sit, yeah, roll over, yeah! OK, I’ll rub your tummy. Bet you’re hungry, right, boy?

Overdosing on the social life? “Did Barry have many girlfriends?” I ventured.

Darlene rolled her eyes, opened her refrigerator, and popped open a beer. She did not offer me one, which was probably just as well.

“Look, I already talked to that private dick—”

“John Rufus?”

Darlene slurped foam. “Yup, and I told him about the bra saleslady—”

“Pam?”

“Yup.” Darlene tried unsuccessfully to suppress a belch. “That’s what the cops called her when they showed me her picture. Blonde who wears her hair in sort of a pickaninny?”

“The very one.”

“Well, she’s been over there, too. Those two, Pam and Ellie. That’s all I know about Barry’s girlfriends. ’Cept he didn’t leave either one of ‘em his dog.”

“Thanks.”

Darlene put down the beer, picked up the grocery bag, and shoved it at me. Since she couldn’t find any puppy food, she added, she’d given Late some chili last night. He’d seemed to like it.

“Chili?” I repeated, nonplussed. No wonder you were up all night.

When Darlene raised that thin eyebrow again, I hustled back to the foyer. Arch had thoughtfully brought along a leash and was clipping it to Late’s collar. Late, panting, twisted his stubby, muscled neck to look me over. He was a hefty, short-haired black hound with a wide, white chest and magnificent gold streaks along his face. He did resemble Barry’s old hound, Honey, especially with his red-rimmed eyelids around large woeful eyes. I’m grieving, his countenance seemed to say, cheer me up.

“He’s just three months old,” Darlene explained from behind me. She couldn’t hide the joy in her voice at the prospect of ridding herself of the hound. “Oh, and he goes to High Country Vet, so you might want to check in over there, you know, see if he needs shots or worming or something.”

I thanked Darlene and headed out after Arch and the puppy to the van. Late’s enthusiasm for Arch did not extend to going in a car, however, and once we were all inside, the little dog started whining inconsolably. I started the engine. The dog wailed even louder.

“Let me try to calm him down, Mom, before you pull out. I brought him some smoked pigs’ ears.”

“Jake won’t be happy you snitched from his store of treats.”

At this, Arch launched into more Dog-Speak: Don’t worry, buddy, your new brother is going to love you, yeah, buddy, Jake’s a big old bloodhound who shares everything, et cetera, et cetera. I disconnected from Arch’s reassuring chatter and Late’s crying, and studied Barry’s chalet-style house next door. Two sheriff’s department cars were parked in the driveway. The red police tape that I knew was printed with the word Evidence had been strung around the house and yard. Hmm.

Barry’s house stood out in this neighborhood because he’d taken great care to make it look handsome. While Darlene had continued to paint her home an opaque lime green—hip some decades ago in Aspen Meadow, like everything else about Darlene—Barry had painted the gingerbread trim of his dark brown wooden house a bright red. Now, the outside lights illuminated not only the Swiss-style abode, but the fresh fall of snow in the front yard. The curtains were pulled, but a lit interior told me the detectives were working.

Without thinking, I released the brake and allowed the van to roll down to Barry’s driveway. Arch, preoccupied with calming the dog, did not notice. Nor, apparently, did anyone inside. I powered down my window and stared at the house. Why did you leave me your dog, Barry? I heard no answer to my question but puppy whining and the frigid night wind sweeping through the pines.

“Mom!” Arch whispered. “You’re freezing me out! Late’s shivering! Close the window, would you?” The dog threw back his head and began to howl. “Mom! What are you waiting for?”

We took off. Tom was not at home, which puzzled me, but Arch helped me get the separate “pet housing area,” as we called it, ready for our latest guest. Because of the catering business, I had to be extra careful about keeping the animals out of the kitchen. I tried not to think of the unsuccessful box barricade Darlene had built for Late.

Late, meanwhile, was getting to know Jake out in our fenced backyard. Like Barry’s yard, ours was blanketed with snow. Howls, yips, and growling let us know the two canines hadn’t quite decided to be friends. When Arch opened the back door, Jake began to lumber in, but was impeded by Late streaking through his legs. Arch said he’d calm Jake if I could get hold of Late. I quick-stepped into the living room, where Late was avidly sniffing one of Tom’s Oriental rugs.

“No you don’t, buster.” I scooped him up and hugged him to me, then lowered myself into one of the wingback chairs. To my surprise, Late turned, perused my face, and began to sniff my chin. My heart melted at the sight of those droopy brown eyes with their pink rims. The dog appeared worried. You, he seemed to be thinking, definitely aren’t Barry.

“Why did your master leave you to me?” I asked him. “From the sound of it, he had two girlfriends. Why didn’t he leave you with one of them? The only thing recommending me was that we already had a hound. Different kind, though.”

In my lap, Late panted, but said nothing.

“Was it because of the truck accident?” I asked Late. “Barry was scared because that truck nearly killed him as well as me? So he called his neighbor and said, ‘If I die before I get home, give my dog to the caterer’?”

Late still wasn’t in a talkative mood, so I just patted him. Arch appeared, carrying a tray of homemade dog biscuits. Apparently, Late’s olfactory glands worked as superbly as Jake’s, because he whirled, jumped off my lap, and tore toward Arch. Arch, delighted to be once more the center of the basset’s universe, started feeding him goodies from the plate. When the phone rang, I headed for it, mostly to prevent myself from mentioning crumbs and dog-mess to Arch.

“I had to finish up something at work,” Tom reported from his cellular. “Apparently my delegating didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. Anyway, I didn’t want you to worry. Did you get the dog?”

“Yeah, thanks for asking. Arch is spoiling him rotten even as we speak.”

“Is he cute?”

“He’s black streaked with gold and white, and he has a face frozen in the ‘sad’ setting.”

Tom snorted. “Did Barry ever mention to you that he wanted you to take care of his hound? The detectives are still working at his house.”

“Nope. I saw them there, by the way. Do you happen to know who’s going to inherit the place? I don’t think Barry has any kin.”

“I don’t know about kin. One of the guys mentioned that Barry had left his goods to the ASPCA. It’ll be a while before they can get the transfer worked out, though. Why?”

I couldn’t tell my husband Because I’d like to be able to snoop around in my old friend’s house, and figure out why somebody stuck a knife in his gut. So I just said, “Oh, I need to know what kind of food he was giving the dog, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.”

