Crunch Time

4

I interrupted. “Tom, let me get them back to their place.”

“Just remind me,” said Tom, his tone still gentle, “was Ernest investigating Kris? Trying to prove he’d been harrassing you?”

Yolanda looked down and sighed.

Ferdinanda shook a gnarled index finger at Tom. “Not yet. But Ernest, he promised he would help as soon as he finished up some other things.”

“Some other things?” said Tom.

Yolanda intervened. “He was going to help me. But he had to finish up the divorce case, the puppy mill, investigating Humberto and the missing assets. After that, he was going to go after Kris. Ferdinanda is right. He promised.” Another sob escaped her lips.

Ferdinanda dug in her pocket for the tissue. She muttered, “Humberto,” and spat into the tissue.

Tom pressed her again. “Did Kris by any chance know that Ernest was going to investigate him?”

Yolanda looked out the van windshield. “I’m not sure. But Ernest did say he was going to, you know, open a file on Kris.”

“When did he say this to you?” Tom asked.

“I don’t remember.”

Tom’s fingers tapped the dashboard. “He was going to open a computer file? A paper file?”

“I told you, he had a nice handmade cabinet, with hanging files in it.” Yolanda’s tone had turned sour again. “I didn’t check to see if he had a file on Kris.”

“Tom, please,” I said again. “It’s getting late. The puppies need to be fed. Can we go?”

“Just one more thing. Does either one of you know how to shoot?”

“Tom!” I cried. “You said they weren’t suspects.”

Yolanda sighed. “It’s all right, Goldy. No, I told you before, Tom. I do not know how to shoot a gun, and I don’t want to learn.”

Ferdinanda frowned in defiance. “I know how to shoot. I was a francotiradora, how do you say, sniper, in Raul’s army. Somebody comes after me or Yolanda? I will shoot them.”

“And that’s all either one of them is going to say without a lawyer,” I interjected.

Tom turned in his seat to eye me directly. “Listen to me. I want you to ask permission of the investigators at Ernest’s house before you go in and touch anything. Understand?”

“All right,” I said.

“Yolanda,” said Tom, “do you have a remote to get into Ernest’s garage?”

“Uh,” she said, “yes.”

“Good,” said Tom. “Still, when you all see the police car, I want you to honk or something before you go in. Understand? Yolanda, I know you and your aunt may want to stay there, but I just don’t want the investigation messed up.”

“Okay,” said Yolanda.

I asked, “Could you call me when you know what’s going on with John? Because if Yolanda and Ferdinanda decide to stay with us, and John can’t let the dogs out tonight, I’ll need to find somebody else to do it.”

“Yup,” said Tom as he heaved himself down from the van. “Thanks for your help, ladies.”

“Tell your friend I’m sorry I hurt him,” said Ferdinanda.

When Tom said, “He knows,” I wanted to hug him.

A clap of thunder startled us as we drove toward Aspen Hills. Yolanda had asked if we could trade places, so she could be in back with Ferdinanda. Once they were sitting next to each other, they began to speak in Spanish. I would have tried to follow what they were saying, but they began to speak so fast that there was no way I could make it out.

Which they no doubt knew.

I couldn’t help but wonder, Did Yolanda take Humberto’s money to spy on Ernest? And did she actually spy on him and tell Humberto what Ernest was doing? What is the story on those missing assets?

The sky began to spit large drops. I glanced at my watch. The storm had been brewing all afternoon, and now, at ten to six, it was hitting us. The television meteorologists were always warning that this time of year in Colorado could yield “unsettled” weather patterns. For a caterer, this means “unsettling,” because if you had an outdoor event scheduled, you could, at the last moment, be hustling a lot of chairs and tables inside. Thank goodness for CBHS’s alternate plan to use the gym the next day. Thank goodness we didn’t have anything we needed to cook outside. Thank goodness Arch had his own transportation that night and wasn’t depending on me. Thank goodness . . .

I recognized my own thought pattern. I was trying to calm myself, trying to get distracted, before something potentially unsettling was due to take place. As Yolanda’s tires ground up the hill into the back entrance of Aspen Hills, I swallowed hard. Up, up, up we went. The engine gnashed its innards as I turned the steering wheel hard for first one, then another switchback.