I always wondered why I bothered to lie to Tom, since he could invariably tell when I was skirting the truth. A fierce crackle broke our connection before I could protest, or even ask when he would be home.

Arch appeared in the hall holding the puppy in his arms. Could that be a smile on Late’s face?

“I’m going up to finish the last bit of homework I’ve got,” my son announced. “I’ll take care of Late. What kind of dumb name is that for a dog, anyway?”

“I have no more idea about that than I do why Barry left him to me.”

Arch turned and started up the staircase, his usual clomping replaced by gentle steps. Snug in Arch’s arms, Late wagged his tail like a metronome.

In the kitchen, I started some milk heating for hot chocolate. While I stirred heavy cream and sugar into best-quality cocoa, I listened to the answering machine. There was only one message, and it was from Heather, the weeping mall office secretary. Westside was in limbo over the lunch event I was supposed to be catering on Thursday. She just wanted to give me a heads-up. Super.

I whisked the steaming milk into the cocoa mixture and considered. I had not heard back from Ellie McNeely. The kitchen clock said it was almost nine. Ellie was a friend, so I sipped the cocoa and punched in her number. No answer. Either she wasn’t at home or she wasn’t picking up.

Arch appeared in the doorway and said he thought Late, who was whining again, might need to go out. Hearing Arch’s voice and the whining puppy, Jake started scratching at the door to the pet area. I released Jake while Arch held on to the puppy with one hand and opened the back door with the other. Snuffling wildly at Late while giving me occasional confused looks, Jake seemed both curious about, and disheartened by, our canine orphan. Finally Jake loped through the back door. Late, howling, streaked after the bloodhound. I sensed imminent canine combat, although I was confident Jake could fend for himself. For the first time since we’d arrived home, I caught a glimpse of Scout. The cat’s green eyes peered down at the dogs from his perch in a small pine tree.

I sipped more hot chocolate and tried to think. Since the previous night, I hadn’t made it through a single hour without worrying about Julian. This hour was no exception, I thought, as I finished the chocolate. Just before ten, I washed my cup, let the dogs in, and settled them into their little room. A moment later, Scout scratched at the door, and I carefully placed him into his feline bed on a shelf above the hounds. Then I punched in the numbers for the St. Luke’s recorded prayer list and added Julian’s name.

I was starting up to bed when the dogs began to wail. I sighed. Was this what we were going to have to listen to all night, every night? Outside, someone killed a car engine. Oh good, I thought, my spirits rising. Tom’s back.

But it was not Tom. A timid knock at the front door only intensified the dogs’ howling. I checked the peephole, then opened the door.

Ellie McNeely, her trim figure still swathed in the trench coat and scarf in which I’d seen her earlier in the evening, gave me an apologetic look. Her hands fidgeted as she struggled for words. What was she sorry about? The unannounced visit? The late hour? The fact that she had not answered my calls?

Her hands finally came to rest on her lapels. She smoothed her coat and tossed her bangs off her forehead.

She said, “We need to talk.”

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“Please, Goldy. I need you to come with me. I feel… awful.” A zigzag of emotional pain twisted her lovely face. “The cops suspect me. They told me not to leave town. They say I need to be clearer about my relationship with Barry. What about the cuff links? What about this? What about that? They want me to give a minute-by-minute accounting of where I was Monday night. I told them, I went home with a friend. Why don’t they believe me? Are they going to let Julian out and send me to jail instead?” Her voice cracked. “If you don’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

CHAPTER 12

Come with you where?” I asked, bewildered. If we needed to talk, why couldn’t we do so in my snug kitchen?

“For a drive,” she replied enigmatically. She looked up and down our street. A chilly whip of wind slashed through the evergreens. Ellie turned back to me, stamped her boots, and pulled her gloved hands into fists. “Please. It would help me so much to talk to you. But… it just has to be the two of us.”

“It’s almost ten o’clock, Ellie. And there’s no one here but my son. Why don’t you come inside? I’ll make you some hot—”

“Please, Goldy!”

I pressed my lips together, then nodded. Ellie was my friend from both St. Luke’s and Elk Park Prep. In fact, she was one of the only school parents who’d ever even been nice to me. Plus, she seemed distraught. And if I was going to help Julian, I needed to find out what Ellie knew. If that meant taking a drive, so be it.

“Let me run tell Arch I’m leaving.”

I sprinted up the stairs and informed Arch that Ellie McNeely was here, and we were going out for a bit. I’d put the pets to bed, I assured him, and Tom would be home soon.

“I don’t need a babysitter, Mom.”

OK, it was official. I had had enough. “You know, Arch, I wish you would try to be a bit nicer to me. Even a tiny bit would do.”

“Sorry, Mom. But you are always bugging me.”

How was telling him I was going out “bugging him”? I didn’t know. Lately, it seemed as if there were lots of things I didn’t know. I asked, “Do you want the animals up here with you?”

“I suppose.” He threw off his quilt, revealing his standard nighttime wear of sweatshirt and sweatpants. “That way I can take care of the puppy, in case he gets scared.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and paused, hunched over. He struggled for words. “Good idea, Mom,” he mumbled.

I’d had a good idea? Where were the Guinness people when you needed them?

While I donned my snow boots, mittens, down jacket, and scarf—with the temperature in the single digits, the wind chill was bound to be horrific—Arch shepherded the two dogs up to his room. Scout the cat, not surprisingly, decided to stay put.

Ellie sat waiting for me in her new SUV, a silver BMW that was the twin of Marla’s. The car was lovely, but in its interior light, Ellie didn’t look very good. Her expensively colored hair had turned waxy, probably from being repeatedly raked by her manicured nails. Her face, usually flawlessly made up, was puffy and still wrought with worry. The whites of her eyes were dark pink. From crying?

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard how somebody or somebodies are trying to smear me?” she demanded as I slid into the cold leather passenger seat.

“I’ve heard some things. That’s why I’ve been trying to call you.”

She revved the engine that she’d kept running while I was getting ready. “I suppose you heard the story about my Lexus being stolen and rammed into Barry’s car.”

“Yeah. But that was a while ago, wasn’t it? Barry took me out for espresso at The Westside Buzz in his new Saab. He loved having a fancy new car, and didn’t seem too upset about losing his old Mercedes.”

“Well, somebody’s upset about it.” She flipped on the overhead light and handed me a typescript clipped to several photographs. “I’ve got a friend who works on the Mountain Journal. She got her hands on copy they’re planning to run tomorrow.”

As she piloted her tanklike vehicle toward Main Street, I peered at four blown-up, grainy photos. The first featured Ellie, clad in a tailor-made suit, which made her look stern and manageresque. The second and third showed Barry. In one, he was smooching the cheek of a beaming Pam Disharoon, whose pigtails bobbed enthusiastically. The third photograph of the bunch showed Pam whispering in Barry’s ear, while he sported an impish, cat-who-swallowed-the-canary grin. The fourth photo was a blurry shot of the county coroner’s van. I turned back to the typescript. The caption read: The Man Who Loved Too Much?

How had the Mountain Journal, which demanded that I submit my ads two weeks in advance, put together a background article so quickly? But I knew the answer to that. Gossip, easily obtained in Aspen Meadow, sold copy. In our small town, it didn’t take long to call dozens of sources and put together a smutty article—full of “alleged’s”—that masqueraded as news. And with computers speeding up typesetting, you could gather enough garbage the day after a murder to put together a story and still meet press deadline.

I hastily skimmed the palaver, with its repeated references to a “love triangle.” The fact that Julian had been arrested for Barry’s murder was glossed over, and for this, at least, I was thankful. I guessed the Mountain Journal brains, such as they were, had figured a detained caterer’s assistant wasn’t as sexy as two women smitten with the same man.

In the Man Who Loved Too Much article-to-be, two incidents were detailed, beginning with: “Last month, witnesses claimed an unidentified woman shoved Barry Dean into a ditch on the mall construction site,” followed by “Mrs. McNeely’s allegedly stolen purse” and her “allegedly stolen Lexus keys,” which had ended up with “the Lexus belonging to Ellie McNeely somehow getting smashed into Barry Dean’s classic Mercedes. The Mercedes was totaled.” The paper proceeded to have a field day with the cuff links ordered by Ellie to be engraved for Barry being found in the out-of-control truck that had almost killed him earlier the previous day, only hours before he was brutally murdered. Who had been their sources on this? How I wished I knew.

“It’s unbelievable,” Ellie said, her voice just above a whisper. Her tone was resigned, despondent. “My boyfriend-who-wasn’t-quite-my-fiancé was infatuated with a lingerie lady. Now he’s dead, and I’m implicated. I can’t even grieve, because the cops are showing up on my doorstep, at my office, you name it. They ask things like, ‘After you picked up the cuff links, Mrs. McNeely, how did you get them into the truck?’ And worse, ‘Have you had medical or military training, Mrs. McNeely? Did you learn how to stab someone so that they’d be certain to die?’”

“Oh, no.”

“I’m going nuts! I think they’re just holding Julian Teller until I crack! Then they’ll arrest me!”

“OK, first of all,” I said, shaking the typescript, “forget our local rag. People leak stuff to it all the time, their own version of how they want something to read. The staff never checks a single fact, because they don’t have time once they round up their material. How come nobody calls them ‘alleged reporters’?” I was hoping Ellie would laugh, but she didn’t. I tossed the packet into the backseat and turned off the light. We were now chugging past the Bank of Aspen Meadow, where the thermometer read two below zero.

Hunched over the steering wheel, Ellie shook her head grimly. “Not to be materialistic,” she went on woefully, “but the gold cuff links I bought for Barry are in police custody, and I don’t have that engagement ring Barry promised me—”

“So you were engaged?”

She squirmed. “Well, not really. We’d been talking about it. He told me he had a big surprise for me, and he eventually said it was ‘the ring I’d been hoping for.’”

“How long ago was this?”

She shrugged. “About a month? He gave me a riddle I couldn’t understand, though. He promised to help me with it. I ordered him a pair of cuff links, and paid almost three thousand dollars for them. But then I saw him with Pam, in the mall, having lunch. He’d told me he had a meeting with the Pennybaker people, and there they were, acting like lovebirds. That’s when I hired Rufus.”

“Did you push Barry into a ditch?”

“No.”

“Do you know why he had headaches?”

She sighed. “I only knew that he did have headaches. He told me he’d been fighting with someone who worked in the mall. I thought, a fight, like, argument. I didn’t think he meant a real physical fight.”

“You never picked up the cuff links?”

“My purse was stolen! My car was stolen, then wrecked! I had no ID, no credit cards, no driver’s license! Remembering the cuff links was way, way down on my list.” She sighed, but it came out like a sob. “Now the cuff links are being held by the cops as evidence in a murder. It’s like I tried to do something nice for a man I believed really cared about me, and the whole thing backfired. Backfired beyond belief.”

I murmured, “Yeah, it sure did.”

“Dammit, Goldy!” Ellie’s voice turned strident. “Say something that’s going to make me feel better! Why do you think I came over? I thought Barry Dean loved me! And now my life has gone to hell!”

“Well…,” I ventured. “I don’t know if this will make you feel better, but in the You’re-Not-Alone Department, I was married to a man who, even though he was a well-paid doctor, gave me only two hundred dollars, in cash, to spend on Christmas. Because I wanted him to care about me—even though I knew on some deep level that he didn’t—I spent a hundred and fifty dollars of that tiny hoard on a Seiko watch. I’d even felt lucky to find it on sale! But the Seiko wasn’t a Rolex, and the day after Christmas, I found the watch in the trash.”

Ellie managed a wry smile. Then the smile turned bitter. “What am I going to do? How can I keep little Cameron from being humiliated by all this?”

“Your daughter will be OK,” I assured her. “She knows you’re a good mom.” I remembered Arch’s brusque declaration: I don’t need a babysitter. “Anyway, Ellie… Cameron’s in tenth grade now. Maybe she’s not so little anymore.”

“And here I was thinking what a loving stepfather Barry would make.” She sighed. “I’m just worried the other kids will read this trashy Journal article and make fun of Cameron. I hate to think of those Elk Park Prep bitches hurting her feelings.”

We whizzed by the lake. Wind-blown pebbles of snow pelted the ice. Under the bright night lights, a few brave skaters were taking advantage of the late burst of freezing weather. Just the thought of skating made me shiver.

“Ellie, where are we going?”

“Well, if you don’t mind, we’re going to Elk Park Prep. I… I forgot something.”

I knew she was lying. “The school will be locked up, Ellie.”

She waved one hand. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll explain when we get there.”