On our right, John Bertram’s house, then his garage, came into view. A hundred yards beyond that, crime-scene ribbons wrapped around rocks and posts fluttered in the wet breeze.

As John Bertram had told us, Ernest McLeod’s house was a third of a mile farther up. When I saw it, my heart plummeted. So much for just worrying about weather, cooking, transportation, and other insignificant issues.

“Hey, you two,” I said to Ferdinanda and Yolanda. “Everything all right?” They’d both begun sniffling, so no.

I peered ahead into the gloom. I could not see any police cars. If Ernest had had one garage remote and Yolanda had had the other, how had they gotten in? Well, presumably John Bertram had a spare key to his friend’s house and had given it to the sheriff’s department. And even if John hadn’t, the police had their ways. They’d already gotten in once and found the seventeen thousand under the mattress.

But if Tom wanted me to honk at the police car, then to get permission to go inside, how was I supposed to do that if I couldn’t see anybody there?

Yolanda and Ferdinanda were still crying. I pulled over onto the graveled shoulder, then reached into my bag and handed tissues back to Yolanda, who kept one and gave the other to her aunt. Ferdinanda wiped her eyes and then tucked the tissue into another unseen compartment of her wheelchair. I wondered where she kept the baton, and how often she used it.

We were just above the highest location of the crime-scene tape stretching around a boulder. The rain pelted down; the yellow ribbons blew sideways. I strained to see up to Ernest’s house. There was no police car. Could the investigators have been dropped off by another team? There were no lights. Was it possible they were done already?

Tom had said they would be there. I honked three times. There was no reponse.

I punched in first Tom’s cell, then his office number, but was directed to voice mail both times. I left messages saying I couldn’t see a department car at Ernest’s house, and that I’d honked, to no avail. If I couldn’t see the investigators or reach them, should we go in?

Could the team have left already? That didn’t seem likely. County investigators usually stay on a fresh murder for hours in pursuit of clues. I didn’t know which investigators were assigned to Ernest’s place. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk Tom’s wrath by going into the house without the permission I’d promised him I would get.

I called Tom’s cell four more times during the next ten minutes. I tried Sergeant Boyd, his most trusted subordinate, and got voice mail there, too.

On my last try to Tom, I said that even if Yolanda and Ferdinanda decided to stay with us, they would need toiletries, clothes, and so on. I knew he wouldn’t want us to come back to Ernest’s house when it was completely dark and the team had left, would he? I supposed we could go to the grocery store for essentials, I said, and run the washing machine for Yolanda’s clothes for tomorrow. . . .

I reluctantly hung up. Ferdinanda and Yolanda had started up their Spanish conversation again. Shame or no shame, I wanted to ask Yolanda why she hadn’t felt the confidence to call me when Kris hit her. She knew my history. Had she been too proud to ask for help? I wondered.

While waiting for Tom to call back, I contemplated Ernest’s dark house, which was barely visible now through the relentless downpour.

The weathered-gray-clapboard-sided house had originally been a one-story summer vacation home for a public school teacher. The teacher, who’d had the old-fashioned name Portia, had lived and worked in Denver from the end of the Second World War, when the house had been new, until the early seventies. Never married, Portia had lived year-round in the house after her retirement. Like many Aspen Meadow residences of that era, the place had been small—only two bedrooms and one bath. But its glory had been the fifteen gorgeous, sloping acres that commanded a spectacular vista of national forest.

I stared at my cell phone, willing Tom, Sergeant Boyd, or someone from the department to call me. Nothing. I shook my head and stared back at the house.

Over the years, Portia had told Ernest, she’d had multiple offers from builders riding various booms. He told us this story as he waved his hand, the way she had, as if Portia had been a princess who’d dismissed suitors who weren’t up to snuff. These builders, Portia had angrily told Ernest, were trying to take advantage of unincorporated Furman County’s lax building restrictions. They wanted to put sixty structures on one-quarter-acre parcels. How could anyone enjoy the view with all the houses cheek by jowl? No, no, Portia told Ernest. She put her house up for sale several times, to take advantage of rising prices. But she stood firm in one area: Whoever purchased it had to sign a legal notice that he or she would never tear down the original house nor subdivide her land. Buyers weren’t interested in a small, outdated, ramshackle place with only two bedrooms and a single bath. Builders were scared to death to sign away their desire to develop.