“Speaking of Elk Park Prep, can you… explain to me why you were arguing with Shane there tonight?”

She exhaled and slowed around a curve. “Board business is supposed to be confidential.”

“Ellie, I promise, I’m not going to get on the phone and call people about board business.”

“Shane… is having financial problems.”

“I know about the eviction from Westside.” I gnawed the inside of my cheek. I know he was holding back on his rent. I know his wife has a bad spending problem. And worst of all: I know I haven’t received final payment for this lunch I’m doing for him tomorrow.

Ellie squinted into the darkness. “Shane’s blaming his problems on Barry. I don’t believe this story about Barry demanding a kickback for ignoring the rent issue, by the way. In any event, Shane’s broke. And in debt. So… he and Page are pulling their girls from Elk Park Prep. They’re demanding their two-thousand-dollar deposit for next year back. I tried to explain that we simply can’t do that. The deposits are nonrefundable. But you saw how Shane was tonight; he wouldn’t listen. If you heard about the car accident, you probably know how Page intercepted his loan money.”

“I do.”

“I can’t bend school rules for him. I can’t help him at the bank, either. But he just refused to believe that I can’t.”

We pulled through the school’s massive stone gates. Elegant street lamps lit the drive like luminarias. The BMW rolled smoothly over the snow-rutted road.

“What’s bothering you most, then?” I probed gently.

She exhaled again before replying. “Bothering me most? You mean apart from the fact that a man I loved and was hoping to marry might have been betraying me, but we’ll never know because now he’s dead?”

“Ellie—”

“Let’s see. The cops aren’t making my life easier. I’ve told them over and over, I hired Rufus because I thought Barry was cheating on me. Whether he was having a bona fide affair with Pam or was just infatuated, having a mental fling, Rufus never did find out. That’s what’s so funny! But those detectives are obsessed. I told them I was having a massage when somebody tried to drive over Barry. They don’t listen. I swore Marla, Page, and I left Prince and Grogan just before nine, but they won’t let go of it. I got a ride home with Elizabeth Harrington. So what? The cops just keep insisting and poking into my life. OK, here we are.”

We drove into the parking lot we’d just left a few hours earlier. Lights rimmed the asphalt and lit the sidewalk angling steeply up to the lacrosse fields. The place looked desolate and forlorn. Ellie reached for the door handle, then hesitated.

“Ellie, where are we going? The headmaster will be fast asleep.”

She gnawed her bottom lip and hesitated. “Apparently, there’s some evidence that will clear me. Somebody called, said they’d leave it for me at the lacrosse field. And I don’t know who it was, so don’t ask.”

“Said they’d leave evidence at the lacrosse field?” Was this like Barry leaving me his puppy? “Who left evidence at the lacrosse field?”

“I don’t know.”

My eyes followed the shadowy sidewalk up to the dark, bleak playing field. Under dimmed lights, the empty bleachers looked like the skeleton of some prehistoric beast. The portable toilet looked like a gloomy, abandoned outpost.

I asked, “Why not leave this evidence at some warm, populated place like the library, for crying out loud? Why not give it directly to the police?”

“Who knows? Look, you can see that there’s nobody up there. We’ll just run up and get it.” Ellie popped open her glove compartment. I was thinking she’d be reaching for a flashlight, but no. Her hand emerged with a small twenty-two, a woman’s gun.

“Oh, Ellie, no.” As much as I was curious about what someone might have left for Ellie, I didn’t want to be a part of anything involving a gun. “This is ridiculous. The sun will be up in, what? Six hours? Seven? We’ll go get the ‘evidence’ then. Let’s go home.”

Ignoring me, she grabbed her cell phone with her free hand and stuck it into her coat pocket. Still gripping the ugly little gun, she said, “I told you, Goldy, I’m desperate. Let’s go before this wind blows whatever it is away.” She inhaled, gripped the pistol, and slipped from the car.

Crap, crap, crap. Why had I come out with her in the first place? And why couldn’t she be a liberal and believe in gun control? I powered up my own cell and hit the automatic dial for Tom’s phone. If he was at the department or at home, it would be on. If he was between the two, we might be out of range. When the messaging service answered, I cursed silently. Then I announced that I was at Elk Park Prep with Ellie McNeely, and that if we weren’t back by eleven, come get us. While Ellie stamped her boots and gestured impatiently to me with the pistol, I reached into my bag and pulled out the Mace. Did everyone in Aspen Meadow carry a weapon? I followed her, but didn’t feel a bit comfortable.

The wind died for a bit as our feet crunched over the snow of the parking lot. Ellie glanced around; I kept my eyes on the field. On the bleachers, I could just make out a pile of lacrosse sticks, loaners the school kept on hand for practice. A crumpled athletic bag sat atop the players’ bench, abandoned or forgotten. Then again, maybe it contained evidence that would clear Ellie of innuendo…or murder.

“Actually,” Ellie said, with a nervous laugh, “this is sort of like one of Barry’s little games. You know, follow the clues.”

The wind picked up again, and I shivered inside my jacket. “Heather the receptionist told me you hadn’t been able to find the engagement ring.”

“Heather told you?” she asked, shaking her head. “What, was Barry so embarrassed by my stupidity that he laughed at me with his secretary?”

“I… I don’t know.” Actually, it did sound sort of smarmy, as if Barry not only had been playing games with Ellie, but looking down on her as well. He’d even made jokes about her behind her back.

We climbed over a plow-made drift at the edge of the lot. Ellie tried to make her voice cheery. A cover for fear?

“The clue for the ring went something like, ‘When we fight, and then we…go to bed, that’s how you’ll find your ring.’ So I thought it had to do with sex or foreplay, and I ripped through sheets and box springs and pillows, with Barry laughing the whole time. I never found any ring.”

I slipped on the ice, dropped the Mace, and grabbed for the handrail at the side of the walkway. I also cursed Barry Dean, because it looked as if he’d poked almost relentless fun at a woman he supposedly was committed to.

“You all right?” Ellie asked.

I grabbed the rail. “Let’s rest for a sec.”

“Sure. Anyway, I wanted to believe he was sincere,” Ellie went on. Her breath was coming out in steaming gasps. “I believed I’d find the ring eventually. So that’s why I bought him the gold cuff links and left them to be engraved.”

“You left them to be engraved, and then what happened?”

She sighed. “I tucked the jeweler’s receipt into my purse, bought a cup of coffee, and sat down by the tot lot. That was when the purse was ripped off. In the mess that followed, I spaced out about the receipt. Not very smart, huh?” She paused. All was silent, except for the wind rushing through the trees above the playing fields. “Later, when the cops were trying to cut a deal with Teddy Fury, that teenage brat admitted he’d stolen my purse along with twenty or so others. He claimed he dumped it—he remembered the Louis Vuitton pattern, and was afraid of being caught with it—after taking the cash. According to Teddy, somebody else must have picked my purse out of the Dumpster, and lifted my car keys and the receipt. Just like later that same day, Teddy claims, somebody else crashed my car. Later in the week, Teddy also swears, somebody else used the receipt to pick up the cuff links. Then whoever did that conveniently placed the cuff links in that damn truck.” Her eyes watered as she smiled at me. “Are you ready to go?”

We made our way slowly up the sidewalk. I had a new appreciation for all the walking Arch had to do in a day. And he carried a heavy bag.

“What do you think?” Ellie demanded, when we were halfway up the steep ascent to the field.

“I think my lungs are going to burst.”

“What do you think about Teddy Fury’s story?”

Ellie seemed determined to downplay the fact that we were out in the freezing wind, at night, chasing after elusive evidence on a deserted school field. Fine. We soldiered on.

“What about the jewelry clerk?” I asked. “Did he remember the person who picked up the cuff links?”

“Nope. And whoever it was didn’t have to sign anything. The clerk who handed over the cuff links looked at a sheriff’s department photo of Teddy Fury and said Teddy wasn’t the one.”

We were finally at the bleachers. Gusts of snow swirled up and around the field. Only two halide lights, one by each net, lit the shadows. Ellie traipsed in front of the bleachers, which held nothing but the sticks, and then over to the players’ bench, where she set down her pistol and dumped out the contents of the bag. Socks, Gatorade bottles, a jersey, pads, and a book fell onto the snow. Ellie stooped and pawed through them, then straightened.

“Nothing!”

Surprise, surprise. “Let’s go. We can—”

“Oh, wait.” She picked up the gun and pointed it at the toilet. I peered at the battered metal door. A manila envelope had been taped to it. Manila envelopes, Barry’s old trademark. Ellie quick-stepped toward it. Reluctantly, I followed.

“This says, ‘Evidence is inside’!” she cried in dismay, as she noisily ripped the packet off the door. “Dammit!” Wrenching the door open with her free hand, she stuck her head inside. A second later, she stepped closer to get a better look.

Then she shouted and disappeared.

“Ellie!” I cried, scrambling toward the toilet. “Ellie!”

“Goldy!” Was she struggling with somebody? My whole body was braced, hoping against hope not to hear a gunshot. “Goldy!” Her voice sounded as if she was at the bottom of a chasm. “There’s no floor in here! Don’t step inside! It’s just all… blech!”

“Ellie!” I was at the toilet door, which I swung open recklessly, concerned only about Ellie. I looked inside. The smell was unbelievable. I could not see her. “Ellie?” I wailed. “Where are you?”

“I’m waving at you.”

I saw only blackness. I blinked and squinted. It didn’t help.

Ellie’s voice said, “I’d guess I’m about eight feet down. It’s an extra large tank that the school bought to save money.”

I didn’t say, But what happened to the damn toilet? What happened to the floor? Instead, I told Ellie: “Wait. I’m going to go bang on the headmaster’s door. He’ll be able to call for help.”

Before she could reply, I skidded back in the direction of the walkway. Five, ten minutes at the most, I would have her out of there.

Then I heard a car… but saw no headlights. The car sounded as if it was slowly winding up the school driveway, approaching the lot. Was it possible that it was Tom? Could he have received my message? I doubted it.

And where were the car’s lights? Why would you drive around in the dark without lights?

“Somebody’s coming!” I croaked.

“Oh, no! They said to come alone! They don’t know you’re here!” Her voice was getting hysterical. “Goldy!”

I watched carefully. I finally made out a vehicle that had almost reached the parking lot. One of the lights along the driveway briefly revealed it as a small four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was not Tom.

Ellie had been lured here, and she’d stepped into a trap. My instinct told me whoever this was approaching in that dark car wasn’t here to help. I skittered back to the portable toilet and pulled the door completely open.

“OK, pay attention,” I called into the darkness. “Do you have your cell phone?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was hoarse. “And the pistol.”

“Press a button on your cell phone so I can at least see a little light. I need to know where you are.”

A tiny square of green glowed a foot out of reach. In the sickly light, I could just make out Ellie’s face.

“Hand me the gun!” I commanded. Not that that would do much good. The two times I’d been with Tom at target practice, I’d completely missed the paper man with the concentric circles around his heart. But I knew how to ease off a safety. And I knew how to make a lot of noise.

I lowered myself to my knees, then lay flat. Ignoring the stench, I inched forward until my shoulders were over the pit. There were sloshing sounds as Ellie moved below. The car roared into the lot.

The stench was horrific, the air frigid. I took shallow breaths while reaching for the pistol, which Ellie pressed into my hand. Once I had it, I eased upright.

“Whoever got me to come here isn’t expecting you,” she warned desperately.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I scrambled to my feet. I hid most of my body around the far corner of the portable toilet, and only stuck my head out far enough to see the parking lot. The small four-wheel-drive was slowly circling Ellie’s car. “I need you to yell for help!” I commanded Ellie.

“Help!” Ellie shrieked obediently. “Help!”

Far down in the lot, the vehicle stopped. It idled by Ellie’s car. Were any of its windows open? I couldn’t tell.

“Again!” I whispered.

Ellie screamed, “Help! Come and get me! Help!”

Moments later, the driver-side door of the new SUV swung open. A figure in a long, hooded coat emerged. Tall? Short? Fat? Thin? Impossible to tell from way up on the field. Whoever it was cast a glance up at the portable toilet and headed across the lot toward the path.

“Do a man’s voice,” I urged, “like you’re coming to help!”

“OK, Ellie,” she bellowed in a surprisingly convincing bass, “I’ll be right there!”

“Me, too!” I hollered. Then I held the gun out and fired. One, two, three shots exploded.

The figure froze and glanced up.

“I think I got him, Ellie!” Ellie’s bass voice boomed out from the toilet tank like a whale’s. “He’s not going to bother you!”

I let out a high cackle and fired another shot. The figure trotted back to its car, hopped in, and gunned the motor to get away.