And then along came Ernest McLeod, a cop who was unmarried at the time. Ernest charmed Portia and asked if he could have her permission to buy her house and add on to it. No matter what, he promised, he would never subdivide her land. And for the addition, he would use the same siding, let it weather, and keep Portia’s style of architecture, which even an amateur art critic would sneeringly call nondescript. Ernest also insisted he would do all the work himself and, as if to prove it, showed Portia pictures of the addition he’d done to his place in Denver. He’d also told her he’d just been accepted into the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. He wanted to live in Aspen Meadow, because the people were so nice. And, he said, he would be using the land only to host picnics for his fellow law enforcement officers.

Portia, a lifelong Republican who was a great believer in law and order, had gladly sold Ernest her house. Shoveling the long driveway might have kept her in shape for the first decade of her retirement years, but the winters had begun to grind on her. She wanted to move to Arizona. The deal was made, and they were both happy.

Portia had sent Ernest postcards from Tucson, which he’d shown us. In reply, he’d sent her pictures of her old house, with whatever project he was undertaking highlighted in “before” and “after” snapshots. Ernest had begun by adding a garage and a cantilevered second story that featured a second, new kitchen, a new living/dining room, and two more bedrooms, plus two more baths. He’d then moved on to building a deck in the middle of the second-story façade, with a greenhouse on one side and a glassed-in winter porch complete with wood-burning fireplace on the other. He’d carved a sign that said PORTIA’S PERCH and hung it outside the winter porch, then another one that read PORTIA’S PARCEL, which he’d staked next to a boulder. Portia had written back to Ernest that they were her favorite photographs; she showed them to everyone in her retirement home.

Even after Ernest married Faye, who divorced him three years into their union for the Wyoming doctor, he’d sent snapshots to Portia, until his last letter was returned, stamped “Addressee Deceased.” He’d told us about her passing with tears in his eyes, and shortly after that, his casual drinking had turned heavy, then addictive, and he’d been forced into early retirement. Still, he’d told us at one of the department picnics he still hosted at his house, he’d found spiritual renewal through AA and a “new way to fight the bad guys,” as he put it, in his job as a private investigator.

Tom and I had often admired the view from Ernest’s deck. Every house in Aspen Meadow had a slightly different view. It was that same puzzle posed by the Mountain Journal, which Tom had reminded me of: “Whose view is this?” For a whopping five bucks, you could drive around and try to figure it out.

Portia, for her part, had hated the newspapers and had called the cops when the Mountain Journal had shown up, uninvited, to take a photograph of her view. Ernest said Portia called the media “a bunch of pinkos.” Remembering, I smiled as I recalled Tom putting his arm around me as he pointed out the spectacular vista of national forest, with its steep nearby mountains. Around Ernest’s house, the land was peppered with quartz and granite boulders, towering lodgepole and ponderosa pines, stands of aspen, and the occasional perfect, Christmas tree–shaped blue spruce. After some December poachers had come in with chain saws, which they’d used to cut down over two dozen of the spruce, Ernest had put up signs every twelve feet that read ABSOLUTELY NO TREE CUTTING, although he’d told us we could come get a tree any time we wanted. We demurred, saying Portia wouldn’t have wanted it.

I sighed and stared at the house, which, with all the additions, had a hodgepodge look to it. The place already showed indications of neglect, although Ernest had been gone—I couldn’t bring myself to think dead—for only two days. It was hard to make things out through the wind, the rain, and the gathering gloom. The PORTIA’S PERCH sign hung at an angle. The long deck had the painful look of abandonment. When Ernest hadn’t returned Saturday night, Yolanda clearly hadn’t known to bring in the pots of annuals. These massive displays—petunias, geraniums, nicotiana, and a dozen other florals—had died from the frost we’d had the previous night. Every spring, Ernest had grown the flowers from seed in his greenhouse, before placing them outside on the deck. Now they looked scraggly and forlorn, as did the whole house, come to think of it. I felt a rush of sorrow.

After fifteen minutes, I still hadn’t heard back from Tom. No one appeared. Yolanda and Ferdinanda seemed to have exhausted their conversation. Ferdinanda’s voice sounded like stones scraping together when she said she needed to go to the bathroom.

I called John Bertram’s house, since it was just down the road. There was no answer, and the place was dark. I started the van, moved it to the end of Ernest’s driveway, and honked again. There was no response.

Finally, I told Yolanda and her aunt that I would call out to whatever law enforcement people were in the house, if there were any, to get their permission to come in.

Pulling on my jacket, I took the remote that Yolanda handed me and jumped from the warmth of the van. I was immediately stung with freezing rain and another clap of thunder, but I trotted up the driveway to the garage door anyway. When I opened it, only Ernest’s pickup was inside.

“Hello?” I called.

I raced to the door leading into the house, tentatively calling, “Tom Schulz sent me!” and “Hello!” The only response was a chorus of yips. Nine puppies? Only nine? The place sounded like a kennel at feeding time.

“Is anybody here?” I yelled when I pushed through the door.

No one answered. The house did have a slightly peculiar smell, but I couldn’t place it. Not rotting food, not puppy mess, but something else . . . what? My mother had always claimed I had overdeveloped olfactory receptors and that I could sniff scents that she couldn’t. This was common among foodies, I later discovered, and so it was only natural, I told my mother much later, that I should go into catering. Then it had been her turn to sniff, but that was another story.

I pressed switches on a nearby panel, which brought illumination to the shadowy interior. Then I raced back to the van.

“Let’s go,” I said as I shook drops out of my wet hair. I eased the van into the space next to Ernest’s pickup truck, and Yolanda brought Ferdinanda into the basement.

“We’ve decided to stay with you,” said Yolanda. “Will it be all right for us to make calls from your house? We still need to phone Ernest’s friends and make arrangements.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But we’d better go as quickly as possible,” I warned them. “I was supposed to get permission for us to be in here.”

“Five minutes,” Yolanda replied. “We don’t have much stuff.”

“Do you have suitcases?” I asked, but my words were drowned out by the barking of the puppies. “Should I go do something with them?” I called to Yolanda, who was rolling her aunt into the bathroom.

“No, I can do it,” said Yolanda. “Ernest told me what to do. It’ll just take me a few minutes to—”

“I can figure out what the dogs need,” I called back. “You’ve got enough to worry about already.”

“Thanks, Goldy.” Her beautiful face was filled with gratitude. “You do too much for me.”

“Where are the dogs?”

She pointed at a door. Before I could go through it, though, my glance snagged on a section of the small living room where Yolanda and Ferdinanda watched television. The hearth of the tiny moss-rock fireplace was covered with a cloth topped with various statues: the Virgin Mary, a metal chalice with a rooster on top, and a mask of some kind, with cowrie shells for eyes and a mouth. It was some kind of . . . well, what? Altar?

The dogs’ crying pulled my attention away, and I pushed through the door Yolanda had indicated. It opened into a small, linoleum-floored storage room, which also served as the laundry room. I flipped on the lights and was immediately greeted with a barking storm and a horde of beagles.

“Wait, wait!” I cried as I tried to get my bearings in a world of stink. Whatever order Ernest had imposed on this room, where he had placed a row of metal cabinets, all labeled alphabetically, Auto to Yard, was gone. The floor was strewn with stained wet newspapers. The beagles raced about, clambering over my feet, clawing my legs, and falling every which way. They were probably the cutest animals I’d ever seen, a tumble of brown, black, and white fur and lovable baby hound faces. Still, I resisted the urge to get down on the floor and play with them. The stench of dog urine and feces was so strong that my eyes watered. I looked around wildly. Ernest had hung a mop, a broom, and other cleaning items next to the washer and dryer. Above the machines was a shelf that blessedly contained a neat pile of newspapers and a spray bottle of disinfectant. On the floor was a trash can lined with a plastic bag. Hooray.