I put the safety back on the pistol and stood stock-still, shivering uncontrollably. It wasn’t from the cold.

After a moment, I called down to Ellie, “Our visitor’s gone.” Ellie began to cry. “OK,” I said, with a matter-of-factness I wasn’t sure I was feeling. “Let’s rescue you! How are you doing?”

“I don’t know whether it’s worse to freeze your butt off or be asphyxiated!” she sobbed. “Please, please, get me out of here!”

I peered into the darkness, and tried to come up with some idea of how to rescue Ellie. The wind had picked up again, and my eyes began to tear.

“OK!” I called. “I’m going to go get the headmaster!”

“No!” she yelled. “That’ll take forever! You know that lacrosse bag? It had a pocket knife in it—”

I squinted at the upended athletic bag. OK, got it. I set the gun down, then moved quickly over the ice and snow. I rummaged through the bag’s detritus, and finally closed my freezing fingers around a Swiss Army knife. I gasped out steam and moved to one of the lacrosse goals, where I sliced, chopped, and hacked to free the net from its moorings. Once I had an armful of netting, I closed the knife and hustled back to the portable toilet. There I twisted the white nylon into a makeshift rope and tossed one end down to Ellie.

Gripping the jerry-rigged line, she climbed up as I tugged with every iota of strength I possessed. I groaned and strained, but kept pulling until Ellie heaved herself up from the pit. Once out, she gasped for mouthfuls of clean air.

We hobbled back down to Ellie’s car. Ellie’s coat, clothes, and boots smelled terrible. She stripped down to her underwear in the bitter wind and jumped into one of her daughter’s spare sweatsuits. Shivering and crying, she revved the engine to drive me home.

CHAPTER 13

On the way back to my house, Ellie calmed down, and we talked in earnest. Yes, someone had deliberately lured her to that field and that hole. Yes, she was in danger. When she left me off at home, she promised to take Cameron out of school and stay someplace safe, “until this whole thing blows over.” She would call both Marla and me when she was settled, and give us her number. And yes, she had to let the cops know where she was, too.

“Thank you so much for coming tonight,” she said. Her voice quavered, and her face was still pale with worry. “Oh, Goldy, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s OK. Take care of yourself, Ellie. And don’t forget to let me know where you and Cameron are.”

Tom was putting on his boots when I stomped through the front door. “Miss G., I just got your message. What happened?”

I gave him an abbreviated version of the night’s events, then begged to take a shower. He said he would call the sheriff’s department to examine the toilet and lacrosse field. It might or might not be attempted murder, he added somberly, but we were definitely looking at criminal mischief. Technically, the lacrosse field was a crime scene. Great, I thought, as I stumbled up to steaming hot water and lots and lots of soap. Now Arch was really going to love me and be more polite.

Some time later, I snuggled up next to Tom’s warm body. His smooth, pine-scented skin felt heavenly.

“The dogs are in with Arch,” he whispered.

“I know. I told him it was OK. You know how he loves dogs. And at least Late isn’t howling. He must feel protected by Arch and Jake.” Tom was silent. “Why am I talking about a basset hound?” I said. “I just rescued a friend from a frozen toilet tank, for crying out loud!”

Tom’s laugh shook the bed. He enclosed me in a bear hug, then planted a passionate kiss on my neck. And that was just the beginning.

Lovemaking, like food, can be wonderfully healing.

Wednesday morning, an even stronger icy wind battered the house and shrieked through the trees. Brilliant pink clouds shone along the eastern horizon. I’d lived in Colorado too long not to know this was a winter storm front announcing itself. I made French toast for Tom and Arch. While Tom was rinsing the dishes, Arch offhandedly lifted his shirt to show me his tattoo.

“All the lacrosse guys have ‘em,” he explained. “And sometimes they come in handy in identifying corpses, Tom told me.”

“Arch, please. A mom would like to start the day knowing her son is focusing on school, not corpses.”

“Oh!” he said, brightening. “That reminds me. Todd is going to pierce my ear so I can wear one gold earring.”

My stomach turned over. “Please, Arch. Please don’t pierce your ear.” I was suddenly desperate for another espresso. “Isn’t it time for you guys to take off?” I asked, trying not to sound exasperated.

“Yup!” Tom said with cheer, as he put on his jacket and Arch hoisted his backpack.

“Don’t you want your lacrosse equipment, buddy?” I asked. Then I remembered that they’d be missing a goal, the one I’d hacked to pieces. Plus, the snow-covered field was about to be turned into a crime scene.

Arch sighed. “There’s no lacrosse today. You’re one of the moms taking us on the field trip to dissect a cadaver at Lutheran Hospital. Don’t you remember?” I rubbed my forehead, baffled. “You were going to pick up Todd and me and a couple of other guys in the parking lot at four. Are you still going to be able to do it, or should Todd call his mom to take over?” His tone said that he suspected I would once again let him down.

“I will be there,” I promised through clenched teeth.

As Tom hustled Arch out the door, I pulled myself a triple shot of espresso and took a long sip. Heavenly. Before starting to cook, though, I turned my attention to the animals. I brought Jake’s and Scout’s bowls in from the deck, filled them with food and water, and put the dishes back outside. On the deck, I stared down in confusion at two of my Minton bone china bowls, now crusted with dog food and ice. Arch had either ignored or forgotten the bag from Darlene, and had poured some of Jake’s food into my expensive china bowls to feed the puppy. Shaking my head, I filled the china bowls with soapy water, then reached into the grocery bag from Darlene that held Late’s dishes.

I pulled out one, then the other. When I felt tape on the dish bottoms, I casually turned each over, then gaped at them in disbelief. When I recovered, I put them down carefully and filled some old bowls of ours with more of Jake’s food for Barry’s puppy. When all the dishes were outside, I called the animals. Scout was, as usual, no place to be seen, but Jake and Late came bounding over and began gobbling.

Back inside, I put in a call to Darlene Petrucchio. I kept staring at the two dishes she’d given me. They both looked as if she’d hastily applied masking tape to them, then penned in the name.

“Darlene!” I said when she picked up. “It’s Goldy Schulz—”

“It ain’t even eight in the morning! I don’t wanna hear what you gotta say! I ain’t takin’ that hound back!”

“Darlene, please. This is very important. Did Barry Dean tell you to write the puppy’s name on the bottom of these two dishes?”

“What? Lemme get some coffee.”