I gathered up all the soiled papers, shoved them into the garbage, and sprayed the entire floor with disinfectant. This was no easy task, as the puppies kept yipping madly, whining, licking my ankles, digging their tiny teeth into my calves, and rolling onto their backs to have their tummies rubbed. When they decided to go off and play with their pals, their paws slid every which way on whatever part of the floor I’d just mopped. I pushed the sponge-on-a-stick as best I could to get the whole floor, then sprayed again and mopped again. When I got on my hands and knees to lay down clean newspaper, the puppies decided I was the Eiger and began to climb. They also licked my face, my hands, and my arms before they went back to whining.

“Did you feed them?” Yolanda asked from the doorway.

“I haven’t even rinsed out the mop.”

“I’ll do the mop,” she said, grabbing it. “You feed them.”

“Okay. Where’s the puppy chow?”

Yolanda looked around and frowned. “We put the bags of food right there.” She peered at the shelf, as if willing the chow to appear. “Oh, wait, I finished the first bag he bought this morning. Damn. Do you see more in here?”

I looked around the storage room. “Nope. Would it be in one of these cabinets?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice frantic. “I’ll do the mop and take this stinky bag out to the trash bin in the garage, and then I’ll give them fresh water.” From the distance, Ferdinanda called to Yolanda. Yolanda inhaled and closed her eyes. “Goldy, could you go look for more puppy chow? Maybe John Bertram’s wife has already been in here and she moved it. She’s a slob without the first clue about how to keep a house.” Like her husband, I thought, who was a slob who couldn’t find a police file if his life depended on it. Yolanda went on. “I wouldn’t doubt that she moved it, ’cause in addition to being messy, she’s also absentminded. Oh, yeah, and allergic to dogs. Still, I know Ernest bought several bags of puppy chow. In the kitchen, maybe? I’ll check the garage. Ernest is—was—a neat freak, so we should be able to find it somewhere, no problem. Thanks, Goldy,” she said as she rushed off, clutching the mop handle, to tend to Ferdinanda.

John Bertram! I wished I had his cell number. But then I remembered that he was down at Southwest Hospital. He was having his baton-bashed knees examined and treated. Maybe that was where Tom was, too, which could explain why he wasn’t getting my calls. I was willing to bet that SallyAnn Bertram was also at the hospital. Whenever a cop is hurt badly enough to be taken to the emergency room, the spouse drops everything to go check on his or her loved one. Staying at home, imagining how bad things could be, did not help.

I phoned the Bertrams’ home number and waited until I was connected to voice mail. I left a message for SallyAnn, asking that she please get in touch with me. Guiltily, I added that I hoped John was all right.

I climbed up the stairs, then poked around from room to room, ostensibly looking for puppy chow, but also to figure out if the cops had finished their investigation. Ernest had made one bedroom his own. It was a masculine blend of brown and white, with a white rug and chocolate-colored Roman shades. The cops had pulled the mattress and linens off and emptied the drawers. I wondered what they’d found.

Ernest had turned the other bedroom into a study. It was only slightly more tidy. The wooden file cabinet was open, and a single file lay on Ernest’s desk between the computer and telephone. A bag filled with papers was on the floor. Had the sheriff’s department’s guys been interrupted? It certainly looked that way.

That slightly odd smell I’d noticed when I first came in was a bit stronger upstairs. It wasn’t like spoiled food, it wasn’t like men’s cologne or soap, and it wasn’t from one of those plug-in air fresheners. It was like . . . clover. Or maybe alfalfa. I was extremely curious, but I was on a mission for puppy chow.

En route to the kitchen, I passed the large room that Ernest had made into a living and dining space. A white leather sectional sofa stood atop Navajo rugs, all new since Faye had moved out. The dining table and chairs were a contemporary mahogany style, and I wondered if Ernest had made them or bought them locally.

When I moved into the kitchen, I wondered how anyone could keep a cooking space so sparkling clean. But Ernest had. He’d put up old-fashioned pine-paneled cabinets that he’d reclaimed from a log cabin that was being torn down. Ernest had been big on recycling materials before it was fashionable. I smiled when I saw a framed poster for a local production of the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest in the kitchen, where he’d refinished the cabinets and put down a hickory floor. The effect was dazzling.

I moved from one highly organized cabinet to another: No puppy chow. I sighed in frustration. The last thing we needed was more delays before getting back to our house. Even if Yolanda and Ferdinanda were able to get every last bottle of shampoo and deodorant they needed, I still foresaw a trip to the store on the way home, and I hadn’t given a thought to dinner. I tried to think what we had in the refrigerator, in case Arch arrived first. . . .

The phone startled me. I looked around and saw it on the wall. On the third ring, I figured Yolanda was still dealing with Ferdinanda, so I glanced at the caller ID. It read Captain, Humberto. Was he calling Yolanda, on Ernest’s home number? And should I pick up the phone, or not? Well, what harm could come if I did answer it? I picked up the receiver and pressed Talk.

“This is Goldy Schulz.”

Click.

I slammed the phone down and made a mental note to tell Tom about the call. Yet even as I went back to hunting for puppy chow, I felt guilty. I didn’t want to believe that Yolanda was working for Humberto.

I checked both bathrooms for puppy chow. Nothing. The winter porch was next, but it was cold and empty except for the bent-twig furniture Ernest had put in there.

“Doggone it,” I muttered, and headed off to the greenhouse, the only room left that I hadn’t searched.

Because of the black clouds, rain, and fog, darkness seemed to be falling quickly, even if it was technically still summer. I turned on the lights by the greenhouse door before entering. The alfalfa-type smell was stronger in here. But the switches I’d flipped also contained an exhaust fan. I coughed and looked around. Ernest had been growing string beans, peppers, and tomatoes. The reclaimed glass Ernest had used for the walls made the darkness outside seem huge, despite the overhead lights. At the far end of the greenhouse were some big, bushy green plants and—victory!—a bag of puppy chow.

Only, would somebody please tell me what dog food was doing in the greenhouse, next to big bushes? Wait a minute. As Tom was always saying, “I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.”

These weren’t ordinary bushes . . . they were marijuana plants. Hello!

I counted them: six. I knew that under Colorado law, you could grow six plants legally if you were the provider for a card-carrying medical marijuana user. But . . . Ernest was a recovering addict. Was it really such a good idea for him to be growing a plant with narcotic properties? And why had he left the puppy chow up there? So the dog food would absorb some of the marijuana’s properties and the puppies would sleep through the night?

And why, oh why, had the cops missed this?

Or had they?

Okay, I’d graduated from the University of Colorado, one of the top party schools in the nation, and I hadn’t been born last night, either. I knew enough about weed to know that it was the bud, and not the leaves themselves, that provided a quality high. Harvested leaves only produced what was known to folks in the know as schwag, and everyone from stoners to stockbrokers knew that schwag was junk.

Ernest’s marijuana plants each boasted large buds, so they were ready for harvest. Without thinking, I walked over to Ernest’s shelf of tools, picked up a pruner, and snipped off a large bud.

It was then that my vision caught a movement outside: what looked like a small rock, only not on the ground, because it was moving. For the first time since I’d entered the house, fear scurried down my spine.

I squinted. What with the rain and fog, it was hard to make things out. I watched for a moment, and saw the moving rock was a person, a tall, heavyset person who was carrying something in one of his hands. Was he a cop? I doubted it. The guy was moving in too stealthy a manner. Was he a looter?

I swallowed my fear and tried to think. Kill the lights, my inner voice said. Try to get a better look at him, without his seeing you. And call the cops. I shoved the marijuana bud deep into my jacket pocket, reached for the switch, and turned off the greenhouse lights. I rooted around in my pocket for my cell while keeping my gaze fixed outside.

The man seemed to be wearing a dark jacket. My dousing of the lights had not bothered him—just the opposite, in fact. My mouth dropped open in disbelief as the intruder used his free hand to pick up a large rock. He reached back and heaved it at the greenhouse.

I ducked as the rock exploded through the glass. Damn it! Where is my cell phone? Rummaging for it, desperate to call 911, I saw the intruder bring a small object out of an unseen pocket. He fumbled with the thing, whatever it was. Then a light flared in the near-darkness. The man was bald.