I waited, then asked her my question again.

“Yeah, yeah, he told me to write the name just the way he spelt it. He said tape it on the dishes before I gave you the puppy. I said, ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ He just laughed. He said he couldn’t spell. And I said, ‘No kidding.’ He also said you’d get a kick out of it.”

“Hold on a sec. So has this always been the puppy’s name?”

“No, no, no,” Darlene corrected me. “Barry was going to call him Honey Boy or Honey Hound, something like that. But those sounded too girly, you know? Or maybe it reminded him of his old dogs, I don’t know. So we just called the puppy Puppy. Until Monday afternoon when he called. He said jes’ to put that name on. He said he knew the spelling was wrong. But I should just write it the way he spelt it, and tape it onto those bowls. So I did.”

I thanked her and hung up, troubled. The dogs had finished eating, and were eager to come in from the cold. I settled them in their pet condo and washed and dried their dishes. Then I studied Darlene’s block letters, penned in blue ballpoint on masking tape.

I thought Barry had named the hound Late. But staring up at me from both dishes was the word LATTE. Latte, the coffee drink.

So. Was this a joke? Or was this Barry’s little good-bye puzzle to me?

What had Barry and I had in common? Psych class. A love of dogs. Coffee.

Barry hadn’t been a very good boyfriend to either Ellie or Pam—at least, not in my opinion. But he’d been a regular old good friend to me once, and we’d drunk a lot of coffee together. So was Barry saying, Take care of my dog, and you’ll love him since he’s named after a coffee drink? I supposed so.

It wasn’t much, and it was sappy to boot. But it made me cry anyway.

At eight, the phone rang. To my surprise, it was Rob Eakin, now acting manager of Westside Mall.

“Sorry to be calling so early,” he apologized. He sounded hurried. “I’m in early, trying to get a million things straightened out.”

“What can I do for you?”

I heard him take a deep breath. “We’re postponing the Prospective Tenants’ Lunch,” he said timidly. “Ah, indefinitely. When there’s a crime in a mall, potential lessees get cold feet,” he rushed on. “Half of the prospective tenants who were coming to the lunch have already canceled. We’re expecting the rest to be no-shows. And with the drainage problem still delaying completion of the addition, we don’t have much to show folks who might want to locate here. Frankly, we can’t take the chance of turning them off permanently.”

My heart plummeted. I tried to take a yoga cleansing breath and ended up gasping. The twenty pounds of aged prime rib in my side-by-side would last two, three days at the most. I could freeze it, of course. However, the chances of finding another client with the same menu were slim.

There was something that worried me more, however. With mall traffic down because of Barry’s unsolved death, and with construction on the much-touted addition delayed, would Rob Eakin expect a refund for the Tenants’ Lunch? By contract, of course, the money was mine, and we were talking over a thousand dollars. Despite my new prosperity, this was not a sum I could afford to see disappear, especially since I’d already spent most of it on Arch’s trashed guitar.

“You’re going to, I mean, do you have another date—”

Rob Eakin sniffed. “We’re sorry to be canceling within twenty-four hours of the event. But you’ll have all that food left over that you can use elsewhere, not to mention a whole day off, courtesy of the labor cost we’ve already paid for.” He cleared his throat, and a voice in the back of my head snarled, Hang up on this dolt right now. But I didn’t, and Rob Eakin raised his voice. “We’d like to rely on your honor and have you refund us seventy-five percent of our payment.”

“Mr. Eakin. I have also paid for that food. In the labor department, my staff will expect to be paid, whether they show up or not.” I inhaled to steady myself. “Goldilocks’ Catering pays its bills for food and labor. We don’t want to get a reputation for reneging on our commitments. In fact, we have an excellent reputation for servicing the best-heeled clients in both Furman County and Denver. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the articles about us in the newspapers.” When all else fails, threaten media exposure. Especially in the Mountain Journal.

Rob Eakin hesitated. “Barry did tell me you’d been in the news. We… don’t want you to speak negatively of us.” Bingo.

“Oh, no,” I replied hastily. “Never.”

“We’re… actually thinking of doing a big Fourth of July event. When the mall addition is finally open.”

“Fourth of July?” Nobody wants prime rib on the Fourth; they want barbecue. Besides, a three-month stay in my freezer would burn that beef to toast. And did Westside’s management really think the addition wouldn’t be done until summer?

“Look, Mrs. Schulz.” Eakin’s voice indicated he was backtracking, hopefully the length of his entire frigging mall. “I… I promise you’ll be the caterer for our next event.”

That sounded fair to me, I said. I thanked Eakin and hung up.

I frowned at the marble counter, trying to think. Yes, the full payment from Westside had been deposited, and yes, I had all this food left over, but I didn’t like having a big event canceled, even if the cancellation wasn’t my fault. I wondered if it was possible that Westside had canceled for a reason other than the one Rob Eakin had given. Maybe the new mall management didn’t want to have anything more to do with Goldilocks’ Catering, what with my assistant jailed on suspicion of murdering their manager.

The phone rang again.

“It’s Ellie,” my friend announced.

“Are you OK?”

She sighed. “Cameron and I are at the Westside Suites. You know it?”

“Yes.” The Westside Suites, not far from Westside Mall, were the closest thing to a luxury hotel that Furman County offered. “You called the police, I take it?”

She snorted. “I had to…I’m a suspect in a murder case, remember? Even though they have Julian in jail, somebody in the sheriff’s department or county attorney’s office thinks ‘the cuff-link lady,’ as they now refer to me, had something to do with Barry’s death. In a couple of hours, they’re coming over here to ask me some more questions.”

“Better phone a lawyer.”

“That’s my next call.”

“Please take care of yourself, Ellie.”

“I’m trying.” She hesitated. “Thanks for being such a great friend, Goldy.”

“I’m trying to be just that,” I told her firmly.

After we signed off, the phone rang yet again. I couldn’t handle any more bad news, so I ignored it. The phone rang and rang. The sound reverberated dully in my head. Our machine finally picked up. The message was long. I couldn’t face it just yet.

Time for some coffee and positive thoughts, I reflected resolutely. I pressed the buttons on two machines: the espresso and answering ones. Dark, life-giving caffeine swirled into a green Italian demitasse cup Tom had given me, while Liz Fury’s voice on my answering machine announced that the wedding reception had gone well. Her daughter Kim had brought her van back, and now she, Liz, had just dropped Kim off with her new Boulder housemates. If I needed any special food supplies—Boulder was a mecca for gourmet goodies, and she was just leaving—I could reach her on her cell phone. Otherwise, she’d be back by nine to help with the Stockhams’ lunch.