This guy had a lighter? What was he going to do, have a cigarette while he waited for us to come out? Or maybe Ernest was his medical marijuana provider, and he was going to smoke his last joint before getting some new buds?

He was going to do neither. He lit the thing he was holding in his other hand. It flared hugely. It was a cloth, hanging out of a glass bottle. Oh my God, the man is holding a live Molotov cocktail. He reached back and flung the flaming bottle toward the hole he’d already smashed through the greenhouse glass.

“Yolanda!” I screamed as I raced out of the greenhouse. I dug my hand into my pocket and finally grasped my cell. “Get out! Get Ferdinanda out! Right now!”

The Molotov cocktail crashed through the hole in the glass. There was a sudden whoosh that actually propelled me headfirst down the stairs to the basement. The cocktail had reached its target. Damn, I thought as I rolled and got awkwardly to my feet. Damn, damn, damn.

My cell phone had skittered across the floor. I grabbed it and pressed 911. “I need a fire truck up here right away!” I hollered at the operator. “Ernest McLeod’s house, I don’t know the address. Sorry.” Then I hung up and stuffed the phone in my pocket. I knew enough about emergency services to know that the operator could figure it out. I barreled toward the garage as Yolanda raced in from it. We barely avoided colliding.

“Goldy!” Her face was filled with alarm. “What is it? Why were you up here yelling? What’s going on—”

“Somebody’s trying to burn the house down!” I grabbed her and turned her around by the shoulders. “You need to get Ferdinanda out right now! And, and, and we need to take the puppies out, too!”

“I’ll put Ferdinanda into the van,” she called over her shoulder, “and open the garage door. Where is this person? Where is the, the fire?”

“In the greenhouse! When you get Ferdinanda into the van, wait for me to bring the puppies. Then back the van well out into the street and keep the windows closed. Be sure you lock the doors!”

“Where will you be while I’m getting Ferdinanda—”

“Just do it!”

Yolanda raced off to her duties. I rushed into the puppy room, where the dogs were barking crazily. Either they already smelled smoke, or they had picked up on our sudden anxiety, or both.

I glanced out the window in the storage room but could not see the bald man. Then I looked wildly around the room. What was I going to put the puppies in? What had Ernest used?

I didn’t know, and couldn’t find out on short notice. I yanked open the storage closet marked Yard and dumped out a cardboard box of spades, gardening gloves, and fertilizer. Fertilizer! What if Ernest had kept fertilizer, which was highly combustible, up in the greenhouse? Rain or no rain, this place would go up like a tinderbox.

Upstairs, there was another crash, tinkle, and whoosh. The bald arsonist had sent in another Molotov cocktail.

“You son of a bitch!” I screamed. The puppies were crowding around me, whining and yipping. “Okay, dogs, I didn’t mean you.” I put five beagles in the first box, then hustled it out the garage door. Smoke was already filling the house, and the smoke alarm was beeping so loudly I couldn’t think.

I ran into the garage, trying not to jostle the puppies too much. Yolanda was in the driver’s seat of the van. Ferdinanda was in back, next to several plastic bags of stuff, which I assumed contained as many of their belongings as they’d been able to pack. I wondered fleetingly where the seventeen thousand bucks was.

“Can you help me?” I asked Yolanda. She immediately unlocked the rear door, slid it open, and took the box of dogs. Ferdinanda gripped the sides of her wheelchair.

“If only I had my old rifle,” she said fiercely.

I moved bags around, trying to figure out where we were going to put the other box of dogs. The old woman’s wrinkled hand tapped my arm.

I said, “Ferdinanda—”

“With my scope, I could see Batista’s people—”

“Ferdinanda,” I cried cheerfully, “not to worry. Tom has a gun at our house! Now, I need to go back—”

“That bastard, Kris,” she said, her tone still stubborn.

Yolanda begged, “Please let me help you, Goldy.”

“Guard Ferdinanda,” I ordered tersely. “Close the van windows and call nine-one-one. I’ve already phoned them once, but I didn’t have the address here.”

I sprinted back into the house. Smoke stung my eyes. It did not smell like marijuana, I noted bitterly. I should have put a wet rag over my nose and mouth, I thought, too late. It was hard to think with the fire alarm continuing its high shrill.

In the storage room, I pulled open the door marked Trains and dumped out another cardboard box, this one filled with tracks for an HO set.

“Sorry for the accommodations,” I muttered as I chased the last four puppies, who’d decided that they didn’t like me after all. I finally corralled them all into the box. I dashed to the van, placed this second puppy box on the floor of the passenger side, and jumped in.

“Hit the gas!” I yelled to Yolanda. As she backed out of the garage, I stared into the night to see if I could see the bald man. The fire, which was now raging, lit only the long grass, trees, and rocks on Ernest’s property. “Hurry!” I called to Yolanda.

Alas. We had barely turned out of Ernest’s driveway when the strobe lights of not one but two police cars lit the street in front of us.

“What the hell?” I asked. “Where were they, in the neighborhood?”

The police cars blocked the roadway, so Yolanda pulled over. I looked behind us. Ernest’s house was completely ablaze.

A barrel-shaped uniformed cop approached us, shining a blinding flashlight at us. When he was some distance away, he called, “What are you doing at this house?”

“Getting my belongings,” Yolanda cried.

“It’s okay,” I said as relief washed through me. “We know this guy. Remember Sergeant Boyd? He’s great.”

“Getting your belongings?” Boyd shone the light into the van. When he saw me, he said, “Goldy? What the hell are you doing here?” He directed the flashlight at Yolanda. “Yolanda? Is that you?”

“Yes.” But her voice wavered, as if she weren’t quite sure who she was.

“Please listen,” I begged Boyd. “Yolanda and her aunt are Ernest McLeod’s friends. They were living here.”

Boyd exhaled. “Anybody in the house now?”

“No, thank God. But a bald man threw two Molotov cocktails at Ernest’s greenhouse! He may still be around here.”

“Armed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Description?”

I did the best I could, but the enveloping mist and darkness, plus my surprise at the bald man’s actions, made it hard to recall details beyond “sort of hefty, maybe tall.”

Boyd nodded anyway and spoke into his radio to officers fanning into the field around Ernest’s house. Then he put his hand on Yolanda’s shoulder. Romantic sparks had flown between these two when Boyd had come out to the spa to help me the previous month. Now he said gently, “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“Hang in there.”

I said, “Do you know if the fire trucks are on their way?”

“Hold on.” Boyd again spoke into his radio, and received a reply that the fire engines would arrive in less than ten minutes. Boyd clipped the flashlight onto his belt and rubbed his scalp. His once-black hair was turning to gray at the sides, but he still wore it in an unfashionable crew cut.

“Where were you guys?” I asked. “Why weren’t investigators inside the house? I called and called, but nobody answered.”

Boyd ignored my question and looked back at Ferdinanda. “Yolanda, would you introduce me to your aunt?”

I smiled. Apparently, courting rituals took precedence over the deliberate setting of a house on fire and the destruction of evidence. But when Yolanda patiently went through introductions, she seemed to calm down.

Finally, Boyd said, “The team in the house got a call that shots had been fired five miles away. It’s the next neighborhood over, and they were the closest cops. They couldn’t find anything, but then they got another call. More shots fired. So they called us, and a couple more of us raced up here. We kept looking in that neighborhood and in this one, but we didn’t find anything.”

The puppies whimpered at me, and I patted them.

“Did you take anything else?”

“No,” I said guiltily, keeping my eyes on the puppies. It felt, of course, as if that big bud of marijuana was burning a hole in my jacket pocket. But I didn’t want to tell Boyd about it in front of Yolanda and Ferdinanda. I needed to tell Tom about it first, I decided.

Boyd rubbed his forehead. “Do you know where Tom is now?”

I said, “He’s supposed to be at Southwest Hospital.”

“Why there?”

“He’s, uh, with John Bertram,” I said, trying to avoid giving the reason.

“What happened?” asked Boyd, his voice on edge.

“I hit him with my baton!” called Ferdinanda from the back. I heard the unmistakable sound of Ferdinanda snapping her weapon open. She thrust it through the window at Boyd, who jumped back. “You be nice to Yolanda, or I’ll hit you, too!”

I put my head in my hands. It was going to be a long night.