Just what I needed: more food! But it was good of Liz to call. She and I needed to have some face time, no question about it. We’d had a bit of a spat at the end of the mall event, and of course I was going to pay her for her work that evening, plus double her regular fee for bailing me out with the wedding reception. But we had to talk. Without implying anything, without being rude, I needed to know how my new assistant—who’d appeared to be flirting with Barry Dean in our final strategy meeting—really felt about the man who’d barred and then forcibly evicted her shoplifting son from the mall. Had she actually had a date after the event? Or had she canceled so she could go off to find Teddy? What had happened with Teddy? And how had Liz gotten home, since she had no vehicle at the mall?

Worst of all, I thought, as Liz’s recorded voice continued to speak, was this question: Had Liz been so furious with Barry that she’d stabbed him to death? I shook my head. No way.

Still, there was lots to find out at a single catering event. I booted up the menu for Shane Stockham’s capital investors’ lunch. Liz’s recorded voice kept droning on. It had been snowing in Golden to beat hell, she didn’t think that would slow her up, we needed to think about Easter ham dinners to make in advance for big clients….

She stopped talking for a moment. The recorded buzz of empty cell-phone communication filled my kitchen.

“Teddy’s disappeared,” Liz said abruptly. “Oh, Goldy, he took his mittens but not his damned boots!” Sobbing, she hung up.

I slammed down some of the espresso—hot, powerful, and just what I needed—then dialed Liz on her cell. She answered before the end of the first ring.

“Liz, it’s Goldy, and you’re going to be fine,” I reassured her. “Your son is seventeen. He’ll survive without boots.”

“Goldy, you don’t understand.” Her voice cracked. “After I… found him Monday night at a fast food place, I called the cops, the way I’d promised back when he was… first trespassed from the mall. I said I’d keep track of where he was every minute—”

“Wait. You mean the security guys didn’t call the cops to get him hauled off somewhere?”

“I guess they tried, but the sheriff’s department told the security guys to release him outside the mall. I suppose they did that, because when I went into the security office to find Teddy, the guards told me my son had told them he’d go to McDonald’s. And the cops would contact me later. Which they did, but not until late Monday night. They…came to see me about Barry, asked a bunch of questions about where I was when, where Teddy was when, that kind of thing. Before they left, they told me I had to keep track of Teddy all the time.”

“Good Lord.” Confused, I guzzled more espresso. “So. What did happen after you left us Monday evening?”

“I told you.” A hint of exasperation wended into her voice. “I went to the security office, then walked to the McDonald’s near Westside, and Teddy was there, chowing down. He had my little car, remember, and I drove him home. Yesterday, while I was doing the wedding reception, he snuck out! He didn’t even have a car! I thought maybe he was with friends, but then he didn’t come home.” She stopped and gasped for breath. “Before he left, he… he put on his ski mittens that he always leaves by the front door. Then he nabbed one of my… of my carving knives. He proceeded to pick-ax his way into a batch of credit cards that I’d frozen in a plastic container of ice at the back of our freezer.”

“Oh, no…”

“He didn’t take his boots, so he wasn’t going snow-boarding. I know where he was going,” she continued, her voice bitter. “Shopping. And before you ask, yes, I canceled the cards. A couple of them, anyway. I think there were about eight in there, and all I could remember were the Visa and Saks Fifth Avenue—”

“You don’t have to work today,” I interjected. “I can manage, I promise.” This wasn’t true, of course. With Julian in jail and my body somewhat the worse for the nighttime excursion to the portable toilet, I really did need Liz. But she was hurtling over a much larger bump on the motherhood road than anything I’d been dealing with lately.

“No, I’ve got to work,” she protested, her tone urgent. “I can’t just wait for him to call, I’ll go nuts. The cops have my cell phone number. They swore they’d call if Teddy showed up… or got caught. God, I feel awful!”

“As soon as you get here, I’ll fix you some breakfast. I’ll be fine on prepping the lunch.” Better than fine, I thought. I’d just had an idea.

“Goldy, you’re the best. And I haven’t even asked how you’re doing.”

I thought I could say I’d been feeling pretty crappy, but that seemed tactless. “Everything’s fine. Well, not really. Tom told you Julian’s been arrested.”

“And I told him how bad I felt. How’s Julian doing?”

“Not too good. Liz…I thought you had a date or something with Barry after the party.” When she snorted, I said, “Do you know anything about Barry’s social life? I guess I mistook your…chat with him at our planning meeting as, I don’t know, interest.”

She guffawed. “No! I didn’t have a date, although I thought a judge I’d gone out with might show up at the leasing event, so I dressed up. But he didn’t show. Let’s see, Barry’s social life… well, I thought he was going out real seriously with Ellie McNeely. In case you wondered why I was being so nice to Barry at our meeting, I was trying to get on his good side, in case Teddy showed up again and made more trouble. Didn’t work, though.”

“Do the police… I mean, are they searching for Teddy because he’s underage, or because he’s missing, or—” I couldn’t finish my own sentence, because I knew the answer.

“They don’t look for anyone who’s just missing until forty-eight hours have gone by.” The line filled with static; Liz must have been driving by some high rocks. “They’re searching for Teddy for the same reason they told me not to leave town. Even though Julian’s been arrested, we’re both still suspects in Barry’s murder.” She paused. “Goldy, you’re one of the few friends I have.”

The line went dead.

Well. I hadn’t felt particularly good since the portable toilet ordeal, but now a warm glow suffused my senses. I had helped Ellie, after a fashion. And now I was helping Liz. Arch might think I was always bugging him or getting in the way, but at least my friends appreciated me. On this happy note, I put in a call to Marla, who was out. Well, Easter was right around the corner. Marla always spent enormous amounts of time and money finding clothes in the hues of dyed eggs. Then again, maybe she was hunting for more gossip that could help Julian—to her, this would be much more attractive than groping in ice-covered undergrowth for eggs.

And speaking of which… outside, a blinding curtain of snowflakes had begun to whirl down. Welcome to spring in Aspen Meadow. One year, it had snowed every day in May. I pitied Liz driving the narrow, winding foothills road between Boulder and Aspen Meadow.